Other Words for Love Read Online Free Page B

any makeup and thinking she looked much younger this way, more like she did before she blossomed and cast a spell over everyone. Back then—before puberty and highlights and operations to fix her lazy left eye and to straighten her nose—she used to just blend in. Except during the holidays, when some kids picked on her because she had a Christmas wreath on her door and a Hanukkah menorah in her window. Make up your mind , they used to say, and I told them they were ignorant. I said that Summer’s mother was Episcopalian and her father was Jewish, and Summer was going to pick her religion someday but for now she was both.
    “Ari,” she said. “I’m sorry for drooling over Patrick, but I’m dying without a boyfriend.”
    “ You’re dying?” I said.
    She knew what I meant—that I’d never had a boyfriend in my entire life. She reached over and squeezed my arm, leaving a smear of flour on my skin. “You’ll get one. Then you’ll see how nice it is to make love.”
    She smiled dreamily and I kept hearing those last two words even when she was quiet and cutting dough. She didn’t say screwing or banging , and she called a guy’s you-know-what a magic wand instead of the four-letter words that everybody tossed around at school. But Summer was mature and smart, and she’d read most of her father’s medical books in his library down the hall.
    She wanted to be a psychiatrist too, and she already acted the part. She’d explained to me years ago that schizophrenics hear voices and that kidnapping victims can develop Stockholm syndrome, and she once had a talk with a boy in our seventh-grade class who had a crush on her. He used to call her house just to hear her answer the phone, he wrote sappy poems, and we actually found him collecting strands of her hair from her jacket in the coatroom. So Summer sat him down and explained that he wasn’t in love with her, that he only thought he was in love because he was suffering from something else—a psychological word that I quickly forgot. Whatever it was, she said it was similar to lust but much worse because it could get you so stuck on somebody that you’d simply lose your mind.
    He didn’t bother her anymore after that. Summer considered him her first cured patient and started talking about UCLA, her father’s alma mater. But I didn’t want her to talk about any colleges that weren’t in New York. Summer had been my best friend since first grade, and the possibility that she would go so far away was depressing.
    “Ari,” Tina said later on, when Summer and I were chopping raw steak into cubes. She gave me a piece of paper with a name and telephone number on it and ran her hand across her forehead. Her hair was limp and she looked exhausted as usual. “Please give that to your mother. She needs the name of someone to contact at Hollister.”
    “Thanks, Tina,” I said, and I wasn’t being disrespectful. Summer’s parents didn’t want me to address them as Mrs. Simon and Dr. Simon. They’d told me years ago to call them Tina and Jeff. Mom rolled her eyes when she found out about it and mumbled that Tina and Jeff were progressive .
    I folded the paper and stuck it in my pocket. I felt Summer staring at me. I’d told her about our inheritance and the Parsons School of Design, but I had never mentioned Hollister Prep.
    “Are you going to Hollister?” Summer asked.
    She looked nervous. I guessed she was worried that I might accidentally mention embarrassing things to her Hollister friends, things like her eye surgery and her nose job. They must have believed that she was born perfect.
    “My mother wants me to,” I said. I was still secretly hoping that Mom would forget the whole thing and let me finish my last two years in Brooklyn. But I rarely got what I wanted.
    A month later, my parents and I went to Queens for a Saturday-afternoon lunch. Patrick was on duty and I was sleeping over, because Evelyn’s due date was getting close and he didn’t want