by Lara Zielin
I tapped my pen against my teeth and looked at my notes. Suddenly, a spark flared in my memory. “Didn’t the Paul Bunyan Press run something about Mollico a couple years ago?” I asked. I closed my eyes, trying to remember the exact headline, but all I could recall was Molly huffing at Nat and me, saying her dad was being falsely accused of something.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Some of the farmers in Owosso had cows that kept getting these weird tumors, and they asked the Minnesota Department of Environmental Quality to look into it. The Mollico land was suspect for a while, but they were never able to prove the connection to the tumors. In the end, just to be safe, my dad buried the whole thing by giving the farmers a bunch of cash. But even still, the state flagged the land and said they would keep an eye on it. If my dad can unload it before someone finds something, he skates out of the mess free and clear.”
I chewed on the end of my pen. Jake’s theory was starting to look more credible. “The documents you found,” I said, “where are they now?”
“I left the originals there, but I took a picture of them with my phone.”
I nodded. It was good work, but something still wasn’t clicking with me. “But how is this connected to the prophecy?” I asked. “Assuming, of course, that it is.”
Jake pressed his fingertips together. “That’s the piece of this I can’t figure out, Em. I feel in my gut there is a connection. I can’t explain it, but I know it’s there. I wanted to tell you about it before, ever since the baptism. I’m sorry I didn’t, but things were . . . well, you know.”
I stared at the table. If I hadn’t been such a jerk to Jake, he would have told me all this months ago.
“We should tell my dad this,” I said finally. “It might not be connected to the church, but we should definitely let someone know.”
Jake’s brown eyes got worried. “You’re probably right,” he said. “But I don’t know if I can. I mean, this is my dad’s company.”
“But the board is voting about my mom this weekend,” I said. “Do you really think we can keep everything you just told me a secret?”
“Cripes, I don’t know,” Jake replied, frustrated. “All I could think about when I got your phone call was that we should talk. I hadn’t gotten much further than that.”
“Okay,” I said, softening. “Okay, let’s just think about it for a second. Look, it’s late and we’re tired. What if we sleep on it and figure out what to do about this in the morning? Nothing’s going to happen tonight anyhow. It’s too late. Er, too early. So, let’s say we meet tomorrow at some point and go from there?”
Jake smiled, showing two rows of perfectly straight, white teeth. How had I not noticed such gorgeous teeth before? He put his hands over his head and stretched, and I caught a glimpse of his toned abs. I nearly drooled. “Okay,” he said. “We can talk more tomorrow.”
“Fair enough,” I replied, trying to sound casual and professional. But my stomach was already doing somersaults at the idea of seeing Jake again.
Chapter Ten
As I stepped outside into the late-night darkness, I was surprised at how quiet the camp was. A few voices and noises drifted to me in the air, but everything was largely silent. I could hear a chorus of crickets and frogs in the distance. I watched Jake’s shape disappear into the parking lot and wished he didn’t have to head home. I wished we could have kept talking all night.
I took several big gulps of the fresh night air and tried to clear my head as I walked back to my tent. I almost couldn’t stand my luck. Not only did Jake not hate me, but he had information that could help my mom.
I almost didn’t believe it. And then, for a moment, I wondered if I should believe it. What if this was a trap? The information Jake had given me was interesting, but still, it was a little spotty. What if it was all made up and what if Jake was getting revenge for the way I freaked out about the “I love you” thing? What if he was pretending to be my friend and help me, only to humiliate me somehow down the road? It wasn’t exactly a stretch of the imagination, considering the way Molly had turned on me.
Even if that were the case, there was a part of me that wanted to just go on talking to him because it felt so easy. If things really are okay between us, I thought, I should tell him everything tomorrow.
Everything starting with what went down just a few weeks ago—when Nat and I had spoken our last words.
So far that summer it had just been the two of us—Molly wouldn’t hang out with Nat when I was around and vice versa—but Nat and I weren’t getting along anyway. Whenever we hung out, it would be fine for a little while, but then we’d always end up snapping at each other like irritated alligators. I tried convincing myself that everything was fine, but more and more I realized that instead of getting beyond our fight that day after biology, we’d been avoiding it. It was like when my mom sometimes shoved a pepper or an onion to the back of the fridge and then forgot about it until it began to rot, and the sticky smell oozed out every time we went to grab a glass of milk or a piece of bread. With me and Nat, the same thing happened—and now the decay was still working its way through our friendship like a cavity, and we could feel the ache of it even if we weren’t brave enough to look at it.
That is until Nat told me she and Carson had had a powwow about how to handle Nat’s dating restrictions, and they had decided they should just put it all out in the open with Nat’s parents and see what happened.
“Oh, Emma,” Nat said, perched on top of Lizzie’s slide in my backyard, her words all shivery and whispery as the air grew darker and cooler around us, “it was so awesome. We figured we should just ask my parents for permission to date and come clean with how much we liked each other. So right away I went home and told them all about Carson and how much I cared about him. I asked them to let me date now instead of in September when I turn seventeen, and they said yes! Can you even believe it?”
