Maine Squeeze (13 page)

“Fine. Really? Did you want to give me any details?”

“I just … I don't know why you're asking. Now. I mean, it's a little late. You could have asked me back when it was actually semi-relevant.”

“Yeah, but what would be the fun in that?”

I was so sick of hearing him say that. The
fun
. Was that how it felt, completely ignoring someone by not keeping in touch?
Fun?

I started thinking that I must have really bad taste when it came to boyfriends. Maybe that was it; maybe that was why I'd had two of them while my friends didn't, because I'd picked guys who were no doubt available because they were horrible, evil losers.

But that didn't make sense, because Ben was a totally nice person with zero flaws except (a) nearly vomiting when he met me, which technically had nothing to do with me, and (b) being too nice sometimes, to a fault.

Ben wasn't the problem. Evan was.

“I can't believe you're still wearing your Birks to work. I thought Trudy banned sandals as footwear. Didn't we go over that, like, a hundred times?”

Evan just looked at me with a small smile turning up the corners of his mouth. “Funny.”

“What?”

“You never struck me as the nagging girlfriend type.”

“That's because (a), I'm not nagging, and (b), I'm not your girlfriend.”

Before I knew what I was doing, I'd stepped closer to Evan, and I gave him a little shove, a bit more forceful a shove than I'd meant to. His sandals slipped on the slick docks, and he lost his balance. Then he plunged backward into the harbor, landing butt-first with a loud smack in the dirty, fishy, disgusting cold water.

“Oh, no—oh, Evan—I'm sorry!” I cried, running over to him when he surfaced.

I expected him to be coughing and sputtering and yelling at me, but he wasn't. He was actually smiling.

“Are you okay? Are you freezing?” I asked. “Come on, get out.”

“You know what? It's refreshing, actually,” he said.

“Refreshing? You're literally swimming with the fishes.” I could see a fish skeleton bobbing in the water beside Evan.

Erica ran out of Bobb's toward us, holding a couple of towels. “Evan, are you all right? Do you want help getting out?”

“Thanks, Erica. That would be nice.” He swam toward the dock and held on to it with his fingers, which already looked slightly blue. I watched as he reached up for Erica's hand, while she dumped the towels in my arms.

Suddenly, Evan grabbed my ankles instead of Erica's hands—and pulled me facefirst into the water. I threw the towels over my head as I dove in.

The water hit me like a wall of ice cubes. I think my heart actually stopped beating for a second as my head submerged, and I closed my eyes and mouth against the freezing, murky water.

When I surfaced, I saw Evan smiling at me. He hadn't even started to get out of the water yet. “You … This is so dangerous!” I said.

“So … it's okay for
me
, but it might hurt you?” Evan's hair was slicked back, and he looked so good to me that for a few seconds I just treaded water and stared at him. I started remembering a night last summer when we'd dared each other to go swimming. Not just swimming, actually. Skinny-dipping.

We were walking home from a party, and we took a detour down a dirt road, by this private cove, to check out the full moon.

And yeah, we both did the dare. And then—

Erica cleared her throat loudly. “So, don't you think you guys should get out now? We should all get back inside.”

“Right!” I said quickly, swimming to the edge. I hauled myself up onto the dock, with Erica's help, and grabbed one of the towels from her, quickly covering the wet T-shirt and shorts that were now clinging to my body. I rubbed my hair with the towel, trying to dry it a little bit.

“I lost a sandal.” Evan was crouching at the edge of the dock, peering into the water.

“So dive down and find it,” I said.

“Like I could.” He stood up and looked at me, giving a slight laugh as he reached down to slip off the one remaining Birkenstock. It was dripping wet. “It's your fault, and they're like ninety-dollar sandals.”

“You only lost one. So that's forty-five.”

“But I can't buy just one, I have to buy a new pair. So you owe me ninety bucks.”

“Yeah, but they were at least two years old, so they weren't worth that much.”

“So? Replacing them will still cost me ninety.” Evan rubbed his head with a towel. “You can start paying me tomorrow, out of your tips. Unless you have ninety on you right now.”

I quickly reached into my pocket, hoping I hadn't lost my wad of bills to the harbor along with Evan's stupid sandal. Nope, it was still there. But I wasn't handing it over.

“No. I don't. And I can't give you all the money I make tomorrow. I need it.”

“Well, you should have thought of that before you pushed me in.” He turned and walked up the dock and then up the ramp to the restaurant's back door.

If I could have found that missing sandal, I would have thrown it at the back of his head.

We had a shower in the basement that he was probably going to use. I'd stay out of his way until he was finished. Me, maybe I'd just go home and shower, so I could change my clothes. And if I didn't work any more tonight, I wouldn't make any more tips, so then I wouldn't have to pay him back.

Right?

I started shivering and realized I needed to get inside. I called home and asked Haley if she could bring me a change of clothes.

“Why do you need new clothes?” she asked.

“Don't ask.”

“I just asked.”

I let out a sigh. “Because I fell into the water and my clothes are sopping wet and I smell like bait.”

“Gross. Why didn't you just say so?”

