Parts of it are, I said.
The rain fell for hours. When it finally stopped, almost as quickly as it started, I opened the windows and doors to let the new air in. Then I went outside to look at the branches and the shingles from our neighbor’s roof, littered over our lawn. I collected a stack of the shingles, along with a drainpipe and a deflated soccer ball. A few minutes later I saw Jill on her bike, riding into the driveway with a bottle of ketchup under her arm.
“You travel with condiments?” I asked.
She got off the bike and leaned it against the railing by the front steps. “Only when I’m thinking about hot dogs,” she said. “Last time I was here I think I spotted a pack in your freezer. Is your power out?” She kicked at a branch that had fallen across the sidewalk.
“I don’t know.” I flipped the light switch by the front door: nothing.
“Yup. Powerless,” Jill said. “All of West New Hope’s going dark. There are a lot of trees down.” We went inside.
“This is the first time all summer that I haven’t been sweaty,” Jill said. “I smell really good. Do you want to smell me?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks.”
We went into the kitchen, where Jill immediately started rummaging through the freezer. “Are these kosher?” She held up a package of frozen hot dogs.
“Don’t leave the freezer open; you’ll melt the ice cream,” I said. “Anyway, what do you care about kosher? You aren’t Jewish.”
“Kosher dogs taste better,” Jill said. She put a pot on the stove, then reached for the knob and realized the stove was electric. “Dang. A serious setback.” She bit her lip, then stared at the frosted package in her hand. “Where are your candles? Maybe I can cook these over a flame.”
“Do you think Wallis and CeeCee will show up tonight?” I asked.
“I don’t know. You’re the one who invited them.” Jill found our junk drawer and started raking through our collection of chopsticks, tea strainers, pickle pickers, tape dispensers, batteries, pencil stubs, coasters, and glue. “Which means that, even though you keep denying it, you’re still president of the book club. Chief organizer. Ooh. A flashlight. You’re going to need that.”
“Wallis should have told us she was leaving town,” I said. I opened the cabinet above the junk drawer and handed Jill a green pine-scented candle from the previous Christmas. “Do you know where they’re moving?”
“Connecticut. Her mom got a job there.” Jill plopped the candle onto a plate. “Are you going to miss her?”
“Do you mean Wallis? Am I going to miss Wallis?”
“That was my question.” Jill found a pack of matches and lit the candle.
I wasn’t sure how to answer. Maybe that’s why I had wanted to meet. Would I miss Wallis’s bear-cub voice and her rashy legs and the sight of her wearing my castoff clothes?
Jill opened the hot dogs and forked them apart under running water while giving me a tally of what she had sold that week at the pool. She managed to spear one of the franks with a knife. “Somebody’s knocking at your door,” she said. She looked out the window over the sink. “Actually, at both doors. We’re in here!” she yelled. CeeCee and Wallis had showed up at the front and back of the house, and arrived in the kitchen at the same time.
My Fellowship of the Ring speech, as if attached to a fistful of helium balloons, floated gently away.
“Are you cooking a hot dog over a candle?” CeeCee asked. Jill was holding a kosher frank over the pine-scented flame.
“Why not?” Jill asked. “The package says they’re precooked. Hey, Wallis.”
“Hi,” Wallis said.
We stood around in the kitchen talking about nothing, our conversation a wandering river of aimless ideas. Jill said her parents had driven to Maryland for their anniversary. “Every year they eat at the restaurant where they had their first date, and after they eat they drive to a park where they used to make out.”
CeeCee said that people over twenty-five should never make out, and then Jill told a story about a girl who’d had the hiccups for eleven years, and Wallis made some observations about meteors, which were often called shooting stars, she said, even though they weren’t stars, and CeeCee wanted to know if any of us worried about getting brain cancer from our cell phones, because she had heard on the radio that they emitted the same whatever-y things as microwaves, which meant they were literally frying our brains, but Wallis said the research wasn’t reliable and she hoped we understood that meteors streaked across the sky by the millions each day, in fact it would probably be easy to see them on a night like this, with the power out, particularly if we were up on a hill or a roof.
