Girls of July

by Alex Flinn

  “You could just say thank you, you know,” he said, putting down a rock.

  “Thank you.”

  He turned away to find another rock, then turned back. “Look, I know you don’t . . . is there any way, could you just ask Meredith to talk to me?” His face was all sad and scrunched up, like a blown-apart dandelion. “Please.”

  Spider knelt to pick up some of the branches. “So let me get this straight: You only asked her out to annoy me, and you told her that, but I’m supposed to take your side?”

  “Yes.” He drew in a breath. “I shouldn’t have said that, but . . .” He shook his head.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I know it’s hard for you to feel empathy.”

  “I need to feel empathy for you? Why, when you hate me so much?”

  “You hated me first,” he said. “Ever since we were little kids, that day you made such a big stink about our dog.”

  “It ate my cover-up.” She dropped half the sticks she’d picked up.

  “And my mom made me buy you a new one with money I earned from, like, a solid week of pulling weeds, which I think was just a chore my mom invented to punish me, considering we don’t usually pull out wildflowers. And we had to keep the dogs inside for the rest of the summer, so they wouldn’t bother the little city girl.”

  Spider scoffed. But she’d forgotten they’d bought her a new cover-up, and she hadn’t known Harmon had paid for it himself.

  “From day one, you always acted like you thought you were so much better than us.”

  Spider laughed in disbelief. “Thought I was better than you? You thought you were better than me. The rugged outdoorsmen.”

  “What? You said we were hicks. You hated us.”

  “I wanted to be you. You and your brothers, all of you. You ran all over the place and had so much fun. You knew all the secret places where animals hid, and you got to stay here all year long, every year.” She was rambling. And as she said it, she realized it was true. “I wanted to swim in the lake in summer, then be here when it hardened to skate in the winter.” It was painful to admit this, painful to admit envying one’s enemies. And yet, didn’t most hate stem from envy, when you came right down to it? Could you really hate someone with all your heart if you didn’t secretly love them with some of it?

  Harmon was stammering. “I . . . I didn’t . . . I never stopped you from doing that.”

  “And your one brother, the one that’s older than you but just a little, the tall, dark-haired one, Brodie, I think. He has some kind of health problem?” She could picture the boy, panting up the hill behind Harmon, even though Harmon was younger.

  “Brodie? He’s got asthma. That’s why we don’t have the dogs anymore.”

  Spider nodded. “One time, he had an asthma attack or something, and you all ran to help him. You found his inhaler, and your other brother, he looked really concerned.”

  “He’d been in the hospital, and we were worried he’d have to go back. You hate us because of that?”

  “No. I liked you because of that. My brother and sister always acted like I was faking when I said I didn’t feel well.” It was a betrayal of her family to say that. But it was also true.

  “That sucks.” Harmon shook his head. “Brodie swims faster than any of us. Mom put him on the swim team because it’s supposed to be okay for people with asthma. He’s teaching swimming at YMCA camp this summer.”

  “I wanted to swim with you guys too,” Spider said.

  “I didn’t know,” Harmon said. “You could have. You still could. Gibb’s coming home for Mom’s birthday in August. He lives in Florida, and Brodie and Tanner and Jackson will be around then too, before college starts. And Colt, but he’s old and boring with kids of his own. It’s sort of a family reunion.”

  “I’m not part of your family,” Spider said.

  He thinned his lips, thinking. “Sure you are. What’s a family without that annoying little sister who gets in the way but everyone still loves? You’ve been around my whole life, every summer.”

  Spider thought about it, then said, “Maybe.” It was nice to think of them that way.

  “It would be fun. Your friends would be gone by then?”

  She didn’t want to think about that yet. Her friends. “Yeah. They’ll leave at the end of the month.” She looked back at the circle of rocks on the cleared land, his handiwork. “That was so stupid, what you said to Meredith. She really liked you. I have no idea why.” She kind of had an idea why. She had eyes, after all, but Meredith seemed too smart for it to be just that.

  “I know. I liked her. I like her.”

