Fifteenth Summer - By Michelle Dalton Page 0,11

very nice forehead.

Wait a minute, I thought. There’s no such thing as a nice forehead. Foreheads aren’t nice or not-nice. They’re just . . . foreheads. What kind of weirdo admires a guy’s forehead of all things? What does that mean?

But I think I already knew.

It meant that I had been struck with an instantaneous crush—a crush that was possibly mutual (there’d been that double take, after all) but just as possibly not.

I tried to think of something to say. Something breezy and bright that had nothing to do with ham sandwiches. Of course, my mind was blank—except for the part that was consumed with this boy’s long fingers and his stylish Euro sneakers and (still!) his forehead.

So I just watched in silence as he turned to a wheeled cart behind him. It was stacked neatly with paperbacks. I assumed that Stella, the store owner, had left them there so she could shelve them later.

The boy took a silver pen off the cart.

It hovered over the front cover of his book.

I felt myself tense. What was he doing? Was he going to write something on the book cover?

Only when I heard the sound of paper tearing did I realize that he was doing something even worse. He was slicing the cover off the book! The pen was not a pen. It was an X-Acto knife!

Maybe Stella didn’t mind if customers read her books without buying them or got vanilla wafer crumbs in the bindings. But even she wouldn’t stand for this, would she?

“What are you doing!” I cried, grabbing the boy’s wrist.

Now it was his turn to be shocked.

“I’m doing my job,” he said. “What are you doing?”

I realized I was still clutching his wrist. It felt satiny smooth and warm. I dropped his arm like it had burned me.

“What kind of job involves slashing a book cover?” I demanded. “What did that book ever to do you?”

That’s when something weird happened.

Weird in a wonderful way.

The boy smiled.

His teeth were very white and straight, except for one crooked eyetooth. Each of his cheeks had a dimple in it.

“It’s nothing personal against the book,” he said. “It’s just being remaindered. These all are.”

The boy gestured at the cart full of paperbacks.

“Remaindered?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“They’re not selling,” he explained. “So we return them to the publisher. But it’s too expensive to ship back the whole book, so we just send them the cover and recycle the rest of the book.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid and sad all at once. I eyed the cart full of books.

“You’re going to slice up all those books?” I said. “How can you stand it?”

“They’re not selling,” the boy repeated with a shrug. “If we don’t get rid of the ones that won’t sell, we won’t have room for the books that will.”

I plucked a tomato-red paperback off the cart.

“Waiter, There’s Soup in My Fly,” I read.

“Fly-fishing humor,” the boy said with a sorrowful shake of his head.

“Well, I don’t know why that’s not selling,” I said sarcastically. I reached for another book.

“My Life as a Cat Lady,” I read with a shudder.

“I’m telling you,” the boy said. With one hand he reached out to take the book from me. With the other he held up his X-Acto knife.

“No,” I protested, plunking the book back onto the cart. “How can you kill off all those innocent cats?”

“Well, we are dog people here,” the boy said, glancing toward the lounge, where E.B. was wetly gobbling another vanilla wafer. The boy rolled his eyes and shook his head.

But he also smiled, and those dimples showed up again.

My stomach fluttered. I hoped he couldn’t tell. Quickly I bent down so I could peer more closely at the books on the cart—and hide my face from him.

One paperback was sunset orange. I pulled it out.

“Coconut Dreams by Veronica Gardner,” I said. “That sounds beachy to me. I’ll take it.”

The boy laughed.

“You’re not actually buying that,” he declared.

“I’m rescuing it,” I said, hugging the book to my chest. “This book does not deserve to die.”

“Do you even know what it’s about?” he said.

I glanced at the back of the book.

“It’s a dollar ninety-nine on clearance,” I said, eyeing the red sale sticker. “Ooh, and it’s YA! That’s a good start. Let’s see . . .”

I began to read the description on the back cover aloud.

“ ‘Nicole can’t believe her parents have shipped her off to camp for the summer. Even if the camp is on a tropical island—’ ”

I paused to