Jill had sliced up two hot dogs but they were still partly frozen, and the little pink pork cylinders, because of the candle she had used to roast them, tasted somewhat like pine. “We can get to your roof from your attic,” she said. “Right?”
I said that my mother didn’t want us up there.
CeeCee had found a package of marshmallows in the cabinet. She pointed to my copy of The Awakening on the kitchen table. “Should we bring this with us?”
We blew out the candle and left the hot dogs on the counter. I grabbed the flashlight and a beach towel that we could sit on. Then I led the way up the attic stairs and stepped through the window above my mother’s bedroom and climbed onto the roof.
“This town looks better in the dark,” Jill said. “It’s almost pretty.”
“I’ve heard people say that about you,” CeeCee said.
Standing side by side, we could see exactly where the blackout had hit, because the lights south of West New Hope were just being turned on. Though our whole town was dark, we could pick out the landmarks: the rectangular roofs of the other houses, the meandering shape of the creek, the elementary school, the Towne Centre, and the beginning of the road that led to the park, and beyond it, to Wallis’s. I felt as if I were looking at an architect’s model: I almost expected to see a tiny version of myself, living within the grid we were looking down on.
CeeCee tore the bag of marshmallows open. “I don’t see any meteors, Wallis.”
Wallis said we had to wait until it got darker.
I spread out the towel so we could sit down.
“Hey, Adrienne: this is a good place for your epiphany,” Jill said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. But I couldn’t remember what my epiphany was. It had probably trickled out the bottom of my brain like a hair down a sink. Still, I thought I remembered that it had involved wanting the book club and the books we had read to have some kind of meaning. “School starts three weeks from now,” I said.
“That’s a lousy epiphany.” CeeCee clicked the flashlight on and then off. “Do people still use Morse code?” she asked. “Did we learn it in Girl Scouts?”
Jill reminded her that she’d been thrown out of Brownies and never made it to Girl Scouts.
“I guess I remember that,” she said. “What did they throw me out for?”
“Swearing at Angela Carriman’s mother.” Jill grabbed the marshmallows. “We were in first grade.”
Two houses away, someone dragged a plastic trash bin to the curb. Otherwise it was quiet. The stars began glittering overhead.
“We’re going to be juniors this year,” Jill said. “I used to think I’d feel old when I was a junior.” She tossed a marshmallow into her mouth. “But I feel the same.”
I felt the same, too. Maybe I would never feel older or more mature. When I tried to picture myself at forty or fifty or even eighty, all I could imagine was a gray-haired, confused-looking person sitting on a roof with her mouth full of food.
“I should go home now,” Wallis said.
“You can’t leave until we see a meteor,” CeeCee told her.
Jill said that seemed fair.
In a month, I thought, Wallis would be living somewhere in Connecticut, I would be hanging out with Liz, Jill would be running half a dozen organizations, and CeeCee would rediscover how important she was an
d would probably pretend not to see me when we met in the hall.
CeeCee reached across me for the marshmallow bag. “Here’s an epiphany,” she said. “I think when you’re older you should hire a detective to track down your dad. And when you find him, even if he’s eighty years old and drooling into his soup, you should make him feel like crap for missing your childhood. You should tell him how incredibly fun every single second of it was.”
“I don’t think her childhood’s been that much fun, though,” Jill said. She licked some marshmallow dust from her fingers.
“It’s starting to get cloudy,” Wallis said. “That’s why we aren’t seeing meteors.”
“We can’t give up yet,” CeeCee said. “We’ll just have to kill a little time.” She turned on the flashlight and gave it to me.
I asked if she expected me to use it to find a meteor.
“No.” She handed me The Awakening.
“You don’t want me to read out loud up here,” I said. But she apparently did.
