The Summers

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Alloy Entertainment

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Skyscape, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477827307

  ISBN-10: 1477827307

  Cover photograph by Colin Anderson/Blend Images/Getty Images

  Cover design by Liz Dresner

  Book design by Liz Dresner

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

  For my mom, who would have read this on the beach

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Three summers later

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  THE END OF summer was supposed to be a letdown, but I never believed that was true. If you’d spent it right, it just meant you could look forward to the next one.

  My family always spent it right.

  Mom was locking the door to our beach house. It was two stories, with blue paint and a white porch, just two blocks from the beach in Harborville, Massachusetts, a little town at the “elbow” of Cape Cod. Even though I spent most of the year in New Jersey, when I thought of home, this house was what I saw.

  She gave the door three quick taps, with the same soft touch she used to scratch behind the ears of our ancient calico, Merlin.

  Becca rolled her eyes. “Mom, you’re such a dork.”

  “I know.” Mom’s grin was a living thing. She could never quite get it right in her self-portraits.

  “She’s my dork,” Dad said, pulling Mom to stand with us. He kissed her forehead.

  “Now what do we say?” Mom asked.

  “Thank you, house. ’Til next time,” my parents, three sisters, and I chimed in unison.

  The car was loaded up. Driving out of Harborville, we’d go to our secret spot on Cockle Cove Road just off the highway to pick blueberries from bushes that told you it was September by the way they were weighted down with berry clusters. Mom would pack them in our lunches on the first day of school, so we’d feel like we had one more day of summer. And halfway home, we’d stop on Interstate 95 to go to our favorite diner, where we’d order all kinds of breakfast foods for dinner. It was a family tradition.

  Before we left, though, Mom always had one last thing to do.

  She put a painting on the white wood steps. This one was of Dale’s Dream Cone, the ice cream shop on the boardwalk. The CLOSED sign was up and a girl sat on the counter, clearly at the end of her shift, licking a strawberry cone and looking at peace with the world. The girl was my sister Eliza, and her stint at Dale’s had been her first real summer job.

  FREE PAINTING TO GOOD HOME, read the handwritten sign Mom placed in front of her work. Sometimes she sold pieces—the whole town hall of Harborville was filled with Mom’s work, and she even had shows in New York galleries from time to time—but Mom believed that art should be free, too. I liked that idea. Someday, when I was a published author, I wanted to leave copies of my books on park benches for people to discover.

  “Okay, let’s get a move on.” Dad knew if we waited too long, our hunger pangs would begin well before we reached the diner. He claimed a man’s worst fate was driving a car full of hungry women.

  So we piled into the car. Mom and Dad in front. Teagan, my littlest sister, who was twelve, sat in the way back of the minivan. Eliza usually sat next to her, preparing her day planner for the new school year. (She was proud to be the only Coolidge High student with a day planner.) Becca and I took the row behind my parents.

  “Wait one second,” Eliza said, even though we were all in the car, ready to go. She slid open the minivan door and stepped on my foot as she hopped out.

  I watched her jog to the driveway next door. Ryan Landry had just come outside.

  Even though Ryan was out here for Eliza, my gut seized up. He must have thrown on his blue hoodie to come outside, but he had no shirt on underneath. He was eighteen to my fifteen, so I knew my daydreams were crazy. But I was jealous anyway. I watched her throw her arms around him, my cheek resting on the cool glass of the car window.

  Every year, Ryan and Eliza were together all summer long. Every year, I was just one of Eliza’s kid sisters.

  And every year, Eliza was perfectly content to basically shrug him good-bye. She went back to school and always found a new boyfriend just in time for the first dance of the year. She had businesslike precision with boys and she’d always been big on advising all of us not to get our hearts set on just one guy.

  But I’d always had my heart set on Ryan. Someday, he’d notice me back.

  Maybe even next summer.

  Three summers later

  CHAPTER ONE

  “COUNT OF THREE?” My sisters and I stood on the porch of our summer home. The door was unlocked but we hadn’t yet gone inside. Going inside was never a problem before. But then, our problems weren’t problems before.

  “Count of three,” Eliza said, popping her gum so her words came out a spearmint cloud.

  “One, two . . .” Becca said in her husky voice. My dad joked that she’d sounded like a sixty-year-old smoking barmaid when she’d said her first words. Or, he used to joke, anyway.

  “Three,” we said in unison.

  None of us moved.

  I guessed it was because no one goes running into a haunted house.

  “How about deep breath, then in?” Tea, at fifteen, loved deep breaths and yoga and adopting mantras, especially since Mom died.

  “We are doing this,” Eliza said definitively. She looked more like Mom than any of us—they shared the same ashy blond hair and that olive skin that never sunburns—but where Mom quietly coaxed you into doing something so in the end, you thought it was actually your idea, Eliza liked you to know she was making you do something. “Besides, I haven’t been a bridezilla yet, so you have to. For me.”

