Rhode Island
Summer before Freshman Year
I lifted my foot to the bumper of my parents’ car and braced myself as I wrestled my suitcase out of the trunk, anxious to start my vacation. A cloudless blue sky stretched above me, and a salty breeze tempered the August heat. The perfect way to begin an end-of-summer getaway.
Every August my family made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from our home in Norwood, Connecticut, to stay with our (loaded) uncle Tommy and aunt Tess at their summerhouse. They were right at the heart of everything that the pristine, manicured beach town had to offer: the ocean; the preserved Gilded Age mansions; and Thames Street, Newport’s main drag. We spent two weeks each year enjoying the fruits of my aunt and uncle’s good fortune, wishing we’d come across some of our own.
That summer, I was fourteen, and my family was broke. My dad—Uncle Tommy’s brother—liked to refer to himself as a “starving artist.” He’d been a teacher at Norwood’s local high school until a few years earlier when he’d been unable to dodge a hailstorm of layoffs.
Once he’d lost his job, he had this epiphany that he should pursue his long-forgotten dream of publishing a novel. Sure, he’d put in job applications when my mother reminded him that his unemployment check and her paralegal salary weren’t enough to put two girls through college, but nothing over the past three years ever seemed to pan out. Including the novel.
So we were all ready to forget about life for a while when we pulled up to Uncle Tommy’s cabin that summer. It was nothing like a cabin, of course, but that’s what we’d always called it. Originally built in 1902, it had been a Victorian before various additions and build-outs turned it into the turreted, twenty-four-hundred-square-foot Thing with a Porch that currently stood on the property.
Whoever owned the house before obviously hadn’t been into the whole historical preservation craze that permeated the rest of Newport. Not that I complained; everything was modern and clean, and I didn’t have to share a room with Miranda. Plus, having restored mansions and the beach practically in your backyard had the crazy effect of making everything seem right with the world.
If only I could get the damn suitcase out of the car.
I wasn’t sure what happened next—if the hard smack that impacted my upper arm caused me to jostle my suitcase loose, or if the case had just broken free of whatever it had been caught on and flew out of the trunk. Either way, my butt hit the ground and so did my luggage, right after it bounced off my foot.
“Ow!” I grabbed at the stinging spot below my ankle and massaged it.
“Are you okay?”
I looked up with a jolt at the sound of the unfamiliar voice. It belonged to a boy about my age. He and an older man peered over the white fence that separated Uncle Tommy’s driveway from theirs. The boy’s thick black hair flopped over his forehead, and both his hands stretched toward me, though I didn’t know how he planned to help with a fence between us. Or while wearing a baseball glove.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
“Completely my fault,” the man added, waving his own gloved hand in the air. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “I missed it by a mile. Are you all right?”
Only then did I notice “it”—the worn-looking baseball nestled in the grass a few feet from where I sat.
“I’m fine,” I lied, not wanting to make a big deal. I let go of my foot and stood to retrieve the ball, wishing I had more hands to rub all the places that hurt.
“Jimmy!” a voice carped through one of the open windows in the house behind the fence. “Where’s my Swiss Army knife?”
The older man sighed and shook his head, his thin shoulders sagging. “In a box in the hall closet, Dad, exactly where I told you I put it,” he called back.
“I can’t find it. Get in here, would you?”
The man’s mouth twisted as he abandoned his glove and turned toward the house, stopping to give me a look of regret. “Again, my apologies.”
I waved, unsure of what else to do, before winging the ball toward the boy. A thwack sounded as it slammed into his glove, and his eyes went round as quarters.
“Nice arm!” He grinned, revealing a row of metal braces and drawing my attention to a small beauty mark beneath the left side of his bottom lip.
“For a girl?”
“For anyone.”
I laughed and walked toward him. “I’m Kelsey.”
“David.”
I threw a glance at the house behind him. “Do you live there?”
“That’s my grandfather’s house.” He grumbled when he said it and looked at the ground, like it embarrassed him.
“Really?” I pointed at the house behind me. “This is my uncle’s house. We’re here at the end of every August. I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”
“We usually come at the beginning of the month. My dad helps pay Grandpa’s bills and stuff.” Under his breath, he mumbled something that sounded like, Makes sure he hasn’t killed himself yet. David cast a tense look over his shoulder at the house. “He’s needed some, uh, extra help lately, so we’ve been coming more frequently. And if you’ve been here every summer, I should probably apologize on his behalf.”
So he knew.
A nervous laugh bubbled up in my throat. “He doesn’t bother anyone.”
David smiled. “I see niceness runs in your family. Your uncle is the only one who never calls the police.”
“My uncle’s also not here most of the year.”
But I’d heard stories from when he was. Jay, David’s grandfather, had a bit of a drinking problem, one that had gotten worse as time passed. In earlier years his behavior had been more or less harmless; Aunt Tess told us he’d passed out with the TV blaring a couple of times, or failed to hear an alarm clock that could wake the dead—for over an hour. Most recently, though, my uncle had found him out cold on his back porch, wearing boxers and a parka. In the middle of an eighty-degree day in August.
“David! I see you’ve met my niece.”
I turned at the sound of Uncle Tommy’s voice. He stood at the door, smiling beneath his strawberry-blond beard.
David raised his gloved hand. “Hey, Mr. Crawford. I sort of knocked her over with a baseball. Sorry.”
Uncle Tommy waved off the apology as he trotted toward us. “Don’t worry about it. Girls always get flustered around good-looking guys like us.”