“I don’t mind,” Jill said. “My parents will probably be making out for another hour.”
Wallis was frowning up at the sky.
“Go ahead. We’re waiting,” CeeCee said.
“Just don’t read the ending, because I haven’t gotten there yet.” Jill popped a marshmallow into her mouth and lay down.
I opened the book, embarrassed but wishing that Ms. Radcliffe could see us, her AP English students on a roof in the dark, eating marshmallows and reading literature under the stars.
Wallis and Jill and I gave a brief summary of the plot for CeeCee: Edna Pontellier didn’t love her husband—and seemed only occasionally interested in her kids—so she had spent her summer flirting with another man. Edna had thought she was one sort of person, but it turned out that she was someone else.
“A slut,” Jill said.
“I don’t think she’s a slut,” I said. “She’s married.”
“Can’t married people be sluts?” Jill asked.
Wallis suggested that I read the part where Edna learns how to swim.
I flipped through the pages until I found it. I read about Edna’s fear of the water and her first clumsy strokes. “A feeling of exultation overtook her,” I read, “as if some power of significant import had been given to her.”
CeeCee lay still. Jill had stopped chewing. Wallis, though she was supposed to be looking for meteors, had shut her eyes. Edna “grew daring and reckless,” I read. She swam by herself, away from shore. “A quick vision of death smote her soul.” But she finally staggered out of the water; she had learned how to swim.
“I definitely get a bad feeling about where this book is going,” Jill said.
CeeCee stretched. She said that most of the books we read for school ended with someone dying, because teachers liked it when their students got depressed.
I read another page. “ ‘A thousand emotions have swept through me tonight,’ Edna explained. ‘I don’t comprehend half of them.’ ”
“I wish Edna would stay with her husband,” Jill said. “I hate the guy she hooks up with. He’s a total weasel.”
I read another two pages and then stopped at the end of a paragraph. Wallis stood up. “I need to go home.” It was fully dark.
“Take the flashlight with you,” I said, wanting to be generous. I held it out to her but our hands collided, and the flashlight rolled down the slope of the roof and landed in the gutter with a metallic clunk.
“That’s okay. I brought the headlamp your mother gave me,” Wallis said. She pulled the elastic band from her pocket.
“You can SOS us,” CeeCee said.
I asked if Wallis would be afraid by herself.
“No,” she said. “What would I be afraid of?”
“I don’t know. The dark. Evil people. Monsters. Thieves.”
“I don’t have anything a thief would want,” Wallis said. “And the monsters don’t notice me.”
We took turns climbing back through the window into the attic and, bumping into each other, we navigated our way through the rest of the house. Wallis strapped the headlamp to her head. We walked her to the door.
“Where in Connecticut are you going to live?” CeeCee asked. “I have a cousin in Hartford.”
“We’ll be in a small town,” Wallis said.
We stood on the porch, looking into the yard. It was one of those moments that in real life is probably short, but it stretched itself out, Wallis’s hand reaching behind her for the metal latch on the door. One day we would read about her, I thought, when she discovered a new planet or a cure for cancer, and we would see her picture on TV or in the paper (by then she would probably wear her hair in a bun and have glamorous glasses) and I would wish I had found a way to tell her that we should keep in touch; that was what I was thinking, that I had to extend the moment before she opened the door and walked out of our unbearable book club and into the dark, and then Jill leaned forward to hug Wallis goodbye while at the very same moment CeeCee suggested that—even though none of us were supposed to be out; in fact, she herself was actually grounded for the first time in her life—she and Jill and I, for old times’ sake and because it was our last evening together, should walk Wallis home.
17. CLIMAX: A climax is the high point or exciting part of something. Which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good. Terrible things can happen during a climax. That’s what I learned the night CeeCee and Jill and I walked Wallis home.
Every step we took that night brought us closer to a bad idea.
I looked back at my house, receding behind us. I pictured my mother coming home and finding the attic window open, a candle and some massacred hot dogs on the kitchen table, and a trail of spilled marshmallows leading to the roof.
