by Alex Flinn
“Oh!” Kate said, like something had startled her. “I just thought of something, something way more interesting.”
That wouldn’t be hard. Still everyone leaned forward.
“When I was younger, I used to sleepwalk.” She looked around, like she was trying to see if they believed her.
“Like, you just walked around in your sleep?” Spider had heard of people doing that, but she wasn’t sure she believed it was true. It would make a good plot for a movie.
“Apparently. I don’t remember it, but I would get out of bed, walk around. I even ate in my sleep. At least, my mother said I did. Once, she bought some Thin Mints, which was a big deal because she thought the Girl Scouts were too feminist. She told my brother and me we could have four each. But the next day, they were all gone, two whole boxes. I accused my brother, and he accused me, but when I went upstairs, I found smudges of chocolate on my sheets. I had no memory of it.”
“Weird,” Britta said.
“Another time, I cut my hair. My mother took me to the doctor then. He said it could be caused by stress. My mother said I wasn’t under any stress, but after that, she tried to be super nice to me and made my brother be nice and locked up the scissors and knives.”
“Knives!” Spider said. “Good you didn’t stab anyone.”
Kate laughed. “I know, right? My mom was so mad about my hair, though. I was starting cotillion, which are these dance and etiquette classes at our country club. My mother cleaned up my haircut, but I still looked like I was going for the lead in a production of Peter Pan.”
“Maybe you were stressed out over the etiquette classes,” Meredith said.
Kate’s face darkened. “Probably. I still had to go, though, and wear white gloves and learn to fox-trot. There was this awful boy, Charleton Atherton, who picked on me for being the tallest girl, and I had to dance the rumba with him. He teased me twice as hard with no hair.”
“Maybe you cut your hair off because you didn’t want to go,” Ruthie said.
Kate shrugged. “If so, it didn’t work. But I did eventually stop sleepwalking.”
Spider shrunk back. She still hadn’t thought of anything. Fortunately, Ruthie said, “I think I have a few different things, other than just being older than dirt. I was a professional actress, as you may have heard. I was once in a commercial for Coca-Cola.”
“Really?” Britta said.
Spider had known that. She’d seen the commercial.
Ruthie nodded. “I was Girl Drinking a Coke. People said I’d take Broadway by storm. But I gave it up to have two beautiful children and five grandchildren, one of whom you have met.”
“The most beautiful,” Spider said.
“Nice try,” Ruthie said. “Another thing that’s special about me is that, when I was a teenager, I drove down with two of my girlfriends to the March on Washington.”
“Wow,” Meredith said. “So you heard the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in person? That’s one of the best Original Oratories ever.”
“It was difficult to hear,” Ruthie said. “There was a problem with the sound system, and there were over two hundred thousand people there. But you could feel the energy. We each had lied to our parents about where we were going. My friend Janet said she was staying at my house, and I said I was staying at Rhoda’s, and Rhoda said she was staying at Janet’s. It was quite a house of cards.”
“But worth it, right?” Meredith asked.
“Absolutely.”
“I have such a cool grandma.” Spider felt really proud as she said it.
“So what’s your thing?” Kate asked Spider. “I noticed we skipped you.”
“Oh, uh.” Spider looked at her hands under the table, then at Ruthie. “Um, I love old movies, movies like Casablanca and Rebecca. I have dozens on my computer, and I watch them every night before I go to sleep. I want to be a screenwriter someday.”
That was enough. No one had said it was supposed to be a deep, dark secret, and Spider hated talking about herself, especially to strangers. Most people were strangers to Spider.
“Is that what you were doing when I came in last night?” Britta said. When Spider nodded, she said, “I wanted to ask you about it, but you hid it.”
“Yeah, it’s sort of nerdy. I was watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
“Okay. I thought of something we all have in common,” Britta said. “Two things. One is that we all wanted to come here to take a break from our lives, for whatever reason.”
Spider noticed that Kate looked down, her long finger tracing the whorls in the wooden table. She was hiding something, same as Spider. Spider knew it.