As soon as she dropped off the clothes, and when Evan was done, I went into the bathroom and took a long, hot shower, trying to wash away the entire day: the cat food on my sunglasses, the bad talk on the ferry with Ben, the nasty harbor smell in my hair.

The way Evan had looked, treading water beside me. How it reminded me of last summer.

And how I shouldn't be thinking those kinds of things anymore.

Ben wasn't waiting for me when I got home that night, and I can't say I was surprised. In a way, I was a little relieved, because I was so exhausted that I didn't know if I could (a) deal with his being mad at me, (b) explain why my shoe smelled of coleslaw, and (c) explain why I'd acted so secretive about the whole thing with Evan.

I shouldn't have secrets from Ben. Should I?

But I did.

Chapter 11

It was still raining the next morning, so I decided to take advantage of the bad weather to work on a new collage piece.

I've been doing collage art since I was about nine. It started out as an art project for school—I'd always loved children's books by Eric Carle, Leo Lionni, and Lois Ehlert, to name a few. So I tried to imitate their techniques, but it didn't come out quite right. Dad helped me improve, though, and I started small, making Mother's Day and birthday cards, then worked up to bigger pieces. I made mini-yearbooks for my friends, and even taught art in my parents' classes a few times a year. We sometimes used discarded lobster, clam, and mussel shells and stones from the beach to make glued collages—a different type than I usually made, but it was still fun.

My dad, Magic Marker Man, couldn't have been more thrilled by my decision to pursue an art major. After Richard gave up liberal arts to become a stockbroker, Dad had been convinced he'd failed somewhere along the line. Now, sadly, I would apparently uphold the Templeton tradition of doing lots of work for no pay.

But maybe it wouldn't come to that. I was working on some new pieces, and getting slides made of others so that I could start putting my portfolio together and maybe someday have a gallery show. Portland has a lot of galleries and a really active arts scene.

“Why don't you paint? You should paint,” my uncle Frank would say whenever he saw my work. “You know, Betty McGonagle sold over
fifty
paintings last summer.”

Which might sound impressive, except that:

(a) Betty McGonagle paints only one thing.

(b) It's the ocean.

(c) She does the same thing over and over again and they're all 5”x7”.

(d) They're sold at the Landing gift shop, and you could put old, expired, rancid
meat
at that gift shop and it would sell, as long as it had the word
Maine
imprinted on it. (People get desperate when they see the ferry about to leave, and they reach for something—anything—quaint.)

(e) Betty McGonagle is like seventy-five years old and has all day to paint.

Don't get me wrong. I love paintings of the ocean. Winslow Homer really knocks me out. But I just can't get excited about Betty McGonagle's paint-by-numbers … numbers.

Suddenly I realized there was a reason I was thinking so much about Betty McGonagle. And it wasn't jealousy over her sales figures or ability to capture moving water.

The smell of paint was wafting down the hallway and sneaking into my room. Was there another artist in residence that I didn't know about? I set down my glue and wandered out into the hall. Then I followed my nose to Blair's room. I knocked on the door. “What's that smell?”

“Paint!” she called out. “Come on in—check out how good it looks!”

I walked into my parents' bedroom and nearly tripped on a bucket of paint as Blair switched on the overhead light to give me a better view.

“Purple?” I cried. “You painted my parents' bedroom bright purple?”

“No. It's lupine, actually,” she said. She leaned down to look at the can of paint sitting on newspapers on the floor. “Late-afternoon lupine.” She was wearing overalls and a white T-shirt, with a baseball cap over her hair.

“It's still … purple, though,” I said.

In a way, it looked sort of cool. And my parents could be fun, and it fit into the category of playful elementary school colors. But she had a lot of nerve, painting a room that was only going to be hers for a couple of months. And who was going to get into trouble? Not her.
Me
. “How could you do this?”

“What?” She seemed surprised by the question.

“You just … paint someone's room? Without asking? You're only living here for two months!”

“But I needed a change,” Blair said. “That light blue—it was bringing me down. So washed out. When I wake up in the morning, I need a blast of energy, not to look at myself in the mirror and just seem … faded and tired.”

“But it was new. And it matches—excuse me,
matched
—everything,” I said. “And it's my parents', and my mother picked out the color and she spent like a year choosing it.” One of the most aggravating years of my
life
, I could add—the great Templeton redecorating project of the new millennium. Poring over home improvement books and comparing color palettes until the break of dawn, night after night. It was my mother's reaction to Richard leaving home for college. (Of course, she didn't finish all the work until well after he graduated.) I wondered what she was going to do when I left home.

First, probably repaint my room and turn it into something else.

Or maybe Mom would deal with my leaving home by going to Europe without me for the summer. Hold on. How did that make sense?

Anyway. Blair wasn't all that apologetic about it, and I wasn't the kind of person to fight and fight over it. I strongly believed in that old adage “What's done is done,” maybe because my father said it all the time, usually whenever he botched a home improvement project. I told Blair that we'd have to repaint before the summer was over, then I went downstairs, took down the house rules list, and wrote: