by Alex Flinn
These woods were cool, with a breeze the color of the sky. She walked faster, pushing herself against the wind. The ground beneath her felt rough and slippery with pine needles, and she remembered the boy, Harmon? Harlan? He’d taken her hand when she slipped. She’d barely seen him, but she’d know his face if she saw it again. She reached the place where she’d fallen the night before (recognizable because of the embarrassing butt print in the dirt). There was a rustling in the brush. She whirled. Was it him?
No, just a chipmunk, a tiny, adorable creature. She had brought her phone this time. She moved closer to take a picture, but it scurried up the closest tree, spiraling around in a circle.
It stopped. About ten feet up the tree was a platform, like a treehouse, but for wildlife. A few sticks protruded from it like bits of a nest. Meredith couldn’t see inside. It was too high.
She wondered who had put it there. No, she didn’t wonder. She knew.
No more animals. Finally, admitting to herself that she would find neither wildlife nor the mystery boy, she started back toward the road.
He’d said he lived close by, but she didn’t see a house. After Meredith walked a good half mile, maybe more, she saw a road sign. It said “Abel Dickinson Way.” It was surrounded by wildflowers, black-eyed Susans, and Queen Anne’s lace, bowing in the summer wind.
Just as she did, she saw the other girl, Kate, coming from the opposite direction down the road. She glanced at her watch, five thirty. Kate clutched her phone.
There was a strange, mournful wail in the distance, not an owl, another bird. It came from the direction where Spider had said the lake was. She hoped to go there today.
She looked back at Kate. Kate wasn’t taking pictures, and her mouth was a thin line. Meredith remembered that Kate had asked about cell phone reception. Meredith hadn’t really cared, since she was trying to get away. But it had been the only thing Kate had said the entire ride. Meredith wondered if something was wrong.
They kept walking until it became inevitable that their paths would cross, until it would be rude not to speak to one another. And yet, she didn’t know if Kate wanted to talk to her. Kate was sort of unapproachable, so pretty and rich. She was wearing actual hiking boots, adorable ones that were probably from some fancy designer, with cute blue-and-white socks sticking out of the top. She was the kind of pretty, popular girl who never wanted to be friends with Meredith.
Kate was, at most, ten feet away, which gave her about five seconds to say something. But what?
Lovely day.
Was something her grandmother would say.
Hey. How’s it going?
Said nobody interesting ever.
Five feet.
Just as Meredith opened her mouth to say “Hello,” Kate turned, aiming her phone at . . . something, something Meredith was pretty sure wasn’t there. What a snob.
Meredith passed without speaking.
12
Spider
INT. CABIN DINING AREA — MORNING
Britta and Spider are setting the table under a chandelier made of antlers. Spider is trying to avoid eye contact or anything that might encourage Britta to converse with her. We can see her failure haunting her eyes.
“IT’S SO COLD here in the morning!” Britta said for about the third time.
“Uh-huh.” Spider added a napkin to a place setting without bothering to fold it.
“I mean, maybe you don’t think so, but I’m from Miami and sixty degrees is pretty cold.” She pretended to shiver. Or maybe she actually shivered. Spider didn’t know. Or care.
Strangers. When she and Ruthie had hatched the idea of renting the rooms, it had seemed like a good idea. Her parents would stop pressuring Ruthie to sell the place. Then, Spider would be able to come here forever. But she’d forgotten one important aspect of the plan. She, Spider, would have to spend a month “relaxing” in a houseful of strangers.
Ruthie probably hadn’t forgotten. It would be just like her to think it was good for Spider to be more social. Ruthie believed the old saw about strangers just being friends she’d never met. She talked to everyone. Everyone. Driving up, Ruthie had held some woman’s baby at a rest stop while the woman fixed her makeup. She knew every shopkeeper in town, from the boy at the meat market, who wanted to be an actor, to the antique store owner, who had three dogs. She even knew the dogs’ names.
Spider didn’t know the dogs’ names; she didn’t care about the people’s names.
