Sun-Kissed Christmas (Summer) (16 page)

Marquez laughed. “So what’s the fashion emergency?”

“Oh. I almost forgot. It’s down to two choices. Two-piece, barely there, electric blue. Or black tank, fits really well, would be really good for swimming and jet-skiing and stuff.”

“Summer, Summer, Summer. This is spring break, girl. In Florida, not Minne-so-dead. Definitely the two-piece.”

“I can’t wait to see you,” Summer said softly.
“I have to hang up now before the quarters run out, okay?”

“I’ll call you next time.”

“You’re broke, too.”

Marquez smirked at Diana. “Yeah, but Diana isn’t.”

Diana sat up and grabbed the phone. “Summer? I just wanted to say …” She turned away from Marquez, lowering her voice. “I just wanted to say I really miss you. … Yeah. Me too. … Yeah. Buy the two-piece, okay?”

She tossed the phone into her beach bag. Marquez stared at her, incredulous.

“What?” Diana demanded.

“‘I really miss you’?” Marquez parroted. “Have you been out in the sun too long? If I didn’t know you better, I’d swear that was like, you know, an actual emotion.”

Diana almost looked hurt. “I like Summer a lot. I was a little hard on her last summer, but once I got to know her. … Anyway, she
is
my cousin.”

Marquez eyed Diana suspiciously. “Still, you’re being awfully nice to us, setting up this yacht and all. This isn’t even your spring break. You graduated last year, remember?”

“But I kind of missed mine. So I’m compensating.”

“You’re compensating for
something
,” Marquez said
with a grin. “But I just can’t figure out what.”

“Oh, Maria,” Diana said, knowing how much Marquez hated being called by her first name. “Such a suspicious little mind. With the emphasis on
little
.”

Marquez closed her eyes. The sun was like a sleeping potion. She’d figure out Diana another day, when she wasn’t in a solar coma.

Next to her, Diana sighed. “She’ll buy the tank, you know.”

Marquez smiled fondly. “I know.”

Good-byes Without Yawns and
Good-byes Without Explanation

“I miss you already,” Seth whispered.

They were parked in his dilapidated Ford in front of Summer’s home. He pulled her close—not an easy task, since they both had on down jackets—and lowered his lips to hers. It was a familiar kiss, warm and soft, and it occurred to her how comfortable she was with his safe, reliable, always-just-the-same kisses. How many times had he kissed her like this? Hundreds? Maybe even thousands?

To her horror, Summer suddenly felt a yawn coming. She tried to stifle it, forcing her mouth to stay closed, but it was no use. She yawned hugely. Her mouth opened to cavelike proportions.

Seth pulled away. “Sorry,” he snapped. “Was I boring you?”

“You could never bore me,” Summer said, placing her hand over his. “I’m just … I’m really sorry.”

He ran his fingers through his thick chestnut hair. It was shorter than he’d worn it the previous summer, when they’d met, and his tan had faded to Wisconsin pale. But the great brown eyes hadn’t changed—laughing and intense and thoughtful at the same time.

“I thought we were having a passionate kiss.”

“We were. I didn’t sleep very well last night, is all. My parents were fighting with Diver again.” She made a little circle on the steamed-up window.

“So I wasn’t putting you to sleep?”

“No! Was I putting
you
to sleep?”

“You’re the one who yawned.” After a moment Seth managed a lopsided grin. He patted her thigh. “Sorry. It’ll be okay with Diver. He’s just having a hard time right now.”

“I guess.”

Seth checked the stick-on clock on the peeling dashboard and sighed. “I need to get going.”

“I feel like all we do is say good-bye to each other.” Summer reached into the backseat to retrieve her shopping bags. “Wait, I almost forgot!” she exclaimed. “I bought you some stuff for the trip.”

“So that’s what took you so long. Cool. Presents!”

They weren’t just presents, they were part of a scientifically designed plan to rekindle her romance with Seth. Summer knew about rekindling because she read her mother’s
New Woman
magazine sometimes, and revving up a romance seemed to be a big concern for couples like her parents, not that she wanted to think about
that
too much. And since she and Seth were a long-term couple of nearly nine months (Summer insisted on counting from the day they’d met), she figured it might be time for a little rekindling.

Toward that end, she’d bought some of the items suggested in the article. Candles. A book called
101 Love Poems to Set the Mood
. A bottle of coconut-almondpapaya- scented suntan oil for rubbing on Seth’s back while they basked in the Florida sun. And, from one of those Spencer kind of stores, a watch without hands. It was meant to symbolize that they weren’t going to think about anything but each other. Seth was kind of obsessive about time.

Slowly Seth examined the items, one by one. He lingered on the tanning oil, grinning. When he got to the watch, he groaned.

“It’s symbolic,” Summer explained. “Five days without time pressures.”

“You know, it’s not like I’m obsessed,” Seth said irritably. “Just because I know that when the big hand’s
on the twelve and the little hand’s on the three it means it’s three o’clock.”

“I already said I was sorry at the mall,” Summer snapped. “I lost track of time.” They were doing it again. They always had nitpicky little fights right before saying good-bye.

Seth stroked her hair apologetically. “Thanks for all the cool stuff. Will you pack it for me? I’m just taking my backpack.” He made a big ceremony of putting on the watch. Then he passed her a small paper sack from the backseat. “Here. For you, for the big trip. I went shopping, too.”

She opened the bag. “Zinc oxide!” she said. It was precisely the same voice she used every Christmas when she opened one of her great-aunt’s handmade sweaters.

“Green. For your nose, ’cause you know how you burn.”

Summer smiled. “Thanks.” It occurred to her that rekindling their romance might be more work than she’d thought.

