Summer People Read Free Page A

Marcus followed him out.
    “I don’t appreciate your tone,” Marcus said. He sounded, ridiculously, like a homeroom teacher. Garrett didn’t even turn around. “I’m sorry I’m bumming you out. I don’t want to ruin your summer with your family.” Marcus couldn’t believe he was talking like this. What he’d learned in the past nine months was that the easiest response to other people’s shit was silence. Let his eyes drop to half mast, pretend like he hadn’t heard. Pretend like nothing they said could bother him. Marcus would get his revenge on everyone later, once his book was published.
    “Why did you come then?” Garrett said. “I know my mother offered. But you could have said no. You could have spent the summer at home. Closer to … your own family. Why did you come with us?”
    Marcus felt guilt rising in his throat along with his long-ago-eaten breakfast. He
should
be at home. His father was going through a very stressful time trying to live without Mama. But things at home had gotten so horrible that Marcus needed to escape. At home, the phone was always ringing, the press calling, or people who had somehow gotten their number who wanted to share their feelings about what a monster Constance was. Marcus had lost all his friends, he suffered cold-eyed glares from his neighbors and teachers and people he didn’t even know. He couldn’t get an aspirin from the medicine chest without seeing all of Constance’s half-used make-up, the tubes of lipstick, the skin stuff she loved that made her smell like apricots. He couldn’t walk in or out of the apartment without thinking of Angela and Candy’s bodies bleeding onto the floorboards. The worst had passed—the weeks after the murders when they were forced to stay in that fleabag motel, the humiliating afternoon in the swim team locker room—but Marcus’s life in Queens, his new identity as the
murderer’s son,
suffocated him. His mother was gone forever but at the same time she was everywhere, tainting every moment. He wanted out. On the whiter, brighter side, there was Marcus’s book deal, Mr. Zachary Celtic, true crime editor at Dome Books, the thirty thousand dollar advance that no one knew a thing about except for Marcus and his English teacher. At home, Marcus would have had to get a job. Here, he had the luxury of a summer without work—long days of quiet hours to write the truth about his mother, whatever that was.
    But he couldn’t say any of that to Garrett. He reached past Garrett into the car for his own bag—a black leather duffel that had cost him nearly two hundred dollars. He’d bought it to impress these people, but in the Nantucket sun, Marcus saw it was all wrong. It looked like a drug dealer’s bag with garish brass buckles and a strong smell of leather.
    “I don’t know,” Marcus said. “But here I am. A nigger boy on your turf.”
    Garrett glared at him. “That’s a low blow. You’re calling me a racist, and that’s not what this is about.”
    “What’s it about, then?” Marcus said. He felt himself sweating and worried about the expense of dry-cleaning his new shirt. It was at least ninety degrees out.
    “It’s about us losing our father,” Garrett said. “That’s what this summer is about. That’s what every day has been about since his plane crashed. That’s the only thing anything’s going to be about ever again, okay?” Garrett got tears in his eyes, but because his hands were full, he wiped his face on his shoulder.
    “Okay,” Marcus said. He was proud of himself because he understood not only what Garrett was saying, but what he hadn’t said.
Our father is dead because of your mama. If he hadn’t been defending her, he wouldn’t have gone to Albany. If he hadn’t gone to Albany, his plane wouldn’t have crashed.
Arch was another victim of the day Connie Tyler lost her mind. Marcus wanted to apologize on his mother’s behalf, but apologizing wouldn’t help. If Garrett hated him, Marcus