“They got here a few nights ago.”
* * *
When I get home, the first thing I see is my bike. It seems like the most natural thing in the world to swing a leg over it and ride to the cemetery, where Grimshaw will be waiting for me, except I know that she won’t. An icy feeling clamps onto the small of my back. For the first time, it occurs to me that I might have done something very wrong. Not the kind of wrong you can apologize for, but a permanent wrong, an irrevocable wrong, a wrong someone doesn’t have to forgive you for. An adult wrong. The feeling follows me into the house and upstairs to the portico roof, where I find Allegra and her friend sipping what looks like minted sun tea out of a mayonnaise jar. When I climb through the window, Allegra sits up and shades her eyes.
“Saints preserve us,” she says lazily. “If it ain’t the teenage runaway.” She lies back down and closes her eyes. “Serena, Robyn. Robyn, Serena.”
“Hi, Robyn.”
“Hi, Serena. Nice jacket.”
“Tea?” asks Allegra, holding up the mayonnaise jar.
“No, thanks. I had a big lunch with Mom.”
“Have you been sucking up to the principal again?” Allegra asks.
“You know I’ve always been a suck-up. That’s what explains my success in life.” I take off Bo’s jacket, shirt, and pants. I ball his coat up into a pillow and put it under my head. Trading dirty clothes for sun is good.
“There are actually two jugs of tea,” Robyn explains. “Virgin, and experienced.”
“What’s it experienced with?”
“Bourbon,” says Allegra.
“I’m from Kentucky,” Robyn explains.
“Where is everybody?” I take a sip from the mayo jar of experience. “Damn. This is really good.”
“Aaron’s playing ultimate Frisbee somewhere,” Robyn says. “Spending the night with a friend. Zack’s at extended day care with Nora.”
“Which reminds me.” Allegra puts a hand on Robyn’s arm. “We better not get too drunk. We have to pick him up at six o’clock.”
“I’m not that drunk,” Robyn says. “I’ll get him.”
I eye Robyn and frown. For a newcomer, she seems awfully breezy, somehow, with family information.
Allegra sits up. “I’ll stop drinking, too,” she announces. “I’ll cook.” She pulls on her T-shirt.
“I’ll stop, too.” I take another sip.
“Since we’ve been here, Mom and Scot don’t have to come home much,” Allegra explains. “Robyn and I act as the collective soccer mom.”
“When do you go back to school?” I ask her.
“I don’t. I quit.”
“You quit college?”
“Mom didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“The whole thing reminded me way too much of what I went through last summer in Maine,” Allegra says. “I was out of my league with those summer people. They weren’t real friends, not like I have here.”
They exit through the bedroom window.
After they go, I keep sipping the tea. The sun goes down and the tree frogs start trilling and a warm breeze wafts off Mizerak’s fields, bringing the smell of turned earth. The moon is a few days bigger than it was over the parking lot at Boomtown, Nevada, and it seems like a different moon. I never even found out Bo’s last name. Bo from Texas. That’s all I knew about him. Now that’s all he’ll ever be. I get up to go inside and I jump when I see someone standing over me, waiting for me, silhouetted in the window. It’s Allegra.
“You scared me,” I tell her. “How long were you standing there?”
“I was thinking about college,” she says. “I didn’t know who I was there.”
I look down at my notebook. “I don’t know who I am here.”
“We’re really different, aren’t we, that way?” she muses. “Anyway, we’re going to go downtown to get some food.” After they’re gone, the streetlights blink on over the empty house lots, and I start writing in my upward mobility notebook. Even if everything that happened was a dream, it’s still a dream I don’t want to forget. One week in my life when I really lived, when what I did, for better or worse, actually had consequences.
Many pages later, Robyn and Allegra have long since come back, and Nora and Zack are bouncing on Mom and Scot’s bed and screaming a shrill song about underwear. I shut the notebook and go inside to take a shower.
