
We stayed in the ocean for what felt like hours at a time. Cam made avocado and sprout sandwiches with Susannah's homemade mayonnaise and whole wheat bread. I spent the whole next day in the ocean with Cam. He showed me again, putting his arm over mine. "Let's do it again," I said, pretending to be confused. It was the closest I had ever been to him. Then he brought me in close and positioned my arms around his so we stepped together, side by side. "My mom taught both of us," Conrad said simply. I tried to ignore them and look only at Conrad. It's a relaxed kind of dance," my mother said from the couch. "Get on the beat," Steven said from the sidelines. It was harder than it looked, and I was nervous. "One-two-three, one-two-three, rock step." "This is how you shag," he said, shuffling his feet from side to side. He was still big on doing the right thing then. I was afraid my love for him and my need for him to say yes would be written on my face like a poem.Ĭonrad sighed. "Connie, dance with Belly," Susannah urged, her face flushed as Jeremiah twirled her again. I was lying down on the floor, on my stomach, looking up at them. "Stevie, dance with me," I demanded, poking him with my big toe. I did dance ballet and modern, after all. I watched them, Susannah throwing her head back and laughing, and Jeremiah twirling her around, and I wanted to dance too. It was called the shag, and it was a 1960s kind of beach dance. He'd been playing poker with Steven and Conrad and my mother, who was very, very good at poker.Īt first Jeremiah protested, but then he was dancing too. That night I put the Boogie Beach Shag CD on the big stereo in the living room, and Susannah grabbed Jeremiah and started to dance. I would listen to it on Susannah's old Walkman when I tanned. My favorite music was the Motown and the beach music. And then my mother might put on her Aretha Franklin CD, and Jeremiah would sing all the words, because we all knew them by that time, we'd heard it so much. Jeremiah would put on his Chronic CD, and my mother would be doing laundry, humming along. There was the Police, which Susannah put on in the morning there was Bob Dylan, which she put on in the afternoon and there was Billie Holiday, which she put on at dinner. We spent the whole summer listening to the same CDs.

The summer house had a stack of CDs that we listened to, and that was pretty much it. When he was sweet like this, I remembered why I did. Good night, Bells." Bells, my nickname from a thousand years ago. Conrad had a way of looking at me, at you, at anybody, that made everything unravel and want to fall at his feet.

To uncover the writer’s puzzling identity, Birdie must come out of her shell…discovering that the most confounding mystery of all may be her growing feelings for the elusive riddle that is Daniel.He smiled.

Daniel also shares her appetite for intrigue, and he’s stumbled upon a real-life mystery: a famous reclusive writer-never before seen in public-might be secretly meeting someone at the hotel.
The summer i turned pretty online free driver#
The hotel’s charismatic young van driver shares the same nocturnal shift and patronizes the waterfront Moonlight Diner where Birdie waits for the early morning ferry after work. In her new job, Birdie hopes to blossom from introverted dreamer to brave pioneer, and gregarious Daniel Aoki volunteers to be her guide. But her solitary world expands when she takes a job the summer before college, working the graveyard shift at a historic Seattle hotel. Raised in isolation and homeschooled by strict grandparents, she’s cultivated a whimsical fantasy life in which she plays the heroic detective and every stranger is a suspect. Mystery-book aficionado Birdie Lindberg has an overactive imagination. “An atmospheric, multilayered, sex-positive romance.” -Kirkus Reviews (starred review) After an awkward first encounter, Birdie and Daniel are forced to work together in a Seattle hotel where a famous author leads a mysterious and secluded life in this romantic contemporary novel from the author of Alex, Approximately.
