by Alex Flinn
But people thought they owned you, like they had the right to stare just because of an accident of birth of having blond hair and symmetrical features.
“Do you need help with that?” He gestured toward her bag.
“Oh, that’s all . . .” She glanced at the tiny space left in the overhead bin. It was going to take some shoving. “Yes. Please.”
He hoisted it up. “There you go!”
“Thank you.” Kate took her seat. Her phone buzzed inside her purse. She didn’t want to answer it. It was probably Mother, as close to hysterics as when the maid had used Carpet Fresh on the Persian rug from Sotheby’s. But she knew she should pick it up.
“I’m about to take off,” she said.
“You finally answered.”
Not Mother. Not Mother at all. Colin’s deep, sweet voice.
“I can’t talk to you,” Kate whispered, even though she wanted to.
“Just one minute. Where are you going?”
She felt the resolve draining from her like blood from a wound.
“I can’t, Colin. There’s no point.”
“No point to us? But why? I thought—”
“Please. I don’t want to hang up on you.”
“Then don’t. Don’t. We can work out . . . whatever it is.”
“No, we can’t. It isn’t fair to you.” As she said this, she realized she sounded like her father, trying to protect her. “I can’t anymore. I’m sorry. Goodbye.”
Before she changed her mind, she ended the call, then switched the phone to airplane mode. She stuck in her earbuds.
The boy in the next seat, who wore a T-shirt from a college she’d never heard of, looked at her. “Boyfriend trouble, huh?”
Kate drew in a deep breath and pretended not to hear, even though he could probably tell she didn’t have any music on. Music would drown out the only sound she wanted to hear, Colin’s voice, saying, “No point to us?” When he’d said it, she could see his face before her, sweet, shy Colin.
She leaned her forehead against the cool, smooth window.
3
Spider
FADE IN:
INT. CHARMING CABIN, BEDROOM — DAY
RUTHIE WEBSTER, 72, an elderly former flower child and SPIDER WEBSTER, 17, her bespectacled beanpole of a granddaughter are making up a bed. We see them talking from behind. Both move similarly. It is not until Spider turns toward the camera that we realize that she is younger.
SPIDER SAW HER life as a movie. She planned to write and direct someday, to make an impact with her brain, since she obviously wasn’t going to be competing in the Olympics anytime soon. Everything that happened to her would end up on screen, including this summer.
“We’ll put Meredith and Kate in the rooms up here,” she told Ruthie as she smoothed down a yellow-and-white double-wedding-ring quilt. “Britta can sleep downstairs.”
“The two girls are friends,” Ruthie said. “They’ll probably want adjoining rooms.”
Spider shuddered to think about that. Two girls giggling all night and running in the halls. They might even sneak out for beer or boys.
“I don’t know. That Britta seemed kind of loud, and the walls are thin.” Spider knew this from hard experience. Her sister, Emily, had been in the room adjoining hers every summer. Em could even do yoga loudly, thumping her feet against the wall while Spider tried to write. But at least she was familiar with her sister’s brand of annoying. A stranger would be worse.
“The walls are made of logs,” Ruthie said. “I saw that ad you placed, and it sounded like you were looking for three monks.”
“I was not.” Spider folded the sheet over the top of the quilt. “I specified female roommates, so they couldn’t be monks . . . though a vow of silence would be a plus.”
“And what did poor Britta say to make you think she might be”—Ruthie pretended to cringe—“loud?”
Spider thought back to the phone call. It wasn’t anything specific the girl had said, just her energy level, which could be described as a shih tzu on Adderall. But she and the other girl, Meredith, had answered the ad together, so they were a package deal. Also, they hadn’t gotten many responses. Apparently, teenage girls weren’t all that interested in relaxing.
Spider was not a typical teenage girl, as people in her life loved to remind her. Extroverts frightened her.