  “You’re some kind of ’zilla,” Becca said. “Maybe a bitchzilla?”

  “Oh yeah, bitchzilla,” Tea squealed. Her mantras only went so far.

  “How about this?” I proposed. “We close our eyes, count to three, step inside,
deep breath, open eyes.”

  “Works for me,” Becca said.

  “Fine, good plan,” Eliza added, with a grateful look to me.

  My sister was only twenty-one and had just gotten engaged to her boyfriend, Devin, in March. They’d been together for almost all of college, so I was used to having him around, but the sudden big Cape wedding took me by surprise. Eliza had practically scripted the proposal, right down to giving him my mom’s engagement ring for him to propose to her with. The day after they broke their news, Eliza had announced they’d be getting married on Morning Beach at the end of the summer, which was why we’d all come back to Harborville.

  We hadn’t been here since Mom died, but we couldn’t avoid the beach house forever. The last few summers had felt bleak and gray. I’d driven with friends for the day to the Jersey Shore a few times but it was rhinestones to the Cape’s diamonds.

  Now Tea grabbed my hand. Becca took my other one. Eliza stood behind us, her arms stretched across our shoulders. We closed our eyes and counted to three together.

  Eyes still closed, we stepped inside, moving as a gawky unit, like we were trapped together in some kind of sixteen-limbed Halloween costume.

  “Deep breath.”

  The air was déjà vu. Every year, our first day in the house, the air was always this way. Last time we were here, three years ago, it tasted the same way. Like salt water, winter dust, and something else that I only tasted here.

  The air was summer.

  I hadn’t breathed summer in three years.

  “Open your eyes,” I said.

  My mother had made a nice home for us in New Jersey but this beach house was where she’d made her mark. Her charcoal drawings of beach scenes were still hanging in their frames. My eye went right to the one of a golden retriever running crazily over a sand castle. Over the bookcase in the living room was a mosaic of a turtle that she’d made from pieces of sea glass we’d collected for her.

  I watched my sisters’ faces, to see how they saw things. Eliza, imperturbable as ever, looked around coolly. “Looks good. Like we left it.” Even after Mom’s funeral, when the days were gray, even when they were sunny and I felt the ache for my mom like the fly, like a sickness that washed over me in waves, Eliza never cried in front of us. But I knew she did. She had to.

  Becca went right to the sea-glass turtle. “One of the pieces is missing,” she said, zeroing in on an almost imperceptible square from the turtle’s front foot. Becca could ignore her room when the mess got beyond reason, but could spot a small imperfection like the missing glass from a mile away.

  Tea started to cry then, her breaths coming in ragged gasps, her feet planted to the driftwood floor. She was the littlest of us, in age and size, but her tears were always the biggest. And they had the instant effect of making you go to her to calm her down.

  So we did. We hugged her.

  “It will get easier,” Eliza said. “We needed to do this.”

  “She would have wanted this,” I added. I knew it was true, even if I hadn’t believed it until now.

  “Maybe, if we go to our rooms?” Becca suggested.

  Before, we’d have run to our rooms, our feet pounding on the stairs, the wooden banisters trembling. Four girls who’d just found summer. We’d root in the drawers, check the closets, unearthing any stray oddities left behind by winter renters. Always, inevitably, some waterlogged paperback, maybe a scarf, candies secreted in the back of drawers. Eliza once found a super-old copy of Playboy crammed beneath her mattress and spent the rest of the day disinfecting her room.

  We broke apart, and headed in our different directions. Eliza went to the ground-floor room next to my parents’ master bedroom. Dad wasn’t here yet; without Mom by his side, he’d only reluctantly agreed to come at all. He wouldn’t drive out until a few days from now.

  The rest of us had rooms on the second floor. Instead of running, we took the steps somberly. The stairs stilled creaked in all the same spots. The door to my room still had the little ding in the brass knob where Becca had accidentally smashed it with her softball bat. Inside, the bedspread was new but still a pale periwinkle, like before. Over the dresser was still my mom’s drawing of ten-year-old me, my teeth seeming too big for my face, my eyes happy and almost dancing.

  It was nice to be in my room, alone. The drive here had been an exercise in distractions. Becca complained that Tea, who’d earned control of the stereo, was playing a Deepak Chopra audio book, while Eliza, in the driver’s seat, talked about wedding cakes. I filled the empty spots by blathering on about UC Berkeley, where I’d be going in the fall.

  I pulled aside the curtain and looked down on the narrow street in front of our house. It was still early in the season. Though we were in the part of Harborville where more year-round residents lived, in a month the streets would be crammed with parked cars and people dragging coolers the few blocks to the beach, teenagers riding bikes barefoot and screaming kids.

