How to Meet Boys (10 page)

I put my putter on my shoulder. “Let’s call it a game.”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

Lucy and I walked over to the wooden shack and turned in our golf balls and clubs, then headed to Midge’s right next door. Midge’s had the best ice cream in Bridgeport, according to Lucy. I hadn’t tasted nearly enough ice cream so far that summer to be sure.

A few couples were lingering outside at picnic tables. Just as Lucy and I walked up to the window to order, a car pulled up and about six guys climbed out. One of them was wearing a St. Paul Saints T-shirt, which made me think of Jackson—he’d been wearing a shirt for the same baseball team when we played beach volleyball.

I’d been having such a good time hanging out with Lucy that I’d almost—almost—forgotten about Jackson and how much I wanted to see him again.

Thankfully I’d gotten control of my emotions where Jackson was concerned.

I wasn’t going to see him. I’d been avoiding him for the past two days, staying away from the coffee shop. Not hanging out at the Club after work. If I avoided visiting Lucy at work too, I could just keep my distance until this whole thing cooled down.

Lucy nudged me and raised her eyebrows as the guys came up behind us in line.

I nudged her back gently with my elbow. “What are you going to get?”

“Small hot fudge sundae with banana walnut ice cream,” she said. “You?”

“Mint chocolate chip in a cone,” I said. “Maybe a triple.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Lucy said.

“I’m hungry!” I said. But when I got my cone a minute later, I could see why she’d been so worried. We both burst out laughing as the server handed it to me. The ice cream cone was so tall, it barely fit through the take-out window.

“You need some help with that?” one of the boys behind us in line asked as I walked past.

“No—uh,” I mumbled.

“Because we could split it,” he said.

“No—uh,” I said again. I rolled my eyes—at myself—as I gingerly carried the giant tower of ice cream.

“Don’t mind her,” Lucy said. “She’s a foreign exchange student.” She hurried after me toward a picnic table. “You’re going to drop it!” Lucy said, laughing.

“What did they do, put a whole gallon on here? There’s no way I can even, like, hold this!” I laughed.

Lucy pulled her phone out of her shorts pocket and took a picture of the gargantuan cone, then checked her messages. With my non-cone hand, I scrolled through Facebook posts and updates, checking out what my friends and family were up to back home.

While Lucy was busy texting, I quickly turned to the side and looked up Jackson’s profile. His privacy settings kept me from seeing too much. Still, I couldn’t find anything about him I didn’t like—the only mark against him that I could see was the fact he’d ruined Lucy’s life for a while. That wasn’t easy to overlook. Still, maybe it wasn’t a big deal anymore. They were young then. We weren’t now. It wasn’t like she had talked about still having a crush on him or anything—she’d moved on.

Right?

“Anything good?” Lucy asked, glancing up. Her eyes widened. “Mikayla!” she cried.

“What?” I instantly turned over my phone, worried she’d seen me checking out Jackson and his friends.

“Look at the table!”

There was a large pool of green ice cream spreading wider and wider, while my hand was covered with ice cream. I’d gotten so wrapped up in scanning Facebook that I’d neglected to eat my cone.

Lucy ran to get more napkins and a dish for me, while the guy sitting one table over with his friends said, “I offered to help, you know.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what she was thinking,” Lucy said as she returned. “Clearly she needs help.”

He smiled back and then laughed, shaking his head, while Lucy began to clean me up. I felt like a little kid, like my stepbrothers used to be: they’d wear half of their ice cream instead of eating it. So. Totally. Embarrassing.

“What were you looking at, anyway?” Lucy asked.

“Oh, the usual stuff.” I turned my phone over and immediately went back to my own Facebook page, where my mom had posted a new photo of my half sister, Anya, posed with our dog, who she’d dressed up in a hat and scarf. I held it out to show Lucy. “Cute, right?”

“So where are you guys from?” The group of boys just sort of converged on us, some of them sitting at the table next to ours, while others stood around our table.

“M-Minneapolis?” I said.

He looked askance at Lucy. “I thought you said she was a foreign-exchange student.”

“Her English is really terrible,” Lucy said. “Don’t let her fool you.”

