The Summer I Turned Pretty

I’d sit next to the radiator in history class and wonder what they were doing, if they were warming their feet along the bottom of a radiator somewhere too. Counting the days until summer again. For me, it was almost like winter didn’t count. Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in summers. Like I don’t really begin living until June, until I’m at that beach, in that house.

The thing is, Susannah was right. It was a summer I’d never, ever forget. It was the summer everything began. It was the summer I turned pretty. Because for the first time, I felt it. Pretty, I mean. Every summer up to this one, I believed it’d be different. Life would be different. And that summer, it finally was. I was.

Susannah was always calling us children, but the thing was, I didn’t even mind. Normally I would. But the way Susannah said it, it didn’t seem like a bad thing, not like we were small and babyish. Instead it sounded like we had our whole lives in front of us.

“And for your information, I don’t want either of them. It’s not like they look at me like that anyway. They look at me like Steven does. Like a little sister.”

Taylor tugged at my T-shirt collar. “Well, maybe if you showed a little cleave…”

I shrugged her hand away. “I’m not showing any ‘cleave.’ And I told you I don’t like either of them. Not anymore.”

When he hugged me good-bye, he gave me his trademark condescending look—sad eyes and a half grimace—and said, “Don’t do anything stupid, all right?” He said it in this really meaningful way, like he was trying to tell me something important, like I was supposed to understand.

But I didn’t. I said, “Don’t you do anything stupid either, butthead.”

He sighed and shook his head at me like I was a child.

We waited in line for the cars, and when it was our turn, the guy told me to get into the blue one. I said, “Can I drive the red one instead?”

He winked at me and said, “You’re so pretty, I’d let you drive my car.”

I could feel myself blush, but I liked it. The guy was older than me, and he was actually paying me attention. It was kind of amazing. I’d seen him there the summer before, and he hadn’t looked at me once.

Getting into the car next to me, Jeremiah muttered, “What a freaking cheeseball. He needs to get a real job.”

I also recognized our neighbor Jill, who spent weekends at Cousins—she saved at me, and it occurred to me that I’d never seen her outside of the neighborhood, our front yards. She was sitting next to the guy from the video store, the one who worked on Tuesdays and wore his name tag upside down. I’d never seen the lower half of his body before, he was always standing behind the counter. And then there was the waitress Katie from Jimmy’s Crab Shack without her red-and-white striped uniform. These were people I’d been seeing every summer for my whole life. So this is where they’d been all this time. Out, at parties, while I’d been left out, locked away in the summer house like Rapunzel, watching old movies with my mother and Susannah.

When he finally called, he didn’t bring up the party. He asked me to go to the drive-in. I said yes. Right away I worried, though—did going to the drive-in mean we were going to have to make out? Like, crazy make out, steamed windows and seats all the way back?

Because that’s what people did at the drive-in. There were the families, and then there were the hot and heavy couples toward the back of the lot. I’d never been part of a couple before.

“I’m glad I have you to talk to about this kind of stuff.”

“I am too. But you know, you could talk to your mother.”

“She wouldn’t be interested in any of it, not really. She’d pretend to care, but she wouldn’t.”

“Oh, Belly. That’s not true. She would care. She does care.” Susannah cradled my face in her hands. “Your mother is your biggest fan, next to me. She cares about everything you do. Don’t shut her out.”

I didn’t want to talk about my mother anymore. I wanted to talk about Cam. “You’ll never believe what Cam said to me tonight,” I began.

After she went to bed, early, Conrad said to me, conversationally, “They’re getting a divorce.”

“Who?” I said.

“My parents. It’s about time.”

Jeremiah glared at him. “Shut up, Conrad.”

Conrad shrugged. “Why? You know it’s true. Belly’s not surprised, are you, Belly?”

I was. I was really surprised. I said, to both of them, “I thought they seemed like they were really in love.”

Whatever love was, I was sure they had it. I thought they had it a million times over. The way they gazed at each other at the dinner table, how excited Susannah got when he came to the summer house. I didn’t think people like that got divorced. People like my parents got divorced. Not Susannah and Mr. Fisher.

“Please don’t be mad, Belly. I want things to stay the same with us forever,” Taylor said, brown eyes brimming with tears. What she really meant was, I want you to stay the same forever while I grow bigger breasts and quit violin and kiss your brother.

