Jill Barnett - The Days of Summer

Pom-poms flew into the air and the university cheerleaders tumbled across the wooden floor. The crowd cheered and stomped their feet so loudly you could barely hear the time buzzer. Players and coaches swarmed all over one another, and a teammate ripped Cale’s jersey in two and ran around him, holding the torn piece with his number, twenty-three, high in the air. They shouted, “Banning! Banning! Banning!”

Victor didn’t know he was smiling. He felt something he couldn’t ever remember feeling for Rudy. Maybe a hundred feet stood between Cale and him. They hadn’t spoken since Christmas. He placed one foot in front of the other, closing the distance.

“Cale!” An attractive young blond girl raced down from the bleachers and across the court, her ponytail flying, her long tanned legs running straight toward the knot of Loyola players. She wore a Mount Saint Mary’s sweater and flip skirt, and flung her arms around Cale, who caught her and spun her around, laughing as she kissed his cheeks.

Victor stopped, unable to move forward. Another girl he can throw his future away on. Cale hadn’t learned a thing from last year, from any years. Victor turned away in disgust and walked out of the gym without looking back. He wasn’t there when Cale set his roommate’s girlfriend down and tugged affectionately on her ponytail. And when Cale slung a towel around his sweaty neck and looked around the gym for the one person in his life to whom winning was everything, Victor was already on his way home.

CHAPTER 7

The Island Theater was housed inside the old casino and always busy on the weekends, so Laurel studied the coming attractions on posters lit with small strings of Hollywood lights. A group of girls her age joined the back of the line, chattering. Shannon worked part-time at her mother’s shop, so Laurel stepped out of line and moved toward them, then waited for a pause in their conversation. She tapped Shannon on the shoulder. “Hi.”

“Laurel. Hi. I haven’t seen you in weeks.”

“I’m home for spring break.”

Shannon introduced her, then said, “The town’s going to be really crazy. Spring break always is. The beach gets packed. The bars. Guys and girls all over the place. Parties in the hotels. It’s pretty wild. You haven’t been here for Easter yet, have you?”

Laurel shook her head. “I’m not here much anyway, because of school. Just some weekends and holidays.”

“Laurel already graduated.” Shannon explained to the other girls. “She goes to cooking school in LA. What’s that place called again?”

“Pacific Culinary Institute.” The school was one of only three in the country that offered Cordon Bleu courses and certificates. The classes were small, tuition steep, and they accepted only one out of every few hundred applicants. The administrators and internationally famous instructors there would have cringed at the phrase “cooking school.” One of them could easily have waved a boning knife under poor Shannon’s nose and said, “Culinary institute. Cooking school is for the people who work at Denny’s.”

“You want to be a cook?” one of the girls asked, as if Laurel were nuts.

“I want to be a professional chef.”

“Like the Galloping Gourmet?” One of them giggled.

Shannon gave the girl a pointed look, but Laurel laughed. “Graham Kerr is a good chef.”

“Why would you want to be a chef? You’ll have to work in a hot kitchen, just to cook food for other people? Why not just be a housewife?”

“Ouch!” someone said. “That wasn’t nice, Karen.”

“Well, I mean, isn’t that like being some kind of glorified slave?”

Shannon punched Karen in the arm. “I wouldn’t talk. You said you wanted to be a nurse. I’d rather cut vegetables and take out the garbage than change sheets, give sponge baths, and clean bedpans.”

“You don’t meet cute doctors in a restaurant kitchen.” Clearly Karen had a plan.

At the box office, Laurel paid her admission and stepped aside, waiting for them. They bought their tickets, then the girls looked at her and at Shannon.

“Well, we’re going inside now,” one of them said.

“Do you mind if I tag along?” Laurel spoke to Shannon. A couple of the girls exchanged strained looks. Karen stared pointedly at Shannon. It was one of those long moments of telling silence and Laurel felt awful, but she kept a plastic smile on her face.

“Sure,” Shannon said without much enthusiasm. “Come on.”

The lobby was crowded and the concession counter hummed with activity, surrounded with the crackle of popcorn popping, the hollow rattle of ice in an empty cup, and the whirring of the drink dispenser. It smelled like popcorn and hot dogs and Laurel was hungry almost instantly. A pack of local boys joined them and swept the girls toward the counter. Laurel ordered Coke, popcorn, and Butterfingers, and when she turned around, the two groups had all paired off. Five boys. Five girls. And her. While the others were talking, she edged her way to Shannon and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. You didn’t know we were meeting them.”

“I’ll just ease away. I don’t mind sitting alone,” she lied.

“No,” Shannon grabbed her arm and turned to her boyfriend. “Jake? This is Laurel Peyton. I work for her mom.”

He seemed genuinely nice and before she could sneak away, he introduced Laurel to the other boys. She made some lame excuse and turned to leave, but they stopped her.

“You can’t sit alone.”

The girls weren’t happy. She wasn’t alone, but a few minutes later, when the heavy red curtains parted and the lights dimmed, she decided even sitting alone would have been better than sitting in the middle of a long row of seats with snuggling couples on either side of her.

M*A*S*H flashed on the screen, and by the time Sally Kellerman was Hot Lips, the couple on her right was making out. Laurel set her Coke down and bumped into Karen’s knee. “Sorry.”

A boy’s hand closed over her thigh. Karen’s boyfriend had the wrong girl’s leg. She removed his hand, but they shifted positions and now were leaning on her arm. On her other side, Shannon was locked in a long, deep kiss with her boyfriend. Hunched in the center of her seat, surrounded by lovers, Laurel shoveled handfuls of popcorn into her mouth, ignoring the soft whispers and moans next to her.

The film suddenly fluttered over the screen, then snapped off. The audience groaned and everyone sat in the dark. The lights came on and the manager came out to a round of boos. “Sorry. Sorry. The film’s broken, so there will be free passes for everyone at the box office. But don’t leave your seats. We will be showing Love Story .”

The audience clapped and whistled as the lights dimmed and Ryan O’Neal stood on the huge screen. Both Laurel and her mother had watched every single episode of Peyton Place , her mom always joking that they had to be loyal to the name.

Laurel settled into her seat with the jumbo Coke, the tub of popcorn, and the huge yellow box of Butterfingers to hold on to instead of a boyfriend’s arm. Instead of being in a romance, she would watch one, forced by lousy luck to dream of happily-ever-afters.

The camera panned in on O’Neal, sitting alone in the bleachers as he said, “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died.”

It seemed a cliché, a man sitting at a bar drowning his troubles. But bars supplied the perfect environment to beat yourself up for making stupid mistakes, so Jud was living the cliché in a small beachside bar in Avalon that night. The bartender whipped through drink orders and Three Dog Night blasted from the requisite jukebox in a smoky corner. Deep in the recesses of the place, couples played pool and drank.