Maine Squeeze (2 page)

Ben and I actually met on the ferry to school one morning. Everyone from seventh grade and up goes to the mainland for school, which means I'd been catching the ferry at seven o'clock every morning for the past six years for the forty-five-minute trip. But enough about my tragic life.

Meeting someone on the ferry probably sounds really romantic, but you haven't known nausea until you've ridden a ferry that smelled like diesel and you've had to sit inside because it was cold and raining very hard. Even someone like me, who'd been taking the boat for years, had trouble on days like that.

Ben was new to the island, and he was looking
completely
green. My friend Haley and I felt so sorry for him that we went over to him and asked how he was doing. Haley told him to look at the horizon, which is a trick for not getting seasick. Then I gave him some of my still-half-frozen cinnamon-raisin bagel and told him to come stand in the doorway with me, because it's better when you have something in your stomach and when you get a little fresh air, even if it's cold and wet outside.

“What's your name?” I asked him.

“B—Ben,” he stammered, looking around nervously.

“Colleen Templeton,” I said, shaking his hand, trying to distract him by making small talk and introducing myself.

“Colleen?” He nodded, biting his lip. “I really don't want to puke on my first day.”

“You won't,” I assured him. “Just have another bite of the bagel and you won't. But at least if you do? We're all wearing raincoats.”

He laughed and then clutched his stomach.

I don't know how I could have found someone so green, so cute. But he was.

And I don't know if he asked me out a couple of months later out of gratitude for that day, or what. By that time I was starting to realize Evan—who I thought was the love of my life
last
summer—had moved on, so I decided I might as well, too. It was good timing, which was a first for me. My family's notorious for bad timing.

So now it was kind of funny that Ben would be spending eight to ten hours a day on the ferry. There's an expression, “getting your sea legs.” Ben had those now, and very nice sea legs at that.

I was really looking forward to spending the summer with him. This year would be so different from last year. I wouldn't have any big ups and downs, like with Evan, who my friend Samantha had dubbed “the drama king.” I wouldn't have to worry about how Evan felt about me, or whether Evan and I were going to get together, or whether, after we
did
get together, anyone would catch us making out in the walk-in fridge at work, which in retrospect seems a little tacky. Fun at the time, though, I have to admit. But my life was a lot less racy, now. I was a lot calmer—and happier.

As Ben and I were standing on the porch, saying good-bye, an old, faded blue-and-white pickup truck came rattling up the road. “Here comes trouble,” Ben said as Haley Boudreau pulled into the driveway.

Haley slammed the driver's door shut. “What are you doing here?” she asked Ben.

“He came over for breakfast—to say good-bye to my parents,” I told her, looking at all the boxes and bags in the back of the truck. Haley was moving into my brother Richard's old room, and Samantha would be coming up from Boston tomorrow and taking the guest room. I was going to pick up Erica when I drove my parents to the Portland airport that afternoon.

“You knew I was here, right? That's why you came over, so I could help you carry all that stuff in,” Ben said as Haley unlatched the truck's tailgate.

“Yeah. Do you think you can lift this?” Haley picked up a small duffel bag and tossed it to Ben. “We'll do the heavy stuff. What do you think, we're not strong enough?”

Haley could be so stubbornly independent. You'd never know from the way she was talking to Ben that they were such good friends. The three of us did practically everything together.

She pulled a large cardboard box out of the back of her family's beat-up pickup truck. “How much did you
bring
?” I asked as I went over to help.

“I'm glad this is the last box,” I said as we climbed the stairs. “Remind me again why we told Ben to leave and let us do this on our own?”

“Come on, it's good for you,” Haley said. “You'll be ready to carry those big heavy trays.”

“Strength training? Okay. Consider me strong.” I dropped the box of CDs onto the floor in Richard's old room. It was funny to think of Haley moving in here when she only lived about five minutes away. It was like when we were ten and had sleepovers at each other's houses every Saturday night. We used to annoy Richard to no end; I wondered how he'd feel about “Horrible Haley” living in his room.

Haley and I have been friends ever since my family moved to the island, when I was eight. My mom grew up here, but went away to college and lived in Chicago for a while, which is where she met my dad and where Richard and I were born. Then her parents needed help, and Mom and Dad were sick of big-city life, so they turned their summer vacations on the island into year-round living. First one job at the elementary school on the island opened, and my dad took it, and then another, and my mom took that. (They're like the tag team of silliness when it comes to working with little kids. Maybe it's because they spend so much time with little kids that they're slightly, well, goofy. I mean, they've definitely spent too much time inhaling glue, paste, and Magic Markers.)

Haley is the shortest person I know—not that it matters, but it's a fact. Her father and her uncle are lobstermen, just like her grandfather, and his father before him, etc. etc. They've been on the island for decades—probably a century or two, for all I know. They call everyone who arrived since 1900 “from away.” But they're not standoffish about it, the way some people can be.

I once asked her why she'd decided to work at the Landing, instead of with her family, this summer. “My family's crazy,” she'd said. “You know that. They wouldn't even
pay
me. Or they'd say they were going to, but then they'd tell me they needed the money for something else, and would I mind waiting a few weeks … you know how it was last summer. I made about ten dollars.”

