They were still playing the game, and Jordan tried to get Annabelle and Ruby to choose between Billy, the friendly pool janitor who was probably in his fifties, and Doug at the front desk, whose shirt was damp with sweat even on the cool days but who knew every single swimmer’s name and always said hi.
For once, a reply jumped into Annabelle’s brain.
“I don’t know,” she said to Jordan. “Why don’t you choose first?”
She felt bad afterward, even though everyone laughed. Lily Ericson-Bentley, who was in Annabelle’s class at the Academy, would probably point out that the only reason they laughed was because they were uncomfortable with homosexuality on some level, and that was wrong. Lily would have a problem with pretty much every part of this game, and she’d be brave enough to tell Jordan and Connor and Ruby exactly why.
Pretty soon, everyone tired of the game and Annabelle relaxed a little. Ruby asked Jordan about some sort-of-famous person whose lawn he mowed—Dennis Martin, who directed movies, apparently. She made a big fuss out of how great the movies were, and Annabelle nodded along, even though she hadn’t heard of any of them.
“He’s a good guy, actually,” Jordan said.
“What?” Connor said. “I thought you’d never even spoken to him.”
“Well, not directly,” Jordan admitted. “His wife is the one who sets everything up with the lawn mowing. But I heard him on the phone the other day while he was sitting out by the pool. You could tell it was a business call, but he was real laid-back about it.”
Connor grinned and patted Jordan on the back. “Right. Yeah, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before you turn on the old Bernstein charm and Dennis Martin’s inviting you over to hang out by the pool and tell him all your great ideas about his next movie.”
Ruby took her hair out of its clip. “That pool is ridiculous.”
“You swam in it?” Annabelle asked.
“Um, no.” She shook her head so that her hair swished against her shoulders and the flowery smell of her shampoo overtook the usual pool smells of grease and chlorine and sunscreen. “Dennis Martin’s pool. I wish.”
“Someday, Rubes,” Jordan said, “I will charm Dennis Martin, just you wait and see. And then you and I will be floating around in his pool and he’ll be asking us to do a cameo in his new movie.”
Connor caught Annabelle’s eye and raised one eyebrow before turning to Jordan. “Good luck with that, man,” he said. Then he pointed over to the grassy lawn where the game of cornhole was always set up: two slanted wooden boards with holes on the back end, about ten feet apart, and little bean bags you tried to throw onto the boards or into the holes at the back. “Wanna play cornhole?”
Annabelle used to play all the time with Mia and Jeremy, but Connor was asking Jordan, not her, and she couldn’t get up the nerve to invite herself to join.
So she slipped out of the shorts and T-shirt she’d worn over her suit, slathered on some more sunscreen, and settled on a chair with her summer reading book. If she could get through a whole chapter and explain it to Mom on the way home, even though she’d missed tutoring, Mom might not be quite as mad.
Ruby spread out on the lawn chair next to her with a magazine and actually sounded interested when she asked what Annabelle was reading. “Oh, I love that book!” she said.
But with Ruby right next to her, Annabelle was too embarrassed to hold her index card under each line and move it down the page to keep her eyes focused. And it was too hard to pay attention to tiny black words crammed too close together on a page when Connor Madison was nearby, chatting with the pretty college-aged lifeguard as Jordan divided up the beanbags and waited for him.
Connor finally joined Jordan, and they started their game. But now Annabelle was too thirsty to read, so she walked over to the water fountain. And when she peeked back at Connor and Jordan, Connor was watching her, too.
She gave him that closed-mouth smile she’d practiced in the mirror with Mia, but it widened into a grin when she heard Jordan yell at him.
“It’s your turn, Mads! Come on!”
She’d made Connor Madison forget it was his turn. She’d never felt so powerful in her life.
Chapter 14
Mom was there at the end of practice, standing so close to the edge of the pool that her beige linen work dress was dotted with water spots. When she pushed her sunglasses up to the top of her head, there was that worry line, creasing the triangle of skin between her eyebrows and her nose.
