Fifteenth Summer (8 page)

“I think he’s heading to the Pop Guy,” she whispered. “Score! I can get the boy
and
dessert!”

“If I hadn’t just seen her in a bikini,” I said to Hannah, “I’d swear
she
was a boy.”

“ ‘It’s just a body,’ ” Hannah mimicked. She put her hands on her hips and swished them back and forth. “ ‘What’s the big deal?’ ”

I laughed so loud that Abbie turned around and glared at me. I tried, not very hard, to quiet down. Not that it mattered. Jim (or John or whoever) was completely oblivious to us.

He also didn’t seem to be in the mood for a pop. Just before he reached the rainbow umbrella, he jaywalked across the street, heading for the corner.

And on the corner was—

“Oh, no,” I breathed, skidding to a halt.

“What! What is it?” Abbie asked as she and Hannah hopped off the curb in pursuit.

When I didn’t answer, Abbie huffed with impatience and grabbed my hand. She dragged me across the street, almost getting us hit by a pickup truck while she was at it.

Before I knew it, we were pushing through the jangly front door of Dog Ear. Immediately after feeling a rush of best-bookstore-ever happiness, I was seized with panic.

Josh couldn’t see me like this! I was supposed to be wearing my favorite yellow sundress with the bell-shaped skirt. I should have on mascara and lip gloss. My nose should
not
be bright red after a morning in the sun, and my hair . . . Well, there was nothing that could be done about my hair, but a big hat would have been nice.

I froze in my tracks. Abbie, still clutching my hand, tried to get me to follow her to the lounge, where her boy was headed (probably just to snap up some free snacks without even making the pretense of reading something). But I wouldn’t budge. My eyes darted around the bookstore. Behind the half-dozen stacks of books on the corner of the L-shaped counter, there was a girl with cherry-red streaks in her hair. She was sitting on a stool, reading a book and scratching her head with a neon pink pencil. A gray-haired man was unpacking a box in the kids’ section, and a half-dozen people were browsing the stacks. But I didn’t see Josh.

I breathed a little easier, but I wasn’t in the clear yet. I decided that if he didn’t surface in three minutes, he probably wasn’t there and I was safe.

Until then I was staying put. I pretended to study the table full of bestsellers just inside the door.

“Oh, fine!” Abbie whispered. “I should have known I couldn’t count on you in a bookstore. Come on, Hannah.”

Hannah followed her to the lounge. I watched as Abbie smoothly grabbed a random book off a shelf, then flopped herself onto the couch next to her boy. She kicked off her flip-flops and plunked her feet onto the coffee table, the better for J-boy to check out her legs.

It took, oh, about thirty seconds for him to recognize Abbie and start chatting with her. Hannah perched easily on the couch arm and joined in on the banter. How did my sisters make it look so effortless?

I pulled my ragged little notepad out of my bag. I jotted down
all the things that would have been going through my mind if I were Abbie:

Okay, so he remembers me,
I wrote, channeling my sister,
but that doesn’t mean he
likes
me. What if he doesn’t?

What if he
does?

What if he does but he has a girlfriend?

What if
I
become his girlfriend and then find out he kisses like a fish?

I stopped scribbling and looked at Abbie’s face. It was as open and sunny as the mason jar full of daisies on the coffee table. Clearly she was thinking
none
of these ridiculous things. I bet the only loop running through her head was:
I look awesome! This hottie is the perfect match for me. Until I dump him to head back home.

I sighed as I flipped my notepad closed and tossed it back into my bag. When Abbie was born, she hogged all the badass genes, leaving none for me when I came along.

On the bright side, I realized, three minutes had passed and Josh hadn’t emerged from a back room or from behind a bookshelf. He clearly wasn’t there. Which meant I was free to dig into Dog Ear without worrying about how horrid I looked.

I glanced at Abbie and Hannah. Hannah had found a book and sunk into the leather chair to read it. Abbie was laughing with J-boy. She flicked one of her braids over her shoulder and propped her chin on her fist. She was laying it on thick! I had time.

I wondered if that book Josh had showed me,
Beyond the Beneath
, was still in stock. I started for the YA section.

But as soon as I passed the stacks of books on the corner of the counter, I realized I’d made a grave miscalculation.

