Girls of July

by Alex Flinn

  “Maybe tomorrow. I’m at an exciting part.”

  Judging from the fact that the book’s cover had a picture of a girl in a Victorian dress sniffing a flower, Kate doubted that. But she said, “Yeah, it looks it.”

  “No, really,” Meredith protested. “They made it into a movie.”

  “Was it any good?” Kate asked.

  “I haven’t seen it,” Meredith admitted. “I wanted to read the book first.”

  “So you can complain about how they ruined it with the movie?” Her friend Philippa had once spent a solid hour complaining about how Hermione’s dress in one of the Harry Potter movies was blue when it was supposed to be pink or pink when it was supposed to be blue. Kate couldn’t remember which.

  “Maybe they won’t ruin it,” Meredith said.

  “Judging from the length of that book, I’m guessing the movie will leave out some details,” Kate said. But she liked that Meredith seemed as weird and sheltered and quirky as Kate was, as Kate felt. But, unlike Kate, she’d been encouraged to be that way. No one told her not to be a know-it-all, which was the same as saying not to show that she was smarter than her mother’s friends. But she was. It wasn’t hard.

  Kate realized all these girls were strange in their own way. Maybe everyone was.

  “Okay, can I borrow that book when you’re finished?” Kate realized that, in three suitcases, she hadn’t packed a single book.

  “Sure.” Meredith looked pleased. “I’ll try to read more quickly.”

  Meredith got back to it, and silence reigned again, silence so complete that Kate could hear the drip-drip of the water off her hair, and the silence made her think of Dad and Colin and Mom. Maybe she could find a book at the house to read.

  Finally, Ruthie glanced at her old-lady watch. “It’s almost six!”

  The sun was still bright, and the day had flown, though they’d done little. One day down, twenty-nine to go. Would she regret when it was over or be happy?

  22

  Britta

  BRITTA TOOK SPECIAL care with dinner, being sure to mince, rather than simply chop, the garlic and slice each piece of onion thin as paper. Her Cuban ancestors would have been proud. When the others came back from the lake, she was chopping parsley to sprinkle on top. She called out, “Dinner’s almost ready!”

  “Oh, good. Swimming makes me so hungry,” said Kate.

  Ruthie glanced around suspiciously. “Alicia isn’t helping?”

  “She went upstairs to rest, I think. I just came down to check on the chicken.” Britta flicked a piece of parsley off the cutting board.

  “I hope she didn’t bamboozle you out of helping,” Ruthie said.

  “No, she was really helpful. She’s going to be a great chef someday. Don’t know what I’d have done without her.” Britta laid it on thick.

  Ruthie raised an eyebrow. “Great chef?”

  Oops. Maybe too thick. “I mean, if she works on it. If you’ll excuse me.” She started to rise. “I have to take this out.”

  At that moment, Spider came back downstairs, and Britta said, “Spider, would you mind helping me with this?” Britta wanted to see her squirm. “I was just telling Ruthie how extremely helpful you’ve been.”

  “Oh. Great. So what do you want me to do?”

  Britta instructed Spider, making sure she knew where the potholders were before she burned her hands up in the oven, and eventually, dinner was on the table.

  “This is really good,” Meredith said, taking the first bite. “You made this?”

  “Well, Britta did. I just helped,” Spider said.

  “You’re being too modest,” Britta said. “She cut it up, and she blended the spices and—”

  “What kind of spices are in this?” Ruthie interrupted, looking at Spider.

  Spider took a bite and chewed with great concentration before answering, “Um, salt and pepper. Two kinds of pepper.” She glanced at Britta, who fluffed the rice on her plate with her fork, seeming not to notice Spider’s distress.

  Finally, Britta said, “Cayenne pepper, right?”

  “Oh, right. Cayenne pepper.”

  “But there’s something more interesting in here.” Ruthie took a forkful. “What is it?”

  Britta suspected Ruthie knew exactly what it was. After all, it was in her kitchen. Cumin. She was testing Spider to see if Spider knew. Spider should know. “Come. On,” Britta enunciated. “Come. On. You know. Come on.”

