Maine Squeeze Read online

  Maine

  Squeeze

  Banana

  Splitsville

  Catherine Clark

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Maine Squeeze

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Banana Splitsville

  8/17

  8/18

  8/20

  8/21

  8/22

  8/23

  8/24

  8/27

  8/28 3:42 A.M.

  8/30

  8/31

  9/1

  9/2

  9/4

  9/7

  9/9

  9/11

  9/12

  9/13

  9/14

  9/15

  9/17

  9/18

  9/20

  9/21

  9/22

  9/23

  9/24

  9/25

  9/30

  10/1 2:13 A.M.

  10/2

  10/3

  10/4

  10/6

  10/8

  10/9

  10/10 a/k/a “The Longest Day of My Life”

  The Big Talk Continued …

  10/12

  10/13

  10/14

  10/17

  10/19

  10/20

  10/21

  10/22

  10/23

  10/26

  10/27

  10/27 11:44 P.M.

  10/28

  10/31

  11/2

  11/3

  11/4

  11/5

  Later …

  11/6

  11/7

  11/9

  11/10

  11/11

  11/12

  11/13

  11/14

  11/16

  11/17

  11/18 The Next Morning, Back Home … Finally Thawed

  11/19

  11/20

  Chapter Number 57 In Which the Tom Lives Up to His Name; Or Not.

  11/21

  11/22

  11/23

  11/24

  11/25

  11/26 1??? A.M. or so?

  Thanksgiving Morning (pre-poultry)

  Thanksgiving Afternoon (post-poultry)

  Thanksgiving Night

  11/27

  11/28

  11/29

  11/30

  12/2

  12/3

  12/4

  12/5

  12/6

  12/7

  12/8

  12/9

  12/11

  12/12

  12/14

  Later that Same Day

  12/16

  12/17

  12/18

  12/19

  12/20

  12/21

  12/22

  12/23

  12/23 ReallyReally Late or Early on the 24th

  12/24

  Later that Same Day

  12/24

  12/24 Continued

  12/25

  12/26

  12/27

  12/28

  12/29

  12/30

  12/31 8.30 A.M.

  1/1 2:15 A.M.

  1/2

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  Back Ads

  About the Publisher

  maine squeeze

  Chapter 1

  “You’re not just going to leave me behind, are you? You’re not going to strand me on this island. Are you?”

  “Don’t make fun of me. Just don’t.” I looked at my boyfriend, Ben, and raised one eyebrow. “But are you seriously that upset about my being gone for a day?”

  “Well, no. But it is kind of lousy,” Ben said.

  Ben and I had just gone for an early-morning walk so we could have a little time together before I drove my parents to the airport. When they first told me they were leaving the island for the summer, I’d had that exact same reaction, which was why Ben was teasing me about it.

  I’d kind of panicked at first. I don’t know why. It wasn’t like it was a deserted island or that I would be stranded—I lived there year-round. By the way, it’s just referred to as “the island,” like a lot of islands off the coast of Maine, and I’ll keep it that way because (a) I’m too lazy to change everyone’s names, and (b) I don’t want to incriminate anyone. If you’ve been there, you might recognize it, but I’m going to keep some things mysterious in that Jessica Fletcher/Cabot Cove/Murder She Wrote–reruns kind of way.

  Not that there will be any murder in this story. Unless crimes of passion, crimes of the heart, count.

  Anyway, my parents would be landing in Frankfurt, Germany, tomorrow, while I’d be showing up for my first day of work at Bobb’s Lobster. Something about it didn’t seem quite fair.

  “When do you think you’ll be back tonight?” Ben lingered in the doorway of my house, his hands on my waist.

  “Maybe seven? Not too late,” I said. I’d drop my parents at the airport in Portland—from there they’d fly to Boston, then overseas—then I’d pick up my friend Erica and drive back.

  “I wish I could go with you.”

  “Would you really want to listen to my parents chanting along to German-language tapes in the car because they haven’t quite mastered the language yet?” I asked. Not that they’d gotten the hang of French, Spanish, or Italian, for that matter, but that wouldn’t keep them from spending ten weeks in Europe. Nothing would. Not even the prospect of leaving me and Ben alone all summer. (Well, only if his parents would leave, too....) I wasn’t actually going to be “alone” alone, anyway, because three of my best friends were moving in.

  I thought back to the night two months before when my parents told me they were going to Europe for ten weeks. At first I thought we were all going together. I was really excited, but then I realized I was not included, that they’d be sipping wine in the Alps while I schlepped melted butter at sea level.

  But I couldn’t begrudge them this second honeymoon concept—they deserved it. And did I really want to trek all over the world with my parents? I pictured my dad wearing a pair of lederhosen and doing a jig around a beer hall in Austria, while I cowered in the corner, hoping no one would guess we were related.

