When We Had Summer, page 3
Honnnnnnnnk. The cabdriver was now banging on his own steering wheel and shouting something in a language Daniella didn’t recognize, but it was definitely not friendly. Daniella felt her heart start to flutter and her throat tighten.
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, remembering what Dr. Richards had taught her. Picture the forest. Deep and thick and green. Birds chirping. The breeze—
Honnnnnnnnk.
“Why don’t you hop out here?” Daniella’s dad suggested. “I’ll park in a garage and bring your bag up.”
Daniella grabbed her oboe case and threw open the car door, launching herself at the sidewalk. She kept her head down as she ran, convinced the angry cabdriver was going to start screaming at her. When she reached the paved courtyard of the apartment building, she paused for a moment, half expecting Carly to come running through the set of glass doors from the lobby. Grabbing Daniella into a hug so tight it would hurt, but in a good way.
Reality: That was not going to happen again, today or ever. The thought of it made Daniella nearly double over, clutching her oboe case. She might have started sobbing right there if someone hadn’t called out “Daniella!” in a bright, familiar voice.
It was the doorman, stepping into the courtyard to greet her.
“Hi, Joe,” Daniella replied, swallowing hard.
Joe had worked in Carly’s building since before the girls were born. He’d watched Carly grow up and she called him Uncle Joe as a joke, but also not as a joke. He was the one who waited with her for the school bus every day and taught her how to Rollerblade in the basement. When they were six, Daniella was so jealous that Carly had a Joe, she decided she needed one, too. She still remembered the fit she threw when her mom refused to hire a doorman for their house.
“It’s great to see you,” Joe said. He paused, his cheerful expression flickering into something darker and sadder. Daniella recognized it from watching him at Carly’s funeral. It was like one of those lenticular pictures that change when you tilt it, but now Joe was smiling again.
“You too,” Daniella murmured.
“The McFaddens said to send you right on up when you got here.”
Joe pressed the elevator button for Daniella, and she found herself waiting for the doors to slide open so Carly could pop out.
Dear Brain: You’d better stop this crap right now.
She stepped into the elevator and glanced at herself in the one mirrored wall. At the outfit she’d carefully picked out, trying to find the most “city-ish” look she could (denim miniskirt, floral boho blouse). Every Thanksgiving, Daniella and her parents would visit overnight to spend the holiday with Carly and her family. Daniella’s dad was Carly’s mom’s brother. They’d all get up early to find a spot to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. The next morning, they’d go ice skating at Rockefeller Center and see the windows at Saks Fifth Avenue.
Carly loved to style Daniella in some of her clothes and use her tricked-out camera to take photos of their day doing touristy things, pretending she was a fashion photographer. Riding down this elevator, they’d check themselves out in that mirrored wall.
“Look at us,” Carly would say. “We’re awesome.”
And Daniella always knew that in that moment, with Carly, she was.
As the elevator approached the sixth floor, Daniella’s eyes swept over the empty, Carly-less space next to her in the reflection and felt her throat closing up again. She couldn’t do this. There was no way she could spend the summer here. Not where everything around her was a place Carly used to be and wasn’t anymore. Why had she ever thought this would work? What had she been thinking? She could just drop out of the music program. She could—
Ding!
The elevator stopped and the doors opened.
Aunt Tina, Uncle Chris, and her cousin Zoe were waiting on the other side. A family missing a piece. Daniella felt her throat grow tight.
“There she is!” Aunt Tina cried, taking Daniella’s hand and pulling her out of the elevator. “Ready for her NYC adventure!”
Aunt Tina hugged her first, then Uncle Chris.
“Where’s your dad?” Tina asked.
“He should be here any minute with my giant suitcase,” Daniella said, surprised that her voice didn’t crack. She glanced over at Zoe, who was leaning against the wall and staring at her. Zoe was only two years younger than Daniella and Carly, but she always seemed like a totally different species from her sister. The only thing Carly and Zoe had in common was that auburn hair, although Zoe kept hers short.