  “Cumin!” Spider burst out. “There’s cumin and salt and two kinds of pepper, and I put all the spices in a bag and put the chicken in and shook it up. So—ha!”

  Ruthie looked a bit taken aback. “Ha?”

  “You didn’t believe I was helpful. Admit it.”

  “Of course I believed you were helpful.” Ruthie raised an eyebrow. “Why would you lie?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Spider lied. “I wouldn’t.”

  “So what does everyone want to do tomorrow?” Meredith changed the subject.

  “I want to go hiking,” Spider said. “There are so many mountains around here. My family has a book of great day hikes.”

  “I saw it!” Britta said before remembering she’d seen it when she was supposed to have been upstairs, writhing in pain. “It looked fun, sort of like that movie.”

  “The Revenant?” Spider quipped. “Or 127 Hours?” These were survival movies about hikes gone very wrong.

  “The Reese Witherspoon one,” Britta said.

  “I know. Wild.”

  “I loved that movie,” Britta said. “It should have won an Oscar.” She wanted to ask Spider why she wasn’t in so many of the photos of her family’s outdoor adventures.

  Spider seemed surprised, but nodded. “Hollywood sexism. Anyway, some of the highest peaks have fire towers on top of them. They’re these towers they put up so someone could sit up and see . . . um . . .”

  “Fires?” Britta asked, she hoped helpfully.

  “Right. There’s a fire-tower challenge. Hike to twenty-three towers in the Adirondacks, and more in the Catskills, but they’re kind of far. Once you get to the top, you can climb the tower. It’s really high, and you can see all the mountains and lakes and take pictures.”

  “It sounds beautiful,” Kate said.

  “It is.” Spider seemed excited for the first time since Britta had met her. “I climbed one with my family once, but I want to climb all of them this summer.”

  “Twenty-three towers sounds ambitious,” Ruthie said. “Especially with your—”

  “I want to try,” Spider snapped.

  “Fine.” Ruthie held her hands up, offended, and even Britta was surprised how Spider had cut her off. They seemed really close. When Ruthie saw Britta looking at her, she said, “Too strenuous for my old hips.”

  “Oh.” Spider looked disappointed. “Okay. How about the rest of you?”

  “My ankle is feeling better,” Britta volunteered.

  The rest all wanted to go, and Ruthie offered to clear the table and do the dishes so they could plan their trip. They walked to the living room to get the book Britta had seen. On the way there, she nudged Spider’s arm. “Hey. Thanks for including me.”

  Spider looked startled, then smiled at her. “Sure. Just don’t throw any onions at me.”

  “I won’t,” Britta said. Then, after a second, added, “On a hike, it would be rocks.”

  23

  Meredith

  Essay topic: When you daydream, who do you hope to become in the future?

  NOT SOME SILLY girl who goes around chasing boys.

  Not that Meredith was doing that. Of course not. What would be the point, since Harmon obviously had a girlfriend? She’d been stupid to think he’d been flirting with her. She knew about lots of things, but not about boys. Besides, he was clearly a rugged outdoorsman, not an intellectual. Meredith hated rough, coarse boys, the type of boys who thought the outcome of a football game was more important than the outcome of an election.

  She’d come out to look
at the stars.

  The night was cool and dark. Meredith settled into an Adirondack chair. Alone by design. She liked the other girls, but she loved the silent loneliness of the night, loved standing still as her eyes became acclimated to the darkness. Then, each star appeared. She shivered a delicious shiver and found the Big Dipper.

  The only sound was the crickets.

  And a giggle.

  A giggle?

  Yes, a giggle. And a voice. Voices.

  “I don’t believe you saw an owl here.”

  Oh no. It was a girl. The girl from the lake.

  “You don’t have to believe me.” Harmon. “If you’d be quiet and walk softer, we could find it.”

  “Are you telling me to shut up?”

  “Yes.”

