Second Chance Summer (15 page)

But my parents hadn’t agreed, and now, after only two weeks here, Lucy was leaving. I was supposed to be saying good-bye, and even though I said good-bye to Lucy at the end of every summer, this was different.

“Look,” Lucy said, carefully smoothing her bangs down. I loved Lucy’s bangs and was incredibly jealous of them. But when I’d gotten my own cut the fall before, they hadn’t hung even, straight, and thick, like Lucy’s did. They had been wispy and flyaway, always parting in a cowlick in the center and causing my mother to have to buy me a lot of headbands. My hair had grown out by the time summer came, and I never had to tell Lucy that I’d copied her. “My mom said if she gets the house and things work out, I’ll be able to come up here soon. Maybe even in a month.” She tried to put a positive spin on the last word, but I could hear how hollow it sounded. What was I supposed to do for a month without Lucy?

“Right,” I said, trying to be cheerful too, even though I didn’t mean it at all. “It’ll be great.” I gave her a big, fake smile, but Lucy just stared at me for a moment, and we both started cracking up.

“T,” she said, shaking her head. “You are the worst liar ever.”

“I know,” I said, even though I couldn’t remember a time when I’d ever needed or wanted to lie to Lucy.

“But at least you aren’t going to be all alone in New Jersey, like I am,” Lucy said with a dramatic sigh. “I’m going to be
so bored
.”

“I’m going to be bored too,” I assured her. “Who am I going to hang out with?”

Lucy shrugged, and for some reason didn’t meet my eye when she said, “Your friend Henry, maybe?”

Even though I knew it wasn’t fair to Henry, I groaned in response. “It’s not the same,” I said. “All he wants to do is go into the woods and look at rocks. He’s a huge dork.” This wasn’t exactly true, and I felt bad after I said it, but I was trying to make Lucy feel better.

“Lucy!” Mrs. Marino yelled from the house, and as I turned to look, I could see her standing in the driveway, where the car was packed up and ready to go.

Lucy let out a long sigh, but both of us seemed to realize it was time to leave. We scooped up our Skittles and walked toward the house. In her driveway, we did the hand-slap pattern we spent most of last summer working out (it involved a double spin) and then said good-bye and hugged quickly when Lucy’s mom started
complaining about how if they didn’t get started soon, they weren’t going to beat the traffic.

I stood with my bike at the side of Lucy’s driveway and watched the car pull away, Lucy leaning out the window, waving until I couldn’t see her any longer. Then I got on my bike and started to pedal slowly in the direction of home. I didn’t necessarily want to be there—it was hours until dinnertime—but I didn’t know what else to do. It seemed incredibly lame to go to the beach or the pool by myself.

“Hey, Edwards!” I looked over, but I knew it was Henry, skidding to a stop next to me. He’d been going through a phase recently where he was calling everyone by their last names. And even though I knew he wanted me to, I refused to call him “Crosby.”

“Hey, Henry.” I stepped down to the ground and kicked at my pedal, setting it spinning. Henry, on the other hand, kept riding, looping in circles around my bike.

“Where’s Marino?” he asked, as he circled me. I kept having to turn my head to look at him, and I was starting to get dizzy.

“Lucy’s gone for the summer,” I said, feeling the impact of the words. “Most of it, anyway.”

Henry stopped circling me and dropped one bare foot to the ground. “That’s a bummer,” he said. “Sorry to hear that.”

I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure Henry meant it. He and Lucy had never gotten along that great. I knew he thought she was
too girly, and she thought he was a know-it-all. The few times the three of us had tried to hang out together, I’d felt like I was a referee, constantly trying to make sure everyone was getting along, and it had been exhausting. So I tended to hang out with them separately, which worked out better for everyone.

“So,” Henry said, getting back up on the bike’s pedals, “I was going to the beach. Want to come?”

