Chapter 3: The First Day of Summer

The First Day of Summer

The long rains had let up at last, and the sun had not come back hard enough yet to bake the ground dry. On Harkness Island that gave the year its two good weeks, and the Vances were spending one of them on the west lawn.

Three in the afternoon.

Sound came off the water in pieces — a splash, a shriek that turned into a laugh halfway through, a boy shouting another boy’s name — and every so often the bass line came up through the flagstones.

Fifty-odd kids in swimsuits, on the stone and in the pool and out in the trees past the wall, running and screaming and shoving each other off the edge of the deep end. Servers in white shirts and black pants went among them with trays at shoulder height, and the glasses on the trays were cold.

If the island had an Eden, it was on that lawn that afternoon, and it was private property. Nobody in that water had ever been hit by anything, and nobody was going to be.

In the state of Rowan the drinking age was twenty-one. Not half the people in that water were twenty-one. Nobody had ever come up the drive over it, and nobody ever would, which was more or less why the first party of the summer was always at this house.

Everybody on that lawn was somebody’s kid. There was no other way in. Rowan had eight or nine names that mattered, and the party was those names and whoever the names had brought along.

Five martinis down, Lance Ellery belched and turned his head toward the next lounger.

“So the old man still won’t let you go.”

“Mm.”

“Things are as quiet as they ever get.” Lance took a sixth off a passing tray. “It’s Paris. You don’t need a babysitter to eat a croissant.” He drank half of it. “So that’s it? The old man says no, and you leave it there?”

“The old man added someone.” Jason yawned. “I’m not going to fight him over something this small.”

The kids around him came in on it right away.

“Added you what?”

“Something good?”

“Better than Elena?”

“Elena’s not that good.”

“Something very boring,” Jason said. He laughed through his nose once. “A shadow. Everywhere I go.”

That got a groan out of them, a real one. Paris had been the plan since spring, and everybody on that lawn had heard about it.

“While we’re on it, though,” Lance said. “What was it about Elena? Her family’s nobody. Art student. Walks around this lawn like she’s doing us a favor. All those rules, and she looks down her nose at every person here.”

“Big tits.”

Lance choked and sprayed it. The circle around them lost it — somebody actually went off the end of a lounger onto the stone — and Lance sat there with his mouth open and his glass dripping into his lap.

“Jesus Christ, Jay.” He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “Did they take you off the tit too early or something? You’re a Vance. There isn’t a woman in this state you couldn’t have, and that’s the one you’re hung up on?”

Lance squinted out across the deck, found what he was looking for, and snapped his fingers at it.

“Amanda. Sweetheart. Come here.”

The bikini was three scraps and a knot, and the skin outside it had gone the color of honey. She came across the deck in no hurry, hips swinging, and the whistles started up around the pool and went on a while.

“Jay’s not happy,” Lance said. “Do something about it. Show him what he’s been missing.”

She smiled, ran a hand back through her hair — dark chestnut, heavy — and sat down against him, warm and practiced, until there was no seam left between them.

He did not move. His hands were behind his head and the sunglasses were on, and there was nothing to read anywhere in his face.

It did not put her off any. She kept her eyes on his face the whole time.

He was the old man’s oldest grandson, and everybody on that lawn knew exactly what that was worth. He would have drawn the same looks without it. Girls at parties like this one had settled on Apollo years ago and never revised it.

He wore blue plaid trunks and nothing else. There was still a boy’s softness in his mouth and his jaw. The shoulders, the back, the flat line of him under the white skin had been finished for a while.

“Jason.” She leaned in until her lips were at his ear, and her voice had that rasp in it. “Who made you unhappy? Let me fix it.”

Her hand started moving. Her mouth came down on the side of his face.

He made a small sound in his nose that was almost a laugh. He did not answer her, and he did not move her off.

Lance finished the drink. His tongue had gotten thick.

“Forget Elena, Jay. You start college in the fall. You think there’s a shortage? You won’t even have to lift a hand. You look at a girl across a room, she comes over to you on her own.”

He laughed at that, bored, and his head tipped to one side. Her mouth had found a spot under his jaw that tickled.

Amanda said something into his ear and laughed at it herself. He did not answer her.

On the far side of the pool some kid had climbed up onto the diving board and was standing there, and the party turned to watch. The music kept going. She stayed against him, and the light came off the water and moved on the underside of the leaves.