  Were they coming here? Would they see her? Maybe. Maybe not. Would they make a ton of noise and ruin her enjoyment of the evening with their chattering? Absolutely. But maybe if she was quiet, they’d move on.

  “Harmon Dickinson, I cannot believe you’re—”

  “Shhh!”

  “. . . shushing me! I’m going to tell your mother.”

  A loud whisper. “If you want to see wildlife, you need to shush.”

  “Fine!” the girl said loudly enough to scare away any bird in a five-mile radius.

  Even their footsteps were loud. Actually, it was probably only the girl’s footsteps that were loud, and the good news was that they were stomping away from Meredith into the woods. For a few minutes, they were actually quiet.

  Then, “Harmon! Harmon! Where are you?”

  Why would Harmon like such a loud girl?

  Oh yeah, she was pretty. Hot. He would probably say hot.

  “Harmon?” Running footsteps.

  “I’m over here. Hold on a sec.”

  Weirdly, his voice came not from where the girl was, the woods where he’d been the night before, but from behind Meredith, closer to the house.

  What was he doing by their house?

  Meredith was pretty sure he didn’t know she was there. Should she say something? Or just sink down in her chair and hope he didn’t see her, hope he’d leave so she could enjoy the quiet night with its lace coverlet of stars.

  “Harmon!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Hope, no owl would come within half a mile of you, even if you were covered in dead mice. Let’s go inside.”

  His voice was right by Meredith, and she realized there was no way he wasn’t going to see her. If she sat still, he might trip over her.

  She stood.

  “You should do that,” she said, kind of smirking when he started at her voice. “Some of us are trying to enjoy the quiet.”

  He recovered himself enough to put his smarmy voice back on. “Some tourists are the ones who ruin the quiet for everyone else.”

  “I wasn’t noisy. You obviously didn’t even know I was there. If you had, you wouldn’t have acted like such a buffoon.”

  “A buffoon, huh?” In the darkness, she saw him glance toward the house, then back at her. Finally, he said, “Anyway, we were just leaving.” He walked toward the woods and yelled, probably louder than necessary, “Come on, Hope! Let’s leave!”

  Meredith lasted about five more minutes in the beautiful silence, enjoying the stars, until finally it got too cold and she had to go inside.

  When she did, she noticed something stuck into the frame between the screen door and the solid one, paper, an envelope. She picked it up and turned it over.

  It had her name on it, misspelled, Merideth, in messy, boy handwriting.

  What was it? What did he want of her? Was it hate mail? Or, the opposite, a love letter?

  Stupid. Of course it wasn’t a love letter. They’d spoken twice. And this was the twenty-first century. If a guy liked a girl, he said, “Hey, let’s hang out.” And he hadn’t said that either. He had a girlfriend. Meredith read too many books.

  Meredith opened the envelope. It was a photograph Harmon had taken earlier, the one of her face as she saw the bat fly up. She didn’t know if he had used some type of filter or technique, but in it, she looked beautiful, like an angel.

  But why had he left it there?

  Meredith looked off in the direction the pair had disappeared in, but they were long gone.

  24

  Spider

  INT/EXT. SPIDER’S CAR – DAY

  The four girls are driving down a rural route, without much else in sight. Spider is driving. Britta is shotgun, the others in back. They are lost, and it is obvious they are getting antsy.

  SPIDER HAD HOPED to impress everyone with her knowledge of the fire towers. She’d spent the winter and all of June researching them in Adirondack Life magazine, online, and in stacks of books from the library to supplement those her family had already owned. It wasn’t enough. She should have predriven all the routes to the trailheads. She’d made a wrong turn somewhere, and they were lost. She’d gotten on a dirt road, then turned back and headed the other way, going around in a circle like the family in the old Vacation movies.

  “Can we ask Siri?” Britta said.

  “It doesn’t work,” Meredith said. “I already tried. The service is bad.”

  “Besides, you can’t ask for directions to a trailhead.” Even from the driver’s seat, Spider could tell that Kate was rolling her giant blue eyes. “I thought you knew your way.”

