The Forget-Me-Not Summer (12 page)

Z
innie couldn't help going back for seconds, even though she was stuffed. There were red baby potatoes and corn on the cob wrapped in little packages of tinfoil. There was spicy sausage and lobster, which Aunt Sunny showed them how to crack open and use a little fork to get the meat out of. Lily, who had never had lobster before, ate two whole claws. There were clams and mussels, neither of which Marigold would eat, claiming they could give you diseases, but which Zinnie loved. There were jars full of melted butter for dipping and pouring. And it had all been cooked right there on the beach, on a bunch of rocks and a pile of stinky seaweed. Now that she had tried everything, she knew what to get more of. Clams! Salty, buttery clams! Zinnie couldn't believe it, but she preferred clambakes to taco trucks.

She stood up from the picnic blanket where she,
Marigold, and Lily were sitting. Marigold was letting Lily “do her hair” as she read to her from the
Night Sprites
book. This meant that Lily was using the handful of hair elastics she found in Marigold's purse to put a bunch of weird uneven braids and ponytails in Marigold's hair. Normally, Marigold didn't let anyone but a professional touch her perfect golden locks, but she couldn't go back on her promise to Lily. Besides, there was no one here she cared about seeing her, so what did it matter?

Zinnie walked back to the group gathered around the clambake. There were about fifteen people from four different families, but none of them had kids their ages. The only “kids” here were college students, who were laughing together and running behind the dunes. The grown-ups asked the sisters the usual questions like “What grade are you in?” and “How old are you?” Zinnie thought that if you knew the answer to one of those questions, you really didn't need to ask the other, but she was politer than Marigold and more outgoing than Lily, so she answered with a smile for all three of them.

Every time someone learned they were Aunt Sunny's nieces, that person would exclaim: “She's my best friend!” Or “Aren't you lucky?” Or “Isn't she a firecracker?” Or “You mean the sage of Pruet?” And their faces would open into big, laughing smiles. As for Aunt Sunny herself, Zinnie hadn't seen her sit down
once the whole time. She was laughing and chatting, flitting around the clambake like a hummingbird in a field of wildflowers.

The tall man with a sunburned nose and white hair who had done most of the cooking, Tony, smiled so much when he talked about Aunt Sunny that Zinnie thought his face might break.

“I'd like more clams, please,” Zinnie said to him when she went back for seconds.

“You take after your aunt,” he said, and piled clams onto her plate. “These littlenecks are her favorite. She eats 'em like candy. Maybe if you eat enough of these, you'll be as smart as she is. She's the smartest woman I know. Did you know that she once explained hydrodynamics over a coffee cake at Sue's Café?” Zinnie shook her head. He paused for a moment and added, “Yep, she's one of kind. And pretty as a peach.”

Pretty as a peach?
Though Aunt Sunny did have a nice, friendly sort of face, Zinnie had never thought of her as pretty. She wore her gray hair short and had old-fashioned-looking glasses and never dressed up or wore makeup. She also had kind of yellow teeth.

“I see you've met Zinnia,” Aunt Sunny said, and put a hand on Tony's shoulder. Aunt Sunny was pretty short, so in order to touch his shoulder, she had to reach her hand up past her head. Tony turned as red as a fire engine.

“Why, your ears must've been burning up,” he said.
“We were just talking about you.”

You're the one who's burning up,
thought Zinnie.

“You're not telling her how we locals like to whoop it up at the Clam Shack, are you?” she asked.

“Nope,” Tony said, and laughed.

“Well, that's good. I'm a role model, you know.” Then she squinted, looking at something in the distance. “Well, I'll be darned. They decided to join us, despite the impending weather,” Aunt Sunny said. Zinny dug into her clams. She ate two, and Aunt Sunny took one off her plate, claiming it was “the aunt tax.” Zinnie wasn't missing the town beach at all. In fact, as she devoured another buttery clam, she wished there were a clambake every day. Aunt Sunny waved to someone behind Zinnie. “So glad to see you, Jean, and you've brought our champion sailor.”

“We're a little late because of a birthday party, but we couldn't wait to get here,” a lady said.

“I'm so pleased for you to meet my niece. This is Zinnia Silver.”

“It's so nice to—” Zinnie turned around, ready to shake hands for the zillionth time that day. But her fingers went limp, and she felt her cheeks get as hot as the rocks that had cooked the clams. She had no idea how to finish the sentence she'd started, for she was face-to-face with Peter Pasque, who knew her by an entirely different name.

I
n a matter of seconds the raindrops started to really come down, but Marigold was the only one who seemed to care. She ducked against the rain and shoved her
Night Sprites
book deep into her purse.
These people are nuts,
she thought, noticing that almost all of them were laughing as they collected the trash and loaded their arms with beach chairs, towels, pots of seafood, and baskets of rolls. They were smiling as they covered their plates with other plates and shoved their sodas into their beach bags and started to climb back over the dune. As if this were normal! As if it were cool to be stuck on the beach in the rain! As if her leather bag weren't going to be ruined—the second purse in less than a week! Not to mention her brand-new gladiator sandals!