“Zoe, aren’t you going to say hi to your cousin?” Uncle Chris asked.
Zoe stayed frozen for a few long moments, that laser gaze trained at Daniella. Then, suddenly, she threw herself forward, wrapping her arms tightly around Daniella’s waist. Maybe a little too tightly.
“Come on,” Zoe finally said as she drew away. “I’ll show you my new bed.”
Daniella followed her cousin into the apartment, her aunt and uncle trailing behind. Through the living room and down the hallway, and then before Daniella could prepare herself, they were passing the door to Carly’s room. It was closed, even though a red sign on the door read come in! we’re open! in big white letters. Carly had bought it at a flea market in Ocean Park Heights two, or maybe three, summers ago. Daniella looked the other way and kept going until Zoe opened the door to her own room.
“Voilà!” Zoe said.
The tiny space was almost completely taken up with a bunk bed.
“I’m on the top,” Zoe said. “Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Daniella echoed.
“Mom said, this way I can have sleepovers all the time. Starting with you. This will be like a sleepover that lasts all summer!”
A sleepover that lasts all summer. Aunt Tina had said the same thing to Carly and Daniella, the first year Carly came to stay at the shore on her own for most of July and August. But it had been more than a marathon sleepover. It had given Daniella an almost-twin—five months older than her, but sometimes they pretended it was only five minutes. A taste of what it was like not to be an only child. Even when they got on each other’s nerves and argued over stupid things like forgetting to flush the toilet or borrowing a barrette without permission, Daniella secretly loved it.
Zoe showed Daniella the drawers she’d emptied out for her, the chair she’d set up for Daniella to practice her oboe. Her eyes brimmed with excitement.
Daniella suddenly got it. Why she needed to spend most of the summer in New York. Carly would want her to be there for Zoe, even if staying with her family was going to be hard and strange and sad. Zoe had lost her sibling and Daniella had lost the person she most thought of as one.
They both needed the same thing. I’m not sure Zoe will ever feel like a sister, Daniella thought, but I can totally try to be one for her.
It was midnight, and Zoe was snoring like a sputtery boat engine.
Outside, a siren screeched. Cars honked, probably by more pissed-off drivers shouting in every possible language. Nighttime city sounds were so different from the crickets, cicadas, and distant waves she listened to at home every night, during the hours it took her to fall asleep.
Earlier, after Daniella’s dad arrived with her suitcase, they’d all had a big Chinese takeout dinner together. Then he kissed Daniella on the top of her head and headed home to Ocean Park Heights.
Now she was huddled into Zoe’s bottom bunk. Wide-awake. Trying to do the breathing Dr. Richards had taught her.
In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight.
Four-seven-eight. Four-seven-eight. Toss, turn, repeat.
Usually, at this point, Daniella would prop her phone next to her pillow, dial up the dumbest online video she could find, and hate-watch it until she drifted off. But she didn’t want to wake Zoe, and she couldn’t sleep with earbuds in.
Great. And now she was kind of hungry.
Daniella swished out of bed as quietly as she could, then opened the door just wide enough for her to slip through. Carly’s voice was in the back of her head as she padded to the kitchen: Come on, I know there’s half a pie in here somewhere.
That was another one of their traditions. The night after Thanksgiving, she and Carly would raid the fridge for desserts.
There was no pie, but there was a carton of milk and some fortune cookies left over from dinner. Daniella ate and drank standing at the counter, reading the fortunes.
A cynic is only a frustrated optimist.
You will know it when you see it. It will know you when it sees you.
“Oh, bite me,” she said to the little slips of paper, tossing them in the trash. She cleaned up the crumbs and put away the milk, making sure to destroy all of her snack-scarfing evidence.
She started tiptoeing back down the hallway, but her feet stopped halfway to Zoe’s room. In front of that closed door.
COME IN! WE’RE OPEN!
She wanted to go in so badly, it hurt. Also, she never wanted to go in, ever.
