In the eighth episode of the third season of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Belly Conklin finds herself cornered by Conrad the Summer I Turned Pretty character. The evening before she is to marry his younger brother, Jeremiah, Conrad stops her on the sand outside the house and admits that he has loved her all along. The fact will surprise no one watching. Years earlier, shaken by his mother’s death and troubled by his own nerves, he had let Belly go. Not long after, she began seeing Jeremiah.

They are older now, though only by a few years – twenty-one instead of seventeen – and Conrad pleads with her to stop the wedding. His appeal is not simply for his own sake. Neither she nor Jeremiah has any degree, nor do they have work. The ring on her hand looks as if it were won from a slot machine, and Jeremiah’s finances would frighten a banker.

Belly, however, will not listen. “I want you to leave,” she says to him. “I want you to make up one of your bullshit excuses. And I want you to go – to Boston, to California. I don’t even care where, just get out of here.” Conrad appears at a loss. Perhaps it is because she has lately encouraged him: once she bent close to touch his lips to a cut he had taken while surfing, and at Christmas they passed several days together without telling his brother. Or perhaps it is because she is ordering him out of his own house.

From Teen Crush to Complicated Love Triangle

When we first meet Belly in Season 1, she is a girl just out of childhood, counting her years by the summers spent at Cousins Beach with her mother’s old friends. The Fishers have two sons of much the same age. The careless ease of childhood passes, and in one summer she begins to look different, which changes everything between them. Soon there is the suggestion of romance with both boys.

Every drama of this sort makes use of the triangle. You see it in Gossip Girl with Serena, Blair, and Nate; you see it in The O.C. with Seth, Summer, and Anna. This series has the same device, and for the first two seasons it serves well. One can hardly choose between Conrad the Summer I Turned Pretty portrays as clever and withdrawn, and Jeremiah, who is open-hearted and light in spirit. Yet by the third season the story shifts. Nearly all the others grow older in thought and feeling. Belly does not.

College Years and Stalled Dreams

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We meet Belly at Finch College, a place of little distinction, where she has formed only one friendship outside of Jeremiah and her old companion Taylor. She has no fixed idea of her future. At times she speaks of sports psychology; at other times of studying in Paris. But when Jeremiah must remain behind another term to finish his degree, she drops the thought at once. This, despite the fact that he has already betrayed her.

The step between youth and adulthood is never easy. Yet what grates with Belly is her certainty that she has already crossed it. She accepts Jeremiah’s hasty proposal, though nearly everyone she knows warns against it. Meanwhile her brother Steven finishes Princeton ahead of schedule and sets up a business, and Taylor secures a valued post in New York. Belly, in contrast, drifts from one Fisher house to another, watched with disapproval by Jeremiah’s father.

Cousins Beach: A Place She Can’t Let Go

It soon becomes evident that Belly does not simply spend her summers at Cousins Beach, but builds her whole sense of self around them. There is something uncomfortable in her closeness with the Fishers, when it is clear enough that she does not belong to them. Without that house by the shore, what remains of her? And without one of the brothers to lean on? She makes little effort to find out.

One may recall a reading of Pride and Prejudice which claims Elizabeth Bennet’s love for Darcy is sealed not by his words but by her first sight of Pemberley. Much the same spirit runs through Belly’s talk of Cousins. She may well care for the Fisher boys in their own right, but she also seems convinced that their wealth, their house, and their ease of life are somehow hers by right.

Yet the story leaves her a chance to grow. In Episode 9 she departs at last for Paris, after Jeremiah breaks the engagement. There she must stand alone: no parents to guide her, no brothers to lean on, no grand house to return to. Even her name must change. Belly is put aside, and Isabella must take her place. Who she becomes, we have still to see.

Conclusion

The real summer Belly was, perhaps, the one in which she at last turned away. Having followed her three seasons of back and forth between Fisher brothers like a beachgoer who is especially indecisive between SPF 30 and SPF 50, her flight to Paris seems less a character development than a mercy mission, to the audience.

The most tragic thing about the show is not the brooding of Conrad the Summer I Turned Pretty highlights, or the financial troubles of Jeremiah but the fact that it turns what would have been a great coming-of-age movie into a lengthy experiment in arrested growth. The way in which Belly, as a naive teenager, becomes… a little older, but still a naive person with passport stamps, implies that at times the most beautiful change is just knowing when to leave the beach house behind.