After the kids go to bed, I sit down in front of some cold pizza and start telling Allegra and Robyn about my trip, starting with the postcard. By eleven o’clock, I’ve just gotten to the part in Grimshaw’s kitchen where I shut the door in Mike Lyle’s face. When Mom comes home, the three of us race upstairs and dive on my bed.
“Serena!” Allegra hisses. “You seduced Mike Lyle?”
“I didn’t seduce him exactly,” I explain. “I just took advantage of his reptilian brain.”
“Who is he?” asks Robyn. “Is he famous?”
“Only within about twenty yards of the football field. He was big stuff back in the day.”
“One of those,” says Robyn. “The savior of the high school, Jesus for a year.”
“I wish I hadn’t done it, though,” I tell them.
“Except your friend would never have left him if you hadn’t provoked him,” points out Robyn.
“Except my friend didn’t want to leave him.”
“Then why did she?”
“He sort of broke up with her, and she left. She’s very proud.”
“Then he’s a prick and you did her a favor.”
“Except now she hates my guts.”
“She’ll get over it.”
“You don’t know Grimshaw.”
It occurs to me that the sharpest image from that whole event is the one I haven’t told anyone about, the black body stocking stretched like a rope in between Mike Lyle’s hands. It still has the power to scare me, even safe in my own home, even with him all the way across the country.
“He actually sort of threatened me,” I blurt out. “For real.”
“Well, you’re very provocative, Serena,” says Allegra. “You know you have a big mouth.”
“Still, threatening is not cool,” says Robyn. “Did he literally threaten you, with words?”
“Well, not exactly with words, per se.”
Allegra turns to Robyn. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve wanted to kill my sister with my bare hands?”
“Not the same,” she argues back.
* * *
At one a.m., Scot comes home, and I’ve just described our night at the Lone Pine Indian Reservation. He knocks on Allegra’s bedroom door, kisses my forehead, tousles my hair, and leaves without saying a word. We go into the bathroom to brush our teeth.
“What’s up with Mom and Scot?” I whisper. I turn on the water so my voice won’t echo.
“Nothing,” Allegra says.
“Is Mom on pills or something?” I ask. “She seemed weird today.”
“She just got off them, you idiot.” Allegra drops the toothpaste cap on the floor and bumps her head on the sink standing up. “She went on them after that fiasco you perpetrated last summer.”
The three of us go to bed. Allegra’s in the middle. “Turn out the light,” she says. I turn out the light. “And don’t talk anymore.”
“You don’t think Scot’s having an affair?” I ask into the darkness.
Allegra rolls over with her back to me. “Serena, go to sleep. Just because your life is a melodrama doesn’t mean everybody’s is.”
“What about Nanci Lee?” I ask.
“What about her? She lives with that cop. Now shut up.”
“What cop?”
“The one that fixes Mom’s speeding tickets all the time. The weight lifter.”
“Oh.” I think about the time I surprised Scot in the Crossways Tavern, and how he seemed much more relaxed with Nanci Lee than he’s ever seemed here. I have an image in my mind of the two of them, how they fit together comfortably on th
e bar stools, reading the paper. Maybe some people just fit together—their broken edges fit together and make them whole again—like Bo and I did for just one night. The fact that Mom and Scot don’t fit together probably matters more than any affair he might be having.
“Scot sold another lot,” she says. “So he works during the day and does contracting at night. He’s not having an affair. He’s too busy.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“I thought they were having an affair,” I tell her. “I better rewrite that part of my upward mobility notebook.”
“Your what notebook?” Robyn asks.
“I keep a notebook for Western Civ, as part of an independent study, and it sort of turned into a lot of other things. It made the trip to Los Angeles with me.”
“That sounds interesting.”
I turn on the light again, zip open my backpack, find my notebook, and show it to her. She leafs through it, reading parts, and for some reason none of this bothers me.
“Very picaresque.” Allegra puts the pillow over her head. “Who’s—” Robyn turns the notebook upside down. “William John Pabo?”
