Local Girls

by Jenny O'Connell

  I took the top sheet and shook it until the neat folds fell apart, then I laid it on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, watching me take a pillow from the sofa and place it atop the sheet.

  “Perfect, no?”

  I pulled him down with me and we lay there with our heads on the pillow, staring at the ceiling. “Not bad.”

  “I never noticed that before,” I told him, and pointed above, where thin slices of morning light shone through the planks of wood. “You can see right through the roof.”

  “It is an old barn, Kendra,” Henry reminded me, then slipped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer to him. “Those cross beams up there have to be almost a hundred years old.”

  “Are you trying to freak me out, because now all I can think of is that those two-ton, hundred-year-old beams up there are going to come down right on us.”

  Henry laid his head on my shoulder and kissed my neck. “I don’t think you have to worry about that. They’ve lasted this long, I think they’ll last a little longer.”

  It was the right person and the right time and the right place. And I couldn’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner.

  “I love you, Kendra.”

  I closed my eyes and let the words swirl in between the rays of light before answering. “I love you, too, Henry.”

  “What would Mona say?” he asked.

  As if on cue, my eyes opened and I turned to look at Henry, who grinned at me.

  “Do we have to tell her?” I answered, following a script we’d both rehearsed before.

  Henry shook his head. “I think she already knows.”

  “Then I guess there isn’t anything we can do about it, is there?”

  Henry took my face in his hand and leaned in closer. “Well, maybe there is one thing.”

  And before I could answer he was kissing me, and my eyes closed and I couldn’t see anything except the remains of the morning light floating up, up, and away.

  “Hey, Henry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think I may be a morning person after all.”

  Chapter 29

  Labor Day weekend was always a strange time, both a beginning and an end, a return to normalcy. And yet, because we’d become used to the tourists and traffic and crowded sidewalks, it didn’t feel quite normal with everyone leaving the island. The three-day weekend was the official end of summer, dates we could circle on our calendars so we had something to work toward. But once Labor Day arrived, it felt less like an achievement and more like the day after Christmas.

  Mona and Henry were on the six o’clock ferry home. The last time I met Mona at the ferry to say good-bye, we had no idea what to expect: she was heading off to Boston to a new house, a stepdad, and people she’d never met, and I was staying on the island to learn how to go it alone without my best friend. While the logistics hadn’t changed, just about everything else had. Maybe that’s why, when I pulled Lexi’s car into the space in front of the Steamship Authority and spotted the black Range Rover at the end of the ferry line, I didn’t have the same pit in my stomach, the same feeling of dread I’d had last year.

  Before, I was afraid everything would change, but I wasn’t afraid of that anymore. It was going to happen whether Mona and Henry stayed on the island or not, whether I went three thousand miles away to school or just up Route 93 to Boston, whether I was ready for it or I resisted it with every bone in my body. Even though I hadn’t wanted to admit it, Mona was right, I had changed, and not just because I fell in love with her brother. The thing was, we’d all changed, Mona and Henry and me, Lexi, my parents, all of us, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. And even if things between us would never be exactly the way they were before Mona moved, before Henry and I got together, even before the deli disrupted our entire family, that was okay. I wasn’t sure I wanted us to stay the same forever; I decided I’d rather see where all that change would take us.

  Henry was standing next to the car waving at me, and I waved back, then headed over to him.

  It was a day of lasts. We’d had our last morning of fishing, our last meetup at Stop & Shop when Shelby needed corn syrup, our last drive back to the inn, where he kissed me before I went inside to serve my last breakfast of the season. Then, at four o’clock, Wendy handed me my last paycheck and Shelby and I said good-bye, but not for the last time. She’d sent in her application to the culinary school and was still waiting to hear if she could start in the winter semester. Until then she’d keep working at the Willow, and I’d stop by to steal some bacon on my way to school.

  I wove my way through the rows of idling cars until I got to Henry, who waited until I reached him to step away from the cars and come toward me.

