Page 93 of Summer Reading

“No. Nope. Nuh-uh.”

“What?”

“We’re not having this conversation.” He gestured between us with his dripping spoon, leaving splats of chocolate on the table. I grabbed a napkin from the holder and wiped them up.

“What conversation?”

“The sex conversation,” he said.

I gaped at him, my face a mask of innocence. “What makes you think I want to talk about that?”

“Just because you and Ben—”

“Stop right there,” I said. I felt my own face get warm.

“Ha!” he said. “Not so much fun now, is it?”

“It was never going to be fun,” I said. I scooped up more ice cream, not caring if I got brain freeze. “I just need to know that you’re being careful.” I paused, feeling a pain in my head that had nothing to do with the ice cream. “Like do you need me to buy you condoms or anything?”

“Ah!” He let out a horrified yell. “I’ve barely even kissed her!”

“Oh, well that’s good,” I said. “You’ve just been together so much I was worried that things might be moving too fast.”

“Really feeling uncomfortable right now,” he said. He shoveled some more ice cream into his mouth as if he could end this conversation if he cleaned out the bowl.

“All right,” I said. “There’s just one thing that we need to talk about and then I’ll stop torturing you, I promise.”

He closed his eyes, no doubt hoping he’d be abducted by aliens before I continued.

“I know they cover the basics of sex”—he made a strangled noise that I chose to ignore—“in health class, but do they talk about consent?”

He looked physically pained and made a moaning noise. His face was now as red as a beacon, and if he perched on East Chop, he could stand in for the lighthouse out there, no problem.

“When you’re... you know... you have to listen to her,” I said. “Simply put, no means no, and it doesn’t matter when she says it or if she said yes and then changes her mind. No means no. I don’t care if you have to slam it in a door to get a grip. Understood?”

“Got it! Can I go now?” he asked. “I’m feeling a sudden need to climb into a blanket fort with all of my stuffed animals.”

“Go,” I said. He practically ran from the room, and I yelled after him, “But no snuggling them if they say no!”

“Ah!” he yelled all the way up the stairs.

So that went well.

•••

To make up for embarrassing the heck out of him, I took Tyler to our favorite breakfast spot on the Vineyard. It was a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop called the Grape. They were known for their coffee and their pastries, my favorite being the cinnamon-raisin roll. Buttery, flaky pastry loaded with raisins and veins of cinnamon. I could eat four in a sitting and have no regrets.

As I stood in line to place our order, Tyler stared at the wall of photos in the small dining room. The Grape had been here forever and hosted live music, poetry slams, and assorted fundraisers for everything from saving the rain forest to helping refugees. Family owned and operated by the Camara family, they only hired Camaras. It was one of the reasons Ben and I had scratched it off the list of places where his mother might have worked.

I paid for our bag of pastries and joined Tyler by the wall. He was staring at one picture in particular and frowning.

“Hey, Sam, have you seen this before?”

He pointed to the photo. It was old and slightly faded. There was a red neon date in the lower right-hand corner but I couldn’t read the numbers, as theywere all squared off and impossible for me to decipher. I looked at the people in the photo instead.

Standing to the right was a man with dark hair, styled in a mullet—never a good look—and he was holding a pair of drumsticks and grinning.Dad!On the left, in profile, was another musician, holding a guitar. He was tall and lanky, wearing a T-shirt with a Ramones logo on it, and his golden brown hair was long and wavy, reaching just past his shoulders. In between the two men stood a woman. She and the guitarist were gazing at each other with such raw longing, I felt as if I was intruding on their moment.

She was not my mother, and I didn’t recognize her as a person I’d known on the island as a child. I looked more closely and noticed she had familiar blue-gray eyes, a straight nose, and full lips. I gasped. It had to be Moira Reynolds.

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