Sixteenth Summer by Michelle Dalton Page B

cursing under his breath and slapping at his calves.
    “Oh, the mosquitoes,” I said. “I can help with that. Come on.”
    We hiked back to the head of the path, and because we were hurrying against the drone of the bugs, we got there in only a few minutes. I pulled a little plastic box out from beneath my bike seat. In it I had an emergency stash of sunscreen, bug spray, and sno-cone money.
    I held out the spray bottle, but instead of taking it, Will cocked his leg in my direction.
    I hesitated for a moment, then dropped to one knee to spritz the fumy stuff on Will’s ankles and calves. I tried not to fixate on Will’s muscles, the hair on his legs that was somewhere between light brown and sun-bleached gold, or the way his frayed khaki cutoffs grazed the top of my hand when I stood up to mist his arms.
    I guess I held the bottle a little too close when I sprayed theback of Will’s neck, because the repellant pooled up in a little froth just below his hairline.
    “Man, that’s cold!” Will said.
    “Sorry!” I giggled, then used my fingertips to rub the stuff in.
    Touching Will’s neck seemed shockingly intimate. Part of me wanted to jerk my hand away. Another wanted to put my other hand on his neck too, and maybe give him a little massage.
    But instead I just swiped the bug spray away quickly and said, “You know, my shift at The Scoop starts kind of soon. I should probably …”
    Will nodded, smiled, and walked toward his bike.
    I had no idea if he’d thought of that moment as A Moment—or if he’d just been grateful for the bug repellant.
    Either way, I felt calmer as we walked our bikes back to the highway and headed to town.
    Because whatever that moment had been, I now felt pretty certain that it wouldn’t be our last.
    O ver the next couple of weeks, Will and I fell into such a comfortable groove, it was almost hard to remember that day and a half of
will he call or won’t he?
Because Will did call, whenever he felt like it.
    Or I called
him
.
    One morning he wandered over to the North Peninsula with a beach towel, a paperback book, and a giant iced coffee, just because he knew I’d be there.
    And one evening I stashed some ice cream in a cooler anddrifted over to the crooked little boardwalk that connected his rental cottage to the beach, because he’d told me that he liked to sit there at night, dangling his legs over the tall grass and listening to music.
    We covered every corner of Dune Island, me on Allison Porchnik and Will on Zelig. That’s the name, from another Woody Allen movie, I’d come up with for his chunky red bike.
    But with each day that went by, I realized we hadn’t given our bikes the right names at all.
    Unlike Zelig, the character who traveled the world pretending to be all sorts of people he wasn’t, Will was incredibly honest—but sweet about it. (For instance, he eventually told me that he
had
noticed my blue lips that morning on the beach. But he also told me he’d thought they were cute.)
    And after Will chucked Owen’s thirty-six-hour rule, I never felt like jilted Allison Porchnik again.
    It was thrillingly comfortable being with Will.
    But also uncomfortably thrilling.
    Every time I saw him, I felt like my eyes opened a little wider and my breath got just little quicker. I felt
intense
, like I was getting more oxygen than usual. And even though this was preferable to the way I’d felt when I’d first met Will—and couldn’t get enough air
in
—it still made me a little self-conscious.
    I worried that I looked like a chipmunk in a Disney cartoon, all fluttery lashes and big, goofy smiles—basically, the worst incarnation of cute.
    But I couldn’t stop the swooning. Every day I discoveredanother little bit of Will. One afternoon he told me he’d been the resident haunter in his old apartment building. Every year on Halloween, he’d dressed up in a different creepy costume to scare the sour candy out of the kids trick-or-treating in the hallways.
    Another