by Sarah Dessen
I always did a lot of good thinking while washing dishes, and Mimi’s sink had been slam full. By the time I was done, I’d decided to look at my time here at North Lake as a kind of organizing. So back up in my room, once I unpacked my suitcase and put my clothes away, I pulled out the one notebook I’d brought with me. MIMI + JOE, I wrote at the top of a blank page, with CELESTE and WAVERLY each under a vertical line beneath. From those, I drew more lines, adding in my dad beside my mom’s name, and mine underneath it. Then I did the same with Trinity, Jack, and Bailey under Celeste’s, realizing as I did so I had no idea who her husband was. I’d be here three weeks, though. I had a feeling I could fill in the gaps.
Just then there was a whirring sound from outside, distant, and I turned to see a motorboat puttering from the shore to the floating platform I’d seen earlier. Then I saw another from the corner of my eye, followed by one more, all of them converging to the same spot from varying directions. The first pulled up alongside, and a dark-haired girl in a yellow bikini top and shorts jumped out, her phone to one ear. As the others docked as well, more people joined her. Within moments, between the boats and those who had arrived on them, you couldn’t see the raft at all.
Downstairs, the screen door slammed—this sound was becoming familiar—and I heard someone come into the kitchen, then start up the stairs.
“. . . told you, I was at work and couldn’t answer,” a guy, maybe my age by the sound of it, was saying. “Taylor. Don’t start. Seriously.”
The bathroom door closed, and I heard water running, along with more of this conversation, now muffled. As the screen door slammed again, I thought how much this place would have driven Nana crazy: she treated her house like it was fragile, with doors and drawers eased shut, gently. You slammed, you scrammed. That was a direct quote from my dad.
“Jacky?” Mimi yelled from the kitchen. “You here?”
“One sec,” the guy yelled back from the bathroom.
“Jacky? Hello?”
“ONE SEC,” he replied, louder. This time, she didn’t say anything, but a moment later I heard the fridge opening. I looked back at my family tree, full of gaps, and went downstairs.
“There you are,” Mimi said when she saw me. Still in her tie-dye, she’d ditched her sandals and put on fuzzy slippers in their place. A can of Pop Soda was in her hand. “I wondered where you got off to.”
“I fell asleep after Dad left,” I told her. “And then saw Celeste and Gordon.”
“Oh, good,” she said, turning back to the fridge. “You want a soda?”
“No, thanks,” I said. As the kid of a dentist, they’d been so forbidden in my early life that when I finally could have them, I’d lost interest.
“Oxford’s holding down the office until dinner, so I was just getting ready to watch my shows,” she said, grabbing a bag of potato chips from the top of the fridge. “Want to join me?”
Upstairs, Jacky—Jack?—was talking again. “Sure.”
She started down the hallway, to the living room we’d passed on the way in. The walls were lined with long couches—one leather, one dark blue corduroy—and there was a huge TV set, surrounded by shelves of family pictures. Off the back side of the room was the screened-in porch I’d seen earlier from outside, separated by a door with a glass pane that had been covered with a tacked-up towel. The result was a dimness that would have made the room feel cold even if the A/C hadn’t been going full blast, which of course, it was.
“Does it feel hot in here to you?” Mimi asked as I thought this. I was about to say no, and try not to do it vehemently, but then she was over at the A/C unit, adjusting it from 67 to 65. “That’s better. I hate a warm house. Have a seat.”
She was already doing just that, lowering herself onto the leather couch and putting her soda into the built-in cup holder on its arm. Even though the couch was huge, I didn’t want to crowd her, so I moved to the blue one.
“Now, let’s see,” Mimi said, pulling up a list of recorded programs. “What are we in the mood for?”
As I looked at the screen, scanning the titles, it was clear there was only one answer to this question: home improvement. Everything listed—Fix and Flip, Contractor: You!, From Demo to Dream House—shared this same subject. I said, “I take it you like renovation shows.”
