The Summertime Girls

by Laura Hankin

  Beth fought a momentary urge to throw a bunch of dirt from a nearby planter on her friend’s sundress. Instead she just said, “Yeah, I guess he did. His face still turns pink, though.”

  “Really?” Ally said, her eyes opening wide. “His face was fine the whole time I was there. Well, that settles it, then. I’m giving him to you!”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Beth snapped. A crack opened up in the dam. “You’re giving him to me?” She heard her voice coming out pinched and harsh, but she didn’t care.

  Ally’s face fell. “Oh, no, I didn’t mean—”

  “How generous, Ally. What a nice little present to give your friend. And my birthday’s not even for another month!”

  “Beth, no, that came out wrong—”

  “Oh, so he’s not a birthday present? Well then thank you for your charity. I appreciate your tax-deductible donation.”

  “Beth! Beth, wait.” Ally grabbed her arm and forced her to stop walking. “I’m sorry. That was a stupid way for me to say that. Obviously you’re gorgeous and funny and all that wonderful stuff. Plenty of guys like you better than me.” She let go of Beth’s arm and rubbed her hand over her right temple, like she was trying to coax out the proper words. “I guess I just meant—oh, I don’t know how to make this sound right—I meant that I could try to flirt with him because, you know, it’s fun to flirt with cute guys, but what would be the point, because he’s clearly so much better for you? And, given the face-flushing, he’s clearly much more into you than me anyway. So you guys should totally fall in love. And I am an idiot. And I’m sorry. Sorry.”

  Watching Ally fumble, looking so completely repentant, Beth felt the clenched fist inside her start to relax its grip. Not completely, but enough for her to say, “Okay. It’s fine.”

  Ally gave her a tentative smile, and they started walking again.

  “Anyway, it’s not like I need to fall in love with Owen Mulberry right now,” Beth said. “That’s actually the last thing I need.” So it’s good that Ally came in before things went any further, she thought. “I’m going back to Haiti, so—”

  “Wait, you are?” Ally stared at her, looking more shocked than Beth had expected. “When? For how long? Like, a few months?”

  “The plan right now is to take another month or two at home, and probably get started on some online classes and applications. Then I’ll go back to Haiti until med school and then when med school is over, I’ll just live there. Deirdre and Peter want me to work with them. They asked me before I came back to the States if I wanted to work my way toward being a third partner of Open Arms.” Beth hadn’t spoken out loud yet about this plan to anyone since she’d decided to say yes to it.

  “Oh.” Ally nodded, looking somehow even more deflated than she had when apologizing a moment ago. “Wow.”

  “Yup.” Beth felt a strange disappointment. But then Ally turned on a smile.

  “Beth, that’s really exciting,” she said. “A third partner? You’re such a superstar.”

  “Thank you,” Beth said.

  “But wait, why didn’t you tell Grandma Stella this last night?”

  “Um,” Beth said, “I haven’t really told anyone yet. I’m still figuring out the details. And Grandma Stella already has enough to worry about with the moving stuff. I’ll tell her after she’s gotten to Sunny Acres. Maybe don’t mention it for now?”

  “Got it,” Ally said. She gave Beth a searching look. “So you really liked it there in Haiti, huh?”

  Beth hesitated, not sure how she could answer the question. “I did,” she said finally.

  “Whoa, calm down now,” Ally said. “Enthusiasm overload.”

  “I mean, it’s not really about liking, right?”

  “Okay, so you didn’t like it? Then why are you going back? You could do so many other things.”

  “Well, yeah, everything isn’t sunshine and joy there. But if I don’t do it, what if nobody does? That’s part of the reason that there’s so much inequality in this world. Nobody wants to make sacrifices. And it’s just getting worse.”

  “Right,” Ally said slowly. It seemed to Beth that she was turning over every word in her mind before she said it aloud. “But you alone don’t have to make up for the sacrifices the whole world should be making.”

