Twenty Boy Summer (8 page)

eleven

"What were you guys talking about last night, anyway?"

My sleep-sticky eyes blink open one at a time like a broken doll's, unable to piece together the images in front of me. Frankie, sitting on the edge of a bed that isn't mine. A strange room. Sherbet sunlight falling on my face at all the wrong angles. I sit up quickly, my memory kicking in late to remind me that we're in Zanzibar.

It's the morning of our first full day.

And Aunt Jayne
knows.
Not everything, but more than anyone else.

"Huh? Oh, nothing. Just a little bit about Matt." My heart beats faster.

"That's what I thought." Frankie slides off the bed. "Do you really think she's okay now?"

"Yeah, I think she's good. Last night was fun, wasn't it?" I run my hands through my tangled hair, shaking more sand out on the wood floor. "I mean, the beach part."

Frankie scratches her head. "Yeah, tell me about it. I have sand in my ears."

I check the white plastic clock on our shared night table -- eight a.m. We didn't sleep more than four hours last night, but excitement for the day ahead overshadows any lingering sleepiness.

"Anna, thanks for staying with me last night when I freaked. I'm sorry about all that weirdness and yelling at dinner."

She looks at me and half smiles, and I think of the therapist guy Frankie's parents sent her to a few times last year. I went with her once. If he was here, he'd probably say something like, "It's okay, you needed to explore the memories triggered by your first vacation without your brother." But all that comes out of me is, "Don't worry, it's cool."

I slide off the bed and stretch, trying to rub the sleep from my eyes.

"Hungry?" I ask. "We could make chocolate chip pancakes." It's not psychotherapy, but chocolate chip pancakes work for a lot of things.

She nods. "Anna, can I ask you something?"

"I know what you're going to say. Yes, we can use strawberries, too."

Another smile -- a hint of a laugh. "No," she says. "Not that. It's... Why are my parents such
freaks
?"

"Because they're parents. It's in the job description. Must drive minivans. Must be immune to fashion. Must be freaks."

"I'm serious, Anna," she says, peeling a broken fingernail. "Mom is, like, yelling and crying one minute, then she finds an old toy car and she's running down to make sand angels on the beach. Why did they want to come here?"

I consider her question, one I asked myself a thousand times in the weeks after their initial invitation. "I think they just want to make things better, Frank. Maybe they thought it would get things back to normal."

"But it won't," she says. "They don't get it."

I open my mouth to say something in their defense, but Frankie shakes her head. "It's okay, Anna. I'm just a little out of it. I mean, last night was fun, but it's still kind of weird after Mom freaking out over my stupid spilled drink like that. Let's go downstairs -- I think they're already cooking something."

We stretch and head for the stairs, slowly moving toward the breakfast smells floating up from the kitchen. I pick out Aunt Jayne's French toast from the vanilla and cinnamon in the "secret" recipe she learned from a cooking show, along with the usual coffee and bacon staples.

"Morning, my angels." Aunt Jayne kisses Frankie's cheek and gives me a wink that's quick and subtle like a secret handshake.

"Hi, Twinkies," Uncle Red says, a frying pan full of bacon in hand. "Hope you're hungry."

"I'm starving." Frankie sits at the table and reaches for the orange juice. "And still wondering what happened at dinner last night. If anyone cares. Which I'm sure they don't."

"Sweetheart, let's not talk about last night," Jayne says, patting Frankie's hand. "We called a do-over, right?"

"Mom, that's not the point."

"Okay, kids." Uncle Red joins the table with a dish towel on his shoulder and a platter of French toast at the ready. He's prepared to prevent another stomping, door-slamming incident at all costs. "Eggs are getting cold."

Frankie puts down her glass and takes a deep breath. "Dad, I was just surprised, okay?"

Red stands with the frying pan awkwardly balanced over the plates, waiting to dish up breakfast like he's the hired cook rather than a man embroiled in a conversation about his dead son.