  Then I pictured me, here, alone in this house. Me and Ben. Alone. It sounded too good to be true. I was afraid that they’d make me stay with Uncle Frank and Aunt Sue.

  It’s not that I don’t like my aunt and uncle. I just didn’t want to live with them. My aunt has this blueberry addiction—she spends the whole summer trying to invent new recipes using blueberries. She eats so many that I could swear her skin sometimes has a blue tint. And if my uncle told me one more time that I should paint instead of doing collage art … I would go nuts.

  Fortunately, my parents suggested my friends move in here, rather than me move in with my aunt and uncle. I’d be eternally grateful for that.

  Ben smiled. “You’re right. I can probably skip the German lesson in the car.”

  “Yeah,” I sa
id.

  “But it’s our first day off from school—and our last day off before we start working full-time. It’d be great if we could just go hang out on the beach or something.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “We’ll just have to make up for it—we’ll find an extra day somewhere,” I said. “We’ll both call in sick or something. Middle of July.”

  “Okay, it’s a plan.” Ben nodded. “Maybe we’ll be sick for two or three days. No, wait. I don’t want to lose my job.”

  Ben was so psyched about his first summer on the island. He’d gotten a job working on the ferry, which we called “Moby” for obvious reasons—it was large, white, swam, and carried lots of people inside it. He’d be one of the guys taking tickets, tying up at the dock, loading bags of mail and unloading carts of groceries and other supplies, handing out life jackets in the event of an emergency—whatever was needed, except for the actual navigation and driving of the ferry. That was left to a few guys on the mainland and a couple on the island: John Hyland, a grumpy, retired fisherman who hated “summer people” and never smiled (his wife, Molly, ran the island post office and wasn’t much friendlier), and “Cap” Green, who talked your ear off and told you more about the tide, the neighbors, and his health than you ever wanted to know.

  Ben and I actually met on the ferry to school one morning. Everyone from seventh grade and up goes to the mainland for school, which means I’d been catching the ferry at seven o’clock every morning for the past six years for the forty-five-minute trip. But enough about my tragic life.

  Meeting someone on the ferry probably sounds really romantic, but you haven’t known nausea until you’ve ridden a ferry that smelled like diesel and you’ve had to sit inside because it was cold and raining very hard. Even someone like me, who’d been taking the boat for years, had trouble on days like that.

  Ben was new to the island, and he was looking completely green. My friend Haley and I felt so sorry for him that we went over to him and asked how he was doing. Haley told him to look at the horizon, which is a trick for not getting seasick. Then I gave him some of my still-half-frozen cinnamon-raisin bagel and told him to come stand in the doorway with me, because it’s better when you have something in your stomach and when you get a little fresh air, even if it’s cold and wet outside.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “B—Ben,” he stammered, looking around nervously.

  “Colleen Templeton,” I said, shaking his hand, trying to distract him by making small talk and introducing myself.

  “Colleen?” He nodded, biting his lip. “I really don’t want to puke on my first day.”

  “You won’t,” I assured him. “Just have another bite of the bagel and you won’t. But at least if you do? We’re all wearing raincoats.”

  He laughed and then clutched his stomach.

  I don’t know how I could have found someone so green, so cute. But he was.

  And I don’t know if he asked me out a couple of months later out of gratitude for that day, or what. By that time I was starting to realize Evan—who I thought was the love of my life last summer—had moved on, so I decided I might as well, too. It was good timing, which was a first for me. My family’s notorious for bad timing.

  So now it was kind of funny that Ben would be spending eight to ten hours a day on the ferry. There’s an expression, “getting your sea legs.” Ben had those now, and very nice sea legs at that.

  I was really looking forward to spending the summer with him. This year would be so different from last year. I wouldn’t have any big ups and downs, like with Evan, who my friend Samantha had dubbed “the drama king.” I wouldn’t have to worry about how Evan felt about me, or whether Evan and I were going to get together, or whether, after we did get together, anyone would catch us making out in the walk-in fridge at work, which in retrospect seems a little tacky. Fun at the time, though, I have to admit. But my life was a lot less racy, now. I was a lot calmer—and happier.

  As Ben and I were standing on the porch, saying good-bye, an old, faded blue-and-white pickup truck came rattling up the road. “Here comes trouble,” Ben said as Haley Boudreau pulled into the driveway.

  Haley slammed the driver’s door shut. “What are you doing here?” she asked Ben.

  “He came over for breakfast—to say good-bye to my parents,” I told her, looking at all the boxes and bags in the back of the truck. Haley was moving into my brother Richard’s old room, and Samantha would be coming up from Boston tomorrow and taking the guest room. I was going to pick up Erica when I drove my parents to the Portland airport that afternoon.

  “You knew I was here, right? That’s why you came over, so I could help you carry all that stuff in,” Ben said as Haley unlatched the truck’s tailgate.