  “Well, right, of course I can’t do that. But the excuses have to stop somewhere. Thinking that I’m exempt, that somebody else can pick up the slack, that’s the line of thinking that leads to everybody doing nothing. We get so caught up in this happiness rhetoric, you know, the idea that the best thing for us to be doing is the thing that makes us the happiest, when maybe what we should be trying to find is the thing that doesn’t make us unhappy while also putting the greatest amount of good in the world.”

  “Okay, I hear all that. But I don’t know, aren’t there other things you can do that help people but don’t involve you giving up your whole life?”

  “Working in Haiti doesn’t mean I’m giving up my whole life,” Beth said, adamant. This conversation was making her uncomfortable.

  “Okay,” Ally said. “Sorry.”

  They walked silently, passing their little Britton Hills landmarks. There was the ice cream shop where they’d worked that one summer. Mr. Stebbins, the owner, had painted a cartoon version of himself on the window under the pink-and-white striped awning, rotund and stern, Uncle Sam–like, with a word bubble from his mouth saying I Want You to Eat Ice Cream!

  And there was the pizza place where they’d cried together that first summer of high school, when Ally was convinced she was too fat, and her preoccupation had infected Beth too. They’d eaten only salad for an entire week, and then broken down and gone for pizza. As they’d tearily shoveled slices into their mouths, Ally had said through the great gobs of cheese and grease and mucus, “It’s just so ridiculous to not be able to eat what you want.” The high schoolers Beth could see through the windows now, waiting for their lunches, looked so young, only partially formed, their limbs long and wild. The boys joked around, throwing napkins at each other, and the girls sat in the booths, giggling, whispering in one another’s ears.

  A block later, Beth felt Ally stiffen and slow beside her.

  “What? Since when has there been a music store here?” Ally asked, walking toward a large storefront window, filled with various instruments and sheet music.

  “Hooked on Tonics? I think it opened up a couple years ago. I’ve never actually been in,” Beth said. She watched Ally stop in front of the window as if in a trance.

  “Cool,” Ally said, her measured voice contrasting with her shining face. “God, look at that guitar. It’s gorgeous.”

  Beth thought the polished, dark wood of the instrument was pretty, but she wouldn’t have picked it out of a crowd. Looking through the window, she could see Nick Danner, the store’s owner, sitting at the counter and frowning at a magazine in front of him. “Should we go inside?”

  Ally turned her head quickly. “Nah,” she said, and picked up her pace.

  “Hey, wait,” Beth said. Seeing Ally close down like that, so rapidly, she felt a familiar sense of protectiveness. Despite her annoyance over Owen, over Haiti, she wanted to do something nice for her. So she asked, “You want to walk along the shore before we go back?”

  Ally nodded.

  The Britton Hills shoreline moved from harbor to rock beach to sand, finally turning to wild grass with a steep, sloping drop. Beth and Ally had loved each section in turn. Some years, they spent their time at the harbor, wandering among the brightly painted boats and making a game of pointing out the most creative names (PB and Jellyfish was their all-time favorite). Other years they concentrated on the rock beach, with Beth trying to teach Ally how to skip the stones. Ally was hopeless at the skipping part, but they spent hours picking up various rocks, feeling their smoothness or their jaggedness, looking at the patterns the sea had mad
e on them. Sometimes they brought towels to the sand beach and dug their feet in, lying out in the sun for full afternoons, sitting up every couple of hours to help each other reapply sunscreen. With the wild grass, they’d stalked through like explorers in their sneakers, checking each other for ticks afterward.

  And always, the ocean waited, alternately wild and coy, lapping at their feet and tumbling them around in its surf. They braved its frigidity. The fear of fully submerging themselves never quite went away, whether it was the first day of their trip or the last, so each time, they masochistically isolated the cold shock to each part of their body in turn. First, they forced their feet to feel it, then pushed themselves in up to the thigh. Then came the worst part, when the water hit the area covered by their bikini bottoms. Next, they exposed the soft lower parts of their stomachs, and then they’d finally let their legs fall out from under them and sink down completely in a blind frenzy.

