Girls of July

by Alex Flinn

  44

  Britta

  IT HAD BEEN a week since Britta had suggested she and Spider make the video together, and they had become, if not friends, friendly. They got into a routine together. Each morning, they woke early and Britta did yoga (yes, DVDs still existed up in the boonies!) before breakfast. Spider joined her most days. Britta had initially suggested it to help with Spider’s obvious but unspoken aches and pains. But Britta found that yoga relaxed her too.

  Some days, Kate and Meredith joined them for yoga. Other days, Kate was off on some mysterious mission, and Meredith was out—even more mysteriously—with a boy. Knowing Meredith, Harmon was probably an SAT prep tutor or knew someone on the Harvard admissions committee. That was all she cared about.

  After breakfast, if they weren’t hiking, she and Spider planned their video, going through footage Spider had taken of Ruthie over the years. She had hours, days of it. She also had similar amounts of coverage of her siblings, kids at school, and her cat.

  “Are any of the cat videos funny?” Britta asked Spider one day, sitting on Britta’s bed, watching Spider’s laptop. “Like, maybe you could build up a following with a funny cat video, then get those same people to watch your video about Ruthie.”

  Spider stretched out her fingers and grimaced. “That’s your marketing plan? Cute cat videos?”

  “Not my entire plan.” Though she was still working on her plan.

  “That’s good, because Ilse mostly just lies there.”

  “Then why do you film her so much?”

  Spider raised an eyebrow. “Duh. Because she’s my kitty!”

  It was pretty funny to hear her refer to “my kitty” while wearing a T-shirt depicting the Psycho shower-stabbing scene, but Britta said, “Oh, yeah, that is actually a pretty good reason. I miss my cat. You should have brought Ilse up here.”

  “She pukes in the car, or I would have.”

  “Another good reason. You’re crazy logical today.”

  Spider hit Britta with the chipmunk pillow she’d bought from the quilt lady.

  “That was completely unprovoked!” Britta said.

  Late mornings, they did more of that, or they went to the old, mildew-smelling town library to use the internet and research how to make a video go viral. Some ways were easy (release it on a Monday or Tuesday! Make it short!). Others were harder (give it a viral title). Others were harder still, like figuring out who would want to share their video.

  “It says, figure out products that might tie in with your video,” Britta said, looking up from her laptop. “What products tie in with true love?”

  “Can’t think of any products,” Spider said. “Maybe theaters, theater blogs. And LGBTQIA bloggers, though that’s not a product. But maybe they’d think it’s a compelling story. They were separated because of society’s disapproval. But now they can be reunited.” Spider glanced around at the library shelves, which held books that looked like they were from Ruthie’s summer stock days. The windows were stuck together with layers of white paint. “You think Ruthie will like it, right?”

  Britta paused in her reading. “I hope so. We were going to show it to her first, remember?” She realized that posting the video would out Ruthie (and maybe Janet) to her family and friends. They absolutely needed to get her approval first.

  “Of course we are,” Spider said. “As soon as we’re finished.”

  Relieved, Britta wrote down some key words she thought should be in the YouTube description, another tip. “Is star-crossed one word or two?”

  “Maybe two with a hyphen. Definitely not one.”

  Britta wrote down all three. She could use all of them as tags, just in case, and figure out which was the most popular for the actual description.

  “I wish we had some film of them together,” Spider said. “Or, at least, some more photos instead of just that one.”

  “Um . . .” Oh. Britta hadn’t mentioned the scrapbook to Spider, since that would mean also admitting she’d snuck around. And snooped. She and Spider were getting along really well, which was good since the other two girls kept disappearing. But Britta wasn’t sure how Spider would react to her snooping and sneaking. “Do you think there might be some film? Or, I think she mentioned a scrapbook? Can you ask her about that?”

  Spider looked down. “You should ask. You’re outgoing and talkative. I’m the one who hasn’t asked my own grandmother about this in seventeen years of life. And she loves you. You’re like a little mini-me with all the theater stuff.”

