Summer Nights by Caroline B. Cooney Read Free Book Online

bare feet. That was the most wonderful thing about summer. Freedom of the foot.
    Briefly Kip wondered if Mike would be at the party. He had been her first real boyfriend, and they had drifted apart, never quite becoming ordinary friends again. She really regretted this, but it happened to everybody else, too. If only when you stopped seeing a boy, you could still be buddies. She really liked Mike. It would be nice to be able to chat with him as easily as with anybody else. Maybe it would happen tonight.
    She drove to the parking lot by the river and got out of her car. “Hey, Kippie!” shouted some of the kids already there. “ Now the party will start! Kip’s aboard!”
    Kip laughed with delight and danced up the gangplank onto the Duet.

Chapter 10
    B ETH ROSE HAD A favorite, unnamed daydream. She played it continually and never tired of it. It was a game in which the Perfect Boy would show up at last, just around the next corner. It was a daydream never fulfilled, and yet always hopeful. By the end of a typical day Beth would have dreamed up at least a dozen situations in which this Perfect Boy could show up, but never did.
    When she drove away from Anne’s, she headed for the difficult intersection at Fifth and Maple. She would have to stop at the red light there, wait through two or three light changes as she crawled through the summer traffic. This would surely be the day when a convertible—a red one—driven by a terrific handsome teenage boy—would pull up next to her—perhaps with a second terrific handsome boy in the passenger seat. Beth Rose would toss her auburn curls and wink at them. The passenger would be so attracted to her, he’d vault out of the convertible, not even pausing to open the door, and race around her car as the traffic ground to a halt and horns honked. He’d leap into her passenger seat, and kiss her, and Beth Rose would have found true love.
    However, she arrived at the traffic light at Fifth and Maple and next to her was a station wagon driven by a grim-looking mother whose toddlers were invisible inside their white crash seats. The passenger side was entirely full of brown paper bags and groceries.
    Beth discarded that dream and planned that when she drove up her own street, the house two down from hers would finally have been sold, and the family moving in would have a perfect teenage boy. Oh, heck, make it good. Three perfect teenage boys. They’d all be in love with her. Probably fight over her.
    However, the FOR SALE sign was still imbedded in the grass.
    Beth went on into her own house, dark and cool, to shower and change for the party. Into a carryall she slipped white jeans, an XXL sweatshirt that said HARD ROCK CAFE NEW YORK, and her bathing suit. She slid into her dress. It was pale lemon-yellow, sprinkled with confetti dots of white that were almost invisible. The skirt was tulip-shaped with lettuce ruffles. The dress was sleeveless, cool and comfortable, and in the wind the skirt filled and swirled and made her feel wonderfully feminine.
    Beth was slim but the heavy yellow belt made her look positively skinny. She loved that. Her mother didn’t. Her mother said she Looked Like Death, and When Was She Going To Eat More? and did Beth want to read this little pamphlet on Anorexia?
    Mother, Beth would say, I am not too thin, I love food, I eat enough. They would eye each other suspiciously and drop the conversation.
    Beth thought forlornly about Gary. She would probably never be over her crush on Gary. Carry it to her grave, no doubt. When she was an old crone of eighty-six she would be sick and delirious, still muttering the name Gary. By then she wouldn’t have had a date with him in seven decades.
    Gary would be at the party tonight, of course; he was a good friend of Con’s and always appeared at any party.
    She and Gary had dated on and off for a year. Gary was drifty. Half aware of the world, not of the world. For Gary, graduation had been the end of torture known