“The chipmunk and the squirrel,” I say. “Pretty hot.”
“What are you, jealous? What were you doing all afternoon, finding two things? What were you up to?”
“We were just talking, Cass. And you made the teams, not me.”
She turns me around to face her, and I see all over again how gorgeous she is, her hair down and loose, her eyes bright blue and alive. Really, she looks like someone from a magazine.
“I think you need to be talking to me, not her.” She slides her hands over my shoulders, her blue T-shirt lifting up over her tanned belly as she raises her arms.
“You weren’t here.”
“Is that how it works, Luke?” Her gaze falls away from my face for a moment, and she looks genuinely hurt. “You can only see what’s in front of you? Would you like me to be like that?”
I look at her, shake my head. “No, I wouldn’t.”
“I mean, I talk to Mark, but I’m not talking to him. I’m thinking about you, about us.”
About winning, I think, but don’t say it. How can I? I mean, she’s right—I shouldn’t be here kissing Cassie when all I thought about all afternoon was kissing Ella. That’s not how I want it to be, not any of it. If the world is fake, then I don’t want to be fake, too.
“You’re right,” I tell her, letting my fingers move through the tips of her hair.
She smiles and slips her hand around my neck to kiss me. “Ooh, say that again,” she says, smiling as she presses her mouth to mine. We kiss, and then she moves her mouth beside my ear, whispering to me.
“Baby,” she says, “I spent the day with that dork for us. I am going to get us that night alone, I promise.” She reaches down for my wrist and pulls my hand up, outside the folds of her T-shirt, until my fingers are resting on the curve of her breast. “You think about that tomorrow when you’re out moving around the park, okay?”
I nod, but can’t really speak, can’t move, my fingers just lightly touching her. She kisses my neck a final time, tells me she has to meet Mark, and, as she exits the bathroom, looks back at me one last time, smiling like she’s already won.
At midnight I tell myself I’m just going for a walk or that maybe Cass will be there to meet me near the castle again, but some other part of me knows the truth, and knows it more fully when I see Ella sitting in the shadows, on our old bench. It seems now like years ago, those nights we used to sit out here and just talk. Or the night she walked off holding hands with Mark. It’s a pretty chilly night for Florida, and she’s wearing flannel pants with pictures of sushi all over them and a Red Sox T-shirt, playing her usual game of kicking off her flip-flop, then sliding it back on.
“When you’re right, you’re right,” she says. “Totally stood up.”
“Hey, you don’t win corporate promotional contests by lying around on your butt sleeping all night.”
“Gandhi said that, right?”
“I think it was Mrs. Gandhi. She was kinda pushy.”
“Like someone else I know.” She scoots over to let me sit.
“Looks like we’re going to win,” I say, letting her comment slide.
“Yeah, at our pace . . . we could win if the contest was extended until, say, the next millennium.”
“No, ding-dong, I meant we are going to win by default. We get the prize and don’t have to do a damn thing.”
She nods, looking off. “Hurrah,” she says.
“I know.”
We are quiet a few minutes, until she starts smiling to herself. “I had fun today,” she says. “I’m still laughing about the pants.”
I smile back at her, nudge her knee with mine. “I’m thinking Dale needs some gym socks and a farm cap.”
She laughs. “You know, they originally had an eighth dwarf, who didn’t have pants, and his name was Sleazy.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, for real. The animators drew him into the movie, then had to take him out.”
“There’s no way,” I say. “I don’t know where you heard that, but there is just no way.”
“I have it on good authority. Mark told me when I told him about that stuff we were talking about today. And he should know.”
I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut, all the air forced out of me. I thought our time under the tree was just that—our time, not to be shared with others. Then again, why wouldn’t she? Suddenly, I’m feeling like an idiot.
“Well,” I say, “I’m shocked.”
She looks at me and smiles. “I know. I mean what were they thinking?”
“No, it’s not that,” I tell her, almost trying to pull back my words as I say them. “I’m shocked that Mark would talk to you about anything that involves pants. He seems a little . . . delicate for that.”
Her smile disappears; her face looks flushed, even in the dim light. “Mark isn’t gay or something, Luke. He’s a gentleman, not climbing all over me at the breakfast table like your girlfriend does. He’s nice to me. He’s nice.”
“‘Nice,’” I say. “That sounds really thrilling.”
“He can kiss,” she says quickly, not looking at me, her eyes wet. “He’s a good kisser, Luke. That help you get the picture?”
“Yeah, that’s great,” I say, feeling like I want to sink into the bench, into the concrete beneath the bench. “Not as good as Cassie, I bet.”
“God, you are such a child. I mean, nice retaliation.”
I look down at my own feet, shaking my head. “It’s only retaliation if it hits, Ella. You don’t care what I say about Cassie. You just don’t like her, that’s all.”
“Well, Luke,” she says as she stands up to leave, “wrong again. I hope Cassie will be a little nicer to you. Enjoy your prize. And by the way . . . yeah, it hit. Right on target. Congratulations.” She turns and walks off into the dark, toward the dorm, and it’s all I can do not to jump up and follow her.