  Wow. It almost seemed like Spider admired Britta. Britta didn’t say that though. “She likes me. She loves you. It would be more meaningful coming from her granddaughter.”

  Spider seemed to accept this, and that night, when the girls were making dinner (a simple stir-fry that didn’t require dismembering a chicken), Spider walked over to the kitchen table where Ruthie was reading.

  “So, Ruthie?” Britta heard Spider say. “Do you have any photos or scrapbooks of you when you did summer stock around here? It sounds so cool.”

  “You never seemed interested before.”

  “Yeah, well, Britta . . .”

  “You two are spending a lot of time together. You’ve gotten over your initial animosity.”

  She’d told Ruthie she disliked Britta? Britta felt betrayed.

  “Yeah, well . . .” Spider lowered her voice, and Britta strained to hear. “She’s not that bad, I guess.”

  Britta couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation over the sound of angels singing. To have Spider actually acknowledge that she was “not that bad” was incredible. She’d live on this for the next week.

  “What are you smiling about?” Spider asked over dinner.

  “Nothing. Just happy.”

  Later that evening, Spider knocked on Britta’s door.

  “Come in.”

  Spider tossed two scrapbooks onto Britta’s bed. One, Britta had seen before. The other, she hadn’t. “Jackpot.”

  They looked through them. The first, of course, was photos, programs, theater stuff.

  The other was full of handwritten letters.

  October 23, 1963

  My dearest, darling Ruthie,

  No, I can’t tell either. Our love will have to be our secret, yours and mine alone, always. Always. My family would disown me if they knew, so they must never know. I have to admit that having a secret like this, though sad, is also delicious. I don’t have to share you with anyone! We will be together soon, and we will be so happy! As for my family, they will just have to believe that I am an unfortunate spinster who lives a very mundane existence in the city—but for the presence of my platonic roommate, who is a star on Broadway. I know that you will be, my darling. I must be content to bask in your light. But bask I will, and soon.

  I’ve put in my applications to the colleges we discussed. Hunter seems like the best bet. I will keep you posted.

  I miss and love you, but I am making plans.

  Love, JC

  45

  Spider

  INT. SPIDER’S ROOM — DAY

  Spider is sitting at her computer, wearing a T-shirt that says “I speak fluent movie quotes,” poring over Janet’s letters. A voice-over of YOUNG JANET reads excerpts from each of them, her voice overlapping itself in places.

  YOUNG JANET (VO)

  Remember when we went to the Italian restaurant?

  Remember when we tried to pierce each other’s ears, but I chickened out?

  I was just thinking about that day with the champagne!

  I can’t wait until we can be together again!

  THE LETTERS OPENED up whole new vistas to Spider. Before she’d seen them, Ruthie and Janet were like girls in a novel. Now they were real girls who wrote prose that was a little too purple. But reading about their shared experiences and shared plans, the fact that Ruthie had priced apartments and was practicing her typing while Janet worked in a five-and-dime store to save money, made it all so real, and in the end, so poignant.
All the letters were in Janet’s handwriting, so when Spider reached the final letter she understood how hard it had been for Ruthie to receive it—and for Janet to write it.

  The filmmaker in her wanted to tell the entire story from start to finish. But Britta’s tips (keep it SHORT!) rang in her head and made her focus her vision. And she’d been obsessing over the title. The working title was “Help My Grandmother Find Her True Love.”

  “Do you think that’s too long?” she asked Britta a few days later when they attempted Mount Prospect near Lake George. It required walking on a scary bridge over the expressway. It was also possible to drive all the way up by car, but they were climbing.

  “I thought we were taking a break from the movie today,” Britta said.

  “I know, but I get obsessed,” Spider said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Britta admitted. “I think the title’s catchy, but I wonder if we should mention that they’re two women.”

  “I thought about that too. Do you think it would be less viral because of haters?”