  “Yeah. Do you think you can lift this?” Haley picked up a small duffel bag and tossed it to Ben. “We’ll do the heavy stuff. What do you think, we’re not strong enough?”

  Haley could be so stubbornly independent. You’d never know from the way she was talking to Ben that they were such good friends. The three of us did practically everything together.

  She pulled a large cardboard box out of the back of her family’s beat-up pickup truck. “How much did you bring?” I asked as I went over to help.

  “I’m glad this is the last box,” I said as we climbed the stairs. “Remind me again why we told Ben to leave and let us do this on our own?”

  “Come on, it’s good for you,” Haley said. “You’ll be ready to carry those big heavy trays.”

  “Strength training? Okay. Consider me strong.” I dropped the box of CDs onto the floor in Richard’s old room. It was funny to think of Haley moving in here when she only lived about five minutes away. It was like when we were ten and had sleepovers at each other’s houses every Saturday night. We used to annoy Richard to no end; I wondered how he’d feel about “Horrible Haley” living in his room.

  Haley and I have been friends ever since my family moved to the island, when I was eight. My mom grew up here, but went away to college and lived in Chicago for a while, which is where she met my dad and where Richard and I were born. Then her parents needed help, and Mom and Dad were sick of big-city life, so they turned their summer vacations on the island into year-round living. First one job at the elementary school on the island opened, and my dad took it, and then another, and my mom took that. (They’re like the tag team of silliness when it comes to working with little kids. Maybe it’s because they spend so much time with little kids that they’re slightly, well, goofy. I mean, they’ve definitely spent too much time inhaling glue, paste, and Magic Markers.)

  Haley is the shortest person I know—not that it matters, but it’s a fact. Her father and her uncle are lobstermen, just like her grandfather, and his father before him, etc. etc. They’ve been on the island for decades—probably a century or two, for all I know. They call everyone who arrived since 1900 “from away.” But they’re not standoffish about it, the way some people can be.

  I once asked her why she’d decided to work at the Landing, instead of with her family, this summer. “My family’s crazy,” she’d said. “You know that. They wouldn’t even pay me. Or they’d say they were going to, but then they’d tell me they needed the money for something else, and would I mind waiting a few weeks … you know how it was last summer. I made about ten dollars.”

  Haley had a strong Maine accent, so when she said words like summer and dollar, they sounded like “summah” and “dollah.”

  “So you’d rather sell postcards and ice cream cones?” I’d asked. “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” she’d said. “You have no idea how stubborn my mother can be.”

  Actually, I did, because I knew how stubborn Haley could be. Like this latest standoff with her mother—it could last for months. Haley and I had had a few standoffs ourselves over the years. We always got over them and apologized to each other, but sometimes it had taken weeks.

  “Good. Fine,” Mr
s. Boudreau had said when Haley told her about our summer plan to share the house. She was already mad about Haley’s going to work for someone else, and it showed. “Have a wonderful time,” she said coldly. “See you in September.” Which, of course, sounded like “Septembah.”

  I’ll quit talking about their accent now—I just really like the way it sounds. I always wanted to have an accent, but I could never pull it off since I wasn’t born here.

  Unlike me, Haley didn’t have a serious boyfriend. She was determined not to get too serious or tied down with anybody while she was still young. Her older sister had gotten married by the time she was twenty, and then had two kids right away. Haley wanted to get off the island and go to college and see the world before she did that. She’d earned a scholarship to Dartmouth—she was brilliant in science and calculus—and was looking forward to getting off the island and meeting people who’d never even heard of it. Or so she said. I wondered how she was going to handle being so far away from the ocean when she’d never lived anywhere else. (I’d be attending Bates College, which isn’t on the coast, either, but it’s not far from it.)

  “So, how do you think Richard’s going to take the news?” Haley asked as she sat on the bed. “Do you think he’ll even come out here this summer?”

  I fixed the bulletin board, which was hanging crooked. The board was covered with photos of Richard and his freshman-year girlfriend, Richard and his sophomore-year girlfriend.... He always went out with beautiful girls, but he had a time limit on his relationships, it seemed. Two or three months and he was moving on. Tick, tick, tick.

  It was hard to think that my big brother, who I’d worshiped for years (because he was five years older, he was just old enough to be really nice toward me most of the time, at least once he got past the new-baby-hatred phase—and I really looked up to him), was maybe not all that different from other guys, or that he did typical guy things that made him sort of a jerk.

  “He’s supposed to be coming for July Fourth. He doesn’t get much vacation time because he’s so new at his job,” I told Haley. “So he’s only coming for the long weekends—Labor Day, too.”

  “But we’ll be gone then,” Haley said. “Isn’t that weird to think about?” She opened the box on the bed beside her and pulled out a few books. “Did I say weird? I meant incredibly great.”

  “And we’ll be unpacking then, too,” I said. “Is that why you brought so much stuff? Are you practicing?”