The only person I’d
seen
behind the counter was the girl with the red streaks. But behind that barricade of books, there was plenty more room for another person. Especially if that person was sitting in a low chair and bent over a desk tucked below the counter.

I stifled a gasp as Josh came into my sight line. He was doing his letter
C
slouch again, so hunched over that you could almost see the knobby curve of his spine through the thin, white fabric of his T-shirt.

And in case you were wondering whether I thought his spine was as cute as his forehead, the answer, pathetically, is yes.

I froze in place, debating whether I should tiptoe back to the front door, where Josh couldn’t see me, or dart into the stacks to hide among the books. Before I could do either, though, I got distracted by the thing on Josh’s desk.

It was a huge poster. It had a blown-up image of a book cover in one corner. I couldn’t read the name of the book, but I could see that it was an image of blue sky filled with perfect fluffy clouds.

Josh was inking in a sketch above the cover. It was a beautiful girl’s face, gazing down at the book. She looked hazy and transparent—like she was one with the sky.

It was really,
really
good.

In another corner of the poster, Josh had made block letters in a funky, slanty font. I recognized it from the Dog Ear sign.

I glanced around at some of the other posters on the walls, each advertising an author reading or book launch party. Josh’s same leaning font was on every one.

Other than that, they were all wildly different. One poster—for
a book about a London punk—featured E.B. the dog with a Mohawk, black eyeliner, and safety pins in his floppy ears. Another, for a campy zombie book, had a funny portrait of a zombie gnawing on a human arm like it was a cob of corn. Still another, for a children’s picture book, had a pigeon pitching a fit from all different angles, like a police mug shot.

Clearly Josh had made all of these.

With my mouth hanging open in surprise, I glanced back at him. That’s when I saw that he was staring at me!

As our eyes met I snapped my mouth shut with such force, I felt my teeth jangle a bit.

Josh did the exact same thing.

I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or to duck my disheveled head and run out of Dog Ear. Given my lack of makeup, I kind of wanted to do the latter.

But given Josh’s adorable face?

I stayed.

“You finally came,” he said.

He had a nervous/sweet half smile on his face. And his smooth cap of hair was kind of flattened in the one part where I guessed he’d been propping it on his hand while he drew. His shoulders were angular and adorable inside his thin T-shirt.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to, but things have been kind of family-intensive. I’m with my sisters right now, in fact . . .”

My voice trailed off as I gestured at them in the lounge.

What I didn’t say was, “My sisters dragged me in here because I was too terrified to come by myself.”

“Oh,” he said. Which made me wonder what
he
wasn’t saying.

“So you made all these?” I said, pointing at the framed posters lining the wall.

“Well . . .” Josh glanced at the half-finished poster on the desk, and then I
could
tell what he was thinking. He was wishing he could do a full-body dive on top of it, covering it up so I wouldn’t know his secret.

“So . . . it’s not all receipt tape?” I broached.

He looked squirmy again. But a sheepish smile snuck through. And even though he was trying to fight it off, it lit up his face.

“Did you ever start that book?” he said, changing the subject. “The one with the monsoon?”

“No monsoon yet,” I said with a laugh. “But she did compare the rising tropical sun to a hothouse hyacinth.”

“Ooh, that’s bad,” he said, and cringed.

“Oh,
wretched
,” I said happily. “Which, you know, can sometimes be a good thing. Like Lifetime movies of the week? My sisters and I love them.”

“Because you can laugh at them—”

“Not with, but at,” I interjected.

“Right,” Josh said. “But the point is, you do it together. Can’t do that with a book.”

Then his eyes lit up.

“Wait a minute,” he said.

He disappeared beneath the counter. I heard a shuffling sound, and the
slap
,
slap
,
slap
of paperbacks hitting the floor. I glanced nervously at Abbie and Hannah. Hannah was completely immersed in a book that just reeked of important subject matter.
And Abbie was giving J-Boy a flirty punch in the arm. She practically batted her eyelashes at him.

Suddenly Josh reemerged. His flattened hair had popped back up. And he was holding a coverless paperback book. I pointed at it.

