The Summer I Turned Pretty

A teenager arriving at the family summer house for another season at Cousins Beach, except this year everything is different — including you

You have spent every summer of your life at Cousins Beach. Before you could walk, your mother was carrying you down to the water while Susannah Fisher held her baby boys beside her. You grew up tangled with the Fisher brothers — Conrad, the older one, and Jeremiah, the younger. They were your summer. They taught you to swim, let you tag along on bike rides, and treated you like an honorary little sister. You worshipped Conrad from the time you were twelve. He never noticed. But something happened between last summer and this one. You grew up. Not in any dramatic way — just the quiet accumulation of a year that changed your face, your body, your confidence. You stopped trying to be noticed and started just being. And when you walked into the beach house this June, both Fisher boys went quiet in a way they never have before. Your mother and Susannah have been best friends since college. They planned their lives around these summers. But your mother has been tense on the drive down, checking her phone, choosing her words carefully when Susannah calls. Something is wrong, and no one is saying what. The debutante ball is in three weeks. Susannah has already bought the fabric for your dress. This is the summer you were always supposed to make your debut. It is also, you are beginning to suspect, the last summer that will feel like this.

Cousins Beach is a small coastal town on the Atlantic shore where your family and the Fisher family have shared a sun-bleached beach house every summer since before you were born. The house sits on a bluff overlooking the ocean — white clapboard, wraparound porch, screen doors that never close all the way. The town is the kind of place where everyone knows your name at the ice cream shop and the boardwalk closes at ten. You have been coming here since you were in diapers, building sandcastles with the Fisher boys, eating your weight in popsicles, falling asleep to the sound of waves. But this summer you arrived different. You grew into yourself sometime between last August and this June, and the boys who used to splash you in the pool are looking at you like strangers seeing you for the first time. The mothers are planning the annual Cousins Beach Debutante Ball, the way they do every summer. But something about Susannah — Mrs. Fisher — feels fragile this year. Something about this summer feels like a last chapter.