And there was Mia, standing in the middle of a group of girls, watching Annabelle’s mom with her whole body angled forward to listen instead of paying attention to what the other girls were saying.
“Get your things and let’s go,” Mom said. “Now, please, Annabelle.”
Mia caught Annabelle’s eye and frowned, as if to say she was sorry Annabelle was so obviously in trouble. It was the same frown she gave Annabelle when teachers asked to talk to her after class, and it made her want to scream. At least Connor was busy talking to Jordan and the other guys instead of watching her get scolded by her mother as if she were a six-year-old who’d gotten caught sneaking an extra cookie.
She caught up with Elisa on the way to the locker room.
“So do you work at Beach Buzz?” she asked. That was the most popular coffee shop in town, on the cobblestoned Main Street across from the preppy shops that only summer people shopped at. They always hired lots of extra high school kids for the summer.
“Yeah, I just started,” Elisa said.
“Lots of fancy summer people asking for all those fancy drinks?” Annabelle asked.
“So many fancy drinks!” Elisa said. “I guarantee you they sell, like, two half-caf skinny iced mocha-caramel-whatever lattes the whole rest of the year and then two thousand in the summer.”
Annabelle was relieved to reassure herself that things were normal with Elisa, to sort of . . . counteract what had happened during the game, when Jordan had called Elisa manly and laughed. But it struck her how easy it was to bond with girls, too, by sort of making fun of someone else. When in doubt, say something mildly insulting about summer people to another year-round islander. Or at school, complain about a teacher. Or for the kids who went to the public school, complain about kids who went to the Academy. She didn’t like it when she was part of the group that got complained about, but here she was doing it, too.
Then her wet ponytail thwacked against her right ear and a tan hand grazed Elisa’s shoulder.
“What’s up, Pricey? Fun hanging out with you, Hummingbird!” Connor called on his way into the guys’ locker room.
Elisa raised her eyebrows, and Annabelle wanted so much to talk to her about Connor. To get Elisa to help her analyze all of the interactions she’d had with him today the way she knew Mia probably wouldn’t.
But Mom was waiting and only getting angrier, so she hurried to get dressed and then hurried to the car, where tulle and fake flowers from one of Mom’s parties littered the passenger-seat floor.
“You’re going to call Janine to apologize as soon as we get home,” Mom said as she started the engine. “And you’ll be on dishwashing and trash and laundry-folding duty until I say otherwise. What were you thinking?”
She didn’t wait for Annabelle to answer, though. She kept on talking, and Annabelle zoned out enough that she only caught a few select words. Irresponsible. Inconsiderate. And, of course, worried.
Annabelle looked out the window as they left the pool. She watched five or six kids chasing each other around the emerald-green lawn of a summer house. They were about ten or eleven—around the age Annabelle had been when she’d moved to the island. Even though the car windows were closed, their shouts and squeals streamed in.
“And from now on,” Mom said, “if I don’t approve of your ride to practice, you don’t go. Got it?”
Annabelle nodded, but it was hard to care too much about her punishment after Colette had put her with the second-fastest freestyle relay team during practice
and Connor had gone out of his way to flick her ponytail twice.
“You get one warning here, Belle,” Mom added. “This is it. If anything like this happens again, you’re showing me you can’t handle the extra responsibility of the high school team, and it’s back to the middle school team for good.”
That got Annabelle’s attention. “I won’t mess up again,” she promised.
Because she couldn’t lose being on the high school team.
Because after today, it didn’t seem all that impossible that a guy like Connor really might choose a girl like her. And that would be as good as—or maybe even better than—an A in Mr. Derrickson’s history class.
“Oh,” Mom added as she pulled into their driveway. “Mrs. Sloane called this morning. Something opened up in her schedule tomorrow afternoon, so she wants to meet us then.”