I didn’t say anything for a moment because I couldn’t. I fingered the chain of the swing I was sitting in and tried to ignore the fact that my mouth felt like it had been stuffed with corn husks. “Don’t you want to think about this?” I asked finally. “I mean, what do you guys even have in common?”
Nat looked down at me from the top of the slide. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s Carson Tanner. He thinks it’s cool to push freshmen into lockers. He doesn’t exactly seem like your type.”
Nat tilted her head and her thick hair fell to one side. “What’s your deal with Carson? Are you jealous or something?”
I laughed. “Uh, negatory. In case you missed it, I don’t go for the blond jock type. As far as I can tell, Carson doesn’t really have any brains.”
Nat shrugged. “Well, I like him. And he likes me. Right now that’s all that matters.”
Except for me! I wanted to shout. Molly and I were no longer friends, Jake and I weren’t talking, and now Nat was going to leave me so she could spend all her time with her tongue down Carson’s throat. Lizzie was looking like my best chance at a social life in the immediate future.
I tried a different tactic. “Don’t you think you guys just, I don’t know, are from different worlds? I mean, what’s he going to say about Living Word Redeemer? Or the fact that you fast for church, like, twice a month? Don’t you think that’ll make going out to dinner just a teensy bit hard?”
I said it like I was joking, but Nat didn’t even attempt a smile. Instead, she just leaned back and looked up at the dark sky. “I don’t know. And part of me doesn’t really care.”
Now I was getting mad. Maybe I was a little jealous, but there was something else too—a thought that was like an itch in my mind, making me wish I could reach behind my eyes and scratch it.
Three months ago, back in the lunchroom, Nat had basically defended Mr. O’Connor’s stance on women. That meant that in Nat’s world women couldn’t do empowering things like preach, but they could do completely idiotic things like date guys they had nothing in common with, who probably had
no clue what Christian faith even was.
I could feel anger spreading through my body like a poison. “You should hear yourself,” I said in a low voice. “You really should. It’s like we should give you an apron and throw you back into the 1800s or something.”
Nat hopped off the slide and took a step toward me. “What are you talking about?” she asked. I could feel the fury radiating off her.
“I’m talking about you,” I said, standing up too. “You basically stuck up for Molly when she said her dad was right about women not preaching, but now you’re going around getting excited about dating a guy who doesn’t even know what the New Testament is.” My hands were shaking and the swing set was getting all out of focus as anger blurred my vision.
“How can you say that?” Nat asked, getting right in my face. “I wasn’t defending Mr. O’Connor that day in the lunchroom. I was trying to make you see my point about supporting your friends when it matters. I mean, why is it you expect me to see your point of view about everything when you won’t even see my point of view about . . . anything?”
I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. Nat was wrong—it wasn’t that I didn’t understand her point of view, I just wanted her to stay away from Carson.
“Don’t change the subject,” I said. “All I’m saying is that you’re making a huge mistake about Carson.”
Nat scoffed. “Oh, so I see. Well, how about this? If you won’t even try to understand how I feel about Carson, then how about I stop trying to understand how you feel about your mom? I mean, heck, if you have a Bible handy, then please allow me to point to all the scriptures that say she’s sinning by being a preacher.”
I smiled like I thought that was the funniest thing ever. “Go ahead and point,” I said. “It’s no sweat off my back if you show the whole world what a hypocrite you are.”
“I think the hypocrite here is you, Em,” Nat fired back. “Not to mention you’re a jealous, narrow-minded, poor excuse of a friend.” Nat turned on her heel and started walking around the house toward her car parked in our driveway. I was almost glad to see her go. Good riddance.
“Hope you’ve already gotten the HPV vaccine!” I called after her. “Cuz you’re going to need it when you and Carson start messing around!”
And Nat? Right then she actually flipped me the bird.
And that was it. We hadn’t spoken a syllable to each other since.
Chapter Eleven
The Harleys rumbled to life, and I looked at my watch. Nine A.M. Jeez. Way to let the camp sleep in, guys.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, then ran a brush through my hair quickly. I pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and decided that was enough prep to get me to the GaSmart, where I could finish getting ready.
I unzipped my tent and stepped outside into the chilly morning, which felt scrubbed clean from the cool night air. I took in a couple deep breaths and felt taller, fresher.
“Morning, Emma!” called Bear from the Harley camp. I smiled and waved.
“Hey.”
“Did you sleep well?”
“Yep, thanks. You?”
“Like a baby,” said Bear, opening a bottle of water and dousing his bald skull with half of it. He shook his head and looked very much like his namesake, as if he would be just as comfortable in the middle of a rushing Alaskan river, shaking the water off his fur after eating a mouthful of salmon.
“We’re going to go for a quick ride this morning, then we’re going to return to camp before heading out again,” said Bear as he unfolded a towel to dry his face. “Would you like to join us later?”
“Really? Where are you going?”
“I don’t know, actually. Maybe we’ll ride toward Trout City and perhaps stop off somewhere for lunch. What do you say?”
