Twenty Boy Summer (12 page)

Part of me doesn't want to go.
Matt and I were walking through the neighborhood, whispering in the middle of the street at two in the morning. They were set to leave for California in two days, and after that, we'd have about a month before Matt moved to Cornell. I tried not to think about it; tried not to count the days until he left or the days until we'd visit him or the days until he was home for break. An hour wasn't that far away, but we'd all have school and it's not like we could just go up there whenever we wanted. No more text messages to sneak out in the middle of the night. No more dumping out all the sugar just to have an excuse to run next door for something after dinner.

You've been talking about college since we were kids, Matt.

I know, but you won't be there. Everything will be different.

Not here. We'll be the same.

What if I come back and I'm different, Anna? Sometimes you go to a place where everything is different, and everything you ever know changes, and no one ever looks at you the same.

No way.
It's all I could say. And then I kissed him.

I didn't know what he meant back then. I thought he was being sentimental, just worried about leaving home for the first time. To Frankie, Red, and Jayne, he was confident and ready, born for college, born for reading and writing and achieving great things. But I knew he was scared. It was such a change for him -- being away from me and Frankie, away from our inseparable triune, away from his family. Truthfully, I was just as scared to see him go as he was to leave, but in those vulnerable moments when he confessed his insecurities under the stars, I couldn't agree with him. I couldn't do anything but stare at him and hold his hand and hope that he knew what I was thinking -- that I could never, ever look at him differently, or feel anything other than what I felt in those shared and fleeting moments.

Now, curled up under my sheets and writing to a ghost in my journal, I know what he meant. I've been in California for just over a week, and I'm already different. Everything about me feels different. It hurts to remember Matt, to relive his postcards, to try to simultaneously remember and forget his voice. I'm fighting it every day.

I can't stop thinking about Sam.

And Frankie has absolutely no clue about any of it.

It's ten-thirty, and Red and Jayne are finally asleep. The sneak-out witching hour approaches. Frankie is anxious to get back to Jake, but I'm not ready to see Sam tonight.

"What's up?" Frankie asks, surprisingly gentle. "You were all over him last night. You don't want to go?"

I close my journal and shrug, not quite sure how to explain it. She sits on her feet at the end of my bed. "Anna, did something happen?"

I consider her question.
Yes, something did happen. Sam kissed me, and it was crazy and intense, and even more amazing than it was with Matt, and now I want it to happen again.
There, I said it. Only I didn't really say it.

"No, not like that. I don't want to freak them out, that's all." I conveniently omit the rest. "If we keep showing up every single day and night, right on schedule, they're going to think we're desperate."

"Aren't you?" she teases, broken eyebrow arching hopefully toward the sky.

"Sure." I smile. "Just not tonight."

Frankie nods, playing with the red glass bracelet on her wrist. This buys me the night, but another day wouldn't hurt, either.

"Frank, we haven't really spent any time alone together on this trip. Why don't we get up early tomorrow and go somewhere without the guys? San Francisco, maybe?"

"Wow, you
really
don't want to seem desperate."

"I just thought it would be nice to get off the beach for once. We still have two more weeks to hang out with Jake and Sam." His name catches in my throat, and I hope that Frankie doesn't notice my skin flush.

She considers my idea and nods.

"There's a bus down the street that goes into the city," she says. "But my parents would never let us go alone, and I don't really feel like spending the whole day with them. I had enough family bonding today to last the rest of the trip."

"So. They don't let us sneak out at night, either, but we do that."

"Excellent point," Frankie says. "Isn't it time Jackie invites us out on her boat for the day? With her parents, of course."

It's probably the one and only time Frankie will ever call me brilliant, but she does, and as we turn off our matching lights and pull up our matching blankets, the wheels of Operation San Francisco are in motion.

The next morning, I wake up at seven as Red and Jayne leave for their morning walk. I grab my journal and tiptoe down to the kitchen, hoping to finish writing about the past few nights and work out the remaining bits of guilt still jolting my stomach before Frankie wakes up.

I make myself a cup of green tea as quietly as possible, dig around for a granola bar, and head out to the deck in my bare feet, carefully sliding the door closed behind me.

The morning is perfect. It's early enough that only the runners are out, affording me a relatively unspoiled view of the ocean. I peel open my granola bar and prop my feet up on the adjacent chair, making a mental note to get out of bed early more often.

The earthy smell of the tea reminds me of Mom and Dad in their garden, quietly working side by side on steadfast soil invaders, not talking yet still somehow communicating -- kind of like seeing with my eyes closed last night with Sam. I can't picture Mom and Dad in the same thought with me and Sam, so I dismiss it entirely, wondering instead what they're doing two thousand miles east and three hours into the future. I sent them a postcard from Alcatraz and talked to them a few days ago on the phone. Their voices were light and faraway as they told me about Dad's latest sale and ongoing progress in the garden, real estate deals closing and weeds growing and life moving on without me.