Annabelle’s throat went dry. She was supposed to have so much time left before the meeting. And it was supposed to be in the morning, not in the afternoon when she had practice.
“It’s good, I figure,” Mom said. “The sooner the better.”
“I’ll miss practice,” Annabelle pointed out.
But she could have recited her mom’s response along with her. “School comes first.” Always.
Chapter 15
It was strange to be back at school during the summer. In the hallways of the middle school building, the maroon lockers sat open and empty, and the bulletin boards were stripped bare. It turned out those bulletin boards were covered in peeling gray-blue paint under the bright paper teachers usually covered them with and speckled with old thumbtack holes and the occasional shine of a staple that hadn’t been pulled out. No “exemplary student work” hanging on them now.
Annabelle followed her mom to Mrs. Sloane’s office, and they sat on the benches in the hall where kids had to wait for their punishments when they’d gotten in trouble.
She thought back to the first time she’d been inside Mrs. Sloane’s office, when she visited the Academy the summer before sixth grade. Back then, she still let Mom choose her outfits and braid her hair to the side on special days. She’d worn a pale yellow dress and ballet flats that had a shimmer in the leather, and she’d tried to count the shimmery flecks as she waited for Mrs. Sloane to let her in.
She’d known the answers to all the questions Mom had made her practice answering: her favorite subject, and what she did outside of school, and her favorite book.
But then Mrs. Sloane didn’t ask any of those things. She spent most of the time peering down through her glasses at Annabelle’s fifth-grade report card and the results of the tests Annabelle had taken as part of her application to the Academy. The only thing she asked was how hard Annabelle was willing to work.
“Really hard,” Annabelle had promised.
Now, looking at her final seventh-grade report card, Mrs. Sloane would probably think she’d lied.
The office door swung open, and its creak echoed in the empty hallway.
“I’m so glad it worked out for you to come in today,” Mrs. Sloane said, shaking Mom’s hand first and then Annabelle’s.
“Thank you so much for making the time to meet with us,” Mom babbled. “Nothing is a bigger priority to us than Annabelle’s schoolwork, and we think it’s so important to talk about this year now, while we have time to make some changes before eighth grade starts.”
Mom took a seat at one end of the hard, gray sofa that sat against the wall of Mrs. Sloane’s office, a few feet away from her cluttered desk, and pulled out Annabelle’s learning plan. An educational psychologist had written it up after Annabelle had all that extra testing in the winter of sixth grade, just a few months into her first year at the Academy, when she was already falling behind. Mrs. Sloane walked over to her desk chair, and Mom talked and talked about accommodations and tutoring and final exams.
Annabelle sat down on the other end of the couch and examined the gray and white area rug underneath her feet. The rug hadn’t been there the last time she was here, and she tried to imagine Mrs. Sloane picking it out.
Mrs. Sloane had probably wanted something that wasn’t too cheerful, since almost nobody went into her office for a happy conversation. Something too cheerful would rub that in.
“Annabelle?”
Mrs. Sloane’s voice now. So Mom had finally stopped talking.
“I’m sorry,” Annabelle said. “What was the question?”
Mrs. Sloane gave her a patient smile, but it was the kind of patient that strained to cover up exasperation. Annabelle was an expert on that kind of patient, because she got that same look from teachers. The nicer ones, anyway, who bothered to hide their annoyance.
“It wasn’t a question,” Mrs. Sloane said. “More of an observation. That the end of the year proved challenging for you.”
That was a school word, challenging.
Last year, Annabelle’s English teacher had made the class brainstorm transition words they could use in their essays—however and as a result and in addition. Annabelle imagined a classroom full of teachers brainstorming words they could use to keep the kids who weren’t smart from feeling too bad. Challenge was the big winner. The comments on her report cards were always peppered with different forms of that word. Challenge, challenging, challenges. And then there was the old classic: developing.
