The Summertime Girls

by Laura Hankin

  “Sure,” Beth said, sounding more alert. “What’s going on?”

  “I just—where did you go?”

  Beth was silent, so Ally forced a laugh as she continued. “I mean, obviously I know you were in Haiti and you were busy. But I sent you so many e-mails, and you barely wrote me back. Nothing, from December to the end of April.”

  Still, silence. Ally plowed on. “I just really needed my best friend to be there for me, especially with all the awful shit going on in my life. It felt like I was sending the most vulnerable parts of myself into a void, this blankness, where there used to be so much love and support. I was having a really terrible time, and you weren’t there.”

  She waited, tensed and bare, goose-pimpled, feeling like she’d just cut herself open and proffered her insides in the most haphazard way. Though she’d spent months thinking about this conversation, she still didn’t have any clue how it was supposed to go.

  “I didn’t mean to become a void,” Beth said slowly. “Voids are no fun. It’s just that I was so busy in Haiti. The nearest Internet café was miles away, and Deirdre and Peter needed me with them pretty much constantly.” In her first few months in Haiti, Beth had gushed nonstop in her e-mails about Deirdre and Peter Allen-Fox, the couple who ran the mission clinic, to the point where they’d attained mythical status in Ally’s mind—a superhuman power couple who saved the world and also probably had amazing, limber sex at least three times a day.

  Ally waited for Beth to keep talking, but she didn’t. So finally, Ally said, “Yeah, that’s understandable,” then immediately wanted to kick herself for making things easy.

  “It’s good that we’re getting to spend this time together now,” Beth said.

  “Definitely.”

  “And now, I’m sorry, but I’m completely exhausted so I’m going to be lame and go to bed.” Beth turned over, aligning herself toward the door.

  “Good night.”

  So it turns out, Ally thought, that it’s possible to face the bulwark directly, to tap on it, and feel no give at all.

  FOUR

  Beth squeezed her eyes shut so hard that patterns burst across the backs of her eyelids. Ally liked to play the victim, and she was leaving out all the parts of the story that didn’t flatter her. No mention, of course, of how she had been the first to retreat, the initial creator of the black hole. No apologies, ever, for the crime of being too into her boyfriend and too careless with her best friend. And no recognition, Beth thought to herself, that whatever awfulness that had been so difficult for Ally to deal with alone paled in comparison to what Beth had begged Ally to listen to while Ally had turned blithely away.

  Lying there, still and quiet, Beth let herself hate Ally. She screamed a full-throated scream in her mind. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. And, just like that, as the scream reverberated inside her motionless body, it became clear to her, the decision she’d been dragging her feet on for weeks. She had to go back to Haiti. She had to tell Deirdre and Peter yes. Because she could devote herself to their goodness, no matter how much it hurt, or she could fall into the self-centeredness that Ally so unknowingly espoused, the feeling that one’s life was awful even when nothing was really wrong with it. And it was better to be good. You had to be good, because if you weren’t, where did you put all the guilt? How could you ignore it, as it piled itself higher and higher?

  When she opened her eyes the next morning, the anger had crystallized, hardened out of something fragile. Calmly, it waited next to her new certainty. She looked over at Ally, sleeping with her arm thrown over her face and a sheet bunched up in her fist. Beth decided not to wake her up.

  She slipped from the bed quietly, excellently, a perfect ten for considerateness. She walked to the kitchen in silence, her footfall defying the floorboards’ usual creak. She could see Grandma Stella at the kitchen table, bent over a newspaper. Stella subscribed to both the Britton Hills Bugle and the New York Times. Together, she claimed, they made one perfect newspaper. “The Bugle has my funnies and my silly advice column,” she’d always say, “and the Times has everything else.” Judging by the Comic Sans print so large she could see it from the door, Beth guessed her grandmother was currently concentrating on the Bugle.

  “Good morning!” she said, brightly. After a little tango of solicitude, in which Grandma Stella insisted on making Beth breakfast, and Beth insisted that she stay seated and relaxed, Beth joined her grandmother at the table and bit into a peach. The juice dripped its way down her chin and, laughing, she wiped it off with the back of her hand before it could reach her neck.

