alwaysamy | I promised to tease ...

so here goes. Pictures of Us will be available in bookstores next week, and to give you a taste of the story, here's Tess remembering how she met Michael.

There's not much evidence of it in this particular excerpt, but the Westfield of Tess and Michael's youth is very much the town where I spent most of my childhood, and graduated from high school. While I was writing this, I was very much back there -- the graceful, tree-lined streets, the old houses (so many of them un-air-conditioned), long afternoons listening to albums (actual vinyl, folks), sharing Marlboro Lights as we walked downtown to the Rialto or to work at Baron's, the drugstore. More than that, I let myself remember the feeling of possibility, the electricity of a first kiss, the rush of wind through the open windows of a car on a warm summer night. Tess is right there in this excerpt.

I might have created him, given the right tools. His resemblance to the man I’d dreamed of, danced with, spoken to in the fantasies that occupied me while I did my barre work, or ran in the mornings before school, was so unnerving that, from the beginning, I found myself obsessed with touching him. A dream made flesh, or so it seemed, I wanted the reassuring proof of bone beneath skin, the rhythmic pulse of a heart that beat.

I don’t have any photos of the day we met, of course. We were just seventeen when we did. The school year had ended the day before, and Lucy, Cath, and I had piled into Lucy’s ancient Beetle to drive to the Jersey shore. Sandy Hook was only forty-five minutes away, and the weather was perfect for it——hot and clear, with a wispy breeze. Not that bad weather would have kept us away; the senior class had graduated the previous night, and most of them would be at the beach today, nursing hangovers and kicking off their last summer of freedom before college with sunburns, volleyball, and an endless rehash of last night’s parties.

Lucy was fiddling with the radio, which was notoriously temperamental, and Cath was still half asleep behind an enormous pair of sunglasses, her long dark hair riffling out the open window. I was curled in the backseat, my bare feet propped on the stack of beach towels, watching out the back window as the crowded lanes of the Parkway unwound behind us.

The summer stretched out ahead, and I wasn’t sure I could face it yet. Cath, I knew, would spend the long weeks sleeping until she couldn’t take the heat in her attic bedroom any longer, and then haunting the library and the record store downtown most afternoons. Lucy’s job at the day camp would begin next week, and she had already informed us that she intended to paint her bedroom, too. Both Cath and I knew that she would also plow through every book on the senior reading list, and probably volunteer at the children’s hospital in Mountainside, as well. Lucy had been anticipating filling out college applications for so long, she was a one-girl compendium of achievements.

And for the first time since I was twelve, I not only needed to find something to fill the months before school started again, I had to consider applying to college. To study what, I had no idea. Nothing appealed to me. College didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to spend the summer in bed, with the blinds drawn against the sun and the fan spinning in lazy circles above my head. Secretly, spending the rest of my life just that way didn’t sound awful.

I looked down at my knee as Lucy pulled into the crowded parking lot at the beach, examining the scar that cut through it. It was still angry, a jagged pink arrow pointing to the fact that my life had changed irrevocably in one afternoon. My parents liked to remind me that I was lucky to be able to walk, but I didn’t care much about that. If I was going to be curled up in bed for weeks at a time, hypnotized by daytime TV and drinking diet soda by the gallon, two functional legs didn’t seem necessary.

“We’re here,” Lucy said, jerking on the emergency brake as the car shuddered to a halt. “Cath, wake up.”

“I’m up,” Cath mumbled, shoving her sunglasses on top of her head and squinting out at the sparkling water. “God, it’s bright.”

I climbed out of the back when Cath got out, stretching her arms over her head before lighting a Marlboro, and threw the others their towels. I was hauling my backpack over my shoulder when Lucy nudged me.

“Look at that,” she whispered, cocking her head toward Billy Caruso’s Jeep, parked just five spots away. “Who is he?”

“He” was beautiful, tall, with dark, slightly unruly hair and large dark brown eyes, his lean body delicately corded with muscle. I swallowed and felt the blood rushing to my face when he glanced up and saw me looking at him.

Westfield isn’t a small town, but there’s only one high school. By the time you arrived there, you either knew everyone, or someone you knew had gone to grammar school or one of the two junior highs with the people you didn’t. For Bill, a freshly graduated and enormously popular senior, to show up at the beach today with a strange boy who looked like this one did, without any warning whatsoever, was a social error of fantastic proportions. He was fresh meat, a new face, a walking possibility.

