The Summer of Skinny Dipping, page 1
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2010, 2019 by Amanda Howells
Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Belle & Bird Design
Cover image © Caiaimage/Francis Pictures/Getty Images
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Southampton
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Indigo Beach
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Georgia
Seventeen
About the Author
Back Cover
There are summers you’ll always remember and summers you’ve forgotten even before they’re through. It’s never an in-between season. Whole months can slip by, and you don’t know what you did or where you were. June, July, August, they’re all the same.
This is the other kind.
Long after that summer ended, I stayed stuck inside it, reliving that night, over and over, and everything that led up to it. Sometimes I still wake up shivering in the early hours of the morning, drowning in dreams of being out there in the ocean, of looking up at the moon and feeling as invisible and free as a fish.
I know I am different, and yet, in a way, I’m still the same, only more myself now, because that’s what happens when your life changes so completely. It takes pieces of you that you kept deeply hidden, even from yourself, and forces them to the surface like splinters working their way out of your skin.
But I’m jumping ahead, and to tell the story right, I have to go back to the very beginning. To a place called Indigo Beach. To a boy with pale skin that glowed against the dark waves. To the start of something neither of us could have predicted, and which would mark us forever, making everything that came after and before seem like it belonged to another life.
My name is Mia Gordon: I was sixteen years old, and I remember everything.
Southampton
One
“This is terrible,” Mom moaned, fussing with her hair as we inched down the Long Island Expressway, a line of cars as far as the eye could see. “When will we start moving?” she asked Dad. “Or will we have to spend the summer in the car?”
“Do I look psychic?” Dad replied in a rare moment of irritability. “This is your home turf, not mine, Maxine.”
We were all irritable. The heavy New York heat rolled over us like a carpet, so humid it constricted lungs and seemed to lick armpits. We’d been driving for days, and ever since the car’s AC gave out somewhere near Pennsylvania, everyone had been losing it.
Dad had said that driving to New York would be an “adventure” and that we’d “need an extra car” at my cousins’ house. But we all knew it was more about keeping costs down. Four airline tickets were nothing to sniff at for Dad, especially since his hardware business was struggling and his retirement savings had tanked in three months—along with everyone else’s since the economy had taken a nosedive.
“This sucks,” my sister, Eva, whined. She blew a giant bubble with her gum that exploded, leaving bits of stickiness across the back of my mother’s headrest.
“Eva Marie, stop that!” Mom said. “And watch your mouth, sweetheart. It’s not pretty to speak that way, and you need to behave well in front of your cousins, please.”
This was about the angriest my mother ever got with Eva, the family brat and apple of Mom’s eye. Eva was nine, and she had the biggest, bluest eyes imaginable—so big and so blue they could take her “all the way to Hollywood,” or so my mother never stopped telling her. Eva had been named after Eva Marie Saint, the actress from that old movie On the Waterfront.
I’m also named for an actress: I’m named after Mia Farrow, but unlike Eva, I look nothing like my whisper-thin, blond namesake. Luckily for Mom, she got what she had always wanted with her second kid: a beautiful replica of herself, who could live out the fantasy Mom had always dreamed of but never followed: to be a star. The last thing I would ever want to be.
“Mia, do you want me to put the radio on?” Dad asked. I caught Dad’s eye in the rearview mirror and smiled because Dad was always tuned in to me. So on the favoritism front, you could say things even out.
“Not that station,” I said quickly as the radio static turned to something recognizable. “I hate that song.” “Forever” was actually one of my favorites. Until six weeks ago, when my boyfriend, Jake, had dumped me.
• • •
“I didn’t plan this,” Jake said.
We were standing outside school. I was trying not to look at Jake because I knew if I looked at him, I would cry. I stared at his shoes instead.
“It’s just getting to be too serious too fast between us. I need space.”
“So that’s why you’re hooking up with Gabi? To get space?” I spat back. “How does that work?” I lifted my gaze and stared him down, picturing Gabi Santiago draping her leggy body all over my boyfriend. “Correction,” I snapped. “There is a lot of space when it comes to Gabi. Between her ears.”
“You’re going away for the summer. Gabi is here.” Jake looked embarrassed. “It’s just timing.” He shifted awkwardly, rolling a skateboard back and forth under his foot like he couldn’t wait to roll on out of there and away from me. “Mia, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
But I thought I loved you! Even thinking the word love made me feel sick. This boy whom I had fallen for the minute I’d laid eyes on him. My first boyfriend. We’d only been together two months, but it had felt like forever. The way love should feel.
“How long has this been going on?” I asked, my voice low and hard. “What exactly is the timing of this relationship?”
