Summer at Sea: The Summer Series Book 1 Read online

  Summer at Sea

  Beth Labonte

  Copyright © 2015 Beth Labonte

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Second Edition (November 2016)

  www.bethlabonte.com

  Love comes to some gently, imperceptibly, creeping in as the tide, through unsuspected creeks and inlets, creeping on a sleeping man, until he wakes to find himself surrounded.

  P.G. Wodehouse, The Prince and Betty

  1

  Just kill me. Somebody, right now, kill me. Please. If somebody doesn’t hurry up and put me out of my misery, I cannot be held responsible for the words that come out of my mouth.

  I mean, have you ever helped your parents pack for a weeklong cruise?

  No? I didn’t think so. So shut it. You have no idea the torture that is engulfing every fiber of my being. There is underwear all over the bed. Literally everywhere. My parents’ underwear is everywhere—like ninety-seven pairs between the two of them—for an eight-day cruise. I tried to talk them into narrowing it down to maybe sixteen pairs each. I thought that was pretty reasonable. If they are both suddenly unable to control their bodily functions, sixteen pairs will still leave them with one fresh pair to change into daily. Reasonable enough.

  “But what if something happens?” Mom asks, clutching six pairs in each hand, like underwear pom-poms. “What if something happens to the boat and we can’t get home? What will we wear?”

  “You realize you could always re-wear a pair, right? You could even rinse them out if they got dirty.” I’m trying to ignore the underlying grossness of this conversation and just keep it together. My parents somehow lived through multiple wars, and this is the kind of stuff that they find to worry about. “I bet you could even get by with bringing only five pairs for the entire week.” I throw that last bit in just to be a jerk.

  Mom laughs maniacally, as if I told her she should try out for the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, or eat sushi. Then she gathers up the massive collection of underwear and shoves all of them into her suitcase. Subject closed.

  “How many pairs of slacks do you think your father will need?” She shuffles over to the closet and starts rifling through pairs of corduroy pants. We’re cruising to Bermuda, in August, and she’s packing corduroy pants. I sink into a rocking chair in the corner of the bedroom and bury my head in my cell phone. While Mom is engrossed in determining whether or not a pair of pants is navy blue or black—why does this even matter?—I covertly snap a photo of all the junk on the bed. Four jackets of varying weights, enough socks for the entire Confederate Army, three umbrellas, most of the antacid aisle from the local pharmacy, and six pairs of old people sneakers that all look exactly the same. My parents don’t pack six pairs of sneakers for style purposes. It’s not like “This pair of plain white sneakers look better with these navy blue corduroys than this pair.” No way. They’re all being packed out of sheer terror that one of them might step into a puddle while walking across the pool deck.

  Not only might they walk through a puddle, but also some force of nature—perhaps the Bermuda Triangle itself—might prevent them from lifting their feet from the puddle in a timely manner, thus soaking them through all the way to the skin. And if that were to happen, mixed with the ultimate threat of getting “a chill” from the air conditioning, you may as well just accept that your death is imminent and you will never again set eyes on dry land. I can’t even imagine how Mom sleeps at night with the possibility of wet feet looming in the air.

  And then there are the umbrellas. I mean really, are umbrellas even allowed on a cruise ship? I’m not sure that anybody has ever attempted to bring one aboard before. If it rains, wouldn’t you just move along to one of the covered areas? I’m pretty sure they don’t want thousands of people roaming around with open umbrellas, poking each other’s eyes out. I would love to throw all of them overboard. The umbrellas, I mean. Right.

  Packing for the Umbrella Apocalypse.

  I punch the words into Twitter, attach the photo, and off it goes. I still can’t even believe we are going on this trip. My parents never travel. There are too many possibilities of death and destruction involved with every mode of available transportation. Ironically, they love to travel by car—the only mode of transportation that literally has a crash rate of every minute of every day. But for some reason they feel safer with my dad behind the wheel, driving forty-five miles per hour down the interstate, than on a cruise ship full of lifeboats going eleven miles per hour through a totally empty Atlantic Ocean.

  I sigh more loudly than necessary, and look up to see how Mom is doing. She’s moved to the other end of the closet—the part where Dad keeps the suits that he used to wear to work before he retired. Mom and Dad had me when they were in their early forties, which was unusual at the time. Some of my friends’ parents are in their forties now, while my parents are already in their sixties and retired.

  The age gap tends to make things a bit...difficult.

  “Uh, Mom,” I ask, putting away my phone. “What are you doing in the suit section?” She’s just kind of standing there, staring up at the suits. Maybe she’s having a nervous breakdown. Mom is always claiming to be having nervous breakdowns. It’s taken me twenty-six years to figure it out, but I think my mother announcing that she’s having a nervous breakdown is the equivalent of a regular person saying, I could really use a drink.

  “I was just thinking that your father might need a few suits,” she says. “I mean, what if we’re asked to dine with the captain?”