Then Daniella heard footsteps and she froze, heart racing again. A shadowy, bathrobed figure stood at the end of the hallway: Aunt Tina. She shuffled closer and Daniella could see her face. A crease straight down the middle of her forehead. Eyes red from crying. Dark circles beneath them—circles her aunt had never had before.
Now they were both standing outside Carly’s door. Tina smiled slightly, glanced at the sign, then reached out and grabbed the doorknob. She turned it, pushed the door open, then nodded toward the room before continuing on to the kitchen.
Daniella hesitated for a brief moment. Then she stepped inside and closed the door behind her, switching on the light.
It almost took her breath away, how nothing had changed. Like no time had passed since Thanksgiving. Carly could be in the bathroom right then. She could pop in any second, wearing her dad’s old college jersey as a nightshirt, and say, “It’s only twelve? Bruh, the night’s just getting started.”
Carly’s bed was made, but the pillows were too perfectly arranged. Daniella knew her cousin would never have set them up that way. She liked to throw them and let them land wherever. Several strings of fairy lights hung on one wall, with miniature clothespins that each held a photo. Daniella spotted the one from that morning last summer, all of them celebrating the Bucket List.
Her heart pounded faster and her throat started to close again. She couldn’t draw in a deep enough breath.
Don’t start hyperventilating now, she warned herself. Aunt Tina will hear. Also, Carly would freaking hate it.
She crawled onto Carly’s bed, closed her eyes, and started doing her deep breathing. Four-seven-eight. Four-seven-eight. She pictured her forest. Then she pictured a knight holding a sword, dressed head-to-toe in black armor, hiding behind a tree. That was Anxiety Man.
This is my forest! Daniella yelled at him (in her mind). I’m in control and you don’t belong here, so get the hell out!
Amazingly, after she repeated that a few more times, he did.
The whole forest scene with Anxiety Man was embarrassing. It made her feel childish and silly, but it usually worked. She could control her panic attacks now, unlike when they’d first started a month after Carly died. Dr. Richards had really helped her.
Daniella kept breathing, staring at the ceiling, her eyes searching out patterns of shadows against filtered light from outside. Wondering if they were the same ones Carly had seen when she went to bed each night.
Once her heart felt like a normal beating heart, instead of a thing on the verge of exploding, Daniella got up and walked over to Carly’s desk. All her school textbooks and binders were arranged in a definitely non-Carly way. Carly always lined up her binders in rainbow order. Daniella knew this because she’d thought it was so cool, she’d started doing it, too.
A giant bulletin board above the desk was covered in pages torn gently from fashion magazines. Designs that Carly liked and would re-create with her own spin, either from store finds or sewing her own clothes. She had an old dress form that she used for putting together those outfits. Where was it? Daniella scanned the rest of the room, then spotted it half-hidden in the corner, draped with fabrics and vintage clothing.
Daniella went over and touched the edge of the faded black velvet jacket that was hanging on the dress form’s shoulders. She remembered Carly texting a photo of herself wearing the jacket, on the day she discovered it, with the message Thrift store score!
Then Daniella saw the purse.
The shell purse.
Strung diagonally across the dress form the same way Carly always wore it.
Daniella reached for the purse and as it moved, it made that familiar clinking noise, and she drew her hand back. The purse was only halfway zipped. Daniella could see a folded sheet of paper inside. Last summer’s Bucket List, she thought. Last summer when everything was still okay.
She turned away from it, her eyes stinging. Her throat tightening again.
A car honked loudly outside and Daniella froze, that morning last September reaching out, pulling her close.
The four of them on the jetty. Cotton candy and the waves and someone’s broken flip-flop. The Summer Sisters signing their names and watching the sun come up. If someone told Daniella she could live inside one moment for eternity, that’s what she’d pick.
She turned and went back to the shell purse. Slid the zipper all the way open. Pulled out the paper, and unfolded it as carefully as possible, like it was an ancient artifact.
