Free Fifteenth Summer by Michelle Dalton

posters on the walls, each advertising an author reading or book launch party. Josh’s same leaning font was on every one.
    Other than that, they were all wildly different. One poster—fora book about a London punk—featured E.B. the dog with a Mohawk, black eyeliner, and safety pins in his floppy ears. Another, for a campy zombie book, had a funny portrait of a zombie gnawing on a human arm like it was a cob of corn. Still another, for a children’s picture book, had a pigeon pitching a fit from all different angles, like a police mug shot.
    Clearly Josh had made all of these.
    With my mouth hanging open in surprise, I glanced back at him. That’s when I saw that he was staring at me!
    As our eyes met I snapped my mouth shut with such force, I felt my teeth jangle a bit.
    Josh did the exact same thing.
    I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or to duck my disheveled head and run out of Dog Ear. Given my lack of makeup, I kind of wanted to do the latter.
    But given Josh’s adorable face?
    I stayed.
    “You finally came,” he said.
    He had a nervous/sweet half smile on his face. And his smooth cap of hair was kind of flattened in the one part where I guessed he’d been propping it on his hand while he drew. His shoulders were angular and adorable inside his thin T-shirt.
    “Um, yeah,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to, but things have been kind of family-intensive. I’m with my sisters right now, in fact . . .”
    My voice trailed off as I gestured at them in the lounge.
    What I didn’t say was, “My sisters dragged me in here because I was too terrified to come by myself.”
    “Oh,” he said. Which made me wonder what he wasn’t saying.
    “So you made all these?” I said, pointing at the framed posters lining the wall.
    “Well . . .” Josh glanced at the half-finished poster on the desk, and then I could tell what he was thinking. He was wishing he could do a full-body dive on top of it, covering it up so I wouldn’t know his secret.
    “So . . . it’s not all receipt tape?” I broached.
    He looked squirmy again. But a sheepish smile snuck through. And even though he was trying to fight it off, it lit up his face.
    “Did you ever start that book?” he said, changing the subject. “The one with the monsoon?”
    “No monsoon yet,” I said with a laugh. “But she did compare the rising tropical sun to a hothouse hyacinth.”
    “Ooh, that’s bad,” he said, and cringed.
    “Oh, wretched ,” I said happily. “Which, you know, can sometimes be a good thing. Like Lifetime movies of the week? My sisters and I love them.”
    “Because you can laugh at them—”
    “Not with, but at,” I interjected.
    “Right,” Josh said. “But the point is, you do it together. Can’t do that with a book.”
    Then his eyes lit up.
    “Wait a minute,” he said.
    He disappeared beneath the counter. I heard a shuffling sound, and the slap , slap , slap of paperbacks hitting the floor. I glanced nervously at Abbie and Hannah. Hannah was completely immersed in a book that just reeked of important subject matter.And Abbie was giving J-Boy a flirty punch in the arm. She practically batted her eyelashes at him.
    Suddenly Josh reemerged. His flattened hair had popped back up. And he was holding a coverless paperback book. I pointed at it.
    “Is that—”
    “Coconut Dreams,” Josh said. “We had two copies. This one was in the recycle box. My parents are supposed to drive the stuff over to the office supply place to get them shredded, but of course that hasn’t happened yet.”
    This time, though, Josh seemed kind of delighted to have parents who neglected the boring bookstore chores.
    “So . . . what?” I said. “You’re gonna read that?”
    “ We could read it,” he said. “You know, at the same time.”
    “Like a book club?” I said. That sounded, um, wholesome, in a middle-aged kind of way.
    “Naw,” Josh said. “It’s like an anti –book club. We could both read it and make