I looked at him and thought about it. Hanging out with Henry would definitely be better than going home—even if he did call me Edwards and was always trying to get me to race him or see who could eat more hot dogs. “Okay,” I said, spinning my pedal back and standing on it. “Sounds fun.”

“Awesome.” Henry smiled at me, and I noticed that his teeth were no longer crooked in front, like they’d been when I first met him. And his smile was really nice. Why hadn’t I ever noticed that before?

“Race you to the beach?” he asked, already ready to ride, his hands gripping the handlebars.

“I don’t know,” I said, as I pretended to fuss with my gears, all the while getting into position. “I’m not sure if I—Go!” I yelled the last word and started pedaling as fast as I could, leaving Henry to catch up. I laughed out loud as I started to fly down the street, the wind lifting my ponytail. “Loser buys the Cokes!”

Lost & Found

chapter twelve

T
HE WAITING ROOM IN THE ONCOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF THE
Stroudsburg hospital seemed like it had given up on any attempts to be cheerful. The walls were painted a dull peach, and there weren’t any encouraging posters about managing your cold or proper hand-washing techniques, like I’d been used to seeing in my doctor’s office. Instead, there was only a single badly painted landscape of a hill dotted with either sheep or clouds, I wasn’t sure which. The chairs were overstuffed, making me feel like I was slowly sinking down into them, and all the magazines were months out of date. Two of the celebrity marriages trumpeted on the glossy covers had since imploded in messy divorces. I flipped through the closest magazine at hand anyway, realizing how different these happily-ever-after stories seemed when you were aware of what the outcome was going to be. After a few minutes, I tossed it aside. I glanced down at my watch, and then at the door my father had gone through to meet with his doctor. This was not exactly how I’d imagined spending my day off.

I had planned on quitting the snack bar after the first disastrous
day, seeing no reason to spend the summer with people who disliked me and made no secret of it. But at dinner that night, as we’d feasted on corn on the cob, French fries, and hamburgers cooked on the grill—what felt like our first real summer meal—my plan hit a snag.

Gelsey, it seemed, hated tennis. While she complained about how stupid the sport was, and how all the people in her tennis class were equally stupid, and Warren was simultaneously attempting to tell us that tennis had been invented in twelfth-century France and popularized in the court of Henry the Eighth, I’d just sat there, enjoying my corn, waiting for the moment that I could jump in and explain that while I was sure that there were merits to working at the snack bar, I felt that my time might be better utilized this summer by doing something else. Anything else. I was working out my explanation in my head, and so wasn’t really paying attention to the conversation around the table. It was only when I heard my name that I snapped back to attention.

“What?” I asked, looking at my father. “What was that, Dad?”

“I was just saying,” my dad said, mostly to my sister, who was glowering down at her plate, “that you also had a new, challenging experience today. But unlike your sister, you are taking it in stride.”

Crap. “Um,” I said, glancing at Warren, trying to see if I could silently communicate with him, and get him to distract everyone, or tell us how something else was invented. But Warren just yawned and helped himself to more fries. “Right. About that…”

“Taylor’s not quitting,” my father said. I cleared my throat, hoping that I could get him to stop somehow without looking like the flakiest person on earth. “And I’m sure her day wasn’t easy. Was it?”

He turned back my way, and everyone in my family looked at me, Warren’s fry raised halfway to his mouth. “No,” I said honestly.

“There you go,” my dad said, giving me a small wink, making me feel terrible about what I was about to do. But then I thought of Lucy’s face when she’d realized I was working there, and how lonely it had been, eating lunch by myself.

“Look,” I said, realizing that this might be my best chance to extricate myself from a situation that, I was sure, was only going to get exponentially worse as the summer went on. “It’s not that I don’t want to work. It’s just that the snack bar wasn’t… um… exactly what I expected.” My mother glanced over at me, her expression indicating she knew exactly what I was about to say. I looked away from her as I continued. “And, given my academic workload next year, I think I should use this summer to—”

“I don’t care!” Gelsey wailed, sounding on the verge of tears. “I don’t want to play tennis and I shouldn’t have to. It’s… not… fair!”