  “I’ll find it,” Spider snapped. She was just barely holding it together. Also, she wanted to scream at Britta that cuh-min was an accepted alternative pronunciation of cumin. She’d looked it up.

  The truth was, she hadn’t been on any of these trails since she was a kid in the back seat. Her siblings had stopped asking her along, deeming her too slow to keep up, saying, “We knew you wouldn’t want to go anyway,” when questioned. And she hadn’t, not really. But now she did. Adulting, though, was a bit overwhelming, especially in front of a bunch of strangers.

  “There was a town that way.” Meredith pointed toward the back of the car. “Maybe we could ask for directions.”

  Spider ignored her, driving forward.

  “This is really charming,” Britta said as they passed a dilapidated farmhouse with a lone spotted cow outside. She leaned back to address the others. “Isn’t it charming?”

  “It really is,” Meredith agreed.

  They sat in silence for another minute until they saw a yellow house with a hand-painted sign advertising quilts for sale. “Maybe we should stop here and ask,” Britta said.

  “It’s not a store,” Spider said as they whizzed past the house. Two dogs—one maybe a hybrid wolf—barked from behind a fence. “It’s a lady selling a few quilts. They’re not in the directions business.”

  “Maybe I want to buy a quilt,” Britta said.

  Only Kate didn’t speak, but Spider heard judgement in that silence too. She decided that maybe they were right or, if they were wrong, at least she could prove them wrong and be done with the whole stupid conversation. She slammed on the brakes. “Okay, okay, we can go back.” She pulled off the road to make a U-turn.

  Boom! The car lurched down the shoulder of the road.

  “Ooh!” All three girls yelled at once.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” Spider assured them.

  But when she tried to back the car up, it wouldn’t budge. She floored the gas and tried again. It made a loud “Vroom!” but stayed put.

  “It’s stuck.” Britta stated the obvious.

  “You think?” Spider kept trying, but the car was, indeed, stuck.

  “Maybe if Britta moves to the back seat,” Meredith said.

  “What would that do?” Britta said.

  “Change the weight so it’s not so front-heavy. Or maybe we should all get out.”

  “Are you calling me fat?” Britta said.

  “But what if opening the door makes it worse?” Spider said.

  So Britta climbed between the seats to get into the back. Spider tried again.

  Nothing.

&
nbsp; “What if we get out on this side?” Meredith gestured to the side closer to the road.

  “Are we sure it’s safe?” Kate said.

  “There’s no traffic,” Meredith said. “I’m going to try it.”

  Meredith unlocked her door and pushed it gingerly. It didn’t budge.

  “Ugh, stupid gravity,” she said.

  “Let me help,” Britta said.

  So they both shoved themselves against it. This time, it opened enough to let them out.

  “Try now!” Meredith yelled.

  Spider tried. The Subaru made loud, frustrated noises, like her great-uncle Stanley coughing into a handkerchief, and like Great-Uncle Stanley, it didn’t budge an inch.

  Britta was knocking on the window, probably to gloat. No, that wasn’t fair. She hadn’t gloated. Still, Spider took her time opening the window.

  “Should we try to push it?”

  Spider shook her head. She’d thought of that already. “It might run you over.”

  “I think we’re going to have to call a tow truck,” Meredith said.

  Spider nodded. But when she tried her phone, it didn’t work.

  So they were, after all, going to the quilt lady’s house.

  25

  Britta

  OKAY, SO IT was a little bit of poetic justice that, after Spider acted like they were all so stupid to want to ask for directions, they were going to have to. Not that Britta was thrilled about driving off the road. And she could tell Spider was embarrassed.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Britta said as they trudged down a road bordered in lady slippers and Queen Anne’s lace. “It’s about the journey, not the destination.”

  “I sort of wanted the destination,” Kate said.

  Britta didn’t think they’d gone that far past the quilt house, but the road was winding and it was out of sight. Fifteen minutes later, they were still walking. “Maybe it was a mirage,” she said. “Like when people in the desert think they see water.”