Fifteenth Summer - By Michelle Dalton Page 0,1

boy either. We all know Mr. Darcy could be a total grump.

What I wanted was to feel like Lizzy and Katniss and Mia felt. And not because my boy was tall and broad-shouldered and blue-eyed. That wasn’t how I pictured him. He wouldn’t be everybody else’s version of gorgeous. He would have a funny extra bounce in his walk or a cowlick in his hair. He would be super-shy. Or he’d have a too-loud laugh.

He would make me swoon for reasons that were mine alone. I just didn’t know what those reasons were yet.

Dave Sugarman?

There was no swoon there. The most I could manage for him was an uncomfortable smile while we raised our arms over our heads and swished our hips around, throwing in the occasional clap or semi-grindy deep knee bend. When I glanced at the other couples nearby, I took comfort in the fact that they almost all looked as awkward and goofy as I felt.

There was one exception, though. Emma and Ethan. They seemed to fit together as neatly as their names.

Ethan was definitely tall enough to partner Emma. He put his hands on her waist and swung her around in graceful circles. He held her hand over her head, and she improvised a triple pirouette before landing lightly on his chest. She turned and leaned back against him, and they shimmied from side to side as if they’d rehearsed it.

Do you even have to ask if their dance ended in a dip?

After the song ended, Dave gave me a little pat on the arm, then hustled back to his friends, who were pelting each other with M&M’s.

But Ethan left the dance floor with Emma.

They headed directly outside, where, according to Emma, they leaned against the school and kissed for a full twenty minutes without coming up for air. That twenty minutes was all she needed to fall deeply, deeply in love.

Dancers are like that. One good dip, and they are yours.

After that, Emma stopped obsessing about the Intensive and started obsessing about her new boyfriend.

“Kissing Ethan,” she told me one night after a long make-out session on Ethan’s patio, “it’s like ballet. My head disappears and I’m just a body.”

“Wow,” I said. I couldn’t relate at all. Most of the time I felt like I was just the opposite—no body, all head.

“I mean, he kisses me and I just melt,” Emma went on. “It’s like our bodies fuse.”

“Whoa,” I said this time.

“Oh my God, not like that,” Emma said, reading my mind. “I’m just saying there’s something about being mouth to mouth with someone for forty minutes . . .”

“You beat your record,” I muttered.

“Yeah,” Emma giggled. She hadn’t caught the tiny touch of weariness in my voice. “Anyway, it’s almost like you’re touching each other’s souls.”

“Really?” I said. “Your souls? Really?”

“Really,” she said with the utmost confidence.

I knew nothing of this soul-touching kind of kiss. The few kisses I’d had had been brief. And awkward. And, to tell the truth, kind of gross. I’d clearly been doing it wrong.

I was happy for Emma. But it felt weird to watch her join this club that I was so not a member of.

Before you became a member of this been-in-love club, life was murky, mysterious, and, most of all, small.

Post-love, I imagined, your world expanded with all the things you suddenly knew. You knew what it felt like to see a boy’s name on your caller ID and suddenly feel like you were floating. You knew a boy’s dreams and fears and memories. You knew what it was like to open the front door and feel a burst of elation because your boy was standing there.

You’d kissed that boy and felt like you were touching his soul.

I didn’t know if Abbie had ever felt that way. She had a string of two-month relationships behind her. Almost every time, she’d been the one to break things off when the boy had gotten too attached.

But Hannah had definitely been there. She’d dated an older boy, Elias, for a year. Then he’d enrolled at UC Berkeley and had broken up with her to “focus on studying.” Which Hannah had sort of understood, being a studious type herself. It was when Elias immediately hooked up with a girl from his dorm that he’d broken her heart.

She seemed to be completely recovered now, though.

“When’s that sailboat race they have every year?” she was asking Abbie. She grabbed her sleek, white smart phone out of her bag. She’d gotten it for her