Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) Read Online Free PDF Page A

wasn't the kind of thing you did to any old girl. You couldn't take it back. You could try to discount it. You could pretend it hadn't happened. But it was there between them. Thankfully, though (he was thankful, wasn't he?), the rest of the day had seemed to consti tute an implicit agreement to a mutual amnesia.

    His distress and pleasure mixed and married, giving birth to several anxious children. Maybe he shouldn't have come back here. But what else did he have?

    The trick was to have what he had without destroying it, if that was possible. Could you even do that? Every desire fulfilled was thus defeated. Could you interrupt the cycle? Could you make the world hold still?

    There was nothing new in loving Alice. He had always loved her, even when he was mean to her. He remembered it, and he had been told so. He'd loved her before she even realized it. Wasn't that the easiest way to love a person? She was fat and wordless and comforting to him when she was a baby. He 'd carried her around from place to place. His mother's psychiatrist had said that Alice was his transitional object.

    He knew at the age of four when his father died that he wasn't going to be getting any brothers or sisters in the traditional way, and Riley had understood that, too.

    "It's okay," Riley had told him, "you can share Alice."

    � 24 � The Last Summer (of You and Me)

    Riley was his equal, his rival, his flip side, and his best friend. In some ways, he found it hard to distinguish himself from her. They were the same age, and for years they'd been the same size. They'd worn the same pants. He felt disloyal for having kept growing after she had stopped.

    Alice wasn't his friend, though he knew she 'd always wanted to be. She was something else, neither more nor less but not the same.

    When he thought of Alice, especially when he was lying in this bed, he thought often of the summer when he and Riley were thir teen. Old friends and cohorts were turning vain and stupid every where they looked, losing interest in the things that had once mattered to them. Kids like Megan Cooley and Alex Peterson started up spin-the-bottle and truth-or-dare parties in the back room of the village library. Riley hated it, and Paul was afraid of it. What they'd witnessed from their parents made them only more determined to stay on the safe side of adolescence. Alice, at ten, copied her indignation from them.

    As a band of children, they had laid a magical world over the topology of this skinny place, spread it from ocean to bay. It had places and creatures both evil and good, and part of the enchant ment was their power to change sides whenever a good game required it. Both he and Riley realized this world was fragile. It would sink unmarked into the sea if they let it. It required believ ing in, and fewer and fewer people did.

    In outward disgust and inward fear, he and Riley had estab lished a mostly wordless covenant. Bodies were being snatched left and right, but they had each other to remind them what was true. If they kept each other honest, they decided, it would not happen to

    � 25 � Ann Brashares

    them. They would lash themselves to the mast of prehormonal bliss and sail through the storm that way. They'd had the prestige at that time to say, This we know is true. And if ever anyone said it was untrue, they would know that evil was whispered in their ears and the enemy was at hand. They would not talk. They would not give in. They'd carry the poison pill and use it if they had to.

    But what would happen when they came out on the other side of the storm? They hadn't thought it through that far. They hadn't quite considered that by trusting one part of your life, you could undermine all the others. By siding with an early version of your self, preemptively, you would doubt all future selves that conflicted with it.

    Alice had been easy to enlist at the age of ten. Alice, who would grow breasts at thirteen and attune herself to the broader and