Summer's Kiss (The Boys of Ocean Beach 1)

Wish you were coming! There’s still time. We don’t leave til the 1st and I talked to Mason. He says you can still come. The choice is yours…call me.

Then from Catherine:

I’m sorry about how things ended between us. I was just shocked and worried. I get now that you were in a weird place but hiding won’t make it better. Face it and own the mess. It’s not the big deal you think it is. No one knows but us and we’re not telling.

My friends mean well, but I wish they would leave the subject alone. They’re leaving for Paris in a couple of weeks (thirty-five days—but who’s counting?) and the willpower it took to walk away from Mason has been the hardest thing I’d ever managed to do. I’d given up a lot for him—spring break, prom, graduation activities…so many things, and now I’m giving up the trip because he’ll be there too and I just…can’t.

I noticed there were no emails from him. There never have been. He couldn’t leave a paper trail or anything tangible to connect us together. I guess texts could be deleted but emails were too risky. At the time I brushed it off. Like a lot of things.

I run my hand between the mattress and the wall and dig out my journal. The photo is of the two of us, a selfie. Both our heads are on a pillow and he’s smiling at the camera while I’m smiling at him. It’s a good photo. A telling photo. Little did I know, within weeks of this photo everything would be a mess. Next to the picture is the airline ticket to France. Still valid. As long as I have it I know there’s a chance. A choice. But choosing him, which is what it would mean, is not an option.

The metal door opens and my mother walks into the camper. I toss the papers back in the book and slide them next to the wall, unable to just trash them like I know I should.

“Get up,” my mother says, seeing me lying on the bed. I notice a bottle of wine wrapped in a brown paper bag in her hand. “Put on something nice.”

“Why?” I ask. I’m not even sure I can. My sunburn is pretty bad. No chance I can wear a bra.

“We’ve been invited to cocktail hour.”

“Cocktails? In a trailer park?”

“Yes, every Monday they have cocktail hour. We’ve been invited.”

“You’re kidding. You want to go?” I can tell by the look on her face she wants to go. What has my life come to? Where is my mall-shopping, suburban, keeping–up-with-the-Joneses mother?

“Oh, I’m going. And so are you.” She starts to undress and I avert my eyes, but not before I see the old jagged scar on her chest. The one she got climbing a fence when she was a kid. In a second, she’s slipped behind the shower curtain and yells, “Twenty minutes. Be ready.”

&n

bsp; Chapter 3

I’m not wearing a bra.

I can’t.

My shoulders and back and chest and that sensitive skin near my armpits is fried. I have on a loose sundress that if I bend over too far will reveal everything. I don’t even care. The pain takes precedence.

“You look like you need something to drink,” an older man says to me. Obviously, he’s older. Everyone here is older. He has on some kind of fishing hat and the tanned skin of the year-rounders. That’s what they’re called, compared to me and my mother, who are just summer people. The year-rounders seem to all be over the age of seventy, except Anita and her extended family. And this guy. He’s more my mom’s age. Anita’s family is exempt anyway because they own the campground. I overheard another woman call the locals “townies.” I suppose she and her family would qualify.

“I had one,” I say, holding up my empty glass. I’m only eighteen but there’s no way I’m hanging out drinkless at a cocktail party full of old people. Not to mention my mother has been crowned queen of the night by the Ocean Beach Family Campground. Once word got around that true crime author Julia Barnes rolled her shiny silver trailer into the campground for the summer, the fans emerged. It’s not really a surprise that a village of vacationers are fans of her books, they’re pretty much as “beach reading” as you can get. One person recognized her from the back of a copy of “Dahmer’s Deaths” and the gossip chain took off. Now she’s sitting in a beach chair, in the middle of a dozen men and women, telling them stories about all her adventures. Nothing makes a better cocktail party anecdote than ritualized murder.

I glance at my mother, who is laughing at something, and then at the bottle of wine the older man has offered and hold up my glass for a refill. He smiles and starts pouring. “I thought so,” he says. “My name is Richard.”

“I’m Summer,” I say and take a gulp of my drink. I’m going to need more than a buzz to get through this. I wish Anita was here but this doesn’t seem like her crowd. We’re clustered on a wide dock owned by the campground. The sun is setting, casting a pretty pink glow on everything.

“So what brings you down for the season?” he asks, and I start to wonder if he’s flirting (ew) but he seems genuine so I let it pass for the moment.

“My mom’s writing a book and I tagged along. We decided to go the scenic route and live with the locals rather than the tourists.”

“Sounds adventurous.”

I glance at my mother. “That’s my mom. Always up for a challenge. Have you met?”

His eyes shift to where my mother is animatedly telling a story of some kind. I swear I hear the name John Wayne Gacy. “We have.”

“Oh well, then you know. She’s the life of the party and all that.”

“She is that.” He gives me a sympathetic grin. “And you’re not?”