My Almost Epic Summer (10 page)

The important thing is I said my piece. Whether Mom re-examines it or not will be up to time. I slide back down on the couch and pick up my book. Soon I’m disappearing inside the story, on the coast of Cap d’Antibes, a place that sounds so glitzy and gold-drenched and shimmering that I wish I knew how to pronounce it out loud.

So far, the Dicoles’ lives are perfect.

 

 

 

THE RINGING WAKES ME. Mom, too. She must have come home after I fell asleep. I know by the way she’s bumping madly down the hall in search of the phone that she is thinking: Roy.

Then she knocks and whispers, “For you!”

When I open my bedroom door, Mom seems more sleepy than angry. Girls’ Nights Out are good for her that way, at least. They take the edge off, temporarily. “Tell whoever it is that next time you’ll be grounded for any calls past ten, okay?” Then she swoops back into her room.

It takes me a few seconds to realize the phone in my hand means somebody is on the other end. Somebody who wants to talk with me. Now. While I’m still half asleep. “Hello?”

“Irene? It’s Drew Fuller.”

Drew Fuller? Who is that? “Hi?”

“Is this too late to call?” I can’t place his voice, which is soft and gentle, calling to mind guitar players more than football players. “I got your number from an old Bishop Middle snow chain.”

“What?” I cough the sleep rasp from my throat. “Are you sure you have the right number?”

“You’re Irene, um, Morse?”

“Yes.” One thing I’m sure of. “I’m Irene.”

“Maybe you don’t remember me. I was in Mr. Frank’s sixth grade and you were in Mrs. Calderon’s fifth, and we were both in the gifted program. We did the Shark Park Project together for science fair?”

The Shark Park Project, how could I forget? It was a proposal petitioning the Fijian government for allocation and protection of a three-mile strip of water off the island of Tonga in order to preserve the near-extinct tiger shark. We were Bishop Middle’s official selection, and went on to win fourth place in the State Regionals. I still have the ribbon, although we failed to get the sharks their park.

And now my memory also sifts up a scrawny, silent kid with a mouthful of sharklike silver braces. Why is geeky Drew Fuller calling me at midnight? And am I now supposed to talk to him as if this is a normal, every night occurrence? I give it my best. “Oh, yeah, I remember. Didn’t your dad once give some of us rides home?”

“Yep. You still live on Valentine?”

“Uh-huh.”

I search for small-talk topics and come up empty-handed. “Why are you calling me?”

“Right. About Tara.” Drew Fuller coughs. “Tell Tara Malloy to stop doing that stuff. I saw her steal those candy bars and drinks. You gotta tell her, since you’re her friend, that she’s crossed the line. Also what she did to my car. My brother and I bought that car together with our own money. You can’t believe how mad he was. Tell her enough is enough.”

It takes my brain almost a hundred years to process that Drew Fuller from the Shark Park Project is also Starla’s beloved, despised D.

He is waiting for me to speak. What should I say first? Should I clarify that she’s Starla now, not Tara? Or that I’m not really her friend? Mostly I want to ask Drew Fuller when he got so tall.

Instead, I come up with, “I think
Starla
wants more reasons about why the two of you broke up.”

In answer, silence. Then, “We’re not each other’s types. She’s too intense. Can’t you tell her that?”

“I’d have a hard enough time explaining that you called me at midnight.”

More silence. I can hear the after-echo of my last words, and I wonder if I sounded mean. Then Drew says, in a rush, “Hey, did you know I was Golden Bookworm the year before you? But I only had to read thirty-four books. My class wasn’t really into it—otherwise I could have read way more, easy. My kid brother drew vampire bats on my
Bartlett’s Quotations
.”

“What a brat.”

“Nah. It’s not like I can’t use it.” But Drew wouldn’t have confessed about the vampire bats unless he thought it was bratty, too. He must love his big, beautiful
Bartlett’s
the way I love mine.

“So, you broke my record,” he says.

“I guess.”

“By, like, seventeen books,” he adds.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So . . .” His voice is slightly disbelieving. “How’d you do it?”

