by Julie Buntin
“Oh my God. When did you become such a criminal!?” I blushed and took a bow, the sun dappling my shoulders with warmth. We’d been resolutely sleeveless since the start of May. “Is this my influence? I sort of really want to take credit for this.”
We decided the party would take place the first Thursday of June, our very last day of school. The Hodsons had a migratory pattern identical to most of the tourists—fudgies. They came up to northern Michigan for a couple of weeks during Christmastime and then again for spring break. After that they were gone until the summer. As soon as the clock struck twelve on Labor Day, Kewaunee and Coral Springs were back to their townie selves. My mom kept the Hodsons’ schedule on our calendar, the dates of their comings and goings drawn over the squares in a glittery silver, a color she must have chosen, consciously or not, because it symbolized how valuable they were. Our activities were written in regular old Sharpie black. The Hodsons wouldn’t be back until the middle of the month—that left more than enough time for us to get away with the party.
Back in April, Marlena had helped my mom and me clean the Hodsons’ after their spring CancerCare fundraiser. We lifted strings of tinsel off the banisters, deposited cheese rinds and expensive cloth napkins stained with lipstick and red wine into trash bags we carried from room to room. Marlena had a great respect for the old house, for the ceiling beams and the obese sculptures of nudes and the backyard that turned into a private beach when it hit the water. I was careful not to leave her alone too long and let myself be separated from her only once, when I had to go to the bathroom. After, I couldn’t find her for a long time. I wandered up to the third floor and there she was, cross-legged on the carpet before a painting of a thatch-roofed house drifting in a sea of flowers. “Isn’t this beautiful,” she said. “That’s where I want to live.” I didn’t think it was beautiful, and I assumed the Hodsons didn’t either—otherwise why would they hide it all the way up there?
“There?” I said. “I wish I lived here.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But there, no one could find you.”
It is true that I trailed her all day because I thought she might steal. She did check inside every medicine cabinet and bedside table drawer. But having lied and stolen doesn’t mean you’re a liar and a thief, and Marlena was not a thief at heart. Maybe out of boredom or necessity, but not in spirit. Until I saw her thumbing through Mrs. Hodson’s cashmere sweaters with interest instead of the bitterness I felt when I saw that ridiculous closet, I hadn’t realized how different she was, from me, about having no money. The only reason I didn’t steal from the houses Mom cleaned, from the very, very rich, is because I was afraid of getting caught. Marlena didn’t steal because she didn’t see the point. You can’t steal a whole new life.
* * *
I, she had said. Not we.
* * *
It snowed on the last day of school, spastic flurries that came and went as the day dragged on. Mrs. Tenley propped the main doors open anyway, as per annual tradition, and the air inside felt full of knives. Snow in June, can you believe it, everyone said, feeling stunned and a little scared. Some of the older teachers stood at their classroom windows, nodding—this was not so rare, they said. They’d seen it before. The snowflakes vanished the instant they crashed into the tiled halls, and between showers the sun dribbled a muted, useless yolk. We knew an omen when we saw one, even if we didn’t know what it meant—aside from the obvious, which was that the weather was more evidence of our shitty luck.
“It’s really true this year, I know it,” Marlena said. We were, as usual, smoking—this time in a copse of trees near the tennis courts. “Summer’s never coming back. It quit us.”
“Suck a dick, summer,” Greg shouted at the treetops. A handful of birds dispersed into the confused sky. “We don’t need you anyway.”
“These don’t even look like snowflakes,” Tidbit said. She held out her palm and a few evaporated against her skin. “They’re more like ash.”
We walked back to school arm in arm. We were all in love with each other because of the party. On the last days of school past, I’d never felt much. What did I have to look forward to? Going to the mall with Haesung. Mostly reading—that’s how I muddled through time, the last page of one book opening onto the first page of the next, so that I lived in a kind of amended super-book, alongside Anne Shirley and Hermione and Bunny and Heathcliff.
But not this summer. I hadn’t once gone back to the library.
