We'll Always Have Summer Read Online Free PDF Page A

felt ashamed. Of him and for him. All my friends loved Jeremiah. They thought he was practically perfect. I knew that as soon as I told Anika, all of that would be gone. This would be real.
    For some reason, I still wanted to protect him.
    “Iz, what happened?”
    I’d really thought I was done crying, but a few tears leaked out anyway. I went ahead and said it. “Jeremiah cheated on me.”
    Anika sank onto the bed. “Shut the door,” she breathed.
    “When? With who?”
    “With Lacey Barone, that girl in his sister sorority.
    During spring break. When we were broken up.”
    She nodded, taking this in.
    “I’m so mad at him,” I said. “For hooking up with another girl and then not telling me all this time. Not telling is the same as lying. I feel so stupid.”
    Anika handed me the box of tissues on her desk. “Girl, you let yourself feel whatever you need to feel,” she said.
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    I blew my nose. “I feel … like maybe I don’t know him like I thought I did. I feel like I can’t trust him ever again.”
    “Keeping a secret like that from the person you love is probably the worst part,” Anika said.
    “You don’t think the actual cheating is the worst part?”
    “No. I mean, yeah, that is horrible. But he should have just told you. It was turning it into a secret that gave it power.”
    I was silent. I had a secret too. I hadn’t told anyone, not even Anika or Taylor. I had told myself that it was because it wasn’t important, and then I had put it out of my mind.
    The past couple of years, I sometimes pulled out a memory I had of Conrad and looked at it, admired it, sort of in the same way I looked at my old shell collection.
    There was pleasure in just touching each shell, the ridges, the cool smoothness. Even after Jeremiah and I started dating, every once in a while, sitting in class or waiting for the bus or trying to fall asleep, I would pull out an old memory. The first time I ever beat him in a swimming race. The time he taught me how to dance. The way he used to wet down his hair in the mornings.
    But the was one memory in particular, one I didn’t let myself touch. It wasn’t allowed.
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Chapter Eight
    It was the day after Christmas. My mother had gone on a weeklong trip to Turkey, a trip she’d had to postpone twice—once when Susannah’s cancer came out of remission and then again after Susannah died. My father was with his girlfriend Linda’s family in Washington, DC. Steven was on a ski trip with some friends from school. Jeremiah and Mr. Fisher were visiting relatives in New York.
    And me? I was at home, watching A Christmas Story on TV for the third time. I had on my Christmas pajamas, the ones Susannah had sent me a couple of years back—they were red flannel pjs with a jaunty mistletoe print, and they were way too long in the leg. Part of the fun of wearing them was rolling up the sleeves and ankles. I had just finished my dinner—a frozen pepperoni pizza and the rest of the sugar cookies a student had baked for my mother.
    I was starting to feel like Kevin in Home Alone. Eight o’clock on a Saturday night, and I was dancing around the living room to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,”
    feeling sorry for myself. My fall-semester grades had been eh. My whole family was gone. I was eating frozen pizza alone. And when Steven saw me that first day back home, the first thing out of his mouth was, “Wow, freshman fifteen, huh?” I had punched him in the arm, and he said he was kidding, but he wasn’t kidding. I had gained ten pounds in four months. I guessed eating hot wings and ramen and Dominos pizza at four in the morning with the boys will do that to a girl. But so what? The freshman fifteen was a rite of passage.
    I went to the downstairs bathroom and slapped my cheeks like Kevin does in the movie. “So what!” I yelled.
    I wasn’t going to let it get me down. Suddenly I had an idea. I ran upstairs and started throwing