by Alex Flinn
At least it wouldn’t be that long. Since it was Independence Day, Ray-Ray’s father was working a half day. He’d be home by two. Kate glanced at her watch.
Nine twenty-five.
Ray-Ray skipped past her on the sofa, again barely making the leap to the rocker.
“Let’s play a different game,” Kate said.
“The floor’s lava!” Ray-Ray leaped to the coffee table.
Why hadn’t she remembered how difficult boys could be? Oh yeah, because they’d had a nanny. Any romantic imaginings she’d had about watching her brother were just that.
Kate caught him before he made the next jump. “Oh, I just realized the floor solidified. You can walk on it now. See?” She took a few teetering steps.
“Awww.”
“Hey, you won!” He struggled against her. “Now stop before you split your head open. Let’s play hide-and-seek.”
“Okay.” He stared at her, and she realized he’d never played before.
“I’ll hide. And you count to . . .” She thought. “How high can you count?”
“A hundred.”
Kate doubted that. “Maybe we should just count to twenty.”
“A hundred!”
“Okay, a hundred.” Because why discourage him, and at least she’d get a break. Kate established the oven as base, chose an easy spot behind his bedroom door, and waited.
It did not take long (he didn’t get close to a hundred). In fact, Kate had barely managed to catch her breath when he was at her knee, yelling, “Caught you!”
“You did! Now, you hide.” She only had to do this about five hundred more times.
In light of this, she decided she actually was going to count to a hundred. Maybe he’d learn from it. She used the opportunity to wash the dishes Lizzie had left soaking in the sink. It couldn’t be healthy for a child to grow up in such depressing clutter. She took her time finding him, looking first in the master bedroom, saying, “I wonder where Ray-Ray could be!” so he could feel like he’d accomplished something. Then, she tried the bathroom. She was rewarded when he dashed past her, giggling, on the way to the kitchen, yelling, “Yah! I’m a rocket!”
“Guess I’ll have to be ‘it’ again!” She’d count even more slowly this time.
The second time, she’d finished about half the dishes when her phone rang. She’d kept it on in case Britta or Spider fell off a mountain, hiking. Kate glanced at it.
It was Mother. She ignored it. She didn’t know what to say.
It was harder to find Ray-Ray this time. She looked under his bed and in the closet, then under Lizzie’s bed, behind all the doors, and in the master bedroom, which was even messier, even in the garage. It was there, in the garage, that she heard something, pounding on the roof.
She opened the door that went to the backyard. “Ray-Ray?”
A tiny giggle from above. “Ray-Ray!”
She spied a ladder leaning against the house. “Ray-Ray? Are you up there?”
She glanced up. He was lying on his back on the roof. Fortunately, the roof was not that high-pitched, but he could still fall. “Ray-Ray, don’t move.” She grabbed a ladder rung.
He rose. “I’m a rocket!”
She pictured him swan-diving to the lawn. “Don’t move.” Hand over hand, she climbed the ladder. “Stay right there. Stay . . .” She tried to remember where rockets sat. They’d been to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida once, when her brother, Blake, had wanted to be an astronaut. “Stay on your launchpad. We haven’t counted down yet.”
“Count down!” he yelled.
“Do you know how to count down?” She figured he wouldn’t, but he started.
“Ten . . . nine . . .”
She scrambled up the ladder as he was saying, “Eight!”
“Got you!”
“No!” He screamed in mock terror. She’d forgotten what fun hide-and-seek was.
“That’s where I used to hide from Mommy!” he said. “To see the stars.”
“Oh, I thought you never played hide-and-seek before.”
“I just hided.”
That was weird. Or not weird. Maybe his mom was scary sometimes or yelled. Poor kid.
“Don’t go on the roof anymore. You can’t see stars during the day.”
The phone buzzed three more times while she was hiding. Finally, when it was her turn to be “it” again, she picked up.
“Hello?”
“Do you know what people are saying about us?” Her mother’s voice.