“Alicia?” Her grandmother still called her Alicia. The nickname Spider had started when a middle school bully had seen her struggling up stairs, all long arms and legs, and yelled, “Hey, look at the spider!” But Spider had taken ownership of it. After all, spiders were pretty smart about things like spinning webs and trapping their prey. Lately, she’d taken to wearing a lot of black too. It was like her superhero name.
Spider pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “She mentioned being into theater. She’ll probably go around singing show tunes all day.”
“I was in theater,” Ruthie said.
“Well, sure. But that was, you know . . .” Spider bent, then flexed, her aching fingers.
“The dark ages?”
“I was going to say when Shakespeare was alive.”
“Ha ha ha.” Ruthie picked up another quilt and walked to the door. “Well, I, for one, think it would be nice to have some young voices here.”
“What am I?”
“You’re an old soul. I miss when your whole family used to come.”
“Me too.” She hadn’t always gotten along with her siblings, but at least when they were little, they’d gone frog hunting or out for ice cream together. Spider guessed she understood that they had other things to do, but she would miss this place if she couldn’t go here. It was like summers fortified her, so she could stand the rest of the year.
“It was a good idea you had, renting out the other rooms,” Ruthie said.
“It was the only way to keep Dad and Aunt Laura from renting out the whole place. Or worse, trying to get you to sell it.” Spider started toward the room that had belonged to her brother, Ben. The sheets there were blue and comfortable-looking. She wouldn’t have minded nestling down on them, smelling the mountain air through the window, listening to the leaves fluttering in the breeze. But she’d promised to go with Ruthie to the bus station. Spider herself had never taken a long bus trip. She probably should, as part of a filmmaker’s experience, but it looked pretty bad in movies, like Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and even worse in the movie Speed, which was about a bus where a bomb would go off if the driver didn’t go fast enough.
“You keep drifting off,” Ruthie said. “Are you thinking about movie plots again?”
Spider laughed. “Movie plots are my life. I actually got the idea of renting out the rooms from Enchanted April, you know?”
“Was Maggie Smith in that?”
“It was Joan Plowright.” Spider fluffed the quilt and let it fall over the bed.
“No one your age has heard of Joan Plowright.”
Spider surveyed the room a final time. “So Meredith will be in here. And Kate in Em’s, and that Britta can sleep downstairs in my parents’ room.”
“You could take the downstairs room if you wanted. It would be fewer stairs.”
“Nah.” Spider had already considered and rejected this idea. Much as she hated noise and stairs, she didn’t want to be the one left out. “I want my old room.”
Ruthie glanced at her watch. “We should go.”
Spider took one last look. “Okay, let’s go get Katherine and Meredith and that Britta.”
“You might not want to call her ‘that Britta’ to her face,” Ruthie added.
“I’ll say it a few times in the car, get it out of my system.”
They started downstairs, Spider running her hand against the exposed-log walls, smooth from years of children’s fingers, her family’s fingers. She hoped this summer would be the start of a new adventure. She hoped she could be friends with these girls, at least one of them, since she was stuck with them. She hoped at least on
e of them would know how special the place was.
4
Meredith
Essay topic: What would you want your future college roommate to know about you?
I’D WANT HER to know that silence is a virtue, especially on a bus.
“Can you believe we’re doing this?” Britta said for the fourteenth time.
Britta was like a bird. Or a small dog. Meredith had regretted her decision to travel with her about three minutes into the flight. For four hours, she’d talked about trees. What were Meredith’s thoughts on pine trees? Did Meredith think there’d be deer? And were kayaks the same as canoes? If not, what was the difference?
“What did you say to get your mother to let you go?” Britta asked now.
Deep breaths. Meredith thought about the Universal College Application essay prompts. It calmed her. According to them, an essay should “demonstrate your ability to develop and communicate your thoughts,” whatever that meant. Suggested topics were a current event or a life-changing personal experience. This was where she was supposed to write about how she’d discovered a way to build landfills on the moon or how her father had died when she was nine, only one of which was true. And then, there were supplemental essays for each college, like Dartmouth’s: “It’s not easy being green” was a frequent lament of Kermit the Frog. Discuss.
