Chapter Two
SUMMER SQUISHED A MOSQUITO ON HER ARM AS SHE WATCHED Alice Miller cross the stage to take her diploma. Ugh, they were only on the M’s. She lifted her thick strawberry blond hair from her neck, wiping away the sweat with the back of her hand. At this rate, it would be at least another hour before she could ditch this yawn-fest and dive into Jace’s pool. Up in the grandstands, her parents were laughing and talking with their old high school friends like a bunch of rowdy teenagers. If she and Jace were back here with their kids in twenty years, somebody might as well just shoot her now.
“Heads up!” a voice shouted at the exact same moment a beach ball slammed into the head of a nerdy boy sitting in front of her. Summer picked the ball up off the grass. From a few rows back, she could hear Maz’s obnoxious laugh. Typical.
Summer looked at the boy who’d been hit, the pink flush of embarrassment rising up his neck. She wished she had the nerve to say something to him. To tell him that high school would probably be the pinnacle of Maz’s pathetic life. But before she had the chance, the boy turned around and shot her a dirty look, as if the ball in her lap made her guilty by association.
Summer glared back at Maz, then opened the valve and squeezed. The ball collapsed in her hands, air whistling as it escaped.
“Chill out,” said Jace, giving her a finger flick to the neck. By some fluke, he was seated right behind her. Jace Fitzgerald and Summer Dalton, high school power couple extraordinaire. The way the girls in school treated her, you’d think being popular and having a cute boyfriend were the keys to eternal happiness.
Summer never understood what made her and her friends so “popular” anyway, considering half the school hated them. Not that there was any point in bringing this up. Every time she tried to talk about something other than:
1. Who was getting fat
2. Who hooked up with who
3. How wasted they were last weekend
her friends would accuse her of being a nerd. As if. Summer was pretty sure that she’d be the laughingstock of her Poetry 101 class in college. It hadn’t stopped her from signing up, but still, the fear was real. So far, the only person to read her poetry was Jace, and he’d said it was amazing. But how much could she trust a boy who considered Maxim magazine heavy reading?
And it wasn’t like her parents understood it any better. They could barely wrap their heads around the fact that she wasn’t going to school with all her friends at UMass Walford. But Summer couldn’t wait to go to Boston College in the fall. She wanted to hang out with people who had their own opinions; people who argued with her; people who weren’t so afraid to just be who they were and live or die by the consequences.
“Tiernan O’Leary!” Principal Roberts’s voice boomed through the loudspeakers. God, they were only on the O’s.
“Freak!” Maz shouted as Tiernan crossed the stage. Like a girl with blue hair, combat boots, and red day-glow lipstick would consider that an insult.
“Can you tell your monkey to shut up?” she whispered to Jace.
“You know I can’t control him,” Jace said, shrugging his shoulders.
On the stage, Tiernan curtseyed to the crowd, while raising her middle finger in Maz’s general direction.
Thankfully, Summer only had to deal with Maz for one more week. For the month of July, it was good-bye Walford, hello Martha’s Vineyard.
“Tell me again what your beach house is like,” Summer said, fanning Jace with her diploma. She needed to work up a good daydream if she was going to make it through the rest of commencement.
“Uh, it’s gray,” Jace replied. Vivid descriptions were never the boy’s strong point.
Not that it mattered. Summer had already painted the picture in her mind. Picnic dinners of boiled lobster and corn on the cob; sandy games of touch football on the beach; sunsets spent writing poetry in her journal.
Hopefully, Jace wouldn’t mind if she slipped away now and then to write. Knowing Jace, he’d probably be fine with it as long as she didn’t miss out on any important beach activities—especially the kind that happened after dark. Summer closed her eyes, imagining the sunsets off of West Chop.
She must have drifted off because the next thing she knew, loud clapping and a chorus of “Woo hoos!” and “Hell, yeah, babies!” jolted her awake. She turned around to ask Jace why he hadn’t woken her—well, to yell at him, really—but he wasn’t there. Lately, he was always disappearing like that. Summer scanned the crowd. Her parents and their friends were still chatting away up in the bleachers, enjoying their own party too much to notice that graduation was actually over. But Jace was nowhere to be seen.
She headed toward the edge of the field, weaving her way through the throngs of people, dodging tossed caps and that infernal beach ball (reinflated courtesy of Maz). Where on earth had Jace gone? Summer was almost at the bleachers when a familiar hand tapped her on the shoulder. Only, it didn’t belong to the person she was looking for. It belonged to Alice Miller.
“Hey, there,” said Alice casually, as if it wasn’t the first time they’d spoken in nearly four years. “Happy graduation.”
“Happy graduation,” Summer answered by reflex. As far as Summer was concerned, she and Alice had drawn a line in the sand freshman year, one they’d both agreed never to cross. Now, for some unimaginable reason, Alice was acting like the line had never been there to begin with.