Lucy wasn’t waiting, either. She and Billy had been on the newspaper together, and his social credentials didn’t faze her even slightly. Tucking her gingery hair behind her ear and pushing her glasses up on her nose, she hefted her beach bag and marched toward him. I followed, nabbing Cath by the hem of her black T-shirt as I did.

“Congratulations on graduating, Billy,” Lucy said, raising up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, her lips landing on the hard line of his jaw instead. “The paper won’t be the same without you.”

“I’m sure you’ll marshal the troops, Luce.” His voice was light as he inclined his head at me and Cath. He was every inch the suave upperclassman, his baggy plaid shorts riding low on his hips, his Ray Bans perched on top of his cropped blond hair. “Tess. Cath.”

“Who’s your friend?” Lucy asked, sticking her hand out to the stranger, who was watching the interchange with what looked like amusement.

“This is Michael Butterfield,” Billy said, his eyes busy scanning the people down on the sand. “Just moved in next door to me.”

“Hi,” Michael said, shaking Lucy’s hand as he nodded all around. “Caruso said the beach was the place to be today.”

“You from the city?” Cath said, eyeing Michael’s H.S. 475 T-shirt.

“Yeah.” He shrugged when the short answer was met with three pairs of curious eyes, his hands jammed in the pockets of a pair of faded cutoff jeans. “My dad died, and my mom wanted to join a practice out here. School ended last week.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. The words sounded inconsequential in my ears, useless and small, but Michael smiled at me. A real smile, his eyes going warm and even darker. I felt my cheeks heating up again and tried not to bite my bottom lip.

“Well, I guess we’ll head down,” Lucy said abruptly, turning and heading for the worn wooden steps that loped over the dunes. “You guys coming?”

She’d done her duty and satisfied her curiosity at the same time, and if I suspected that she wished Michael had given her the smile he’d given me, she would never say so. Cath was, as usual, oblivious to anything that wasn’t shouted, and she dawdled as we trudged across the hot sand, trying to light another cigarette in the breeze.

But she noticed when Michael spread his towel out next to mine, and arched a dark, plucked eyebrow in reaction. The safety pin in her left ear gleamed in the sun, and she left on her shirt and the black leather collar around her neck when she lay back on her towel. She was going to have one strange tan, not that she would care.

Michael seemed fascinated by a game of Frisbee further down the beach, and for a minute I wondered if he’d realized where he’d chosen to sit. I pulled off my plain white T-shirt and pretended I didn’t know he was there as I smoothed oil on my legs and my stomach.

It wasn’t until a half hour later, when I rolled onto my stomach to change the station on the radio, that he even moved.

“Do you want some on your back?” he asked, picking up the greasy bottle of Hawaiian Tropic. He held up his other hand to shade his eyes, and I looked away from his squint before I blushed again. It was so hot by then that I was probably bright red already, and I had to resist the impulse to dab sweat off my forehead and chest with the corner of my towel.

“Sure.” I gave him a noncommittal shrug, and hoped I wasn’t trembling as his hands worked the oil into my back in long, firm strokes. His fingers were strong, but equally gentle, and everywhere he touched felt strangely alive, vibrating with a teasing echo of his hands. I was suddenly painfully unsure what my plain bikini bottom covered, and what it didn’t, what the long curve of my spine looked like, and if my shoulder blades were anything more than bony wings.

When he finished, I propped myself up on my elbows to rummage in my bag for a piece of gum. My mouth had gone dry, and I was just unwrapping a piece of Juicy Fruit when he leaned closer still. My heart was already beating hard as he waited for me to return his gaze. And when I did, he licked a drop of sweat from my upper lip without any warning.

“Hot,” he said.

I blinked, and I think I nodded, riding out the potent combination of shock and arousal and curiosity. Michael Butterfield wasn’t like the few boys I’d gone out with so far, kids I’d known for years, as familiar and unsurprising as my own face. From them I could imagine a cheap grope, an attempt to untie my bikini top, a casual slap on my ass. This was different.

Michael turned over and lay on his stomach, propping his head on his crossed arms so he could look at me. I think I knew even then that my life was going to change again, even if I couldn’t predict exactly how. But I knew one thing for sure. The summer I’d been dreading for weeks wasn’t going to be aimless or empty if Michael Butterfield had anything to do with it.

I promised to tease ...

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