So now Ruthie was scrambling eggs and Spider was setting the table with some perky girl from Miami. “You do the plates,” she told Britta after she almost dropped one because sometimes her hands didn’t work right first thing in the morning. “I’ll do silverware and napkins.”
Britta took the plates. “Has your family been coming here long?”
“Yes.” Spider went to find the silverware.
When the others returned, Ruthie served breakfast. Spider sat next to Kate and tried to be nice. She even passed the toast. Then, they sat in silence, chewing.
“Mmm,” Kate said, trying the potatoes. “Good!”
Spider could tell Kate was also trying to be friendly. Ruthie smiled. “Do you like it?”
“I do.”
“It was my grandmother’s recipe,” Ruthie said. “They had a deli in Borough Park when I was growing up. People came from all over for her hash browns.”
“I guess you’re used to grits,” Spider said. Why had she said that?
But Kate smiled. “I do like my grits, but these are wonderful.” She took another bite.
The table fell silent.
“Why don’t you tell us more about your theater career?” Britta said to Ruthie, and Spider smiled because Ruthie talking for an hour about Hair would take the onus off her.
But Ruthie shook her head. “Enough about me for now. We should get to know one another, all of us. I think your parents’ generation calls it bonding.”
Spider noticed Kate looked dubious. Maybe she was shy too. But Britta said, “Good idea,” because of course she would. “Does anyone know any, like, icebreaker games?”
Spider stifled a groan, and Kate looked down, but Meredith said, “Last fall, when I was president of Key Club, or maybe it was German Club, the vice president suggested a getting-to-know-you activity. We divided into groups, and each group had to come up with one thing they all had in common, and then each person in the group had to come up with one unique thing, something no one else in the group could say.”
“Like what?” Britta asked.
“Well, like this one girl said she had a pet sugar glider. And there was this boy who had lived in Thailand until he was five. So different stuff.”
Spider thought there was nothing interesting about her, at least nothing she wanted to share.
But Ruthie said, “Oh, that’s a splendid idea!” Spider knew better than to mess with Ruthie when she was using words like splendid. “What a clever girl you are, Meredith.”
Meredith smiled, chin raised, like she knew she was clever. Spider resolved to go last, to see what the others said.
“So how do we start?” Britta asked.
“In Key Club, we all said things about ourselves and saw whether other people had them in common.” Meredith looked around the table, to see who would go first. Spider knew she should volunteer, as hostess. But maybe Meredith should go first, since this was her idea.
“I’ll go.” Britta smiled. She’d taken out her braids, and her dark hair hung in silken curls that reached just past her shoulders. “Okay, so I’ll say stuff, and if you have it in common, raise your hand.” When they all nodded, she said, “I’m sixteen years old.”
No one raised their hand. The others must all be seventeen already. Except Ruthie.
“I’m going to be a senior in the fall.” Britta looked at Ruthie and said, “Oh, wait. You definitely aren’t,” and laughed.
“Um,” Britta went on. “I love musical theater.”
Only Ruthie raised her hand fo
r that. Kate said, “I mean, it’s okay. We went to New York last year and saw a play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. It was pretty good.”
“Lucky! Tickets to Harry Potter are really hard to get!” When Kate didn’t respond, Britta continued, “Okay, more things, more things. I love mint chocolate chip ice cream.”
Meredith raised her hand for that, but no one else.
“And Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”
Spider knew it was an Amazon Prime show, but she hadn’t watched it. The others hadn’t either.
“No one?” Britta said. “Guys, you have to watch this show. Okay, and I have a cat named Scooby.” She rolled her eyes. “I mean, no one else is going to have a cat named Scooby, but I have a cat. I like cats in general. That’s what I meant to say.”
Everyone but Meredith liked cats. “Sorry, they seem sneaky,” she said.
“And I like dogs too, but my mother won’t let me have one. She thinks they’re messy.”
“I think she’s right,” Spider said.
