That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (read more books .txt) 📕

describing paradise, and not forays to drink warm vodka in the laundry room, or outside, if it was warm enough (between October and March in New Hampshire, she’d learned, it was hardly ever warm enough). “You could get expelled if you got caught.”

Julia cut her eyes at Cade, who gave her a blank look before turning to Beatrice with his toothy Kennedy smile.

“So why’d you leave?”

“I got kicked out,” Beatrice said, after she’d chewed and swallowed her cracker. That got the table’s attention. All the girls were looking at her. Cade pulled back his chair for a better view. Even Ezra had put down his energy drink.

“Really?” asked Finn.

“What’d you do?” asked the girl who was either Lila or Lily.

Beatrice swiped her tongue over her front teeth to remove any traces of food. She could lie, and say that her expulsion had something to do with drinking or drugs or boys, and probably impress these kids. But she didn’t think that these were kids she wanted to impress, so she said, “Part of it was that I was running an Etsy shop. I do a lot of crafting—crochet and needle-felting, mostly—and I was spending more time doing that and not”—she hooked her fingers into air quotes—“ ‘focusing on my academics.’ ”

“How much money were you making, doing that?”

“Oh, like four or five hundred dollars a month. It depended on how much work I took on.” She pulled out her phone to show a few of the dogs she’d sculpted. “That’s so cool!” said Lily or Lila, and Finn asked, “You get a hundred dollars for each one you make?”

“Sometimes more.”

Finn looked impressed. Then Julia tossed her hair and said, “You guys remember Kenzie Dawes? Well, she makes bank on Instagram. She gets, like, older guys to tell her things to say to them, and then she says it. She doesn’t, like, take her clothes off or anything. She just whispers stuff. ‘You’re my daddy,’ or whatever, and they Venmo her, like, fifty bucks.”

The other girls murmured approval at Kenzie’s ingenuity. Beatrice felt herself scowling. She took a bite of carrot, chewed, swallowed, and said, “Another reason I got expelled was that two of my friends and I painted the word ‘rapist’ on a boy’s door.”

The table went very quiet. Julia’s face was flushed, and the girl who was either Lily or Lila was glaring at her. “Why?” asked Finn.

Beatrice stared at him. “Because,” she said, speaking slowly, “he raped one of my friends. And the school didn’t do anything about it.”

Julia nudged Cade, giving Cade a meaningful look, one that Beatrice couldn’t read. But Cade’s toothy smile was firmly in place when he turned to Beatrice.

“So you’re an activist.”

Beatrice patted her lips with a paper napkin. Looking right at Cade, and only at Cade, she said, “I think it’s important to do the right thing.” If this boy was really, actually interested in her, it was better that he knew who she was and what she believed in, right up front.

Cade looked impressed. But the girls, and most of the guys, all seemed to be varying degrees of shocked. Ezra and Finn both looked angry. Lily and Lila were whispering to each other, and Julia was glaring at Beatrice with unmitigated hostility.

“What?” Beatrice finally asked.

“I have a brother,” said Julia, as if that was all the explanation required.

Beatrice shrugged. “Well, as long as he doesn’t rape anyone, I won’t spray-paint anything on his door.”

“What if some girl just says that he did?” Julia asked. She turned to the other boys in appeal. “That’s all it takes, these days, right? Some girl makes an accusation, and then the boy’s guilty until proven innocent.”

Beatrice made herself take a breath before she spoke. She kept her voice mild. “I don’t think it’s something girls lie about.”

Cade clapped his hands. The color in his cheeks seemed, to Beatrice, even more pronounced than it had been at the start of the lunch period. She wondered what he was thinking, if he was flustered, or embarrassed. She wondered, again, what she was doing there, when he said, “Hey, how about we change the subject?” He turned toward Beatrice, and ran his hand through his dark hair. “A bunch of us are going to the movies Friday night. Want to come?”

“I don’t get it,” Beatrice told Doff after school as they sat on the steps in front of the school. Doff’s fine blonde hair was drawn up into a ponytail, and she was using her tongue to push her mouth guard in and out of her mouth.

“You’re the new girl,” Doff said, as if this was totally obvious. “Most of the kids here have known each other since kindergarten. When Lily got here freshman year, it was like a movie star showed up.”

Beatrice shook her head. “There’s no way he actually likes me.” Still, there was that prickle of excitement, a buzzing sensation at her knees and the small of her back. The smooth, handsome rich boy falling for the artsy girl from the wrong side of the tracks—or, in her case, the girl who just looked like she was from the wrong side of the tracks—that was the kind of thing that happened in old movies, the kind her mother watched. From her limited experience, it never happened in real life. Things that happened in real life were like what had been done to her friend Tricia, back at Emlen. She could still remember Colin Mackenzie sitting down next to them, at Chapel, putting his arm around Tricia and having the nerve to look confused when she shoved him away. She’d known then that nothing would happen to Colin. He’d just say he’d gotten mixed messages, or that he’d been confused, and he’d get to stay, and Tricia, who was on scholarship, would get sent home.

“Invite him to poetry club,” Doff said with a smirk. “See if he asks you to take a look at his Emily Dickinson.”

Beatrice snorted. “How long did it take you to think