Sixteenth Summer by Dalton Michelle

Author:Dalton, Michelle [Dalton, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2011-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

Later, much later, Will and I ducked under Figgy Pudding to say good-bye. Owen and Ms. Dempsey had already started walking home. Will had brought his bike, so he’d told them he’d catch up to them in a few minutes.

We hid under a branch that was heavy with sticky-smelling figs. While Will put the cup of lemonade he’d been sipping on the ground, I leaned against the trunk, my back cushioned by the neon pink boa constrictor. Will kissed me good-bye, a delicious lemon and sugar kiss. Then we kissed again. And again and again.

It was I who pulled away first. I looked down at my hands, trying not to bite my lip in disappointment. The end of this evening somehow felt like the end of everything.

When I looked up at Will, though, it was clear that he wasn’t thinking anything like this. He was only surfing the swells of those kisses, not to mention the crazy crowd, the weirdness of Figgy Pudding, and the exotic party food.

Will pulled something out of his back pocket—a handful of plastic spoons and a long twist tie that he must have found on a bag of paper plates at the food table. He grabbed his Styrofoam cup from the mulchy ground and slugged down the last of his lemonade.

And then he started poking the spoon handles through the Styrofoam, just below the lip of the cup.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Hold on,” Will said. “This’ll just take a minute.”

He placed each spoon about an inch from the last, so their handles crisscrossed inside the cup and their bowls protruded outside of it. The spoon bowls all faced the same direction, reminding me of the curvy wings of a pinwheel.

Next Will knotted one end of the twist tie and poked it through the bottom of the cup. Finally he dangled the sad little sculpture in front of his mouth and blew.

It spun.

“It’s the best I could do on short notice,” Will said.

“That’s a whirligig,” I pointed out, laughing despite myself. “Are you sure you aren’t Southern? You’re, like, one step away from catching ghosts with a glass-bottle tree.”

“A what?” Will said.

I waved off his question with a weary smile.

We crept around the tree until we found the perfect branch on which to hang Will’s ornament. Then I watched him swing his leg over Zelig and roll down the dirt drive. The tick-tick-tick-ticks of his coasting bicycle gears were quickly drowned out by the whirring of the cicadas. A moment after that, Will was swallowed up by the night.

Every time I left the house for the next few days—until a raging thunderstorm put an end to Figgy Pudding for another year—I stopped by the branch where Will had perched his whirligig.

I would reach out with a fingertip and graze the plastic, wishing it was Will’s hand that I was touching instead. I’d pause and close my eyes for a moment of languid sensation that existed only in my mind, in my memory.

And then I would remember that too soon, all I’d have left of Will were memories.

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