Riding with the born-again Harley gang? Even though I didn’t want to spend my donut camp time hanging with more Christians, my Paul Bunyan Press story was calling and I had only one day left to get it. This was an interesting bunch of people, and I had to admit there was story potential there—even if I hadn’t exactly uncovered it yet.
“Thanks, that sounds good.”
Anita poked out from behind Bear. Her hair was pulled back in a stringy ponytail, making her lean face look even leaner. Her sharp cheekbones protruded from her face like the edges of a cliff. American flag earrings hung from her ears and glinted in the morning light.
“Hey there, Emma,” she said, lighting a cigarette.
“Hey, Anita.”
“You coming with us later?”
“Yeah, Bear just invited me. It sounds cool.”
Anita took a big drag from her cigarette, then exhaled smoke. I noticed that although her fingernails were painted, the tips of her fingers were yellowed with nicotine. “We’re not going to any sit-down restaurants for lunch,” she said, blowing smoke while she talked. “That okay with you?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
There was a pause, during which Anita took another drag, and then my curiosity got the better of me. “Um, any special reason?”
Anita motioned me closer with a quick flick of her bird-like head. I took a few steps in—close enough to smell the stale smoke pressed into her biker jacket like layers of sediment pressed into the Grand Canyon—and stopped. She looked me up and down.
“You ever had a job?”
I nodded. “Sure. My parents make me work all the time.”
“You ever had a job your parents didn’t make you do?”
I lifted my chin a little. If Anita thought I didn’t know what hard work was, she had another thing coming. I’d been working since I could remember, even if I didn’t get paid for it by an “employer” so to speak. But my parents were the toughest bosses of all.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Anita, maybe sensing I was defensive, redirected her question. “You ever been a waitress?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Well, I have. Best and worst tips I ever got were at a place called Happy ’s in Missouri.”
“Anita had some difficulty there,” Bear interjected.
“There was a short-order cook named Gus who took a liking to me,” Anita continued, “but I didn’t feel the same way about him. He kept asking me out and I kept sayin’ no, until finally he decided to do something about it.”
“He made Anita’s job at Happy’s quite challenging,” Bear explained, looking down at the top of Anita’s head.
“Challenging how?” I asked.
“I’d send an order back to the kitchen and he wouldn’t cook it,” Anita said. “I’d have tables that waited over an hour just for omelets and toast. Wasn’t nothing I could do about it when they thought it was my fault. I’d try explaining, but what could I say? They wound up not tipping me and my paychecks got a lot thinner. I told the manager about it, but you know what his response was?”
I swallowed. “What?”
“Said I should just sleep with Gus, get it over with, and then get back to my job.”
Bear smiled sadly, in a way that puffed out his stubbly cheeks.
“Jeez, Anita,” I started. It was all I could think of to say.
“It’s okay, kiddo,” she said, her pencil-thin lips pale. “I was just telling you so you knew why we didn’t go to any sit-down restaurants on our ride.”
Bear gave Anita’s shoulder a pat and looked at me. “Meet back here at eleven-thirty?” he asked, changing the subject.
I nodded. “Sure thing. Eleven-thirty.”
“See you then,” said Anita in her gravelly voice, and crushed the end of her cigarette into the grass with the heel of her black leather boot.
Poor Anita, I thought as I picked my way through camp toward the GaSmart. As bad as things were at Living Word Redeemer, thank God I wasn’t being asked to sleep with someone just to make the issues go away. Was this common among waitresses? I wondered. And, if so, did the fact that I had no clue about it mean that I was completely sheltered, or simply that I didn’t kno
w very many waitresses?
I tried to keep my thoughts focused on Anita as I made my way through the camp, yet, as much as I tried not to, I also thought about Jake as I walked. Suddenly hot Jake. Son of the man who was trying to ruin my parents’ lives Jake.
Logically, I knew I shouldn’t feel anything except contempt for an O’Connor, since they say the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to trust Jake. He seemed like a very atypical O’Connor anyway, like he’d fallen very, very far from whatever tree that family grew from. I imagined an O’Connor family tree and pictured the twisted, bloody tree in the Johnny Depp Sleepy Hollow movie—the one with all the severed heads in it.
As I approached the GaSmart, I saw there was a line for the women’s bathroom. Of course. There were even more people at the camp this morning, and the GaSmart was one of the only decent places to pee. There were Porta Potties along the perimeter of the donut camp, but they didn’t have running water and, well, they were Porta Potties.
The line stretched out the front door and snaked along the side of the building. If I was going to have to wait this long, I figured I could at least use the time to do some more interviews. It couldn’t hurt, after all. I stepped in line behind two college-age girls who were sharing iPod headphones. They looked like they were in the middle of making a playlist. I dug out my notebook and pen and took a deep breath. “Excuse me,” I said, tapping one of them, a blond with black-rimmed glasses, on the shoulder. She looked up from the iPod and took the earpiece out of her ear.
“Yeah?”
“Um, excuse me, I was wondering if I could ask you two some questions. For a story I’m doing? It’s on the campout.”
The other girl, who had brown hair and was wearing a T-shirt showing two unicorns humping, nodded. “Okay. Sure.”