Daniella scanned the page, excited to see Carly’s handwriting.
Wait. No.
This wasn’t what she thought it was.
FOR PENNY, PUBERTY HAD ONLY ONE UPSIDE SO FAR: it meant she got her own room at her family’s beach house.
Okay, it wasn’t a room, exactly. Most people would call it half an attic, maybe a loft if they were being fancy, with a futon tucked into one corner and a small dresser in the other. A musty space up a narrow staircase, where the ceiling was only a few inches from your head and the dormer window didn’t even open all the way.
But Penny called it heaven. No more sharing a room with her brothers, no more locking the door and frantically changing clothes before someone started banging to come in. Penny’s older brother, Nicholas, was sixteen and everything he did, everything he owned, everything he touched actually, smelled disgusting. Her younger brother, Jack, who’d just turned twelve, always stayed up late gaming on his laptop, muttering “Bro!” or “Dude!” into his headpiece microphone every few minutes.
Penny would have slept in the bathtub this summer if it meant having some privacy.
The best thing about the low, slanted attic ceiling: It was great for posters. Or rather, a poster, and Penny had bought the one she knew would make her new space perfect. It was the main art from her favorite animated series, Tomcat Vigilante.
On day three at the shore, with everything else in the house unpacked, Penny was ready to add that finishing touch. She sat on her futon and pulled the poster out of its cardboard tube, then unrolled it slowly, careful not to make a single nick in the paper. With one hand on the top and one holding the bottom, Penny took a moment to admire its awesomeness.
She gasped out loud when she saw it.
There was Tomcat, in all his half-boy, half-feline glory. And there was Tomcat’s sidekick, a striped kitten-girl hybrid named, well, Kitten Girl, known for her curvy figure and airhead personality. But someone had taped Penny’s face on Kitten Girl’s body. Cut out from a copy of her yearbook photo, which on top of everything was the worst picture taken of her ever.
Penny knew what it meant to feel your blood boil. She knew about volcanoes erupting in the pit of her stomach and her brain imploding into fireballs. Every metaphor for feeling rage—as the sister of two brothers, she’d been there. She’d learned how to handle it. But this was different.
This, she felt throughout her whole body at once as a combination of hatred and hurt. They’d gone too far, messing with the one special thing she’d brought to the beach house that summer, her connection to a show that had helped her through her grief over Carly. And then…that body. The huge chest and the big butt. Was that how her brothers saw her? Was that how everyone saw her?
Penny stormed downstairs to the living room, where Nick and Jack were swallowed up in beanbag chairs in front of the TV. They took one look at her and turned to each other, smirking.
“Been decorating your new room?” Nick asked Penny, raising one eyebrow, straight out of the evil supervillain handbook.
Penny opened her mouth to let out the string of creative curse words she had ready, but something stopped her. She knew they were waiting for her to do this. That it was part of the fun. She also knew there was nothing she could say or do that would make them understand or even feel bad for a single second. Besides, Penny had already peeled off the photo—carefully, so carefully—and the poster was now in its place on the wall, looking exactly how she’d imagined it.
“Yup,” Penny replied to Nick. “And it looks amazing.”
This was where, in the past, she’d text Carly to slam her brothers, and Carly would shoot back with some venting about her little sister, Zoe. Daniella and Lainie didn’t have siblings, so Carly was the one who understood.
Now Penny could only offer Nick her best smile, then go find her mom. No way was she going to give him and Jack what they wanted. Also, there was a definite possibility that she’d open her mouth and instead of yelling at them, she’d burst out crying.
Penny heard her mom’s voice from outside and hovered at the screen door in the kitchen. “I don’t buy it…” her mother was saying. “Why can’t you come early Saturday morning?”
Mom was sitting at the picnic table in their backyard, hunched over her phone.
“Lisa,” Penny’s dad said through the phone speaker. “I told you, if they call a weekend meeting, I have to be there. This is just going to be one of those summers where work is more important than going to the beach.”
