But I couldn’t stop thinking about what Blair would think of how I looked.
Obi followed behind like a shadow. We left the house and jogged over to the office.
“We should really get an air conditioner in here,” I grumbled, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge.
“Thanks, honey,” Mom said, grabbing a notepad off the office table with a list of things she needed in town. “I have to go get some light bulbs for Maple Leaf. You’re on the phone, okay?”
“Got it,” I said.
Just as she took off, Jade ducked in.
“Hey,” she said. “Dad went on a run. He told me to tell you he’d relieve you after three miles. I’m about to go floating with some friends, so I’ll see you later.” During the summer in Moose Junction, everyone loved tying pool floats together and floating down Musky River. Jade and her crew would bring a huge cooler of soda and stay out there all day. Blair would take me sometimes, before she stopped really doing anything fun. I almost felt like calling Sophie and Lex to see about getting together later, but I hadn’t seen them hardly at all since Memorial Day. I’d bumped into Sophie at Coontail’s and we’d talked for a few minutes, but she didn’t ask me to go swimming or anything. I guess I didn’t ask her, either, but it felt like they were avoiding me. A couple of weeks ago I had asked them to come over, but Lex wasn’t feeling well and Sophie was going to see her cousins. Neither of them had texted me the next day to see if I still wanted to hang out. After Mom had mentioned seeing them at the Ice Shanty getting ice cream, I triple-checked my phone to be sure I hadn’t missed any texts.
I hadn’t.
But summer was almost over. Soon, we’d all be back on that school bus for one last year at Waukegan Middle. I’d spent most of my summer helping out in the office and reading fantasy books. While everyone else in town was on vacation, here to have Big Summer Adventures, I was answering phones and reminding Mom about the broken dishwasher in Robin’s Egg. It left me with a lot of time to think about things I didn’t want to think about, Blair and my friends topping that list.
“Excuse me?” a voice called. “Anybody here?”
Jade and I glanced up. Standing there was Simone—looking less than pleased.
“Um, hi,” I said. “Can I help you?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t there anybody a little older around here?”
“My mom’s in town,” I explained. “But do you need new pillowcases or something? I know where everything is.”
She sighed. “There’s a hole in our door now.”
“A what?” I asked.
“A hole . . . Chewed by some sort of animal or something,” she said.
“The raccoon,” I said meekly.
“The raccoon,” she confirmed. “He needs to be dealt with ASAP. The thing kept me up all night. And now there’s a gaping hole in our door, and mosquitos are coming through. Not to mention that anybody who walks by can see right in . . .”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “As soon as my dad gets here, I can send him over to fix the door. And handle the raccoon.”
“Thank you,” she said with a sigh, picking up a brochure for a fishing supply store and fanning herself. “I don’t mean to cause a ruckus here. But my boss is driving me nuts.”
“Understandable,” I assured her.
“He’s just so . . .” She threw her hands in the air. “Well. Anyway. Not your problem. Listen: this seems like a pretty good gig. Stick with it and never accept a job as an assistant for a scientist, no matter how brilliant. Hear me?”
“Heard,” I said with a smile.
“I’ll be at the cabin. Tell your dad to please, please come as fast as he can. My boss likes his privacy, and a big old hole in the door isn’t providing it.” She turned and left.
“It’s just a racoon,” muttered Jade.
I shrugged. “It did chew a hole in her door. In the most expensive cabin. And it sounds like she didn’t sleep all night.”
Jade rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m out of here.” She grabbed a few waters from the fridge and took off.
Jade and I had never really been buddies; she’d had her own friends. Blair had never been Miss Popular since she was always at dance and couldn’t go to normal things like sleepovers, but she still invited me to the stuff she did go to. If I showed up somewhere Jade and her friends were, Jade would have a heart attack. She basically wanted me to disappear. That was fine with me. Her and her friends didn’t talk about anything more important than lip gloss and listened to screechy music. It’s not like they wanted to learn about Katherine Johnson or how to find Scorpius.
