Fifteenth Summer

That night my dad grilled corn and salmon, and my mom tossed an arugula salad with hazelnuts and lemon juice. Abbie and I collaborated on wildly uneven biscuits. Mine looked like shaggy little haystacks, while hers were perfectly round but as flat as pancakes. Hannah made a fruit salad, then muddled raspberries and frothed them into a pitcher of lemonade.

But instead of setting the table like usual, we piled all the food into boxes and baskets and toted them down the two blocks to the lake.

Sparrow Road was narrow and sharply curved. Though the road was paved with used-to-be-black pavement, walking it meant wending your way around various large cracks and potholes. Before you knew it, you were usually in the middle of the road. Which was fine because there were hardly ever any cars. There was no reason to drive on Sparrow unless you lived in one of the twenty-or-so houses on it.

I always loved our first shadowy walk to the lake. It was so thickly overhung with trees that by August you felt like you were in a tunnel. Of course, by August you also had to spend most of that walk slapping away mosquitoes and horseflies. But even that—after doing it my whole life—felt like a ritual.

I think we all exhaled as we rounded the last bend in the road that led to our “stop.” This was a little wooden deck with a bike rack (not that anybody bothered to lock their bikes here) and a rusty spigot for hosing the sand off your feet. A little gate on the far end of the deck led to the rickety, narrow boardwalk that led to the beach.

None of us spoke as we kicked off our shoes, then walked down the boardwalk single file.

Tonight the silence seemed heavy with meaning and mourning. But actually we were always pretty quiet during our first visit to the lake. After the Pacific, so violent and crashy, the lake seemed so quiet that it always made us go quiet too. As a little kid I imagined that this water kept people’s secrets. Whatever you whispered here was safe. The lake would never tell.

As we stepped—one after another—from the boardwalk onto the sand, I realized that maybe I hadn’t completely outgrown that notion.

After we’d settled onto the sand (nobody had had the extra arm for a picnic blanket) my mother declared, “Dinner on the beach on our first night in Bluepointe. It’s a new tradition.”

Even though her voice caught on the last syllable and her eyes looked glassy in the light of the setting sun, she smiled.

I gave her my own damp-eyed smile back. It felt weird to be simultaneously so sad without Granly and so happy to be there in that moment. The smoky, charred corn was dripping with butter and the sand was still warm from the sun, which had become a painfully beautiful pink-orange. The gentle waves were making the whooshing sound that I loved.

When I’d finished my salmon and licked the lemony salad dressing from my fingers, I got to my feet. I scuffed through the sand, tiptoed over the strip of rocks and shells that edged the lake, and finally plunged my feet into the water. It was very, very cold.

I gasped, but forced my feet to stay submerged. The cold of the water felt important to endure for some reason. Like a cleansing of this very long day.

I glanced back at my family. Abbie was sitting with her legs splayed out while she gnawed on her cob of corn. Hannah was lying on her stomach gazing past me to the sunset. My parents were sitting side by side, both with their legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles, my mom’s head resting on my dad’s shoulder.

There was only one person missing.

My mind swooped to an image of Granly. If she were here right now, she’d be sitting in a folding beach chair. Maybe she’d sip a glass of wine while she searched the sky for the first stars of the night. Or she’d be efficiently packing the dishes up while she gossiped with my mom about old Chicago friends.

But then something surprising happened. Just as quickly as my mind had swooped to Granly, it swooped away again and landed on—the boy from the bookstore.

I wondered what it would be like if he were here on the beach with me. He didn’t seem like the goofy splashing-around-in-the-water type. But I could definitely picture him taking a long, contemplative walk along the lake. Or building a sand castle with me, with all the turrets carefully lined up according to size.

I wondered if he knew the constellations and would point them out as the night sky grew darker. Or maybe he didn’t like to talk much. Maybe he was more of a listener.

I tried to imagine what it might feel like to lean my head against his shoulder or snuggle into those lanky arms. And I remembered the way his face had lit up when he’d smiled at me for the first time.

But after his mom had brought him back down to earth, his face had tightened. His mouth had become a straight, serious line as he’d struggled with the receipt tape and perhaps reviewed a long to-do list of chores in his head.

It had not looked like a kissable mouth.

And those broad shoulders? It seemed there was enough leaning on them already. There was no room for my head there.

Even if there was, was Josh thinking about me in the same way?

Was he thinking about me at all? He didn’t even know my name!

I couldn’t stop repeating his name in my head. Josh. I loved the one-syllable simplicity of it. I loved the way it ended with a shhhh that you could draw out, like the soft sizzle of a Lake Michigan wave.

But I stopped myself from whispering the name out loud. If I did, I felt sure that I wouldn’t be able to get it—to get him and my does-he-like-me? angst—out of my head.

So instead I tromped back to my family, who looked blurry and ghostly now that the sun had set.

“Isn’t it time for frozen custard?” I asked.





It was funny that we had so many rituals in Bluepointe, when we had hardly any in LA.

At home we went to whatever brunch spot had the shortest line. Here we might wait for ninety minutes to get Dutch baby pancakes (and only Dutch baby pancakes) at Francie’s Pancake & Waffles.

