“Green. For your nose, ’cause you know how you burn.”
Summer smiled. “Thanks.” It occurred to her that rekindling their romance might be more work than she’d thought.
She kissed Seth good-bye. In her mind, she was not in an uninspectable 1982 Ford with a hole in the floorboard. She was not wearing two pairs of thick wool socks in her Doc Martens. In her mind, she was already in Florida, touched by hibiscus-scented tropical breezes. The ocean was churning gently, waves breaking on a pristine white beach. The sun was kissing her bare shoulders with soothing heat.
This kiss, she didn’t yawn once.
“Bought you something.”
Summer tossed her Dayton’s bag. As usual, her brother was lying on the couch in the family room. Oprah was on. Diver’s blue eyes were slitted like a dozing cat’s.
“It’s a book,” Summer said. She plopped down onto the La-Z-Boy, her legs draped over the arm. “Guide to Southeastern Coastal Birds.”
Diver brushed his blond hair out of his eyes. It was darker than it had been the summer before. The gold streaks from sun and salt water were gone, and he’d cut it at their parents’ insistence. He studied the cover, which featured a prehistoric-looking pelican. “Cool,” he said vaguely. “Thanks.”
“It’s for when we go down for spring break. Aren’t you getting excited about it? Going back to Florida, I mean? It’s been six months since we’ve seen a palm
tree, Diver. Or the ocean. Or a big, fat, sunburned, hairy-backed tourist in a Speedo.”
Diver smiled wistfully. “Or a pelican. I miss Frank.”
“Me, too,” Summer said, recalling the mega-pooping pelican who’d resided on their porch.
“Sometimes it all seems so unreal,” Diver said. He looked at Summer with the clear, innocent gaze that often made her feel as though he were the younger sibling, even though he was two years older. “Last summer, I mean, and finding you, and then coming here, and Jack and Kim, and … you know.”
It still bothered Summer when he said that. Jack and Kim. Jack and Kim were Mom and Dad, his mom and dad, and hers. She didn’t understand why Diver couldn’t call them that, after all they’d suffered through. Why he couldn’t say two little words.
Of course, her parents were no better. They called him Jonathan, when he was clearly Diver and always would be.
Summer grabbed the remote and switched to CNN. Diver didn’t even blink. “I talked to Diana and Marquez today. Aunt Mallory has this friend with a yacht we can use.”
Diver nodded noncommittally. He was thumbing through the bird book.
“Diver,” Summer asked suddenly, “do you wish you’d stayed in Crab Claw Key? Do you hate it here
in Minnesota?”
He smiled. It was pure smile, the kind of smile that she’d watched melt a hundred female hearts at Bloomington High School. “Well, it’s very cold here,” he said, as if that were an answer.
Their mother appeared in the doorway. Her coat was damp. She grimaced at Diver. “I thought you were working today.”
“I called in sick.” Lately Diver had been working as a stock boy at Target.
“Jonathan, this is just what happened with Burger King—”
Summer winced. She did not want to be around for this. “Mom, I got a great bathing suit,” she interrupted. “Two, actually. Will you tell me what you think?”
Her mother hesitated, eyes flickering between Summer and Diver. “I’ve got a ton of groceries in the trunk,” she said. “Come help.” She pointed a finger at Diver. “We’ll talk later.”
Diver did not answer. He was tracing the pelican photo with his finger. “Frank had more brown here, around the eyes.”
“I’ll get the groceries,” Summer said to her mother. “You check out my bathing suits. They’re in the Dayton’s bag. And try not to react like a mom, okay?”
Her mother gazed at Diver. “That’s harder than you think,” she said softly.
Summer lay in bed, her quilt tucked up around her chin. It was quiet. Finally.
There’d been another fight that evening. Slammed doors, loud voices. Mostly her parents’ voices. Diver hardly ever argued. He just absorbed other people’s words.
Sometimes she still had the dream. The one about the little boy chasing a red ball, about the day Diver had been lost to the family. Summer hadn’t even been born yet, of course, so the dream was just a collage of stories from her parents, from news clippings, and from Diver’s own vague recollections. Not that he remembered much. He’d been kidnapped, he’d grown up knowing two other parents as his own, they’d been abusive, he’d run away.
Maybe he’d been on his own too long. Maybe that was why, when he and Summer had found each other by some crazy miracle the summer before, he hadn’t seemed entirely sure about coming back to the family that was really his own. He was uncomfortable with rules and curfews and schoolwork. He didn’t quite belong in Minnesota.
Summer slept fitfully. She kept hearing things: her door, a creak in the hallway, a sound from downstairs. She dreamed she was lying on a couch by the edge of the ocean, watching a pelican toss a little red ball in the air, then catch it in his great beak. Diver was there, too, but he was watching her. He said something, two words she could not quite make out, and then he dove into the water, swimming slowly away until he was just a speck on the horizon.
She woke up shivering beneath her quilt. Her pillow was wet with tears. It was a bleak, gray dawn. She sat up a little, quilt pulled close, and then she noticed the torn sheet of notebook paper on the edge of her bed.
She saw Diver’s scrawl and the two words she had not been able to hear in her dream: I’m sorry.
And she knew he was really gone.
About the Author
After Katherine Applegate graduated from college, she spent time waiting tables, typing (badly), watering plants, wandering randomly from one place to the next with her boyfriend, and just generally wasting her time. When she grew sufficiently tired of performing brain-dead minimum-wage work, she decided it was time to become a famous writer. Anyway, a writer. Writing proved to be an ideal career choice, as it involved neither physical exertion nor uncomfortable clothing, and required no social skills.
Ms. Applegate has written more than one hundred books under her own name and a variety of pseudonyms. She has no children, is active in no organizations, and has never been invited to address a joint session of Congress. She does, however, have an evil, foot-biting cat named Dick, and she still enjoys wandering randomly from one place to the next with her boyfriend.
Katherine Applegate, Sun-Kissed Christmas
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