Same Time Next Summer

by Annabel Monaghan

Putting a person back together isn’t easy, but if you’re smart about it you can reassemble yourself in a totally different, better way.

This is how our beach house has always looked, sort of like a preschool classroom before they sing the cleanup song.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that it’s totally possible to love someone from a safe distance.

I want Jack to fully understand the seismic impact of that breakup on my life. It’s like when you’ve been covering up an ugly scar but also sort of want to show it to people so they know what you’ve been through.

“Are you going to talk to him?” Gracie asks, motioning to the treehouse. “Not on purpose,” I say.

Damn mood

He felt like he and Sam had always been on this stretch of sand, and he loved that they’d be there again at the same time next summer.

We looooove finding the title of the book

She had to stop playing this game. Actually, if she could stop playing this game for a full week, then Wyatt would call. She was in a loop of deals with God.

“You’re going to have to forgive me sometime.” Sam turned to face him. “Actually, that’s one thing I don’t have to do.”

He thought about Sam and how he’d destroyed that last good thing in his life. It was as if everyone around him had let him down, so he figured he’d just finish the job.

They are that deadly kind of margarita that tastes so sweet that it leaves you wanting tortilla chips and another margarita.

“Something’s happened to you,” my mother says. “Lots of things have happened to me,” I say. “I’m thirty.”

For the third time… mood

“You’re the most important person that’s ever been in my life, and you’re not even the most important person in your own.”

I have a strong urge to protect her, to shuttle her through these years quickly so she can be thirty. Or, better, forty. But that’s not how caterpillars get there. It’s not how any of us do.