But we couldn’t let Wallis walk home by herself—which was why the four of us headed into the darkness under the trees, every light in West New Hope extinguished because of the storm.
“Your headlight’s dying,” Jill said as the oval light from Wallis’s headlamp shivered and dimmed.
“Let me see it.” CeeCee took the elastic strap from Wallis’s head and shook it, then tapped the headlamp several times against the ground. The light went out completely.
“Well done,” Jill said. She walked ahead of us. We were all moving slowly because of the fallen branches; leaves that should have dangled above us erupted, strangely, out of the ground.
Now that we were moving instead of sitting still, a piece of my epiphany started to come back to me. This was my chance to talk to Wallis. This was my chance to understand what her story was. I did have a theory: she and her mother were in hiding. That was why they were moving; it was why they had changed their last name and why Wallis’s mother never went anywhere and never showed up at book club. That was why Wallis didn’t want her picture taken and why they lived in an unnumbered house on Weller Road—they didn’t want their stalker to know where they lived—and that was why Wallis’s mother had (possibly) carried a gun. All I had to do was lay out the theory and say, “Is that right?”
But I didn’t do it. Wallis would probably tell me that they weren’t hiding: that her mother had gotten a job and they had changed their last name because her parents had gotten divorced. And she would say that they lived in an unnumbered house because they liked the quiet and that she had gotten a scar on her forehead because she fell down.
Jill asked how my leg was holding up; I said it was fine.
We walked through the playground: three cement tubes to crawl through, a slide that led to a pile of foul-smelling sand, and four rusted swings. We walked past the road that led to Jill’s. But it was only when we crossed the soccer field that I understood where we were going. We didn’t have to walk past it on the way to Wallis’s, but maybe out of habit, or maybe because we sensed that, like the heart-shaped pointer on Jill’s Ouija board, it might have the ability to tell us something, we ended up at the pool.
With the lights off, at night, something about the fence and the trees arou
nd it looked very different. There was the spot where we usually sat; there were the diving board and the lifeguard chair; there was the gate near the locker rooms. And around the corner behind the locker rooms, there was something else.
CeeCee put her hand on the chain link and followed the path around the fence.
“Unbelievable,” she said. And it almost was.
A tree had fallen. Its roots had torn themselves out of the earth, clutching several large rocks in their wooden fingers. As if it knew we were coming, the tree had fallen directly onto the fence, which had crumpled at the top like a piece of tinfoil.
“This is a black walnut tree,” Wallis said as CeeCee pulled experimentally on one of the branches.
“Don’t,” Jill said. “I know what you’re thinking. And we’re not going to do it.”
CeeCee turned toward her. “Do you wear your seat belt at the dinner table?” she asked. She backed up toward the tangled roots of the tree, then leaned her weight against the trunk. “It’s totally stuck,” she said. “Feel it. It’s not going to budge.”
The trunk was at least a foot in diameter. The branches were caught on both sides of the fence, which kept the whole tree still. It was a rounded balance beam with handholds.
Jill reminded me that I didn’t want to hurt my leg. “I’ll lose my job if anyone sees us.”
“It’s August,” I told her. The tree seemed to have laid down its life for our benefit. “How much longer were you going to work?”
CeeCee was already halfway up the trunk. I could barely see her; she had been swallowed up in the foliage.
“If this is fate, I don’t like the looks of it,” Jill said. “We’ll jump in and then out, CeeCee,” she called.
“Whatever you say,” CeeCee agreed. “Wallis, are you coming? We’re finally going to teach you to swim.”
Walking up the ridged, uneven slope of the walnut tree, I understood that we should have turned around and gone home. But it felt like the crucial moment that our entire summer had been leading up to: the moment when the four key members of the Literary Trespassers Association for Delinquent Girls would climb over a locked chain-link fence during a blackout to get back to the place where everything had started: the pool.
The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Page 16