Warren rolled his eyes at me across the table, and I shook my head. This was what came of being the baby of the family. You got to throw tantrums years after you were officially much too old to do so. Gelsey started to sob into her dinner napkin, and I realized that the moment to announce that I was quitting my job had probably passed.

So I’d suffered through two more shifts at the snack bar, mostly just so that I could quit and still save a little bit of face with my dad. They were pretty much the same as my first day—Lucy barely spoke to me, and I spent the entire workday counting down the minutes until I could go home, more convinced with each passing hour that this was not worth the minimum wage. I’d planned on taking my day off to go down to the clubhouse, tell Jillian, leave a message for Fred (who would undoubtedly be fishing), and then tell my family once it was a done deal. But that afternoon, as my dad set aside his work and prepared to go to Stroudsburg for his doctor’s appointment, my mom called me out to the porch.

She was sitting on the top step, combing my sister’s hair. Gelsey was one step below her, a towel around her shoulders, her head tilted back slightly as my mother pulled a wide-tooth comb through her damp auburn curls. This was a ritual the two of them had. They didn’t do it all the time, just when my sister had a bad day or was upset about something. As I watched her getting her hair combed now, I wondered if this was because of the trauma she’d suffered at her tennis lessons (which she hadn’t been allowed to quit) or something else. Years ago, I’d wanted my mother to do this for me, when I was much younger. I’d eventually realized, though, there was probably no point to it. My mother and Gelsey had the same reddish-brown hair—long, thick, and curly. And I had fine, pin-straight hair that never got tangled and that I barely needed to comb myself. But still.

“What?” I asked. Gelsey made a face at me, but before I could respond in kind, my mother turned her head back so I could only see her profile.

“Would you go to Stroudsburg with your dad today?” my mom asked.

“Oh,” I said. This was not what I had been expecting. “Is he okay?”

“He just has his doctor’s appointment, and I was hoping you could go with him,” my mother said, her tone even, as she drew the comb from the crown all the way down to the ends that were already starting to curl into ringlets. I looked at my mother closely, trying to see what she meant by this, if there was anything truly wrong, but my mother could be inscrutable when she wanted to be, and I couldn’t tell anything. “You’re all set,” she said, smoothing her hand down Gelsey’s hair, then whisking the towel off her shoulders.

Gelsey stood and headed inside, crossing to the door in a series of fast twirls. I stepped aside to let her pass, totally used to this, since for several years now, when she was in the mood, Gelsey would seldom walk when she could dance.

“So?” my mother asked, and I turned back to see her plucking the loose hairs from the comb. “Will you go with your dad?”

“Sure,” I said, but still felt like there was more to this than she was telling me. I took a breath to ask when I noticed that my mother was tossing the stray hairs into the air, where they were lifted by the
faint breeze that had been ruffling the trees all afternoon. “What are you doing?”

“It’s why you should always comb your hair outside,” she said. “This way, mother birds can weave the strands into their nests.” She looked down at the comb, then started to head inside, folding the towel as she went.

“Mom,” I said, before she reached the door. She looked at me, eyebrows raised, waiting, and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be able to talk to her like Gelsey could, and tell her what I was really afraid of. “Is Dad okay?”

My mom gave me a sad smile. “I just want him to have some company. Okay?”

And of course I had agreed, and my dad and I drove the hour into Stroudsburg together, my father behind the wheel—I felt like I’d learned my lesson as far as questioning him about that. My dad seemed to be treating this excursion, brief as it was, like a real road trip. He stopped at PocoMart for honey-roasted peanuts and sodas for us, and put me in charge of radio duties as we headed out of town. This was perhaps the most unexpected part of the afternoon, since whenever we’d been in the car together before, he was always either on the Bluetooth talking to his office, or listening to the financial report.