“The other,” Britta said, “is we all have pierced ears.”
Spider’s hand flew to her own ears. It was true. She was wearing two different earrings. One was the Big Dipper, the other, a star. Britta had on little earrings with heart-shaped pink stones. Kate wore small, flower-shaped silver earrings, and Meredith and Ruthie had no earrings, but they did have a hole where an earring would go, so they’d been through that same third-grade ritual. Spider remembered when her friend Lauren had gotten pierced ears, and she’d had to have them too. She always wanted to be exactly like Lauren. Lauren had dumped her in fifth grade to hang with the cooler girls, the ones who took dance lessons or horseback riding or, at least, didn’t stay in bed all day Saturday.
But she said, “Good catch, Britta.” Then she smiled at Ruthie to say, See? I’m being nice.
She wondered about the other thing Britta had said, about them all wanting to take a break from their lives. No one had objected to that, so it must be true. But normal teenage girls didn’t want to go to the mountains to relax. Normal teenage girls were like her sister. They wanted to have fun, go to the beach, party.
Maybe the four of them had more in common than she’d thought.
13
Kate
KATE WAS SO happy when they moved off “getting to know you” and on to another subject—a cooking schedule for meals—that she momentarily forgot an important fact: she couldn’t cook, not at all.
In the emails they’d exchanged, there’d been something about sharing cooking. It hadn’t really hit her that it meant other people would be eating dishes she had cooked.
This was not a reasonable thing to expect, assuming people had functioning taste buds.
Kate couldn’t cook. She could make sandwiches, but they’d always had a maid. Even her mother didn’t cook, and she’d certainly never taught Kate.
Maybe she could make something frozen on her day. Or, when she’d visited her friend Hadley at college, she’d had something called ramen noodles. That seemed easy enough.
She felt this weird, sick feeling in her stomach, like it was about to give way. All these girls would think she was an idiot, a sheltered, spoiled idiot. Maybe she should go home.
“Um, as you may know, Ruthie . . .”
Kate became dimly aware that Spider was talking. Strange girl. She had on a black T-shirt probably for some movie, a scary alien with “Obey” written over his head. Her voice was slow and husky, almost the way Kate imagined an actual spider speaking. “Will you walk into my parlor?” said the spider to the fly.
Stupid. What was she saying?
“Ruthie, um, you know I’d probably poison people if I cooked.” Spider turned her eyes on Ruthie, like she was trying to butter her up. “Would you maybe want to take my day?”
Silence. Spider added, “Pleeeeeze.”
“Ha!” Ruthie said. “What utter nonsense! I’m taking my own days and no others. And no ramen noodles either. Any idiot can follow a recipe, and you are no idiot. We have cookbooks. If you haven’t learned to cook in seventeen years, it’s time you did.”
So much for ramen!
“I can cook,” Britta volunteered. “Maybe we can pair up, at least at first. I can help you.” She smiled at Spider, who suppressed a scowl.
“Splendid!” Ruthie said. “Spider can be your sous chef for tomorr
ow’s dinner.”
“What’s a sous chef?” Britta asked.
Kate said, “It’s the person who does all the prep work, like chopping onions.”
“Oh, goody! The boring stuff.” Britta clapped her hands. “I make this great roast chicken, and I need onions, garlic, and two kinds of peppers. You have to chop the garlic real fine, like mince it. Otherwise, it’s not as garlicky and . . .”
She kept going and going. Kate glanced at Spider. Her hands were folded atop the quilted place mat. When she noticed Kate looking at her, she snatched them away. So weird.
Britta must have noticed the movement too. She stopped midstory. “Um, but if you’d rather do something different, that’s fine too. Like, I could show you how to—”
“I’m fine,” Spider snapped. “I can chop garlic. I’m not an idiot.” She smiled at Ruthie.
Kate decided it was only fair to admit she was in the same boat—or maybe the same kitchen. “Y’all don’t want to eat my cooking either. I’m sure I can manage something, though, maybe heat something up, canned soup or . . .”