Frankie continues. "You guys are the ones that wanted this trip in the first place. You didn't really ask me. Well, I'm scared, too, you know? All the things I remember about California -- I just don't want -- I'm scared I'll remember new stuff, and everything else will be --
erased.
"

Jayne stands up from the table and moves to the sliding door, her back to us. Her shoulders shake lightly, but she doesn't make any sound. After a minute, she wipes her eyes and joins us again at the table. I've seen this movie a hundred times, but it never gets any easier. I want to crawl under the table and disappear.

Uncle Red gives up on the eggs and sits with us. My face is hot as I focus on the interlocking circle pattern along the edge of my blue plate. I can't stop thinking about the back door, and how good it would feel to run straight through it and down to the shore.

"Frankie." Jayne reaches again for Frankie's hand. "We aren't trying to erase memories or pretend that everything is okay."

"I
know
that, Mom. It's just --"

"My girls," Uncle Red says, voice soothing, eyebrows crinkled, "let's just get through breakfast, okay? We have to take it as it comes." He puts his hand on Jayne's cheek and smoothes it with his thumb.

Jayne nods and pats Frankie's hand.

Frankie sighs and touches her foot to mine under the table. "Sorry," she mouths.

"You girls were up late last night," Red says, resuming his position as head chef and dropping a healthy scoop of home fries on his plate. "Causing trouble?"

"Just a little girl talk." Aunt Jayne smiles at me as she passes the maple syrup. My eyes lock on hers for a moment, and I wonder whether she can read my thoughts: that I want to tell her more about Matt and me. That I don't know what to do about Frankie. That I'm not sure how I can compete in the Twenty Boy Summer contest when there's only one boy I ever think about.

A new wave of guilt laps at my toes, threatening to creep up into my heart with the rest of my regrets. Aunt Jayne was a great listener last night, and I'm glad I said what I did about Frankie, but maybe I shouldn't have let her believe that I cared about Matt as more than a friend. If she sees us talking to other guys on the beach, will she think I'm cheating on her dead son?

"Right, Anna?" Frankie kicks me under the table, shaking me from my thoughts.

"Right. Sorry, what was that?"

"Our plans today. We're just going to lie around the beach near the house, right?"

I know Frankie has no intention of staying anywhere near the house or its private, secluded beach and designated middle-aged lifeguard, but I nod. "I go where you go, Frank."

"Dad and I are going grocery shopping after," Jayne says. "We have to get stuff for the rest of the trip. Don't you want to come?"

"Let's see," Frankie says, holding her hands out to her sides like Lady Justice. "Walk around in a grocery store for two hours while Dad evaluates the quality of the produce, or hang out on the beach where we can swim, get a tan, and meet -- I mean, swim and get a tan. Tough choice, Mom, but we're gonna have to pass."

"Thought so," Aunt Jayne says. "Just make a list of anything you want. And make sure you wear sunscreen, and reapply after going in the water. And if you've been out there more than two hours, reapply again. Actually, you shouldn't be out there between twelve and two, so --"

"Got it covered." Frankie rolls her eyes. "You guys act like I've never been in the sun before."

"No," Red says, patting her shoulder, "we act like you get burned every time we come out here."

"Dad, that's not burning. That's getting a base tan."

Uncle Red shakes his head and smiles. "All right, you girls can wander down to the concessions area if you'd like, but I don't want you going near the alcove. There aren't any lifeguards. Okay?"

"Okay, Dad," Frankie says.

"Good." Uncle Red. So loving. So trusting. So naive. "Have fun, my lovelies." After seconds and a few thirds, he pushes his cleared plate away. "Mom and I are heading out soon. Call the cell if you need anything. Otherwise, be back before dinner. Mom wants to cook Chinese."

Such a normal family breakfast on such a normal family morning. If they had a dog, his name would be Spot, and he'd start barking outside until one of us tossed him a Frisbee.