I blew an indignant pfff through my lips and shook my head.
“Besides, David’s no fool,” Uncle Tommy teased as he righted my suitcase and pulled out the handle. “He probably spotted you a mile away and made a beeline.” He winked before adding, “That’s why you’re gonna go back inside and keep your raging teenage hormones away from my beautiful niece. This young lady is spoken for.”
I wanted to die on the spot. My parents must’ve told him about Eric, my friend who’d recently ambush-kissed me in front of the entire cafeteria. My best friend, Maddie, made the mistake of mentioning it in front of Miranda and the news had reached my mother in a nanosecond. Maybe I should’ve told them that I found out later he’d done it on a dare. I’d hardly call that “spoken for.”
I rolled my eyes and gave David an apologetic shake of my head.
“All right, I’ll catch you guys later. Let me know if you need me to work on your yard this weekend, Mr. Crawford.”
“You got it, David. I know where to find you.”
David gave me a hesitant wave. “Nice meeting you, Kelsey.” And thanks to Uncle Tommy, I couldn’t help but notice he was pretty cute. Minus the braces and shaggy hair, of course.
I waved back. “See you later.”
Turned out later came sooner than I expected. When we returned from Thames Street that night, stuffed full of fish-and-chips and all things delicious, I spotted David’s hunched form on the back porch of his grandfather’s house. The voices of two shouting males rang from inside and met my ears the moment I stepped out of the car.
“Maybe I should go over and see if everything’s all right,” Uncle Tommy said. Before he finished his sentence, Miranda ran over to the fence, grabbed the peaks at the top, and strained on her tiptoes to see over them.
“Hey,” she crowed, “there’s someone sitting out there!”
“Shh! Let go before you knock it over!” I pulled her hand from the fence and held it at my side, the same way Mom used to whenever Miranda tried sneaking candy onto the conveyor at the grocery store. Seeing David had looked up, I waved at him. “Hey. Um, is everything all right?”
“Yeah.” He tried to smile, but only half his mouth cooperated. His hands were jammed in his pockets, and the porch swing creaked back and forth under the weight of his slouched body. “I’m waiting for it to quiet down in there. Sorry.”
Miranda hopped on the balls of her feet, trying to get a better look at him. “Come over and play video games with us! We’re having a tournament! You can be on my team, because my mom stinks.”
Collective laughter rang through the darkness. Leave it to my sister to make clueless cute.
“Sounds good.” David stood up, leaving the wicker swing swaying behind him. “Let me, uh, leave them a note.” He grimaced in the direction of the upper floor, where the shouting raged on.
“If you’d grown up and gotten your act together years ago, you and Mom never would have divorced!”
“Still high and mighty, even with the ink wet on your own divorce papers! I don’t need you and your kid telling me how to run my life!”
I shuddered and gave Miranda a gentle push in the direction of Uncle Tommy’s house. “Go inside and help Aunt Tess set up. I’ll wait for him.” Even with her bubble of obliviousness protecting her, I didn’t want her hearing something she shouldn’t.
David reemerged from the house a moment later, jogging up our driveway with his hands bunched into the pockets of his jeans.
“Sorry about that,” he said, nodding toward the other house. “He’s never been this bad before. It’s . . .” He shook his head and frowned. “Out of control.”
“Hey, don’t apologize. He said it himself; you’re not his babysitter.”
“But it’s getting to the point where he needs one. We’re too far away to come running every time he screws up.”
“Where are you from, by the way?” I started toward Uncle Tommy’s back door, David walking at my side.
“Originally Portman Falls, Connecticut,” he said.
“Oh, not far from us. We live in Norwood.”
David stopped in his tracks. “No way. My dad and I are in the middle of moving to Norwood.”
“Shut up!” I stopped too, and gaped at him.
“I swear. Your uncle helped us find the house.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “It is what real estate agents do. What street are you moving to?”
“Meadowbrook?” He said it like he couldn’t quite remember, but I knew exactly which street he was talking about.
“That’s right around the corner from us! The house next to the big empty field, right? Kind of purplish?”
David grinned. “You mean purplish, scary-ish, and dilapidated-ish? That’s the one. But we’re gonna fix it up—it won’t be an eyesore for long.”
I tilted my head and gave him a quizzical look. “You really need to stop apologizing for things that aren’t your fault. Our place doesn’t exactly look like the White House either. None of the houses in our neighborhood do.”
It wasn’t that Norwood was known for being poor on the whole. But the deeper into it you got, the more obvious it became that someone had forgotten to post a NO BOTTOM-FEEDERS ALLOWED sign. Beautiful houses on generous plots of land eventually gave way to narrowing, woodsy roads; shrinking, unkempt properties; and houses that could fit inside the master suites of the ones you’d driven past five minutes ago.
That was the part we lived in.
“Anyhow, I’m going to Norwood High,” David said. “Are you? Or will you be at one of the private schools?”
“Ha! Private school.” Maybe if I really wanted to feel like a bottom-feeder. I shook my head. “Norwood Public High is good enough for me. If you want, I’ll introduce you to my friends.”
A genuine grin lit his face. “Cool.”
“Kelsey, hurry up!” Miranda called from inside the house.
I wrapped my fingers around the door handle, then paused. “I should warn you—I usually win.”
“Then I should warn you that you need to kiss your winning streak good-bye, because this is the end.”
“We’ll see about that.”
We headed into the house side by side. David was wrong, of course. It was only the beginning.