Summer Nights (14 page)

The boat docked with more of a jolt than anybody expected. They shrieked happily as they staggered to keep their balance. Ropes were flung and tied, the gangplank dragged out, and the party goers poured out onto dry land.

“Oooh, I’m still swaying!” cried one girl, as if they had all been on an ocean voyage for six months.

“It was a great party, wasn’t it?” said a boy, fishing in his pockets for car keys.

“I wonder if we’ll ever get together again for parties like this.”

“Of course we will. Nothing will change.”

They carried unfinished sodas, purses, towels, changes of clothing, bites of dessert snatched from the leftovers on the buffet. Anne had an armload, half of it dropping from her grip. Girls stooped to help her. A crowd headed for Con’s car to dump the booty in his backseat.

“Hey! Don’t leave yet!” cried Con. “More party to come!”

Anne turned. She looked at Con in complete exasperation. He knew the look well. I just told you I want to go straight home, and the first thing you do is announce More Party?

“See you next year, Anne!” shouted one group.

“Anybody need a ride? We have room for one more!”

“Don’t forget to write.”

In vain Con shouted for them all to come back. At last he turned. “Kippie,” he said in his meekest, sweetest voice, “Kippie, do me one more favor. Please?”

“I can hardly wait till I’m in college and you can’t hit me up for any more favors. I’ll do this only because you held me up in the water. Although,” she added, because Kip always liked the last word, “I did in fact save myself.”

“Yes, you did,” Con assured her. “You always will.”

Kip raised her voice. She informed everybody they were to sit on the grassy bank facing the river. She wanted them bunched together and she wanted no nonsense about it, time was moving on.

There was instant obedience. People heading for their cars put their keys back in their purses and wheeled in a circle to go to the grassy bank.

“How do you do that?” Con said.

“Just bossy, I guess.”

Con laughed. “Kip, I will miss you so much.”

I will miss him, too, Kip thought. Conceited, annoying Con, I will miss him terribly. And Anne, and Emily, and everybody here! Kip’s eyes grew misty.

She looked at the pairs around her—some that had lasted for years, some that began tonight.

Emily and Matt.

Anne and Con.

Beth Rose and Jere.

Molly and Blaze.

Only she, Kip was alone.

And I don’t even care, she thought. Because it won’t be for long. Boys in New York City have to be a hundred times more exciting than the ones I’m leaving behind in Westerly.

When the girls were together, they generally talked of the L word—a word conspicuously absent from most boys’ vocabularies. Yet when Matt declared Love to Em, and gave her a diamond to prove it, Love seemed frightening. Kip and her friends weren’t sure they wanted it after all.

Kip wanted Love on her own terms, according to her own description. She had scheduled it for New York.

Oh, Life! thought Kip Elliott, collapsing on the grass next to her friends. Here I come!

Beth Rose thought, I turned the corner and found not one, but two perfect boys. That won’t happen again in this century. Of course one vanished in the blink of an eye and became Molly’s. But the other is here beside me. And Jere lives in Westerly, goes to Westerly High. What if we date all year? I’ll get to do my senior year over again!

More basketball play-offs. Another carnation day. A second senior prom!

She wondered how Jere would look in a tuxedo. If he knew what I’m planning for us, she thought, ducking her head so nobody could read her thoughts, he’d probably swim the Atlantic Ocean to escape. But I’m crafty. I’ll sit here telling him what a great cameraman he is, and who knows?

“You look happy,” Jere said.

People often informed Beth of this, slightly accusingly, as if she had no right to show any stray inexplicable happiness.

“What’s so terrific?” asked Jere, true to form.

Beth smiled at him. “Life,” she said. “I like it. I accept.”

Molly Nelmes sat where, in her heart of hearts, she had yearned to be throughout the four years of high school. Among the In crowd. The Anne/Con crowd.

But high school was over and there was no longer a crowd to be part of or to get left out of.

I came too late, Molly thought.

Blaze said to her anxiously, “You’ll be ready first thing in the morning? You won’t be late?”

Molly laughed. Who cared about the past? She had Sunday to look forward to, and a week of Blaze’s company. “I won’t be late,” she promised.

Anne Stephens’ heart and mind and soul were singing the theme from
Annie. Tomorrow, tomorrow,
…

Con flopped on the grass, pulling her down into his lap. “We’ll sit here,” he commanded.

Oh, well, thought Anne, what’s a few hours of sleep? The party can’t last forever and even it if lasts till dawn, I can sleep on the plane.

Planes.

Anne pictured tomorrow. Collecting her passport, traveler’s checks, tickets. Hand luggage and suitcases. Loading the car. Leaving plenty of time for traffic to the airport. Flight to New York. Disembark, take regularly scheduled bus-limousine service into Manhattan. Arrive at hotel. Meet Miss Glynn! Dress for dinner!