“Um, and I like pizza, online shopping, and watching makeup videos on YouTube.”
Spider noticed Meredith grimaced at this last, probably mirroring her own expression. Kate had started to raise her hand but put it down.
Britta turned to her. “You look like you’ve watched a few videos,” she said.
It was true. Kate had a face full of perfect makeup in the middle of the woods.
Kate sighed. “Okay, okay, I have been known to study up on the intricacies of the smoky eye. But y’all don’t have consensus on that.”
“Thank you for your honesty.” Britta looked around. “Pizza? You guys don’t like pizza?”
All but Ruthie raised their hands.
“Lactose intolerant,” she said. “I like pizza, but it doesn’t like me.”
Britta giggled. “I’m right-handed?”
Spider was left-handed.
“Well, I give up,” Britta said, “not because you’re left-handed or you’re lactose intolerant,” she assured Spider and Ruthie. “Maybe we should try the different things first.”
“That might be a better idea,” Ruthie agreed, and they all nodded, though Spider had been dreading this. She could only think of three different things about herself, and they’d all make people think she was weird. “Though we have seen several commonalities, so that’s helpful. What’s your different thing, Britta?”
Britta thought for a second, then said, “I can perform Wicked by heart. It’s a musical,” she added, in case any of them had been in a cave in France the past ten years. “The whole thing, start to finish. I first saw it when I was eight, and I loved it. I loved the friendship Glinda and Elphaba had, even though they were so different, and I loved how heroic Elphaba was, even though she was weird, or maybe because she was weird.”
Had Britta glanced at Spider when she’d said “weird”? No, it was just her imagination.
Britta continued. “The first time I saw Elphaba flying at the end of the first act, singing ‘Defying Gravity,’ I turned to my mother and said, ‘I want to do that.’ I saw the play four more times onstage, and then I watched it online even more times and read the book. So, anyway, if you all ever have two and a half hours to kill, I can do Wicked for you. The whole entire thing.”
She laughed a little awkwardly. They all did.
“Is that the kind of thing you mean?” Britta looked at Meredith. “Or should it be something more unusual, like having absorbed a twin before birth?”
“Oh, I did that,” Spider said, then laughed. “Kidding.”
Meredith said, “No, that’s good. That’s what I meant, a special talent or experience.”
“Bless your heart. I feel like I know absolutely everything about you now,” Kate said. Was that sarcasm? Spider looked up at her.
But Britta said, “I’m glad,” like she was oblivious to Kate’s tartness. Or maybe she was trying to deflect it? Or trying not to care?
“So, I’m next?” Meredith said. Spider was sitting to Britta’s left, and that would make her next. But Ruthie gestured for Meredith to go ahead.
“Okay, um, when I was a kid, I was really smart.”
Spider tried not to raise her eyebrow. Sometimes the left one just raised involuntarily when people said things like I’m really smart. “So that’s your thing? Being really smart?”
“She was really smart,” Britta said.
Meredith nodded. “Thanks, Britta. But, no, that’s not it. My mother always pushed me. Like, I could never just dress as a Disney princess for Halloween. Instead, it was like Career Day. One year, I was a doctor, the next year, a lawyer. One year, a famous author came to our school and mentioned her editor. That year, I was an editor for Halloween.”
“How do you dress up like an editor?” Kate asked.
“My mom did some research, and after some serious thought, I wore black pants and a fashionable sweater with some chunky jewelry, and I carried a cardboard cutout of a laptop.” She laughed at her patheticness. “Even when we read stories, my mother changed the endings. Like when Snow White went to sleep, she woke up not to a prince but to a recruiter from Princeton. She said a duke would also be acceptable, as long as it was Duke University.”
“That’s a lot of pressure,” Kate said.
“Tell me about it. Anyway, my thing is, since I was so smart in school, my mom had me take the online test to go on Jeopardy. I guess I passed because I got to audition in person.”
“So you were on Jeopardy?” Britta said.