“They’re my therapy,” she replied, scrolling through the titles before picking an episode of something called 3 Flip Sisters. “Have a hard day with everything breaking down all around you, then come and watch somebody else fix something up nice. I can’t get enough.”
She sighed contentedly, taking a sip of her soda as the show began. “One family,” intoned the announcer as the screen showed a trio of blond women, all with long hair, wearing matching plaid shirts, “three opinions, one firm deadline. This is 3 Flip Sisters.”
Just then my phone beeped in my pocket, the first noise it had made since my dad texted from the airport an hour earlier to say he and Tracy were boarding their plane. This time, it was Ryan. She’d been incommunicado since arriving at Windmill a couple of days after the wedding.
Testing testing. Anyone out there?
I smiled, quickly typing a response. Your phone works? I thought you were in the middle of nowhere.
I am, she replied after a moment. But if I climb this hill and stand on one foot, I have a signal. For now anyway. What are you and Bridget doing?
I filled her in, as succinctly as I could, while the TV showed a montage of the sisters and Bill and Shelley looking at various properties. By the time I hit send, they’d settled on a ranch house with hideous green linoleum floor in the kitchen that Angie, the sister Realtor, said was priced to sell.
“They’ll end up putting an arch in there someplace, mark my words,” Mimi said as the TV cut to a commercial. “Paula loves an arch.”
My phone beeped. Holy crap. Is Bridget’s grandpa okay?
Haven’t heard from her since she left, I wrote back. So not sure.
Are you okay? What’s it like there? I’ve never even heard you mention having another grandmother.
Even though Mimi was on the other couch, a fair distance away, I tilted the screen to be sure she couldn’t see it. The desire not to hurt her was that strong, even as I knew that I, too, could have claimed injured feelings, considering. Where had she been all this time? It was one thing if my mom had kept her at arm’s length—notoriously private, she got even more so when she was using—but five years had passed since her death. Had my dad run interference, thinking Mimi and all the rest of the Calvanders would be too much for me to handle?
Plus, my mom had never talked much about her family. It was Nana—my grandfather died young in his forties—who was consistently there for holidays and birthdays. Other than the funeral, which was a blur, the only trip I’d ever taken to my mother’s home was so long ago I didn’t even remember it. Yes, I had the Lake Stories, but they were never about people as much as a place.
“Arch!” Mimi said, pointing at the TV. “What did I tell you?”
Sure enough, on the screen, Paula was gesturing at a small, cramped living room as a computer graphic showed what it would look like with that shape as an entryway. “You told me,” I said.
She cackled, and I looked back down at my screen at Ryan’s question. What was it like here?
Unclear, I told her. Stay tuned.
I heard thumping, then footsteps crossing the kitchen. A moment later, a tall, thin guy with red hair, a baseball hat, shorts, and a faded NORTH LAKE T-shirt passed by in the hallway, his phone to his ear.
“Jacky,” Mimi called out, and he stopped, turning to peer in at her. “Didn’t you hear me calling you before?”
“I was taking a shower,” he said, sliding his phone into a back pocket.
“Well, say hello to your cousin Saylor.” She nodded at me. “She’s staying awhile.”
It was a testament to the dimness of the room, and the dark blue couch I was on, that Jacky hadn’t even seen me until she said this. H
e looked surprised as he lifted a hand. “Hey.”
“Hi,” I said. “It’s Emma, actually.”
“Oh, sorry,” Mimi told me, her eyes on the TV, where I saw someone was now carrying a sledgehammer. “I keep forgetting you changed it.”
But I didn’t, I wanted to say. I’d always introduced myself as Emma, even as a kid: my mom was the only one who called me Saylor. Could you literally be a different person to different people? I was pretty sure I was going to find out.
“I’m going out to the raft,” Jacky told Mimi. “Back for dinner.”
“We’re having burgers,” she replied. “I made the patties already.”
“All right,” he said, then started toward the door again, drawing his phone from his pocket.
“Jacky.”
He stopped, exhaling visibly. “Yes?”
Mimi shifted in her seat. “Why don’t you take her with you?”