  A dark blue pickup truck pulled up and stopped in front of the house next door. Without even seeing the driver’s side, I knew who it was. I’d watched Ryan Landry pull his car in front of the house next door a million times before. There was a way to it. Even when the street was at its most packed, Ryan could glide right in. It was the thing about Ryan: He just knew how to get where he was going, and how to be where he was.

  As I stood by the window, a memory washed over me. Three years ago, sitting in this very room.

  “Do you like the blue, or the green?” Eliza had asked, holding two sundresses, one in each hand. She was getting ready to go to a party in Ryan Landry’s carriage house above the Landrys’ garage. I’d never seen the inside.

  She came toward me with the dresses, holding them up to her chest. She smelled like the ocean and coconut suntan lotion. I lifted my arm to my nose, sniffing and only smelling sand and sunburn.

  “Are you smelling yourself again?” she asked. “Don’t be weird.”

  I brought my arm down. “I like the blue,” I said. She knew I’d say blue. Blue was my favorite color, but it looked better on Eliza. Everything looked better on Eliza.

  I peered out my window, watching the street for Ryan’s car. “Do you think I can go to the party?” I was going to be bored out of my mind at a barbeque with my parents, their friends, and my little sisters. We’d have to sit there, playing Uno, while the adults shrieked with laughter about stuff they’d done before they’d had kids.

  Eliza patted me on the head. I hated when she did that. “You need to keep Becca and Tea company. And besides, you’d be the youngest one there. Maybe you can have Jessica over. Ask Mom.” Jessica Ambrose was my age and we’d hung out on the boardwalk a few times while Ryan and Eliza were doing whatever they did when they were alone. But Jessica would just want to talk about what they were doing at Ryan’s party. I couldn’t think of a better way to feel less invited.

  Ryan pulled his truck into the open spot in front of the Landrys’. He hopped out of the cab and opened the tailgate, pulling out cases of beer.

  He looked up and saw me and, with a big smile, waved at me. Eliza shoved me out of the way, heaving the window open. “Did you get the strawberry wine coolers this time?”

  “Morrison’s bringing them,” Ryan called up.

  “He’d better not forget this time,” Eliza said, and slammed my window shut.

  She tossed the green dress onto the bed and slid the blue on over her bikini. The Landrys had a hot tub out back.

  “Okay, the blue,” she said. “And make sure you’re not hogging the bed when I get back tonight. I’ll be tired.”

  As I reached the end of the memory, I snapped to attention, shaking my head as if to physically shake it off. I realized I’d been standing here for a few minutes, and I felt like a weirdo, standing at the window, watching Ryan.

  I hadn’t seen him in three years, not since the Landry boys
had come to my mom’s funeral, all three of them looking strange in their dark suits. Up until then, we had only seen them in summer clothes. The most dressed-up our two families had ever got was putting on nice jeans and sundresses to go to brunch at the Chatham Bars Inn, a few towns over.

  We had all kept in touch, sort of, if you counted showing up in someone’s Facebook feed as keeping in touch. Ryan wasn’t on Facebook, but if I was lucky, I could find glimpses of him in the background of his brothers’ photos. I still remembered his birthday—March 19—every single year. He was twenty-one now to my eighteen.

  And if it was possible, he was even better-looking. He hopped out of the truck’s cab and unlatched the tailgate, pulling a box of paint cans out of the back. The box must have weighed at least fifty pounds, but he didn’t even flinch. His jeans were paint-splattered and his navy shirt was just tight enough, not like the practically Spandex things guys at my school wore to show off their abs.

  I hated myself, because I couldn’t look away. It was the same as when I was fourteen and saw Eliza and Ryan kissing on the beach. I’d just stood there awkwardly, looking at them. Not for the kiss, but for Ryan. He was magnetic. Or at least he was to me. Like now—why couldn’t I stop staring?

  Then he looked up.

  He didn’t look surprised exactly, but he stopped what he was doing. I was tempted to drop the curtain and run, like I really was some apparition that he imagined. But he had seen me.

  I knew because he smiled. I watched his lips as they formed the words, Hi, Katie. I was Kate now, but he didn’t know that.

  I waved, bending all my fingers like a little kid in a parade, and nervously brushed some of my dark hair away from my face. And Ryan smiled again, bigger this time, nodded, and took his paint cans wherever he was going with them.

  It took a few seconds for it to happen, but then came the special, delicious kind of agony that only Ryan Landry could bring. He was like signing for a delivery of your favorite cake for a birthday party you weren’t invited to. He didn’t cause a warm sensation, or tingles. That was kid stuff, for bad novels that didn’t understand his powers.