  “Haters gonna hate, hate, hate,” Britta sang.

  “Okay, Taylor.” Spider laughed and stepped over a branch. The good thing was, with her mind on something else, the climbing was easy. Spider knew that getting into a rhythm was the trick. After this, she’d try to persuade Britta to climb one of the fire tower mountains.

  “Or maybe star-crossed love? Lost love for sure.”

  “Help My Grandmother Find Her Lost Love? Help My Grandmother Find the Girl She Lost?” Spider suggested.

  “They’re both good.”

  Spider had written the script. It would begin with her, in a voice-over, saying that Ruthie had met Janet in 1962, and they’d fallen in love. In the background, Britta (as Janet) would read poignant passages from her letters, talking about all their plans. Visually, it would show the beautiful woods where the theater had been, photos of the girls, scrapbook pages. The last seconds would focus on Ruthie alone, filled with memories and wondering what happened to Janet. Then, it would appeal to people to help find Janet, if they knew her.

  “Do you think it’s too schmaltzy?” Spider asked Britta.

  “It depends. What’s schmaltzy?”

  “I keep forgetting you don’t have a Jewish grandmother. It’s like cheesy.”

  “Ah. My grandmother would say picuo. Or sometimes, es como una de mis telenovelas.” At Spider’s questioning look, she added, “Like one of my soap operas. I’m thinking Cuban grandmothers and Jewish grandmothers are similar.”

  “Probably. They’re probably so alike they’d hate each other.” Spider turned sideways to go up some rocks. “But I bet yours doesn’t talk about getting naked onstage.”

  Britta laughed. “Only from lack of opportunity.” They were almost to the top. Almost there. Britta stopped climbing and looked thoughtful. “Your video’s going to be so good. I wish it could be longer, tell the whole story.”

  “I was thinking about writing a full-length script,” Spider admitted, catching up to Britta. “After I know how it ends.”

  “Shut your mouth! That would be so great. I wish I could see it. I wish I could be in it.”

  “Maybe . . .” Spider stopped. She was about to say maybe Britta could be in it, but that was stupid. She wasn’t going to make a whole movie over the summer, and Britta would be gone after that. Her thighs suddenly ached with the effort of climbing.

  “What were you going to say?” Britta stopped climbing.

  “Nothing. It’s dumb.”

  “I’m going to be in New York for college auditions next year, and maybe for college after that. I have to talk my mother into it, but I will. So we can still see each other after this summer.”

  Spider gestured to Britta to keep climbing. “We’re almost there.” She felt good, mostly, but she also felt like if she stopped, she wouldn’t want to start again. She also wasn’t quite ready to admit she’d miss Britta when she was gone. But weirdly, she felt like she might. It was almost like Britta was some kind of annoying little muse.

  They continued trudging uphill, Britta talking to hikers who were coming down, asking how much farther it was, stopping to pet every single dog. Finally, they reached the summit. It was crowded with people, people who’d driven there, mostly, people climbing on rocks, clustering around binoculars that cost a quarter to use.

  “I don’t have a quarter,” Britta said. “Do you?”

  Spider shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. The sky is so cloudless.” She remembered a line from a song in a Barbra Streisand movie. “I feel like I can see forever.”

  46

  Meredith

  Essay topic: Please tell us how you spent the last two summers.

  RIGHT NOW, IF Meredith had to write an essay about what she had done this summer, it would be a total fail. What would she say: I fell in love? Yeah, that would get her into Princeton. And yet, it was true, with all the movie-montage connotations that went with it. Someone who knew how to make movies, someone like Spider, would cut her whole summer together to a Coldplay song. Her and Harmon hiking and caught in the summer rain, goofing around in the river, kayaking until the boat tipped over (okay, the boat never tipped, but in the movie version, it would), looking at the beautiful star photos Harmon took, kissing under the night sky.

  God, what would she say? That she liked the way she felt when she was around this guy? Yeah, that made her sound like a serious student. But she did.

