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

Her mother had brought her here when she was a toddler, with her friend Zoe and Zoe’s mom, Hannah, so the girls could run around the big upstairs ballroom on rainy days. As Beatrice had gotten older, she’d become more interested in the actual museum, the exhibits of bodies and brains, tumors in jars and the rows of 139 skulls, collected by a single Viennese doctor when phrenology was all the rage. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go see some dead things.”

She grabbed Cade by the hand and half-walked, half-dragged him into the atrium, which was sunny, and empty, and had a kind of indefinably museum-ish smell. To their right was an exhibit of the history of spinal surgery, complete with spines. To the left, up the stairs, was the Soap Lady, a woman whose body was exhumed in Philadelphia in 1875 and whose remains were encased, per the sign by her glass coffin, in a fatty substance called adipocere. That, she decided, was a good place to start.

Beatrice and Cade stood, shoulder to shoulder, looking down at her: a vaguely female shape that appeared to have been turned not to soap but to stone. Her torso was a mottled brown and white; her mouth was a gaping, dark hole. Hanks of hair still hung from her scalp.

“This must’ve given you nightmares when you were a kid.” Cade leaned forward. He had a few blemishes on his forehead, and bony wrists protruding past his cuffs, like he’d gotten taller overnight. Not perfect, in other words, which made her glad. She wouldn’t have been able to tease him if he’d been too good-looking.

“Actually,” Beatrice said, “I thought it was kind of cool.”

Cade looked down at the woman, then sideways, at Beatrice. “Cool? She looks like the Crypt Keeper.”

Beatrice rocked from her heels to her toes, trying to think of how she could explain. “I guess I liked the idea that you could be dead but still interesting. That people would come and look at you.”

Cade put his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know,” he said. “If you want people to care about you after you die, you could write a song, or a book. You could invent something.”

“True. But don’t you think that dying in just the right place for just the right set of circumstances to turn your body into soap is a lot easier?”

“You might be onto something there.” He was smiling, looking at her like she delighted him, was more interesting than anything in the museum.

“Want to see the collection of inhaled and swallowed objects?” she asked.

“You’re kidding, right?”

She made her eyes wide. “Oh, I never kid about inhaled and swallowed objects.”

“Okay, then,” he said, and tucked her arm into his.

“You probably think I’m a weirdo,” she said, as they took their seats in a booth at the Silk City Diner on Spring Garden Street. Her original plan had been to ask him to bring her back to school by lunch, but they’d ended up spending the whole morning in the museum. Cade had been fascinated by the replica of conjoined twins Cheng and Eng, and Beatrice had asked if he’d read the novel about them, which led to a discussion of their favorite books, with Beatrice passionately insisting that The Magicians was much better on the page than it was on TV, and Cade telling her about Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer graphic novels.

“No,” said Cade, straight-faced. “I think you’re a perfectly normal teenage girl.”

Beatrice laughed as the waitress slapped menus down on the Formica. When she looked up from her menu, Cade was staring at her again.

“What?” she said, hoping that she didn’t have something on her face or stuck between her teeth.

“I’m just trying to figure you out.”

“Well, you can’t,” she said. “I’m a mystery wrapped in an enigma. What do you want to know? How I got to be so stylish?” She batted her eyes. “So fascinating?”

He paused, looking down. With his eyes on his menu. “Brave,” he said quietly. Beatrice felt her face flush with pleasure, but before she could fully absorb the compliment, he said, “Like, you don’t care that nobody else dresses the way you do, or looks the way you do, or likes the same kind of music, or whatever.” He looked at her earnestly. “Everyone else I know, especially the girls, all they want is to be the same as everybody else. Even the stuff they do to be bad, or stand out, it’s all the same.”

“Stuff like what?”

Cade shrugged. “Julia vapes. And Emma’s got a tattoo. But even stuff like that, it’s like…” He picked up his fork, held it between his thumb and forefinger, and tilted it back and forth. “… like they googled ‘how to be a rebellious teenager,’ and just did whatever popped up.” He looked at Beatrice. “All of our parents say the same stuff to us—how you can do anything you want, be anything you want. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who acts like she believes it.”

She stared at him, not saying a word, thinking that this was, by far, the best compliment she’d ever been paid, the nicest thing that anyone, boy or girl or parent, had ever said to her.

“You two ready?” asked the waitress.

Beatrice got her favorite fig and pear salad. Cade got the turkey BLT. “And I’m definitely getting a milkshake for dessert,” Beatrice said.

“Will you share?” he asked.

“I will if you share your fries. So what’s your favorite museum?” she asked. Cade admitted that he didn’t have one.

“I used to like the Franklin Institute,” he said. “Have you been in the giant heart?”

She shook her head a little at his cluelessness. “Everyone’s been in the giant heart. Have you ever been to the Edgar Allan Poe house?”

He told her that he hadn’t, but that he had read “The Tell-Tale Heart.” They talked about horror stories until the food came. After a few bites of salad, Beatrice asked, “What about you?”

Cade knew what she was asking and