“What?” he said.
“Saylor,” she replied, nodding at me. “I mean, Emma. She’s just got here, doesn’t know anyone. You can introduce her around.”
“Oh,” I said quickly, mortified, “he doesn’t have to—”
“They’re all out at the raft this time of day,” she explained, cutting me off. “Figuring out what kind of trouble to get into later.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I had no sense of the rules here, but I did know enough to not want to be someone’s burden. “I’m fine.”
The TV went back to 3 Flip Sisters. “Demo,” Mimi said, nodding at the screen. “You can tell, because everyone’s in goggles.”
“Right,” I said.
Jacky hesitated a moment more in the non-arch hallway opening, then started out the door. “Be back to grill,” he called over his shoulder.
“Okay,” Mimi said, taking a sip of her drink.
The door slammed, and I turned my attention back to the Flip Sisters. A moment later, though, he was back.
“Hey,” he said to me. “You really want to watch that?”
I looked back at Mimi. It wasn’t clear she’d heard him, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, even if this had all been her idea.
But Jacky didn’t seem worried. Instead, he just pushed the door back open, holding it for me. “Emma,” he said. “Come on.”
Five
The girl in the yellow bikini I’d seen from the window spotted me as we approached the raft. By the time I looked her way, she was already scowling.
I’d been preoccupied, smarting from various ways I had almost died of shame since leaving Mimi’s house. The first involved the awkward silence as I followed Jacky across the grass and down the nearby dock to a white motorboat with red seats that was tied up to a row of cleats.
“Thanks for bringing me along, Jacky,” I said finally.
He glanced up, then began loosening rope knots. “It’s Jack, actually. Only Mimi calls me Jacky.”
“Oh. Sorry,” I said. “I understand. She’s actually the only person who has called me—”
But this was lost as he turned his back again, jumping onto the boat and behind the wheel. The seats were aged and cracked, the floor covered with a few beat-up-looking life jackets. He turned a key and the engine rumbled, coming to life.
I was still standing on the dock, not sure what I was supposed to do, when he looked up at me and said, “You getting in?”
Right, I thought, my face reddening. I took a step onto the boat, but because the ropes were loose, it drifted out into the water, taking my leg with it. This led to a frantic effort not to fall in myself accompanied by, I hated to admit, a shriek. I ended up back on the dock, but just barely.
Jack observed all of this with a flat expression. Then he pulled the boat up to the dock so I could climb in. Once inside, I started to the back bench by the motor, but hit a slippery spot halfway there that resulted in me tumbling down onto the life jackets, arms flailing.
“Whoa,” he said, in that same monotone. “Careful.”
As we picked up speed and my embarrassment subsided—slightly—I was able to begin to appreciate the view of the lake. It was one thing to look at it from land, like a picture in a frame, another to be within it, wide and blue all around you. It’s pretty here, I thought, and turned in my seat, looking back at Mimi’s house to find the window to my mom’s bedroom, which was growing smaller behind us.
The raft, in contrast, was larger than it had looked from shore. By the time we got there, about seven boats were tied up, either to the raft or each other, with people on them in groups, laughing and talking. As we got closer, a tall, skinny guy with white-blond hair, shirtless and in swim trunks, walked out to the back of a blue motorboat with white trim to meet us. When Jack slowed the motor and walked to the bow, throwing him a line, I saw the girl staring at me.
Short, and stout, with strong-looking arms and legs, she had a deep tan, all the better to set off her yellow bikini top, which she wore with cutoff shorts. Her hair was black and long, flowing down her back, a pair of sunglasses holding it back from her face. When our eyes met, she slowly crossed her arms over her chest, squaring her shoulders.
“This is Emma,” Jack said, cutting the engine. “Help her out.”
The boy with the white-blond hair—it stuck up in the back, a cowlick I somehow knew he was probably always messing with—extended a hand. Cautious after how I’d boarded, and feeling awkward grabbing ahold of someone I knew not at all, I nonetheless got to my feet and gripped his fingers, stepping onto the blue boat, then the raft.