“Come on,” Marigold said. She rolled up their towel
and took Lily's hand. She stood up and looked for Zinnie, who would be easy to spot because her hair became so wild and frizzy in the rain, it stood up four inches from her head. Sure enough, she found her in a second. She was helping roll up tarps and talking to a boy. “Zinnie!” Marigold called. “Come on, let's go!”

Zinnie and the boy stopped rolling up the tarp, turned around, and looked at Marigold. Zinnie's eyes were wide. Oddly wide. Wide with warning. Marigold shrugged a kind of what's-up? shrug. And then she realized who it was: Peter Pasque! The boy she'd told her name was Seraphina Snoopy! The boy who'd seen her topple backward into the water! She was about to run her hands through her hair, something she always did when she was nervous, when she felt Lily's hairstyling creations all over her head. There was one ponytail sticking straight up on top and two more next to her ears. The back of her head was covered in braids. She knew she looked like a total freak, but there was no time to fix it.

“Hey, Lily, I'll race you to the car!” Marigold said, and took off. “Run fast and pretend we're being chased by the hairy cows!”

“You can't catch me, hairy cows!” Lily called. Then, a few seconds later: “Marigold, wait up!”

Marigold paused for a moment, giving Lily a chance to catch up, then grabbed her arm and sped up again, practically pulling Lily, who was breathless and
giggling, over the dune. “It's raining cows!” Lily sang, laughing in the afternoon shower.

“And the cows are mad and they're after us,” Marigold said, hoping to get Lily to hurry up, but instead, Lily sat down and stuck her tongue out, claiming that she was thirsty. Marigold scooped Lily into her arms and raced down the dune and dropped her sister into the backseat of Aunt Sunny's station wagon. She hopped in front and caught her breath as Lily giggled in the back, thrilled by the downpour. Marigold had wanted to see Peter again, but not when she was soaking wet with an insane up-do! And not when she'd be forced to reveal her true identity, which was now inevitable.

At least she hadn't had to see him face-to-face today.
Phew!
She started to remove one of her braids when Lily shrieked. “No, Marigold! Don't! Don't take them out! It looks so beautiful, and I worked so hard!”

Marigold's fingers froze as she watched Lily's face assume a precrying frown. “Okay,” Marigold said in her calmest voice. “Don't cry.”

“Promise you won't touch it?” Lily asked, her lower lip trembling ominously.

“Promise,” Marigold assured her, sinking in her seat on the chance that Peter might walk by the car. “At least not until I go to bed.”

“Not even then,” Lily insisted as Marigold slid into a strange crouching position below window level. “You need to keep it like this the whole summer.”

“But I won't be able to sleep with this—” Marigold began to say, but at that very moment Zinnie opened the car door and climbed into the backseat, along with Peter Pasque.

“I told him our real names,” Zinnie said, dripping with rain. “I had to. Aunt Sunny introduced me. I guess this was the surprise from the surprise brownies.”

Peter grinned. “Why do you look so miserable, Marigold? Did the rain ruin your hair?”

“N
ow my shoes are destroyed,” Marigold said, trying to stay calm as she buckled her seat belt over herself and Lily, who was seated on her lap. Being cool was not easy with her hair done up in these silly braids. And to make matters worse, she had been demoted to the backseat. Aunt Sunny was giving Peter and his mother, Jean, a ride home because they had walked here. Jean, as an adult, automatically got shotgun. “Another pair ruined! The first pair—” She stopped herself.

“You mean your wedges, Marigold?” Peter asked with a devilish grin. Marigold had never heard her name pronounced the way Peter did,
Maah-ri-gold
. She wasn't at all sure that she was okay with it.

“Peter, how do you know about wedges?” Jean asked with a laugh, turning in her seat to face him. Then she
noticed the book peeking out of Marigold's bag. “Oh, are you reading the
Night Sprites
series?” Jean asked.

“Yes,” the three sisters answered at once.

“Do you know that they're making a movie of this?” Jean asked. “Directed by Philip Rathbone?”

“Yes,” Marigold said. Did she know? Of course she knew! It was all she thought about. Day and night. At the town beach. In her boat bed. While eating plain yogurt at the breakfast table.

“And I suppose you know where Philip Rathbone spends two weeks every July?”

“No, I don't,” Marigold said, leaning forward.

“Right there,” Jean said, and pointed to the mansion on the hill, tapping her fingernail on the window.

“The monstrosity!” Lily said.

Aunt Sunny laughed and added, “The piping plover–destroying monstrosity!”

Marigold gazed up at the mansion in awe. Zinnie had been wrong, she thought. This was the surprise from the surprise brownies. She and Zinnie locked eyes and smiled. It started to rain bullets. It started to rain so hard that a wall of water fell on the station wagon and Aunt Sunny had to pull over. But Marigold didn't mind the pounding rain or clouds that darkened the sky. Inside her mind the sun was shining.