Page 85 of The Book of Summer

“No, the two cups represent two options.”

Evan points to one.

“French roast from Claudette’s…” He gestures to the other. “Or decaf, if you’d rather.”

“Oh brother.” Bess rolls her eyes. “Does this relate to my, uh, revelation?”

“It does,” he says with a grin.

“You’re really trying to get me to commit to a decision, aren’t you?”

“You’ve already made a decision. I only want to know what it is.”

Wobbly-stomached about why, exactly, Evan might want to know, Bess reaches for the decaf but then changes her mind and grabs the French roast. She takes a sip of neither.

“I want to show you something,” Bess says, and jams the French roast back into its cardboard. “Follow me.”

She leads Evan into the butler’s pantry.

“Ah. Your famous escape route,” Evan says.

He taps on these walls, too.

“Yep. Also.”

Bess gestures to a stack of yearbooks on the left-side counter. Some are Clay’s, some are Lala’s, but most are Bess’s.

“My Nantucket High yearbooks,” she says, then immediately pictures the woman’s hoodie.

Was she familiar? She didn’t seem familiar. Bess shakes her head.

“Isn’t it wild that I still have them?” she says.

“Lizzy C., the whole reason people purchase yearbooks is for keeping.”

“We bought them? I thought they were forced upon us.”

Bess flips open the front cover of Nantucket High School: 1996–1997. Acting as if she doesn’t know its precise location, Bess ticks through a few pages until she lands on Evan’s varsity baseball team photo. He’s in the back row, center. Royal-blue cap. White grin.

“Look at that guy,” she says, tapping the photograph with an unexpectedly shaky finger. “He must’ve had all the babes after him.”

“Not as far as I know. Only the babe who mattered.”

Face hot, Bess claps the yearbook shut and stretches toward one of Grandma Ruby’s photo albums.

“Check this out,” Bess says, changing the subject if not with deftness at least with speed. She pushes the album in Evan’s direction. “It’s so bizarre. My grandmother saved dozens of articles written by some friend of hers and I can’t figure out why this person was so important. Her name is in the book but Grandma Ruby never mentioned herat all.”

Evan shrugs.

“She was probably a friend from school. Nostalgia will get you every time.”

“Yes it will.” Bess skims a few more pages and then closes the book with a sigh. “It’s like Ruby was stalking her.”

Stalking and nostalgia: Both run in the family, it seems.

“I didn’t know your grandmother well,” Evan says. “But she didn’t seem like the stalking type. She intimidated me, to be honest. I saw her as so regal and refined.”

“She was both. A nice balance to the total spaz that is my mother—God love her. We bonded over the various manifestations of Cissy cuckooness.”

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