Amor and Summer Secrets Read online

  Amor and Summer Secrets

  DIANA

  RODRIGUEZ WALLACH

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Teaser chapter

  Copyright Page

  To my parents and grandparents, for their inspiration.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people contributed to this story and to me becoming an author. First, I would like to thank my agent, Jenoyne Adams, who encouraged the creation of this book and who stuck with me even when I was losing faith in myself. Jenoyne promised she was “in it for the long haul,” and I hope she knows how much those words meant to me. I’d like to thank my editor, Kate Duffy, for showing such enthusiasm for this project. Kate championed this book from the moment it touched her desk and that support kept me driven to live up to her excitement.

  I’d also like to thank Candice Smith for her speedy and thoughtful edits.

  If not for the influence of countless teachers, this book would not exist. I’d like to thank those in Ridley High School’s English Department and BU’s College of Communication for helping me hone my craft. Also, there are many magazine editors who kept me writing every day for years, and those experiences greatly contributed to the ease with which I write now. In addition, I have many lifelong friends who volunteered to read my novels, and I thank you all for your encouragement and wit. I’ll try not to include too many of your quotes in my next book. And I’d especially like to thank Jackie Baskin for double-checking all of my Spanish phrases.

  I want to thank my family, not one of whom laughed when I told them I was going to write a novel. I greatly appreciate the Wallachs who restrained themselves from asking “how the book was going” no matter how badly I know they wanted to—I couldn’t have joined a better family. And I’d particularly like to thank Paula for taking so much time to carefully edit this manuscript. I’d like to thank my brother, Lou, for giving me work to pay the bills while I pursued this goal. I’d like to thank my sister, Natalie, for being the first person to read my first book and for telling me that she knew it was going to happen. I’m indebted to all my relatives in Puerto Rico, especially Ventura, for showing me my roots. And above all, I’d like to thank my parents, Lou and Chris Rodriguez, who instilled me with a belief that I should find a career I love.Writing truly doesn’t feel like work and their support helped me to dream big.

  I’d like to acknowledge my grandparents who are no longer with me, Marcello, Antonia, Raymond and Stella, for the inspiration that led to the creation of this story. Lastly, I want to thank my husband, Jordan, for reminding me of that fated psychic, for being my first reader and biggest fan, for telling me to quit my day job to pursue this passion, and for making me very, very happy. We did this together.

  Chapter 1

  An argument was about to erupt between Vince and my father. I could already sense it. I hated being around when they fought—like just my presence made things worse. It wasn’t that I didn’t get along with Vince; it was more that I got along with our parents, which irritated him to no end. I hung up my dish rag and walked to the door. The last thing he needed was to see his fifteen-year-old sister drying the pots and pans like a good little girl.

  Vince tossed his dinner plate into the sink with a thud so hard it was obviously intentional. I knew he was looking for a reaction. And my father was not one to disappoint.

  “Vincent Ruíz! Do you not have any respect for your family’s things?” my father yelled from his seat at the kitchen table.

  For a man who lost his Spanish accent as soon as he got off the plane from Puerto Rico, Lorenzo Ruíz surprisingly had the “Latin temper-thing” down. It seemed his voice had only one setting—loud—and if you really provoked him you could make the vein in his forehead turn purple and pulse. Not that I ever set him off, that was purely my brother’s territory.

  “Oh, please! ‘Our family’s things,’ ”Vince mimicked. “That’s all you care about. ‘Don’t break the china!’ ‘Don’t scratch the convertible!’You don’t buy that stuff for us.You buy it to impress the neighbors.”

  He ran his chewed nails through his greasy black hair and let it fall back on his forehead. His dark eyes narrowed and his mouth curled to the left, a face I knew would only tick off Dad more.

  “Oh, you think you know so much? Well, what would you do if we took this ‘stuff ’ away? I’m sure there are other teenagers who would be much more appreciative of a new BMW. Maybe I should go ask ‘these neighbors’ of yours if they’d like your car, if that’s who I’m really buying it for. I guess you wouldn’t mind?” My father cocked his head to the side, smoothed his ebony mustache, and returned his gaze to the magazine he was reading.

  At this point I didn’t know who was being more immature, my forty-five-year-old father or my eighteen-year-old brother. I leaned my shoulder against the oak doorjamb to our gourmet kitchen, yanked my white T shirt over the top of my cargos and remained silent. Sometimes their arguments fizzled out on their own, and I was desperately hoping this was one of those times.

  Vince grabbed another plate from the granite-top island and slammed it into the sink. Any harder and it would have shattered, but I knew he wasn’t trying to break it. He just wanted our father to realize that he could.

  “Fine. But you know what? You aren’t going to be able to run my life forever! I’m eighteen! I’m an adult!” he yelled.

