After who knows how long, Althea wraps her hands around the tree trunk, no thicker than her waist, and gives it a gentle shake. The bird does not emerge.
“I want to see her,” she whispers.
“I don’t think she wants you to.”
She jostles the tree again, harder, the muscles in her wrist flexing under her pale skin. Leaves rustle and branches sway, but the bird stays put, giving no hint of her location, continuing her song.
Althea tenses, jaw clenched with frustration, tightening her grip, getting ready to give it another go. Oliver knows this look, the wicked determination that is both the best and the worst of her. She’s forgotten the party, the shattered mirror, even Oliver’s presence at her side; this one bird has her full attention. He figures he has about thirty seconds before she starts shouting obscenities and tries to climb the tree. He puts a hand on her slender wrist; her bones feel avian and small.
“Leave it alone,” he whispers.
Casting up a final, reluctant glance, she relents; the taut muscles go loose again. She releases the tree trunk, but Oliver clings to her, mysteriously unwilling to let her arm drop back to her side. Her expression changes as her interest turns from what’s happening in the tree above them to what’s suddenly happening underneath it.
Pulling her toward him, Oliver traces her blade of a cheekbone with his fingers, letting his other hand rest on her hip while hers find his waist. Through the cotton of her skirt, her hipbone fits perfectly into his palm. The salty air is warm, and except for the bird’s blithe singing, the street is muffled under its canopy of blooming trees. This is the summer they wanted. The ocean is much too far away for him to hear, but he almost believes that’s what’s pounding in his ears. There’s not a single light on in any of the houses, no random car catching them in its headlights as it passes. Their town is asleep around them in the long hours before morning. He can feel Althea’s blood pulsing faintly in her veins. She smiles at him shyly, biting her lip to suppress a nervous giggle.
He closes his eyes, making it impossible to tell who moves in and closes the final inches. All he knows is their lips finally meet in their first kiss. She tastes like beer and peppermint; he catches a whiff of smoke from her long hair. Her bare knees brush against his jeans. Her lips and tongue tentatively mimic the motions of his. Leaning into her, Oliver staggers, and she stumbles backward into the tree, pulling him along. Bark scrapes his knuckles. Drunk and giddy, they punctuate their giggles with more kisses. He nibbles her neck. Althea, infamously ticklish, shakes with silent laughter, her head thrown back against the tree. Her skin is warm and saline against his lips. He kisses his way back up her neck, her throat vibrating against his mouth as her laughter trails off.
“I think we finally scared that bird away,” he whispers, and kisses her again.
Oliver is learning to kiss as he goes, guided by some unknown instinct. He strokes her hair back, out of her eyes and off her forehead. Their kisses are tender and earnest at first, mindful of their own newness. Her hand finds his; their fingers interlace. Cupping his cheek sweetly in her palm, she gently squeezes his bottom lip between her teeth and then releases it.
Pressing her against the tree, he clutches at her hipbone, her neck. Their hesitation vanishes along with their nervous laughter; their kisses grow strident and insistent. Althea’s fingers dig into his shoulders; they climb his chest, tugging at his shirt. He’s almost sad they’re not on their own Magnolia Street; what a show this would make for Mrs. Parker.
Althea breathes faster. He traces the muscles that run the length of her bare thighs. The fantasy he had earlier in her room returns. Running his hands up her sides, he grazes her breasts and she gasps softly, a brand-new Althea sound he’s never heard before. Now he’s panting, too, their legs intertwined against the tree, their identical heights putting them exactly at eye level.
“Oliver,” she whispers in a raspy voice. “Maybe we should go back to my house.” Her cheeks are flushed, eyes glassy.
He nods.
They untangle themselves, Althea smoothing her ruffled hair and skirt. Taking her hand, he breaks into an easy jog, which she, of course, turns into a race. She slows down to let him keep pace, then pulls away again, laughing while he chases her with no chance of ever catching up.
The charge home is quick, too quick, and suddenly they are standing in front of her house. The haze is lifting from his vision. Though his usual lucidity has not yet returned, he is abruptly aware of what they are about to do, what Althea is offering him as she starts up the path to her door.
“Wait,” he says.
“What? Oh, you’re right. We should probably go in the back.”
“No, just—just wait.”
“What?” she asks, irritated.
Oliver can only shake his head.
“What’s wrong?” Her words slur together like ice cubes melting in a glass. “Come on.”
It’s her impatience that betrays her. Sensing his reluctance, she’s realizing that the moment under the tree has passed. She’s trying to seize what’s left of her chance to get this thing done, because once it’s done they can’t undo it. To her this is some kind of first step, a necessary catalyst that will set off a series of reactions and completely transform their relationship. To him it’s just an experiment, the test of a curious hypothesis. That’s exactly the reason he is glued to the sidewalk, refusing to follow her down to the basement and at last make proper use of that old couch. If he goes inside with her, then what? Is he going to wake up as her boyfriend just because he got drunk and made out with her under a tree? Isn’t it better to disappoint her now, before, than to do it in the morning?
“I’m not—” He pauses. “I’m not ready.”
