“‘I always feel like somebody’s watching me,’” Lauren sang as she walked, although she didn’t really. If anyone was watching she felt that it was a benign somebody.
She liked that song a lot, although Miranda didn’t think much of it. Miranda had listened to Def Leppard’s Pyromania album nonstop since she discovered it the previous year, and whenever Lauren came over she would put it on. Lauren was pretty sure she could live the rest of her life without ever hearing “Rock of Ages” again.
The ghost tree was about a ten-minute walk from the place where Lauren dismounted her bike. Miranda was already there, arms crossed and leaning against the tree with her eyes closed. Lauren wondered what Miranda was thinking about.
She wore a white sleeveless shirt that buttoned down the front, and Lauren could see her training bra through it. Lauren had started wearing a training bra too even though she really didn’t need it yet. By the time she actually needed the trainer Miranda would be wearing women’s bras, probably.
The shirt was tucked into her jeans—Jordache, naturally, and their ankles brushed against her white Adidas shoes with the black stripes on the side. Miranda always had name-brand everything, because her parents were both managers at the canned chili factory and they would take her to the next town over to go to the mall for her clothes.
She was also an only child, which meant her parents didn’t have to worry about having money for the next kid’s stuff. Lauren had heard her mother sighing many times that the trouble with having a girl and then a boy was that you couldn’t reuse anything. Not that there had been so much stuff around for reusing by the time David was born—he was ten years younger than Lauren, a “surprise package,” as Lauren’s dad called him. Lauren’s parents had thought their late nights with a colicky baby were long gone.
“What took you so long?” Miranda said, straightening when she heard the rattle of Lauren’s bike chain. “And what are you wearing?”
What are you wearing was what Lauren wanted to ask, but instead she looked down at her Cubs shirt and cutoff jeans and said, “Clothes for playing in the woods.”
Miranda shook her hair, an elaborately teased and sprayed mass that had been wrestled into a high ponytail. “We’re not playing in the woods. What are we, nine? We’re going to the Dream Machine.”
“Why didn’t you just say we were going to the Dream Machine?” Lauren asked.
Lauren didn’t really care about arcade games except maybe pinball, and she especially didn’t like going to the Dream Machine because lately it meant that she and Miranda would stand around watching boys that Miranda thought were cute.
“Tad asked me to meet him there,” Miranda said excitedly, ignoring Lauren’s question. “He actually called me today.”
So why do I have to go? Lauren thought. If she’d known what Miranda had planned she would have brought a book to read. There was nothing more boring than watching some guy playing Pac-Man. Also, what kind of stupid name was Tad? Lauren wasn’t sure she remembered who exactly Tad was, either. It was hard to keep track of which boy was at the top of Miranda’s scrolling list of interests.
“And he said he’s going to bring some of his friends, so there will be someone for you, too,” Miranda finished. She said this last bit like she had gotten a really amazing present for Lauren and couldn’t wait to hear how much she loved it.
“Oh,” Lauren said.
“Let’s go,” Miranda said. “Leave your bike here. We can cut through the woods and come out behind Frank’s.”
Frank’s Deli was directly across the street from the Dream Machine. Lauren didn’t like coming out of the woods there because there were always rats running around behind Frank’s. She always told her mother not to buy lunch meat there because of that.
“Don’t be silly, Lauren,” Mom would say. “Of course there are rats outside. They’re attracted to garbage. That doesn’t mean there are rats inside.”
“It doesn’t mean there aren’t, either,” Lauren said darkly, and refused to eat so much as a slice of roast beef from Frank’s. It meant a lot of peanut butter sandwiches because her mom would almost always go to Frank’s unless she went shopping at the big super grocery store in the next town and got deli meat while she was there.
“Which one is Tad again?” Lauren asked as she leaned her bike against the tree. There was no worry that anything would happen to it. No one ever stole anything that belonged to the ghost tree.
Miranda hit Lauren’s shoulder with the back of her hand. “He works at Wagon Wheel, remember? We just went there to see him last week.”
Lauren dredged up the memory of a greasy-haired guy throwing two slices of pizza in front of them as they’d sat on the tall chairs at the counter, feet dangling. He’d barely acknowledged Miranda’s existence.
“That guy?” Lauren asked.
“He looks just like Matt Dillon in The Outsiders,” Miranda said with a little sigh.
“No, he doesn’t,” Lauren said.
Usually she let Miranda’s statements pass by without an argument, but she couldn’t let that one go. Lauren had the poster with the cast of The Outsiders on it hanging on the back of her bedroom door, and she got a good look at Matt Dillon every morning. Tad did not look a thing like him.
“He totally does!” Miranda insisted.
“No way,” Lauren said.
“Well, he’s going to be a junior and he has a Camaro,” Miranda said, as if this settled everything.
When Miranda said things like that, Lauren could feel the strings that had bound them together their whole life unknotting one by one. Lauren really didn’t care if he had a Camaro, and the old Miranda wouldn’t have either. The old Miranda would have wanted to stay in the woods instead of going to the Dream Machine. But the old Miranda had disappeared in the last year, leaving Lauren to wonder why she still came when Miranda called.
