Gracie said the first thing that came into her head. “Let’s call the cove Chuck.”
“Because…?”
“Because you throw things into it.” Was she making any sense at all?
He nodded, considering, then broke into a ridiculous, light-filled, hideously beautiful smile. “Perfect.”
The ride home was like a kind of punishment—cool air rushing through the windows, the radio turned down low, this strange, unwanted feeling beating a new rhythm in her chest. The dark road spooled out in front of them. She wished she were home. She wished they would never stop driving.
Eli’s transformation was a betrayal, a bait and switch. Eli Cuddy was supposed to be safe, and now he felt dangerous. She cast around for someone else to want. She’d had a crush on Mason Lee in the ninth grade, and she made Lila take her up to Okhena Beach, where he was lifeguarding, in the hope that seeing him might jolt some sense into her. Unfortunately, the only amazing thing about Mason was the way he looked with his shirt off. He was like a golden retriever. She understood the appeal, but that didn’t mean she wanted to take him home.
Mornings when she knew she was going to see Eli felt suddenly breathless and full of possibility. She bought a new shirt in lush, just-dusk purple, picked out slender silver earrings in the shape of feathers, bought apple-blossom lip gloss because it looked like something magical in its pink-and-gold tin, and when she touched her fingers to her mouth it felt like an incantation. See me. See me the way I see you.
Gracie knew she was being stupid. If Eli liked her as more than a friend, he’d never given her any clue. He might even have a girlfriend in the city who he wrote long letters to and made out with between classes. He’d never said he did, but she’d never asked him. It had never mattered before. She didn’t want it to matter now.
The summer took on a different shape—a desperate, jagged shape, the rise and fall of a dragon’s back. The world felt full of hazards. Every song on every album bristled with portent. She found herself trying to communicate through the records she chose, and interpreting the ones that he chose as code. She forced herself to spend more time with Mosey and Lila, and at Youvenirs, cleaning things that didn’t need to be cleaned, battling her new greed for Eli’s company. But was it new? From the first, her hours with Eli had been warm sand islands, the refuge that had made the murky swim through the rest of the year bearable.
She was torn between the need to say something, to speak this thing inside her before summer ended, and the conviction that she had to avoid that disastrous course of action at all costs. For the first time, she found herself counting down the days until September. If she could just make it to Labor Day without letting her heart spill out of her lips, she’d have the whole school year to get over this wretched, ridiculous thing that had taken her over.
On the Saturday before Labor Day, Gracie and Eli watched the closing fireworks above Greater Spindle. They sat next to each other on the edge of the truck, knees almost touching, shoulders brushing.
“I wish you had a phone,” she said, without meaning to.
“Me too. Sort of.”
“Only sort of?”
“I like saving up all the things I want to tell you.”
That has to be enough, Gracie told herself, as blue and silver light washed over the sharp gleam of his features. That should be better than enough.
It got easier. She missed summer. She missed Eli, but it was a relief to be free of the prospect of seeing him. She went to junior prom with Ned Minnery, who was funny and played trumpet. He loved puns. He wore suspenders and striped pants, and did magic tricks. He was the anti-Eli. There was nothing serious about him. It was a fun night, but Gracie wondered if maybe she wasn’t any good at fun. She drank enough peach schnapps to talk herself into kissing Ned, and then got sick by the side of the road.
When Memorial Day came around, she felt ready to see Eli, but she didn’t let herself go to the Dairy Queen. She couldn’t have that kind of summer again. She wouldn’t. She went to Okhena Beach instead, planted herself next to Mosey and Lila on the sand, and stayed there as the sun sank low and the opening weekend bonfire began. When someone brought out a guitar, she found a spot atop a picnic table a little way off, bare feet on the bench, shivering in her sweatshirt. I’m fine, she thought, telling herself she’d rejoin the others by the flames in just a minute. I’m good. But when she saw Eli walking toward her with those long, loping strides, his hair bright in the firelight, face eager, carrying that stupid backpack, all those months of hard work vanished. How had he even gotten to Greater Spindle? Were his parents letting him use the car now? Longing unfurled inside her, as if it had just been waiting for the warm weather to be aired out.
He sat down beside her and said, “You’re not going to believe what I found today. The Hall of Records has a whole collection of spoken-word albums behind the Christmas section. It’s amazing.”
Gracie made herself laugh. “Can’t wait.” Did you miss me? Did you kiss anyone? I did, and it was terrible.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t spend another summer this way. It would drive her insane. She would make up some excuse—emergency hours at Youvenirs, a cholera outbreak. Whatever it took. She pulled the pot of apple lip balm from her pocket. It was nearly empty, but she hadn’t bothered to buy more. It was too embarrassing to remember the things she’d let herself think when she’d paid for it.
Eli snatched it from her palm and hurled it into the darkness, into the lake.
“Hey!” Gracie protested. “Why would you do that?”
He took a deep breath. His shoulders lifted, fell. “Because I’ve spent nine months thinking of apples.”
Silence dropped around them like a curtain. In the distance, Gracie could hear people talking, the lazy strum of guitar chords, but it was all another country, another planet. Eli Cuddy was looking at her with all of his focus, his blue eyes nearly black in the firelight. That hopeless thing in her chest fluttered, became something else, dared to bloom.
Eli’s long fingers cupped her face, traced the nape of her neck, kept her still, as if he needed to give her every bit of his attention, as if he could learn her like a language, plot her like a course. Eli kissed Gracie like she was a song and he was determined to hear every note. He kissed her the way he did everything else—seriously.
Now summer was round and full, fruit ready to burst, a sun emerging fat, yellow, and happy from the sea. They kissed behind Youvenirs, in the red velvet seats of the Spotlight, on the floor of the record room—the sound of static filling the headphones around their necks as some song or other reached its end.
“We could go to your house,” she suggested.
“We could go to yours.”
They stayed where they were.
On afternoons, when they left the DQ, Eli’s lips were cold and tasted like cherry. On balmy evenings, when they lay on the banks of the cove named Chuck, his hands were warm and restless. Gracie floated in her sandals. She felt covered in jewels. Her bicycle was a winged horse.
But sometime around the end of July, Gracie heard the drone of the insects turn sorrowful. Despite the heat and the sunburned backs of her thighs and the neon still lit on the main road, she felt summer begin to go.
At night she’d hear her mom and Eric laughing in the living room, the television like gray music, and she’d curl up on her side, that narrow panic settling in. With Eli she could forget she was seventeen. She could forget Little Spindle and what came next. A page out of her mother’s life, if she was lucky. A car loan so she could go to community college. Watching the kids from her school leave for other places, better places. She wished Eli had a phone. She wished she could reach out to him in the dark. We could write letters. I could take the train to New York on the weekends. At night she thought these things, but by the next afternoon Eli was bright as a coin in the sunlight and all she wanted was to kiss his studious mouth.