Personal Touch Read Free Page B

life—imagine loving David who loved Margaret forever—but by the next Monday the crush was all gone and David was just another pleasant kid in my algebra class.
    “I think you actually like Tim,” I accused David. “I thought you would have higher standards.”
    David laughed. “I think Tim qualifies for high standards. I went sailing with him a couple of times last year. He’s a lot of fun. He never wants to do anything the way anybody else does it. I wouldn’t want to be in a sailing race with him; he’d have to make up his own course and he’d get disqualified. But just to sail with—gosh, Sunny, we had a blast.”
    “I don’t want to hear about it,” I said.
    “He just has too much energy,” said David.
    I thought that “energy” was a very kind word for what Tim had too much of. I closed my eyes to stare up through my lids into the sun. Prisms of rainbow colors chased themselves across my eyes. What dumb fantasies I have, I thought. I know what rich summer boys are like. They’re like Tim. Spoiled rotten. I’ve got to stop pretending I want to date a handsome, rich, gallant, yacht-owning summer boy. I’ve got to begin looking for someone nice and ordinary and pleasant like old David.
    Except that all the pleasant old Davids were taken.
    Abruptly, David and Margaret got to their feet, synchronized like twin watches, and shook the sand off themselves. Would I watch their cassette for them, they asked, they’d be back in a little while. Holding hands, they strolled down the beach toward the Point where gnarled old pines make a private grove.
    “They didn’t even have to ask each other if they felt like it,” said Ginnie. “They just knew they wanted to go off and make out.”
    I kicked the sand.
    Keeper of the cassette, that was me.
    And this summer? Would I be keeper of the bookstore, while the Margarets I knew were off with their boyfriends?
    “I’m not jealous,” said Ginnie. “Sunny, tell me I’m not jealous.”
    “You’re not jealous,” I told her. “But I am.”
    We fell back on the sand and giggled. It was a relief not to be the only girl not dating.
    “It’s like field hockey,” said Ginnie.
    “What is?”
    “Not dating. When the captains start picking their teams and you’re the one still sitting on the gym floor because no captain in her right mind would want you on her team.”
    “Oh, how depressing,” I said. “Ginnie, don’t talk like that. I’m always the one left on the gym floor. Captains of basketball, soccer, field hockey and softball all pray somebody else will get stuck with me. I couldn’t go on living if I thought dating was going to be like that, too.”
    “You could always go back to Leland,” suggested Ginnie.
    “Oh, well, Leland,” I said. “Those weren’t dates. Those were cooking sessions.” Ginnie and I lay on the blankets talking about boys and school and the summer to come and I knew and she knew that what we were really thinking about was David and Margaret off in the pines.
    When David and Margaret sauntered back down the sand, Ginnie said, “Funny. They—don’t look different.”
    I knew what she meant. You’d expect stars in their eyes. At the very least, mussed-up hair.
    David and Margaret could have been off buying charcoal briquets for all the romance in their eyes.
    “I don’t want to be that settled. I want to whip around some,” Ginnie told me. “My mother says thirty is a good age to be settled.”
    “And there are David and Margaret settled at sixteen,” I agreed. “Well, I don’t want to be settled, Ginnie, but I sure would like to be attached!”

2
    I N MAY THE STORES began opening for the season and the summer residents began sifting back into our lives. My father was terribly busy wrapping up the school year and my mother was totally involved with starting up Chair Fair again.
    In May Mr. Hartley told me that summer people don’t read books in the morning. At first I did not think that was particularly useful