“Don’t be an ass, Adam. It’s not going to the beach. It’s spending time with your kids. And me.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, remembering what Dr. Richards had taught her. Picture the forest. Deep and thick and green. Birds chirping. The breeze—
Honnnnnnnnk.
“Why don’t you hop out here?” Daniella’s dad suggested. “I’ll park in a garage and bring your bag up.”
Daniella grabbed her oboe case and threw open the car door, launching herself at the sidewalk. She kept her head down as she ran, convinced the angry cabdriver was going to start screaming at her. When she reached the paved courtyard of the apartment building, she paused for a moment, half expecting Carly to come running through the set of glass doors from the lobby. Grabbing Daniella into a hug so tight it would hurt, but in a good way.
Reality: That was not going to happen again, today or ever. The thought of it made Daniella nearly double over, clutching her oboe case. She might have started sobbing right there if someone hadn’t called out “Daniella!” in a bright, familiar voice.
It was the doorman, stepping into the courtyard to greet her.
“Hi, Joe,” Daniella replied, swallowing hard.
Joe had worked in Carly’s building since before the girls were born. He’d watched Carly grow up and she called him Uncle Joe as a joke, but also not as a joke. He was the one who waited with her for the school bus every day and taught her how to Rollerblade in the basement. When they were six, Daniella was so jealous that Carly had a Joe, she decided she needed one, too. She still remembered the fit she threw when her mom refused to hire a doorman for their house.
“It’s great to see you,” Joe said. He paused, his cheerful expression flickering into something darker and sadder. Daniella recognized it from watching him at Carly’s funeral. It was like one of those lenticular pictures that change when you tilt it, but now Joe was smiling again.
“You too,” Daniella murmured.
“The McFaddens said to send you right on up when you got here.”
Joe pressed the elevator button for Daniella, and she found herself waiting for the doors to slide open so Carly could pop out.
Dear Brain: You’d better stop this crap right now.
She stepped into the elevator and glanced at herself in the one mirrored wall. At the outfit she’d carefully picked out, trying to find the most “city-ish” look she could (denim miniskirt, floral boho blouse). Every Thanksgiving, Daniella and her parents would visit overnight to spend the holiday with Carly and her family. Daniella’s dad was Carly’s mom’s brother. They’d all get up early to find a spot to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. The next morning, they’d go ice skating at Rockefeller Center and see the windows at Saks Fifth Avenue.
Carly loved to style Daniella in some of her clothes and use her tricked-out camera to take photos of their day doing touristy things, pretending she was a fashion photographer. Riding down this elevator, they’d check themselves out in that mirrored wall.
“Look at us,” Carly would say. “We’re awesome.”
And Daniella always knew that in that moment, with Carly, she was.
As the elevator approached the sixth floor, Daniella’s eyes swept over the empty, Carly-less space next to her in the reflection and felt her throat closing up again. She couldn’t do this. There was no way she could spend the summer here. Not where everything around her was a place Carly used to be and wasn’t anymore. Why had she ever thought this would work? What had she been thinking? She could just drop out of the music program. She could—
Ding!
The elevator stopped and the doors opened.
Aunt Tina, Uncle Chris, and her cousin Zoe were waiting on the other side. A family missing a piece. Daniella felt her throat grow tight.
“There she is!” Aunt Tina cried, taking Daniella’s hand and pulling her out of the elevator. “Ready for her NYC adventure!”
Aunt Tina hugged her first, then Uncle Chris.
“Where’s your dad?” Tina asked.
“He should be here any minute with my giant suitcase,” Daniella said, surprised that her voice didn’t crack. She glanced over at Zoe, who was leaning against the wall and staring at her. Zoe was only two years younger than Daniella and Carly, but she always seemed like a totally different species from her sister. The only thing Carly and Zoe had in common was that auburn hair, although Zoe kept hers short.
“Zoe, aren’t you going to say hi to your cousin?” Uncle Chris asked.
