He gives me that long-suffering look again. “I don’t have to rescue you.”
“You’re not going to throw me back.” I fling the words like a gauntlet.
He runs his entire hand down his face. “No. I’m not.”
I point across the lake. “I live over that way.”
I don’t say anything for a little while. Neither does he. I wouldn’t say there’s silence though, what with the mosquitoes and cicadas and frogs and owls and water lapping against things. Picturesque lakes are a lot louder than people think.
I look at him while trying to pretend like I’m not actually looking. He’s tall, much taller than me, with reddish-brown hair and eyes the color of celery.
“I needed to get away for a while,” he finally says. His voice is different, softer.
“That’s why I’m out here too.”
I feel like there are entire life stories packed into those two sentences. A novel in fourteen words. I realize I want to know everything that happened to make him say it.
I take a deep breath. “Do you ever get so tired of pretending, that you feel like if you have to keep it up, even for one more minute, you might just explode?”
“Yes. Absolutely, yes. My dad’s always riding me about stuff.” He winces and stares out across the lake. “Just having something to look forward to helps me get through countless hours of lectures. The boat. At night. That’s my thing.”
I smile. “I get that.”
But do I? What do I actually have to look forward to?
I feel like I’m on the cusp of something huge. I also realize we’re approaching the part of the lake where I live.
“This is me,” I say, pointing to the dock.
He maneuvers in. Ties up the canoe. I’m so relieved I don’t have to handle the knots again that I almost hug him. Almost. Then he helps me hop from the boat to the dock, holding my hand like the good guy in a black-and-white movie.
“Thank you.” I smile at him. The bubbly, charming kind.
“You’re welcome,” he says. He’s leaning over the railing of the boat, and then he shakes his head like he remembers where he is. “If you ever want to get away—you know, together—give me a call.” He slips back into the driver’s seat, and his mouth spreads into a smirk. “You know. When you’re not drunk.”
I’m pretty sure I’d rather punch myself in the face than call Sergeant Mansplainer.
And besides, he didn’t even give me his number.
He drives away, but I’m not ready to go inside yet. I pull out my phone and look at the pictures my friends are posting. Eight of them crammed into a row of seats at the bowling alley, Emmeline laughing, Carter trying to make a duck face, and Paige—her grin is so big.
It’s the caption that gets me though: Victory bowling is the best bowling.
It’s not that I don’t want them to win. I totally do! It’s just that it stings a little.
Just having something to look forward to gets me through countless hours of lectures.
This is what I have to look forward to. Watching other people live my dreams. If anyone had ever asked, I’d have told them I’d be playing this game until I was a creaky old lady. And now I am one. At sixteen. And there is nothing I can do about it.
I need something for me.
Scarlett
“Where have you been?” I fling the words at Sky as soon as she walks up the stairs from the garage and into the carriage house. I guess I use a little too much force because Ames and Ellie jump. Oops. Well, Sky shouldn’t have left me like that.
Her face turns as red as my name. “I don’t know. I went down to the dock.”
“Really? Because I went down there, and you weren’t there. I had to say you were tired, so you came over here to take a nap.” I also had to “show Amelia Grace and Ellie around the carriage house” and “help them get settled” all by myself. Translation: Get out of our hair so we can drink more wine and talk about grown-up things. Which would have been fine, except I’m not great at small talk, and I really needed Sky to keep this awkward ship from sinking. My sister’s always been the one who’s good at making friends, the popular twin.
Amelia Grace stops texting whoever on her phone, and Ellie stops painting her nails. They both stare at us like this is the most interesting thing that has happened all day. Or like they’re scared. One of those. They probably think I’m a total freak show after my meltdown before.
Sky just kind of shrugs and blushes even harder.
“Dude, DID YOU MEET A BOY?”
“What? No.” She shoots pointed glances at Ellie and Ames.
I shrug, the grandmother of all sarcastic shrugs. “They don’t care.” I realize I technically don’t know if this is true. “Do you?”
Ames says no, and Ellie caps her nail polish in a way that is positively gleeful. “Tell us all about him. Or her.” She sits cross-legged on the floor like a kindergartner ready for story time.