I close my eyes and sip the tea, allowing Sam to creep back into my thoughts. The sun falls warm on my face in orange and lemon rays, reminding me of his hands as he closed my eyelids and taught me to see in a whole new way. It's simultaneously painful and exhilarating, but I make myself go back there in my head, replaying every instant, every touch, every breath. I can almost feel his lips on my mouth again, when --

"
There
you are!" Frankie startles me, stomping all over my quiet reverie like an impossible elephant. "Why didn't you wake me up?"

"I thought you heard me get out of bed," I lie, hoping I don't sound too irritated.

"Anna," she says, pulling hairs off her shirt and letting them drop to the floor. "You have to shake me, otherwise I'm dead to the world and look what happens. You have to spend your morning alone."

"Right." I close the unfinished story in my journal. "Tragic."

"What are you wearing today?"

"For what?"

"Anna!" She sighs. "You really exacerbate me sometimes!"

"You mean exasperate."

"Huh?"

"I
exasperate
you."

"That's what I
said
! Anyway, San Francisco, remember?"

Oh, that.
While I was off on my pre-Frankie morning mind trip, I kind of forgot about my idea. My San Francisco Sam diversion.

"I'm sure you'll pick out something cool for me," I say as she heads back into the kitchen to look for breakfast.

I watch her through the open sliding door. Beneath the clang of her hands searching the silverware drawer, the clink of a spoon tossed into a cereal bowl, the bang of the cupboard door responding to her careless hand, Frankie softly hums a song from our shared childhood. She pulls a box of Cheerios from the pantry, a carton of milk and a can of Diet Coke from the fridge, and sings quietly, unaware of her audience.

"If you could, would you ask
for moonbeams in a heart of glass?

For sun rays on the silver sea?

Or would you ask for me?"

I haven't thought of that song in forever. When we were in fourth grade and Matt was in sixth, we all went to see him perform in the school show,
Music Moves Me.
My parents and I sat with Frankie and Jayne while Red stood in the back row with all the other dads videoing the musical for future hours of family torture.

Now I remember it as if we'd just left the auditorium. Matt had a solo for "Ask for Me." He wore a tuxedo with a silver-sequined cummerbund. Kids from the younger class dressed as mermaids and fish. Matt sang the chorus and led the kids center stage to sing their own verses. Most of them forgot their lines, so Matt just kept on singing as if it were scripted that way.

Sometimes looking at Frankie is like seeing Matt through a glass of water -- a distorted composition of him with all the right parts, but mixed up and in the wrong order. As I watch her sing his old song, I can't shake the feeling that he just stopped by to say hello.

Frankie scoops up the dishes and food and continues humming. When she finally catches me spying, she stops and giggles, and for a moment I see her -- not the distorted Matt composition but the real Frankie, the one who used to bake cookies for me when I was sad, the one who picked dandelions for her mother on the way home from school, the one who's embarrassed to get caught singing.

"Don't listen to me," she says softly, letting out a fake cough. "I wasn't," I lie. "I just heard you coming out."

She sets her breakfast staples on the table and begins the meal by reaching into the box for a handful of little beige Os. Satisfied with the magnitude of their crunch, she pours a bowl full and drowns them in milk.

I hate milk slurping more than all other breakfast idiosyncrasies combined, but Frankie is unable to enjoy her breakfast any other way.

"I'm pretty sure the San Fran bus leaves every two hours on Sundays." Milk pools in the corners of her mouth as her spoon dives for another lot of Os like a heron for fish. "It's, like, a two-and-a-half-hour ride. We can catch the ten and spend the whole day there."

Over the course of our vacation I'd become quite comfortable with lying to Red and Jayne in two- or three-hour increments so that we could spend more time on Sam and Jake's side of the beach. It wasn't really lying, anyway. We were still on the same beach, just a few hundred feet from where they thought.

The San Francisco trip was my idea, but lying to Red and Jayne for the entire day seems much worse than our previous tales, especially since we'll be sixty or seventy
miles
from where we're supposed to be.

"Why don't we come back before dinner?" I ask. "Then your parents won't be so suspicious."

Frankie almost drops her spoon at my suggestion.

"God, Anna. You're so
provokial
sometimes!"

"Parochial -- and no, I'm not. I just don't think we should --"

"Look, telling them about Jackie's boat was your idea. If we come back for dinner it will look fake. Boating is an all-day thing, plus I'm sure Jackie's parents will invite us to stay for dinner."

"I guess."

"Come on, Anna. You were right. We need some girl time. Now finish up here and go get ready -- we've got to look
good
today."