  Spider could tell. He looked really destroyed. Like, if she saw an actor in a movie looking like him, she’d think he was overdoing it. And she knew Meredith had been crying about him earlier, but she couldn’t tell him that. Even she knew it would violate Girl Code to do so.

  “You’re kind of like Lloyd Dobler,” she said.

  “Who’s that? Some guy from Long Island?”

  Spider scoffed. “I forgot most people are basically ignorant about movies. Lloyd Dobler’s this guy in a movie, Say Anything. He’s kind of a regular lowbrow guy, and he falls for this really smart girl, Diane Court.”

  “So I remind you of him because he’s stupid?”

  The guy was very perceptive. “He’s not stupid; he’s just . . . normal, and she’s a super-genius, like Meredith. He’s exactly what she needs, but she breaks up with him, and he tries to get her back by standing outside her window and playing ‘In Your Eyes’ on a boom box.”

  His eyes lit up in recognition. Everyone knew that part. It had been parodied on The Simpsons. “The trench coat guy. Does it work? Should I do that?”

  Spider thought about it. “Not really. I mean, she doesn’t come back to him because of the grand gesture, but she does come back to him in the end.”

  It was maybe her favorite “teen” movie, and she smiled thinking about it. She picked up some twigs to use as kindling. Harmon started to get his tools. “Can you talk to her for me?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think it would help. But I can see if there’s an opportunity.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.” He started to walk toward his truck with the tools.

  “Some kind of gesture probably wouldn’t hurt.”

  He nodded. “What kind of gesture?”

  “I don’t know. Something that shows you understand her.”

  “That’s easy,” he said in a voice that indicated it wasn’t. He started to walk away again.

  “Harmon!”

  He turned back again, and she said, “Thanks for helping with this.”

  “Think about coming over next month. It’d be fun to catch up.”

  She smiled. “I will. Thanks.”

  When he reached the truck he said, “Spider? About your family?” When she looked up, he said, “Sometimes, I think people are in denial about how bad you’re feeling because they hope it’s not really that bad, for your sake. That’s how it was for us with Brodie.”

  Spider wasn’t sure if she believed that. It would be nice to think that was true.

  She waved as he drove away. Strange, talking to him after all these years of hating him and his family. She wanted to talk to someone about it. But, she realized, the person she wanted to talk to was Ruthie.

  54

  Britta

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing?” Kate asked when she saw Britta rooting through the laundry room garbage.

  “Getting lint for a fire starter. Weren’t you ever in Girl Scouts?”

  Kate shook her head. “My parents aren’t real into female empowerment.”

  Britta laughed. “My mom’s idea of camping was staying at a Hilton instead of a Hyatt, but our Girl Scout leader, Nancy, taught us to make fire starters out of dryer lint.”

  Kate seemed to have no response to this, so Britta headed to the kitchen.

  Meredith looked at her quizzically when she started taking the paper towels off the roll.


  “I guess you weren’t in Girl Scouts either?” Britta said.

  “Nope.” Meredith waved her hand. “My mother said learning to make a fire was a waste of time. No offense.”

  “None taken. I’ll be ready for a hurricane, and you’ll be in the dark.”

  Spider, to her credit, didn’t have anything negative to say about Britta’s fire starters. But Britta suspected it was just because she was too sad to be sarcastic.

  Finally, they were ready, as the sky was darkening, gathered around the fire.

  “Wow, this looks really good,” Britta said. “I can’t believe you did all this.”

  “I may have had some help,” Spider said, looking at Meredith. “From Harmon.”

  Meredith was silent, so Britta said, “Okay, well, we should get started.” She threw one of the fire starters onto the sticks and lit the end. “I brought lighter fluid, just in case.”

  But when she lit it, it blazed to life.

  “Whoo!” Kate yelled, impressed.

  “Should we tell ghost stories?” Meredith asked a few minutes later as they bobbed their marshmallows over the fire.

  “Does anyone know any?” Kate asked.