Boys had looked at her differently ever since her body had started to “develop.” That’s the way Mia’s mom had put it, when they’d gone on that shopping trip and Annabelle had come out of the dressing room wearing that striped shirt. That something that clingy was going to draw a lot of attention since she was so “developed.” When it came to her body, Annabelle was ahead of Mia and almost everybody else. When it came to school, she was always stuck “developing”—her reading skills, her understanding of essay writing, her ability to conjugate Spanish verbs—and never quickly enough.
“What do you think we should do?” Mom asked Mrs. Sloane.
“Well, there are a few things Ms. Ames suggested,” Mrs. Sloane started. “For one thing, there’s summer work.”
Mrs. Sloane was wearing a necklace with a thick silver chain and a stone in the front. It looked like the pink quartz rocks that were buried in the sand all over Gray Island, except it was bigger than any stone Annabelle had ever found, and it was a perfect oval.
Mom was off again, listing all the work Annabelle was doing with Janine, as if that might earn Annabelle bonus points for next year. Or earn Mom bonus points for doing so much to help. Make it clear that it wasn’t because of her that Annabelle had so much trouble.
Mom had never had this kind of trouble in school. She’d gone to a great college, gotten a great marketing job in New York City right after she finished. It was Dad who hadn’t even made it through his sophomore year at his much-less-impressive college.
Mrs. Sloane nodded, and Annabelle focused on the way the iridescent flecks and swirls in the stone on her necklace caught the light. She was almost certain it was pink quartz, which the waves and sand wore down into smooth, roundish pebbles. She couldn’t understand how it was so big and smooth, though.
“That’s a great start, certainly,” Mrs. Sloane said. “It’s important for Annabelle to have supports in place to keep up with the required work. But Ms. Ames and I think we’re at a point where we need to step back and address some of the underlying issues that are leading to Annabelle’s difficulties.”
Difficulties. Another word Annabelle heard a lot of. Not quite as gentle as challenges, so teachers only pulled it out when they really wanted to make a point.
Mrs. Sloane kept going: about test scores and Annabelle’s processing speed and working memory.
Then she leaned back, and the shiny pink stone bounced once against her rib cage before settling on top of her blouse. Mom was scribbling in her notebook, nodding as she wrote. The worry line between her eyebrows stretched down all the way to the bridge of her nose.
Annabelle wanted to grab Mom’s pen and snap it in half
so the ink would leak all over that not-overly-cheerful gray and white rug.
Mrs. Sloane picked up a marked-up copy of Annabelle’s fourth-quarter report card with the C in Spanish circled in blue.
“We could consult with the educational psychologist who did Annabelle’s testing. At the time, he didn’t recommend a Spanish waiver, but based on Annabelle’s recent report card, it wouldn’t be unusual for her to be excused from a foreign language.”
“Wait. You want to kick me out of Spanish?” Annabelle asked.
She actually liked Spanish, even though it was hard. They sang songs to remember new words and watched videos to learn about Spanish culture, and Señora Melkoff once said that learning Spanish had been hard for her, too, but then everything had clicked when she spent a summer in Chile in high school. Annabelle thought things might still click for her, too.
“No one’s kicking you out of anything,” Mrs. Sloane said. “But your particular learning profile means that the skills you need to master a foreign language are still . . .”
“Developing?” Annabelle suggested.
“Exactly,” Mrs. Sloane agreed. “Ms. Ames wouldn’t be free every language period to meet with you, but sometimes you’d be able to work together during that time, and on other days you would have your own individual study hall. You could do your homework right on the bench outside my office, and I could keep an eye on you.”
On the bad-kid bench? Where every single person in the seventh and eighth grades could see her?
Mom was nodding. “It does sound like that could take some of the pressure off.” She turned to Annabelle. “You could get your math and science homework done during that free period sometimes, and then you’d have more time for history and English at night.”
Mrs. Sloane set down the report card, took off the glasses she’d had perched halfway down her nose, and folded them up. “Annabelle, do you think you could give your mom and me a moment?”
Up for Air Page 8