  She also liked the person she was when she was around him, the person who wasn’t stressed out and competitive all the time, the person who didn’t have panic attacks.

  She kept waiting for Harmon to mess up in some way, for some reason other than his not being a book or an essay or an activity she had to do. But he stubbornly refused to be anything less than a wish-fulfillment boyfriend.

  Still, she kept searching for the catch. There was always a catch. You can have a great father, but you can only keep him until you’re nine. You can have a 5.2 GPA, but you have to be willing, on occasion, to feel like you’re having a heart attack. What was the catch here? Harmon was too good to be true. He was nice, and for someone so determined not to be educated, he seemed smarter than most of the boys she knew in her AP classes at school.

  “Why don’t you want to go to college?” she asked him one day as they were driving through the mountains. They were on a field trip to Vermont, because they couldn’t go to Canada without parental permission, and Meredith wanted to go somewhere. It was only an hour away by ferry, but they were taking the long way, wandering, but not lost, as Harmon’s bumper sticker said.

  “I feel like that question has been asked and answered, as they say in the lawyer shows. I hate school, and I suck at it.”

  “College isn’t like high school. They don’t make you take English every year.” She knew English class and reading books by “dead guys” was a big sticking point with Harmon. “You take a few required courses, then you take what you’re interested in.”

  “Have you been talking to my mother?”

  “Maybe,” Meredith admitted.

  “Why do you want to go to college, and not just any college, but the hardest college?”

  Meredith stared out the window at the rocky gray mountainsides whizzing by. They’d passed an exit for State University of New York at Plattsburgh. The next exit was for Vermont. It was like she’d reached a crossroads, like Frost’s two roads diverging in a narrow wood, and she had to decide which one to take.

  “I want to be a lawyer. You need to go to school for that.”

  “But why do you want to be a lawyer? You want to help people in trouble? You want to make a buttload of money? You’ve just watched that many episodes of Law and Order SVU?”

  “I don’t think I’ve watched any,” Meredith said. “I don’t know. My mom’s a lawyer, and my father was too. They started my college fund when I was in utero, and after my dad died, my mom put in the Social Security checks I got too. It’s always been . . .” Meredith stopped.
She’d been about to say a dream. Her mother’s? Her father’s? Or her own? “I’m smart in school, and everyone’s always known I’d go to a top college and then law school.”

  “What would happen if you didn’t go to a school like that?”

  She imagined what her friends, what Hannah or Lindsay, would say if she suddenly announced she wasn’t going to college or, more likely, was just going to stay home and attend the University of Miami (a perfectly good school where they’d probably give her a full ride) instead of applying to Harvard or Princeton. They’d think she’d lost it. And they’d be happy because she wouldn’t be competition for them. Plus, they could point to her and tell their parents at least they weren’t like flaky Meredith. God, did she even like her friends?

  “Meredith?” Harmon had been talking, and she hadn’t heard him.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I said what would happen if you didn’t go to some fancy school?”

  She shrugged. “Everyone would know I didn’t get in, and I’d be a cautionary tale. Like, they’d say, ‘Don’t slack or you could end up like Meredith.’ And my mother would flip out.”

  “Okay, so we know what your mother and your friends want. What do you want?”

  She thought a second, and she realized she did know something. “Well, I don’t want to stay home. A lot of the colleges I’m thinking about are pretty close to here, actually. Cornell’s in Ithaca. Dartmouth’s less than two hours away.” She had looked that up on Google Maps. Dartmouth was the closest, even though it was in New Hampshire.

  Harmon pumped his fist. “Well, go, Dartmouth . . . what’s their team called?”

  “The Big Green.” Meredith could run a Jeopardy category on Ivy League mascots. Everyone knew Yale’s bulldog, but how many people knew Penn had the Quakers?

  “The Big Green? Is that what dances on the sidelines at football games?”

  “It’s not a big football school. But I think their mascot is an anthropomorphic keg.”