Next Summer

by Hailey Abbott

  “It’s my own little garret,” Jamie said, grinning as if she’d actually picked this room out of all the others.

  “I definitely need to shower if we’re going out,” Ella announced, gesturing to her rumpled clothes and hair. “I can’t meet new people looking like this.”

  “Yeah, because that would really hold you back,” Kelsi said with a snort. There was a small silence, while Jamie looked from one sister to the other.

  “Um,” Jamie said carefully. “We should all shower, then. I feel kind of grimy, too.”

  The three of them gathered towels, soap, and shampoo, and trotted down the long corridor toward the hall bathroom.

  “I can’t believe you have to share a bathroom with so many people,” Ella said with a shudder. “Doesn’t it get gross?”

  “That’s why you wear flip-flops in the shower,” Kelsi said mockingly. She swept back the curtain of the nearest shower and turned the water on.

  “The boys’ dorms are disgusting,” Jamie said, shifting another curious glance from Kelsi to Ella. “But this is a girls’ dorm. Much cleaner.”

  The girls all stepped into the three curtained stalls. Ella sighed with pleasure as the steam and hot water poured over her.

  “So,” Jamie called out over the roar of the water. “Tell me everything that’s going on in Maine. When Beth e-mails me, she leaves all the good parts out, but I know you guys would never do something like that.”

  “Ask Ella about everything,” Kelsi shouted snidely.

  In the privacy of her stall, Ella repeatedly gave her sister the finger.

  “It’s true, I believe in spreading gossip to those less fortunate,” Ella agreed theatrically. “Where should I start?”

  “Beth,” Jamie said immediately. “Definitely. What’s the deal with that lifeguard guy? What about George? It’s all scandalous, and she hasn’t answered my last three e-mails!”

  Ella was only too happy to spill the details of someone else’s bad decisions, of course. Particularly if it helped avoid a discussion of her own—which she worried Kelsi was about one more obnoxious comment away from beginning.

  “Well,” Ella began, running the vanilla shower gel along her arms and enjoying the way her voice echoed in the tiled room. The longer she kept talking, the more likely it was she could keep Kelsi from erupting like Mount Saint Helens. “Our cousin Beth has been a little too busy to answer any e-mails…”

  26

  Adam had stopped calling, and turned up at the cottage early on Saturday morning instead. For once, Beth was grateful for her parents’ interference. Her mother had told him she was still in bed—factually correct, although she hadn’t been asleep—and even someone as determined as Adam didn’t try to argue his way past her mom.

  Beth knew he had to work all day, so she figured he’d be easy enough to keep avoiding. She spent the afternoon wallowing at home, which was so far removed from her usual way of dealing with things that Beth knew she was in serious trouble. She picked up the phone at least a hundred times to call George, but couldn’t make herself hit the SEND button. If she got ahold of George, and didn’t tell him about Adam, she would officially become the Worst Person Ever.

  Looking back over the summer, Beth could see that she should have paid more attention to Ella’s teasing—all the G-2 comments—but she’d been in serious denial about her feelings for Adam all along. It seemed to her now that she’d started to fall for him the moment she’d looked up from the ocean current to see him pull his Jet Ski up next to her.

  As evening crept in, Beth roused herself and set out for a walk. She thought she might hang out on the beach down by the pier, where it would be dark and anonymous and she could keep on brooding. Also, she was pretty sure that Adam might try to drop in on her again, and she didn’t think she could face him just yet. Or maybe not ever. She supposed that made her a total coward. But part of her was hoping that if she never saw Adam again, that would somehow erase what had happened between them. If they didn’t have the inevitable big discussion about it, then it wouldn’t be real.

  Beth was clinging to that.

  She pulled on a baseball cap and a fleece against the cool evening air, and snuck away from the cottages without calling attention to herself. She could hear her family gathering around the barbecue, the way they always did, and she felt the sudden, lonely sting of self-pity. She didn’t feel like she belonged there anymore. Beth had this not-so-irrational fear that they’d all be able to see that she was someone else, all of a sudden. Someone who would do what she’d done to George.

  Swallowing the lump in her throat, Beth turned and headed down the dirt road. Once she was out of sight of the cottages, she suddenly found herself face-to-face with Adam.

  Her heart jumped. Beth hugged herself around the middle, as if that might give her some relief. She just didn’t know what to say to this boy she’d spent the entire summer with, and whose body she’d just explored with so much enthusiasm. He seemed like a stranger to her now.

  “You’re avoiding me,” he said, his blue eyes dark with emotion.

  Beth couldn’t deny that, so she just shrugged and rocked back on her heels. She felt like sprinting down the road and off into the night until she reached the coastline, yet at the same time she felt paralyzed.

  “Look,” Adam said, stepping closer. “I know that maybe things went kind of far last night…”

  Beth cleared her throat and fought down the sudden searing heat of tears. “Adam, I have a boyfriend,” she whispered, unnecessarily. “And I love him. I can’t hurt him.”