“Nooooo. There was a test first, where you read the answers off TV monitors and wrote the questions. Then, they had us play a practice game. That was when I completely freaked. I couldn’t remember any of the answers, even easy ones like R.L. Stine or the capital of Australia. All I could think about was how disappointed my mother would be. I sort of forgot how to form words. Needless to say, I did not get chosen. My mother said it was fine, but a few months later, when it was the Jeopardy Teen Tournament, she made some comment—several comments, actually—about ‘what might have been.’ But, anyway, I got to audition,” she finished with a shrug.
“Did you meet Alex Trebek?” Ruthie asked. “Is he very wise?”
“I wish,” Meredith said. “But I guess I got further than most people.”
“Definitely further than I would have,” Britta said, and they all agreed, but Spider wondered if Meredith was really that boring. Surely there was something more interesting about her than having failed at Jeopardy. What was her deep, dark secret?
No, that was silly. She had said she was president of two clubs at school. Spider knew kids like that, resume builders. The story had been an attempt to humanize herself.
Meredith said, “Well, I can’t perform a Broadway musical or, really, perform anything. So we all have our special things, I guess.”
Spider wondered what her special thing was—that she liked to read a lot? That sometimes, her legs hurt so much she couldn’t get out of bed, and that she missed so much school that they’d yelled at her mother about all her absences? Spider looked around at the cute, dark-haired Hispanic girl, the serious redhead, and the ridiculously beautiful blonde. She wondered how she looked to these girls, what they thought of her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be friends with them, not yet. But she didn’t want them all to reject her either.
Or, worse yet, be nice because they felt sorry for her. There were girls like that at school too. She didn’t want to be a charity case.
She noticed Kate looking at her hands, her red knuckles, and she stuck them under the table. No, Kate wasn’t looking at them. She was just looking ahead. Still, Spider kept them in her lap. Her hands were so ugly.
They’d figure out sooner or later that there was something wrong with her. Eventually, she wouldn’t be able to keep up with them, run down to the lake or carry a heavy cooler, and it would look weird. Girls her age didn’t stay home like old ladies. But, for a while, she could explain these things away as a sprained ankle or an old PE c
lass injury or a cold. For a while. Maybe, once they got to know her better, they’d understand.
“Um . . .” Kate was speaking now, and Spider realized she’d been looking at her because she thought it was Spider’s turn. Which it had been. Oops.
“Um, I’m from Georgia,” Kate said. She looked at them, as if trying to decide whether that was enough. Technically, by the rules of the game, it was. No one else was from Georgia. Spider wished she could pull something like that, but Ruthie and she both lived in the same town on Long Island. So nothing geographical would work.
But Britta said, “And?”
Kate must have decided she was busted. “I’m on the debate team?” she said.
“Really?” Meredith said. “I’m in debate. What events do you do?”
“Oh, wow. Extemporaneous and Lincoln-Douglas. Guess that can’t be my thing then.”
“Maybe it could. I do Original Oratory because I don’t like to think on my feet,” Meredith said. “I’m not very good at it.”
“Meaning she didn’t win state competition,” Britta said.
“Oh, I didn’t either,” Kate said. “Maybe next year, though. Let’s see . . .”
“Any unusual hobbies, interests, pets?” Britta asked.
“In middle school, I had a horse,” Kate admitted, looking down like she was sort of ashamed of it. “I used to think I’d like to do dressage in the Olympics.”
Rich girl has pony. Hardly a surprise.
Kate looked around, like she was expecting someone else to say they had a fancy show horse, but no one did. In fact, Britta said, “You had a horse? That’s so cool.”
“Why don’t you still have it?” Meredith asked.
“I didn’t really have time anymore. I started doing other stuff, and the horse was probably lonely, so my dad said if I couldn’t spend more time with him, he’d sell him.” She pursed her lips. “I really miss Shalimar.”
Spider stifled the urge to yawn, barely.
Britta looked like she was about to ask a follow-up question, but thought better of it.