“I read plays. That was my librarian’s strategy. She was my coach.”

“Wanna hear what I read?” he asks, and then starts reeling off his books. As I listen, I can’t help but think how strangely exciting it is to be sitting in my bed on a midnight phone call with Drew Fuller. And not metal-mouth, shark-obsessed Drew, but older, better-looking Drew, who is most likely calling me from his house, but who I keep picturing standing behind the register at Shady Shack.

Behind his husky voice, though, I can also hear Starla:
You nerds are all alike. Thinking you’re better than anyone else.
What would she say if she knew I was on the phone right now with her very own personal D?

And so when Drew has finished his list, I make myself say, “Okay. And I’ll talk to Starla for you tomorrow.”

“Wait. Tell me
your
books.”

“I can’t think of any right now.”

“C’mon. Sure you can.”

“Well, okay, I read . . .
Monster
and . . .
The Cherry Orchard
—that’s a play. And . . . and . . .” But it’s as if somebody is holding a straw to my ear and sucking out my brain through it. There’s a roar of emptiness inside my head where my book list should be. “It’s so late, I can’t think.” Then I laugh in a way that sounds suspiciously like a giggle.

Drew laughs, too, as if my impaired conversation is subtly clever.

“I guess I better go,” I say. “My mom . . .” But just mentioning my mom makes me feel too self-conscious, and I can’t finish.

“Wait,” he says again. And then we are both just breathing in and out on the phone. The joined sound of our breath stands up the hair on my arms and the back of my neck. It strikes me that the last thing I would ever want to do is hang up this phone. “I’m almost done with this paperback,” Drew says. “It’s called
On the Road
. I’ll let you have it when I’m through.”

“Great.” I don’t want to tell him that I’ve already read it. “And I’ll . . . I’ll talk to Starla tomorrow.” I wince. Saying Starla’s name is worse than saying Mom. It effectively shatters the moment.

“Okay.”

“Good night.” No, not
good night.
I could have said anything but
good night. Good night
means I am ending the call. What is wrong with me?

“Oh. G’night.”

I listen to Drew click off. The hand that held the phone is damp. I lie down in my bed, my eyes wide on the ceiling. My mind is all noodly and my whole body is tingling. I don’t know what to think first. As confusing, as complicated as it is, for the first time this summer, I realize that I am not living in the corner of my life. Something Epic is actually happening to me. Right now. And I didn’t even have to move to Los Angeles.

 

 

 

AN HOUR LATER, I am still awake. I go online. There’s one e-mail, from Whitney.

 

 

From: [email protected]

Um, Irene . . .

Did you send me those bad jokes as a joke? B/c I did not laugh at any. I’ll give ya a tax free charity laugh to the one about what do bald guys put for hair color on their driver’s license. The others were excroosh. Way thumbs down.

Get this today I find out behind my back Walt told this kid Rich Curie that I looked like an Australian prairie vole. I found one online and it is so so not true but I wonder how many people Rich told. So I broke up with Walt and I’m not speaking to Rich. I will never look at another example of the defect male species. From now on it’s tennis tennis tennis and nothing else which is what I should’ve been concentrating on in the first place . . .

Send me a real letter and no nyuck-nyucks.

W.

 

Dear Whit—

There’s this guy who might like me.

Delete.

 

 

Dear Whit—

Do you remember Drew Fuller from a grade ahead of us? Well now he is hot and he called me at midnight.

 

Delete.

 

 

Whitty—

That sucks about Walt. Think of it this way—if you’d married him, you’d be Walt and Whitney Waterman, which sounds like a cartoon and people would be smirky behind your back about it. If you’re feeling the need for revenge, you could always start a rumor that he told you he peed his bed until he was twelve.

So there’s this guy, but I’m not writing about him right now because I don’t want to jinx it. You’ll be the first to know if anything happens.

It’s almost three in the morning so I’ll send a longer letter when I’m conscious.

Your-reen.

 

Not great, and too brief for what I owe Whitney. But it’s better than no mail at all.

It even feels like a jinx to mention Drew at all, but I hit Send.

 

 

 

THE NEXT DAY, as soon as I see her, I tell Starla about Drew’s call.