“Who?”
Allegra sits up and snatches it away from her. “From Beaumont, Texas?” she reads.
I take the notebook from them. On the back inside cover, in Grimshaw’s handwriting, is the name and address of William John Pabo, from Beaumont, Texas, complete with zip code and telephone number. I put my face in my hands.
“So who is he? William John Pabo?” Allegra smiles. “Tell.”
I tell them the rest of the story. To get from Boomtown through New Jersey all the way back to Colchis takes until three in the morning.
“So,” Robyn says when I’m more or less done. “That’s Bo’s leather coat, then.”
“Shit,” Allegra says, reaching for the notebook and looking at the address again. “Now that you know his address, you’ll have to have a moral crisis about whether to send it back to him.”
“Allegra,” Robyn says, “look at her.”
I’m still staring down at Grimshaw’s handwriting, wondering if I’ll ever see her again. Allegra puts her arms around me. “You’re in love,” she says. “I don’t believe it. Our little girl is growing up.”
* * *
There is about a month left to the school year. In Western Civ, we’re well into the twentieth century now, talking about fascism and communism and the Cold War. French IV is still the best. Mlle. O’Shea has started calling it French 4 Fun. We play games, we cook, we go on picnics, we listen to her rhapsodize about Paris, and we learn French. There’s just me and the teacher and the exchange student from Kenya and two quiet girls who are going to be doctors when they grow up.
Mom’s first year as principal is coming to a close, so she’s a little less agitated. Aaron is pitching for the baseball team and spends his spare time with his friends building skateboard ramps on the unused driveways of Versailles. Robyn leaves, and Allegra has started to help Scot with the business, lining up subcontractors for a new house that’s going in. She looks impressively professional when she’s on the phone. She sits there at our kitchen table and purses her lips and gets quotes on loads of fill for the new site. Scot gives cocktail parties on the patio in the backyard for prospective clients and pays me to hostess. The new Serena, I’m happy to announce, is post-ironic. I smile and pass around cheese cubes and smoked almonds and say how marvelous it is that Nora and Zack have so many sand piles to choose from, and Scot’s prospective clients beam at me and say isn’t it nice to see a young person with real manners.
I see nothing of Grimshaw, of course. She lives less than a mile away, but she might as well be on a different planet. Rack and Angel are off living their new lives, but I have no more idea what Grimshaw is doing than if she did live in LA. I know one thing, though: the rising star of the Over Easy isn’t going to put up with chasing Whitney and Dallas through the junkyard for very long. Past that, I don’t know.
I don’t like to think about it, but the memory intrudes. It wakes me up in the night, and I try to keep it away from my throat. I lie there with my heart pounding. I should have told her everything in LA.
* * *
“How’s the independent study going?” Mr. C. asks me one day as I’m leaving his class. “The due date is May twenty-fourth, remember. That’s Monday.” He had no idea I’d hitchhiked across the country during my vacation. He gets really excited about it. He says hardly anyone under thirty-five even knows what hitchhiking is anymore.
Although my conversation with Mr. C. makes me less than a minute late for my next class, I get sent to the principal’s office for a late pass, so I just walk out of the school and sit by myself on our old bench and wait for the bus. There’s about half an hour left until the end of school. In my upward mobility notebook, there is one blank page left. I turn to it and start writing a letter to Grimshaw. I describe what happened that day in that hot kitchen in Los Angeles. No interpretation, no justification, just the facts. I can see that any danger to me is in the past and many miles away. But it’s real, and I should have told her.
There is space at the bottom of the page, and I have time, so in the lower margin, I finish the letter by sketching in the suitcase with the bumper sticker for Niagara Falls. And then on top of the suitcase I draw my old friend Irony Man.
I hear a sharp whistle. It’s Prof, looking at me through the side window of the bus.
“You coming?” he yells.
