The Summer I Turned Pretty (16 page)

It was just like in those movies with the surprise ending, where everything falls into place and clicks. Suddenly my life had become The Usual Suspects
,
and Taylor, Taylor was Keyser Soze. The scenes ran through the mind-- Taylor and Steven bickering, the way he had come to the boardwalk that night, Taylor claiming that Claire Cho had cankles, all the afternoons she'd spent at my house.

They didn't hear me walk up. But then I said, loudly, "Wow, so first Conrad, then Jeremiah, and now my brother."

She turned around, surprised, and Steven looked surprised too. "Belly--," she started.

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"Shut up." I looked at my brother then, and he squirmed. "You're a hypocrite. You don't even like her! You said she bleached out all her brain cells with her Sun-In!"

He cleared his throat. "I never said that," he said, glancing back and forth between Taylor and me. Her eyes had welled up, and she was wiping her left eye with the back of her sweatshirt sleeve.
Steven's
sweatshirt sleeve. I was too angry to cry.

"I'm telling Jeremiah."

"Belly, just freakin' calm down. You're too old for your temper tantrums," Steven said, shaking his head in his brotherly way.

The words came out of me, hot and fast and sure. "Go to hell." I had never talked like that to my brother before. I don't think I'd ever talked like that to
anyone
before. Steven blinked.

That's when I started to walk away, and Taylor chased after me. She had to run to catch up, that's how fast I was walking. I guess anger gives you speed.

"Belly, I'm so sorry," she began. "I was going to tell you. Things just happened really fast."

I stopped walking and spun around. "When? When did they happen? Because from what I saw, things were happening so fast with
Jeremy,
not with my older brother."

She shrugged helplessly, which only made me madder. Poor helpless little Taylor. "I've always had a crush on Steven. You know that, Belly."

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"Actually, I didn't. Thanks for telling me."

"When he liked me back, it was like, I couldn't believe it. I didn't think."

"That's the thing. He doesn't like you. He's just using you because you're around," I said. I knew it was cruel, but I also knew it was true. Then I walked into the house and left her standing outside.

She chased after me and grabbed my arm, but I shrugged her off.

"Please don't be mad, Belly. I want things to stay the same with us forever," Taylor said, brown eyes brimming with tears. What she really meant was, I want you to stay the same forever while I grow bigger breasts and quit violin and kiss your brother.

"Things can't stay the same forever," I said. I was saying it to hurt her because I knew it would.

"Don't be mad at me, okay, Belly?" she pleaded. Taylor hated it when people were mad at her.

"I'm not mad at you," I said. "I just don't think we really know each other anymore."

"Don't say that, Belly."

"I'm only saying it because it's true."

She said, "I'm sorry, okay?"

I looked away for a second. "You promised you'd be nice to him."

"Who? Steven?" Taylor looked genuinely confused. "No. Jeremiah. You said you'd be nice."

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She waved her hand in the air. "Oh, he doesn't care."

"Yeah, he does. It's just that you don't know him." Like I do, I wanted to add. "I didn't think you'd ever act so--so ..." I searched for the perfect word, to cut her the way she'd cut me. "Slutty."

"I'm not a slut," she said in a tiny voice.

So this was my power over her, my supposed innocence over her supposed sluttiness. It was all such BS. I would've traded my spot for hers in a second.

Later, Jeremiah asked me if I wanted to play spit. We hadn't played once all summer. It used to be our thing, our tradition. I was grateful to have it back. Even if it was a consolation prize.

He dealt me my hand, and we began to play, but both of us were just going through the motions. We had other things on our minds. I thought that we had this unspoken agreement not to talk about her, that maybe he didn't even know what had happened, but then he said, "I wish you never brought her."

"Me too."

"It's better when it's just us," he said, shuffling his stack.

"Yeah," I agreed.

After she left, after that summer, things were the same and they weren't. She and I were still friends, but not best friends, not like we used to be. But we were still friends.

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She'd known me my whole life. It's hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.

Steven went right back to ignoring Taylor and obsessing over Claire Cho. We just pretended like none of it had ever happened. But it did.

