The Goodbye Summer by Sarah Van Name

Author:Sarah Van Name
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Here’s the thing about romance: sometimes, it’s inconvenient.

“I wanna make it up to you,” Jake says to me as we sit on his porch on Tuesday. He sets his jaw in an earnest square as he looks at me. His right hand is holding mine, warm and dry, and his left shakes in a jittery rhythm, ash falling from the cigarette onto the unfinished boards below.

“Make what up to me?” I say, because it could be anything. Our definitions of something worth making up for—well, they’re different.

“Leaving this weekend. Going to the beach. I know you were…” He takes a long pause and a drag on the cigarette. The smoke is noxious and comforting, a soft bitterness in the air. “Lonely.”

I stare at the kudzu through the screen window. He’s wrong. I spent the weekend surrounded by people: baking with Mom, laughing with Georgia, eating hamburgers with Dad. But he’s also right, of course. I wanted him to be there with me, under the cheap cul-de-sac fireworks. I could press on the bruise he’s beginning to feel. Or I could be sweet.

“I missed you,” I say, trying for somewhere in the middle. “But I had a really nice weekend too. And, I mean, I get it. It’s cool to hang out with your friends.”

“Sucks you’re so young,” he says, rubbing my hand with his thumb as if consoling me for a great failure. “Coulda come with us otherwise.”

“Yeah. I’ll get older, though.”

“For sure. So, you know how I normally have the early shift on Saturday morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Right, well, Brittany needed to go to a birthday party or something on Monday, and I traded shifts with her, so I have off this Saturday. And I was thinking, maybe I can spend the whole day with you. Morning to night. We can ask your parents to extend your curfew an hour? Half an hour?”

I’m stumped. Jake rarely trades shifts—he likes routine—so I never expect him to tell me his schedule has changed. And in an unfortunate coincidence, Naima has to go out of town for yet another weekend, and Jenny asked me a couple weeks ago if I could cover her.

I said yes. I didn’t feel like I could say no, having left her in the lurch on the Fourth, and I figured it’s a little extra money—a fair amount of extra money, actually, since I’ll be working overtime. But it also means that I need to be there for a full work day, from nine to six. Not a lot of time with Jake.

I tell him this as gently as possible. I’m already annoyed, and I can’t tell whether I’m mad at him for trying to make up for something I just want to forget, or whether I’m experiencing a renewed hatred toward the generally incompetent administration of the aquarium. I pluck the cigarette from his fingers and bring it to my lips when I finish relaying the news. It tastes rancid. I love secondhand smoke, hate smoking.

“Huh,” he says. I hand the cigarette back to him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.