“It’s not a relationship, Mia, I—” Jake began lamely, but I was done.
“Save it,” I choked out. I wheeled around and walked away, my eyes filling with tears. I didn’t want to know any more. Jake was a cheater. I could see it in his eyes. I could hear it in his voice. Not that it mattered anymore. Because the relationship I’d thought was real had never existed. Jake could spin it any way he liked, but I obviously hadn’t meant anything to him. I was just holding him back. If only I had held back from him! If only I could take back the three words I had said to him just last weekend, the words that had come tumbling out of my mouth.
But once you say something like that, you give something you can never get back.
• • •
“Who wants a snack?” Dad had pulled into a gas station that advertised homemade ice cream.
“Rhetorical question,” I said, brightening. Who cared about Jake? He was far away now. And I’d promised myself I wouldn’t think about him. I was on a vacation from heartbreak. I planned to treat myself to things that made me feel good instead. Like ice cream on a hot summer’s day. But then Mom shot me one of her typical downers.
“Honey, snacking between meals is not the way to slim down.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said dryly. “I forgot. You put me on a diet.”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” Mom snapped. “I’m just trying to help you.”
“Why do I keep forgetting that?” I shot back, but under my breath, because there was no point in making my words loud enough to hear. Mom would never get it: I was never going to be like her, thin as a toothpick. Graceful. Elegant. Small boned. Not unless I became anorexic. Which is probably her big dream, I thought angrily.
“Your new top looks very…tight,” Mom had said to me one night as Jake and I were leaving for a party at my friend Kristin’s. I’d bought a tank—something much more tight-fitting than what I usually wore, and Mom evidently thought I should go back to hiding my shape. “I just don’t think clingy tank tops suit your build,” Mom added. She thought she was speaking in a low voice, but Jake overheard her as he waited on the landing.
“You’re wrong, Mrs. Gordon. Mia rocks everything she wears,” Jake had said.
My mother was stunned and said something frosty in reply, something about young men not standing too close to girls’ bedrooms while they got dressed. But Jake just smiled at me, his dark eyes warm and appreciative. He was there for me. Was. But not anymore. He had changed. Or maybe the real Jake was the lightweight who had stood with one foot on his skateboard ready to roll out of my life as fast as he had rolled into it, the new kid in town, the new boy in class, the first boy I’d ever cared about…
“Chocolate or vanilla?” Dad broke into my moody thoughts, leaning into my open window after parking at the gas station. “Or maybe you want to come in and see what else they have?” I shook my head. My mother. One sentence from her lips, and my appetite was instantly suppressed.
Once the car was on the road again, my spirits climbed with the speedometer. Every mile brought me closer to the ocean, and once I was in it, even my mother couldn’t spoil it for me. I’m a good swimmer, and ocean swimming is my favorite kind. But we live in Athens, Georgia, and hadn’t been up to my cousins’ Hamptons beach house for several summers. Dad had expanded his hardware store when the construction business boomed, so he wanted to keep an eye on things year-round, especially during the summer when it got really busy.
There was the beach not too far away, but Mom would never think of staying there for even a weekend. She said it was “too blue collar,” so that was that. Summers were spent at home, with chlorine substituting for salt, and, instead of soothing ocean sounds, the buzz of neighborhood lawn mowers accompanying each stifling suburban day.
But not this summer. “Business is so dead that we might as well enjoy the lull,” Dad had announced to me and Mom. “We’ll go up to New York this summer.” And even though I knew Dad was worried about the store, I also knew he was glad to get away, that we all needed a break from home.
“Almost there,” Dad said, as after what seemed like forever we finally took the turnoff and headed east along the south fork of the island. Off expressway. Yippee! I texted my cousin Corinne.
“Thank God!” Mom smiled, and so did I as we exited the Long Island Expressway and cut along Sunset Road. Then we were on the Montauk Highway, inching closer toward the ocean. Still too far to see the water, but I could feel it getting closer. Just a little farther to my right were the barrier islands, tracing a long, skinny finger shape on the map, parallel to the mainland. Here the Hamptons beaches lie like a string of pearls, separated from the rest of Long Island by bays of blue water, connected only by long, thin bridges that lift you up and over toward paradise, leaving the rest of the world far behind.
Cool salt breezes swept through the stale heat of our car and I took a deep breath, inhaling like I hadn’t breathed in years. Two months. Most of July and the whole of August. Eight weeks spent between the water and the beach, wearing the same pair of cutoffs every day and not caring. Best of all, it would be eight weeks of chilling out with my cousin Corinne.