“Nothing happened,” says Sky. Bullshit. “I’m gonna go sit on the deck.”
She crosses the tiny room and weaves around the coffee table, and then she’s out the door. Ellie sighs audibly. Tell me about it. I almost wish I hadn’t covered for Sky, but the thing is, we made this pact when we were seven years old after coming to the realization that our constant tattling to Mama and Daddy was only getting us in more trouble. And that if we stopped it, if we banded together, it would save us untold hours in lectures and time-outs. So we made a pinky promise, our tiny faces set. The very next day, Sky accidentally knocked my dad’s electric razor into the toilet, and I told him I was pretty sure the dog had done it. When I said that, when I protected her, her chin shot up and our eyes met and I knew. From that day forward, it would be us against them. It would be us against the world.
Just, like, not today, apparently. Ames goes back to her phone, and Ellie gets out hers too. I’m so desperate, I’m thinking about reaching for Sky’s copy of Goblet of Fire. This carriage house is way too small for this much awkwardness. I always thought it was so cool when I was little, the way there are all these little nooks and crannies for storage and the walls slope smaller on the sides. Now I feel claustrophobic. Ames is biting her nails. Ellie starts smacking her gum. And then the balcony door opens again. OH THANK GOODNESS.
Sky shuts the door behind her.
“Back already?” I ask.
She quirks an eyebrow at me. Opens the door again. I can hear their voices all the way from the dock.
Stree-eet-light. Pee-eo-ple. Whoa-ooo-ooo.
“Oh.” I snicker. “So I guess going down to the dock is out.”
“Wait, is that our moms?” Amelia Grace is out of her chair in a hot second, and she does not look nearly as mortified as she should.
Sky winces. “Yes.”
“All of them?”
There’s something in her voice when she says it. It almost sounds like hope, but that can’t be right. And then she’s out the door, and she’s standing on the balcony, and the silhouette of her there, pressed against the slats so desperately, short brown hair blowing around in the wind—she makes me think of the stories of the women who would pace the widow’s walks waiting for their husbands to return from sea.
Before I can help myself, I’m standing next to her, trying to see what she’s seeing. All I see are four grown-ass women singing at the top of their lungs. One of them is holding a bottle of wine that she sometimes passes to the others. They’re jumping up and down like they’re at a concert but they’re the only ones who can see the band. Also, like they are operating under different rules of rhythm and gravity than the rest of the universe. I look at Amelia Grace’s face. I think she might be about to cry. It is possible we are not seeing the world the same way right now.
“You okay?” I ask.
Amelia Grace can’t tear her eyes from the scene in front of us. “I’ve never seen her this way before.”
I giggle. “Drunk?”
She shakes her head. “Happy.”
My mouth opens, but my brain is entirely blank. I wish I could say something profound right now. I wish I could do pretty much anything besides stare. Amelia Grace’s brown eyes go big and she blushes.
“I mean, um, anyway.” She looks around like she’s hoping a push-in-case-of-awkward button will appear. “Hey, what’s that window up there?”
Really? That’s what we’re going with?
She’s pointing at a spot above my head. “It looks like a miniature set of French doors. I don’t remember seeing anything like that from the inside.”
I decide to humor her because crying in front of people is no joke.
“There’s a little loft inside. Not even tall enough to stand in. You didn’t see it because Mama packed it with decades’ worth of crap and ran a curtain across it.”
Ellie bounds outside. “What are we talking about?”
Amelia Grace points again.
“Secret window!” squeals Ellie.
“It’s not really a secret,” I say.
Ellie puts her hands on her hips. “It totally looks like the doorway to another world AND it’s hidden, but sure, okay.” She’s bouncing around like it physically hurts to hold still. “So, what are we doing tonight?”
“Not going down to the dock,” I offer.
She looks at our moms and wrinkles her nose, and my opinion of her goes up a smidge. “Yeah, nope.”
“Sometimes we take the boat and drive around till we find a party or something.”
Ellie’s eyes light up.