  I pick the cruise brochure up off the bed and stare at the cover. Two casually dressed twenty-somethings are laughing it up over dinner. They’re both wearing head to toe white linen outfits, and eating at a table practically on the prow of the ship. A pair of dolphins leaps gleefully in the background. Freestyle Cruising it reads across the top. I know there’s nothing realistic about the photo, but I am still unbelievably jealous of them. The young couple, I mean. Not the dolphins. I can’t even imagine the freedom of going on a vacation not only without your parents, but also with a boyfriend. Going to dinner, sightseeing, doing anything you want at any time. Not having to wear a sweater.

  I hold the cruise brochure up for Mom to see.

  “I think this cruise line’s different,” I say. “You can wear whatever you want. Look, Dad can wear an unbuttoned white linen shirt with his chest hairs showing.”

  “But I saw a show on television once,” says Mom, totally missing the humor. “The people on the boat were all dressed up. They had on sequins and these big shoulder pads.” Mom makes big shoulder pad motions with her hands.

  The Loveboat. She’s talking about The Loveboat. She’s been basing her entire wardrobe around a television show from the nineteen-eighties. I take a deep breath and toss the brochure back onto the bed. The white linen couple lands facedown on a stray pair of Dad’s underwear. Serves them right.

  “Look, Mom. Why don’t you just work on fitting all of this stuff into the suitcase? If you have any room left we can do some more packing after dinner.”

  Hopefully by that point she will have forgotten about the fancy clothes and moved on to a more manageable category such as toiletries or motion sickness remedies. Besides, the chances that the captain is going to decide that he simply must have dinner with the umbrella-wielding elderly couple are basically slim to none. Dad could pack nothing but snorkel gear and an inner tube and everything would turn out just fine. I walk over and shut
the closet door, and then gently lead my mother back over to the bed.

  “How many suitcases did you say we could bring?” she asks.

  “Two each, Mom. Plus a carry-on.”

  Her eyes light up at the mention of a carry-on. “Do you think we should bring The Duffle?”

  The Duffle is the largest duffle bag ever created. It is six-feet long by three-feet wide, and was most likely manufactured for use by the mafia. Mom likes to stuff it full of socks and underwear. I shudder at the thought of them carrying The Duffle through the cruise terminal, one at each end, like they’re moving a bureau. But there is no sense in trying to talk her out of it. The day she found The Duffle laying in the middle of the luggage aisle at Wal-Mart was one of the best days of her life, right up there with the birth of her children. And when you think about how many pairs of socks and underwear The Duffle can hold, compared to how many pairs of socks and underwear her children can hold, well, I think we have a clear winner.

  “Totally up to you,” I say.

  I leave my mother to decide the fate of The Duffle, and retreat to the safety of my bedroom in the basement. My own suitcase sits unpacked on the floor. I suppose that it’s at this point—just in case I don’t make it back from this vacation alive and need somebody to jot down my meager memoirs—that I should tell you my name. It’s Summer. Summer Hartwell. Okay, Summer Eve Hartwell. My parents, in their attempt at giving their little girl a cute name, accidentally named me after a line of feminine hygiene products. At least I assume that it was accidental. Whatever the case, it certainly did nothing to alleviate the self-consciousness that has plagued me for most of my life. It also did not help that in the sixth grade, six seconds after Mrs. O’Neil did the unforgivable and read off my full name during roll call, that Alex Sanderson nicknamed me Summer Douchewell. He called me that up until the very last second that I saw him after our high school graduation ceremony.

  “Cheers, Douchewell!” he’d yelled across the parking lot—his graduation gown hanging open, his mortarboard long gone since he tossed it into the air. I had hung onto mine just as my mother advised. “Only idiots toss their hats,” she’d said. Alex was getting into a car with some other kids, probably headed to a drunken orgy, while I climbed into the back seat of my parents’ Hyundai Excel.

  I remember watching Alex peel out of the parking lot as Dad checked his pants pockets for his wallet. I remember unzipping and removing my graduation gown as Dad went back into the auditorium to retrieve his forgotten jacket. I remember closing my eyes while my parents discussed where we would go for lunch. I remember rolling my eyes as I pictured them sipping their coffee while I sat in the booth bored out of my mind, waiting for them to pay the bill. I remember the car finally beginning to move, and at sixteen miles per hour, pulling out of my high school for the last time. It was nothing like it is in the movies. Nobody’s hair was blowing. The top wasn’t down. No horns were tooting. It was just me and my parents, putt-putting off to the Outback Steakhouse.

  And now, eight years later, we’re preparing to putt-putt across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Smooth move, Douchewell.

  2

  Last night, in a fit of passive aggressive rebellion, I attempted to pack nothing but dresses, shorts, and t-shirts. I waited until eleven o’clock, when I was sure that both of my parents would be asleep, before hauling my suitcase upstairs. That’s when Mom popped up from the living room couch and scared the living daylights out of me. Apparently she’d been lying there all evening with the television turned off, just waiting to catch me in the act. She marched me back downstairs and began examining the contents of my suitcase.

  I’ll spare you the details of the apoplectic fit that followed when she found it completely devoid of sweaters. I tried my best to defend my decision, but there is no argument that can win against the fact that there will be air-conditioning on the ship. And so I stood silently by while she went into my closet, pulled down the last two sweaters that I ever would have chosen, and stuffed them into my suitcase.

