Ice Cream!
During Sag Harbor Benji decides he needs to get a summer job so that he can buy himself food since his parents are working most of the time and therefore not in their summer house. Benji’s job and Reggie’s job become a pretty central part of the story. Almost all of their friends have jobs and the summer job becomes kind of necessary to survive on their own over the summer. We’ve read a lot of coming-of-age books this semester and I think it’s interesting that this is the first one where the summer job comes up. At the beginning of the semester we had a notebook prompt where we had to write about what coming-of-age meant to us. I wrote about how coming-of-age wasn’t necessarily defined by one moment but that a lot of smaller moments contributed to coming-of-age. I said that getting my first job that I had wanted since I was twelve was a big moment in terms of coming-of-age f...