I bummed around in the office, scrolling through Sophie’s Instagram feed. I was right; they were totally avoiding me. There was picture after picture of her and Lex—floating on Musky River, paddleboarding, giving kissy faces in front of the fireworks on the Fourth of July. They even got together with some other kids from school and went to a Brewers game in Milwaukee. Whatever. I pulled up our group text, which had been full of jokes and homework questions and invitations to hang out during the school year. Now it had dwindled to practically nothing.
I clicked over to Caleb Evers’s feed. He didn’t have as many pictures, but there were still a few of him and his friends gathered around a dock. A couple of him holding a big fish. I looked back even further, to spring.
There was the picture from prom. Blair, smiling in her shiny pink dress that we’d all gone shopping for together. Caleb had his hand on her back, and he was looking right at her.
“Abby?” I slammed the laptop shut as my dad walked in behind me. “Whoa, state secrets or something?”
“Nothing,” I muttered.
“I’m here to let you off the hook,” said Dad, wiping the sweat off his forehead. “Man, it’s hot out there. Why don’t you go jump in the lake? Call the girls or something.”
I shrugged. They had my phone number. If they had wanted to hang out with me this summer, they could have.
“Simone came by,” I said. “From Eagle’s Nest? That raccoon chewed a hole through the door.”
“Oh man. You gotta be kidding me.” He groaned. “I’ll go fix it. I need to call Mom and have her pick up some extra plywood first. I hope she’s still in town. Can you run down there and tell them I’ll be there as soon as Mom gets back?”
Go to Eagle’s Nest?
And talk to Dr. Leo Lacamoire?
My heart jumped.
There was something about our newest resort guest that seemed big. Momentous, Mr. Linn would have said, like John Glenn orbiting the Earth for the first time. Some shift happening in the summer that I couldn’t quite place my finger on. Dr. Leo Lacamoire was not an ordinary visitor, and even though I didn’t know it just yet, I knew that it was going to be . . . significant. Sort of like when you see somebody at the airport or the mall and you can’t stop staring at them even though you’re not sure why. That was how I felt about him.
I know, I know. A + B = C. Sure. But passion, adventure—you can say you don’t want those things. You can watch them destroy a person and ruin a summer. That doesn’t mean they don’t hide under your bed sometimes, waiting for you to notice them.
“I’ll go right now,” I said.
I walked over to Eagle’s Nest and knocked carefully on the front door. I could hear music coming from inside, but not the type of music that bugs Dad—loud rap or country played at full volume that messes with the peace of the woods—but classical, like the kind Blair would dance to.
The hole in the door wasn’t so big, but raccoons can stuff themselves through spaces smaller than you’d think.
“Hello?” I called out tentatively.
I don’t know what made me step inside, but I did. I had been in all our cabins a million times, but Eagle’s Nest was by far our nicest. It looked barely lived in, though, besides the cereal box on the counter and the slightly messed-up blanket folded on the couch. It was less of a “cabin” and more of a rustic-chic house that was way nic
er than ours. It had a huge spiral staircase in the middle of the first floor leading up to the lookout, a round room with huge windows. It was where I had seen Dr. Leo Lacamoire the night before, peering out onto the lake.
“Hello?” I called out again. Nobody answered, but I could hear the classical music. It was coming from above me.
I took the stairs slowly, realizing that this wasn’t just any classical music. This was something Blair had danced to at a recital once. I remembered it because, at the end, she had some super tricky turn that she’d practiced over and over. That music was practically tattooed onto my brain. The farther I climbed up the steps, the noisier it got. Violins, trumpets, and piano cascaded across the house in a swirl of sound that made me think of guys in poofy wigs. It gave me goose bumps. Loud, clashing, and dramatic. Passion. Destiny. The sort of sound that sped up your heart.
I pushed open the door at the top. There he was, not through a telescope but standing five feet away from me: Dr. Leo Lacamoire, glasses low on his nose, looking intensely at something on his desk.
