Personal Touch Read Online Free PDF

exist another minute without me around. Not one person had come in begging me to rearrange my schedule because he could not possibly go sailing all day without me. Not one person passing me on my bicycle on my way to work, old halter-clad, porcelain-slender me, had jammed on his brakes and shouted, “There she is! I must have her!”
    If I went with Leland to a movie, at least the following September when somebody asked if I did anything during the summer I could say I dated.
    Also, I got to see a movie. And if I knew Leland, I got to eat all sorts of things all the way through it.
    I shelved some returns to give myself time to think. Leland sat and perspired all over my stool.
    I had had four months of Leland. The winter before Leland I’d had three dates and the spring after Leland I’d had three more. And every one of them had been a date with a boy I really wasn’t very impressed with. Dates just so I could say, Yes, of course I date. Just accepted because I wanted to appear popular.
    I still wanted to appear popular. Even more, I wanted to be popular.
    But four months and six dates were enough of pretending, I decided. Any dates I had this summer would be real ones. I shelved along with the books a strong worry that any dates I had this summer would strictly be fantasies. “Leland, I can’t,” I told him. “I’m so tired by the time I get out of here I can barely stagger home. Thanks anyway, though. It’s nice of you.”
    Leland didn’t hang around.
    Second Time Around is pretty hot for hanging.
    I sold Silhouette romances to a blue-haired old lady, two gardening manuals to a big, chesty woman, and some used comic books to a giggly little boy.
    This is my famous sixteenth summer, I thought, wiping the perspiration off my forehead. Whoopee!
    Eloise came in one day that week. She needed some paperbacks to keep in her toll-booth. She had wised up to the fact that nothing remotely interesting was going to happen to her this summer either, so she might as well read about somebody else having a good time.
    Ginnie came in for an armload.
    “You can’t read,” I protested. “You’re a lifeguard. What if someone starts drowning when you’re engrossed in that spy novel?”
    Ginnie was past tan into permanent peeling sunburn. She said, “Don’t be silly, Sunny. I don’t read while I’m working. I read all the rest of the time when there’s nothing else to do.”
    I distinctly recalled a long lunchtime conversation we’d all had in which we made great romantic plans for our sixteenth summers. “Yeah,” said Ginnie glumly. “Take it from me, Sunny. The only people staying at the Holiday Inn this year are under nine or over forty.”
    Margaret was in Friday. She had a free hour between Arts and Crafts classes and while she was supposed to be using it to prepare for Basketweaving for the tens to twelves, she’d rather swing in the hammock and read. “How’s David?” I said. I bet they’d gotten the perfect tans together.
    “I don’t know. We broke up.”
    I nearly melted from the shock. “You and David broke up?”
    “Yes. It was boring, you know.” She chose a spy novel whose cover promised page after page of unrelenting wild passionate excitement as the KGB chased the CIA over the ice cap. “I felt like an old woman around David,” she told me. “I mean, I’m sixteen. I don’t want to act thirty all the time. I can do that when I’m thirty.”
    I didn’t know whether to feel pleased that we’d all been right and they were a settled dull pair or sad that the one and only decent romantic couple in my group had failed.
    “Is this a good book?” demanded Margaret, waving her spy novel at me.
    I never read spy novels. I keep what I read under the desk because it embarrasses me. I read Westerns. At some point in every Western the good guy will swing the young maiden he’s rescuing onto a horse. Speaking as one who has known a few horses, I’d say that’s a brilliant achievement, as horses are