“Is that—”

“Coconut Dreams,”
Josh said. “We had two copies. This one was in the recycle box. My parents are supposed to drive the stuff over to the office supply place to get them shredded, but of course that hasn’t happened yet.”

This time, though, Josh seemed kind of delighted to have parents who neglected the boring bookstore chores.

“So . . . what?” I said. “You’re gonna read that?”

“
We
could read it,” he said. “You know, at the same time.”

“Like a book club?” I said. That sounded, um, wholesome, in a middle-aged kind of way.

“Naw,” Josh said. “It’s like an
anti
–book club. We could both read it and make fun of it.”

“So you
do
hate books,” I joked.

“No, I don’t!” Josh said. “There are a lot—well, some—that I think are amazing.”

He dropped
Coconut Dreams
onto the desk and grabbed another book off it. It had the same cover as the book on Josh’s in-progress poster. It was called
Photo Negative
.

“
This
one is amazing,” Josh said, showing me the new book. “You haven’t read it because it’s not out yet. But when it does come out, you’ve got to get it.”

“And the writer’s coming here?” I said, nodding at his poster.

“Yeah,” he said, clutching the book a little more tightly. “He is.”

He looked so cutely vulnerable that I smiled. I couldn’t help it. It was like I had no control over my face.

Josh smiled too—tentatively, like he’d dodged a bullet. He glanced back at his desk and seemed about to say something, when I felt Abbie
tap-tap-tap
my shoulder. I jumped.

“Hey,” I said, turning to give her an irritated look. Hannah was behind her, looking amused.

Abbie whispered gleefully, “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

She pulled me over to a display case that blocked our view of the J-boy in the lounge. It was also conveniently out of earshot of Josh.

“The bad news is,” Abbie breathed, “I still don’t know his name.”

I looked over at Josh. His smile had faded, but it hadn’t completely disappeared. He turned back to the desk.

I turned back to Abbie. She was so giddy with her impending good news that she didn’t even seem to notice me making eye contact with Josh.

It probably doesn’t occur to her that I could have a J-boy of my own,
I thought ruefully.

“The good news is,” Abbie said, “he’s invited us to a party on Sunday. It’s called a lantern party. I guess they do it every summer on the last day of June.”

“That’s weird,” I said. “Why that day?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Abbie said, waving her hand dismissively. “He explained it, but I didn’t get the whole story. It’s some small-town private joke.”

“Huh,” I said. I shot Hannah a dubious looks. “So he invited all of us?”

“Yeah, essentially,” Hannah said. “I bet Liam will be there.”

“Oh, great,” I said. “So you can both go off with your boys and leave me with a bunch of strangers.”

“A bunch of
potential
,” Abbie declared. “We’re going to be here the rest of the summer. Don’t you want to make some friends? Don’t tell me you want to stay home with Mom and Dad every night.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Josh. He was sitting back at his desk, scribbling intensely on his poster.

I crossed my arms over my chest and faced my sisters again.

“What’s a lantern party?” I asked.

“It’s at the big dock at the marina,” Abbie said with a shrug. “I assume they’re lighting it all up with lanterns. You’ll love it.”

I cocked my head.

“I might like it,” I said slowly.

“She’s in!” Abbie blurted. She thrust her hand toward Hannah, and Hannah high-fived her. Abbie started for the door. Perfect. If she and Hannah went outside, I could finish talking to Josh.

“Oh, no!” Abbie said. She pointed at the Pop Guy’s stand across the street. He was pulling down his giant umbrella, which meant he was closing up shop. “We’ve gotta catch him!”

She trotted to the door, then looked back and gestured wildly at us.

“Come
on
,” she said. “It’s so hot out, if I don’t get something cold in me, I’ll pass out.”

“Okay, okay!” Hannah said with a laugh. She headed for the door.

“I’m going to . . . ,” I began.

Hannah turned and looked at me impatiently.

“What?” she said. “Aren’t you coming?”

I glanced again at Josh. His head was still down and he was frowning in concentration. Clearly he was back in work mode. I shrugged unhappily and headed for the door. Before I let it close behind me, I snuck a last peek over my shoulder—and saw
Josh
peeking around the book stacks at me! My stomach swooped. I managed a little wave before the jingly door slammed behind me.