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chapter twenty - nine

I heard him come home. I think the whole house must have--except for Jeremiah, who could sleep through a tidal wave. Conrad made his way up the stairs, tripping and cursing, and then he shut his door and turned on his stereo, loud. It was three in the morning.

I lay in bed for about three seconds before I leapt up and ran down the hallway to his room. I knocked, twice, but the music was so loud I doubted he could hear anything. I opened the door. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, taking his shoes off. He looked up and saw me standing there. "Didn't your mom teach you to knock?" he asked, getting up and turning down the stereo.

"I did, but your music was so loud you couldn't hear me. You probably woke up the whole house, Conrad." I

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stepped inside and closed the door behind me. I hadn't been in his room in a long time. It was the same as I remembered, perfectly neat. Jeremiah's looked like hurricane season, but not Conrad's. In Conrad's room there was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. His pencil drawings, still tacked onto the bulletin board, his model cars still lined up on the dresser. It was comforting to see that at least that was still the same.

His hair was messed up, like someone had been running their hands through it. Probably Red Sox girl. "Are you going to tell on me, Belly? Are you still a tattletale?"

I ignored him and walked over to his desk. Hanging right above it there was a framed picture of him in his football uniform, the football tucked under his arm. "Why'd you quit, anyway?"

"It wasn't fun anymore."

"I thought you loved it."

"No, it was my dad who loved it," he said.

"It seemed like you did too." In the picture he looked tough, but I could tell he was trying not to smile.

"Why'd you quit dance?"

I turned around and looked at him. He was unbuttoning his work shirt, a white button-down, and he had on a T-shirt underneath.

"You remember that?"

"You used to dance all around the house like a little gnome."

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I narrowed my eyes at him. "Gnomes don't dance. I was a ballerina, for your information."

He smirked. "So why'd you quit, then?"

It had been around the time my parents got divorced. My mom couldn't pick me up and drop me off twice a week all on her own. She had a job. It just didn't seem worth it anymore. I was bored of it by then anyway, and Taylor wasn't doing it anymore either. Also, I hated the way I looked in my leotard. I got boobs before the whole rest of the class, and in our class picture I looked like I could be the teacher. It was embarrassing.

I didn't answer his question. Instead I said, "I was really good! I could have been dancing in a company by now!" I couldn't have. I wasn't that good, not by any stretch of the imagination.

"Right," he said mockingly. He looked so smug sitting there on the bed.

"At least I can dance."

"Hey, I can dance," he protested.

I crossed my arms. "Prove it."

"I don't have to prove it. I taught you some moves, remember? How quickly we forget." Conrad jumped up off the bed and grabbed my hand and twirled me around. "See? We're dancing."

His arm was slung around my waist, and he laughed before he let me go. "I'm a better dancer than you, Belly," he said, collapsing onto his bed.

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I stared at him. I didn't get him at all. One minute he was broody and withdrawn, and the next he was laughing and twirling me around the room. "I don't consider that dancing," I said. I backed out of the room. "And can you keep your music down? You already woke up the whole house."

He smiled. Conrad had a way of looking at me, at you, at anybody, that made everything unravel and want to fall at his feet. He said, "Sure. Good night, Bells." Bells, my nickname from a thousand years ago.

He made it so hard not to love him. When he was sweet like this, I remembered why I did. Used to love him, I mean.

I remembered everything.

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chapter thirty

AGE II

The summer house had a stack of CDs that we listened to, and that was pretty much it. We spent the whole summer listening to the same CDs. There was the Police, which Susannah put on in the morning; there was Bob Dylan, which she put on in the afternoon; and there was Billie Holiday, which she put on at dinner. The nights were a free-for-all. It was the funniest thing. Jeremiah would put on his Chronic CD, and my mother would be doing laundry, humming along. Even though she hated gangster rap. And then my mother might put on her Aretha Franklin CD, and Jeremiah would sing all the words, because we all knew them by that time, we'd heard it so much.

