In Season 3, Episode 8 of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Belly Conklin has some choice words for Conrad Fisher. The night before she’s due to marry his younger brother, Jeremiah, Conrad confesses on the beach outside his house that he’s in love with her. It’s something the viewer has known for seasons now: Years earlier, Conrad, haunted by the death of his mother and struggling with an anxiety disorder, had broken up with Belly. Several months later, she started dating Jeremiah.
Now the three are slightly older (like, 21 instead of 17), and Conrad is begging Belly to call off the wedding—but not only for him. Neither Belly nor Jeremiah has graduated from college yet, and neither one is employed. She’s currently wearing a ring that looks like a prize from Dave Buster’s, and Jeremiah’s credit score would make a repo man’s mouth water.
But Belly’s not having it. “I want you to leave,” she tells Conrad. “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 looks confused. It could be because she’s been flirting with him lately: She’d leaned in to kiss him while tending to a wound he got surfing, and over Christmas, they’d spent a few days together that she deliberately didn’t tell his brother about. Or it could be because she’s telling him to leave his own goddamn house.
Let’s get this out of the way: I am a millennial woman who watches The Summer I Turned Pretty. Age-appropriate? No. But a fundamental part of my DNA? Yes. When I was a teen, after my homework was done and my chores finished, I’d watch Gossip Girl or Gilmore Girls or the reboot of 90210, and on Wednesdays I’d sneak down to my basement for The O.C. (This one was banned in the Taylor household after my mother caught a 12-year-old me watching an episode in which Mischa Barton’s Marissa Cooper chugs a bottle of straight vodka, sobbing and alone on the beach. A wise parenting choice, but alas, an ineffective one. “What are you doing down there?” My mom shouted one night. “Watching Kim Possible!” I shouted back, sneaky as shit, while Marissa Cooper furiously made out with Olivia Wilde.)
And it’s my long cultural association with those shows that gives me the confidence to fire off a hot take that will likely get me cyberbullied by the youth on TikTok: Belly Conklin is currently the most maddening female character on television.
In Season 1, we’re introduced to Belly as a wide-eyed teenager who “measures” her life in the summers spent at her family friends’ beach house in the town of Cousins Beach. Said family friends, the Fishers, have two boys around her age. But what was once the innocent friendship of childhood changes the summer that Belly got hot (see: the title of the series). Flirtation with both brothers ensues.
A love triangle is at the center of any good teen soap; from Gossip Girl’s Serena, Blair, and Nate to The O.C. s Seth, Summer, and Anna. The Summer I Turned Pretty delivers that delicious trope in spades. During the first two seasons, you’re generally torn on whether Belly should choose the brooding, brilliant Conrad Fisher or the fun-loving and sensitive Jeremiah. But then you reach the third. And by the third, nearly every character has experienced some sort of character growth…except, that is, for the protagonist herself.
We find Belly at the (not very prestigious, it is heavily implied) Finch College, where she has only made one close friend beyond her boyfriend Jeremiah and childhood BFF, Taylor. She’s not quite sure what she wants to do with her life (maybe go into sports psychology?). She wonders about studying abroad in Paris, but when Jeremiah needs to stay back for an extra semester to graduate, those plans are quickly abandoned. Even though he cheated on her.
The cusp between young adulthood and real adulthood is famously hard to navigate. But the frustrating thing about Belly is that she’s so sure about being firmly on the grown-up side. She accepts a rash proposal from Jeremiah against the advice of her family and friends. While her brother, Steven, graduates early from Princeton and starts his own company, and her best friend Taylor accepts a prestigious internship in New York, Belly mostly spends her time wandering between the two homes of her fiancé’s wealthy family, to his father’s annoyance. (“You said she could stay as long as she wanted,” Jeremiah says to Adam Fisher after Belly’s clogged the shower drain in the Fishers’ Boston apartment. “Yeah, but it’s been two weeks, Jer,” comes Adam’s reply.)
It becomes clear to the viewer that Belly doesn’t only measure her life in the summers she spends at Cousins Beach, but actually defines herself by them. It’s a bit uneasy to observe the intense familiarity that she has with the Fishers while also understanding that, well, she’s not a Fisher. (Sorry to be blunt, but family doesn’t fuck family.) Without that beach house, who is this girl? And without a Fisher boyfriend? Belly barely tries to find out herself. “Susannah told me that when I was born, she knew I was destined for one of her boys,” she says in Season 2, referring to Conrad and Jeremiah’s late mother.
There’s a reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that suggests Elizabeth Bennet only really falls in love with Mr. Darcy after seeing Pemberley for the first time—“She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste,” Austen writes. “They were all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!”—and there are echoes of that idea in the way Belly describes Cousins. I have no doubt that she’s in love with the Fisher boys as people. But it also feels like she deeply believes that their home, and the way they live, is entitled to her. As she puts it in the very first episode, “I don’t really begin living until June, until I’m at that beach, in that house.”
But there’s hope for Belly yet: Episode 9 sees her finally go to Paris after Jeremiah breaks off their engagement. She’s forced to make new friends and take care of herself—with no parents, no hot brothers, no multi-million dollar home to fall back on. She also has to ditch her childlike nickname and embrace the more mature Isabella. We’ll just have to wait to find out who that is.