  “That is a delicious peach,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “I’m so glad you like it, darling,” Grandma Stella replied. “I’m just tickled you’re back! Stay here forever.”

  “I wish. So what’s new in town?” Beth asked, pointing to the Bugle.

  “Well,” Grandma Stella let out a big breath, preparing to deliver some shocking news, “today, ‘Detesting my daughter-in-law’ gave so many details about herself that it’s clear to anyone with a brain that she’s Penny Joan Munson. She writes all about how her daughter-in-law doesn’t appreciate her azaleas, and about how her grandson just started working for an investment bank in New York. Penny Joan never stops bragging around town about her azaleas. And for crying out loud, it’s not like someone’s grandson becomes an investment banker every year! I swear, that dolt has single-handedly kept Dear Valerie in business for years.”

  Beth made a sympathetic sound of agreement, her usual response when Grandma Stella started riding on the Penny Joan Munson hate train. Grandma Stella loved most people and things with unmatched enthusiasm, but what she hated (line-cutters, people who said rude things about the Red Sox), she hated with an equal and opposite passion. She could rail on Penny Joan, her Britton Hills nemesis, for hours. She’d start small. For instance, “You’ll never guess what I saw at the grocery store today. Penny Joan Munson asked the deli girl to make her some more tuna salad, when the store was closing in five minutes and there was some perfectly nice-looking egg salad left.” That would balloon into a general indictment of Penny Joan’s character. She’d touch on her selfishness—“It just goes to show she has no respect for people’s time”—then pirouette over to her snobbery. “I bet she thinks she’s too good for their egg salad, just because sometimes it gets a little neon yellow.” Variations on this theme occurred, but she always ended with a vigorous headshake and a muttered, “I should stop before I say something awful.”

  But today, the hate train’s route was cut short. Grandma Stella gasped, remembering something. “And oh! Mulberry’s Hardware just announced that it’s closing at the end of the summer. Such a shame.”

  “Oh no!” Beth said, legitimately dismayed. She was no hardware connoisseur, but her father, forever DIY-ing his way through Grandma Stella’s necessary repairs during family vacations, had taken her along with him on his myriad trips to the cluttered store. Mr. and Mrs. Mulberry had always fussed over her and given her butterscotch-flavored lollipops from a big jar they kept behind the counter. The shop too had an agreeable magic to it. Beth got the sense that you could find anything in the darkness of its shelves. Once, she’d reached for an Allen wrench and pulled out a reindeer-shaped potholder.

  The Mulberrys had a son, Owen, around Beth’s age. He’d never much registered with her until the summer she and Ally worked at the ice cream store. He had come in nearly every day for an ice cream cone, always two scoops of chocolate chip cookie dough. She’d thought him a bit odd. Who liked ice cream that much? And his face flushed red so easily.

  “What would you call that color red? Beetroot? Vermillion?” she’d asked Ally one day, after her fingers had touched Owen’s while handing him his cone and, stuttering good-bye, he’d tripped out the door. This was the summer she’d set herself the goal of learning a new vocabulary word each day—it was never too early to start preparing fo
r the SATs—and colors seemed to be popping up a lot.

  “I’m gonna go with scarlet.”

  “Scarlet! Yes. I can’t believe O’Hara hasn’t gotten tired of cookie dough yet.”

  “He’s totally in love with you, duh,” Ally had replied.

  “Owen? No!” Beth had said and then, after some consideration, “Well, maybe.”

  “Definitely.”

  “No. He probably comes in all the time,” Beth had said, “because he’s in love with you.”

  Beth tended to assume that guys were in love with Ally because, more often than not, they were. It wasn’t that Ally was prettier. Sometimes, Beth even had a sneaking suspicion that she was the better-looking of the two, though she never would have said that aloud. She was taller and thinner, with that luminous red hair that dulled Ally’s brown in comparison.