  “Yeah, well, adults pay their own bills. So unless you want to pay your tuition to Cornell next year, I suggest you close your mouth.”

  “God, you just love being able to hang that over my head, don’t you?”

  “Do you have any idea how good you have it? I had to work full-time to pay my way through school. And you are so ungrateful!” shouted my father, smacking his hand against the glass-topped kitchen table.

  My grandparents had moved their entire family—which included my dad, aged ten, and his two older brothers, my uncles Roberto and Diego—to the U.S. from Puerto Rico decades ago in the hope of finding better opportunities. They settled in a housing project in Camden, New Jersey, where my grandfather worked as a short-order cook and my grandmother raised their three sons in a city titled, “The Most Dangerous in the Nation.” None of them spok
e English, and my father still tells stories of running home from school during recess frustrated that he couldn’t understand a word his classmates were saying.

  By sixteen he had completely lost his accent, by eighteen he had graduated third in his class, and by twenty-six he had paid his way through Temple’s undergraduate program (took him eight years of night classes while working full-time as the manager at a department store—a fact he never let us forget). Five years after that, and two children later, he successfully completed Temple’s MBA program (also at night). He got a job in the marketing department of a start-up corporation manufacturing light fixtures. When their art-deco lighting treatments were featured on a popular television show three years later, the company quadrupled in size, my father was named partner and my entire family moved to the Main Line—an affluent collection of picturesque suburbs outside of Philadelphia. I was five at the time. I don’t remember being poor, but my brother (who was seven when we moved) still talks about eating generic cereal brands like it was a tragic hardship worthy of a movie of the week.

  “I’m not ungrateful! I’m just sick of you telling me what to do. All of my friends are going to Europe this summer. All of them! I can’t believe you won’t let me! I’m the only one who’s gonna be stuck here.”

  Vince slammed his hands on the counter to answer any lingering questions about where, exactly, he did not want to be stuck.

  I groaned and tilted my head toward the ceiling. I should’ve realized that was what they were really fighting about.Vince had been harping about this backpacking-through-Europe subject for weeks now. Even I was sick of hearing about it, so I knew my dad was about to launch the atomic bomb in his direction once the sentence left my brother’s lips.

  “Enough! We have been over this!” he hollered, rising from his chair, screeching its legs across the recently refinished oak floors. “I don’t care how many of your ‘friends’ are going to Europe. You are not! And that is the end of it. Maybe if you were more responsible, you wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  “Oh, God! Not this again! It was one arrest two years ago!”

  “One arrest, no big deal, huh? You were sixteen years old caught drunk at an unchaperoned party that the police had to break up. Do you have any idea how much that could have ruined your life?”

  I grabbed my auburn hair in my fists and debated whether or not to break up the argument before it got any worse. My mom was working at the art gallery and it was typically her responsibility to cool the tempers of the men in the household. My father and my brother were so alike—a fact they both vehemently denied—that when the two of them were in the same room for more than an hour, the energy in the house escalated. Strangers couldn’t sense it; it was like our private Ruíz-family dog whistle. When Vince and my dad were about to go at it, the muscles in my neck would tense from two floors away.

  My mother, Irina, who had a level of patience that could’ve made Ghandi look impulsive, could defuse it just by breezing into the room, her wavy blond locks swishing and her blue eyes smiling. She’d place her palm gently on my father’s shoulder, make a cheerful joke, and immediately everyone would relax. I liked to think that I take after her, that my Polish side won out against my Puerto Rican side in the gene pool, but I knew she possessed a level of grace that I could never match.

  “You always have to bring that up, don’t you?” Vince yelled, taking a few steps toward our father to close the gap between them.

  “Well, if I hadn’t gotten it expunged from your record, you could’ve kissed Cornell good-bye.”

  “Yeah, because that’s the only reason I got into Cornell. It has nothing to do with the grades I’ve been busting my butt for. But you always seem to forget that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I forget. And that car you drive is just a symbol of my ignorance.”

  By this point,Vince and my dad were standing within two feet of each other.The tension was gripping my lungs.

  “All right, that’s it!” I shouted, stepping from the doorway and charging into the kitchen. “Break it up! Separate corners you two, now!”

  I stepped in between them, put a manicured hand on each of their chests, and shoved them in opposite directions.

  “Great, get involved now, Mariana,” my brother huffed.

  “Look, I am not taking sides here,” I defended, shooting my brother a snotty scrunch-nosed look I’d perfected over the past fifteen years. “I just don’t want you guys to kill each other before Mom comes home. Plus, she’ll be pissed if you get blood on her newly refinished hardwood floors. And I’m so not explaining that.”

  My brother rolled his eyes and my dad half chuckled. But the result was what I wanted.The mood was lightened.At least for now.