I pick up my journal, mug, and granola bar wrapper, look up to the sky, and curse the God of Summer Vacations for getting me into this whole albatross-ditching, Sam-avoiding, aiding-and-abetting mess in the first place.

eighteen

Since the Perinos are under the illusion that we've proven our capacity for responsibility by coming home before curfew, avoiding alcohol and boys, and being all-around nice girls, it's not difficult for us to secure an all-day freedom pass when they return from their run. Frankie tells them about nonexistent Jackie's nonexistent parents inviting us out on their nonexistent boat, throws in a well-placed "I love you," and we're good until bedtime.

Getting ready for a day at sea is rather different from getting ready for an unsupervised jaunt to the city, so we quickly shower, throw on casual shorts and T-shirts, and stuff everything else into backpacks so we can get ready for real in the locker room at the community pool down the street.

Uncomfortably coiffed, dressed, accessorized, and stuffed into strappy black sandals that weren't made for walking, we lock our "boat clothes" in a locker for later and walk down to the bus stop, camera rolling. Men and women in khaki shorts and appliquéd golf shirts stare as we approach.

"Is this the bus to San Francisco?" Frankie asks one of the women. "We're making a documentary."

"Yes," the woman says firmly, trying to smile for the camera but unable to stop her eyes from their natural path to the slit in Frankie's denim skirt. I love watching older women react to Frankie. They either stare disapprovingly as if to question what kind of mother would let her daughter out of the house like that, or they look at her longingly from their little white Keds, realizing that their husbands -- consumed with thoughts of car insurance and prostate monitoring -- will never again sneak in through their unlocked windows or kiss them on the mouth in the middle of the day for no reason.

Men, of course, always look at her the same.

Hungry dogs, whimpering for a scrap of food from the table.

The ride to the city takes forever, the bus stopping every few blocks to drop off and pick up passengers. Like Frankie and me, the tourists sit still the entire ride, our worlds composed solely of the resort town and downtown. To us, the little gray villages in the middle are largely invisible. Haggard people board and disembark in between, a constant exchange of strangers carrying groceries or children or heartbreak or some other unknown weight with every step.

Frankie and I don't talk much on the trip, taking turns watching and aiming the camera out the window as buildings and cars and patches of another world sail by. It's like we really
are
on Jackie's boat, heading toward the horizon at a constant speed while everyone else sits bobbing and listless on the water.

When the diesel engine finally cuts out at the downtown station, I'm startled from my daydreaming by the driver's final announcement.

"Last stop -- San Francisco. All passengers must exit."

We hop off the bus and head toward a diner on Market Street. Cars rush past as though we're not even there, splashing heat and exhaust over my bare legs and arms. I'm surrounded by people and colors and sounds and smells unlike any I've ever seen.

If the bus made me feel like I was in a speedboat, the city streets are the ocean, full of the flotsam and jetsam of every race and culture in the natural world, bobbing and weaving along the sidewalks toward an unknown end.

Even Frankie is unnerved, and I realize that she hasn't been here in two years, and never without Red and Jayne and her brother.

"Let's just get lunch," she says, pulling me into the diner once we're across the street. "We'll figure out what we want to see after."

From the safety of a sparkly red pleather booth, we order veggie burgers, fries, strawberry shakes, and an extra paper place mat, noticing a map printed on the back. Typical of tourist attractions listed on a place mat, nothing sounds interesting, and we switch to plan B, which involves finishing lunch and wandering up, down, and sideways through the city streets until something jumps out at us.

We find plenty of fresh vegetable stands and hippie stores with lots of handmade jewelry and blankets and sweaters we can't afford, even when Frankie offers to put the hippies in our movie in exchange for a discount. We film in Chinatown, Frankie flirting with the men wrapping salmon as all the leftover fish heads fall into the gutter and slide down the street. Next to the fish market, an old woman sells postcards and magnets and little green statues in the shape of Buddha.

"I could live here forever," I say, enamored by the bright blue sky and the ocean sleeping in the distance.

"Not me," Frankie says as we wander toward our next unknown destination. "Too crowded. Too expensive. And not to mention, too smelly."

Frankie laughs, and suddenly, right behind her, there it is -- City Lights. I've seen the old bookstore so many times in Matt's pictures, I'd recognize it anywhere. He loved to come here on day trips with Red, Jayne, and Frankie -- but she doesn't seem to notice it.

"Frankie, look -- City Lights! Come on!" I grab her hand and drag her toward the doorway.

"What's the big deal, Anna? It's just an old bookstore. It doesn't even have a coffee place. Let's go somewhere else."

"Frankie, not all of us equate great literature with nonfat caramel lattes. Don't you know this place? It's where Matt used to --"

"I
know
what it is, Anna. Go ahead," she snips. "I'm going next door for a drink. Meet me over there when you're done." She disappears across the street into a place called Vesuvio. It looks like a bar, but when she doesn't come back out the door, I assume they gave her a table.