Once Around the Carousel

Chapter Thirteen

The chapters in a young person's life often open and close with little or no transition in-between. For Sharon and Linda, the summer of 1968 marked one of those leaps. On their last day of eighth grade, they stood in the bus line under the watchful eye of Mrs. Carew, Principal Martino's secretary, then the following day, they found themselves on the beach with no supervision. They were going into high school the following year, and with their educational promotion came a new status. Sharon and Linda were considered teenagers.

On the first morning of their teenage lives, the girls left Sharon's house early and rode to the beach. Sharon on a brand-new, white Schwinn 5-speed - a graduation present from her mother -  and Linda on Sharon's bike from the year before. They parked in the lot behind the Fry Shack, which, even on the first day of summer, reeked of fermenting cornmeal and used fryer oil. Mr. Thompson had told them to come by as soon as school ended. Even though they weren't old enough to work officially, he offered them fifty cents an hour to help with prep work in the mornings. Linda thought it sounded great, Sharon not as much. She told Mr. Thompson they needed more, and after some hemming and hawing, he gave in, offering them seventy-five cents an hour plus free lunches throughout the summer. Sharon's bargaining wasn't for her benefit – her father had taken to leaving extra "allowance" on her dresser as he left her room at night. She wanted the extra pay for Linda. Even though their degree of "what's mine is yours" knew no bounds, Sharon knew Linda sometimes felt awkward.

After helping at the Fry Shack, Linda and Sharon scooted out the service windows onto the boardwalk, just like they'd watched the older kids who worked there doing for years. They went directly to the center section of the beach, an area generally the domain of teenagers. The night before, Mrs. MacCalaster had made them promise to use suntan lotion, at least at first, so they wouldn't peel. As they sat on a blanket slathering Coppertone on each other, Julia Cook and Abby Parker walked up; two of the girls who were so cruel to Linda at the beginning of school. Julia and Abby started tittering on about school finally ending, what fun the summer was going to be, and which boys they hoped would come to the beach – all while casually spreading out their towels next to the girl's shared blanket.

Throughout the year, the kids at school had grown to more than simply accept Linda. But, in many ways, they felt she and Sharon excluded them. From what remained a mystery, one that in years to come would be pondered by people in Metuchin ad nauseam. Quite unintentionally, Sharon's desire that she and Linda keep to themselves created the impression that they had a secret. In their junior high world, little else carried the same aura.

By the first day of summer, the kids who had forever shunned her acted as if sitting on the beach with Linda Stapelton was the most normal thing in the world. For them, the teasing and nasty comments were long forgotten. The pain they inflicted, no different than water poured onto the sand.

Sharon looked to Linda, an unnecessary affirmation. Linda had waited her whole life to be one of the teenagers on the beach. To be like the kids she'd watched while sitting making sandcastles in the wave break. To have this rite of passage progressing the way it did for others provided her immeasurable relief.

By noon, more than a dozen boys and girls from their school were sitting with them, listening to transistor radios, acting like the teenagers they idolized the summer before. They played, joked, and initiated the flirting rituals of summer. School may have been out, but for the youth of Metuchin, Connecticut, the beach had always provided a variety of educational opportunities.

The boys in the group desperately attempted to blend together. Some were bigger and others smaller. All, however, tried to achieve a general uniformity – while at the same time, desperately wanting to be noticed. Their general strategy involved emulating the most disreputable role model they could without bringing on a full-scale parental lecture. Each wore cut-off blue jeans, which they obsessively picked at, pulling out the white weft in an attempt to make fringe. They bore the pale, sinewy physique country kids have after a long, cold winter. Their hair had begun shagging over the tops of their ears – scruffy hair, like the fringe at the bottoms of their shorts, being an essential component in their minds to finding summer educational opportunities.