Only a few problems with that.
1.That prompt made no sense.
2.The seat wasn’t comfortable with her lap desk.
3.Britta, who wouldn’t be quiet.
“Meredith, did you hear me? I asked you—”
“I told her the truth, that I was stressed out.”
“That worked?” Britta’s giant, brown eyes opened wide. “I thought you were going to say you were saving the rain forests in Africa or something.”
“Costa Rica. I was going to say Costa Rica.”
“Whatever.”
“You know Costa Rica’s not in Africa, right?”
“Duh. It’s in South America. I’m not dumb. I just forgot what you said. So you told her the truth, and she said yes?”
Central America. “Yeah. She knew I flipped out in class that time, so I told her I was stressed out and needed a vacation. She wasn’t happy about it, but she let me go, after I promised to write my college essays on the trip.”
“What happened that day, exactly?”
Meredith pretended not to hear Britta. Maybe she’d move on to the next subject, as usual. But no. “Meredith? What happened that day in class?”
“It was nothing, just a panic attack.” Though, at the time, it felt like being trampled.
“What was that like?” Britta asked.
Meredith breathed in, feeling a little short of breath thinking about it. “I thought you heard all about it.” Her voice was a whisper.
“I just heard you freaked out in class.”
“That’s what happened. I got a C on an AP Chem test, and I thought, what if I get a C in the whole class? Then I won’t get into college, and I’ll have to explain to my mother. I started hyperventilating and my vision blurred like it did when I fainted at the doctor’s office once when they were taking blood. I felt the walls closing in, and I got chills. And then, I don’t remember. A minute later, Mrs. Mateu’s standing by me, looking actually concerned, which if you knew her, you’d know is a sign of the apocalypse.”
“I’ve heard that about her. Was that the first time it happened?”
Meredith shook her head. “Just the first time anyone knows about.” She wanted to change the subject away from how messed up she was. “Here, let’s take a selfie.”
That worked. Britta immediately scooted closer and made a duck face. “Send it to me.”
Meredith did and then looked at the list of supplemental prompts.
You are teaching a Yale course. What is it called? (35 words or fewer)
Surely Britta could be quiet long enough for her to write thirty-five words.
Why she was traveling with Britta would be a good essay topic. It had been sort of an alternate universe. One moment, Meredith had been sitting in the library, studying for a test. Then, somehow, she’d gotten drawn into this fantasy of going to the mountains with Britta, whom she barely knew, but who had—she remembered—asked her to be in a group for a project once in fourth grade. She doubted Britta remembered, but it had saved Meredith the humiliation of telling the teacher she had no group and having to be foisted on one. Meredith had never understood why kids didn’t want her in their group when she was smart and would do all the work. Her mother said they were jealous, but Meredith knew that wasn’t it.
“I feel so guilty!” Britta was saying now.
So much for the essay. “Why do you feel guilty?” Meredith asked.
“You know why. I lied to my mother. I abandoned her in her time of need.”
Meredith tried to look out the window. “You didn’t abandon her in her time of need. You left her with her boyfriend.”
“But a bad boyfriend. He’s so skeezy, Meredith. He’s always staring at me.”
“That seems like a good reason to get away for the summer.”
“It is. But my mother wanted me at camp, not running wild somewhere.”
“You’re not running wild.”
“I just had to get away from it.”
Meredith sighed. She didn’t really want to be responsible for Britta. That was the advantage of going away with someone she wasn’t really friends with.
Though, come to think of it, none of her friends would have gone. She thought of Eva, her best friend from bowling, or Lindsay, who ran German Honor Society with her. Her friends never felt stressed out or overwhelmed or needed a break.
It’s not easy being green. Discuss. Should she talk about the environment? Or envy? Green was Dartmouth’s color. Did they just mean it was hard to get into Dartmouth?