“But that would require us being able to get to the boat without our moms seeing us. Mama doesn’t really let us take the boat out at night anymore.”
And . . . the light dies. I decide not to mention any of the factors that led to this new boating policy being instituted last summer. Namely: me, Jim Beam, some college kids, a not-so-minor boat crash.
“Well, we have to do something.”
A) If she is one of those people who emphasizes random words, I am never going to survive the summer. And B) I am so over popular girls and how they expect you to constantly entertain them.
“Can we walk to these parties?”
I grip the banister. Hard.
“It’d be through woods and briars and stuff, and it might be muddy,” calls Sky from inside. “And, um, I don’t really feel like walking tonight, if that’s okay with you guys, but I’m totally cool staying here if y’all want to go.”
Have I mentioned how much I love my sister? It is impossible to disagree with someone that sweet without looking like a Grade A bitch.
“Well, sure, we don’t have to do that,” says Ellie. “Hmm . . .” She taps her fingers against her chin dramatically.
Sky is scrolling one finger down the screen of her phone and whatever she sees makes her mouth go tight. She lets the phone flop on the couch and closes her eyes.
“Sky?”
She opens them. “Aunt Val brought a metric ass-load of wine,” she says.
Wait. WHAT? My sister does not say “ass.” And she definitely doesn’t steal our parents’ wine.
“I could go for a glass of wine,” says Ellie. “Maybe a nice Shiraz.”
I have no idea what a Shiraz is, but I feel this weird desire to know more about wine than Ellie right now. “I bet we could take a bottle, and they wouldn’t even notice.” I cock my head in the direction of the dock like it’s whatever.
Ellie’s green eyes flicker mischievously. “Are you brave enough?”
“Yes.”
She grins. “Cool. We’ll keep watch.”
She struts out onto the deck. Wait, how did that just happen? I don’t even like this girl, and now I’m fetching wine for her? I glance from Skyler to Amelia Grace. If I say no now, I look like a coward. If I say no, Ellie wins. But if I get her the wine, she also wins.
I stomp off to get the wine.
This girl is turning out to be a real pain in my ass.
Ellie
Scarlett comes back victorious with the wine. I shove my hands in the pockets of my shorts so I won’t fidget. Because now that there’s wine, there’s drinking, and I don’t drink. Which is probably something I should have thought about before I convinced Scarlett to get us wine. But also: I’ve spent two hours reading magazines and feeling like bottled desperation, and if I don’t make something happen, I’m going to explode.
“Woo! Let’s get this party started!” I yell.
The three of them just kind of stare at me.
But that’s okay. I can deal. Step 1 of making these girls my friends: Procure wine. Done. Easy.
Step 2: Open the wine. This one proves to be a little more difficult. Mostly because the only corkscrew in the carriage house is rusty and looks like it hasn’t been used since 1995.
“Why. Is. This. So. Difficult?” Scarlett’s tongue is between her teeth and she is working the corkscrew for all it’s worth. “Oops,” she says.
“What, oops?” says Skyler.
“I broke the top half of the cork off.”
We laugh at her misfortune. She narrows her eyes at us. Playfully. I think.
“It’s fine. I’ll get the bottom half next.”
She finally manages to pry it out, and then she pours me a glass in a little mason jar because the wineglasses are in the big house. It’s actually really cute. I’d totally take a picture, except that I’m pretty sure their judgment would slip over the scale into unbearable.
“So. We good now?” says Scarlett.
I turn my head so she can’t see, just in case the hurt shows on my face. And then my eyes land on something that may just turn this night around.
“We will be.” I grin at her and point at the curtain that hides the loft. “When we drink it up there.”
Scarlett looks at me like I’ve suggested going down to the dock and taking shots with our moms. “Why would you want to?”
Because I’m hoping to uncover the secrets of our moms’ friendship, and Amelia Grace inadvertently may have located their clubhouse. “Because. We could either drink it down here where it would be super easy for our moms to peek in and catch us, or we could drink it up there in front of the portal to Narnia.”