For a second, I just stared. Every inch of him was concentrating, from his shoulder blades to his knees. It was like he was trying to will a star into existence.
“Excuse me?” I said. The music was turned up so high you wouldn’t have heard Obi howl, let alone me.
“Excuse me?” I yelled. He jumped a foot in the air when he saw me, and screamed like a little kid. Which made me scream, too.
“Who are you? What are you doing up here?” he exclaimed over the music in a thick British accent.
“The raccoon,” I shouted.
“What?” he shouted back. I pointed to the speakers. He rolled his eyes dramatically before reaching over and turning the music down. He was going to have hearing loss one day if he kept his music that ear-piercing all the time. I was surprised a raccoon was brave enough to come in.
“The raccoon,” I said. “I’m Abby McCourt. My dad is the resort manager. He sent me here to tell you that he’ll be over really soon to fix the hole.”
“The hole?” He looked confused. Was this guy older than I thought? Maybe he had some kind of a memory issue. Before our grandma died, she used to call all three of us Julie, like my mom, or Elizabeth, who was some friend of hers growing up. She once showed up at the grocery store without her shoes on.
“In your door,” I said. “Simone came to the office and said you needed it fixed pronto.” Pronto? Why did I say that? It made me sound like a cowboy in an old movie. Nobody said words like pronto in real life. Something about Dr. Leo Lacamoire could make a person very nervous.
“Simone,” he said. “Yes, right. She’s in town. I told her I needed some room to breathe. I’m working, so, if you don’t mind . . .” He waved a hand across his desk as if to show me how busy he was. There were messy stacks of paper, and—
Telescopes.
Multiple telescopes. Fancy kinds that you’d see in a museum, all set up by the large window. And those weren’t just pieces of paper, they were star charts.
“You like stars?” I asked, surprised.
He looked at me like Jade looked at Obi when he burst into the bathroom as she got ready. Like, Out of my personal space, please. “Yes,” he said shortly.
I stood there awkwardly, a million thoughts circling my mind. Could I look through one of those telescopes? Was he a professional, or just one of those super serious nerds who went to conventions and stuff? Was he here for the eclipse? I didn’t want this to be my only interaction with Dr. Leo Lacamoire, apparent astronomer.
But he kept glancing at me, clearly annoyed, so I turned to go.
“Wait,” he barked. “I have a question.”
I turned back. “Yeah?”
“The library,” he said. “Do you know its hours? Nothing in this godforsaken town has a website.”
“Eight to eight, Monday through Saturday. Closed on Sundays,” I told him. I wasn’t just a fountain of helpful Moose Junction facts. I also loved the library. It was one of those safe, sacred spaces where I could run away to Narnia or Middle-earth or Hogwarts, curled up in one of its cozy beanbags, pretending Blair knew how to eat and my friends were still my friends and Jade didn’t hate me. The librarian, Harriet, was one of my favorite people in the universe. The fact that Dr. Leo Lacamoire might be a library person, though, I hadn’t seen coming. We were kind of a dying breed, in the age of Google and tablets and free shipping. Not many people wanted to flip through a paperback that had someone else’s hot chocolate stains on chapter four.
“Thanks,” he said shortly, turning back to his maps.
“I’ll . . . I’ll tell Dad not to bother you when he gets here,” I said. “Just to fix the hole.”
Dr. Leo Lacamoire nodded, not even looking up.
I bounded back down the stairs and out the door, letting it bang closed behind me. Dad was sitting in the office, typing on a calculator.
“I told him,” I said. “He’s working upstairs, though. Said not to bug him. Just fix the hole.”
“Got it,” said Dad. “I caught your mom just before she left the hardware store, luckily.”
“What are you doing?” I asked, pointing toward the calculator.
“Oh, just moving some numbers around,” sighed Dad. “That meeting last night was . . . well, there’s not enough money in the world, Abby. That’s all there is to it.”