  Now, they slowed in the sand. Beth carefully put down the packing tape she was carrying, and the two of them just stood there, tilting their faces to the sky.

  “Want to put our feet in?” Ally asked. They kicked their shoes off and walked to the water’s edge. Watching a wave unfurl toward them, they braced themselves. As it hit their feet, they both gasped.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” Beth yelped, and dug her feet in.

  “Shit, that’s cold!” Ally said, and started bouncing up and down.

  As Beth looked at her, hopping around like she was on hot coals, she began to laugh, a real, uncontrollable laugh from her stomach. Ally laughed too, with a crazy cackle, doubling over as she continued to hop. The surf leapt up and smacked her in the face, which made the both of them laugh harder. Beth wondered if she could separate this Ally from the one she’d hated the night before, the one she hated still, in that frozen part of her heart. At least until they’d finished helping Grandma Stella move, until she went away forever.

  “Want to go in deeper?” she asked, and held out her hand. Ally looked over, her teeth chattering.

  “Oh, what the hell,” she said, and took Beth’s extended hand. Together, uttering a wordless battle cry against the sea, the two of them charged forward.

  SEVEN

  The following morning, Ally pushed her sweaty hair out of her eyes and took a long sip of her lemonade, surveying the mess of Grandma Stella’s attic. Over the past few hours, she’d carried bag after bag of junk down the narrow stairs. She navigated the steps carefully. Each one was a different height, requiring a new estimate of how high to lift your foot, as if the designer of the house wanted to break as many ankles as possible.

  No wonder, she thought, that no one ever came up here. She herself had only been once before, her first summer in Britton Hills, when she’d been intent on exploring every inch of the wonderland to which Beth had brought her. Back then, she’d left the attic with an impression of claustrophobic darkness and dust, imagining mice, cobwebs, and bugs skittering in corners.

  Now, she was more immune to messiness. She’d endured the New York City subway system. Attic mice seemed cute in comparison to the mutant rats that scurried around the NYC tracks.

  Although she would’ve rather been in bed, this wasn’t a bad place in which to spend the morning. A little window let in the sunlight. The ceiling, with its exposed beams, sloped down on either end to make the whole space into a triangle. And, everywhere, even after hours of cleaning, it was littered with interesting boxes, some closed and others bursting at the tops with odds and ends. Old pieces of furniture were propped in various corners—here a beautiful torchiere, its stained-glass shade chipped at the top, there an ancient-looking rocking horse with a mane of red string. A rack of clothing stood against one of the walls. Ally put down her lemonade and rifled through the fabrics, some of which had gone stiff with age. The hanging clothes ran the gamut from Grandma Stella’s old housedresses to a child-sized church suit that must once have been worn by Beth’s father.

  She began to sort them, laying aside the items that someone could still conceivably want, as Beth walked back up the stairs. “So I think we can do the yard sale Thursday maybe, or Saturday,” Beth said. She deposited a box of garbage bags on the floor, then began to look through a box of old photos. “Friday’s party day, so we should keep that clear.” She continued organizing aloud, talking more to herself than to Ally, making the lists that she loved. Guilty, Ally remembered that phone call from her mom. If she went back to NYC when her mom wanted her to, she’d miss Grandma Stella’s party completely. She pushed that thought aside and kept sorting, and, eventually, Beth stopped talking, studying the photos in silence.

  When Ally finished with the clothing, she pushed aside a stack of old newspapers and gasped.

  “What?” Beth said.

  “I found something cool,” Ally said, trying to keep her excitement in check. Maybe this, she thought, looking at the box in front of her, the box that she’d forgotten about until that moment, could fix the strangeness that had risen up between the two of them.

  “Oh yeah?” Beth said. “I found something cool too, to show you after.”

  “No, you go first,” Ally said.

  “Okay.” Beth held out a photo. “Isn’t this beautiful?” she asked.