  And yet Ally seemed to have some sort of voodoo magic in her smile that, when she unleashed it, caused previously sane-seeming boys to lose their heads. In high school the magic didn’t necessarily extend to the football players or the guys whose hands had smelled like pot since the seventh grade, but it proved startlingly effective on the nice, average ones. Ally was just so approachable to them, so they approached. And she encouraged it. She looked at them like they were superheroes, and then she decided after a few months or weeks or days that their powers no longer impressed her. Sometimes when she let them down, they cried. Beth could never get over this fact: Ally actually makes boys cry, and she didn’t even mean to do it.

  In the meantime, Beth stood there and watched her friend get pursued, and felt terrible about herself. She tried to figure out what the problem was and eventually settled on the explanation that the right boys for her just didn’t exist in high school. She wanted someone as smart and motivated as she was, someone who didn’t make her feel like achieving was a bad thing. And she wanted that boy to care about the world, to have plans for how he was going to make a difference. She pictured a crusading Matt Damon with a high IQ, who volunteered at a soup kitchen after church on Sundays.

  Maybe, wanting that, she intimidated the boys around her. Maybe she wasn’t as capable as Ally at being friendly and flirty to the cute boys, who seemed to expect fawning as their birthright. Maybe Ally had bigger boobs. Well, definitely Ally had bigger boobs. That might’ve had something to do with it too.

  In high school, whenever Beth allowed herself to complain about her seeming undesirability to Ally, her friend always had the counterexample ready. “What about Jack Flembo? He asked you out like three times.”

  Beth was nice to the painfully awkward Jack Flembo because she pitied him. She was the only female besides his mother and his teachers who didn’t ignore him, who didn’t close her eyes and plug her nose when confronted with his acne and his unwashed-boy smell. She’d listened as he’d told her the entire plot of his favorite anime series, and that was enough for him to fall deeply, delusionally in love. He’d asked her to the movies and then, when she’d said no, he’d asked her to Geraldo’s Steakhouse and then, when she’d said no to that too, he’d shown up at her front door with six pink roses and asked her to the prom two years in advance.

  Jack Flembo didn’t count, she always told Ally. She tried to explain that one weird guy being obsessed with her didn’t change everything. It didn’t make the disparity between their love lives feel any better to her.

  So with Owen Mulberry, she suspected that Ally was trying to even the score a bit more. Because Owen Mulberry, despite his blushing and the shyness, seemed too normal to be in love with Beth. He smelled so much better than Jack Flembo, for one thing. And his reedy body showed signs of incipient muscles. Beth hated the idea that Ally was handing Owen to her as a token.

  And sure enough, nothing ever happened with him. She went home that summer, her lips still unkissed. In recent years, Owen seemed to have disappeared from Britton Hills. She never saw him around on her visits.

  “Speaking of Mulberry’s,” Grandma Stella said, “I need packing tape. Would you mind going down there and buying some for me today?”

  “Sure,” Beth said. “I’ll head down now.”

  “Oh, darling, there’s no rush! You and Ally can do something first. Maybe you want to go to the shore?”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  Grandma Stella fixed her eyes on Beth, and Beth squirmed. Grandma Stella slowly raised one eyebrow. The summer Beth turned eight, she’d begged Grandma Stella to teach her how to move her face like that, overriding her grandmother’s concern that the skill couldn’t be taught. The two of them had stayed at the kitchen table for two hours, Beth refusing to give up and Grandma Stella trying every possible method of explanation. She’d put her hands on her granddaughter’s eyebrows, pushing one down and the other up like modeling clay. She’d asked Beth to visualize marionette strings attached to the hairs, and to try to move with an invisible puppeteer.

  When Beth’s right eyebrow finally made its solo journey up her forehead, Grandma Stella had pounded the table in victory. Then, spontaneously, the two of them had started dancing around the kitchen. Every few seconds, one or the other would yell out, “Now!” and they would turn to face each other, frozen, except for their right eyebrows wiggling up and down. They’d stayed motionless until their bodies had started to quake with hysterics.

  Now, Beth thought for a moment of telling the truth to that eyebrow, and to the woman who possessed it. But instead she said, “Ally’s still asleep. I think she’s pretty exhausted. I’ll go now.”