  “Where have you been? The ferry’s in ten minutes.” He wrapped his arms around my waist so I couldn’t move away.

  “I stopped by the inn to pick you all up a little something.” I took out the hand I’d been hiding behind my back and held up the freezer-size Ziploc bag dangling from my fingers. “Sunshine muffins. Courtesy of Shelby.”

  “One for every day of the week?” Henry asked, counting them.

  “No, you have to share. Where is everyone?” I didn’t see Mona or Izzy or Malcolm anywhere around the car.

  Henry took the bag from me and put it on the backseat. “They went to get some bottled water for the ride home.”

  This time when he said “home,” I knew he meant Boston.

  “There they are.” I pointed to Mona, Izzy, and Malcolm, who were on their way back to the car. Over by the dock I could see the ferry workers preparing to let the cars on.

  “Big plans after I’m gone?” Henry joked, taking my hands and swinging them back and forth like we were little kids.

  “I’m heading into town to help with the deli, there’s a lot of stuff to do now that the season’s winding down. I thought I’d help.”

  “When you come to visit promise you’ll bring me a Santa Fe Gobbler or two, okay?”

  “I promise.”

  Mona came around the front of the car and handed a bottled water to Henry. “Where have you been, we were afraid we’d miss you.”

  “I had to stop and pick up a care package from Shelby, she made you some muffins.”

  Mona rubbed her stomach. “Yummy.”

  Henry let go of my hands and went to meet Izzy and Malcolm at the front of the car, leaving me and Mona alone.

  “Make sure you send me some of your pictures, okay?”

  “I will, but wait a second.” Mona reached inside the open backseat window and felt around until she found what she was looking for. “Here, this is for you.”

  It was the print of the little girl looking at her reflection in the building, and it was just as amazing as I remembered.

  Mona tapped the glass. “Henry told me you liked it, so I had it matted and framed.”

  “I love it, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” Mona reached her arms out and pulled me into a bear hug so tight it reminded me of Izzy.

  “Make sure you tell me what you decide to do about the envelope,” I reminded Mona, and she nodded, her hair rubbing against my face.

  “I promise you’ll be the first to know.” She glanced over at Henry. “Well, the second.”

  “Come on, guys, the line is moving,” Izzy called out from the across the hood of the car. “Kennie, you’ll come to Boston soon, right? Malcolm has some sort of Princeton alumni thing he wants to take you to.”

  Malcolm gave Izzy a sheepish grin and then looked over at me. “It wasn’t totally my idea, so I can’t take all of the credit.”

  “Oh, they’re moving!” Izzy yelled, jumping into the front passenger seat. “Get in.”

  “Good-bye, Kendra.” Mona gave me another quick hug. “I’ll miss you.”

  “You, too,” I told her, but she was already in the backseat, opening the Ziploc bag to pick out a muffin.

  “That leaves us,” Henry said.

  “Yep.” I
leaned up against him and he took my face in his hands.

  “I hope you know I love you, Kendra.” His voice was soft and earnest and so completely Henry.

  “I do,” I answered, and our mouths found each other just like that first time, only so much better.

  “I’d better go,” Henry told me, pulling away. “I’ll call you when we get to the city.”

  “I’ll talk to you then,” I agreed, and I had no doubt I would.

  A few minutes later the ferry horn blew and the boat pushed off from the dock, its massive body slowly pulling away from the harbor as it left the island behind. I could see Mona and Henry by the deck railing, waving to me, and I waved back. I waved and waved, not stopping until they were nothing more than specks making their way around the bend of land, and then nothing at all.

  Already the shadows had changed, the sun starting to make its descent earlier, as it did every September. Cars were filing into the emptied lines, preparing to leave on the next ferry, to say good-bye to the island until next year. And I knew exactly what all those tourists were thinking, their cars dusty and filled with sand from the beach: that summer vacation was ending and it was time to go home.

