Slow Dancing on Price's Pier by Lisa Dale

home, she knew the subject of the dance was about to come up again. Garret had never been one to give up easily; she would have been disappointed if he was.
    â€œYou did such an amazing job on the gym,” he said. The light from a black-and-white movie flickered in the otherwise dark room, and the house was so quiet Thea worried he might hear the beat of her heart—too fast for explanation. “All those little white lights. And the hay bales and cornstalks. It must have taken you forever.”
    â€œIt did,” she said. “Thanks.”
    â€œThat’s why I don’t understand why you didn’t go,” he said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. “I get why Jonathan didn’t. He just doesn’t ‘do’ dances. But you . . . You didn’t really want to sit around and watch TV all night, did you?”
    She focused on the buttons of her windbreaker as she snapped them closed. Oh please let him not know, she thought. Oh please let me not do something stupid.
    â€œIs it because you didn’t have a date?” he asked.
    Kill me, she thought. “No. It’s because I wanted to stay here. Keep Jonathan company. I didn’t want him to be alone.”
    Garret nodded, but she could tell he didn’t quite believe her. “Well. It would have been more fun if you were there.”
    She felt her face flushing and she could barely speak. “Did you have a good time?”
    â€œIt was okay,” he said.
    She wondered what that meant—if he wasn’t in love with Carin Woodhouse after all. She picked up her backpack and pulled it onto her shoulders. “Are you going out with her?”
    â€œNo.” He looked down at her face as if he was looking for something. She hoped that whatever it was, he found it. “Maybe next time I’ll skip the dance to stay in with you and Jonathan.”
    She smiled, warmth blooming within. “You’ll always be welcome,” she said.

    From “The Coffee Diaries” by Thea Celik
    The Newport Examiner
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    Much as people love coffee today, rulers of the past had every reason to fear coffeehouses. Coffee causes trouble. It gets people riled up. It incites.
    One theory holds that coffee changed the way people interacted socially on a grand scale. Prior to coffeehouses, much public socializing was done in pubs, where beer made conversation apathetic and sloppy. When coffee arrived in public venues, it sparked alertness and intellectual debate.
    Coffeehouses became places of radical thinking and political uprising—and those in power feared them. England’s Charles II attempted (unsuccessfully) to ban the existence of coffeehouses. Frederick the Great mandated that his people forgo coffee for beer. Some regimes and leaders went as far as punishing coffee drinkers, with repeat offenders paying the ultimate price: death.
    In this country, coffee maintained its revolutionary reputation. Coffee became the symbolic drink of the patriotic due to the British tax on tea. Coffeehouses, which sometimes fused with pubs in colonial America, were places of uprising and revolt.
    Though perhaps the scale has diminished a bit, the dramas of our lives continue to play out in coffeehouses today.

FIVE

    Every year on the Fourth of July, the Sorensens took Ken and Sue’s sailboat out into the Narragansett to watch the fireworks. And every year, Thea had looked forward to it—to packing a picnic basket with grapes, crackers, hard white cheese, juice boxes, and wine. She loved the moment just before the fireworks went off, when the water that cradled the boat’s hull turned black as coffee under the night sky.
    But this year, Thea had not been invited along.
    Now, the fireworks having ended an hour ago, she stood waiting at the marina, her forearms resting on a cool metal railing as she watched the boats and dinghies coming in one by one. They were late to get back, but Thea wasn’t angry. Though she