Haley had a strong Maine accent, so when she said words like
summer
and
dollar
, they sounded like “summah” and “dollah.”

“So you'd rather sell postcards and ice cream cones?” I'd asked. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” she'd said. “You have no idea how stubborn my mother can be.”

Actually, I did, because I knew how stubborn
Haley
could be. Like this latest standoff with her mother—it could last for months. Haley and I had had a few standoffs ourselves over the years. We always got over them and apologized to each other, but sometimes it had taken weeks.

“Good. Fine,” Mrs. Boudreau had said when Haley told her about our summer plan to share the house. She was already mad about Haley's going to work for someone else, and it showed. “Have a wonderful time,” she said coldly. “See you in September.” Which, of course, sounded like “Septembah.”

I'll quit talking about their accent now—I just really like the way it sounds. I always wanted to have an accent, but I could never pull it off since I wasn't born here.

Unlike me, Haley didn't have a serious boyfriend. She was determined not to get too serious or tied down with anybody while she was still young. Her older sister had gotten married by the time she was twenty, and then had two kids right away. Haley wanted to get off the island and go to college and see the world before she did that. She'd earned a scholarship to Dartmouth—she was brilliant in science and calculus—and was looking forward to getting off the island and meeting people who'd never even heard of it. Or so she said. I wondered how she was going to handle being so far away from the ocean when she'd never lived anywhere else. (I'd be attending Bates College, which isn't on the coast, either, but it's not far from it.)

“So, how do you think Richard's going to take the news?” Haley asked as she sat on the bed. “Do you think he'll even come out here this summer?”

I fixed the bulletin board, which was hanging crooked. The board was covered with photos of Richard and his freshman-year girlfriend, Richard and his sophomore-year girlfriend.... He always went out with beautiful girls, but he had a time limit on his relationships, it seemed. Two or three months and he was moving on.
Tick, tick, tick
.

It was hard to think that my big brother, who I'd worshiped for years (because he was five years older, he was just old enough to be really nice toward me most of the time, at least once he got past the new-baby-hatred phase—and I really looked up to him), was maybe not all that different from other guys, or that he did typical guy things that made him sort of a jerk.

“He's supposed to be coming for July Fourth. He doesn't get much vacation time because he's so new at his job,” I told Haley. “So he's only coming for the long weekends—Labor Day, too.”

“But we'll be gone then,” Haley said. “Isn't that weird to think about?” She opened the box on the bed beside her and pulled out a few books. “Did I say weird? I meant incredibly great.”

“And we'll be unpacking then, too,” I said. “Is that why you brought so much stuff? Are you practicing?”

“I brought my favorite things,” Haley said. “Because who knows when my mother's going to get mad at me again and decide to throw out all of my stuff.”

“She wouldn't do that,” I said.

“She would. When my sister announced she was getting married, my mother put all of her belongings at the end of the driveway. Remember that?”

“She doesn't like being left … I guess,” I said.

“What does she think? That we're going to stay home and live with her forever?” Haley started putting books into Richard's empty bookcase. “I wish
she
would go to Europe for the summer, instead of your parents.”

In a way, I almost wished that, too. Now that my parents were actually leaving that afternoon, I was thinking about how much I would miss them.

There was a knock on the door. “Colleen? Could you come downstairs?” my mother asked.

“Is it time to go?”

“Not yet. But there's something important we have to discuss before we leave.”

“What to do when Starsky and Hutch get upset when they realize that you're gone?” I asked, referring to our cats. My dad named them after his favorite old television show.

“No. The house rules,” my mother said.

Haley and I exchanged a look.
What
house rules?

Chapter 2

Haley drove off in the truck, the shocks bouncing along as she backed down the bumpy gravel driveway.

I saw that my parents had loaded their luggage into the back of the old Volvo wagon. (You almost don't need a car on the island, really—you could practically walk everywhere you need to. Mostly you just need cars and trucks to haul things. But if you want one when you get to the mainland, you have to keep it somewhere.)

Dad was sitting on the top porch step, petting Starsky and saying good-bye. Starsky always seemed to know when someone was going away, and then he tried not to let you out of his sight.

“Hutch is obviously crushed you're leaving.” I pointed at Hutch, who was sprawled on top of one of the Adirondack chair cushions, his legs hanging off, about to fall but completely oblivious to the world.

My family had this ongoing debate about how cats ever got onto the island in the first place. My mother theorized that the original feline residents of the island must have sneaked off a pirate ship in search of a better life. My father always said, “Actually, there was that one cat that took the ferry. No, wait. There had to be two.” He was working on a children's picture book about a ferry cat and an ex-pirate cat that fell madly in love. As I said, he can be pretty goofy. Naturally, the two cats in his book looked exactly like Starsky and Hutch. Starsky is a gray tortoiseshell tabby with a white tail, and Hutch is a blond marmalade-colored tabby cat. They're brothers.

I wondered which one was more like a pirate. Starsky did have a habit of knocking my earrings from the top of my dresser to the floor, so maybe he had more of a yearning for stealing—and wearing—gold. Hutch had a habit of sleeping through everything, major and minor.