  But did she? Did she love George? How could she know anymore?

  “I get that,” Adam said impatiently. “But I can’t pretend I’m not happy about what happened. I wanted it to happen all summer.”

  “But it was wrong,” Beth said then, turning away. “For me.” She sighed. “I never should have…” She shook her head, as if to clear it. “After we kissed that first time, I should have just stayed away from you.”

  “But you didn’t.” Adam followed her, not letting her keep her back to him. “And what happened was amazing, Beth. You know it was.”

  Beth didn’t know how to respond. It was true. But how could she even let herself admit that?

  “I know you’re confused,” Adam said, sounding kind of desperate. “But we really have something special, Beth. I’ve never been this into a girl. I can’t talk to anyone the way I can talk to you. I think I’m in—”

  “We shouldn’t even be having this conversation!” Beth cut him off and took a step back, terrified by the prospect of what he was starting to say. “As much as I want to, I can’t go back and undo everything. But I can prevent it from happening again. I can’t hang out with you anymore, Adam. We never should have crossed that line, but we did, and now I need you to stay away from me.”

  “I can’t do that!” Adam replied, his voice heavy with emotion. “I don’t want to do that. And I don’t think you do, either. You should give us a chance, Beth. Don’t you think we at least deserve that?”

  “I…” Beth stared up at his mouth, the mouth she had kissed so many times. She wished she could delete the memory of their hook up from her brain, so when she looked at him, she would feel none of this temptation or wistfulness.

  “I know you feel the way I do,” Adam said softly, studying her face. “I can feel it.”

  Beth reached up, and then dropped her hand to her side. It would be foolish to touch him. She knew that.

  As if he read her mind, he reached over and held her shoulders, massaging them a little bit.

  “Don’t throw this away,” he urged again, with a glimmer of his smile. “We’re friends, we have fun together, and Beth, you’re…incredible. In every way.”

  The night was drawing in close and Beth felt that same weakness flood her. Why was he so captivating? The urge to touch him tingled through her fingertips. She took a step closer to Adam, and he lowered his head toward her…

  Suddenly, she saw a figure
waver in the shadows behind Adam. She blinked and looked closer, and for a long moment couldn’t make sense of what she saw.

  George stood there in the middle of the dirt road. He’d obviously just walked up, on his way to the cottages.

  Beth had never seen that particular look on his face before, like all the humor and spirit that made George who he was had completely drained out of him. Some stranger, some other George, stood there, with dead eyes. She wasn’t sure she could bear to look at him, but she couldn’t seem to turn away. She was aware of too many things at once—Adam’s hands on her shoulders, how close they were standing, how George must have understood everything in one heartbeat.

  “George…” Beth whispered, not even sure she was speaking out loud.

  Adam turned, too, and then all three of them were standing there, staring at one another. Beth thought she could hear the tide pounding against the beach, but then realized that was just the blood roaring in her ears.

  George was holding a huge bouquet of flowers. Yellow tulips, her favorite.

  “Surprise,” George said flatly.

  Still holding Beth’s gaze, he dropped the flowers in the dirt at his feet, then turned and walked away. When he was gone and out of view, all she could think was:

  What have I done?

  27

  Ella and Kelsi were halfway back to Pebble Beach when the tire blew out. First there was a loud banging noise, then the car started wobbling ferociously.

  This is just terrific! Kelsi thought furiously.

  It had been a long, strange weekend. It had been wonderful to see Jamie, as always. She was obviously in her element with all her new writer friends. It was nice to see someone so happy, but it had the unfortunate side effect of making Kelsi think about why she herself felt so unhappy. There was the Ella-Peter thing, of course, which shrouded everything in a foul smog, but Kelsi found that she spent most of the weekend thinking about the look on Tim’s face when she’d left him at U Mass.

  It hadn’t helped that Ella had, predictably, overslept on Sunday morning and they’d gotten a much later start than Kelsi had wanted. She’d been silently seething about that for hours. And there was no reason for the truce any longer, now that the weekend was over. The more miles Kelsi put between them and Amherst, the more she fumed about everything.

  When the tire blew, she drove the car over to the side of the road. Luckily, traffic was light and their ordeal felt less hairraising than it might have if they had been stuck in the usual weekend commute rush hour. This didn’t prevent Ella, who had either been passed out or faking it really well, from jolting upright and screaming like the drama queen she was.

  “That’s not really helpful,” Kelsi told her. The car rolled to a stop, and Ella held a hand over her heart in what Kelsi thought was a needless gesture. Like she was some affronted Southern belle or something.

  “Well, excuse me,” Ella snapped. “The next time we almost die in the middle of a highway, I’ll try to behave more appropriately!”

  Those words were the final straw for Kelsi.