  Said suitcase is now standing by the front door along with the others, including The Duffle, ready to be loaded into the limousine that my brother Eric is sending to pick us up. At least I assume it’s a limousine. He said that the car would be here at ten o’clock. I glance nervously out of the living room window, but it still hasn’t arrived yet. I can’t take this much longer. The longer it takes for the limo to get here, the more stuff Mom and Dad keep remembering that they need to pack.

  Watching Dad is giving me anxiety. He’s been in and out of the bathroom incessantly since we finished breakfast, and he keeps checking and re-checking all of the pockets of his cargo pants. He wears these insane pants that have more pockets than they do surface area. They’re like some kind of miracle of physics that he thinks help keep him organized. In reality they just give him more places to lose things.

  “Joan?” Dad shouts into the center of the living room. “Did you pack the hand sanitizer?”

  “Right here!” Mom pops out of the hall closet, and in a move that would have impressed David Blaine, produces two small bottles from the palms of her hands. Dad slips one into each of his pockets, never to be seen again.

  “Do you think we need these?” Mom holds up a pair of black rubber overshoes with dust bunnies dangling from the heels.

  The room begins to swirl. Umbrellas I can deal with, but rubber overshoes are an entirely different kind of crazy.

  This entire trip is Eric’s fault. He’s rich. Well, up until a couple of years ago he was an immature twenty-eight year old who I only saw during the major holidays. Then he went and invented an iPhone app that makes fart sounds and became a millionaire. Here’s how it works: you push a button and it farts. That’s it. What sets it apart from all of the other fart apps on the market is that it doesn’t just make the same sound over and over again. My brother’s stellar attention to detail has led him to replicate over fifty different tones—everything from a low foghorn to a high-pitched air-coming-out-of-a-balloon sound.

  Gross, right?

  It was particularly gross when he debuted it in front of the entire family over Christmas dinner. Especially after he told everyone that he had recorded all of the sound effects in my bedroom while I was asleep.

  By the time I saw him again at Easter dinner, his creation was the top seller in the app store. He partnered up with his best friend, Graham Blenderman, and together they added several more apps to their portfolio. A couple of months later they sold their empire of flatulence to a major gaming company, and now my brother drives an Audi. I’m happy for them, and at the same time very sad that there are so many people willing to pay ninety-nine cents for a whoopee cushion.

  Long story short, Eric decided to take us all on a cruise in order to celebrate his success. I’m not exactly sure why he decided to make us wait two years for it, but a free vacation is a free vacation. Mom and Dad agreed to it because it sails out of our home state of Massachusetts and there will be no air travel required. Meanwhile, Eric’s spent the past week relaxing in his luxury condo in the city while I try to fit my parents’ entire existence into four suitcases.

  When the doorbell finally rings, I fling open the front door expecting to find whichever unfortunate limo driver was assigned to our case—sometimes I find myself referring to my family as a case—but instead find myself face to face with Graham Blenderman. Before I can even say hello, Mom has hip-checked me out of the way.

  “It’s so wonderful to see you!” she cries, wrapping her arms around his neck.

  I roll my eyes. Mom is in love with Graham. Well, not in love love. But she thinks he’s God’s gift to the world, second only to my brother. She’s always going on and on about how smart he is and how fabulously he played “Fur Elise” at this piano recital that was literally seventeen years ago. When she’s not trying to fix me up with one of her old lady friends’ awful sons, she’s asking me why I don’t “get together” with Graham. As if you can just make a man become int
erested in you. As if you can just make Graham become interested in you.

  Graham Blenderman.

  If his name doesn’t throw you immediately off guard, the rest of him will. He’s got this dirty blonde hair that spikes up in every direction, and a penchant for clothes that were destined to be the last color left on the clearance rack. I’m not being a snob against clearance racks or anything; I’m just saying that he sometimes goes a little overboard with the chartreuse. He’s like the guy at the resort who’s always trying to get people together for a game of pool volleyball. He’ll come barging up to your lounge chair, nose slathered in zinc oxide, while all you want to do is disappear behind a book. He has more personality than I’m comfortable with is all I’m saying.

  Not that he’s terrible on the eyes or anything. To be honest, if anybody can pull off a tangerine colored cardigan, it’s him. I wouldn’t say that he’s drop dead teen romance vampire hot—you know, when it takes every ounce of willpower to refrain from tearing his clothes off in the middle of chemistry lab. No, he’s more Goofy than he is Casanova. But there has always been something about his unique combination of height, humor, and complete disregard for fashion norms that has rendered him quite intimidating to me.

  “Hello, Joan,” says Graham, extracting himself from her tentacles, and tipping an imaginary hat in my direction. “Summer.” His eyes linger on me for a few seconds, moving from my face down the entire length of my body, and back up again.

  I shift uncomfortably, wishing that I had chosen to wear something other than my travel sweats. Graham is wearing a polo shirt in the shade of blue that they dye children’s breakfast cereal. Blue Dye #1.

  “We weren’t expecting to see you until later!” gushes Mom, squeezing the side of Graham’s face in her hand. “What are you doing here?”