Kate was about to say she didn’t care, but that wasn’t true. She did care. Caring was ingrained in her, like a dog who can always find the way home at sundown.
She sighed. “What are they saying?”
“What?” As if she hadn’t expected Kate to ask. Kate wondered how many times Mother had called when she had no service. “Well, some of them are saying you were in on it.”
“In on it?”
“Your father’s . . . activities. They’re saying you were some sort of a . . . conduit.”
Kate stood silent, stunned. Then, she didn’t know why she was surprised. She knew these people, knew they loved gossip and thrived on schadenfreude, pleasure at the misery of others.
“You know that’s not true.” She hoped her mother would say of course she did. That’s what mothers were supposed to say.
Instead, she said, “I don’t know what to believe, Kate. I believed in your father. And now, people are being so awful.” Kate tried not to notice the catch in her mother’s voice.
“What people?” She didn’t really have to ask. She knew all their friends were awful.
“Well, the Davises, and the Olivers. Betsy Oliver called the night of bunco to let me know she could get a sub if I didn’t feel up to attending.”
Kate frowned. Greer Oliver had been one of her close friends. She hadn’t called since the news broke. Kate looked around at the filthy, depressing kitchen. Her mother was saying, “Colin Blackwell’s come by a few times.”
“Colin? What does he want?”
“He wants to see you, know where you’ve gone. He says to tell you he cares about you. And he said something else, something I didn’t understand.”
“What was that?” Kate walked over to the sink and swirled a scrub brush against a pot with cooked-on mac and cheese.
“I wrote it down. He said, ‘Add astera for aspera.’”
Ad astra per aspera. They’d learned that in Latin class, “To the stars, through difficulties.” Kate brushed harder. It was the perfect thing to say. But he was just trying to get her to call him. He just wanted gossip. She remembered her mother laughing at the Linds. People loved awful rumors. Everyone was just waiting for someone’s kid to get a DUI or get kicked out of prep school, so their screwup kid would look good in comparison.
Suddenly, she felt a snap and droplets of water flew up over her. “Oh!”
She looked down. She’d broken off the scrub brush.
“Kate? Are you still there?” Kate had no idea what Mother had been saying.
“What?” she said, looking around for the other half of the brush.
“You should come home. I miss you so much!”
“How would that help? I’d just be afraid to go out because everyone’s talking about me.” It was true. Even this disgusting, filthy house seemed better than Peach Springs.
The house! Ray-Ray! Kate realized she hadn’t heard a peep out of him in quite a while.
She glanced around. “I have to go, Mother.”
“Don’t hang up on me.”
“I’m sorry.” She left her phone on the counter. She checked all around. “Ray?”
Nothing. She headed back to the kitchen, hoping he’d reached base.
He hadn’t. Panic rising, she checked each bathroom, then yelled, “Come out, Ray-Ray! You win!” Nothing.
She went to the garage. He must be on the roof again. She stopped, staring. The garage door to outside was open. So he wasn’t in the backyard, which he had acces
sed through a side door before.
A thousand swear words rose in her ears even as she heard her mother’s voice telling her not to use such language. You can’t stop me, Mother, she thought, grimly jubilant.
“Ray-Ray, are you out there? Please come out!” She tried to yell, but her voice shook. Lizzie had been right not to bring him to their place. He might have drowned in the lake.
Instead, they were near Route 9, with its speeding cars.
Kate ran to the front yard, yelling, “Ray-Ray! Ray-Ray!”
No answer. She dashed toward the road.
36
Spider
INT. WAY-TOO-SMALL CAR — DAY
Britta and Spider are in the car. Spider is driving, while Britta is absorbed in her phone, or pretending to be.
IT WASN’T AS bad as Spider had feared. Maybe because the other two girls weren’t there, or maybe because Britta had sworn silence, she was pretty quiet. Once they reached an area with service, she became absorbed in her phone, texting and posting photographs.
Britta must have a lot of friends. Her phone buzzed continuously.
After half an hour of silence, Britta said, “Can I ask how much farther?”
