Fifteenth Summer

s i x

"I don't think so," I said, trying to sound breezy. I tossed the book back onto the counter. "But thanks."

"Oh, okay," Killian  said. He dug his hands into his pockets and looked away, the way I always did when I was disappointed.

I'm sure that's not it, I told myself. That's probably just where he keeps his extra X-Acto knife blades.

Killianseemed to have spotted something behind the counter. I followed his gaze to the receipt paper trailing out of the cash register. It had a bright pink stripe running along it.

"Oh, man," he muttered. "She never remembers to change the tape."

He ducked around the end of the counter and started extracting the paper roll from the register, scowling as the thing seemed to evade his grasp.

"Weird," I said.

Killian stopped fiddling with the receipt tape and looked at me.

"What's weird?" he demanded.

"I think it would be a dream to work in a bookstore," I said, "and you don't seem to like it at all."

"I like it—" Killian started to say, sounding super-defensive. He stopped himself and frowned in thought. "It's not that I don't like it. It's just that, when people open a bookstore, they think it's going to be all, you know, books."

"Isn't it?" I asked.

"Well, yeah," Killian  said, "but it's also receipt tape. And packing slips and book orders and remembering to pay the air-conditioning bill."

"But you don't have to worry about that," I scoffed. "I mean, you're . . ."

"Fifteen?" Killian  said. "Yeah, well, you don't have to have a driver's license to pay the air-conditioning bill. You just have to have a tolerance for really boring chores."

At that moment he looked a lot older than a boy my age.

Even though, I couldn't help noting, he was a boy my age. Not college age or even my sisters' age.

I don't know why that mattered to me, though. Who cared if he was age-appropriate? Yes, he was really, really good-looking. And mature. And for about three minutes it had seemed like he thought I was pretty intriguing too.

But now I didn't know what to think about this boy. How could I have anything incommon with someone who found a bookstore—this bookstore—as uninspiring as receipt tape?

And how, I wondered as I walked out the door, could I possibly feel worse leaving Dog Ear than I had before entering it?

That night my dad grilled corn and salmon, and my mom tossed an arugula salad with hazelnuts and lemon juice. Ruby  and I collaborated on wildly uneven biscuits. Mine looked like shaggy little haystacks, while hers were perfectly round but as flat as pancakes. Regina made a fruit salad, then muddled raspberries and frothed them into a pitcher of lemonade.

But instead of setting the table like usual, we piled all the food into boxes and baskets and toted them down the two blocks to the lake.

Sparrow Road was narrow and sharply curved. Though the road was paved with used-to-be-black pavement, walking it meant wending your way around various large cracks and potholes. Before you knew it, you were usually in the middle of the road. Which was fine because there were hardly ever any cars. There was no reason to drive on Sparrow unless you lived in one of the twenty-or-so houses on it.

I always loved our first shadowy walk to the lake. It was so thickly overhung with trees that by August you felt like you were in a tunnel. Of course, by August you also had to spend most of that walk slapping away mosquitoes and horseflies. But even that—after doing it my whole life—felt like a ritual.