After breakfast, we (and by we, I mean Frankie) spend over an hour getting ready to swim in the ocean. She switches between sandals a few times and agonizes over which earrings to wear. Hair and makeup are another discussion -- hair casual and messy like always, or swept back with a classy headband? Waterproof mascara, or just a touch of lip gloss? Serious or playful?

"Listen," I say, standing ready in my bikini -- which I'm still not used to -- and sarong. "No one is going to notice what you're wearing. They're going to notice
you.
Everything else is just background noise." I twist my uncombed hair into a loose bun on top of my head.

"Anna, for your information, nothing you put on your face, hair, or body is
just
background noise. Speaking of which, why aren't you filming? We need to document these things." She pulls her camera from her backpack and hands it to me.

I almost laugh, but she isn't joking. Like the boy contest, this is a project for her, carefully planned and executed, recorded start to finish for posterity. Not even her toe rings will be left to chance.

I keep the camera on her as long as I can, discreetly turning it on and off to spare future audiences from the tedium of Frankie applying lip liner, Frankie blowing her nail polish, Frankie tweezing her eyebrows. I'm about to leave without her when she finally announces she's ready.

"Thank God," I say, closing the camera and sweeping my journal and two paperbacks into my bag. "Can we
please
get down to the water now?"

"Wait!" Frankie shrieks with such immediacy that I almost think there's a scorpion or tarantula on my head. "We still have to do
you.
"

"Frank, I've been ready for an hour."

She laughs. She actually
laughs.
"Anna, you can't go out like that. Look at your
hair
!"

"
Please,
Frankie. We're going swimming. In the water. Remember?"

"Don't be lazy about your looks," she says, coming toward me with a comb and a few bobby pins in her mouth. She's one creepy step away from spitting on a tissue and wiping my face with it. "It won't take that long."

Be strong, Anna. Be strong.

twelve

By the time we get to the water, it's close to eleven and the waterproof mascara Frankie combed over my lashes feels heavy and goopy. I worry that all the good spots on the beach are gone, but Frankie assures me that there will be plenty of spots when we get down near the alcove and away from all the "old people."

The other end of the beach is actually a whole different beach -- an entirely separate stretch of sand with no water buoys, hot dog vendors, lifeguards, or people.

It does have
one
thing conspicuously absent on our beach -- a No Swimming sign.

"See?" Frankie asks. "Totally private. No screaming kids or annoying families."

"Or witnesses."

"Don't be a baby, Anna."

"Frankie, it says No Swimming for a reason. Sharp rocks? Sharks? Undercurrent?"

"It says No Swimming because it's not a public beach, so they don't have a lifeguard," she says, crouching to unfold the beach blanket. "It's the same water, Anna. If there are sharks here, there are sharks at our beach, too. It's not like they read signs."

"How do you even know about this place?" I ask, dropping my bag and with it, the shark debate.

"My brother," she says. "He used to come to the alcove sometimes."

The beach is always crowded,
he told me last year, a few nights before their trip. We were alone in the living room, pretending to watch a movie while Frankie dozed on the chair next to us.
But there's this one spot I like farther down. Sometimes I just go there to read and think. The ocean is good for clearing your head.

And for looking at girls,
I said.

Well, sure.
He laughed.
But not that part. No one goes there except for occasional surfers. There's no lifeguard. Just the water and the rocks. One time I sat there for three hours, just listening to the water and wondering what was underneath.

I look out over the water and wonder the same thing, trying hard not to think about the fact that I might be standing in the exact same spot Matt stood, looking out at the same blue sea, wondering the same endless, unanswerable questions.

What would we see if they drained it like a giant bathtub?

I curl my toes into the sand, waiting for Frankie to say something else.

"Here, help me with the blanket." She hands me a corner and lies down on the other side.

"Okay, blanket is secure," I say, still fighting the image of Matt on the couch that night, telling me his favorite things about California. "Now what? Just lie here all day until something exciting happens to us?"