  “Ruthie used to tell one about a play she was in, Shakespeare’s Henry VI,” Spider said.

  “Which part?” Meredith asked. “Henry VI is in three parts.”

  Spider said, “I have no idea. But one of the characters, Suffolk, gets killed in the play, and one of the other characters carries around his severed head.”

  “Part two,” Meredith said. “That’s part two.”

  Britta cleared her throat. “You’re being weird,” she whispered.

  “ANYWAY,” Spider said. “It was opening night, and the actor playing Suffolk didn’t show up. They called his phone number, and he wasn’t there. Finally, they sent his understudy on. That was when bizarre things started to happen.”

  “Whoooooo!” Britta said, getting into the mood. It was starting to get dark.

  “First, someone heard a knocking on a dressing room door. Then one of the empty balcony seats started rattling, nonstop. They took an intermission. As soon as the lights came up, the rattling stopped, but when they went down, it started again.”

  The firelight flickered on their faces, and Britta felt a chill.

  “Then, when the prop master went to get out the severed head for Margaret to carry around, he screamed. It was a real head!”

  “Oh!” Kate shrieked.

  “Yes, a real head, the head of the actor who played Suffolk.” Spider was getting into the story now. She stood to finish. “Still slightly warm and dripping with blood. He was murdered, possibly by his understudy! No one knew what had happened to his body. No one ever found it, but from that day on, the theater was always haunted by his ghost!”

  She grabbed Meredith’s shoulder. Meredith shrieked. “You guys!”

  Britta shivered slightly. “That was so scary.” She looked at the marshmallow she was holding over the flame. It was on fire. “Oh!” She rushed to blow it out.

  Kate handed Britta her skewer. “Here, take mine. I like the burned ones.”

  Britta hesitated. “That is unusually nice of you.”

  Kate waggled it. “Take it before I change my mind.”

  Britta swapped with her. “Does anyone else have any stories?”

  No one did, so Britta said, “I think we should move on to the ritual part of the evening, but people can still make more s’mores if they like.”

  “Maybe later,” Spider said. “I don’t like to muck up my rituals with a lot of chocolate.”

  “Fair enough.” Britta licked the chocolate off her fingers and tried to remember things Nancy had said around campfires. She always said they were ancient ceremonies, but Britta suspected she made them up on the spot. “The ancient people believed in cleansing by fire. Fire is a destroyer and a purifier. Its light can bring us closer to the divine.”

  “Oh boy,” Britta heard someone, maybe Kate, whisper under her breath.

  Britta ignored her. “I have asked each of you to bring something to burn, to sacrifice, something you want to forget, to move past. Who wants to start?”

  When no one volunteered, she said, “Okay, I’ll start.”

  She held up a sheet of paper. Her grade report. She’d gone to the library to print it out. “These are my grades. I failed math. So I’m going to have to spend all next month and part of the fall making it up online so I can graduate. But the thing is, it’s part of a general pattern of behavior. I do thoughtless things that make people think I’m stupid.” She looked at Spider when she said thoughtless. “Anyway, I’m burning it as a symbol that I am going to think about my actions more. I want to put that thoughtless part of my life behind me.”

  Britta stood and walked to the fire. She held up the paper. She said, “I offer this report card up to the fire, so that it may be cleansed, so that it may be destroyed, so that it may be forgotten and I can move on to the future. Accept it into the fire.”

  She threw the paper onto the fire. It lit up and sparked in the wind. In seconds, it was gone. Britta turned and went back to where she’d been sitting.

  Spider patted her arm. “I don’t think you’re stupid,” she whispered.

  “Really?” Britta’s eyes got big. “You used to.”

  “I changed my mind. Don’t make a big deal about it.”

  “Okay.” Britta tried not to smile. “Who’s next?”

  “I’ll go.” Kate stood.

  Beside her, Meredith whispered, “I’ll help you with the math when we get home.”

  “Really?” Britta said. “I thought you had to do college stuff.”

  “I’ll put it down as peer tutoring or something. Shh!”