“Not far. Maybe another ten minutes. That’s a good thing about it.”
“I’m sorry we’re not doing the fire tower.”
“It’s fine.” The more Spider thought about it, the happier she was that they were hiking Buck Mountain instead. It would be her first hike of the summer, and she should work up to higher trails. She wouldn’t admit that to Britta, but she could be charitable. “I think this will be a good first mountain for you.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
Spider couldn’t shake the idea that Britta was also being charitable to her. But she had no reason to think that, so she said nothing. Neither did Britta. It was longer than she’d thought, but finally they saw the brown-and-yellow sign that said “Buck Mountain Trailhead.”
“Yay! I feel like we’ve already accomplished something,” Britta said as Spider pulled into one of the few remaining parking spaces. Spider felt a little stiff from driving, so it took her a moment to get out of the car.
“Everything okay?” Britta asked.
“Perfect.” Spider stretched her legs. She hated to admit that some of her mother’s yoga moves of old actually helped. Stretching was essential. She just preferred to call it “lunging” rather than “warrior one.”
“Oh, good idea.” Britta started to stretch too. “Warrior one.”
Spider winced. “Yep.”
“Can you do dancer pose?” Britta balanced on one leg, the other bent high behind her.
“Um, no. I’ll just stick with this.” She bent her knees and thrust her arms out.
“Ooh, chair pose.” Britta copied it. “My drama teacher starts every class with yoga.”
“Oh, well, this isn’t really . . . you’re right. Terrific.” Spider did a few perfunctory reps, then said, “Let’s get going.” She opened the trunk and removed her backpack, which contained water and a sandwich. She also took out a long stick she’d brought, one she’d found on a family hike years ago. She used it for balance and to reduce the stress on her knees. There were also special hiking poles made for that, but that would make her look like an old lady.
She saw Britta notice it, but she didn’t remark.
“I could carry something,” Britta said. “I mean, if you—”
“I’m not an invalid!”
“Sorry.” Britta slung her backpack over her shoulder and strode toward the trailhead.
Spider hurried after her, but Britta was going very fast. She yelled, “You have to sign in.”
Britta returned to the trailhead register, a wooden box containing a binder where hikers wrote down their plans.
“It’s so they can look for your mangled corpse if you fall off a cliff,” Spider tried to joke.
“Would that really happen?” Britta looked worried.
“No, it’s not Mount Everest. And if it was Everest, they’d just leave you there, frozen, if you didn’t make it.”
“You sure are pleasant.”
“It’s true,” Spider protested. “I saw a documentary about it. There are over two hundred dead bodies on Mount Everest. It’s too dangerous to—”
“Just stop. Stop talking about dead bodies.” Britta opened the binder. “Awww.”
Spider finally caught up to her. “What?”
“Look.”
In the Comments section of the visitor log, someone had written, “I said yes!” The person below had written, “Congratulations!”
“Aw,” Britta repeated. “I hope someday, someone proposes to me someplace cute.”
Spider could have said something sharp about not waiting around for a man to make your dreams come true or, at least, point out that the engaged couple would never see the comment below theirs. But she didn’t. It was cute, and she didn’t want to ruin their day from the start. “Wonder if they’re big hikers.”
Britta wrote her name, the number of people in their party, and the time. In the Comments section she wrote, “First hike with a new friend!” and added a smiley face. Was she for real?
“Let’s go,” Spider said.
They started out on the trail. At first, it was pretty easy, almost flat, actually, and Spider regretted bringing the stick. Just something else to carry. Having the right shoes helped, and Spider had looked long and hard for hiking boots that didn’t look orthopedic. But soon, it became a lot steeper and rockier, with places where it was hard to find a foothold. She dug the stick in to keep from slipping as they crossed a stream.
“Pretty hard, huh?” Britta was having no trouble. She had hopped across the stream and generally was like a fricking mountain goat. If anything, she was struggling to slow down for Spider. “Let’s stop for water.”