Frankie inches and wriggles until she is strategically positioned in her most flattering pose -- stomach flat, parted lips glistening, legs bent slightly, bosom heaving. "You'll see."

"You're really just going to lie there?"

"That's why they invented the beach, Anna."

"What about the water?"

"Are you kidding? We just did our hair!"

She used to love swimming. She and Matt would tell me about it in their postcards -- all the hours they'd spend in the water, skin pruned and eyes burning from the salt, swimming and riding waves and playing Frisbee with summer friends, or sometimes just floating out there on their backs.

"Frank, let's just go in the wa --"

"Oh my God, Anna. Hotties, ten o'clock."

"What?" I turn my head to see what she's looking at, which is more in the direction of two o'clock, but who's counting?

"Don't
look
!" She swats my thigh. "Just act natural. Here they come."

I lie beside her, trying to guess what "act natural" means. I decide on mimicking her position, only I keep my sarong securely fastened and my arms folded over my chest. To the average onlooker, if anyone other than the rapidly approaching boys is looking on, I probably look cold. Or extremely pissed off.

"Oh, Anna," Frankie says in an exaggerated voice when the guys are within earshot. "I'm
really
hot. Pass me a water?"

Is she kidding?

She looks at me expectantly, eyes bulging, bordering on annoyed.

She's not kidding.

I sit up and fish a bottled water from my bag. The boys are about twenty feet away, staring at us with open mouths as Frankie sucks on the water bottle in an entirely inappropriate manner.

"Hey," one of the guys says with a swift man-nod. "What's up?" Frankie shrugs and waves, inviting them over to our previously undisturbed patch of sand.

They exchange glances like hungry lions that have just been invited into the zebra den for dinner and jog over to our blanket, introducing themselves as Warren and Todd (or is it Rod? I've forgotten already). After thirty seconds of conversation, I can summarize their entire raisons d'être.

Drink beer. Meet chicks. Get tan.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

At Frankie's insistence, they shake out their blanket and camp next to us, thankfully on her side. Rod or Todd or whatever is the loud one, unable to be serious, unable to focus on one subject for more than a minute. He's a freshman at Berkeley, studying marine biology, and what his on-campus girlfriend doesn't know won't hurt her,
wink wink.

Do guys really think this crap works on girls?

Frankie giggles. I guess it works on
some
girls.

Warren isn't exactly the
quiet
one, but the fact that I'm pretending to be asleep while Frankie and RodTodd laugh at each other's banter and trade cell phone numbers doesn't leave him an entry.

"Dude," Warren says after about fifteen minutes of staring at the ocean. "I gotta jet. See you later." I open my eyes when he stands, his shadow falling on my face. Frankie is doing some sort of half-kiss thing with RodTodd -- more than friends, but not quite a full-on lip-lock. I expect this sort of gratuitous behavior with foreign exchange students, but total strangers? Annoying strangers, at that? The whole scene is more than I can stomach.

"Frank, I think I see your parents."

"That's my cue," RodTodd says. "Call me later, sexy."

Call me later, sexy?
I'm going to be ill. Frankie, on the other hand, is practically ready to move in with him.

The boys take off down the beach and Frankie scans the opposite shoreline for Red and Jayne.

"Where are they?" she asks. "I don't see them, Anna."

"I guess I was wrong. Can we go in the water now?" I'm hot, bored, and quickly getting cranky.

"Anna, that was two out of twenty already scratched off the list. Why didn't you talk to Warren?"

"He has backne, Frank. Not to mention he's about as interesting as wet sea kelp."

Frankie laughs. "All right. But I'm still counting them as two. With them and the boys checking us out at Caroline's yesterday, that makes four."

"Yesterday doesn't count," I say.

"Well, it would have, if my parents hadn't shown up." She digs her camera from her bag and zooms in on my face. "So, Miss Reiley, will you or will you not admit specimens A and B from Caroline's into the official count of the summer of twenty boys, per the original contract terms of the Absolute Best Summer Ever?"

