Jules sat up in bed, suddenly wide awake because...
Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap!
Yes, indeed, someonewasoutside of his bedroom window.
He threw back the covers and went to pull back the curtain and...
It was the kid called Hobbit, smiling sheepishly as he crouched there on the roof. Jules unlocked the window and pushed it open. Sunrise was just barely lighting the eastern sky. He glanced back at the clock-radio on his bedside table. It was 5:43 AM.
On a Saturday.
“Good morning?” Jules asked.
“Yes!Goodmorning,” the boy said eagerly from the other side of the screen. “I’m so glad you’renot mad. Belle didn’t want to call and wake up your mother, so she, you know, sent me as, like, messenger.”
“Do you... often climb onto roofs to deliver messages?”
He sighed. “I know it’s weird. And potentially treacherous.” He looked around him. “But yours isn’t bad. The roof outside of Shelly’s house is pretty steep. But I’m not afraid of heights. It’s kinda my superpower.”
“Good to know,” Jules said.
“Ready for the message?” Hobbit asked.
“Please.”
The kid cleared his throat dramatically. “It’s a singing telegram,” he explained.
Jules laughed. “Coming from Belle, I would expect nothing less.”
“We are going to the beach today, and you must come along!” Hobbit sang in a voice that was lower than Jules had expected, clearly making up the tune as he went. But then, he switched into a remarkably ridiculous but still pitch-perfect falsetto. “We’re bidding farewell to the summer, summer, summer! So grab a towel and your bathing suit, Jules Cassidy, Jules Cassidy! We’re waiting for you out front in Tom’s! Car!”
With a flourish that was half bow, half victory dance, the kid sure-footedly scrambled away, climbing swiftly down off the roof, then sprinting across the backyard.
Jules closed the window, hit the bathroom, dug through his dresser drawer to find his bathing suit as he brushed his teeth, grabbed his sunglasses and a sweatshirt and then a towel from the linen closet, wrote a note for his mom and left it smack in the middle of the kitchen counter where she’d be sure to see it, and was out of the house in record time.
The beach was very New England.
The water that lapped against the coarsely-sanded shore was the Long Island Sound, and if Jules squinted hard in the bright morning sun, he could almost see all the way across to the North Shore of Long Island. Cold Spring Harbor. Home of Billy Joel, whom his dad had adored.
Shelly had spread several brightly colored bedsheets out on the sand, and Sadie set up an umbrella which they made Hobbit sit beneath.
“You go to the hospital once,” he grumbled. “Justonetime for the worst sunburn in the history of mankind and they make you huddle in the shade for the rest of your life.”
But he clearly loved the attention the two older girls showered on him. Today the trio weren’t dressed identically, with the exception of the truly ridiculous straw sunhats that Sadie had pulled triumphantly from her bag once they were all in the car. Jules had almost been jealous that he hadn’t gotten one, too.
Belle and Tom both ventured into the water—which itself wasn’t arctic, end of summer and all—but the wind was fierce and from the north. After emerging, Belle confiscated all of the extra towels and wrapped them around the two of them as they now sat shivering in the sun.
Belle had peppered Jules with questions yesterday after school—superficial things like where he came from, what were his plans after graduation, favorite color, favorite band, favorite movie, favorite book, favorite Star Wars character, favorite episode of classic Trek, favorite vegetable...
Today she dug a little deeper. “Do you have a boyfriend back in... wherever?”
Whereverwas a good name for it. That town he’d left behind, where David’s parents still lived. David lived there,too, but right now he was all the way across the country at UCLA.
On the other side of the beach-sheet, Shel and Sadie were leaning in to hear his answer. They both seemed annoyingly intent upon setting him up with Hobbit, which was ridiculous. Such matchmaking was regularly done by straights.You’re gay, and I know a gay!As if both he and Hobbit simply being gay was all that was needed for them to start dating or hooking up or whatever the girls were imagining. Like chemistry and attraction and personality didn’t play into it, just sexual orientation.
And yes, Hobbit was adorably weird and sweetly funny, but he was also a tad too young.
“I did,” Jules answered Belle’s question evenly. “Until a few weeks ago. But he graduated and when he left for college—on the day he left—he told me he didn’t want to do long-distance and he broke up with me.”