“I’m Roo,” the blond boy said. He had a small gap between his two front teeth, which took the smile he gave me to another level. Gesturing to the group behind him, he added, “This is . . . everyone.”
No one said hello, or even acknowledged this introduction, too caught up in their own conversations. Except, of course, Yellow Bikini, who was now glaring at Jack as he finished tying up.
“Jack Blackwood,” she said in a voice that was just sharp and loud enough to make everyone else pause their interactions before stopping talking entirely, “I know we’re fighting, but did you seriously bring another girl out here right in front of me?”
“Uh-oh. Here we go,” a tall, slim black girl with short braids in an East U Volleyball T-shirt said under her breath.
“I’d stay out of it if I were you, April,” another guy with a fauxhawk and tattoos covering his arms said to her.
“Yeah, because that will end well,” April replied.
The next thing I knew, Yellow Bikini had crossed the short distance between us to stand right in front of me. Meeting my eyes, her own narrowed, she said, “Look, this is a basic lake rule. You don’t just show up with someone else’s boyfriend, okay?”
“Taylor,” April said. “Remember your calming meditations? Breathe in, then—”
“I’m breathing,” Taylor told her. “I just want answers.”
“I didn’t—” I said, trying to sound as assertive as she did. Unfortunately, my voice was shaking. Meanwhile, I could hear footsteps approaching, the new arrivals now also an audience to this.
“I didn’t,” she repeated in a high voice. She whirled around, looking at Jack. “Seriously? Who the hell is this girl?”
“His cousin,” another voice said, sounding as confident as I wished I had. “Mine, too. So will you get out of her face, please?”
All of a sudden, a girl was standing beside me. Even before I saw she was my height, with the same color blond hair and slightly upturned nose I’d always been self-conscious about, I didn’t doubt for a second that we were related. This was Bailey. I remembered. Again in a way I couldn’t even begin to understand, especially at that moment, but I did.
“Your cousin?” Taylor looked at me again. “You’re forgetting that I know all your cousins.”
“Not this one. Hasn’t been here since we were little kids.” Now, Bailey addressed me. “Hi, by the way.”
“Hi,” I said. This time, my voice didn’t crack.
She turned
back to Taylor. “Are we done? If so, let’s make a plan.”
Taylor looked at me again. “Jack,” she said to my face. “We need to talk.”
“Oh, boy,” the guy with the fauxhawk said. “Duck and cover, y’all.”
As someone across the raft snorted, Taylor turned on her heel and walked across the raft to climb onto Jack’s boat. Jack followed, slowly, looking tired. As soon as he was on board, she started talking, although her words were lost as someone else arrived, their engine chugging.
I was no expert, but even at first glance I could tell something about this boat was different. It was longer, for starters, with a third row of seats—not worn, but shiny and clean—and a larger motor. The guy behind the wheel, tall with dark hair, was in shorts and a white polo shirt with some kind of insignia that I felt like I’d seen before. He had on mirrored sunglasses, reflecting our faces back at us.
“What’s up?” he called out. “Got a plan yet?”
“Oh, great,” April said with a roll of her eyes. “Look who’s here.”
“Stop it,” Bailey told her. “I told you, he’s nice.”
April did not look convinced, even as Bailey crossed the raft, jumping across two docked boats—gracefully, how?—to go talk to him. To me, April said, “She knows to watch out for those yacht club boys. Not that you can tell.”
“Yacht club?” I asked.
April nodded across the lake, at the distant big houses. “Over at Lake North. Everything’s bigger and better there, not that it stops them from coming to our side.”
I realized, suddenly, why I’d recognized the boy’s shirt. It was identical to the one my dad wore in the few pictures I’d seen from the summer he’d spent here teaching sailing when he met my mom. I looked at Bailey again, now scratching one foot with the other as she spoke to the boy, who was grinning up at her.
“That’s her boyfriend?” I asked.
“No,” the guy with the fauxhawk replied.