She tucks her fingers inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt, thumbs poking through the holes in the cuffs. Her shoulders come up around her neck as if she’s trying to retract her head, turtle-like. “That doesn’t even mean anything, you know. What are you, cupcakes in the oven, waiting for the timer to go off? Are we sitting at a red light, waiting for it to turn green?”
“Al, I’m sorry—”
“Why did you even let it start, then?” She raises her voice, heralding the return of the irascible Althea.
“I was drunk,” he says.
“Are you fucking serious?”
“That came out wrong.”
“You know what? Go ahead. Stick your head a little further up your ass. If you have trouble, I can help.” Turning to enter her house, she laughs abruptly. “Oh my God.”
Oliver is wary of her sudden change in mood. “Now what?”
“We left the bathtub running at Jason’s.”
chapter three.
ON HER WAY to school Monday morning, Althea brings her car to a perfunctory halt in front of Oliver’s house. He isn’t waiting for her outside, so she taps the horn, just long enough to elicit a loud, squawking honk. The customary next step is to ring the doorbell continually until he emerges, breathless and annoyed. Reaching for the release button on her seat belt, she hesitates, stifling a yawn. She had barely slept the last two nights, thrashing around on the couch, alternately cringing at the memory of Oliver’s hand up her skirt and wondering if he might come over and do it again. She lay awake for a very long time imagining him slipping into the basement to apologize for his unbelievably stupid comment about only kissing her because he had been drunk. He would explain that he had been afraid or not ready or whatever—she played out every possible semantic variation on this sentiment, and in the end decided all that mattered was that when he finished his brief speech he would lay his palms delicately upon her cheekbones and pull her face to his.
But Oliver hadn’t materialized the rest of the weekend, and now she’s exhausted, with a whole day of school in front of her and the kind of headache that makes her eyes feel full of grit. If he couldn’t be bothered to sneak into her house a
nd say he was sorry, she decides, then fuck him. He can take the bus to school.
• • •
By lunchtime she’s edgy. What if he wasn’t running late this morning but purposely avoiding her? What if he is actually angry with her for some reason? She checks the cafeteria, then the back field, and even the library, but she can’t find him. She’s making her third pass by his locker when she runs into Valerie, drinking a Dr Pepper, a book tucked under her arm, wearing a shirt that looks like she screen-printed it herself, a skull with a knife and fork where the crossbones should be. It reads BON VIVANT in curvy letters.
“If you’re looking for Oliver, I don’t think he’s here today,” says Valerie. “At least, he wasn’t in English.”
They meander the halls together while Valerie drinks her soda.
“What are you reading?” Althea asks.
Valerie flashes the cover of the book, which gleams under the fluorescent lights. “Minty Fresh told me to read it. It’s about the diamond trade. That industry is so totally fucked. The diamonds are all in a vault at De Beers, and they’re not even worth anything. But people buy them because they see some ad that tells them to. Their value is completely invented.”
She spends some time elaborating about the wars that erupted among diamond sellers a hundred years ago, how De Beers emerged victorious and ran a monopoly so unapologetic, they had to keep their offices overseas in London, where they declared their goods “conflict free” even though their origins usually couldn’t be traced, and doled out gems to distributors in small amounts. Althea pictures the vault, underground and elusive, metal drawers lined with imperial blue velvet, opening soundlessly to reveal their treasures. She imagines the tall diamond baron with a pocket watch who slips into his vault on lonely nights to caress and count his jewels. As Valerie goes on about the misallocation of the world’s resources, the flaw in the system that allows that place to exist, Althea nods but thinks if such a thing were hers, she would never give it up, either.
“Someone figured out a way to make diamonds in a machine,” says Valerie. “Can you imagine? The technology’s still rough, but maybe in another twenty or thirty years they can put De Beers out of business.”
“I like your shirt,” Althea says.
“I can make you one sometime. I still have the screen.”
“Yeah?”
“Come over one day next week, when school’s out.” Valerie pauses in the middle of the hallway, tossing her empty soda bottle into a trash can several yards away. “Is Oliver the only person who calls you Al?”
“My dad, sometimes. His mom, sometimes. I try not to encourage the Al thing. People already think I’m a tomboy because I’m best friends with a guy. Having a boy’s name doesn’t help.”
“You think there’s something wrong with being a tomboy?” Valerie says.
Althea realizes she’s made a misstep here, Valerie being something of a tomboy herself. “It’s just not true. If I were a tomboy I’d probably be cutting school right now to go build a tree fort by the river. Which would be great.”
“Mmm,” says Valerie in a noncommittal tone.
Althea redirects. “So you’re calling him Minty Fresh now, too?”
“He asked me to. Says he likes it better than Howard. He even changed the name of the band to Tartar Control,” Valerie says. “Do you think Oliver’s sick again?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him since the party.”
“I’m sure he’s fine. You’re not worried, are you?”
Althea considers telling Valerie everything that happened on the walk home. Isn’t that what most girls would do? Unfortunately, Althea is not well versed in sharing anything personal, and Valerie’s the one person even less equipped to give advice about boys. “Not really,” Althea says at last. “Maybe a little.”