“What are you thinking of?” said Con in her ear.

“Tomorrow.”

Con felt all the pain of being the one left behind, and Anne felt all the joy of the one going.

“Don’t be mad at me,” Con begged. “I’m kind of a nice guy, really, underneath it all.”

The sky burst forth.

White stars exploded.

Galaxies shimmered and fell to earth.

Gold stardust quivered in a sooty sky.

“Fireworks?” Anne gasped. “Con! Is it some president’s birthday I don’t know about? How did you time it like this? Whose fireworks are they? Oh, Con, I
love
fireworks!”

One wonderful year Con had indulged her love of fireworks by driving her all over the state on the weekend of the Fourth, catching displays on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night, early and late.

“They’re your fireworks,” said Con. “You’re better than a president any day.”

Anne made a face at him. “No, really.”

“Yes, really. Look at the fireworks, Anne, not me. It’s going to be a very quick show. I don’t have as much money as the city of Westerly on the Fourth.”

“How could you afford them?” Anne said suspiciously.

“I gave up my freshman year in college.”

She laughed. “No, really.”

“Yes, really.”

A tympani roll of explosions shook the ground. An orange fireball exploded into falling stars that whistled as they flew through the sky.

“I thought there was a noise ordinance,” Anne said.

“There is. I had to get a special permit.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Kip Elliott. “
I
had to get a special permit.”

Anne was stunned. “You mean—Kip, tell me the truth. I can’t trust Con. He really did this? For me?”

Kip nodded, smiling.

“Oh, Con!” Anne dissolved into tears. She ignored the spectacular sky and buried her face against his. “Con, it’s perfect. To go out by fireworks!” She kissed him hard, and he returned it as intensely as he knew how.

The time for meaningful talks, for analysis and regrets, had gone by. Con had a terrible sense of what he had lost.

“Oh, Con,” Anne said, “I’ll miss you so much!”

There was no sentence he wanted to hear more. For if you cannot have your love, you want, at the very least, to be missed. To be a loss. To be thought of in other times, other places.

Ribbons of color streaked the sky and then vanished.

High school, and all their Saturday nights, had come and gone.

The party was over.

The air smelled of celebration.

Five girls went home to dream, to hope, to sleep.

The last summer night had ended.

Caroline B. Cooney is the author of ninety books for teen readers, including the bestselling thriller
The Face on the Milk Carton
. Her books have won awards and nominations for more than one hundred state reading prizes. They are also on recommended-reading lists from the American Library Association, the New York Public Library, and more. Cooney is best known for her distinctive suspense novels and romances.

Born in 1947, in Geneva, New York, Cooney grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was a library page at the Perrot Memorial Library and became a church organist before she could drive. Music and books have remained staples in her life.

Cooney has attended lots of colleges, picking up classes wherever she lives. Several years ago, she went to college to relearn her high school Latin and begin ancient Greek, and went to a total of four universities for those subjects alone!

Her sixth-grade teacher was a huge influence. Mr. Albert taught short story writing, and after his class, Cooney never stopped writing short stories. By the time she was twenty-five, she had written eight novels and countless short stories, none of which were ever published. Her ninth book,
Safe as the Grave
, a mystery for middle readers, became her first published book in 1979. Her real success began when her agent, Marilyn Marlow, introduced her to editors Ann Reit and Beverly Horowitz.

Cooney’s books often depict realistic family issues, even in the midst of dramatic adventures and plot twists. Her fondness for her characters comes through in her prose: “I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.” Her fast-paced, plot-driven works explore themes of good and evil, love and hatred, right and wrong, and moral ambiguity.

Among her earliest published work is the Fog, Snow, and Fire trilogy (1989–1992), a series of young adult psychological thrillers set in a boarding school run by an evil, manipulative headmaster. In 1990, Cooney published the award-winning
The Face on the Milk Carton,
about a girl named Janie who recognizes herself as the missing child on the back of a milk carton. The series continued in
Whatever Happened to Janie?
(1993),
The Voice on the Radio
(1996), and
What Janie Found
(2000). The first two books in the Janie series were adapted for television in 1995. A fifth book,
Janie Face to Face
, will be released in 2013.

Cooney has three children and four grandchildren. She lives in South Carolina, and is currently researching a book about the children on the
Mayflower
.

The house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where Cooney grew up. She recalls: “In the 1950s, we walked home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went outside to get our required fresh air. We played yard games, like Spud, Ghost, Cops and Robbers, and Hide and Seek. We ranged far afield and no parent supervised us or even asked where we were going. We led our own lives, whether we were exploring the woods behind our houses, wading in the creek at low tide, or roller skating in somebody’s cellar, going around and around the furnace!”

Cooney at age three.