Read Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) for Free Online

name. In one way, she loved that he had bothered with all the nicknames through the years (though she was sad when she heard him call other kids by the same ones). In another way, she wondered what the problem of saying her name was and whether perhaps he had forgotten it.

    She thought of his cheek against her body. How close he came and how far he went while she just waited.

    Now he had said her name and she couldn't decide whether it shortened the distance between them or lengthened it.

    u

    Paul wandered with his beer to the recreation room at the back of the yacht club. He could practically smell his old adolescent sweat.

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

    The floor had a patina of spilled soda and sticky bare feet. Paul remembered how black his feet were throughout his childhood summers, and the approximate moment when his mother started to notice and care. At Riley's house, nobody made you wash your feet before bed. The filth of the yacht-club floor lived not only atop the thick coat of polyurethane but also inside the layers. The paint on the walls was the same. They didn't sand or clean the surfaces here but simply slopped on another coat.

    He loved how dirty and ramshackle their yacht club was. He loved the scummy, giddy air and the cheerful slap of the screen door. He liked the degree of exclusivity: If your check cleared, you were in. He liked that it had no yachts, that in fact the harbor was too shallow to host any.

    It was his father in him, he suspected. A rich boy trying to culti vate his liberalism. But his father had lived it deeper and more vividly, hadn't he? He 'd taken the drugs, posed for the mug shots, made the journey to India to bend his mind. Robbie had grown up in a better age for radicalism. And more than that, Paul knew, when it came to unmoored self-destruction, his father hadn't been faking it. After a three-day disappearance when Paul was four years old, Robbie had died alone of a drug overdose in Bellevue Hospital.

    The green felt on the pool table by the windows was scratched and hopeless from years of play by small amateurs. The Ping- Pong table on the other side of the room was given its proper use only sporadically, when someone remembered to get balls on the mainland. The balls always got lost, dented, or crumpled in a mat ter of days. Paul remembered playing games with super balls and

    � 33 � Ann Brashares

    even tennis balls. Summer days stretched out so long you could easily spend a whole rainy afternoon adapting the Ping-Pong table to a game involving tennis balls. Riley was good at inventing games like that. She liked creating the scenario. Some kids got too attached to the rules, even ones that hadn't existed five minutes before. Riley wasn't like that. She liked rules but she always saw the larger promise.

    The stage with the tattered blue curtain was the venue for the talent show held at the beginning of each summer and the Labor Day show at the end. Paul and Riley did a magic act one year and a boomerang demonstration the next, but both had ended badly. Later, they scorned the shows. As the years passed, it became a chance for girls to wear makeup and sparkly Lycra outfits and lip synch to bad pop songs. By the time they were fifteen or sixteen, Paul and Riley didn't perform; they didn't even bother to go. They made like they forgot it was even happening. They'd hear the char itable applause or the thank-God-it's-over applause make it all the way to the ocean beach and they'd say, "Oh, yeah."

    This room was the home of the kids' movie every Thursday night. The combination of darkness and noise and the crowd of kids, their faces lit up by the film, combined for an almost unbear able excitement. He could never remember the plot of a single movie he watched here, but he remembered the feeling of all of them. When they got older, the kids would gather at movie night but not stay for the movie. It was a big party night for the par ents, so the kids ran wild