Rules of Summer by Joanna Philbin

Author:Joanna Philbin
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780316212052
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

One line, five words. All of her questions answered.

JULY

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Traffic—avoiding it, driving around it, anticipating it—had become her job. Or, it would have been her job, had she been getting paid. But she wasn’t. And ever since the fiasco of movie night, there was no doubt in Rory’s mind that not asking for minimum wage had been a big mistake.

The traffic was there in the mornings, it was there in the afternoons, and it was there in the evenings. It was there when she went to Southampton to pick up another pair of needlepoint Stubbs & Wootton slippers for Mrs. Rule (size seven; style: Crest Techno), and it was there in the afternoons when she went to get heirloom tomatoes for five dollars a pound at the stand on Scuttle Hole Road. All day long she crawled east and west on Montauk Highway, and by the end of June she knew every fruit and vegetable stand, every bagel and coffee place, and every Pilates studio and beauty salon, on both sides of the highway. She also began to know the back roads. The Rules had a dog-eared copy of Jodi’s Shortcuts that she kept in the car at all times, and soon she knew to take Ocean Road and then a left on Sagaponack if the traffic was really terrible and drive past open fields golden with fading light, the wind blowing through the open window.

Sometimes she’d pass groups of teenage girls walking down the street in Bridgehampton or coming out of the Candy Kitchen, laughing and talking and swinging shopping bags in their hands, and she’d think of Sophie and Trish. At first, the three of them had traded e-mails every day, but now the messages had tapered off to once a week. She could tell that they already had a million private jokes from working together at the campgrounds, jokes that she’d never get. But she couldn’t really explain this place to her friends, either. It was clear from their e-mails that they still didn’t understand her job or why she wasn’t getting paid. She wondered how things would be when she got home. She’d never spent a summer apart from her friends, and already it felt like this break might have lasting repercussions.

But little by little, she was getting to know Isabel Rule.

“So what do you and Mike have planned for the Fourth?” Rory asked one day, as Isabel drove them along the back roads of Sagaponack. After a couple of weeks she now stuck to the right side of the road, but every once in a while, the car would drift to the center.

“I don’t know,” Isabel said, fiddling with the iPod plugged into the dash. “There’s always a huge party at the Georgica, but that’s not really an option. At least, not with Mike.”

“Why can’t you bring him?”

Isabel gave her an incredulous glance. “You think I should take Mike to the Georgica?”

“Maybe if those girls met him, they’d see how cool he is.” Isabel had told her about the fight she’d had with Thayer and Darwin about Mike.

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