  On her walk into town, Beth used her cell to call Deirdre and Peter. They didn’t answer, of course, so she left them a quick message. “Hi, it’s me. My answer’s yes. Say hello to everyone there for me, and that I’ll see them soon.” She spent the rest of the walk going over her French and Creole vocabulary in her head, visualizing the flash cards she had made. She called up a new one in a regular rhythm, every two steps. Doctor. Doktè. Médecin.

  Gradually the trees thinned and the sidewalks thickened. The sea-salty smell of the air got stronger, and the distance between houses decreased. Soon, Beth reached the main downtown area, a stretch of three long blocks loaded with stores on both sides of the street. She could picture with total clarity the way that the town opened up into the harbor at the end of the third block where boats waited against seemingly infinite ocean. The sound of waves slapping against rocks mingled faintly with birdsong.

  When Beth walked into Mulberry’s, nobody sat behind the counter. The tinkling of the bell on the front door rang into silence. The place, despite its clutter, felt deserted, Sleeping Beauty’s frozen kingdom behind the briars. She thought about yelling a hello but the stillness seemed too perfect to break.

  She wandered throughout the aisles, passing her hands along the shelves. Her fingertips picked up dust and the odd trace of glitter. A warped mirror hung at the end of one shelf and, as she passed it and sneaked a glance, she thought she saw her kid self staring back at her, sucking on one of those butterscotch lollipops. Well, she thought, here goes another piece of my childhood disappearing on me. I could cry about it. But she didn’t. She hadn’t cried since Haiti, where, after the incident with the little boy, she’d been crying every day.

  Then the door to the storage room in back swung open, and the spell was broken. The guy who walked out of the door, loaded up with paint cans, wasn’t a fairy-tale prince but, oh, Beth thought, he was cute.

  “Shoot,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Need some help?”

  “Oh, no worries. I just walked in.”

  He put the paint cans down on the floor and turned his attention on her. “Wait—Beth Abbott?” he said, and his face turned a light shade of pink.

  Owen Mulberry had grown up.

  FIVE

  Ally woke to the vibrations of her phone. Swimming up to consciousness, she answered it. “Mmmfggo?”

  “Sweetheart!” her mother said
in response. Marsha spoke too loudly on the phone, and her voice ping-ponged inside Ally’s eardrums, expediting her wake-up process. As she morphed into a real person again, she remembered that she was sharing a bed. She turned toward Beth’s side to apologize, but it was empty.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  To say that Ally and her mom talked sporadically would be an understatement. Marsha sometimes went a full month without attempting to contact her daughter (and without returning any of the messages Ally left her). Whenever Ally brought it up, she’d say, “Oh, but you know how I absolutely loathe talking on the phone! I much prefer to see someone in person, to touch them, to look at them. Just come home and visit me! Not next week, though, I have a lot going on, but after that, I’m dying to see you!” Then she’d call three days in a row, wanting to talk for hours and protesting when Ally said she had to go.

  “Excellent news,” her mother said now. “Glen and I are coming up to New York in four days! Surprise getaway for Memorial Day weekend!”

  “God, you too?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. Sorry, it’s just Memorial Day mania this year. But that’ll be fun for you,” Ally said, corralling her tone into pleasantness.

  “We of course want to see you. Glen wants to take us all to dinner at Jean-Georges, and I read all about this raw Afghan-Thai fusion place that you and I absolutely must try. Apparently, it’s very healthy, does wonders with your intestines or something like that.”

  “Mom, you know I’m in Britton Hills, right?” Ally interjected.

  “No! Oh, this is a disaster!” Marsha practically shrieked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did.”

  “Well, for how long? Can you come back?”

  “I’m supposed to stay until next Sunday.”

  “That’s ridiculous. What are you going to do up there for that long? You’ll waste away from boredom, and while the early stages of wasting might be a good look on you, I don’t want you to disappear completely! Just come back early. I’m sure Glen would be willing to pay for a flight. He is desperate to meet you.”