Summerland: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

Jordan!
    HIS FATHER :    Ernie is dead.
    Now, in Terminal E, Ava reappeared with her steaming latte and her sesame bagel. Jake checked with his father to see if Jordan found this behavior as remarkable as he did, but Jordan was staring into the middle distance, thinking about something, and Jake knew not to interrupt him. Used to be that he’d be thinking up headlines or lead-ins, or maybe trying to figure out how to justifyraising ad rates or how to fire the sports writer, or where to find a new sports writer from among such a limited pool of candidates. Or he’d be pondering the death of newspapers in general. But what would he be thinking about now? He was thinking backward and not forward. Jake could tell by the glazed look in his eyes.
    Ava blew across her latte and picked a tiny piece off her bagel and popped it into her mouth. Jordan had told Jake that Ava didn’t eat much because after Ernie died, it was one of the many things she had stopped taking pleasure in.
    Now, however, she seemed to be savoring her snack. Sip of latte, bite of bagel. She even opened a tiny container of cream cheese and dragged the bagel through it.
    Jake was as angry as he’d ever been in his life. His heart was a trash fire. We are leaving Nantucket because of you! he thought. He wanted to splash Ava’s latte in her face. He wanted to choke her with her bagel. But the moment passed, followed by an immense ocean of self-pity.
    They were leaving Nantucket because of
him
.

DEMETER
    T hey took her to the hospital even though there was nothing wrong with her. Nothing wrong with her except that she couldn’t stop shivering. Penny was dead. The car had gone up over the embankment at Cisco Beach, where the drop was… eight feet? ten feet? The car had seemed to fly at first, they had been going wicked fast, but Demeter was loving it, it was a carnival ride, scary and thrilling, right up until the very end, right up until she realized that Penny wasn’t slowing down, Penny was on some kind of rampage, and they were going to crash.
    There were police at the hospital. Demeter was confused. Doctors, nurses, police—but where were her parents? Maybe they hadn’t come, though surely someone had called them. Demeter’s fake Louis Vuitton bag had been in the car, and her license was in her wallet, and—sickening thought—there was a nearly empty fifth of Jim Beam in the bag, too. Demeter had drunk some of it in her bedroom alone while the rest of those guys went to the graduation party at Patrick Loom’s house. Demeter hadn’t been invited to Patrick Loom’s party—or rather, she
had
been invited, but only through her parents, who got asked to everything because her father was a selectman. She hadn’t been invited in earnest, on her own merit. She never was.
    So she had drunk some of the Jim Beam in her bedroom, and then she’d locked the door and climbed out her window. She’d scooted on her butt down the sloping roof to just above the garage, where she was able to leap to soft grass. Her parents would never have believed Demeter capable of doing this, because she was overweight and the least coordinated human being alive. She would never be able to execute her escape in reverse, because how would she climb the drainpipe to the roof?
Someone
could—Hobby could, Jake could, possibly even Penny could—but not Demeter. She was too heavy. She would rip the drainpipe right off the side of the house. She would wait until her parents were home from their evening out—they had no less than four graduation parties to attend—and when she was sure they were asleep, she would walk right back in the house, and pop the lock on her bedroom door with a pin.
    Demeter was being largely ignored at the hospital. There was a flurry of urgent-sounding business swirling around her like a tornado. She heard the letters
D.O.A.,
and she knew that that must be Penny. Penny had been dead on arrival. Demeter knew this, and she knew she was supposed to feel