She kissed Seth good-bye. In her mind, she was not in an uninspectable 1982 Ford with a hole in the floorboard. She was not wearing two pairs of thick wool socks in her Doc Martens. In her mind, she was already in Florida, touched by hibiscus-scented tropical breezes. The ocean was churning gently, waves
breaking on a pristine white beach. The sun was kissing her bare shoulders with soothing heat.

This kiss, she didn’t yawn once.

“Bought you something.”

Summer tossed her Dayton’s bag. As usual, her brother was lying on the couch in the family room.
Oprah
was on. Diver’s blue eyes were slitted like a dozing cat’s.

“It’s a book,” Summer said. She plopped down onto the La-Z-Boy, her legs draped over the arm. “
Guide to Southeastern Coastal Birds
.”

Diver brushed his blond hair out of his eyes. It was darker than it had been the summer before. The gold streaks from sun and salt water were gone, and he’d cut it at their parents’ insistence. He studied the cover, which featured a prehistoric-looking pelican. “Cool,” he said vaguely. “Thanks.”

“It’s for when we go down for spring break. Aren’t you getting excited about it? Going back to Florida, I mean? It’s been six months since we’ve seen a palm

tree, Diver. Or the ocean. Or a big, fat, sunburned, hairy-backed tourist in a Speedo.”

Diver smiled wistfully. “Or a pelican. I miss Frank.”

“Me, too,” Summer said, recalling the mega-pooping pelican who’d resided on their porch.

“Sometimes it all seems so unreal,” Diver said. He looked at Summer with the clear, innocent gaze that often made her feel as though he were the younger sibling, even though he was two years older. “Last summer, I mean, and finding you, and then coming here, and Jack and Kim, and … you know.”

It still bothered Summer when he said that. Jack and Kim. Jack and Kim were Mom and Dad, his mom and dad, and hers. She didn’t understand why Diver couldn’t call them that, after all they’d suffered through. Why he couldn’t say two little words.

Of course, her parents were no better. They called him Jonathan, when he was clearly Diver and always would be.

Summer grabbed the remote and switched to CNN. Diver didn’t even blink. “I talked to Diana and Marquez today. Aunt Mallory has this friend with a yacht we can use.”

Diver nodded noncommittally. He was thumbing through the bird book.

“Diver,” Summer asked suddenly, “do you wish you’d stayed in Crab Claw Key? Do you hate it here

in Minnesota?”

He smiled. It was pure smile, the kind of smile that she’d watched melt a hundred female hearts at Bloomington High School. “Well, it’s very cold here,” he said, as if that were an answer.

Their mother appeared in the doorway. Her coat was damp. She grimaced at Diver. “I thought you were working today.”

“I called in sick.” Lately Diver had been working as a stock boy at Target.

“Jonathan, this is just what happened with Burger King—”

Summer winced. She did not want to be around for this. “Mom, I got a great bathing suit,” she interrupted. “Two, actually. Will you tell me what you think?”

Her mother hesitated, eyes flickering between Summer and Diver. “I’ve got a ton of groceries in the trunk,” she said. “Come help.” She pointed a finger at Diver. “We’ll talk later.”

Diver did not answer. He was tracing the pelican photo with his finger. “Frank had more brown here, around the eyes.”

“I’ll get the groceries,” Summer said to her mother. “You check out my bathing suits. They’re in the Dayton’s bag. And try not to react like a mom, okay?”

Her mother gazed at Diver. “That’s harder than you think,” she said softly.

Summer lay in bed, her quilt tucked up around her chin. It was quiet. Finally.

There’d been another fight that evening. Slammed doors, loud voices. Mostly her parents’ voices. Diver
hardly ever argued. He just absorbed other people’s words.

Sometimes she still had the dream. The one about the little boy chasing a red ball, about the day Diver had been lost to the family. Summer hadn’t even been born yet, of course, so the dream was just a collage of stories from her parents, from news clippings, and from Diver’s own vague recollections. Not that he remembered much. He’d been kidnapped, he’d grown up knowing two other parents as his own, they’d been abusive, he’d run away.

Maybe he’d been on his own too long. Maybe that was why, when he and Summer had found each other by some crazy miracle the summer before, he hadn’t seemed entirely sure about coming back to the family that was really his own. He was uncomfortable with rules and curfews and schoolwork. He didn’t quite belong in Minnesota.

Summer slept fitfully. She kept hearing things: her door, a creak in the hallway, a sound from downstairs. She dreamed she was lying on a couch by the edge of the ocean, watching a pelican toss a little red ball in the air, then catch it in his great beak. Diver was there, too, but he was watching her. He said something, two words she could not quite make out, and then he dove into the water, swimming slowly away until he was just a speck on the horizon.

She woke up shivering beneath her quilt. Her pillow was wet with tears. It was a bleak, gray dawn. She sat up a little, quilt pulled close, and then she noticed the torn sheet of
notebook paper on the edge of her bed.

She saw Diver’s scrawl and the two words she had not been able to hear in her dream:
I’m sorry
.

And she knew he was really gone.

After Katherine Applegate graduated from college, she spent time waiting tables, typing (badly), watering plants, wandering randomly from one place to the next with her boyfriend, and just generally wasting her time. When she grew sufficiently tired of performing brain-dead minimum-wage work, she decided it was time to become a famous writer. Anyway, a writer. Writing proved to be an ideal career choice, as it involved neither physical exertion nor uncomfortable clothing, and required no social skills.

Ms. Applegate has written more than one hundred books under her own name and a variety of pseudonyms. She has no children, is active in no organizations, and has never been invited to address a joint session of Congress. She does, however, have an evil, foot-biting cat named Dick, and she still enjoys wandering randomly from one place to the next with her boyfriend.