  Chapter 2

  Lying on my white, shabby chic four-poster bed, I grabbed the buzzing cell phone beside me and glanced at the screen. “Madison,” it read. Not that I was surprised, she called at least twice a day.

  “Hey,” I said, as I flipped the phone to my ear.

  “What up, girrl?” she asked, in a hardcore rap voice.

  Madison Fox was platinum blonde with ice-blue eyes and about as white and Protestant as they come. Her only exposure to rap was the runway show for Sean John.

  I rolled my eyes and giggled.

  “Well,” I answered, “Vince and my father had another blowout. He’s still harping about this whole Europe thing.”

  I lifted my hand to eye level and inspected the fuchsia polish on my nails. It was already chipping.

  “Whatever, it sucks he can’t go. But it’s not the end of the world.There’s gonna be plenty to do here this summer, like my party.”

  “Sure, you wanna come over and explain that to Vince? ’Cause, seriously, I’m about ready to shove him in a suitcase and ship him off to Europe myself,” I stated as I flopped onto the throw pillows covering my bed.

  “So Gayle called again today,” Madison said, revolving the conversation back to her party once again. “Can you believe she can’t find a single baker who will make a six-tier cake in the shape of Louis Vuitton purses? They’re all worried about some copyright crap. Like, whatever.”

  Madison’s Sweet Sixteen was only a few weeks away. For the past six months she’d done nothing but obsess over details with Gayle, an event planner to the stars (or at least to the Philadelphia elite). Madison would be the first in our entire grade to turn sixteen, so she felt it her obligation to kick the monumental year off with a bang worthy of the cover of Philadelphia magazine. Her parents had reserved the ballroom at the Rittenhouse Hotel, a posh hotel in Center City so glamorous and expensive it would make any bride choke with envy. She even bought a silver Vera Wang gown with matching Manolo Blahniks to catch the glint in the room’s chandeliers.

  “Well, Mad, maybe the cake can just be purses. Do they have to have the LV logo?”

  “Uh, yeah. That’s the whole point. What, do I want a bunch of knockoffs at my party?”

  “It’s a cake!”

  “So? My parents are paying this woman a truckload! She should be able to find a baker who will do what I want. Heck, can’t she just call Louis Vuitton’s people and get permission?”

  “I’m sure it’s not that easy.” I sighed.

  “Anyway,” Madison said, “I can’t wait for my party to get here. It’s the only thing happening this summer. We’re gonna have, like, nothing to do afterward.”

  “Well, sort of. I was actually thinking of getting a job. Maybe as a camp counselor at the elementary school,” I stated, as I stared at the skylight on my ceiling.

  “Oh, my God! You’re getting a job? Why? You’re fifteen!”

  “So? Most of the counselors are fifteen.”

  “Yeah, and they’re losers.”

  “Madison, my dad’s always up my brother’s butt because he’s such a mooch. At least if I have my own money I can prevent ever having the same arguments they’re having right now.”

  “So, what? You’re gonna save your money so when you grad
uate from high school you can pay your own way through a drunken European vacation?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. But at least I’ll have the option. And my own bank account.”

  “You’re such a freak.”

  “Am not! Anyway, I gotta go. My mom’ll be home soon.”

  “Fine, fine. I’ll see you in Spanish class tomorrow, señorita!” Madison teased.

  “Whatever, chica. Only two weeks of school left!”

  “You know it!”

  I hung up my cell phone, rolled off the bed and walked toward my bedroom door, which held a full-length mirror. I thought once I got into high school, I’d be different. But my reflection still had the same pasty skin, wavy red hair and geeky freckles that I always had. I pressed on my nonexistent chest. I was barely a B-cup (I had too much pride to ever buy an A cup), but at least I could finally see a hint of cleavage through the top of my scoop neck tee—meaning I could see it if I squished my boobs together with my triceps as hard as I could. My legs still looked too long for my body, which while an asset in ballet class, were not really an asset amongst my peers. Even my best friends made fun of the giraffe legs that consumed my entire appearance and forced me to avoid skirts of any kind.

  Truthfully, I didn’t look like a single member of my entire family. My mom is stereotypical Polish—round face, blond curls, pale eyes, full figure. My dad and brother could practically pass for twins—another fact my brother refused to admit— with dark, almost black, hair, light skin and a five-o’clock shadow that grew two hours after they shaved (my brother had a mustache before most boys his age could tie their shoes). If it weren’t for our shared brown eyes, we wouldn’t have a single physical feature in common.

  But at least Vince’s appearance hinted at the ethnicity that fit with the name “Ruíz.” I, on the other hand, was often mistaken for being Irish, which really didn’t bother me. Because usually when people find out I’m a “Puerto Rican Polack” they either laugh or don’t believe me. Personally, I preferred disbelief, mostly because I also doubted I was a genetic member of this family. Seriously, sometimes I felt this close to ordering a blood test.