I’ve resolved to tell her because:

A. It is the Heroine thing to do.

B. I would be scared if she found out about the call some other way.

Only Starla gets so angry about it that she can hardly speak, or even look at me. So angry that I wonder if she might take out her key and grate up the paint on Judith’s bike. So angry that it makes me angry.

“I didn’t do anything,” I protest for the second time. “And I especially didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You never told me you knew him. You lied, basically.”

“Because I didn’t recognize him. He looked different in sixth grade.”

“Whatever.”

“You make it seem like Drew calling me is my own fault.”

Starla pushes up her bucket hat to scan me from head to foot. Then she rolls her eyes.

“You know, you shouldn’t roll your eyes at a person. It’s the most critically negative of all facial expressions.”

“Then take the hint and go away.”

So I keep away from her. I rally the kids for cannonball contests on the dock. We twirl on the raft. We play Marco Polo and Freeze Tag with Zaps and Annie Waldron, who is, as Lainie testified, icky for no real reason. At lunch, I indulge Lainie in three monstrously dull rounds of Twenty Questions. I am the best babysitter of all time, and the self-appointed guardian of all Larkin’s Pond kids, because I figure if any of them started drowning, Starla’d be too hostile to perform rescues.

Occasionally, I sneak looks at her. She sits like a bronze-cast, stone-faced goddess on her lifeguard chair. Once she catches my eye, and I half smile over in hopeful truce, but she jerks her head away like I’m some pesky bug not worth more than a second’s irritated notice. Underneath, though, I know that each of our minds is fixated on the other, turning obsessive, mental loops.

That afternoon, as I’m packing up, Drew appears.

I try to concentrate on Starla’s anger, but Drew dissolves it. I feel the same as I did last night, helplessly, cringingly self-conscious, trying to prepare myself for the aftershock of whatever dumb thing I might say or do in his presence. Odd, nervous thoughts blow in on a gale.
Does my hair look limp and unlustrous? Is my nose still peeling? Has Drew spied the gross bruise halfway up my right thigh?

“Hi.” I smile at him, hoping that I’ve exposed the correct number of teeth.

“Hey.”

“You work in Shady Shack,” says Lainie.

“Yeah. Come in next time, and I’ll give you a Superblo bubble gum,” Drew tells her.

“And me,” says Evan.

“Sure.” Drew smiles at me over Lainie’s head. Didn’t he used to wear glasses? I’m pretty sure he did, or how else could I have not noticed those eyes? “You’re their babysitter for the summer?”

“Yeah.” Starla is watching us too hard for me to relax into the conversation. I get a sense of invisible knives whistling through the air.

“What a cushy job,” says Drew. “Babysitting’s the easy life, right?”

Cushy? Easy? Most of the time, what I feel about this job is bitter and resentful. Then I’m struck by the possibility that Drew might be having an even worse summer than I am. I look at him harder. Outside and up close, Drew doesn’t seem quite as rubber-band bodied as when he’s slumped behind a register. His smile is awkward but real.

“Irene loves babysitting us,” Lainie declares. “She says we’re the best kids she ever took care of.”

“I believe it.” Drew nods.

“She just takes care of Lainie,” Evan adds. “I don’t need her.”

There’s something funny about both kids trying to show off for Drew. I picture him in their estimation, an older guy, as tall as their dad, with his own job and car.

“Hey!” Starla’s voice, lilting and sweet, snaps everyone’s head around. She is beckoning Drew over.

“The lifeguard wants you,” says Evan, his voice loaded with meaning.

“Right, okay,” Drew half twists in Starla’s direction. “Talk to ya later.”

“Bye.” I want to say more, only not under Starla’s inspection. I open my book and allow myself only the smallest, slyest glances at the two of them. Whatever they’re talking about, I console myself that it doesn’t seem intimate, though at one point Starla laughs, a pealing bell of a laugh that I’m sure is at least halfway for my benefit. Still, it feels like hours have dragged past before Drew detaches, heading back to Shady Shack, with a quick chin lift to acknowledge us as he passes by.