Sixteenth Summer by Michelle Dalton Read Free Book Online Page B

to make you have a bad moment,” Caroline said.
    “You could never …,” Sam began, but Caroline had already waved him off. She was peering out at partygoers.
    “Looks like skirts were indeed the way to go, Anna,” she said.
    She and I were both wearing skirts, if not the A-line uniform of the shoobee girls. Caroline’s was short and sporty. Mine was more flowy, tickling my ankles when the hem fluttered.
    Even though we’d ditched our cutoffs for the evening, I knew Caroline and I didn’t look like those girls. And it wasn’t just because they had bleached teeth and manicures and we didn’t. There was a shininess to the shoobees. And a chilly breeziness. In my mind, these qualities created a sort of force field around them that deflected funky odors and ugliness. Not to mention insecurities about vague date requests from strange boys.
    I was the one who lived here year-round, yet in this “club,” it felt like they owned the whole island.
    “Oh!” Caroline rasped. She grabbed my arm and pointed through the windows to the left side of the pool deck. Thinking she’d spotted Will, I felt my stomach swoop.
    “Daiquiris!” Caroline exclaimed. She was pointing, it turned out, at a bar where people were ordering frozen fruity drinks in voluptuous glasses. “I forgot this place serves the best virgin daiquiris.”
    “Caroline,” Sam said. “There’s nothing less cool than a virgin daiquiri.”
    “Of course there is,” Caroline said, motioning to the entire pool deck.
    Sam and Caroline both dissolved into snorts of laughter.
    I wanted to swat them on the backs of their heads Three Stooges–style, but then I thought of the alternative: Caroline curling her lip at the shoobee girls, Sam swaggering by the shoobee guys, then everyone jumping down to the beach for a good old-fashioned fistfight.
    A little derisive laughter, I decided, was definitely preferable.
    “Listen, can you get me a drink too?” I asked Caroline. At that moment I had as little interest in a virgin daiquiri as I did in geometry. But I was pulling out the trick my mom always used on Kat and Benjie when they were acting insufferable—she distracted them with a task.
    “I’ll see you out there, okay?” I said, pointing vaguely toward the right side of the pool deck.
    Then I headed across the ballroom to the French doors. Just before I reached them, I had an impulse to run to the ladies room, where I could check my teeth for food particles, blot my shiny face, and fruitlessly attempt to pee.
    But at that point I was annoying
myself
with all the nervousness,so I just gritted my teeth and plunged through the double doors. They automatically swung shut behind me, actually making a little squelching sound as they closed. They reminded me of spaceship movies where people get sucked out of the airlock.
    What am I
doing
here?
flashed across my mind.
    Then I was scanning the crowd dizzily. The people really did all look alike to me. But none of them looked like—
    Will
.
    There he was, leaning against the pool deck railing. He wore a pumpkin-colored T-shirt and faded jeans. With the sand and darkening ocean behind him, he almost seemed to glow. In just four days on the island, he had gotten very tan. Somehow I hadn’t noticed in the fluorescent lighting of The Scoop.
    His brown hair had also gotten cutely frazzled by all the salty breezes.
    But did Will have one of those shiny force fields around him? That I couldn’t tell yet.
    When he saw me, though, he lurched off the railing so hard that an ice cube flew out of the Coke he was holding.
    I couldn’t help but laugh.
    He laughed too as he hurried around the pool to come meet me. I relaxed a little as I wondered if he was as scared, and exhilarated, by this moment as I was.
    If he
was
really different from the other shoobees.
    And if this was going to be a night that I’d always remember.
    *   *   *
     
    “ H i,” Will said as he sort of skidded to a stop in front of me. “Hi,” I