“I can show you,” Meredith said. “I cook at home when my mom’s working.”
“Oh, wow. My mom doesn’t work or cook.”
“I mean, not that I’m a chef or anything,” Meredith said. “I get most of my recipes off websites, or boxes of stuff. Like I make this meat loaf with Stove Top stuffing in it.”
“I’m sure Stove Top stuffing is delicious,” Kate said, even though she was sure of no such thing. She’d never had it.
They decided that each team of girls would take two nights a week, with Ruthie taking two because, she said, “I’m a generous soul.” Wednesdays would be what she called Fend for Yourself Night, to eat leftovers. If they decided to go out one night, that would be taken off Ruthie’s nights, which was only fair since she had two.
Britta and Spider went to consult Ruthie’s stack of recipe books. Meredith said, “I have the meat loaf recipe in my head. It’s just two pounds of ground beef, two eggs, stuffing, and barbecue sauce, and that makes two meat loaves.” She entered these ingredients into her phone’s memo feature. “Good to know the phone’s still useful for something.”
“Uh-huh.” Kate wondered if Meredith had thought she was rude earlier.
“We can make a salad,” Meredith continued, “and I’ll teach you to mash potatoes.”
“Sounds easy.” Kate had never done anything as useful sounding as mashing potatoes.
“Not so much when I was ten. It really develops the pronators and supinators. Those are the arm muscles that turn your hand.”
“I think I remember that from anatomy class.”
“So how did you manage to eat,” Meredith asked, “if your mother doesn’t cook and you don’t either?”
Kate looked down, turning her hand over, using her pronators and supinators. “Oh, um, someone came in.”
“Like a cook? You had a cook?”
Meredith was looking at her like she was some member of the British royalty—but in a bad way. Kate wondered if they’d still have Marjana when she got back. Probably not. Probably good if she learned to cook.
“More like a maid,” she said. Then, to change the subject away from her family and their maid, she said, “Maybe we could make fish another day.” Not that she knew how to cook fish.
“I want to see this supermarket before I commit to fish,” Meredith said.
“Good point. Chicken then.”
Meredith had a chicken recipe in her head too, baked breasts with parmesan cheese and mayonnaise. “From the parmesan cheese container. Or maybe the mayonnaise container—I’m not sure. We can make rice and some kind of vegetable. Let’s see if they have a steamer.” Meredith gestured for Kate to follow her into the pantry, a little room attached to the kitchen.
Kate followed, though she was unsure what a steamer even looked like.
“Check that cabinet,” Meredith said, pointing.
Kate rummaged around. There was a metal globe-like thing that she was pretty sure was for draining pasta and a wooden thing with slats. That might be for steaming. She put them both on the counter.
“Oh, good! You found one.” Meredith picked up the wooden thing. “Cool. This is different from ours. What kind of vegetables do you like?”
Kate did know the names of vegetables, and Meredith added them to her list, then instructed Kate to check the cupboard for what she called “staples,” oil and rice and a couple of different spices.
“Hey, so they have the olive oil and the pepper and some kind of spice blend, but I don’t see . . .” Kate stopped talking. Meredith wasn’t listening. She stood, stock-still, staring at something in the corner.
“Meredith?” Kate said.
Meredith didn’t speak but gestured with her head at . . . something.
“What is it?” The bottle of olive oil Kate was holding felt heavy.
“Shh.” Kate noticed Meredith’s gaze travel upward.
Where there was something hanging.
It was about as big as one of the gardener’s old, dirty brown leather gloves, but it was hanging way too high to be one, attached to the wall above their heads.
Kate inhaled. Nothing to worry about. It was just dirt. Or dust. Or . . .
Kate’s eyes focused sharply on the membranous folded wings, the small, pointed ears hanging underneath.
A bat.
It was a bat.