Zoe stayed frozen for a few long moments, that laser gaze trained at Daniella. Then, suddenly, she threw herself forward, wrapping her arms tightly around Daniella’s waist. Maybe a little too tightly.
“Come on,” Zoe finally said as she drew away. “I’ll show you my new bed.”
Daniella followed her cousin into the apartment, her aunt and uncle trailing behind. Through the living room and down the hallway, and then before Daniella could prepare herself, they were passing the door to Carly’s room. It was closed, even though a red sign on the door read come in! we’re open! in big white letters. Carly had bought it at a flea market in Ocean Park Heights two, or maybe three, summers ago. Daniella looked the other way and kept going until Zoe opened the door to her own room.
“Voilà!” Zoe said.
The tiny space was almost completely taken up with a bunk bed.
“I’m on the top,” Zoe said. “Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Daniella echoed.
“Mom said, this way I can have sleepovers all the time. Starting with you. This will be like a sleepover that lasts all summer!”
A sleepover that lasts all summer. Aunt Tina had said the same thing to Carly and Daniella, the first year Carly came to stay at the shore on her own for most of July and August. But it had been more than a marathon sleepover. It had given Daniella an almost-twin—five months older than her, but sometimes they pretended it was only five minutes. A taste of what it was like not to be an only child. Even when they got on each other’s nerves and argued over stupid things like forgetting to flush the toilet or borrowing a barrette without permission, Daniella secretly loved it.
Zoe showed Daniella the drawers she’d emptied out for her, the chair she’d set up for Daniella to practice her oboe. Her eyes brimmed with excitement.
Daniella suddenly got it. Why she needed to spend most of the summer in New York. Carly would want her to be there for Zoe, even if staying with her family was going to be hard and strange and sad. Zoe had lost her sibling and Daniella had lost the person she most thought of as one.
They both needed the same thing. I’m not sure Zoe will ever feel like a sister, Daniella thought, but I can totally try to be one for her.
It was midnight, and Zoe was snoring like a sputtery boat engine.
Outside, a siren screeched. Cars honked, probably by more pissed-off drivers shouting in every possible language. Nighttime city sounds were so different from the crickets, cicadas, and distant waves she listened to at home every night, during the hours it took her to fall asleep.
Earlier, after Daniella’s dad arrived with her suitcase, they’d all had a big Chinese takeout dinner together. Then he kissed Daniella on the top of her head and headed home to Ocean Park Heights.
Now she was huddled into Zoe’s bottom bunk. Wide-awake. Trying to do the breathing Dr. Richards had taught her.
In for four. Hold for seven. Out for eight.
Four-seven-eight. Four-seven-eight. Toss, turn, repeat.
Usually, at this point, Daniella would prop her phone next to her pillow, dial up the dumbest online video she could find, and hate-watch it until she drifted off. But she didn’t want to wake Zoe, and she couldn’t sleep with earbuds in.
Great. And now she was kind of hungry.
Daniella swished out of bed as quietly as she could, then opened the door just wide enough for her to slip through. Carly’s voice was in the back of her head as she padded to the kitchen: Come on, I know there’s half a pie in here somewhere.
That was another one of their traditions. The night after Thanksgiving, she and Carly would raid the fridge for desserts.
There was no pie, but there was a carton of milk and some fortune cookies left over from dinner. Daniella ate and drank standing at the counter, reading the fortunes.
A cynic is only a frustrated optimist.
You will know it when you see it. It will know you when it sees you.
“Oh, bite me,” she said to the little slips of paper, tossing them in the trash. She cleaned up the crumbs and put away the milk, making sure to destroy all of her snack-scarfing evidence.
She started tiptoeing back down the hallway, but her feet stopped halfway to Zoe’s room. In front of that closed door.
COME IN! WE’RE OPEN!
She wanted to go in so badly, it hurt. Also, she never wanted to go in, ever.
