Excerpt: The Last Summer (of You & Me)

The following is an excerpt from the book The Last Summer (of You & Me)
by Ann Brashares
Published by Riverhead Books; June 2007;$24.95US/$31.00CAN;
978-1-59448-917-4
Copyright © 2007 Ann Brashares


One

Waiting

Alice waited for Paul on the ferry dock. He'd left a crackly message on the
answering machine saying he'd be coming in on the afternoon boat. That was
like him. He couldn't say the 1:20 or the 3:55. She'd spent too long staring
at the ferry schedule, trying to divine his meaning.

With some amount of self-hatred, Alice had first walked out onto the dock
for the 1:20, knowing he wouldn't be on it. She'd looked only vaguely at the
faces as they emerged from the boat, assuring herself she wasn't expecting
anything. She'd sat with her bare feet on the bench at the periphery, her
book resting on her knees so she wouldn't have to interact with anyone. I
know you're not going to be on it, so don't think I think you are, she'd
told the Paul who lived in her mind. Even there, under her presumed control,
he was teasing and unpredictable.

For the 3:55, she put Vaseline on her lips and brushed her hair. The boat
after that wasn't until 6:10, and though Paul could miss the so-called
afternoon ferry, he couldn't call 6:10 the afternoon.

How often she did attempt to process his thoughts in her mind. She took his
opinions too seriously, remembered them long after she suspected he'd
forgotten them.

It was one thing, trying to think his thoughts when he was close by, his
words offering clues, corrections, and confirmations by the hour. But three
years of silence made for complex interpolations. It made it harder, and in
another way it made it easier. She was freer with his thoughts. She made
them her own, thought them to her liking.

He had missed two summers. She couldn't imagine how he could do that.
Without him, they had been shadow seasons. Feelings were felt thinly, there
and then gone. Memories were not made. There was nothing new in sitting on
this dock, on this or that wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In
some ways, she was always waiting for him.

She couldn't picture his face when he was gone. Every summer he came back
wearing his same face that she could not remember.

Absently, she saw the people on the dock who came, went, and waited. She
waved to people she knew, mostly her parents' friends. She felt the wind
blow the pounding sun off her shoulders. She slowly dug her thumbnail along
a plank of the seat, provoking a splinter but caking up mold and
disintegration instead.

When it came to waiting, Riley always had something else to do. Paul was
Riley's best friend. Alice knew Riley missed him, too, but she said she
didn't like waiting. Alice didn't like it. Nobody did.

But Alice was a younger sister. She didn't have the idea of not doing things
because you didn't like them.

She watched for the ferry, the way it started out as a little white triangle
across the bay. when it wasn't there, she could hardly imagine it. It was
never coming. And then it appeared. It took shape quickly. It was always
coming.

She stood. She couldn't help it. She left her book on the bench with its
paper cover fluttering open in the wind. Would this be him? Was he on there?

She let her hair out of its elastic. She stretched her tank top down over
her hips. She wanted him to see all of her and also none of her. She wanted
him to be dazzled by the bits and blinded to the whole. She wanted him to
see her whole and not in pieces. She had hopes that were hard to satisfy.

Her legs bounced; her arms clutched her middle. She saw the approach of the
middle-aged woman in a pink sarong who taught her mother's yoga class.

"Who are you waiting for, Alice?"

Exposed as she was, the friendly question struck Alice as a cruelty.

"No one," Alice lied awkwardly. The woman's tanned face was as familiar to
Alice as the wicker sofa on the screened porch, but that did not mean that
Alice knew her name. She knew the lady's poodle was named Albert and that
her yoga class was heavy on the chanting. In a place like this, as a child
you weren't responsible for the names of grown-ups, though the grown-ups
always knew yours. If you were a child, relationships here began
asymmetrically, and there rarely came a specific opportunity for
reevaluation. You bore the same age relationship to people here no matter
how old you got.

The woman looked at Alice's feet, which told the truth. If you were getting
on the 3:55, you wore shoes.

Alice self-consciously straggled over to the freight area as though she had
some purpose there. She didn't lie easily, and doing it now conferred an
unwanted intimacy. She preferred to save her lies for the people whose names
she knew.

She couldn't look at the boat. She sat back down on the bench, crossing her
arms and her legs and bowing her head.

It was a small village on a small island with customs and rules all its own.
"No keys, no wallet, no shoes" was the saying that expressed their summer
way of life. There were no cars and -- in the old days, at least -- nobody
locked their house. The single place of commerce was the Waterby market,
mostly trading in candy and ice cream cones, where your name was your credit
and they didn't accept cash. Shoes meant you were coming, going, or playing
tennis. Even at the yacht club. Even at parties. There was a community pride
in having feet tough enough to withstand the splintering boardwalks. It's
not that you didn't get splinters -- you always did. You just shut up about
it. Every kid knew that. At the end of each summer, the bottoms and sides of
Alice's feet were speckled black with old splinters. Eventually they
disappeared; she was never quite sure where they went. "They are
reabsorbed," a knowledgeable seven-year-old named Sawyer Boyd told her once.

Everyone's business came through this ferry dock, with rhythms and
hierarchies unlike other places. You saw the people as they came and went
and waited. You also saw their stuff piled on the dock until they loaded it
onto their wagon and rolled it home. You knew what kind of toilet paper they
bought. Alice still rated two-ply a luxury more subtle and telling than a
person's bag or shoes. You knew that the people with the Fairway bags and
the paper products were getting off here in Waterby or in Saltaire. The
people getting off in the town of Kismet always had beer.

Cars were conveyors of privacy. Without them, you lived a lot more of your
life out in the open. Where you went, who you went with. Who you waited for
at the ferry dock. Who you brushed your hair for. You were exposed here, but
you were also safe.

The carelessness of the place had always appealed to certain utopian types,
even shallow ones. "Get rid of cars and you get rid of global warming, oil
wars in the Middle East, obesity, and most crime, too," her father liked to
say.

The ferry put an extra emphasis on coming and going. Adults went back and
forth all the time, but there had been many summers when Alice and Riley had
come and gone only once. They came with their pale skin, haircuts meant to
last the summer, their tender feet, and their shyness. They left with brown,
freckled, bitten skin; tangly hair; foot bottoms thick like tires; and
familiarity verging on rudeness.

She remembered the hellos, and she remembered the good-byes even more.
End-of-summer tradition dictated that whoever was last to leave the island
saluted departing friends by jumping into the water as the good-bye ferry
pulled away.

Now she heard the boat grinding up behind her. She loosened her arms and
pressed her hands against the wood. She heard the slapping of the wake
against the pilings as the boat came around. She untucked one leg and
bounced her free heel on the plank in front of her.

Copyright © 2007 Ann Brashares

Author
Ann Brashares is the author of the young adult novels The Sisterhood of the
Traveling Pants, The Second Summer of the Sisterhood, Girls in Pants, and
Forever in Blue. This is her first novel for adults. She lives in Manhattan
and spends summers on Fire Island, New York.


For more information, please visit www.lastsummerbook.com