• • •
It’s Nicky, not Oliver, who’s waiting on the porch the next day, confirming what Althea has already surmised, that Oliver is asleep again, Oliver isn’t coming. He misses those cherished last few days when the rigid structure of forty-minute periods erodes into polite anarchy, seniors visiting favorite teachers to say good-bye, other students emptying their lockers into garbage cans and returning overdue books to the library.
Without Oliver, Althea inhabits an awkward place. Too familiar now with his other friends to remain anonymous in her solitude, she watches from the outskirts of their circle as junior year comes to an end, listening to Minty Fresh and Valerie speak in their own best-friend pidgin while Coby observes her in this freshly vulnerable state. Plans are hatched to drink beer and attend Minty Fresh’s band practice, but when they walk outside, Althea silently heads in the direction of her own car.
“Carter, aren’t you coming?” Coby shouts after her.
She hates the way he calls her by her surname, that forced intimacy. “I can’t,” she says. Offering no explanation, she turns away.
It’s Valerie who stops her. “Come on, Althea. It’s the last day of school. You can’t just go home.” Leaning in, she lowers her voice so the others can’t hear. “You know he won’t be there. You might as well come with us.”
Althea frantically calculates the ramifications of Valerie’s invite. Where is this band practice? How long will this band practice last? To how many hours is she committing if she says yes? What is she supposed to do when she gets there, just sit and watch the band? If so, that might be okay, she could do that, but if not? Then what? Two, three, maybe four hours of beer and conversation—would it be so bad? Absolutely. It sounds profoundly awkward. She wants to go home, return to her sketchbook and her vigil.
On the other hand, when Oliver wakes up, she could have an actual story to tell him. He’d be so impressed that she’d willingly taken a solo ride on the Non-Stop Party Wagon. She could dazzle him with her newfound social skills; she could be new and improved for him. She thinks of her empty basement and all the time to kill before Oliver returns. Chewing a piece of hair, she watches Coby watching her, waiting for an answer.
Reaching into his shirt pocket, she pulls out his cigarettes. “Sure. Can I have one of these?”
• • •
Althea brings two generous slices of Key lime pie out to the gazebo, where Garth is making his way through a pitcher of sweet tea and a mass market paperback, its title spelled out in embossed red letters. A spy novel, not a mystery novel—she can tell by the submarine and the Soviet flag on the cover. He wears a white T-shirt and khakis, his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. His left forearm is significantly more tanned than his right from resting on the open window of his car while he drives. His biceps are so white, they gleam.
“Guilty pleasure reading?” she asks.
“I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you enjoy something, you just enjoy it. No sense feeling guilty about it. What’s this?” he asks as she hands him a plate.
“It’s pie. You know. For eating.” She demonstrates by taking a bite.
Garth follows her example and makes a noise of delighted surprise. “Delicious.”
“It better be. I think I gave myself carpal tunnel squeezing all those Key limes.”
“Where did you even find Key limes?”
“I know a guy.”
They eat. The gazebo falls quiet, except for their forks chiming against their plates, but elsewhere the neighborhood is full of summer’s rich sounds: mourning doves and the humming of insects, the rubbery echo of a basketball bouncing in someone’s driveway down the street. When the last bits of graham cracker crust have been pressed against their thumbs and licked away, Althea moves the plates to the floor and lies down with her head on her father’s thigh, her leg dangling over the low wall of the gazebo, heel kicking against the wood.
“What happened to the visiting artist?” Althea asks.
“She was just visiting, remember?”
“There’ll be another one next year.”
“That there will.” Garth sounds confident about his prospects.
“You’re rich, right?” she says.
“Pardon?”
“I mean, we have money.”
“Technically, I have the money, and you have the benefit of my continued good will. And we’re not rich. We’re comfortable.”
A patch of clouds parts and sunlight streams through the slatted roof of the gazebo. Althea shades her eyes with her wrist. “How come you never take me anywhere?”
“Like to get ice cream?”
“Like someplace not in Wilmington. We always have the summers off together, but we never go away. Well, you go away, but you never take me with you. You just leave me here and tell Nicky to keep an eye on me.”
“Did you see a commercial for Disney World and now you’re feeling deprived because you’ve never been?” Garth shifts uncomfortably under her weight.
She sits up and gives him an accusatory look. “You’re a history professor. Haven’t you ever had the urge to show me Pompeii? Make me climb the steps of some Aztec temple so you could translate a bunch of pictographs and explain the details of their human sacrifices?”
Garth glances longingly at his paperback. “Althea, as appealing as all this father-daughter globe-trotting sounds, you never showed any interest in doing anything over the summer besides going to the beach with Oliver or camping out with him in the backyard.”
“We could have taken him with us somewhere.”
“He’s not like a stuffed animal you could have packed into your suitcase. Nicky couldn’t afford a big trip like that, and she never would have let us pay his way. She would have seen it as charity. You remember what happened when I gave him that telescope for Christmas? Can you imagine if we tried to take him to Europe?”
Althea and Oliver Page 6