Read Sixteenth Summer for Free Online

those people were …”
    “… pretty much everyone in my school,” I said. “It was an end-of-the-year thing.”
    “Yeah …“Will said, trailing off. “And then where does everybody go? For the summer?”
    I opened my arms and gestured to my right and left. Since The Scoop was smack-dab in the center of the boardwalk, there were cafés and candy shops, surf shops and beachmarts on either side of us. I probably knew a kid who worked in every one of the boardwalk’s stores.
    “Oh, yeah, I should have known that,” Will said. “We usually stay home for the summer too. Other people go to the Hamptons or the Catskills or places like that, but we just stay in the city and sizzle. It’s actually kind of fun. New York just empties out every August.”
    I didn’t tell Will that
I
had been in New York in August—and thought I’d never seen so many people smashed into one place.
    “So …,” Will said after popping the soggy end of his cone into his mouth. “I guess you’re going to the thing tonight?”
    “The … thing?” I was confused. Sam had said something about folks going to The Swamp to watch a Braves game later. But how did Will know about …
    “The Movie on the Beach?” Will asked. “I think it’s
Raiders of the Lost Ark
.”
    “Oh,
that
,” I said. “That’s a shoob—”
    I caught myself, then said diplomatically, “That’s the first movie of the summer. They happen every other week.”
    “Pretty cool,” Will said, ignoring my squirming. “Where do they put the screen?”
    “It’s kind of funny,” I said, leaning against the ice cream case.“The guy who does it is a movie nut. He’s the dad of someone I go to school with. And every year he tries a different screen placement. Once he put it on the pier, but the sound of the waves on the wood drowned out the movie. Then he put the screen on these poles literally in the water. But the wind kept blowing it down, you know, like a sail? So he had to cut these little semicircles all over the screen to let the air through. Ever since, the people in the movies looked like they had terrible skin or black things hanging out of their noses, or …”
    I stopped myself. Once again I was putting my foot in my mouth, making fun of something that Will obviously thought was cool. He had no idea that my friends and I only went to Movies on the Beach when there was
absolutely
nothing better to do.
    And when we went, we laughed at the holey screen, or drifted into loud, jokey conversation halfway through the movie, ignoring the glares and shushes of the summer people who found the whole scene so enchanting.
    I could tell Will could see the lame alert on my face.
    “So I guess you have something else going on tonight, then?” he broached.
    I caught my breath. Had he just been about to ask me to the movie? And had I just completely blown it by being snarky?
    Once again I became painfully aware of my father, who’d finished cleaning the milk-shake blender. Now he was loading a fresh tub of Jittery Joe into the ice cream case just to the left of me. He was so close I could feel a gust of cold air from the freezer. The blond down on my arm popped up in instant goose bumps, which only added to the shivery way I was feeling as I talked to Will.
    “Um, well, my friends are kind of having a thing …,” I said weakly.
    “Yeah, that’s cool …,” Will said, stuffing his hands back in his pockets. “I heard about a party going on tonight, too, actually. It’d be funny if it was the same one.”
    I was incredulous. And hopeful.
    “At The Swamp?” I asked—at the exact moment that Will said, “At the Beach Club pool.”
    “Oh,” I said, deflating a bit.
    Of
course
, Will hadn’t heard of The Swamp. The dark little bar and grill, surrounded by an alligator moat, was hidden in a mosquitoey thicket off Highway 80. It had no sign, just a break in the kudzu and a gravel driveway. The only shoobees who ever found it were Lonely Planet types who tromped