  So I made my way back to Lexi’s Honda and drove.

  Read on for a sneak peek at Rich Boys,

  Jenny O’Connell’s second book

  in the Island Summer Series!

  Available now in bookstores everywhere.

  Chapter 1

  I don’t play tennis with Jessie anymore. Not since last summer, when she asked me to just hit it around, and I naively believed she meant we were simply going to volley the ball back and forth over the net, not that I’d get a forehand to the stomach and end up doubled over gasping to catch my breath. Jessie immediately ran over and apologized profusely (she jumped over the net, which, even though I was nearly suffocating, still impressed me), but that was the end of our match. So now the closest I get to Jessie on the court is the sidelines, not so much because she’s so good, which she is, but because she is so much better than me. And as much as I hated getting hit with a ball going sixty miles per hour, I hated losing even more.

  “Come on, just one game?” Jessie begged, bouncing the ball against alternating sides of her racquet head. She was between clinics, so we had an hour to kill before her afternoon program. Even after only a week of teaching junior clinics at the Community Center, Jessie was dark, her legs and arms a warm toffee color compared to my mid-June pallor. The thing was, no matter how dark Jessie’s skin got, and by the end of the summer she was darker than even the girls who loyally fake-baked at the Sun Tropez, Jessie’s hair was always the same color. Almost black. Not a single highlight, no streaks from the sun. Just a solid mass of black curls pulled back into a ponytail, so dark and shiny the color reminded me of licorice jelly beans, which I always thought looked out of place in my pastel-colored Easter basket and always traded with Shelby for the purple, grape-flavored ones. My hair, on the other hand, ended up pale honey blond by the end of the summer, which looked great with a tan. But when my regular old dirty blond started growing in around October and there was no sun and salt air to provide a little assistance from Mother Nature, I had to turn to a bottle to ease the transition to my winter shade of blah.

  I shook my head even as Jessie gave me a look that pleaded pretty please. “I didn’t bring my protective gear.”

  Jessie rolled her eyes at me. “Well, you’d better remember to bring some tomorrow. You’re going to need it.”

  “I think I can handle a few kids on the beach. Besides, who are you to talk? You just spent three hours teaching a group of ten-year-olds how to rush the net.”

  “Yeah, but they get out of line, and whack.” Jessie let the ball fall to the ground, bounce once, then smacked it away with a killer backhand. Even without her trying, it skimmed over the net and slid down the right side of the court, just inside the tape. She’d made the varsity tennis team our freshman year, all thanks to that backhand.

  “If I need your disciplinary skills, I’ll be sure to call,” I said. Jessie had started teaching junior tennis clinics at the Chilmark Community Center last week, which is why every afternoon I’d come by before her afternoon session to hang out. My complete and total boredom. But today was my last day of unemployment, because tomorrow I started work at the Oceanview Inn, as a camp counselor for the chil- dren’s program.

  “Better you than me,” Jessie sighed, looking around for another ball. She taught at the center because it gave her an excuse to hit the court every day, not because she relished explaining the concepts of love and deuce and topspin to a bunch of kids who’d rather be at the beach or at their summer homes playing their Xboxes. “You hear from Shelby?”

  “Yeah,” I said, then waited while she dug a faded yellow ball out from behind the chain-link fence and resumed bouncing. “She said she doubts there’ll be enough time to come home this summer, but she’ll try.”

  Shelby attended the Boston Culinary Institute, turning what had begun as a coping mechanism into an actual vocation. Shelby’s obsession with baking had gone into overdrive the summer after her ill-fated and short-lived freshman year at UMass. It was also the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, but I was babysitting for the Logans and spent more time at their house than I did my own, so I didn’t see Shelby or my parents that much last summer. Which, looking back now, I wasn’t sure was a good thing or a mistake. Because maybe if I’d been around more, I could have fixed what was going wrong. If I hadn’t been teaching the Logan twins how to craft cardboard sunflowers out of paper-towel tubes and styrofoam plates, maybe I would have noticed how much things were changing.