Ryder was going to pick the four of us up after school. His paranoia had only increased, and over the past weeks Marlena’d worked hard to convince him to come. We needed Ryder. We needed his car and his seemingly endless supply of cigarettes, and I think Marlena needed him for her pills. He didn’t want to be seen near KHS, so we were to meet him at the BP station a half mile away. He’d ordered us to take the longer route through the backyards by school instead of going as the crow flies, along the main road out of town.
“I cannot be seen with any of you,” he’d said. “You have that through your skulls?”
“Yes, yes,” Marlena said. “You have a stalker, we get it.”
Ryder’s first stop would be mine and Marlena’s, so that Marlena and Tidbit and I could check in on Sal for the night, feed him, tuck him in, change into our nighttime outfits, and retrieve Jimmy and his car. According to Marlena it was absolutely necessary for us to have two vehicles, in case something happened and we needed to make a getaway. “Really?” I asked her, opening the door, I thought, for a confession—if one was due. “It’s really because we need two cars?”
“Really,” she said, looking at me like, What the? I half-believed that Jimmy was going to rat us out, or stop us from going the instant before we left, but when I bugged him about it—you’re really not going to ruin this, I texted—he wrote back, if you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna do it. someone who’s not an idiot should be there.
We’d rehearsed the plan a thousand times. Everyone had their favorite part—Tidbit was obsessed with the pit stop at mine and Marlena’s because she had some idea that if she wore the tiny black Charlotte Russe dress I’d outgrown in eighth grade she’d finally look as skinny as she so desperately needed to be, Marlena was fixated on making sure we got Jimmy/the potential getaway car, Greg had drawn up a little map of the route to the house and the route back (for some reason, they had to be different), and I wanted to make sure we didn’t run out of cigarettes. It’d taken only a few months to develop a half-pack daily habit. Ryder was on beer duty—easy for him, since all he had to do was give his mom some money and our order, and she would pick it up from the store. I was proud of their excitement. I’d seen them do a million more dangerous things—but this, from the break-in to the grandness of the house, this was next-level, and it had been my gift, my first real contribution.
All day at school we spent our classes making eyes at each other and passing notes. In choir, Tidbit and I switched sections—her singing the alto part, her voice straining, me pitch-y and off, freaking Chelsea out when I matched my voice to hers during the chorus of “Sigh No More, Ladies.” In Algebra we watched the second half of some movie about a math prodigy. Two minutes before the bell rang, Micah dropped a note onto my desk, as I knew he would. Until next year, Kitty-Cat, it said. A cat rode the back of a penis-shaped space shuttle, its body colored in with pen. In French, Marlena and I gave an elaborate speech about our summer plan to open a pop-up Slushee shop at the beach—our first step toward reframing the Slushee as a luxury food. When we finished, Erica and Cassie clapped, and Mrs. Lupin shouted, “Brava, deux pois dans une cosse!”
During AP English—another movie, this time A Separate Peace—Mr. Chung called me out into the hall for my student conference. I really liked Mr. Chung. I liked the questions he wrote in the margins of my work in his skinny hybrid cursive and I especially liked that he let me read whatever I wanted from the AP list as long as I wrote a paper, and as long as I turned it in when I said I would. He asked me what I w
anted to do with my future, quoting a line from a Machado poem he’d made us memorize—I wanted to tell him, honestly, that when I let myself dream I imagined a room full of books, but I felt suddenly shy. Before I got up, he slid the short story I’d written for our creative writing exercise, the final assignment of the year, across the desk. It was about a hotdog-eating contest that sparked a chain of vomiting that spread like a virus to everyone at a local fair, except two girls, best friends, who document the whole thing. I’d written it in a couple nicotine-fueled hours after reading a Stephen King short story with a near identical plot, changing the characters to classmates and the setting to the Kewaunee fairgrounds. After finishing a draft, I read it out loud to Marlena and she laughed so hard she kept saying she was going to throw up. Mr. Chung’s comments were on the last page, underneath a small, red-inked A+. But why THIS story? What if you took on a subject that actually matters to you? Back in the classroom, I rolled the pages into a little telescope and looked through them, first at the TV and then out the window at the snow.
