Local Girls : An Island Summer Novel (9781416564171) Read online

  Praise for

  JENNY O’CONNELL

  PLAN B

  “Plan B, Jenny O’Connell’s first young adult novel, is sure to be a hit. . . . It’s full of believable characters, interesting plot twists, and great writing.” Rating: 10/10

  —Teen Book Review.com

  “Plan B gets an ‘A’ for a clever plot. . . . [Vanessa is] a vulnerable and sympathetic character.”

  —Curled Up Kids.com

  THE BOOK OF LUKE

  “This fresh, honest novel is full of amazing characters and excellent writing. Jenny O’Connell is a smart, talented author; I’m really looking forward to seeing what she writes next! This is contemporary fiction at its best; readers will not be disappointed.” Rating: 5 Stars

  —Teens Read Too.com

  “[A] fun and charming book that’s worth reading.”

  —Young Adult Books Central.com

  “Emily . . . is smart, funny, easy to relate to, and so is her

  narration.”

  —The Yayas, Wordpress.com

  Local Girls

  An Island Summer Novel

  Jenny O’Connell

  POCKET BOOKS

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual

  events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Jennifer O’Connell

  MTV Music Television and all related titles, logos, and characters are trademarks of

  MTV Networks, a division of Viacom International Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions

  thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books

  Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First MTV Books/Pocket Books trade paperback edition June 2008

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  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,

  please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798

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  Designed by Carla Jayne Little

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O’Connell, Jennifer

  Local girls : an island summer novel / by Jenny O’Connell. — 1st MTV Books/Pocket

  Books trade paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When Kendra’s best friend Mona returns to Martha’s Vineyard for the

  summer after spending the school year in Boston, they discover that their friendship—

  along with a lot of other things—has changed.

  [1. Change—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Self-actualization

  (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 5. Summer—Fiction. 6.

  Martha’s Vineyard (Mass.)—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.O2165Lo 2008

  [Fic]—dc22 2008000317

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6335-8

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-6335-0

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6-4171

  For Carleigh, who, after ten years,

  finally saw me jump in the waves of South Beach.

  Acknowledgments

  There were so many people on the island who let me poke around and ask questions, but I could not have written about this wonderful place without Susan, Carol, and Emily, who were so helpful and willing to share island life with me (not to mention babysit). Many others helped me explore all the details that make Martha’s Vineyard just about my most favorite place in the world, including Aerin at the Hob Nob Inn, who let me wander and take notes and wish I could get a room for myself, the real Ghost Lady, who almost made me afraid of the dark, and Steve at the bait shop, who was kind enough to tell me about the best fishing spots.

  And of course my agent, Kristin, who kept telling me to write a series, and my editor, Jennifer, who enabled me to write a series that let me think about summer all year long.

  Prologue

  “It’s just the school year,” Mona reminded me, as if saying “school year” sounded shorter than saying “nine months.” “I’ll be back next summer.”

  “I know,” I told her, even though no matter how you phrased it, Mona was leaving the island. The Range Rover was packed up, her new stepfather was in the driver’s seat, and the ferry line was just about to start moving. In a few minutes Mona would be gone.

  “Kennie, we’re going to miss you so much.” Izzy hugged me, squeezing so tight I could feel her new diamond wedding band digging into my bare arm, probably leaving a six-carat imprint in my skin.

  “Mom, come on, let her go.” Mona stepped between us, pushing us apart. “Kendra’s turning blue.”

  Izzy nicknamed me Kennie in elementary school, something that an eight-year-old Mona had found incredibly unfair. She’d always wanted a nickname, but Mona wasn’t exactly conducive to nicknames, and believe me, she’d tried. The closest she ever came was the time she insisted everyone call her Mo. It lasted all of two days before she realized that Mo wasn’t any better, and might actually be worse.