  But I didn’t realize what was going on at home until Shelby had gone away to school and it was too late. By that point the silence had become so normal, the hush such a part of my family’s daily life, I couldn’t remember what it had been like before, and I didn’t know how to make everything go back to the way it had been. All I could remember is that it had been different, even if I couldn’t put my finger on the exact moment that transformed everything.

  There was no grand fight, no battles over the dinner table or dramatic tossing of wedding china, which is why I guess I didn’t notice right away. Those were the signs they prepared you for in the movies, the noise of crashing objects, shrill voices, slamming doors. Instead, our house just got quieter as my parents began avoiding eye contact during meals, silently acknowledging requests with a slowly nodding head or a polite smile, passing the salt and pepper without touching fingertips.

  And the quieter the house got, the more Shelby baked, as if the sweet smell of blackberry cobbler and banana upside-down cake could fill in the empty space left by my parents’ growing silence.

  “That’s too bad, I miss Shelby’s lemon bars. Maybe we could go to Boston and visit her,” Jessie suggested. “Like in August, when this place is packed and we can’t take it anymore.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get time off, but we can try.”

  “It will have to be after the road race. Nash and I are training together.”

  Nash. Last year, when Jessie first started helping out at the center, she decided she wanted Nash, a sailing coordinator who was spending the summer on the island before heading off for his freshman year at the University of Vermont. Nash’s father was once an economic adviser for the mayor of New York City, and now he taught at Columbia. It was rare for a summer guy to have a job, but I guess as far as jobs go hanging out on a sailboat all day was about as close as you could get to not working while still collecting a paycheck.

  For two months last summer Jessie learned everything there was to know about nautical knots (practiced on her sneaker laces), steering (starboard on your right, port on your left), and rigging (especially the halyard, after she mistakenly wrapped one around her wrist and ended up with a wicked case of rope burn). She played it cool those months, approaching the situation just as she’d approach one
of her matches—equal parts strategy, perseverance, and patience. While the rest of the center’s staff was fawning over Nash, Jessie hung back, piquing his interest with her disinterest (“They were tossing him lobs,” she once told me, “nobody ever wins with a lob.”). Finally, with three weeks left to go before he headed off to school, Nash made his move on Jessie. And for the next three weeks they were together, and then he left for college. Now he was back for a second summer and things were on again.

  “Want one?” I asked Jessie, holding up the bag of chocolate chip cookies in my hand. Chips Ahoy!—not homemade, which I knew would annoy Shelby to no end. But without my sister around, we had to resort to the baked-goods aisle at Stop & Shop like everyone else.

  Jessie reached for the cookie with her right hand while continuing to hold the racquet and bounce the ball with her left. Coordination came so easily for Jessie. She was one of those people who could tap the top of her head with one hand while rubbing circles on her stomach with the other. I knew this because she’d demonstrated the skill to me shortly after we first met. I showed her how I could touch the tip of my tongue to my nose. Somehow I thought that made us even.

  I knew Jessie wouldn’t be able to eat the cookie while bouncing the ball, though. Jessie eats her food in pieces. It was the first thing I noticed when we met, in the cafeteria, our freshman year. Jessie lives up-island, in Chilmark, which meant that even though we’ve both lived on the island our entire lives, we didn’t actually go to the same school until ninth grade. And on the first day, during lunch period, there she was, tearing off bite-size pieces of her ham-on-wheat sandwich and placing them in her mouth one at a time. I remember thinking how weird that was—why didn’t she just bite into the sandwich like a normal person? But then I noticed she did it with everything. An apple couldn’t be eaten unless she had a knife to slice it into chunks. Muffins had to be broken apart, each bite-size piece resulting in an equal amount of crumbs that Jessie would press down on with the tip of her finger and lick. I’d even seen her dismantle a slice of pizza, which was messy and not all that appetizing to watch.