“Well, I know this might sound crazy . . . ,” Alice began. Then, without even taking a breath, Alice launched into a rambling account of her last twenty-four hours—her parents giving her the newly refurbished Pea Pod, then learning the news of the Level3 reunion show. Since it was impossible to get a word in edgewise, Summer just stood there, trying her best to absorb Alice’s onslaught of information. It was hard to decide what bothered her more—that Alice had totally glossed over everything that had happened that night at the Winter Wonderland Dance or that she was dredging up the past in the first place. Note to Alice: High school’s over.
“Sorry,” Summer said, “Jace and I are going to the Vineyard for all of July. But have fun, okay?”
For a second, Alice just stood there looking as if someone had let the air out of her, like the beach ball from before. “Well, if you change your mind . . . ,” she finally stammered, walking away before she even finished the sentence.
Summer was surprised Alice had the audacity to speak to her after all this time, let alone invite her to a concert halfway across the country. But even more shocking was how willingly she took no for an answer. Suddenly Alice stopped.
“He’s still got those dimples!” she shouted through the crowd.
Summer didn’t have to ask who “he” was. She had already googled Travis’s picture when she’d heard about the Level3 reunion on the radio. Not that she would admit it to anyone—especially not Alice Miller. What was more embarrassing than being eighteen and having a crush on some rock star she didn’t even know?
And why was she thinking about Travis’s dimples when she already had a boyfriend? A real one. Maybe Jace didn’t have the soul of a poet, but at least he wasn’t some adolescent fantasy. In fact, he was right in front of her.
“Where have you been?” Summer asked, flustered.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” said Maz, nodding his head in confirmation while his eyes stayed firmly planted on the cleavage of a girl walking by.
“I was talking to Alice Miller. She just came up out of the blue and asked me to go to the Level3 reunion show with her in Austin. It was totally messed up.”
“Austin, Texas?” Jace asked, confused. “Why is she asking you?”
“We used to be friends. Back in middle school.”
“That sounds psychotic,” Maz butted in. “Like what if she goes all Leighton Meester in The Roommate on you and she tries to kill you and take over your life?”
“Funny,” Summer said, wishing she could have had this conversation without Maz’s interference.
“I think you should go,” Jace suddenly declared. “You listen to that stupid band all the time.”
Jace had a point. Summer still loved Level3. But not enough to get her to spend ten days in a van with Alice Miller.
“Even if I wanted to, how could I? We’re going to the Vineyard, remember?”
“Right,” said Jace, fanning himself with his customized “Hawks Rule!” cap, “about the Vineyard . . .”
Maz punched Jace in the bicep, then ran off into the crowd.
“I was thinking, actually”—Jace stopped to rub his freshly shaved chin—“that it might be better if you . . . didn’t come.”
Summer could feel her stomach in her throat. She knew this tone. She had invented this tone. Jace was breaking up with her.
“And I was thinking about the long-distance thing in the fall,” Jace continued, “and how hard it’s gonna be to only see each other on the weekends . . .”
Summer couldn’t believe that in all her years of dating, up until this moment, she’d never been the one at the receiving end of these words. She’d dumped David Long in an e-mail. She’d had a friend tell Brian Rourke that she didn’t want to see him anymore. And poor Scotty Weishaupt, she’d simply shown up to his state finals basketball game holding hands with Chris Hedison.
Jace was still babbling away, doing everything he could to say I don’t love you anymore without actually coming out and using those words. But Summer had plenty of words: mostly the four-letter kind.
“Enough!” she finally said. “I get it, okay?” It always annoyed her when the boys she broke up with wanted to “talk it out,” when clearly the best thing to do was make a clean break, then disappear as quickly as possible. So that’s just what Summer did. She ran through the crowd, hiding under her graduation cap so as not to be spotted by her friends or, even worse, her parents. “Congratulations” was the last thing she needed to hear right now.
Out in the parking lot, traffic was already at a standstill. Part of her wanted to go back to the stadium and punch Jace right in his rock-hard abs. But instead she kept running—past the gym, up the hill by the science labs—as if it were possible to outrun that feeling in her gut.
For months she’d waited for this day to come, for the chance to start over, to have a clean slate. Clean slate, indeed. Jace sure took care of that.
At the top of the hill Summer stopped to catch her breath. Her parents were probably looking for her by now. No doubt, they’d heard the news of the breakup and were ready to console her, right there in front of everyone. Like she needed more humiliation. Just the thought of it made her want to run again. The only problem was, she wasn’t sure which way to go.
What if her parents and Maz were right? What if high school was as good as it got? Or worse: What if there was a better life out there, but Summer didn’t know what it was or where to find it?
That’s when she saw the bright-green van pulling out of the parking lot. It was strange to see the Pea Pod out on the open road after all those years of sitting in the same spot. But there it was, cruising down East Walford Street, just like all the other cars leaving high school forever. It wasn’t until the van drove out of sight that Summer realized she was smiling. If the Pea Pod could get it in gear, maybe there was hope for her yet.