My favorite music was the Motown and the beach

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music. I would listen to it on Susannah's old Walkman when I tanned. That night I put the Boogie Beach Shag CD on the big stereo in the living room, and Susannah grabbed Jeremiah and started to dance. He'd been playing poker with Steven and Conrad and my mother, who was very, very good at poker.

At first Jeremiah protested, but then he was dancing too. It was called the shag, and it was a 1960s kind of beach dance. I watched them, Susannah throwing her head back and laughing, and Jeremiah twirling her around, and I wanted to dance too. My feet positively itched to dance. I did dance ballet and modern, after all. I could show off how good I was.

"Stevie, dance with me," I demanded, poking him with my big toe. I was lying down on the floor, on my stomach, looking up at them.

"Yeah, right," he said. Not that he even knew how.

"Connie, dance with Belly," Susannah urged, her face flushed as Jeremiah twirled her again.

I didn't dare look at Conrad. I was afraid my love for him and my need for him to say yes would be written on my face like a poem.

Conrad sighed. He was still big on doing the right thing then. So he gave me his hand and pulled me up. I got to my feet shakily. He didn't let go of my hand. "This is how you shag," he said, shuffling his feet from side to side. "One-two-three, one-two-three, rock step."

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It took me a few tries to get it. It was harder than it looked, and I was nervous. "Get on the beat," Steven said from the sidelines.

"Don't look so uptight, Belly. It's a relaxed kind of dance," my mother said from the couch.

I tried to ignore them and look only at Conrad. "How did you learn this?" I asked him.

"My mom taught both of us," Conrad said simply. Then he brought me in close and positioned my arms around his so we stepped together, side by side. "This is called the cuddle."

The cuddle was my favorite part. It was the closest I had ever been to him. "Let's do it again," I said, pretending to be confused.

He showed me again, putting his arm over mine. "See? You're getting it now."

He spun me around, and I felt dizzy. With pure, absolute joy.

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chapter thirty - one

I spent the whole next day in the ocean with Cam. We packed a picnic. Cam made avocado and sprout sandwiches with Susannah's homemade mayonnaise and whole wheat bread. They were good, too. We stayed in the ocean for what felt like hours at a time. Every time a wave began to crest, one of us would start to laugh, and then we'd get overtaken by the wave and water. My eyes burned from the salty seawater, and my skin felt raw from scraping against the sand so many times, like I'd scrubbed my whole body with my mother's St. Ives Apricot Scrub. It was pretty great.

After, we stumbled back to our towels. I loved getting cold and wet in the ocean and then running back to the towels and letting the sun bake the sand off. I could do it all day--ocean, sand, ocean, sand.

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I'd packed strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups, and we ate them so quick my teeth hurt. "I love Fruit Roll-Ups," I said, reaching for the last one.

He snatched it away. "So do I, and you already had three and I only had two," he said, peeling away the plastic sheet. He grinned and dangled it above my mouth.

"You have three seconds to hand it over," I warned. "I don't care if you had two Fruit Roll-Ups and I had twenty. It's my house."

Cam laughed and popped the whole thing into his mouth. Chewing loudly, he said, "It's not your house. It's Susannah's house."

"Shows how much you know. It's all of our house," I said, falling back on my towel. I was suddenly really thirsty. Fruit Roll-Ups will do that. Especially when you have three in about three minutes. Squinting up at him, I said, "Will you go back to
our
house and get some Kool-Aid? Pretty please?"

"I don't know anyone who consumes more sugar than you do in one day," Cam said, shaking his head at me sadly. "White sugar is evil."

"Says the guy who just ate the last Fruit Roll-Up," I countered.

"Waste not, want not," he said. He stood up and brushed the sand off his shorts. "I'll bring you water, not Kool-Aid."

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I stuck my tongue out at him and rolled over. "Just be quick about it," I said.

He wasn't. He was gone forty-five minutes before I headed back to the house, loaded up with our towels and sunscreen and trash, breathing hard and sweating like a camel in the desert. He was in the living room, playing video games with the boys. They were all lying around in their swimming trunks. We pretty much stayed suited up all summer.