  It all happened in slow motion: Everything sort of swirled around and then crashed down on her. All the pain she’d been carrying around over Peter, which hurt so much worse now that she knew Ella’s part in it. Ella’s sudden friendship over the past year, which seemed almost more upsetting than the initial betrayal last summer, because it was all so planned and coldblooded. The fight with Tim. Even this past weekend with Jamie—Kelsi had felt so isolated and left out. She was losing her mind, and it was Ella’s fault.

  “Like you’d know something about behaving appropriately?” Kelsi yelled at her little sister. “You fucked my boyfriend!”

  That hung there for a moment, true and ugly, between them.

  Ella stared back at her, her brown eyes wide and stricken.

  Suddenly, Kelsi felt guilty, which made her even angrier.

  “No response?” she asked. “Why am I not surprised?”

  Ella shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Um, do we have a plan for the tire?” she asked in a neutral tone.

  “Are you ignoring me?” Kelsi chided her in disbelief. The very idea of Ella trying to take some kind of high road made Kelsi’s blood pressure skyrocket.

  “What do you want me to say?” Ella shouted, surprising Kelsi with both the volume and emotion in her voice. “You have no idea how bad I feel, and nothing I could say could ever make up for it.”

  “How about saying you’re sorry?” Kelsi slapped her palms against the steering wheel. “Or is that too much for you?”

  “Of course I’m sorry.” Ella stared at her. “I’ve been feeling sorry about this every day for the past year. Does that make you feel any better?”

  And, of course, it didn’t. Kelsi hated that Ella was right.

  “You know what, El?” Kelsi was horrified to hear that her voice was quivering. “I guess I would have thought the fact that I’m your sister should be more important to you than getting one more notch on your bedpost. It’s not like you don’t have enough already.”

  Ella stiffened and her mouth tightened, but she didn’t respond, not even to that last, cruel part. When she did, it was after she took a long, deep breath.

  “It wasn’t like that,” she said quietly. “You always think the worst of me.”

  Kelsi let out a short laugh. “Maybe that’s because you always do the worst things!” she said. “Maybe it’s because you’re so incredibly selfish that ever since we were kids, you’ve gone out of your way to ruin anything that makes me happy.”

  “That is total bullshit!” Ella retorted. “Peter was a mistake. He was a mistake for you, and a mistake for me. We need to get past that. But if you’re not happy about other stuff in your life, that’s your own problem!”

  “God forbid Ella Tuttle take responsibility for any—”

  “Give me a break,” Ella groaned. “You don’t want to be happy, Kelsi. You want to sit around and judge everyone around you and feel superior.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kelsi growled.

  “Take Tim for example,” Ella said accusingly. “Why did you go all psycho on him? What was that about?”

  “You were practically crawling all over him!” Kelsi fired back. “I don’t want a guy who wants you, Ella. Period. The thought of you stealing another guy from me makes me sick.”

  “First of all,” Ella said in a low, angry tone, “you were technically broken up with Peter that night when you saw us together, okay? I’m not saying what I did wasn’t wrong, but just for the record—you had broken up.”

  “Do you really expect me to believe that you didn’t have something going on with him before that night?” Kelsi asked.

  Ella ignored her. “And second of all, I couldn’t care less about Tim. He’s not my type at all, and—”

  “Right, because suddenly, a hot guy who’s alive and within range isn’t your type. Whatever, Ella.”

  “—and,” Ella continued, right over Kelsi, “it’s not like you were even participating in the conversation. You were too busy sulking and being the big victim, which—hello—you always do!”

  “Why am I having this conversation with you?” Kelsi asked, but she wasn’t even directing her words toward Ella anymore. Her stomach was clenched into a fist, and she was shaking. She lurched forward, threw the door open, and got out. On the highway, cars hurtled past at what seemed like amazing speeds. They left wakes, almost like boats, in the air behind them. Kelsi walked around to glare at the flat tire, and realized there were tears blocking her gaze. Fiercely, she wiped her hand across her eyes to clear them.

  She heard the passenger door open and then slam, but she didn’t look up. Eventually, Ella’s ridiculously high platform sandals appeared in her peripheral vision.

  “Do you know how to change a tire?” Kelsi asked numbly. She squinted at her sister quickly, and noticed that she was deliberately looking anywhere but back at Kelsi.

  “No.” Ella eyed the flat. �
�Do we even have a spare tire?”

  “Dad makes sure we do. He’s, like, obsessed.”

  “How come he’s not obsessed with teaching one of us what to do with the spare tire?” Ella asked drily.

  Kelsi ordered herself not to laugh.

  Sighing, she went around to the trunk and opened it, then started shoving things out of the way to access the tire well and the spare within. When she straightened up, lugging the spare tire with her, she found Ella standing in a dramatic hitchhiker position. She had her legs on display and her chest stuck out, and as far as Kelsi could surmise, Ella looked like she was for sale.

  “What are you doing?” Kelsi asked, giving a frustrated sigh.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Sorry, I must have missed that issue of Sluts Quarterly,” Kelsi said.