  “I’m her peer!” Britta said.

  Kate cleared her throat.

  “Oh, sorry.” Britta and Meredith both turned to look at her. She was standing over the fire, her blond hair rippling slightly in the wind. She held up a sheath of papers. “This is the list of all the debutante stuff my mother needs me to do—choose three escorts, find a white dress that’s modest enough but doesn’t make me look like the cast of The Handmaid’s Tale, and ten other outfits for parties, think of a theme for the party they’ll throw for me.”

  “A theme?” Spider said.

  “Yeah, like pirates or The Great Gatsby.”

  That actually sounded pretty cool, but Britta realized that was not the point.

  “Anyway, I’ve decided I’m not doing it. When I get back, I’m telling my parents it’s a waste of money.”

  “Won’t they be mad?” Britta leaned forward, eyes wide with admiration.

  “Sure. My mother, at least. My father might be relieved about the money.”

  “Will they still pay for your college?” Spider asked.

  Kate shrugged. “I don’t think they’ll disown me or anything. I mean, it’s embarrassing to have a daughter who’s not a debutante. But it’s way worse to have one you don’t speak to. If they disown me, I’ll just get a job . . . at Hooters.”

  “Ha!” Britta laughed.

  Kate stuck out her chest. “But, more importantly, I’m done worrying what people think of me. I see now that a lot of problems come from worrying about people’s stupid opinions. My dad got in trouble because he spent money he didn’t have, to impress people. And this family I’ve been sitting for won’t accept any help cause they’re too proud to admit that they need it. Being a debutante is worrying about what other people think, on an epic level. So I’m done.” She held the packet close to the fire. She turned to Britta. “Am I supposed to say something?”

  “Oh!” Britta remembered. “Yes. Say, ‘I offer this paper up to the fire . . .’”

  “I remember. I offer this paper up to the fire so that it may be cleansed,” Kate repeated. “So that it may be destroyed. So that it may be forgotten and I can move on to the future.”

  “Accept it into the fire,” Britta said.

  “Accept
it into the fire,” Kate repeated, dropping the papers. They flamed up, higher and brighter than Britta’s report card had. Kate watched them burn, standing until it was gone.

  “Whooo! I feel strangely better!” She turned and sat.

  “I’ll go next.” Meredith stood and held up a paper. She looked at Britta. “Mine’s kind of the opposite of yours. These are my AP scores.”

  Britta rolled her eyes. “Oh, Meredith. Are they not perfect?”

  “They are perfect.” Meredith held out the paper, a printout of all Meredith’s AP scores, eight in all, subjects like German and statistics. Next to each subject was a number, five. Britta guessed that was the highest. The girl was a robot!

  “I’ve been so stressed out and miserable,” Meredith continued. “When school is the only thing you have, it’s scary. I’ve worked so hard, and now . . . what if I don’t get into Princeton or Harvard? Will my friends gloat? Will my mother be ashamed of me?”

  “Oh, Meredith, of course she won’t.” Britta hoped that was true.

  Meredith shook her head “Sometimes, I think I wouldn’t want to live if that happened.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, but Britta was horrified. “Oh, Meredith.”

  “It’s true.” Meredith wiped at her eyes. “I have no friends, not real friends.”

  “I’m your friend.” Britta stood and held out her arms.

  “You don’t think I’m a weirdo who’s obsessed with school?”

  “No.” Britta hesitated, knowing Meredith could spot a lie. “Not anymore.”

  “I don’t know if I even want to go to a school like that,” Meredith said. “I feel panicky just thinking about it, four more years of competing. I just don’t want to be a failure.”

  Kate stood and walked toward her. “Me neither.”

  “Me neither,” Spider said.

  “Me neither,” Britta agreed. “I worry about that all the time.”

  “How to make my parents happy but still be myself,” Kate said.

  “How to be myself without chasing everyone else away.” Spider added herself to the group hug.

  “Whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo!” A wailing noise came from the trees.

  Meredith sniffed and looked around. “Harmon, is that you?”