“Um, she didn’t,” he said. “You guys just visiting then?”

“We’re here for the whole summer. Working in Bridgeport,” Lucy said. I just kept attempting to eat my ice cream cone while staying out of the conversation. She didn’t need my help. She needed me
not
to help. “How about you?”

“Up for the summer. We’re staying in Kingfield.”

“That’s cool.” Lucy nodded. “You guys going to play mini golf?”

“We might. Are you?”

“We actually just did. So, anyway, we have to go now.” She pulled at my sleeve as she walked past me. “So. Embarrassing,” she said once we got into the car and closed the doors behind us.

We started laughing, out-of-control laughing, the kind that hurts your stomach. She quickly finished her sundae so that she could drive, and we pulled out of the lot.

“Look at your face! It’s still part green,” she said, laughing.

“Since when am I a foreign-exchange student?” I said. “Where am I supposed to be from?”

“I don’t know. Mars?” she suggested, and we burst out laughing again.

That was the thing about Lucy: not only was she a great and true friend, she was always able to make me laugh. It was killing me to not blurt out that I’d met Jackson. I wanted to tell her. But how could I risk hurting her when I wasn’t even sure if Jackson actually wanted to see me—and if he did, whether I was special to him or just one girl out of many he liked.

I knew I couldn’t keep this secret from her for much longer, but for right now, I was keeping my mouth closed. As far as I knew, soon Lucy and I would both be trying to meet boys all over again.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

A crack of thunder boomed outside
and a bright flash of lightning lit up the store’s plate glass window for a second. “Somehow I don’t think we’re going to sell anything today,” I said.

“I hope it stops. I have to work tonight. Not much of a deck view right now,” Jackson said.

“On the other hand, the walleye could just, like, swim onto the deck. Talk about fresh.”

Jackson stopped organizing the greeting cards and postcards in the racks by the front window and peered out the doors at the pouring rain. “It’s not completely hopeless,” he said in a cheerful voice, as if the fact we were in the middle of a tropical storm was just fine with him.

“Just mostly hopeless, then?” I said.

He laughed. “It is kind of monsoonlike, actually. Do you think we’re still supposed to clean the front windows and sweep the sidewalk?”

“Only if you can do it without drowning,” I said. “Maybe use a sponge?”

“Well, at least we’re not working on a sales commission. We get paid whether anyone buys apple stuff or not.”

“Apple stuff?” I asked. “Maybe my grandparents would like to change the name of the store to that.”

“Seriously. They should think about changing it to something else. I took like ten calls yesterday from people wanting help with their iPads,” said Jackson.

“And? Did you help them?” I asked.

“I told them they had the wrong number,” he said. “Except for a couple really easy fixes. Some people are so clueless. I didn’t want them to embarrass themselves by actually calling Apple.”

“You still good at that?” I asked. Then I realized: one thing we never actually did was acknowledge that we knew each other before this summer. We never, ever talked about who we were at home, or who we used to be.

That makes it sound like we had secret identities. Not the case. We just didn’t admit to there being any history between us. Or at least
I
didn’t. One day I was going to have to talk to Jackson about how much he’d hurt me.

“Yeah, I know some things,” Jackson said. “Not like I’m going to major in computer science or anything.”

There was an awkward pause. A long one.
You can do this
, I said to myself.
You can have a conversation with Jackson about something besides apples. And the weather.
Just because I hadn’t seen him in three years didn’t I mean I didn’t still basically
know
him. “So what
do
you want to major in?” I asked.

“I’m thinking economics,” he said. “Maybe accounting.” He shrugged. “Maybe the biology of apples.”

“Is that, like, a thing?” I asked. “Wait, it’s called botany.”

“How would I know? You should know,” he said. “You’re good at science. You used to kill me on tests, anyway.”

There it was again. The past. Yes, it existed. Could we just move on already?

“So are you still into science?” he asked.

I nodded. “I like it. I like history and politics, too. I’m not sure which I’ll end up doing. We have a while to decide, though.”

“Not that long,” he said. “I mean, we’ll have to start applying in the fall.”

“We will,” I agreed.

He nodded. I nodded. It was a nod-a-thon.