“Hang on,” I yell back. As I hurry through clumps of Colchis High kids, people say hi to me and I respond, but I’m basically back to being the semi-invisible character I’ve always been. Nobody knows exactly what I did during my spring vacation, but it has gotten around that it was a little past the edges of accepted middle-class teenage behavior. I carry with me the whiff of the open world, and my peers draw back from it as if they’re afraid it’s contagious. I climb on the bus and sit in our usual seat. It occurs to me that Prof probably misses Grimshaw, too. She chatted with him every day for all those years, and now she’s gone. He watched her grow up. He watches everyone grow up. Even me. I lean forward.
“Are you looking forward to summer?” I ask him.
“You know it,” he says.
“What do you do during the summer?”
“Garden.” He holds up two fingers. “This many acres big.”
“Flowers? Or vegetables?”
“Both. Don’t you know my farm stand?”
“I go away every summer.”
“Summer is a very blessed time,” he says. “I think this Valley might have the most fertile ground in the country.”
We roll through the streets of Colchis. It’s the moment in spring where the little leaves are sticky and pale green and look like clouds of confetti. In the cemetery, the azaleas are out.
“You want to put some music on?” Prof asks.
“Sure.” I go up and look through his shoe box, but nothing speaks to me until I come to the last one in the box. “Who’s John Coltrane?” I ask.
“Put it on,” Prof says. “You’ll find out.” So I put it on, and today the bus ride home has a jazz soundtrack. Normally, spring afternoons on the bus are pretty rowdy, but today the music has everybody, even the seventh graders, staring contemplatively out the windows. We know the doors on every house we pass by. We know every bend and rise in the road. When we get out into the country, I know the shape and lay of every pasture. I know every rock and maple tree in the windrows that separate them. Watching it all roll by one more time, accompanied by saxophone music, makes it not exactly new, but neutral, separate from me. I see it as if I’ve already moved far away. It’s just land; it was here before we were, and it’ll still be here after we’re gone. It’s not limited by anyone’s experience or opinion. The story’s not over. Anything could still happen here. I catch Prof’s eye in his big rearview mirror.
“This music is good,” I tell him.
“It never gets o
ld,” he says. He turns onto my road and downshifts for the last rise. “So,” he says. “You went to find her. You brought her back. You saved her.”
“Maybe, but … she didn’t really want to be saved.” At this, Prof throws back his head and laughs a good one.
“Yeah,” he says. “They say that’s been going on for about two thousand years.” We’re approaching Versailles. We’re the last stop on Prof’s route. He swings open the door. Coltrane is still playing.
After I get off, I turn around and wave through the door. “Bye, Prof. See you tomorrow.”
“You take care, now,” he yells after me. Even after the bus disappears over the rise in the road, I can still hear the saxophone coming to me through the open windows and over the trees.
When I get home, I tear the letter out of the notebook and fold it up and put it in my pocket. I get on my bike and pedal to Grimshaw’s, down the dirt road, out onto the highway to coast the half mile down to her house.
The junkyard has a deserted feel, like nobody’s been there for a long time, although I can hear the television on inside. The blackberries are in bud. I push my bike through the tall weeds between the junk cars, lean it against a lobotomized Toyota, and knock on the front door. After the heavy noise of her slow approach, the door opens just wide enough for me to see that Mrs. Grimshaw doesn’t have her teeth in. When she sees that it’s me on her front stoop, her face gets so red and angry I think she’s going to reach out and clobber me. Over her shoulder I can see Whitney and Dallas watching a soap opera.
“I have something for Melody,” I tell her. “It’s important.”
“He came and got her again,” she snaps at me.
“He did? Mike?”
“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t Santa Claus.” The door shuts in my face, but I do something that surprises both of us. Right before the door closes, I stick my foot in it. She squeezes my foot and then opens the door very slowly and stands in the afternoon sunlight that slants across the field. I stand there on the stoop for a minute. I open my mouth, but no words come out. There are too many.
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