Diana Peterfreund - Rites of Spring (Break)

I looked back at the board. He’d hit the bull’s-eye. “Good shot.” I held up a thick paperback. “What about Catch-22 ?

He looked down at the darts in his hand. “Do you think—?”

The door opened. “Amy!” Demetria called. “There you are.” Half my club trooped in, looking famished and beachy. Everyone wore bathing suits and the appropriate cover-ups (except for Clarissa, whose itsy-bitsy pink bikini and white mesh cover-up were hardly G-rated), sunglasses, and hats, and smelled strongly of suntan lotion. Ben even had zinc smeared on his nose.

I suddenly felt way overdressed in my shorts, sports bra, tank top, and sneakers.

“Clarissa figured you were hiding so we wouldn’t force you on the boat,” Jenny said. “Do you know when breakfast is?”

Darren checked his watch. “About fifteen minutes.” He walked over to me and looked at the book in my hands. “I read Heller last year. Try again.”

This was trickier than I’d thought. Darts forgotten, we traveled down the length of Cavador Key’s collection, which I noticed was pretty much devoid of women writers (with the exception of Ayn Rand, who was present in an almost unhealthy abundance). No Austen, no Alcott, no Ahrendt. And that was just the As. No Brontë, no Behn. Somebody needed to shake up these shelves. Mary Shelley was there, thank goodness, along with a slim volume of Emily Dickinson. But all in all, a pathetic turnout for femalekind.

Figured.

Darren vetoed Animal Farm and 1984 (“I mean, it obviously didn’t happen, right? So what’s the point?”), looked skeptical about Kafka (and who could blame him?), made a face at Flaubert (“So, she’s a madam? Like a hooker?”), and seemed only moderately intrigued by Crime and Punishment (which I thought, but didn’t say, was too old for him).

“You’ll love it in about five years,” I said, placing Dostoyevsky back on the shelf. Nearby was a volume of the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, which only made me think of the one Digger who hadn’t yet come by for breakfast.

It’s fine, Amy. It’s not a date.

“Okay, last suggestion, and then I’m out.” I pulled down a hefty volume. “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

“What’s it about?”

Had he not seen any of the movies? “It’s about a guy who is betrayed by his friends and winds up in this island prison for ages, until he escapes, finds a buried treasure, and gets revenge on everyone.”

“Hmmm…”

“Lots of swordfights. Swordfights and opium and lesbians.”

“I’m in.”

“Good lad.” I handed him the book and patted him on the shoulder. Yep, the old lesbian ace in the hole. Better than Nietzsche for the teenaged boy. Demetria would not approve.

Soon after, breakfast was served, but still Poe failed to appear. I tried to concentrate on my pancakes, which should have been easy, given how delicious they were, but my eyes kept sliding to the door of the dining room, waiting for my date to arrive.

No. Not my date. My, uh, appointment. My eleven o’clock appointment.

Breakfast ended and the others started to gather their things together for the walk to the yacht.

“Are you sure, Amy?” Clarissa asked.

I patted my bag. “Absolutely.” Where was Poe? “I have all kinds of reading to catch up on.” I wasn’t about to tell Clarissa I’d made a non-date with everyone’s second-least-favorite patriarch on the island.

She peeked into the mesh sack. “Longinus? Hell no. If you spend your Spring Break reading literary criticism, I’m going to have to kill you.”

“If you make me get on that boat, you won’t have to. I’ll die of fright all by myself. Really, Clarissa. I’m much happier this way.”

“Okay,” she said warily. “But if I don’t see a tan on you this afternoon, we’re revisiting this topic.”

“Absolutely.”

Everyone filtered out the door, including Malcolm, who gave me little more than a friendly wave, and I settled into my rocker with my On the Sublime and wondered what the author would have thought of a Florida island in springtime. The earlier mist had completely burned away by this time, leaving nothing but warm, lemony sunshine, blue skies, soft, salt-scented breezes, and the sound of singing insects. All I needed was a hammock.

It was so peaceful that I’d almost forgotten I was in waiting mode by the time a shadow fell across the pages.

“Hey.”

I looked up and there was Poe, in a dark bathing suit and a smoky blue T-shirt that made his eyes look almost silver. He wore a faded pair of running shoes and smelled of sunscreen.

“Are you ready?”

No way.

Like many young adults my age and occupation, I suffered from the occasional recurring nightmare of walking into class and finding the other students occupied with taking an exam that I had not only not studied for, but that I had no idea was even on the syllabus. Occasionally, it would be for a class I had no recollection of enrolling in. Such dreams always elicited a peculiar feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, one quite distinct from the queasiness inspired by heights, deep water, scary movies, or bad eggs. There was dread, and then there was the specific dread of being unprepared.

I had that feeling now.

Poe, on the other hand, looked as if he’d spent the past week working up flash cards and doing timed practice tests with a study group.

I stood up, narrowly avoiding spilling Longinus onto the porch. Do not say you were worried he was going to stand you up. Being “stood up” sounds very date-like. Or not, as the case may be. But certainly not not-date-like . “I didn’t see you at breakfast,” I said, and hoped he’d get my point.

“Indeed. Did you like it?”

“Breakfast? Yeah. Why?”

And now he smiled, just a little.

“You made breakfast,” I realized.

“Just the pancakes.”

“Why?”

“I was feeling pretty guilty last year, about the free trip to Florida and all. So I kept offering to do things, as if I could balance the debt through some sort of bizarre work-study program. Salt wouldn’t let me do yardwork, which you know is my specialty, but Cook let me in the kitchen at breakfast. Just breakfast, mind you, because she had some strange idea that I was a tad on the antisocial side and would hide out in the kitchen for as long as she’d let me.”

“Imagine that.”

“But since my pancake recipe was better than hers, she made me promise to give her a refresher when I came back.” He shrugged. “No one knows that, by the way. Malcolm just thinks I skip breakfast.”

“And if word got out, you know we’d all be roping you into tomb brunches.”

“Not your club, no. I think they’d be afraid I’d slip strychnine in the batter.” His tone was light as he said it, but I had to wonder, why would Poe keep his pancake recipe a secret, unless it was to quietly lord it over the others that the breakfast they’d so enjoyed was made by the guy they weren’t altogether too fond of?

Still, that didn’t explain why he’d keep it a secret from Malcolm, nor why he’d confess it to me. Maybe he really was embarrassed by his plebeian roots. Or maybe he was just kidding himself that his richer friend wasn’t completely aware of what made Poe tick.

And yet, I still wasn’t sure what kind of person he was. Wasn’t that the reason I was doing this? To figure it out? The funny feeling in my stomach intensified.

“So,” he said. “What are you up for this morning?”