  Ally walked over and grabbed the picture, then let out an involuntary “Oh!” of appreciation. In it, two women who looked to be in their midthirties sat next to each other at the beach. They wore the early sixties-style bathing suits that Ally wished were still in fashion today (she often thought how wonderful it would be to not worry about cramming her butt into a string bikini, which did nothing to disguise the little bits of cellulite that had already started dimpling her upper thighs). One woman wore a yellow one-piece with a ruched top, and the other, the one she recognized as Grandma Stella, a red bikini with white polka dots and a high-waisted bottom. Their curls blew about in the wind. They’d been captured in a moment of laughter. One woman had her arm around the other, and their faces tilted toward one another, open in glee. They looked glamorous and happy. Radiant.

  “God, Grandma Stella was such a fox. Look at her rocking that bikini,” Ally said. It struck her as infinitely weird, the thought that in just a few days, the carefree beauty from the photo was headed to a retirement home to live out the rest of her time in a chair, staring at a wall. She shook her head, to clear herself of the unpleasant image. “Who’s that with her?”

  “It must be my great-aunt Lila. I only met her a couple times before she died, ’cause she lived in Oregon, but my grandma always said that whenever Lila visited, they had the best times together.”

  “I can’t believe that picture’s just been languishing up here. Grandma Stella needs to frame it, immediately.”

  “Yeah. Maybe we could do it for her,” Beth said. “There are a few other nice ones too.” She passed Ally over a series of Stella and Lila in New York (the two of them standing in front of the Empire State Building with their heads craned up in awe, or tucked into the back of a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park), and one of a group of women at a party, Grandma Stella in the center, luminous in a chiffon dress that Ally coveted immediately. “Anyways, what did you find?”

  “Okay,” Ally said. “Drumroll, please.” She walked back to the box and held it up. “It’s the BAAB! Can you believe it?”

  The Beth and Ally Box. She and Beth had started it their second summer in Britton Hills, when it became clear that Ally’s presence on the Abbott family vacation was no onetime fluke.

  “It’ll be like a time capsule!” Ally had said.

  “And the name is so perfectly palindromic!” Beth had chimed in.

  Over the course of each summer visit, they’d compiled mementos to throw into the wooden box Beth’s father had made them, which they’d decorated with oversized renderings of their names (in bubble letters, naturally), along with stickers of teen idols (their embarrassing crushes on Carson Daly and James Van
Der Beek memorialized long after the ardor had dissipated). Movie stubs mingled with seashells. Photo strips from the booth at Murney’s Arcade abounded. And, starting the summer before eighth grade, they wrote each other letters.

  Each one, carefully sealed at the end of one summer and opened at the beginning of the next, had to contain at least two pieces of information: a favorite memory from the summer in question, and a prediction or wish for the other. The writing of the letters was a private event, undertaken the day before they left Britton Hills (so that they didn’t feel rushed for time, trying to write them while Beth’s parents waited in the car). The girls went to separate corners of the house or yard to write, and then came back together to deposit their letters in the box with a great solemnity.

  “Wait,” Ally said now. “We have unopened letters from each other! We should read them.” The letters they’d written to each other after their sophomore year of college lay on the top of the box’s contents. She pulled the one addressed to her out of the box, tore it open, and started reading aloud.

  Dear Allygator,

  I’m really happy we’ve had these two weeks together. College has been weird. It makes all our time with each other too short—a weekend here, a phone call there. I start to worry that the little details I don’t get a chance to tell you are adding up into a big old book you’ll never get a chance to read. But then we come here, and it’s not just me narrating my life to you or you narrating yours to me. It’s us living life together again. That’s really important to me.

  “Oh Beth,” Ally broke off, looking up from the paper, “that’s important to me too.” This, she thought to herself, was why she had been so weird about Haiti the day before, why she’d felt that sheer terror in her stomach when Beth had announced her plans to go back. She still felt that terror. Haiti had captured Beth before, cut off her communication and buried her in a tangle of vines where Ally couldn’t reach her. When she couldn’t talk to Beth, her life fell apart. She didn’t want Beth to go back. Beth couldn’t go back, or she had a feeling she’d never see her again.