Nantucket Blue - By Leila Howland Page 0,4

the stairs and turn on the TV in the den. I loved being at Jules’s house. It was big but not too big, buzzed with a mild, pleasant chaos, and smelled faintly like her mom’s perfume. And Jules’s room was my favorite. It had dark wooden floors and big windows with white, floaty curtains. It was painted a deep but calming blue. Jules called the color “Nantucket blue” because she said it was the color of the ocean on a clear day in Nantucket.

“Besides, it’s so clear that Jay likes you,” she said, rifling through her closet. I flopped back on the bed and grinned. I drummed my fingers on the pale-yellow coverlet as I smiled wildly.

“Do you think I’ll lose my virginity to Jay?” I asked, biting my lip to hide my smile, not wanting to jinx anything. Jules and I were both virgins, although she’d come very close last summer with some boarding-school guy.

“It’s possible,” Jules said. “But don’t do it right away.”

“Oh my god, no. Six-month rule,” I said. Jules and I decided that six months was the perfect amount of time to go out with a guy before sex. With that kind of time, you would know you weren’t being used. I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

“I just thought of something bad,” I said. “What if Jay turns out like his brother?” Jay has an older brother who was just like him in high school: gorgeous, popular, athletic, but he quit college, got arrested for drunk driving, and now lives at home and works at the bagel shop. And he can’t drive, so I always see him walking places with big circles under his eyes. I could picture him so clearly. “He’s such a loser.”

“Cricket,” Jules said. “That’s mean.” But she was smiling. This was the thing about Jules. I could always say what I was really thinking to her and she wouldn’t stop liking me. Actually, I got the feeling when I said stuff like this, stuff you can think but really shouldn’t say, it made her like me more.

“Sorry, but it’s true,” I said. “He looks sad all the time. I feel bad going into the Bagel Place.”

“I know what you mean. I hate it when he’s working there. I can’t just be myself when I order a bagel.”

“I hope it doesn’t run in the family, because I think Jay and I should get married someday. I mean, after we’ve both been to college.”

“Can I be your maid of honor?”

“Of course.” I sighed. “I can’t believe I won’t see him again for like, months!” He was leaving for Nantucket soon. So was Jules. Everyone was going somewhere for the summer. The Cape. Martha’s Vineyard. Arti was going to an arts program in Innsbruck, Austria. Even Nora Malloy was going on an Outward Bound trip. She was going to scale Mount Rainier (and probably a few of her fellow mountaineers).

“You never know what can happen,” Jules said, considering a pair of white jeans.

I wasn’t looking forward to spending another summer in Providence babysitting Andrew King. I’d be setting up the baby pool in the King’s driveway while everyone else was somewhere fabulous. But my family just didn’t have enough money for a summer place or a European vacation. I could just see myself filling up that damn plastic pool with the hose in the heat of the midday and then stepping on its edge to let it drain when the streetlights came on.

The sound of a trumpet blasted into the room through the speaker in the ceiling.

“Guess my mom’s home,” Jules said. Nina had just discovered a South African jazz musician after she’d read about him in The New Yorker, and was listening to his new album on repeat like a teenager to the latest pop star, blasting it through the house’s surround-sound system. We broke into the dance we’d made up to this now very familiar tune. Jules air-trumpeted and I twirled around her.

Jules and Zack made fun of Nina for her obsessions, but I loved how she’d focus on something—a poet or a film director or even a color, a particular shade of orange—then leave some corner of their house changed by her discovery: an oversized book of Mexican art in the front hall marked with neon Post-its, a William Carlos Williams quote stenciled in the downstairs bathroom, a vintage John Coltrane poster in the den, a yellow ceramic bowl filled with apricots on the dining room table.

Just