  Mona’s convinced that if her mom had actually told her father that she was pregnant, or at the very least sent him a letter telling him she’d given birth to twins, he never would have allowed Izzy to name his daughter after a Leonardo da Vinci painting. But Izzy never shared any details of her pregnancy or the resulting babies with the boy she’d slept with seventeen summers ago and then never seen again. And the only details Izzy had ever told Mona and Henry about their dad was that he was too young and ill-equipped to be a father, much less raise a child—or two. (“He was ill-equipped to raise a child?” Mona always liked to point out. “This from someone who named her twins after a portrait of a morbid-looking woman and a guy who painted a bunch of naked dancing ladies—would it have killed her to just call me Lisa?”).

  “Izzy, we better get going, the line’s about to move,” Mona’s stepfather, Malcolm, called from the driver’s seat.

  She waved him away, but hugged me one last time before getting in the passenger seat and closing the door.

  “You better go,” I told Mona, watching the first cars begin the drive toward the ferry ramp. “You don’t want to hold up the whole line.”

  “I can’t believe I won’t be seeing you every day, I’m not going to have anybody to talk to.” Even before she finished the sentence I could see the tears building, the drops making her already blue eyes even brighter.

  “You’ll have Henry, and I’m just a phone call away. It’s not like you’ll never speak to me again.”

  Mona nodded and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I know, but it’s not the same.”

  It wasn’t the same, and I didn’t even try to tell her it was. Instead I opened the back door and ducked down, looking across to the other seat. “Make sure she’s okay, Henry.”

  Henry smiled at me and nodded. “I will, Kendra, don’t worry, she’ll be fine.”

  “I can’t believe this is it!” Mona sniffled as I stepped aside so she could get into the backseat.

  “This isn’t it, Mona. Like you said, it’s just the school year.”

  “Private school, yuck.” She pretended to stick her fing
er down her throat and I laughed. For the first time all morning, Mona smiled.

  “Don’t forget about me,” I whispered into Mona’s ear before the door to Malcolm’s Range Rover closed shut and the ferry’s horn blew one last time.

  Mona attempted to smile through the open window and whispered back, “Nothing will change. I’ll be back next summer and everything will be the same.”

  If we’d only known how wrong she was.

  Chapter 1

  I closed my eyes and inhaled just long enough to recognize the first sign of summer. Luckily, I opened them again in time to see the four-way stop ahead. But as I pressed my foot on the brake and came to a stop at the intersection, I inhaled again, leaning my head out the open window. I knew that scent even before I could see where it was coming from. The smell of summer. Skunk.

  I glanced at the clock on the dashboard: 8:49. Mona’s ferry would be arriving in eleven minutes. Almost ten months of waiting and I had just eleven minutes to go.

  After looking both ways, I dropped my foot on the gas pedal and headed toward the ferry. Even without spotting the skunk, the slight burning in my nose told me I was getting closer, until there it was, pushed just off the road toward the bike path. Mona always complained when I lowered the car window at the first whiff of skunk. She’d crinkle up her nose and then pinch it shut, her index finger self-consciously rubbing the bridge of her nose and the invisible bump that wasn’t noticed by anyone but her. Still, I always kept the window down and breathed deep, even knowing how much it bugged her, because eventually she’d always end up laughing, a nasally laugh that turned into a snort when she finally unpinched her nose.

  But now, I avoided looking at the black-and-white mound next to the bike path and instead looked straight ahead at the sign announcing I’d entered Vineyard Haven.

  It was near the end of June, and a Sunday, which meant there would be two types of cars at the ferry—the tourists leaving the island after a week’s vacation, and the tourists arriving. The thing is, if it weren’t for the fact that they were facing different directions, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell which was which. But as someone who has lived on the island her entire life, I could tell. It wasn’t the stuff they packed in their cars, because coming or going, the SUVs and sedans were layered to the roof with duffel bags, pillows, beach chairs, and boogie boards. If they were really ambitious, and unwilling to trade their expensive ten-speeds with cushy leather seats and spindly rearview mirrors for an on-island rental, there were always the bike racks hanging off the backs of trunks, wheel spokes slowly turning as they caught the breeze off the harbor. And it wasn’t their license plates, because just about every other car was clearly labeled “tourist”—Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and even a few Pennsylvanias tossed in for good measure. No, it was the difference between the shiny, sparkling cars with their polished hubcaps, and the cars coated with dirt and sand, their once gleaming exteriors dusted on-island like powdered donuts.

