That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (free e reader txt) 📗

She put her arm around Beatrice’s shoulders, pulling her close, and, just for a moment, Beatrice allowed the contact. “Let’s go home.”

2 Beatrice

Class, let’s welcome the newest member of the class, Beatrice Shoemaker.”

Beatrice stood up, smoothed her pale-blue cardigan, and gave her new classmates the smile she’d been rehearsing—cheerful, but not goofy; friendly but not desperate. “Good morning, Beatrice,” the kids droned. Bea waved, took her seat, and looked around. Her first period, A Block (“It sounds like jail,” she’d overheard her father saying), was ninety minutes of American Literature. Followed by World History, followed by lunch. There were fourteen other kids in the class, a testament to Melville’s “commitment to small, intimate classes where your child can shine.” Beatrice recognized just one girl, Doff Cartwright, a former classmate from junior high. The other kids were strangers, and the school itself was a significant come-down from the Emlen Academy. Emlen had a campus, with a collection of gray granite and redbrick buildings crawling with ivy. It had three senators and a vice president among its alumni, not to mention novelists and journalists and researchers and nuclear physicists. Its motto, serve hoc mundo, meant “we serve the world,” and the dean and the teachers were forever talking about the students’ obligation to give back, to use their brains and skills and their talent to make the world a better place.

Beatrice had hated it. She’d hated the bright-eyed, well-behaved students who talked endlessly about their resumes and the colleges to which they’d apply. She hated the cold New England weather, the bland dining-hall food, the way the other kids, including her roommate Celia, treated her crafting as a waste of time. She hated, too, how she’d gone from being one of the smarter kids in her grade to average. Not even average, really. Below average. One of the girls in her dorm had won an international piano competition when she was twelve, and a boy on the next floor was the son of the Senate’s minority whip. The level of ambition, the constant scrambling after achievements and prizes, the anxiety and sleeplessness that preceded every exam or paper’s due date, the way the girls’ bathrooms would reek during finals, when the girls who threw up because they were anxious joined the girls who threw up after they binged. All the kids bragged about how little sleep they’d gotten and how much coffee they’d consumed. To Beatrice, it all felt wearying and pointless. Especially because Beatrice didn’t want to run for president or conduct an orchestra or discover a cure for cancer when she grew up. What she wanted to do was crafts. Knitting and needle-felting, mostly, but she also embroidered and crocheted, none of which were skills appreciated or encouraged at Emlen.

So now she was at this new school, which had been founded thirty years after Emlen and had barely any ivy at all. Melville had a good reputation locally, but it wasn’t a nationally known school the way that Emlen was, and she knew, from the way his lips had tightened in his face and his hands had tightened on the steering wheel when he’d dropped her off, that her father was disappointed.

Oh, well, Beatrice thought, and tried to ignore the twinge of disappointing her dad. On her left, two boys were staring at her. As she watched, one of them whispered something to the other, and they both sniggered. Beatrice was especially proud of that day’s look: an ankle-length prairie-style dress with many ruffles and a petticoat under its skirt and a loose-fitting cardigan with pearl buttons that she’d bought for six dollars at the Thrift for AIDS shop in Queen Village on top. Her hair had been cut in a chin-length bob and she’d dyed it a silvery lavender over the weekend. She wore knee socks and her favorite canvas Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers on her feet. She dressed to please herself, and to feel comfortable, and if these boys believed that her body was an object that existed for their pleasure, she’d be happy to tell them otherwise.

On her right, her old classmate Doff had pulled out her phone and had it half-hidden in her lap. Beatrice could see what she was looking up: PLAN B NEAR ME and PLAN B CHEAP and DOES PLAN B ON AMAZON WORK and IS PLAN B ON AMAZON REAL.

Oh, dear. Beatrice was a virgin. She’d never had sex, let alone a pregnancy scare. The year before, her mother—she still shuddered at the memory—had come into her bedroom one night. Beatrice had just gotten through straightening things up. Her favorite books (Frankenstein and The Sandman and The Gashlycrumb Tinies, the collected works of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti) were in neat rows on her bookshelf. Her lavender-scented candle was burning, she’d made herself a cup of tea, and she was getting ready to sort through her sewing kit when her mom had knocked at her door. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

Before Beatrice could answer, her mother came and sat down on Beatrice’s bed, in the gray fleece overalls she insisted on wearing around the house (Beatrice thought she would actually die of shame if her mom ever wore them out in public. Twice, she’d tried to sneak the overalls out of the dryer and into the trash, but, both times, her mom had rescued them. “Oh, sorry,” Bea had said innocently. “I thought they were rags”).

“I want to talk to you about sex before you go to boarding school,” her mom had announced.

Cringe. “Okay.”

“Now, I know you’ve taken biology, right?” her mom began, in a strangely upbeat tone, smiling like she was trying to impersonate someone she’d seen on daytime TV. “And sex ed in sixth grade? So you know all the names of the parts, and what goes where.”

Oh my God, Beatrice thought. Her mom had flour on her midsection and crumbs on her bosom. She’d been making brioche, and she