Maybe it’s just hard to let your best friend go, even if you have nothing in common anymore, Lauren thought, and sighed a little.
They emerged from the woods behind Frank’s Deli. Two rats, a very large one and a little tiny one, abandoned the bread crust they were chewing and ran behind the three large metal garbage cans lined up next to the back door.
“Gross,” Miranda said as Lauren flinched and made a little squeaking sound.
They heard the sound of soft laughter. Lauren saw Jake Hanson, the son of one of her neighbors, smoking a cigarette behind the electronics shop next door. He was three or four years older than Lauren, so their paths had rarely crossed since she’d been very small. She remembered that once, when she was maybe seven or eight, he’d shown her how to throw a baseball and had spent a half hour patiently catching her wild pitches.
Miranda went straight for the narrow walkway between Frank’s and the electronics shop, ignoring Jake entirely.
Lauren paused, because it really went against the grain for her to pretend someone didn’t exist. “Hey, Jake.”
He was very tall now, at least a foot taller than Lauren, but his jeans barely hung onto his waist with a belt hooked all the way to the last hole. He had on a black uniform polo with the words Best Electronics embroidered on the upper left side.
“Hey, Lauren,” he said, blowing smoke out of his nose.
She wondered when his voice had started to sound so grown-up. He didn’t really sound like a boy anymore—but then, she supposed that he wasn’t. He was probably eighteen years old now, or close to it—old enough to have real stubble on his cheeks and not just the stringy fuzz most high school boys sported.
His blue eyes looked her up and down, assessing. Assessing what, Lauren wasn’t sure. She’d always liked his eyes, how his blue eyes contrasted with his dark hair, but now something in the way they looked at her made the blood rise in her cheeks.
“Nice shoes,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he meant it or he was making fun of her.
<
br /> “Lau-ren,” Miranda called impatiently.
“Better hurry,” Jake said conversationally. He dropped the end of his cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out with the sole of his black boots. “See you around, Lauren.”
“Yeah,” she said, jogging after Miranda. She didn’t really know why but she felt flustered, and when she felt flustered she got annoyed.
“What were you doing?” Miranda said.
“Saying hi,” Lauren said, even more annoyed now because Miranda had clearly heard the conversation.
“You shouldn’t say hi to losers like him,” Miranda said.
“He’s my neighbor,” Lauren said. Her face still felt hot and she knew from long experience that it would take a while for her cheeks to return to their normal color.
Miranda leaned in close to Lauren, stealing a quick glance over her shoulder to ensure that nobody was nearby and listening.
“He deals drugs,” Miranda whispered.
Lauren frowned. “Give me a break. Drugs? In Smiths Hollow? Where would he even get them from?”
“There are drugs even in Smiths Hollow,” Miranda said mysteriously.
The only thing Lauren really knew about drugs came from movies where a character would occasionally smoke a joint. Miranda had seen Scarface, though Lauren hadn’t, and had acted like an authority on all things cocaine-related since then.
They emerged from between the storefronts of the deli and the electronics shop. The Dream Machine was directly across the street. All the windows were open. The sound of loud music combined with the persistent bleep of electronics and the occasional whoop of a player was easily heard over the car engines on Main Street.
Lauren looked both ways so they could cross, but Miranda grabbed her arm and pointed toward the Sweet Shoppe a few doors away.
“I need some Tic Tacs,” she said. “I ate a tuna fish sandwich for lunch before Tad called. If I’d known he was going to call I wouldn’t have eaten anything. I don’t want to look bloated in front of him.”
She patted her paper-flat stomach as she said this and glanced at Lauren as if she expected her to say You’re not bloated.
But Lauren was only half paying attention to Miranda. Going to the Sweet Shoppe meant that they had to cross in front of the large glass windows of Best Electronics. Jake Hanson was back behind the counter, cigarette break over, and was hunched over what looked like a pile of black plastic and wires.
She quickly looked away, first because she didn’t want to get caught staring, and second because if he did look up she didn’t know if she should wave or pretend not to see him. Her gaze shot out into the road and the passing cars.
A maroon station wagon was coming down Main Street and Lauren pretended to be absorbed in Miranda’s face as it went by. The one person Lauren never had any trouble pretending not to see was her mother.
2
Come on, David,” Karen diMucci said, unbuckling her son and gathering him out of the back seat. She’d gotten lucky and found a parking space right in front of Frank’s, so she should have been in a better mood. It was always exhausting to walk more than a block or two towing David and the groceries, especially in the June heat. Today she would get to avoid that.
Just like Lauren avoided my eyes as I passed.
She tried not to let the irritation she felt leak into her tone, but David heard the bite and looked up at her in that serious inquiring way that he had.
“Let’s get some sandwich stuff,” she said, deliberately injecting a hearty note. “And then we’ll get some ice cream at the Sweet Shoppe after, okay?”
“Okeh,” David said.
Lauren and Miranda would surely be gone from the shop by then, Karen thought. Not that she had to avoid her own daughter. But she knew if she saw Lauren now she would be annoyed and unable to keep herself from saying so, and then Lauren would give her the silent treatment all evening for embarrassing her in public.
