Page 4 of The Summer We Fell

“Sit, sit,” she urges as if he’s some visiting dignitary.

I run out to the garage for a tub of ice cream from the freezer while Donna brews coffee. I put out cream and sugar while she cuts the pie. These are tasks I complete every single night, but suddenly I feel conspicuous, as if I’m pantomiming them on a stage, because Luke is watching, and his judgment is a tangible thing, making every action I take feel forced and false.

They eat their pie while I start scrubbing pans, and when my gaze catches his by accident, his eyes flicking from my face to the dishtowel with disdain, his thoughts are so obvious it’s as if he’s said them aloud: “I see through you, Juliet, and you don’t fucking belong.”

I’ve tried my best this past year to be kind, gentle, and forgiving like the Allens, but I can’t be that person with Luke. I just can’t.

I narrow my eyes at him. Maybe I don’t belong here, Luke Taylor. But neither do you.

A pleased gleam lights his eyes as if it was the reaction he wanted from me all along.

* * *

After dinner, we go to a party in a gated community, thrown by one of the kids from Westside—the snotty private school Danny attended on scholarship. Danny does his best to include me.

“You remember my girlfriend, Juliet,” he says, and most of them do, but act as if they don’t. That’s what they’re like.

We’re offered beers, which Danny refuses on both my behalf and his. That’s okay, though. What I want more than a regular high school experience is to be like the Allens, to somehow make myself worthy of everything they’ve given me, or better yet and more impossible still—to become one of them. To be a little junior Donna, smiling at the squirrels chasing each other in the yard, wanting nothing more from her day than to bake a pie and sit at the table with those she loves. There’s a peacefulness to her, a contented silence, and I would like some of that silence for myself.

“You’re that girl the pastor took in, right?” asks one guy when we’re introduced. “Didn’t your brother die or something?”

Or something. Like dying is so similar to other outcomes it’s difficult to tease them apart.

I swallow hard. “Yeah.” He died or something.

Danny’s discomfort is worse than the reminder. I’m not sure if it’s because he feels sorry for me, or if he’s simply embarrassed by the connection. When a teenager from Haverford dies, it’s usually because he’s brought it on himself.

We wander outside, where Luke’s seated by the firepit with a beer in one hand and a girl in his lap, though we’ve been here ten minutes at most. Unlike me, he’s already been welcomed into the fold—because playing college ball carries weight that being someone’s girlfriend does not.

“Juliet?” asks the girl beside me. She’s adorable but appears, in no way, to fit in with this crowd. Her blond hair is cut in a neat bob. She’s without a spray tan, false lashes, or makeup. “I’m Libby. My family just moved here, but I just wanted to say I heard you sing in church last week and you’ve got a beautiful voice. I feel closer to God just listening to you.”

It’s the kind of sentiment I’ve never felt even once, so foreign to me I’d assume she was bullshitting if her eyes didn’t shine with sincerity.

She tells me she just finished her freshman year of college. I can’t believe she’s two years older than me, but I suppose that’s because she’s innocent and well-intentioned, and I’m neither of those things.

“Join the choir,” I urge when she mentions she loves to sing. “I need someone else up there who isn’t a thousand years old.”

She laughs and then holds a hand over her mouth as if she’s guilty she did it.

If I were a better person, I’d let Danny go. I’d let him leave me to fall in love with some sweet, pure girl who feels guilty when she laughs at a catty remark, who feels close to God at any point, ever. But I’m not a better person, and I’m not letting him go.

“Hey, Maggie!” a guy shouts to the girl exiting the darkened pool house, still buttoning her shorts. “You sure weren’t in there long. Take me next time.”

She laughs. “I like meals, not snacks.”

Danny has been adamantly “hands off” seeing as I’m underage and my experiences prior to him were mostly unwilling—making the best of a bad situation. But there’s a dazed, stuporous satisfaction on Maggie’s face, the kind I’ve seen in other girls before. I want to know what that’s like. And I want to know what it’s like not to feel sick about it afterward.

I look away and catch Luke watching me, as if he can see through me, as if he knows exactly what I want. And for a moment, there’s a weird energy between us, a heaviness to the air.

“This isn’t really our scene,” Danny says quietly, glancing from Maggie to the guy lighting up a joint to his right. “You want to head out?”

I nod, though the truth is that everything about this is my scene. In a world without the Allens, I’d be an entirely different girl.

Luke throws Danny the keys to the Jeep as we rise. “Don’t wait up.”

The girl in his lap is already sliding her hand into his waistband, and it makes something burn in my stomach. The rest of the world—girls like her and Maggie—get the things they want. They get to drink and dance and…experiment. Why can’t I?

“Goodness is its own reward,” Pastor Dan often says. But right now, it doesn’t feel all that rewarding.