In LA my mom marked our heights on the laundry room wall whenever she remembered. Not on birthdays or New Years or anything that organized.

But in Bluepointe we always took the exact same photo on the exact same day, which was the last day of our visit. Hannah would kneel in the sand, Abbie would sit next to her, and I would lie on my stomach, my chin on my fists, at the end of the line. We even took that shot in the rain once, because there was no leaving Bluepointe without the “stack of sisters” shot.

Yet another tradition here was frozen custard on our first night in town. We always went to the Blue Moon Custard Stand.

As we drove there Hannah said, “I wonder what color it’s going to be this year.”

The Blue Moon got a new paint job every summer, going from bubble-gum pink to neon yellow to lime green—anything as long as it was ridiculously bright. I guess it was easy to paint, because the stand was no bigger than a backyard shed. There was barely enough room inside for two (small) people to work, and even that looked like a struggle. They always seemed to be elbowing each other away as they took orders, exchanged money, and handed cones through the stand’s one tiny window.

This meant the line was always long and slow-moving, which was part of the fun of the Blue Moon.

Sure enough, when we pulled up to the stand (purple!) just outside of town, there was a crowd milling around it. But as usual nobody seemed to mind the wait. The evening air was cool and breezy, and the air was so lit up with fireflies, it made the weedy gravel lot feel like a fairy ring. Nobody was in a rush, and you didn’t even have to expend mental energy mulling your custard order, because the Blue Moon had exactly two flavors: chocolate and vanilla.

We always ordered the same thing anyway. Dad and Hannah got hot fudge sundaes, hers with sprinkles, his with nuts. I got chocolate custard in a cake cone. Mom had a cup of vanilla drizzled with chopped maraschino cherries, and Abbie got a butterscotch-dipped sugar cone. We all got huge servings, even though frozen custard is about as bad for you as a bacon-topped donut, as distant from the calorie-free, pomegranate-flavored frozen yogurt of our hometown as you could get. That was exactly the point. This first-night ritual was our way of saying good-bye to California for the summer, and hello to Bluepointe, where things—until now—had always been as sweet and easy as frozen custard.

I took a giant bite of my cone as soon as the kid behind the counter handed it to me.

“Oh!” I groaned through a messy mouthful of chocolate. “Thish ish shooo good! How do I always forget the perfection that is frozen custard?”

“If you remembered,” my dad said, wiping hot fudge off his chin with his napkin, “you’d never need to go back for more. And what fun would that be?”

I grinned and took another huge bite. As I swallowed, though, I felt a wave of cold surge though my head.

“Owwwwww, brain freeze!” I groaned. I turned away, squeezed my eyes shut, and slapped a hand to my forehead.

In a few seconds the yucky feeling in my frontal lobe passed, and I opened my eyes—to find myself looking right at—Josh! He was just walking away from the Blue Moon window, holding a simple vanilla cone. Behind him was his mom, digging into a sundae with about half a dozen colorful toppings on it.

Also just like me—he seemed stunned. After what felt like a long moment, during which we just stared at each other, he gave me a little wave.

I gave him a little smile.

And then Stella spotted me. Waving at me with her fudgy spoon, she said, “You were in Dog Ear today, weren’t you, honey? How do you like that book?”

“Oh,” I said, trying to sound breezy and comfortable even though I completely wasn’t, “I haven’t had a chance to start it yet.”

“Well, you let me know, okay?” she said.

I nodded as, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Josh’s gaze drop to the ground. He ate his frozen custard in giant, hurried bites until his mom wandered off to chat with someone else. Then he took a few steps toward me.

“You should,” he said seriously.

“I should . . . what?” I asked him. I wondered how this was going to go. Was he going to be flirty Josh or surly Josh?

“You should come back to Dog Ear,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows. That definitely didn’t sound surly.

“I finished the remainders,” Josh went on. “I promise, all the books are safe for the next few months. And . . .”

Now Josh looked a little embarrassed. “I can also promise you the staffers will be more polite.”

“Oh,” I said. “That sounds sort of like an apology.”

“It sort of is,” Josh replied.

Which might have been sweet in a different tone of voice. But Josh said it in such a somber, almost curt way, I didn’t know quite how to take it. Was this just him doing the right thing, clearing his conscience? Or did he want me to come back to Dog Ear . . . to see him?

I didn’t know what to say. What’s more, my melting tower of frozen custard was beginning to tilt dangerously in my cone. And my family was not two feet behind me. I knew it wouldn’t be long before they emerged from their custard hazes and noticed me talking to a boy. That would mean awkward introductions, followed by a sisterly interrogation for which I would have absolutely no answers.

What could I tell them? This is Josh. We totally hit it off this afternoon. And then we didn’t. And now I don’t know what’s going on, except that I still find him painfully cute.

It would have made no sense to any of them. It barely made sense to me!

So I simply said to Josh, “Well, I guess I’ll see you then.”

As I turned back to my family, I realized I’d said pretty much the same thing when I’d left Josh at Dog Ear that afternoon. Of course, I’d been completely lying then.

Now? I hoped what I said would actually come true.