Fifteenth Summer - By Michelle Dalton Page 0,60

doors, and spiral-bound notebooks, and babysitting, instead of slinging mayonnaise and reading nothing but novels. And being with Josh.

It didn’t seem real, and yet, when Josh pulled me to him, there was a new urgency in the way we kissed.

I let my hands linger on his bare shoulders, trying to memorize all his curves and angles.

He lifted a hand to smooth back my hair and sent water trickling down my face. It felt like tears.

I let my feet leave the soft, loamy mud at the bottom of the pond so that I was afloat, held in place only by Josh’s arm around my waist.

And we kissed as if we had all day. If we pretended the day was endless, then a month was nothing to fear.

Suddenly signs of summer ending were everywhere. The days were getting hotter, but they were also getting shorter.

My dad started working less as his clients got ready to make the “great migration” to their August vacations. And Hannah started taking long afternoon naps, as if she wanted to cram in as much sleep as she could before she started pulling all-nighters at U of C.

Finally, on a day when she knew I wasn’t working at the Mels, my mom pulled the stack of tin buckets out of the hall closet.

The buckets meant blueberry picking. And blueberry picking meant—inescapably—that it was the last week in July.

This was the week we always went picking when we were in Bluepointe, because it fell right before the berry season peaked and the orchards got crowded. Late July was also when the berries were still small and tart. None of us could stand a super-ripe, sweet, squishy blueberry. It must have been genetic.

“Mom,” I said as she clanked the stack of buckets onto the kitchen table. “Is it okay if I invite Josh to go picking with us? I’m working the next few days, and I’d really like to hang out with him.”

My mom frowned and glanced at the other end of the table, which had pretty much been permanently overtaken by her baby quilt.

“I don’t know, honey,” she said. “We’ve always gone with just us.”

I followed her gaze to the quilt top. It was really starting to take shape, with cone-shaped swatches of fabric making a shell-like spiral in the center, framed by small squares. It was amazing, but I knew I didn’t see in it what my mother saw. She looked at it and was carried back to the powdery smell of our baby heads, and the satin feeling of our baby skin, our fuzzy never-cut hair, and our mouths that looked like little rosebuds.

I just saw a bunch of cute old onesies.

“Listen,” I said, “if you want, I won’t invite him. But . . . everything’s different this summer anyway.”

Mom’s eyes got glassy for the first time in a while—at least that I’d seen. I felt guilty.

But I also wanted her to say yes.

She nodded slowly and said, “See if he wants to come. Tell Hannah she can ask Liam, too, if she wants.”

Abbie had just walked into the kitchen to pull a snack out of the fridge when Mom made that proposal. She snorted.

“I can guarantee Fast—I mean Liam—doesn’t want to go on a family berry-picking outing with us,” Abbie said. “He prefers to see Hannah alone. At night. Where nobody can see anybody’s necks.”

“Abbie!” I growled, looking shiftily at Mom.

My mom rolled her eyes.

“Do you think I didn’t see that hickey on Hannah’s neck?” she asked us. “And did you think I didn’t already have a discussion with her about it? Please. Always remember”—she looked straight at me then, and her eyes did not look glassy anymore. Instead they were her steely Don’t mess with me, I’m a teacher eyes—“there’s not much about you girls that I don’t know.”

I think she did know how I felt about Josh—which was why she’d said he could come blueberry picking with us. I flashed a grateful smile and trotted toward my room to start getting ready while I called him.

Before I could finish dialing, though, my phone rang! I didn’t even check to see if it was Josh.

“Hiiiii,” I crooned into the phone.

“Chelsea? You sound weird.”

“Emma!” I blurted with a laugh. “Um, I thought you were—”

“Josh?” Emma said. “Wow. So things are good, huh?”

I could tell by the flat tone of her voice that she had not called me—at six a.m. California time!—to dish about my boyfriend.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, flicking on my closet light and stepping inside.