After English, Marlena threw herself against the locker next to mine as if she had traveled a great and wearying distance. “I didn’t skip a single class today.”
Something that actually matters to you.
How about how I hear her all the time, telling me she didn’t skip, her voice as perfectly alive as it was in that moment, and every time I do, I’m afraid that she already knew that would be her real last day at KHS. I should have asked why she sounded so sad. I should have listened to what she wasn’t saying. She kept talking, went on about her classes, something about Chelsea—whatever it was is lost, vanished to wherever what’s forgotten goes. Something that actually matters.
I interrupted to show her my grade. She looked at me with tenderness and a little pity too, the way I’d seen her looking at Sal, plus something mine and hers alone, a look that drew an outline around the space between us and made me aware, suddenly, of all the history we didn’t share. More years as strangers than friends; but I could barely remember my life before.
“Obviously, stupid. You are going straight to the top.”
“You’re smart as me. Smarter, probably. You just don’t try.”
“What am I going to do? Jet off to college and let Sal take care of himself? Five years and you won’t even remember this place. That’s why we have to treasure this time by getting your freak brain very drunk.”
“Well, that goes without saying, ma chérie.” I matched my tone to hers, but I kind of hated that she didn’t try and argue when I said she was smarter than me.
“To reward you for your great academic effort, as soon as the sun sets I shall make you the filthiest of martinis, and you shall drink it from a chalice.”
“How dare you imply I would ever not drink from a chalice.”
All of KHS was keyed up, from the cultish cross-country team to the art nerds to Chelsea’s crowd to the faceless in-betweens. But we were different. We glowed. Last day of school, snow in June, secret mansion party—like the four of us had injected something special and potent into our veins.
* * *
I rode with Ryder and Greg in the lead car. Marlena and Tidbit rode with Jimmy; Marlena in the front, Tidbit in the back. Ryder refused to leave Silver Lake before dark, and took us on a solid forty-five-minute drive around Kewaunee before curving, with genius levels of roundaboutness and misdirection, back toward Kewaunee and eventually Coral Springs, where the Hodsons’ summer estate spread along an acre of prime Lake Michigan coastline.
“Is that the same car,” Ryder said about a hundred times, his eyes flicking from the rearview to the side mirror, back to the rearview.
“The same car as what?”
“The same fucking car, Cat! The one that’s been hovering since we left your house.”
“This is so incredibly stupid,” Greg said.
But I didn’t mind. I loved being folded up into the dark envelope of the van, blowing cigarette smoke out of the cracked passenger-side window, next to Ryder, where she normally sat. Those quiet minutes had all the promise of the party, all the promise of that night and the rest of the nights we’d all spend together. I reached inside my coat pocket and extracted the last of my stolen almonds, popping it, stale and flavorless, into my mouth. There, in the car with them, separated from Marlena, I was more a part of the group than ever before. And was it wrong to like how they treated me when she wasn’t around? I fiddled with the radio and Ryder indulged the way I changed every song after a verse or two. Greg, who liked me–liked me, though no one acknowledged it, leaned between the front seats. They treated me like her, like something lovely and breakable and precious.
In Coral Springs, window light simmered through the trees, warm little fires that bobbed in and out of view. The summer people were already there, gin and tonics sweating in their palms as they clinked glasses on their lake-view porches or toasted marshmallows in their backyards. The kids caught fireflies in mason jars and kept them on their bedside tables as tiny temporary lamps—Mom and I were the ones who unscrewed the caps and dumped their buzzed-out bodies down the toilets. So many rich-people things we’d never done, or never done to their levels of catalogue beauty. Our marshmallows shriveled on the stick over the pit where we burned our trash. We caught fireflies with our bare hands for an instant or less before they struggled away; sometimes we clapped them between our palms so we could smear their iridescent guts on our cheeks.