Can’t wait, cuz! I scrolled through old texts Corinne had sent me. Another summer w/out u and I’ll kill Beth! If we weren’t texting, we were emailing, and if we weren’t emailing, we were calling, with Corinne gossiping about her annoying older sis, Beth, and me snarking on about Mom and Eva.
Corinne is only two months older than me, and every summer of our childhood we’d been inseparable. We hadn’t seen each other for three years, since she lived in New York City and we hadn’t come up in so long. But now we would be together again.
Except that Corinne had been unreachable lately. I stared at my phone, wondering why I hadn’t received any messages from Corinne all month. The last I’d heard from her was after Jake broke up with me. I’d badly needed to talk to her. I knew she would have the right words to comfort me. She’d had serious boyfriends since she was thirteen. But after calling and emailing a two-page letter, all I got from her was a quick text: Don’t cry cuz. Always more fish in the sea!
More fish in the sea. Was that really all she had to say? I shifted in my seat, the sweaty plastic unpeeling from the small of my back. It was kind of weird that Corinne had gone out of range like that, no words in weeks. But as the car slowed down, my mood kicked into a high-octane leap. Soon I wouldn’t have to think about texts and phones. Soon I’d be seeing my cousin in the flesh, and when we were together, we’d be back in our old finish-each-other’s-sentences groove.
“There they are!” Mom trilled, sticking her hand out the window as we drove through the open gates and up the gravel-chipped driveway to Wind Song, my Aunt Kathleen and Uncle Rufus Drexel’s home in Southampton. “We’re here!”
Before Dad had even stopped the car, I was out, sprinting across soft green grass. My aunt and uncle waved from the porch. Corinne and Beth were lying next to the pool.
I flew toward my cousins, shrinking time with each footstep, or that’s what it felt like. All the lost years would be caught up in an instant. Corinne and I were two peas in a pod, both loving nothing more than to be barefoot and on the beach. We were also alter egos: skinny and solid, loud and silent, always together. It had always been that way, and this summer would be no different. We’d be best friends again in a nanosecond, and it would be like no time had ever passed between us.
Or so I thought. Corinne propped herself up on slim brown forearms. She shot me a lazy, sun-baked smile, held up a long-fingered hand, and gave a small wave. “Cuz! Come down here so I can kiss your cheek. I just poured lotion all over.”
“Hey, Mia,” Beth chimed in her soft, high, breathy voice. “We thought you’d only get here this evening.”
“Didn’t you get my text?” I said to Corinne.
“Bethy and I have ditched our cells this summer,” Corinne replied. “The whole of New York texts us, like, every minute.”
“We are so over being glued to the freaking phone,” Beth added. “It’s insane.”
“So we made a pact,” Corinne added. “We’re detoxing. We need a break from everyone.”
“Oh,” I said, the phone in my pocket feeling suddenly like the deadweight that it was. Now I knew why Corinne had been so silent. Her break from everyone had included me. “I uh, look really disgusting,” I said, babbling to cover up the awkwardness I felt, having sent messages that no one wanted to receive. “It was boiling in the car. I’m dying for a shower.”
“Hurry back.” Corinne adjusted her sunglasses, looking anything but hurried herself.
“Okay.” I tried to appear unfazed, but a wave of disappointment washed through me. It wasn’t just the lukewarm greeting. It also had something to do with the fact that Corinne and Beth, who’d never got along, now appeared tighter than tight. Not that I wanted them to be enemies. But somehow their being best buddies didn’t seem right.
Whenever we’d all been together in the past, Beth had always been the third wheel, too precious and prissy for Corinne and me—especially Corinne. When I’d last seen Beth at fifteen, she’d been the same as she had been as a kid—terrified of getting her hands dirty, constantly brushing her hair, and always sweetly smiling in a way that made her seem very pleased with herself, like she’d accomplished something amazing just by existing on the planet.
Corinne, on the other hand, was a spitfire. I’d always gotten off being near her wild, impulsive spirit. She’d made me feel like I was more alive just for being near her. Now I wasn’t so sure. The two of them were mirror images—long legged, tanned, glowing and…I don’t know…poised, or something.
As I turned away from my cousins, I knew that only one thing was for sure: if any of us was going to be a third wheel that summer, it would be me.
• • •
“You get your own room this time, Meemsy,” Aunt Kathleen said to me, taking my arm and leading me along the second-floor hallway. I smiled as she used the nickname she’d given me when I was little. “Corinne has a friend coming,” she added.
Own room…I had hoped for old times, long nights spent talking with Corinne in the dark. But I would be getting my own room now, whether I wanted it or not. Next door, Corinne would be sharing with her friend. A friend she’d neglected to mention to me.