“I don’t need to.”
Britta plunked down on a flat rock. “I’m thirsty. Besides, if we drink the water, it’s less to carry.” She unscrewed the top. “But you can go ahead if you like. I’ll catch up.”
Spider was sure she would, but she said, “No, you’re right. You should never leave a man behind.” She took a big swig and stretched her legs. Beside her, Britta was doing the same thing. She had been blessedly silent most of the hike so far, only once pointing out a rock that looked like a T. rex. Spider was silent too, thinking about Ruthie. Britta had been right about hiking the easier trail, and she’d been right about Ruthie too. Spider didn’t know which was harder for her to admit, but it was definitely hard to admit both of them at the same time. So, when Britta started to say something, Spider said, “Okay, we should go now.” She stood.
“I was about to say I could use another minute.”
Spider was pretty certain Britta could sprint up the entire mountain, so she said, “Take your time. I want to keep going.”
“What happened to never leaving a man behind?” But Spider pretended not to hear.
Another little stream, another rocky place, another fall on her butt averted by grabbing a branch, another time Britta politely pretended not to notice. Britta had stayed behind for several minutes after Spider started. But soon, she was waiting as Spider struggled uphill. Spider realized Britta had been lying about being out of shape. The girl definitely worked out.
When Spider caught up, she whispered, “Listen.”
“What?”
Britta cupped her hand and gestured toward her ear.
Spider listened. From above, she heard lapping, percolating water. The waterfall. Was Britta worried the waterfall would hear them and get scared away?
“It sounds pretty close,” Britta said. “Let’s go!”
“Go ahead.” Spider surveyed a collection of rocks ahead, trying to figure out which route offered the safest passage, like Buttercup and Westley in the Fire Swamp in one of her favorite movies, The Princess Bride. Spider chose a log that didn’t look too wet, then waited for Britta’s perky ponytail to be far enough away
that she wouldn’t notice if Spider slid on her ass. She took a step. Fine. Another. Fine. Using the stick for balance. It was useful now, but when she planted it in a third spot, it slipped in the mucky brown leaves and Spider felt her foot slide out from under her. She landed on her rear and tobogganed down the mountainside. “Oh!”
“Are you okay?” Britta was already running (running!) toward her. Plus a family of two red-haired parents, three kids, and a dog, all (except the dog) wearing matching T-shirts that said “The McCoys,” all (especially the dog, who didn’t care about ending up in a puddle) more agile than she was, all saying, “Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!” It didn’t come out as cheery as she’d intended. She pushed herself up.
“Are you sure you can get up okay?” Britta asked.
“I said I could,” she snarled, then regretted her brusqueness, especially in the face of the three little red-haired children. “I mean, it’s okay. It looks worse than it is.”
Britta offered her hand, but Spider ignored it. “I’m fine. I’m fine.”
She got to her feet with all of them staring at her. She hated this, hated pity of any kind, hated looking weak and pathetic. She wasn’t. It sucked that her body made it seem that way sometimes, but in her mind, she was strong, stronger than anyone.
The McCoys’ dog came over and licked her leg, and she realized she was bleeding. Great.
37
Kate
WHEN KATE WAS little, she’d had a Siamese cat named Rama, after a Siamese king. He wasn’t allowed outside. Mother had him declawed, so he wouldn’t destroy the antique Chippendale chairs Mother’s grandmother had brought over from England, and Kate had to clean out his litterbox daily. But it was worth it when Rama curled between her legs at night and purred and purred until Kate fell asleep to the soothing sound.
Then, one day, Kate had awakened to find him gone. She checked the kitchen, the living room, even the Chippendale chairs. After a frantic hour, her father broke the news to her: Rama must have gotten out, and he’d found him on the street. “He looked real peaceful, honey. I’m sure it was quick.”
Kate had never gotten another pet. Daddy had offered. Even Mother had told her about a friend whose dog had puppies, and her brother, Blake, had gotten one. But, to Kate, it wasn’t worth the heartbreak.