  I made the left onto Water Street, following a BMW with WASH ME handwritten in block letters in the layer of dirt on the bumper. I patiently waited for the cars ahead of me to pull into the Steamship Authority parking lot and line up single file between the painted rows so they could board the ferry. Then I veered left and pulled Lexi’s car into the row of spaces for people like me.

  My sister knew I’d wanted to meet Mona at the ferry, and since she was planning to be at the deli early to let in the last of the contractors, she’d offered me her car. Even though July Fourth was almost two weeks away, which meant the worst of the summer traffic hadn’t even started, I left the house early. Not as early as my parents and Lexi and Bart, who just had to be at the deli by seven, but early by a seventeen-year-old’s standards, and especially early for someone whose last day it was to sleep late.

  Mona’s ferry wasn’t in sight yet, so I walked to the edge of the water, where waiting families shared overpriced muffins from the Black Dog. They were all there, the Vineyard vacationers you saw in travel brochures and websites. There was the little boy who’d undoubtedly whined until his mom purchased the stuffed black lab puppy now clutched under his arm. His brother with the shark-tooth necklace. The girl with the rope bracelet. A mom in Lily Pulitzer Capri pants.

  They might as well have been wearing the same T-shirts—I WENT TO MARTHA’S VINEYARD AND ALL I GOT WAS EVERYTHING I ASKED FOR.

  “Kendra!”

  I turned toward the voice calling my name and recognized Ryan Patten down by the gazebo. He waved and started walking toward me. When you lived on the island, you didn’t really expect to see people you knew at the ferry this time of year. Maybe in November when you were heading off-island to Target, or in March when everyone was going stir-crazy from the long, gray winter, but for three months during the summer the ferry was for strangers.

  “What are you doing here?” Ryan asked, pulling a leash, and a very large dog, behind him.

  “Mona’s on the nine o’clock.” I pointed to the golden retriever sniffing the grass and flicking his tail against Ryan’s leg. “Who’s that?”

  “Dutch. He’s along for the ride. My cousins and aunt and uncle are coming for a visit. You know how it is.”

  I nodded as if I did, but I didn’t. Nobody in my family ever moved off the island. “So, what are you doing this summer?”

  “Renting bikes at Island Wheels. What about you?” Dutch pulled at his leash and I followed along as Ryan let him continue sniffing the trail of whatever he thought he’d found.

  “Working at the Willow Inn. We start tomorrow.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Mona,” I told Ryan, lowering my voice as if there was any chance she could hear me from the ferry.

  I hadn’t told her yet. The job was my surprise. We’d always talked about working at one of the inns for a summer. It met all three of our criteria. One, no lines. The idea of scooping ice cream while a line of exhausted parents and their demanding kids impatiently shouted out orders for Oreo cookie frappés wasn’t exactly appealing, no matter how much free ice cream you could eat. Two, no retail (see number one, but replace pissy parents and their whiny kids with pissy women who don’t understand why there are no more size 6 Bermuda shorts on the rack). And three, no nights. Serving breakfast at the Willow Inn was perfect. Technically, there could be times when people would be anxiously waiting for their morning coffees, but with only nineteen rooms, it wasn’t like there’d be a line for the blueberry muffins. Besides, we’d always figured people were still optimistic that early in the morning, and therefore nicer to be around. By the end of the day they’d be sunburned, cranky from spending twenty minutes in traffic on Main Street, and downright rude after driving around for an hour, looking for a parking space, only to discover a ticket on their windshield when they returned. The Willow didn’t serve dinner, just breakfast and picnic lunches for guests. Spend three minutes with a hostess trying to placate families who have been waiting over an hour for a dinner table, and you’d understand why.