Karen placed David on his feet and took his hand. He didn’t try to squirm away or run ahead the way most other four-year-olds did. Lauren had been like that—always trying to shake her off, even as a small child.
The air-conditioned cool of the deli was welcome after the stifling heat outside. The weather report in the Smiths Hollow Observer had said the temperature would reach the mid-eighties that day, but it already felt much hotter because there was absolutely no wind. The heat just seemed to settle in and stagnate, especially on Main Street. There were no trees to provide shade—the town fathers had decided some time ago that there were quite enough trees in the woods and no need for the town to spend money maintaining plant life along the sidewalks.
Karen got in line. There were three other people in front of her, all people she knew by sight but not well. In a small town like Smiths Hollow you knew almost everyone by sight. She was grateful not to be forced to accept sympathetic looks and awkward small talk from an acquaintance.
Lately she dreaded leaving the house for just this reason—that she might bump into someone she knew from the PTA or who used to have their car fixed at Joe’s garage. People who weren’t really close enough to be called friends but who felt compelled to stop and ask how she was doing and rub her shoulder and tell her that they hoped things would get better soon.
Karen always did everything she could to hurry along these encounters, checking her watch, saying she had pressing appointments—anything to make the other person just go. She hated the false sympathy, the way the conversations would trail off into sighs.
David waited patiently at her side while they stood in line. Really, he is the best kid in the world, Karen thought. He was good-natured and thoughtful and it never bothered him to wait anywhere. He would just stare around with his big brown eyes—the color and shape matching hers so exactly that everyone always exclaimed that he looked “just like his mommy”—and think his own little thoughts.
Then later when they were alone, when she was giving him his lunch or they were driving to the bank or playing in the sandbox in the backyard, he would tell her what he’d been thinking of, and it always amazed her that such deep thoughts emerged from the mind of her four-year-old.
“Mr. Adamcek likes for everyone to see his money,” David said one day.
Karen, who’d been balancing her checkbook and trying not to cry at the dwindling size of her checking account, had looked up. David was playing with Play-Doh on the kitchen floor. He had newspapers spread around so he wouldn’t get the floor dirty—his idea, not hers. He was that kind of kid.
“How do you know that?” Karen asked.
“He takes a long time to put his change back in his wallet, and sometimes he just stands there at the counter and holds his wallet open while he’s talking,” David said as he rolled the red Play-Doh into a new shape.
Earlier that day Karen had stopped in at the convenience store on her way home from the library because they were out of milk. She didn’t really like buying milk from there because it was usually ten or twenty cents more expensive than the grocery store, but the grocery was out of her way and she didn’t feel like driving all the way over there.
It was true that Paul Adamcek had been in line in front of her buying three packs of Marlboros, and now that she thought about it she realized he had been holding his wallet open the whole time so that it was impossible to miss the stack of $20s inside the billfold.
“He’s going to get robbed if he keeps doing that,” Karen muttered.
“He doesn’t think anyone will try,” David said. “Mr. Adamcek thinks he’s really tough.”
Karen wondered how David had inferred this. It was true that Paul thought he was a tough guy, but she wondered what David saw that made him realize it.
His preschool teacher had, at first, thought there was something wrong with David because he was so often silent. He liked to play with the other children and got along with everyone, bu
t he didn’t talk very much. People often made that mistake, that kids who weren’t talkative were stupid. David wasn’t stupid. He just thought before he spoke, and he spent more time looking and listening than making noise.
“Hello, Karen,” Frank said when Karen finally reached the counter. He leaned out a little so he could see David. “And how are you today, young man?”
David waved up to Frank, and Frank winked at him.
“What can I get for you today?”
Karen read off her list. “Half pound of turkey, half pound of American cheese, and a quarter pound of roast beef.”
When Joe was alive she’d have ordered three times the amount of everything, because Joe had eaten two sandwiches for lunch every day and he didn’t like his sandwiches to be stingy with the meat. But Joe wasn’t alive and Lauren wouldn’t eat anything from Frank’s, so there wasn’t any point in ordering a lot when there was nobody there to eat it. She couldn’t afford to throw away food.
She looked at the premade salads that Frank had in the cooler while she waited. It would be easy to pick up some potato salad to have with lunch, but it would definitely be cheaper to make it herself, and she did have several potatoes in the pantry.
Frank handed Karen her order along with a Tootsie Pop for David. He kept the lollipops behind the counter for his “special customers,” as he called them.
“Thank you, Mr. Frank,” David said as Karen handed him the lollipop.
Karen flashed Frank a grateful smile.
“How’s that girl of yours?” Frank asked. There was no one waiting behind Karen.
Karen shrugged. “Oh, you know. A teenage girl.”
Frank had three grown daughters of his own, so he did know. “She’ll be human again in a few years. Just hang on.”
“I’m hanging, all right,” Karen said ruefully. “By my fingernails.”
Frank laughed and waved at David. “Take care of your mama, okay, David?”
He nodded gravely. “Okeh, Mr. Frank. I will.”
The Ghost Tree Page 2