Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly Read Free Book Online Page B

in cool and damp from the lake with the familiar, moist smell of fish. Out here something in me relaxed; all the awkward restraint that had haunted me through the evening was lifted and I felt like taking off my shoes and dancing in the grass.
    As we were going back to our car I noticed all the silent, dark cars parked around the gravel lot and remarked to Jack, “There don’t seem to be nearly as many people inside as there are cars parked out here.”
    He looked at me a moment, as if he thought I was joking, and then said with an odd laugh and an inflection which I didn’t quite understand, “You’re a good kid, Angie.” That’s all he said and it may have been just my imagination mingled with the mysterious spell of the lake but for a moment, for the only time during the whole evening I thought he looked at me as he had last night.
    But the feeling couldn’t last when, during that short ride back to town, I realized again with doubled humiliation what a terrible date I’d been. Jack didn’t look at me once all the way home, or try to talk and as soon as we got in front of my house he jumped out of the car and came round to open my door. It seemed so funny, walking up the sidewalk, that just this time the night before I had been doing the same thing and wondering if he would call me again; and now he
had
called and I
had
gone out with him and here I was, still wondering if therewould be another time. But tonight it was tinged with a little hopelessness. After the way I had acted what would any boy do?
    Standing on the front steps, I had an uncomfortable feeling that there was something I should say; yet a girl just can’t blurt out an apology for not being like other girls! I could almost feel the right words on my tongue, but when I opened my mouth to speak there was nothing there at all. I broke off a bit of the tall spruce that grows beside our steps and smelled the pungent piny odor rising in the air. Jack was standing running his finger round and round one of the scrolls in our wrought-iron stair railing. “Angie,” he said slowly, “Angie, I’m going to be out of town for a couple of days.” My heart slipped down a little. This was his way of saying that he wouldn’t see me for a couple of days—a couple of days that would probably merge into a week and then turn out to be the rest of the summer. “Going up to Green Bay,” he explained, “to see a cousin of mine and I won’t be back till Friday afternoon some time.” That’s all right, my mind said hurriedly. That’s all right, Jack. You don’t have to tell me anything. I know how I’ve acted tonight. “I wondered,” he went on, “if you’d like to go to the dance at the Country Club with me on Friday night. It’s the first one of the summer and I thought maybe you’d like to go!”
    Lying in bed that night I thought it over. I had wanted an invitation to that dance more than anything else in the world, but now that I had been asked I hardly wanted to go because I could tell just what it would be like. My mother, who isalways good about things like that, would buy me a new summer evening dress to wear; and my two older sisters, who would probably be going too, would arrange my hair and lend me perfume to dab behind my ears and on the hem of my dress so I would swish up a glamorous smell when I walked; and there would be Kitty, sitting on the edge of her bed in her pajamas, watching each step and saying over and over, “Oh, how nice you look!” When we were all dressed my mother would stand back to look at us with her eyes shining, thinking probably, how short a time ago it seemed since we were just little girls. Of course, I would smile and pretend to be excited and so glad to be going but all the time, inside, I’d keep remembering how it had been at Pete’s when I hadn’t been able to talk to the fellows at all and I would keep thinking of how I had watched the cross parrot, pretending to be very interested in his chipped beak