The Summer We Believed (Denim Days #1)

Day 3 -- Melody

The steady drizzle totally sucked as we ran up the hill, escorted by the scent of wet pine on our way to Gustaf's.

"At least when you get to Florida you won't have to deal with weather like this. It's sunny there," I huffed as we ran.

"I bet they get plenty of rain. It's pretty green in all the pictures."

"Yeah, I guess."

"Car," Duncan said, and with a burst of speed, veered in front of me to get over to the shoulder. I moved right, too, the mud squishing up over the top of my cross-trainers. After the car passed we shifted back onto the pavement, and ran in silence the rest of the way to the ancient general store. The parking lot cleared enough space, holding back the tops of the trees, and made it easy to see there was not a single break in the gray clouds that hung low overhead. This weather had settled in and was bound to last all day. The old, wooden screen door creaked and the bell overhead tinkled as Duncan held the door open for me.

As always, Gustaf stood immense and imposing behind the counter. I'd told Duncan once that it must've been someone from Gustaf's family tree that had started the Minnesota legend about Paul Bunyon.

"Two drowned rats," he said as a greeting, with a grimace that was his way of smiling. If you didn't know him, he'd be a pretty scary guy, but he was only teasing us. I think.

I headed for the cooler at the back of the store—the most modern thing in Gustaf's—to grab two waters, while Duncan made small talk with the Viking. "We're moving. Can you believe it?"

"Where?"

"Florida."

"Uff-dah. Too hot there."

I set the bottled waters on the rugged wooden counter so that he could ring us up. A wooden barrel filled with penny candy sat off to the side.

His bushy gray eyebrows lifted. "What about your pretty friend? She is going, too?"

I shook my head.

"That's too bad," he said.

It was. It really, really was.

Outside, I checked the bench of the picnic table before I sat, to make sure there were no large splinters sticking up to jab me. The seat was wet, soaking the back of my sweatpants.

Duncan opened his water bottle and gulped half of it before he said, "He's right. You could come, too."

"To Florida?"

"You've always wanted to travel, and you'd have my family as a safety net. Your mom would be a lot easier to convince than my dad. Then we wouldn't have to..."

Duncan had temporarily lost his mind. I couldn't just up and move away like that. No way.

"Think about it," he said.

And so on our run down the hill, I thought. I thought about going to the U without Duncan—depressing. I thought about running every day without Duncan—insurmountable. I thought about his offer to move to Florida with them—crazy. His Dad would never go for it, and neither would my mom.

Duncan was right about one thing. I wanted to get out of Minnesota and see other things. In fact, you could even call me a little obsessed with it. I think, no I'm sure...it started in seventh grade Geography when we had to pull a country out of a hat and make a scrapbook like we'd traveled there. I'd been disappointed to pull Canada.

"How did I get the only country where I've already been?" I'd complained to Duncan.

"So, just do another country," he'd said.

"Mr. Blah will probably fail me for that."

"Not if you explain why you did it."

I ignored Duncan's advice, started the scrapbook on Canada, and realized that I'd really only seen Thunder Bay, which was just over the border in Ontario. The rest of Canada was freakin' huge, and I wanted to go to Toronto, and Quebec City, and Nova Scotia and Vancouver and the Canadian Rockies and maybe even the Yukon. The scrapbook was supposed to be twenty pages, but mine ended up at fifty. I didn't stop with that assignment either. At home, I had a collection of over fifty scrapbooks. If I ever made it someplace else, I knew what I'd want to see, what I'd want to do, but actually doing it was a big if, because as much as I wanted the adventure of travel it scared me. In some ways it was exactly how I felt about Duncan. It must be some kind of defect to want something so badly and then to be afraid to go for it.

So, as I ran I daydreamed about Florida a little. Mostly, though, I thought about how bad it sucked that I'd come to rely so heavily on Duncan, that I didn't even have a girlfriend to talk to about this. Oh sure, there were girls in our group that I hung out with, and some of them would be going to the U with me next year. But I'd never talked to any of them about stuff like this, only Duncan. When you need to talk about what's going on with your best friend, who do you turn to? Not him. And not them. Of that, I was sure.

At the bottom of the hill, we usually sprinted. Duncan would let me have a head start as we rounded the last curve along the paved road and turned into our long, shared gravel driveway. Most days he caught me before I touched the front step. Today, soaked, and worn out from our cramped pup-tent snooze, I couldn't even muster the energy to do that. We jogged the homestretch.

"So?" he asked, like he expected me to say yes.

"So, I need a shower." I stared at the ground. I didn't want him peering in my eyes, trying to figure out my inner most thoughts.

"Okay." There was hurt in his voice. "We gonna hang out?"

I looked up at him. At those deep blue eyes, his thick lashes stuck together, and darker than ever from the rain. All I could read there was worry. "Of course." I couldn't believe he didn't know that. What was happening to us?