I crinkle my forehead to appear serious. "After careful consideration, the court hereby consents to a compromise. We shall count yesterday's platonic and lackluster ice-cream duo as a single boy."

She agrees, holding up three fingers in front of the camera before turning it on herself. "Three down. Seventeen to go. Not bad for our first twenty-four hours."

I roll my eyes and untie my sarong, ready to get into the water. If reaching our twenty-boy goal takes precedence over the high standards of good hygiene, interesting personality, and a minimum sixth-grade IQ, I'm dropping out right now.

"Can we
please
go swimming?" I ask.

"Oh, all right." Frankie stashes the camera in her bag and follows me into the water, splashing and giggling in the sharkless waves near the shore.

We go in up to our shoulders, waiting to catch the stronger waves and ride them up to the shore. The water and air above it taste equally salty, stinging my eyes and coating my skin, just like Matt said in his postcards.

When you taste the water on your lips, it feels like you've been eating potato chips. But there's nothing else like it, Anna.

"Ready for lunch?" Frankie asks after two hours of wave jumping. "I'm starving."

We gather up our blanket and bags from the beach and head back toward the concession stands near the house for hot dogs and curly fries. After watching us eat, a leathery guy who looks old enough to be our father sits down next to me at the picnic table.

"Can I get you girls a milk shake? Or more fries?"

His breath smells like sour milk as it falls on my shoulder.

"Sure," Frankie says. "I'll have a chocolate shake."

He smiles. "What about you, honey?"

"I'm fine," I say, kicking Frankie under the table. I'm totally creeped out that she's encouraging this geriatric pedophile to spend any more time with us than he already has.

"Fine? You sure are. I'll get you a
cherry
shake, how's that?" Frankie answers for me. "She
loves
cherries."

He winks at us and heads up to the stand to order our shakes.

"Frankie, grab your stuff," I say. "Let's go."

"No way. This is the most fun I've had all year."

"He's an old
man
!"

"We're getting free shakes, right?"

Her logic astounds me. "At what cost?" I ask.

"Calm down,
Mom.
"

Leather Man returns before I can convince Frankie to leave. She brushes her fingers against his when she takes her shake, and his eyes linger on her boobs for a very long time before he returns to my side of the table.

Just when I can't take another shot of his alcohol breath on my skin, we're saved by an equally leathery woman in a bright pink tank dress.

"Harold, what the hell are you doing?" She stomps a half-spent cigarette into the sand with her flip-flop. Her voice is coarse and the loose, brown skin on her arms jiggles. "Marcia's waiting in the car."

"Coming, my darling." He rolls his eyes for our benefit and dislodges from the picnic table -- quite a task when you're drunk. "Enjoy the shakes, cherries -- I mean,
ladies.
"

Mrs. Harold grabs his arm and leads him to the car, nagging him all the way.

"We're not drinking these." I take Frankie's shake before she can get a sip and drop them both in the trash can. Frankie laughs.

"Okay, big brother," she says. I almost laugh, imagining what her real big brother would do if he'd witnessed this disturbing exchange.

"So Old Man Date Rape was number what?" she asks. "Four or five?"

"We're not counting him," I say. "This is the Twenty Boy Summer, not the Twenty Dirty Old Man Summer."

"Sounds like we already have a name for next year's trip," Frankie says, wiggling her one and a half eyebrows. She winks at me and heads up to the counter to order two new shakes, hold the roofies.

None of this makes it into the final report we present to Red and Jayne during dinner when they ask about our first day on the beach.

"We had the best day," Frankie says, showing her parents some carefully preselected footage of our fun in the sun. After lunch, we shot a bunch of stock video of the crowded part of the beach for just this purpose. "The beach was packed, but we still had fun in the water."

Red passes out plates of the Chinese food Jayne cooked for our first official dinner in the house after last night's freak-out, clueless and happy that his daughter and her best friend had such a wonderful first day on Zanzibar Beach.

"I'm glad we decided to stay," he says, beaming.