Free Summer Nights by Caroline B. Cooney Page B

with one at a time.”
    “Good idea. And we’ll get to see which one she cares about most, too. That’s the one she’ll dance with.”
    The others knew better. Beth Rose wouldn’t do the asking. The boy who danced with her would simply be the one who asked first. Lynda suggesting placing bets but nobody would bet; it made them too irritable. Right at that moment, no matter how wonderful her own future looked, there was not a girl on the deck who would not have exchanged places with Beth Rose.
    The combo—two guitars and a drummer—set up on the open upper deck and began playing the current number three on the charts. The party abandoned the chips and dip, and the soda and peanuts, and swarmed up the narrow, almost vertical, metal stairs to dance in the moonlight.
    Anne and Con were already there, dancing the first dance.
    Molly was not shy. She had nothing to lose, and no worries, and hadn’t Beth Rose introduced her as a friend? She was not going to that upper deck without a partner in tow. Molly walked right up to the quartet of Gary, Blaze, Jere, and Beth Rose. She perched on the railing next to Blaze. “Hi there, everybody.” She reserved her smile for Blaze.
    He smiled back. “Hello, Molly.”
    She was immensely pleased. He had remembered her name. “Blaze, I don’t want you to feel like a stranger. How about a dance?”
    He looked startled more than anything else, but he hopped off the railing with her and off they went.
    Beth Rose watched them go. Of course, Blaze could hardly have retorted that he liked feeling strange and would Molly please buzz off. Still, she would have liked…
    Con Winter leaned over the upper deck railing and yelled down to her group. “Hey! Jeremiah Dunstan! What do you think you were hired for? Get up here and film the dancing. You already missed Anne and me alone for the first dance. Now when you film it, it’ll be fake.”
    The boy Jere, whom Beth had scarcely met, got silently up from the deck, picked up his camera and vanished.
    Well! thought Beth. Didn’t take long for my circle of admirers to dwindle. She was very aware of Gary’s presence. After a long absence he was next to her again. Of course with Gary it was hard to tell if this meant a thing. She hoped he would ask her to dance; he was a wonderful dancer. But he didn’t. He talked to her about the restaurant, and how his father had agreed Gary could help design the addition, and how hard it was to hire and keep busboys.
    How could Gary, who had once seemed perfect to her, be boring? Beth changed the subject rather than think less of Gary. “Doesn’t the idea of all our group going on to other things make you feel like a part of history?” she said to him. “We’re even in a book. Caught there, in our yearbook, in black and white, like a text. We are the past.”
    Gary blinked. He said maybe he would drink another soda. She said she’d have one, too. “Do you look at your yearbook much?” she asked him when they reached the bar.
    “I’ve never looked at it once. It ended with high school.”
    Beth kept her yearbook propped open. Into the page where Emily’s photograph smiled out at her, Beth had slid Emily’s engagement announcement. On Anne’s page went the newspaper’s early May interview of Ivory Glynn and the brief announcement from the PEOPLE page about Anne’s job. From the high school guidance department column, she had snipped many a one-liner “…and we are proud that our brilliant Katharine Elliott has been accepted at no less than four top schools…”
    “You’ll be the class historian then,” Gary said. “You’re going to be the only one left anyway, so you can read the papers and keep up with it all. Hey, look, real food! What are those?” he asked the waiter.
    Four vast, deep, hot trays were being laid out. “Lasagna, eggplant parmigiana, ravioli, and cheese manicotti.”
    “I’m in heaven now,” Gary said. “Who would want to dance when there’s decent food