“Oh!” Kate backed up until she hit the cabinets. She wanted to bolt, but she didn’t want Meredith to see she was scared. Deep breaths. Bats were nocturnal. It was probably just sleeping. Or dead. Inhale. Exhale.
Even if it was dead, she didn’t want to touch a dead bat.
Just the words “dead bat” made her shudder. She imagined it flying around above her head. Her hand rose to her hair. The bat must have been awake last night when they’d come in. How close had it been? Had Meredith and Spider let it in when she was outside? Could it have nested in their hair?
But now it was motionless. Meredith glanced at Kate, then backed away. When she reached the pantry door, they instinctively linked arms and slid out of the pantry.
Once out, they kept backing, backing, backing, like participants in some kind of backward three-legged race, through the kitchen and into the dining room, where the other three stared at them, at Kate with her bottle of oil, thinking they were crazy. They exchanged glances. Kate nodded.
Meredith whispered, “There is a bat in the pantry.”
They had hoped, of course, that one of them, maybe Spider, who loved arachnids so much that she didn’t mind being called that, would say, “Oh, that’s no big deal! We see those all the time—let me get this one with my bare hands!”
Instead, they had the following reactions:
Ruthie shuddered. “A bat? In the house?”
Britta ran for the front door. “Tell me when it’s out of here.” Then she scrambled outside.
“How are we going to get it out?” Meredith asked.
Kate and Meredith glanced at one another, then at Ruthie and Spider, then at one another again. Kate knew Meredith was having the same thought she was: as landlords, Spider and Ruthie should definitely be in charge of pest removal. Still, it was ridiculous to expect of an old woman and a girl who clearly couldn’t chase down a bat.
“Is there someone we could call?” Meredith said. “A bat-catching service?”
Ruthie raised, then lowered her shoulders. “If we were home on Long Island, most definitely. But here, it could take days to get someone to come out. Can we wait days?”
They all glanced at the open pantry door.
“I guess we could close it?” Meredith said.
“And go out for meals,” Kate added. Were there even restaurants here?
“Yeah, no.” Britta’s voice came through the door. “I am not sleeping for even one night in a house with that creature. Have you ever seen a bat house? I have, and they’re skinny. He could just sneak out in the middle of the night, out
the door, through the tiniest crack.”
Apparently, in her terror, Britta became a zoologist.
“She’s not wrong,” Meredith said.
“So what do you suggest?” Kate asked.
“Someone needs to get it,” Britta said through the door.
They all looked at one another, then at the pantry.
No one was really looking at Kate, she noticed. They were looking at the old lady more than at her. They probably thought she was too much of a privileged princess to catch a bat.
Well, they were right, weren’t they?
Meredith spoke loudly enough for Britta to hear. “I think two of us should throw a blanket over it. And the rest—including Britta—should stick around to close the door.”
“That’s a lot of people,” Britta said. “Maybe some of us should get out of the way.”
She was talking about herself. At least, Kate thought she was. Or was she talking about Kate? Was she assuming Kate would be more of a hindrance than a help?
Silly. She wasn’t the weakest person here. She shouldn’t be, anyway.
Kate straightened her head, causing her blond curls to fall backward. She thought of every brave heroine in every movie she’d seen, not the shrinking princesses, but the warriors. This was her chance to be one, to show them who Kate Covington really was. She was going to have to be brave in the future. A bat was an easy place to start.
“I volunteer as tribute,” she said, channeling Jennifer Lawrence.
Wow. She sounded like sort of a badass. She looked around.
They were staring at her like she’d grown a third eye.
“I mean, I’ll do it. I’ll be one of the two, with the blanket.”
“I’ll help you,” Meredith said.
“I’ll open the door,” Spider said.
“And I’ll stay here, out of solidarity,” Ruthie said.
“I guess that means you don’t need me,” Britta said through the door.
“You can go upstairs,” Meredith said. “But first, stand here while we get the blanket.”
“Maybe we should get a net. There’s one in the closet,” Spider said.
“And put up our hair.” Kate gathered her hair into a band.