I shook my head. “Taylor Swift? Hello, Dad. Some people can fly to Paris to get dessert just because they feel like it.”
“I think that was Kim What’s-Her-Face,” Dad said.
“Kardashian. You know her name,” I said. Dad liked to pretend he didn’t read the gossipy tabloids Jade left in the office, even though he clearly did.
“Well, fine. Sure. But think of the kids in parts of the world who don’t even know where dinner is coming from. Kids in Milwaukee, even. Kids down the road. Money can be hard to find,” Dad said. “And our town doesn’t have enough of it. Everything’s taking a hit. If you guys want art classes next year, if you want the library to stay open—”
“What?” The library couldn’t close. The thought of living in a town without a library made my skin crawl.
“This eclipse better be everything they say,” Dad said. “We’re booked to capacity. So are Paul Bunyan’s and Cubby Lodge. Even the Blue Moon Motel.” We both shivered. Let’s just say when you drove past the Blue Moon Motel, you wondered who would ever stay there. The owner, Harvey, wore those creepy white tank tops all the time, even in November.
“The economy could use a boost. At least a high five,” Dad said. “That’s all.”
I crossed my fingers. “Here’s hoping.”
“Wish upon one of your stars or something,” Dad said. “Hey, we’re going to see Blair tomorrow . . . are you coming?”
I shook my head. My ponytail whipped my cheeks.
“Abby . . .”
I’m terrible at team sports. I scraped by with a C in art last year because my shooting star sculpture looked more like a rock. Mrs. Schroeder winced in choir when I tried out for a solo, even though she tried to deny it. My skills are limited, okay? If it doesn’t involve a telescope or a comic book, I’m hopeless. But one thing I am very good at: avoidance. I could gold medal in it. I hurried out of the office, leaving Dad and his calculator and his mention of my sister behind me like dust.
4
AUGUST, PRESENT DAY
Twelve years old
The next day, the clouds rolled in. When it storms in the Northwoods, the rain waits and waits and waits before dropping a downpour on you that lasts for what seems like ages. I felt bad for the tourists who came with swimsuits and fishing poles. But I didn’t mind when it rained in the summer. It was kind of a nice break from feeling like you had to constantly be doing something fun and outdoorsy. Like, I live on a resort. Most people’s vacation is just my life. And sometimes it gets tiring.
So when it rains, I usually head to the library.
“Hey, Harriet,” I said, duckin
g in out of the crazy weather. I dropped my umbrella behind her desk. She barely looked up from a tattered paperback. Harriet was black, supersmart, and . . . bigger. Some of the other kids in town made fun of her, but she couldn’t have cared less. She was too busy reading every single book in the library and giving me the best ones when she was done. She was probably my favorite person in all of Moose Junction.
“Hey, Abby,” she said. “You good today?”
“I’m good,” I assured her. If you didn’t know what you wanted to read, Harriet could find it. She was the master at getting books in the hands of people who’d love them. Even Sophie, who didn’t like anything without a vampire. She was a lot better than Josiah, the college kid who helped out in the summer and pushed old history books on anyone who walked through the door. You’d come in looking for a cozy mystery and leave with The Life and Times of John Adams, Extended Edition.
I didn’t usually need a lot of help, though. I was pretty much a Professional Library Browser. I knew all the tricks, like getting on your knees to see what was on the bottom shelf—the best stuff always got ignored down there—and giving a book the tried and true two-paragraph test.
But today I was off my game. Nothing seemed to stand out. I stuck my head back around to the desk. “Hey, Harriet? Did you get the new Star Wars book?”
“No,” she said. “I could only get ten new books this summer and it didn’t make the cut.”
I groaned. “Are you kidding? Ten?”
“You’re telling me,” said Harriet, rolling her eyes. “Every year it’s less and less. This town. I swear.”
“My dad mentioned something about it,” I said. “That we aren’t swimming in dough.”
“Treading water is more like it,” said Harriet. “We had to send Josiah back to Madison and everything.”
What Happens Next Page 3