We went back to our boring tasks without another word to each other. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed that I could be in the same room with Jackson. Now, here we were having a conversation. It might not be a meaningful one, but we were having it.

The apple-shaped bell over the door started ringing, and I glanced out to see a boy holding an umbrella, which he quickly closed and left by the door. His yellow raincoat nearly had rivers coursing down it.

“You sell apples, right?” he asked, shaking water off his coat over by the door.

Jackson and I shared a funny look. “Um, yeah,” Jackson said, launching into his spiel about the various kinds we had in stock, but he was cut short.

“I really hope you can help me.” He lifted off his hood, revealing short, spiky red-brown hair.

“What do you need?” I asked. I walked away from the register toward him.

He looked over at me as if he hadn’t realized I was there too. “Oh, hi.” As I got closer I could hear him panting a little bit, as if he’d run the whole way. His cheeks were pink and a single drop of rain was running down the right side of his face.

“Okay, here’s the deal. I work for Blue Cove Catering. We have this major dinner tonight. Wedding reception. Whatever. Anyway, we’re supposed to be serving apples and cheese. The apples we were supposed to get from the distributor this morning didn’t show up. The apples at the grocery store are too bruised. And the co-op only has Pink Ladies from Washington State and this is supposed to be local.”

“We can help,” I said. “What do you need?”

“Chef Michael is having a Northern Spy crisis. He says if he can’t get ten dozen Northern Spies by noon, it’s going to be trouble.”

“Sounds like an international incident,” Jackson commented. “Or a James Bond movie.”

“It’s definitely an . . . incident,” the boy said. “The wedding’s supposed to be outdoors in the first place, so everyone’s freaking out about whether the tent they arranged is going to be big enough. Which is totally a valid concern. But then the apples . . . chef’s threatening to cancel over the lack of decent Northern Spies.”

“Wow. Canceling over apples?
That’s
extreme.”

“Yeah, he’s a little dramatic. And he yells a lot at whoever happens to be nearby, which usually happens to be me, because the only other employee is his mother, from what I can tell,” he said, raking his hand through his hair. “So is there any way you have ten dozen perfect Northern Spy apples? And if you don’t, can you tell me who might?”

“We should have close to that,” I said. “Let’s go take a look in the back. Jackson, can you bag up what we have out here?”

I walked into the cold storage room, and the boy followed me. “Wow. It’s freezing back here!” he commented, rubbing his arms.

“Yeah, this is where we keep the bad apples,” I joked.

“It’s apple jail?” he said, and we both laughed.

“No, seriously. This is just to keep them fresh.” I found the large bin of Northern Spies and was pretty sure we’d have enough. I measured out dozens into a couple of cardboard boxes and a bushel crate with his help. Then Jackson and I combined the amounts we had and stacked them by the front door.

“I just realized something,” the boy said as he eyed the boxes. “He gave me no way to pay for all these.”

“It’s no trouble. I can make out an invoice and you can take it with. He can send a check,” I said as I headed to the counter for the paperwork. “If he doesn’t, my grandparents will bill him. And if he doesn’t pay that . . . you know, apple justice.”

“Sounds like the Mafia,” he commented.

“Or the Walleye Mafia,” Jackson added.

“Yes, but it’s much worse,” I said. “We actually cut you with an apple corer.” He and Jackson laughed. “So you’re from . . . where, again? And what’s your name?”

“Blue Cove Catering.” He quickly gave the address and phone number. “And my name’s Gus. And you’re potentially saving my life, so thanks.” He smiled at me and I noticed he had startlingly green eyes, with little freckles in them.

That flustered me for a second. “No problem.” I focused back on the invoice, jotting down the details. I handed him the top copy, then followed him to the door. “Let me help you carry those out.”

“I’ll get it,” said Jackson.

“No, I’ve got it,” I insisted.

Gus lifted the top two boxes and I got the bottom two. Outside, a blue van with the letters
B ue Cove Cat ring
painted on the side was parked at the end of the block. The rain was still coming down pretty hard, but the worst of the thunderstorm seemed to have passed. Gus opened the sliding door and we loaded the boxes, one at a time. I stood back and brushed my hands against my shorts as he closed the door.