Skyler’s head shoots up at the mention of Narnia. We trade smiles, but then she goes back to her phone.
“C’mon.” I’m saying it like an obnoxious little kid, and I don’t even care.
“I am kind of curious to see what it looks like up there,” says Amelia Grace.
“See!” I take a pretend sip of my wine. I’ve never actually had alcohol before unless you count that accidental gummy bear. I know there are Muslims who drink. My momma drinks. But she still hides all the alcohol in the house whenever Nani visits from Toronto, and I don’t know. I’m still figuring out how I feel about drinking.
Scarlett rolls her eyes. “It’s just a bunch of junk. I don’t even know where the ladder is.”
“It’s in the closet in the bedroom,” says Skyler without looking up from her phone.
I don’t miss the look Scarlett shoots her.
“Perfect!” I set down my wine, clap my hands together, and search out the ladder. Amelia Grace helps me set it up.
I wonder if I should play a joke on them when I get to the top. Pretend to find a rabid raccoon or Mr. Tumnus or something. I have to stop a couple of rungs short so I don’t hit my head on the ceiling.
“There’s nothing up there but junk,” calls Scarlett. “Sky and I went up there a couple times as kids, and it was super disappointing.”
I sweep back the curtain. A crate of Legos. Another of cords and electronic-looking things. A third entirely filled with CDs. That’s just the first three boxes though. Secret sisterhood materials probably wouldn’t be at the very front.
“There is some really exciting stuff up here. You guys are totally missing out.”
“I can see the Legos from here,” says Scarlett.
“Damn it!”
She busts out laughing. I squeeze the Lego bin to the side so I can
crawl into the loft.
“Don’t blame me if you scratch yourself on a rusty nail and get tetanus or something,” yells Scarlett.
I snort. She wishes.
The rest of the loft is really more of the same. Dust and stuffiness and a smell that is kind of like a library only not as good. Lots of old books/clothes/toys. Cans of paint that look older than me. All the CDs and VHS tapes. Most of it is in those plastic bins with the snap lids, because apparently the twins’ mom is too fancy for cardboard boxes. There’s also a ridiculous amount of old lake toys. I’m just inspecting a box of water guns shaped like sea creatures and feeling as though this could come in handy, when I stand up too fast and crack my head on the ceiling.
“Son of a—”
“Are you okay?” yell three voices.
I duck and take a step backward at the same time. And slip on an ancient roll of wrapping paper. I’m pretty sure I scream, twice—once for the slip and another time when I fall butt-first against the wall and hear a crack. Luckily, it’s the wall and not me.
Amelia Grace’s head appears over the top of the bins. “Whoa, Ellie, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I groan and try to stand up, but the wall gives behind me, and I almost fall again. Okay. Let’s take it slowly.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” one of the twins calls from below. Skyler, I think. The voice is soft.
“Yeah. But I think I broke your wall.” I get back into my half-standing, half-crouch position and start dusting myself off.
“It’s really no big deal,” says Scarlett. “No one ever goes up there. We don’t even have to tell my mom about the wall.”
“Thanks,” I say. I brush my hair out of my eyes. And that’s when I realize. It’s not a wall. “Holy crap, you guys, it’s a door.”
“There’s a door up there?”
“Yeah. I mean, it looks like it’s just a little closet, but—” I take a step closer. I realize now that the cracking noise was me making the door open the wrong way in. It’s tiny—too small for me to go inside and stand up all the way—built into the triangle shape of the roof. I shine my phone inside, because I will forever and always be an eight-year-old at heart, and there could be pirate’s gold or a secret passage or a unicorn in here. Unfortunately, the closet is unicorn-free (okay, I guess it would’ve had to have been a very tiny unicorn), but what it does contain is even better. Namely, some creepy-ass candles and a box of very fancy-looking cigars. And tacked to the wall is a list of rules with a name at the top: The Southern Belle Drinking Club. THIS IS IT. THIS IS MORE THAN I COULD HAVE HOPED FOR. “Okay, I really think you guys are gonna want to see this, and I swear I’m not kidding this time.”
The Summer of Impossibilities Page 8