Then Daniella heard footsteps and she froze, heart racing again. A shadowy, bathrobed figure stood at the end of the hallway: Aunt Tina. She shuffled closer and Daniella could see her face. A crease straight down the middle of her forehead. Eyes red from crying. Dark circles beneath them—circles her aunt had never had before.
Now they were both standing outside Carly’s door. Tina smiled slightly, glanced at the sign, then reached out and grabbed the doorknob. She turned it, pushed the door open, then nodded toward the room before continuing on to the kitchen.
Daniella hesitated for a brief moment. Then she stepped inside and closed the door behind her, switching on the light.
It almost took her breath away, how nothing had changed. Like no time had passed since Thanksgiving. Carly could be in the bathroom right then. She could pop in any second, wearing her dad’s old college jersey as a nightshirt, and say, “It’s only twelve? Bruh, the night’s just getting started.”
Carly’s bed was made, but the pillows were too perfectly arranged. Daniella knew her cousin would never have set them up that way. She liked to throw them and let them land wherever. Several strings of fairy lights hung on one wall, with miniature clothespins that each held a photo. Daniella spotted the one from that morning last summer, all of them celebrating the Bucket List.
Her heart pounded faster and her throat started to close again. She couldn’t draw in a deep enough breath.
Don’t start hyperventilating now, she warned herself. Aunt Tina will hear. Also, Carly would freaking hate it.
She crawled onto Carly’s bed, closed her eyes, and started doing her deep breathing. Four-seven-eight. Four-seven-eight. She pictured her forest. Then she pictured a knight holding a sword, dressed head-to-toe in black armor, hiding behind a tree. That was Anxiety Man.
This is my forest! Daniella yelled at him (in her mind). I’m in control and you don’t belong here, so get the hell out!
Amazingly, after she repeated that a few more times, he did.
The whole forest scene with Anxiety Man was embarrassing. It made her feel childish and silly, but it usually worked. She could control her panic attacks now, unlike when they’d first started a month after Carly died. Dr. Richards had really helped her.
Daniella kept breathing, staring at the ceiling, her eyes searching out patterns of shadows against filtered light from outside. Wondering if they were the same ones Carly had seen when she went to bed each night.
Once her heart felt like a normal beating heart, instead of a thing on the verge of exploding, Daniella got up and walked over to Carly’s desk. All her school textbooks and binders were arranged in a definitely non-Carly way. Carly always lined up her binders in rainbow order. Daniella knew this because she’d thought it was so cool, she’d started doing it, too.
A giant bulletin board above the desk was covered in pages torn gently from fashion magazines. Designs that Carly liked and would re-create with her own spin, either from store finds or sewing her own clothes. She had an old dress form that she used for putting together those outfits. Where was it? Daniella scanned the rest of the room, then spotted it half-hidden in the corner, draped with fabrics and vintage clothing.
Daniella went over and touched the edge of the faded black velvet jacket that was hanging on the dress form’s shoulders. She remembered Carly texting a photo of herself wearing the jacket, on the day she discovered it, with the message Thrift store score!
Then Daniella saw the purse.
The shell purse.
Strung diagonally across the dress form the same way Carly always wore it.
Daniella reached for the purse and as it moved, it made that familiar clinking noise, and she drew her hand back. The purse was only halfway zipped. Daniella could see a folded sheet of paper inside. Last summer’s Bucket List, she thought. Last summer when everything was still okay.
She turned away from it, her eyes stinging. Her throat tightening again.
A car honked loudly outside and Daniella froze, that morning last September reaching out, pulling her close.
The four of them on the jetty. Cotton candy and the waves and someone’s broken flip-flop. The Summer Sisters signing their names and watching the sun come up. If someone told Daniella she could live inside one moment for eternity, that’s what she’d pick.
She turned and went back to the shell purse. Slid the zipper all the way open. Pulled out the paper, and unfolded it as carefully as possible, like it was an ancient artifact.
Daniella scanned the page, excited to see Carly’s handwriting.
Wait. No.
This wasn’t what she thought it was.