“I didn’t think you’d ever act so—so…” I searched for the perfect word, to cut her the way she’d cut me. “Slutty.”

“I’m not a slut,” she said in a tiny voice.

So this was my power over her, my supposed innocence over her supposed sluttiness. It was all such BS. I would’ve traded my spot for hers in a second.

I wanted to tell them both, Conrad knows already and so does Jeremiah, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t be right. It wasn’t my business to tell.

Susannah wanted it to be some kind of perfect summer, where the parents were still together and everything was the way it had always been. Those kinds of summers don’t exist anymore, I wanted to tell her.

To Cam I said, “When I look at Conrad, all I feel is disgust.”

I could tell he didn’t believe it. I didn’t either. Because the truth was, when I looked at Conrad, all I felt was a yearning that never went away. It was the same as it had always been. Here I had this really great guy who actually liked me, and deep down inside I was still hung up on Conrad. There, that was the real truth. I had never really let go. I was just like Rose on that stupid makeshift raft.

“It’s just that your dad is so different from our dad,” I said defensively. “Your dad takes you guys fishing and, like, plays football with you. Our dad doesn’t do that kind of stuff. He likes chess.”

He shrugged. “I like chess.”

I hadn’t known that about him. I liked it too. My dad had taught me to play when I was seven. I wasn’t bad either. I had never joined chess club, even though I’d kind of wanted to. Chess club was for the nose-pickers. That’s what Taylor called them.

“And Conrad likes chess too,” Jeremiah said. “He just tries to be what our dad wants. And the thing is, I don’t even think he likes football, not like I do. He’s just good at it like he is at everything.”

Jeremiah had laid it all out on the line. Now it was my turn. I couldn’t go another whole year not having told him. I’d been so afraid of change, of anything tipping our little summer sailboat—but Jeremiah had already done that, and look, we were still alive. We were still Belly and Jeremiah.

That night I lay in bed and cried. My whole body ached. I opened all the windows in my room and lay in the dark, just listening to the ocean. I wished the tide would bring me out and never bring me back. I wondered if that was how Conrad felt, how Jeremiah felt. How my mother felt.

It felt like the world was ending and nothing would ever be the same again. It was, and it wouldn’t.

I felt mad at her, like I had been tricked. She should have told me. She should have warned me. My whole life, I had never known my mother to lie. But she had. All those times when they’d supposedly been shopping, or at the museum, on day trips—they hadn’t been any of those places. They’d been at hospitals, with doctors. I saw that now. I just wished I had seen it before.

“You have to get out of bed, Belly,” she said softly. “You’re still alive and so is Susannah. You have to be strong for her. She needs you.”

Her words made sense. If Susannah needed me, then that was something I could do. “I can do that,” I said, turning around to look at her. “I just don’t get how Mr. Fisher can leave her all alone like this when she needs him most.”

And she looked away, out the window, and then back down at me. “This is the way Beck wants things to be. And Adam is who he is.” She cradled my cheek in her hand. “It’s not up to us to decide.”

“I’ll wear that dress you bought me last summer.”

“What dress?”

“The one from that mall, the purple one that you and Mom fought over that time. Remember, you put it in my suitcase?”

She frowned, confused. “I didn’t buy you that dress. Laurel would’ve had a fit.” Then her face cleared, and she smiled. “Your mother must have gone back and bought it for you.”

“My mother?” My mother would never.

“That’s your mother. So like her.”

“But she never said…” My voice trailed off. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that it had been my mother who’d bought it for me.

“She wouldn’t. She’s not like that.” Susannah reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “You’re the luckiest girl in the world to have her for a mother. Know that.”

Spinning, I began to recite, “maggie and milly and molly and may.”

Jeremiah took the next line, then me, then him.

And then together, Conrad, too, we all said, “for whatever we lose (like a you or a me) / it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.”

It was Susannah’s favorite poem; she’d taught it to us kids a long time ago—we were on one of her guided nature walks where she pointed out shells and jellyfish. That day we marched down the beach, arms linked, and we recited it so loudly that I think we woke up the fish. We knew it like we knew the Pledge of Allegiance, by heart.