“This neighborhood,” said Ryder, shaking his head, but excitement had hijacked his fear. The beauty here was contagious, welcoming. Nothing like the beauty in Silver Lake, wild and rough against the portable houses and our beat-up cars.
“Jealous, much?” asked Greg.
“Fifty years ago, probably wasn’t even rich people who lived here,” I said.
“Actually, that’s false. This place has been an upper-crust Chicagoan Methodist enclave for at least a hundred years, if not longer,” said Greg. “Pretty sure you have to like, donate your firstborn to the Republican party to build here.”
“But once there were Indians!”
“That’s true.” Greg tugged my ponytail. “Once there were Indians.”
It was almost nine when we turned onto the Hodsons’ long drive. The house was set so deep into its parcel of land that the lights of nearby houses were pinpricks. I was bursting with an unprecedented, cocksure bravery, and when we parked before the darkened mansion, castlelike and hulking against the glittering lake, I would have bet anything—a million dollars, my future, more—reaching into the hanging planter and brushing aside fallen ivy leaves until my fingertips struck the icy tail of the key, that I was making the right choice.
I turned, grinning, my skin dampening around the metal. They’d remained in the cars, not really believing that I would pull it off, that this adventure was ours. I remember them in that moment as if looking at a painting, their faces stained with yellow car-light, their features beautifully indistinct. I loved them so fucking much, all of them, even my stupid fucking liar brother who had not come there out of concern for me.
“Trick or treat!” I yelled. Marlena’s phrase, but that time, it tasted like mine.
“You bitch!” Marlena shouted, jumping out of my brother’s car, and then we were all action, hauling Jimmy’s beer from the trunk, rushing the door as soon as I clicked it open and the house burped its fusty no-one’s-home smell, dried leaves and petals crushed in your palm and the chemical lemon of my mom’s homemade wood cleaner.
Inside, Greg and Ryder tore through the house turning all the lights on, pounding up the stairs, calling to each other like children to come see this, can you believe it? I found them wrestling in the westernmost bedroom on the third floor, Ryder pressing Greg’s head into the carpet and screaming at him to smell it, smell it good and hard. Ryder rolled off Greg and collapsed beside him, their boy chests straining their T-shirts. “Freaks,” I said. Greg flipped over and approached me on all fours, a growl spinning in his throat. He tack
led my shins so my legs buckled, tipping me across his back until my head dangled between his knees, and then I was on the floor too. That’s what Marlena and Tidbit and Jimmy walked in on, the three of us flat on our backs on the carpet, laughing our asses off, staring up at the skylight and marveling at the luxury of stars you could see clearly from inside.
We started the night in the basement, where the bar overlooked a room with deep leather sofas, a pool table, and a TV that spanned the length of an entire wall. Because the house was built into the side of a hill, French doors opened onto the backyard. I propped them wide, to let in the air, which finally, long after sunset, had begun to feel like June. A few steps toward the beach, an antique-looking chimney thing made out of blue tile squatted in the middle of a circle of benches so buttery-soft I couldn’t believe they were really wood. Marlena wanted to play bartender, and lined up the most dazzlingly named bottles on top of the bar—Hennessy, Bombay Sapphire, Limoncello. She uncapped them one by one and sniffed the opening, then poured a little of each into a snifter and sipped, forcing Jimmy to taste this or that. He was sweet with her, gentle—always nearby, his attention eddying around her.
That’s when I knew, really and truly, that the thing between them was not only definite but probably there to stay, and in fact was accelerating right before my eyes, like a time-lapse video of a sapling growing into a full-blown tree. No, I wanted to say. No. I sat on one of the bar stools beside miserable Ryder, who knew, I realized, too, and watched my brother pass my best friend a clean glass, take down a bottle of Maker’s Mark from a place too high for her to reach, laugh with the most complete joy I’d ever seen when she made a funny face after tasting the Limoncello. Everything was about to change—I would be left behind, discarded by both of them, sidekick forever. It had been building all along, since the day I met her; it clicked into place with a twist of sadness, the opening notes of my first heartbreak.