FOR PENNY, PUBERTY HAD ONLY ONE UPSIDE SO FAR: it meant she got her own room at her family’s beach house.
Okay, it wasn’t a room, exactly. Most people would call it half an attic, maybe a loft if they were being fancy, with a futon tucked into one corner and a small dresser in the other. A musty space up a narrow staircase, where the ceiling was only a few inches from your head and the dormer window didn’t even open all the way.
But Penny called it heaven. No more sharing a room with her brothers, no more locking the door and frantically changing clothes before someone started banging to come in. Penny’s older brother, Nicholas, was sixteen and everything he did, everything he owned, everything he touched actually, smelled disgusting. Her younger brother, Jack, who’d just turned twelve, always stayed up late gaming on his laptop, muttering “Bro!” or “Dude!” into his headpiece microphone every few minutes.
Penny would have slept in the bathtub this summer if it meant having some privacy.
The best thing about the low, slanted attic ceiling: It was great for posters. Or rather, a poster, and Penny had bought the one she knew would make her new space perfect. It was the main art from her favorite animated series, Tomcat Vigilante.
On day three at the shore, with everything else in the house unpacked, Penny was ready to add that finishing touch. She sat on her futon and pulled the poster out of its cardboard tube, then unrolled it slowly, careful not to make a single nick in the paper. With one hand on the top and one holding the bottom, Penny took a moment to admire its awesomeness.
She gasped out loud when she saw it.
There was Tomcat, in all his half-boy, half-feline glory. And there was Tomcat’s sidekick, a striped kitten-girl hybrid named, well, Kitten Girl, known for her curvy figure and airhead personality. But someone had taped Penny’s face on Kitten Girl’s body. Cut out from a copy of her yearbook photo, which on top of everything was the worst picture taken of her ever.
Penny knew what it meant to feel your blood boil. She knew about volcanoes erupting in the pit of her stomach and her brain imploding into fireballs. Every metaphor for feeling rage—as the sister of two brothers, she’d been there. She’d learned how to handle it. But this was different.
This, she felt throughout her whole body at once as a combination of hatred and hurt. They’d gone too far, messing with the one special thing she’d brought to the beach house that summer, her connection to a show that had helped her through her grief over Carly. And then…that body. The huge chest and the big butt. Was that how her brothers saw her? Was that how everyone saw her?
Penny stormed downstairs to the living room, where Nick and Jack were swallowed up in beanbag chairs in front of the TV. They took one look at her and turned to each other, smirking.
“Been decorating your new room?” Nick asked Penny, raising one eyebrow, straight out of the evil supervillain handbook.
Penny opened her mouth to let out the string of creative curse words she had ready, but something stopped her. She knew they were waiting for her to do this. That it was part of the fun. She also knew there was nothing she could say or do that would make them understand or even feel bad for a single second. Besides, Penny had already peeled off the photo—carefully, so carefully—and the poster was now in its place on the wall, looking exactly how she’d imagined it.
“Yup,” Penny replied to Nick. “And it looks amazing.”
This was where, in the past, she’d text Carly to slam her brothers, and Carly would shoot back with some venting about her little sister, Zoe. Daniella and Lainie didn’t have siblings, so Carly was the one who understood.
Now Penny could only offer Nick her best smile, then go find her mom. No way was she going to give him and Jack what they wanted. Also, there was a definite possibility that she’d open her mouth and instead of yelling at them, she’d burst out crying.
Penny heard her mom’s voice from outside and hovered at the screen door in the kitchen. “I don’t buy it…” her mother was saying. “Why can’t you come early Saturday morning?”
Mom was sitting at the picnic table in their backyard, hunched over her phone.
“Lisa,” Penny’s dad said through the phone speaker. “I told you, if they call a weekend meeting, I have to be there. This is just going to be one of those summers where work is more important than going to the beach.”
“Don’t be an ass, Adam. It’s not going to the beach. It’s spending time with your kids. And me.”