“God!” Britta was saying by the window. “I am so awful!”
“Shh. Would you?” Meredith noticed the blonde in the seat in front of them giving them side-eye. “Can you please be quieter?”
“I’m awful,” Britta whispered.
“You’re not. You’re nice,” Meredith whispered, patting Britta’s shoulder in what she hoped was a comforting way. “But I’m trying to think.”
“Sorry,” Britta whispered. Loudly. “I’m a bad person.”
“You’re not a bad person,” Meredith said, even though she didn’t really know. But word usually got around, even in a big school, so you knew who the cheaters were, the potheads, the general screwups. Meredith guessed if Britta had done something more subtly bad, she wouldn’t know, but Britta didn’t strike her as subtle. “If you were a bad person just for lying to your mother, then everyone’s a bad person. Everyone lies to their parents.”
“You don’t. You’re, like, a total Girl Scout with perfect grades, and if you’re not washing lepers’ feet on weekends, it’s just because you can’t find any lepers in Miami.”
Meredith laughed, then noticed Blondie looking back again. She lowered her voice. “Actually, washing lepers’ feet sounds really gross. I mean, what if a toe fell off?”
Britta giggled, sort of a sniff-giggle.
“I wasn’t joking,” Meredith said.
“I know. You’re never joking. That’s what makes you so funny, Meredith.”
Meredith blew out a puff of air. She could see the blonde’s piercing blue eyes and disapproving frown. On the other hand, this was a bus, not the library. People talked on a bus. Maybe the blonde should get some noise-canceling headphones.
“What did you do,” she said to Britta, “that was so awful?”
“I crashed Rick’s car.”
This was new. And kind of hilarious. “Really? Rick’s the skeezy boyfriend?”
“He has a Lamborghini. He’s obsessed with it. It has these doors.” She mimed up-and-down car doors. “Scissor doors, Lambo doors. I’m so sick of hearing about the stupid doors. He thinks girls my age are going to think he’s hot
because of it. Yeah, no.”
Meredith bit back the urge to tell Britta to please be quieter. She was trying to be more zen, so she said, “What a weirdo.” She imagined that was what one of Britta’s friends would say.
“I know. Anyway, he moved in, and of course, he needs to park in the garage because his car’s so fancy, so I get stuck in the driveway even though it’s my house.”
“That sucks.” Again, what she figured Britta’s friends would say.
“So my friend Nikolai— Do you know Nikolai?” When Meredith shook her head, Britta went on. “He had this party at his house, and he dared me to drive the car over there.”
“You didn’t?” Of course she did.
“Obviously I did. It was one in the morning, so I figured no one would be on the road, and no one was. Except this possum.”
“Oh no.” Meredith wondered if Britta had been drinking at this party.
“Yeah. I swerved to avoid hitting the cute little possum, and this huge mailbox just sort of jumped in front of the car. Totally killed the door on the passenger side. It wouldn’t . . .” She mimed the doors again, but this time, one of them was frozen in motion. “Scissor anymore.”
Meredith bit her lip, picturing it. “That sucks,” she repeated.
“I’m just so stupid,” Britta said.
“You’re not stupid,” Meredith said. “You’re good at drama. I saw you in a play last year.”
Britta scoffed. “Yeah, I’m great at drama. My mom says I’m good at causing drama. Anyway, after I crashed and she took away my car, I told her I wanted to be a CIT at this sleepaway camp so I could learn responsibility or something by teaching eight-year-olds to make lanyards. But I told the camp I broke my leg, and spent all the money my abuelo left me on this trip.”
Meredith hated to ask the obvious question. “Why didn’t you just go to the camp?”
“Because I’m not responsible. I can’t be in charge of a bunch of kids. I’d screw up, and they’d send me home, and I’d have to spend the whole summer in shame watching my mom make out with Rick or sitting in my room so he won’t stare at me in my shorts.”