  Luckily, the guy who sold Lexi the cash register for the deli knew someone who knew the new owner of the Willow, and two weeks after Lexi placed an order for the Sam4s register with integrated credit card capabilities, I had secured jobs for Mona and me.

  “Does Kevin know she’s coming back?” Ryan asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. She e-mailed me with her ferry time and that was it.”

  Mona hadn’t seen Kevin since she left, that I did know. She only came back to the island once after she moved, last October for her grandfather’s funeral, and I’m sure I would have known if Kevin had gone to Boston to visit her. Kevin went out with Melissa Madsen for a few months this winter, but I was still sort of hoping they’d get back together when Mona returned, and then everything would be just like it was before she left. At least for the summer.

  “It’s here.” Ryan pointed past the houses hugging the shores of the harbor and I could see the ferry come into view, white peaks of water cresting on either
side of the bow as it made its way toward us.

  “Hungry?” Ryan asked, and then pointed to the hand I had clutched against my stomach.

  What could I say? That seeing the ferry coming toward us, the ferry with my best friend on it, had turned my stomach upside down? That all of a sudden the idea of seeing Mona again made me nervous because I didn’t know what to expect?

  “Yeah,” I lied, and rubbed my stomach as if all I needed was a good bowl of cereal. “Starving.”

  We started walking toward the dock. “Where are you meeting your cousins?” I asked.

  “Where they walk off. They got to Woods Hole late and missed their ferry, again. Couldn’t get another reservation for the car until Monday, so they’ll have to go over tomorrow and pick it up.”

  Ryan began telling me how his cousins missed their ferry every year, but even though I nodded in all the right places as if I was listening, all I really heard was the ferry engine revving loudly as it slid into place against the dock.

  “You know what I mean?” Ryan finished. He looked to me for a response.

  “Exactly,” I answered, even though I had no idea what I was agreeing to.

  We stood there with Dutch and watched as the front door to the boat’s belly opened up to expose rows of idling cars. Once the guys working the controls for the ramp gave them the go-ahead, the cars slowly moved across the steel incline, forming a steady, orderly procession as they took turns driving off the boat and past the ferry building before accelerating in the direction of their rental house or relative’s house or, in Mona’s case, their new stepfather’s summer estate.

  I stood on my tiptoes trying to see if I could spot Malcolm’s black Range Rover inside. Last summer, when Malcolm married Izzy in the backyard of his house overlooking South Beach, Mona and I wrote “Just Married” along the side of the car with a bar of Ivory soap. The soap was from Mona’s grandfather’s house. We couldn’t find a bar in Malcolm’s six-bedroom summer “cottage,” where every bathroom had a bottle of L’Occitane almond shea soap on the sink and a matching bottle of body wash in the shower but not a bar of Ivory soap in the whole place. L’Occitane seemed to be the soap of choice in Malcolm’s house, and it smelled amazing. It was actually the second thing I noticed the first time I went to Malcolm’s house with Mona. The smell. It wasn’t sweet like the air fresheners my mother seemed to have inserted into every electrical outlet in our house. And it wasn’t comforting, like the lavender sachets the Willow Inn placed on the guests’ pillows every night. The only way I could describe it was manly, like a combination of fresh-cut grass, seawater, and limes. Even though Malcolm had hired an interior designer from Vineyard Haven to decorate his summer home, it was definitely a house that had been occupied by a man. Malcolm didn’t have any kids, even though Izzy told Mona he was married briefly to his college sweetheart. By the time Malcolm met Izzy, he’d been divorced for way longer than he was married, which is why the first thing I noticed about Malcolm’s house was that it was way too big for a single guy with no kids.