9
Ella
Some things just suck by default, like a rainy day when you’re planning a picnic, or getting the flu when you have sweet tickets to a Sox game. But other things suck in a way that you don’t expect. Like you’re just rolling along enjoying your day, your weekend, your life, and WHAM, out of the blue, major suckage. And not just the crap-I-stepped-in-gum kind of bad, but the hits-you-like-a-meteor-from-outer-space bad, and suddenly you can’t breathe or think or even remember anything before that very moment. I’ve had three moments like that in my life. The first was when Ash died. That was the worst. Like the Hale-Bopp comet just slid out of its trajectory and smashed down hard on the edge of Maine, tipping it into the ocean. The second was when my parents bailed and suddenly I was floating, not like a kid’s balloon drifting into the sky, but like one of those giant ones from the Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. Like instead of being held down by a hundred volunteers dressed as elves, Snoopy is sliding up into the sky, faster and faster, until he’s just a speck in the clouds, and the TV anchors are babbling on about where it might finally make landfall and kids are crying and the head elf is being dressed down by some upper management at Macy’s. I felt like Snoopy that day, looking down on what used to be my world.
The third sucky moment was today. And it wasn’t just a moment, but a string of minor bad moments all strung together, so that they make a chain that threatens to wrap itself around my neck and strangle me. And the thing is, when I look back over today and try to tease out the various moments, I know the real answer as to why I can’t breathe can’t be found in just today but instead over the last year. Like Ash’s death was a train engine and all these cars kept getting hooked to it, sliding along the rails, going faster and faster until there wasn’t any hope of stopping it. If I look closely, I can see the cars. The orange tank car of my parents heading off to Africa. The green boxcar of leaving my house and my friends to come down to Florida, where instead of fall, they have cruise season, and to celebrate summer, they go inside and live in the air-conditioning for five months. There’s the yellow hopper car o
f my aunt’s house, where I practically raised her kids for four months while she got pedicures and facials and went to Botox parties. The purple boxcar of coming here and realizing that once again, I don’t quite fit in. Like everyone has the life manual and all I got was the CliffsNotes version, which gives you the major plot points but tends to skip over the important details.
It’s the blue gondola car hooked on the back that surprises me. At first, I was just mad, hearing my flip-flops slap against the soles of my feet as I walked away into the darkness, the noise hitting the buildings all around me and echoing into the night. As if I give a damn about how Cassie kisses. I stop in front of the banner advertising Cinderellabration, inviting guests to JOIN THE HAPPIEST CELEBRATION ON EARTH. “Not bloody likely,” I whisper to the cartoon image of Cinderella beaming out at me. I keep walking past the entrance to Fantasyland and into Adventureland. I walk up the steps to the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, ducking behind a tangle of vines when I see the light of a flashlight bobbing in the dark. I sit against the base of the tree and wait for the guard to pass. Getting caught by security and receiving a lecture from Evelyn isn’t how I want to spend the rest of the evening.
It’s funny how even when it’s just you in your head, you try to pretend like nothing’s wrong. Like everything is just fine, thanks for asking. It’s not like I’ve never thought about Luke that way—in the more-than-just-friends way. I mean, he’s smart and funny, and the look in his eyes when he thinks he’s just gotten one over on me almost makes me want to fall into them, but that’s the thing that stops me—the desire for that falling and the knowledge that sometimes when you let yourself fall, you just end up splattered across the rocks.
The flashlight beam bounces off the acacia tree in front of me, making me squeeze farther back into the shadows. The rough bark pulls at my hair as I look up into the branches of the tree. If I concentrate hard enough, I can almost imagine that I’m sitting on an island out in the middle of the ocean waiting for a ship to come and rescue me. Maybe that’s the real problem. I keep waiting for someone to come along and take my hand and tell me it’s okay and they’ll help me find my way back home. But it’ll never happen.
A giggle from the other side of the fence makes me sit up and look over at the flashlight. Not a security guard at all. Two shapes are outlined against the log fence that separates the Tree House from the Lost Boys Campground. Another giggle, and then a low voice and more laughter, this time quieter. I push myself back to standing and peer into the darkness. The spill of the light actually makes it harder to see their faces than if they were in the dark, too. All I can see are two pairs of legs, one ending in pink flip-flops, the other in deck shoes. I step forward toward the railing, hoping to see under the low branches, but the snap of a stick under my foot makes them shut off their light. I hold my breath, counting silently in my head, waiting for them to move forward again.
“Just the wind,” the low voice says, but the light doesn’t come back on. I back up into the shadows again, this time wedging myself between two bunches of hanging vines.
“Are you sure it’s up here?” the other voice asks. This one I recognize—Cassie. Then I hear the flutter of pages. The list. The other voice is Mark’s.
“Just around the bend in the stairs,” he says, ducking his head under the closest branch. “Careful,” he says, and I see him reaching back for Cassie’s hand to help her step across a chain designed to keep visitors off the grass. I lose sight of them as they walk under the stairs and up to the trunk of the tree. “See?” Mark says. “You can see the outline of his ears here and here.” I imagine him tracing his finger along the bark, drawing the outline of a mouse over the wood.
“Okay,” Cassie says. “Ready?” A sharp flash of light from under the stairs. A giggle again, this one fainter. More intimate. They step out from under the stairs, Cassie clutching at the back of Mark’s shirt. They stand in the middle of the sidewalk, blinking against the darkness, then start to walk toward Peter Pan’s Flight, slowly, letting their eyes readjust to the night. Cassie places her hand in the middle of Mark’s back, as if to steady herself. “I can’t see anything,” she says, her voice soft.
“Me neither,” Mark says, smiling over his shoulder at her.
I sit back down on the wooden steps and lean back against the tree trunk, tilting my face up toward the upper branches again. It’s funny, I think. Neither can I.
Ash and I didn’t fight. I mean, sure, in the who-gets-the-last-Toll-House-cookie way, but not in the big I’m-going-to-kill-you way that I’ve seen in the park, where brothers and sisters look like they would gladly trade each other for one of those character-shaped juice boxes if they could. I think it might be partly because we were so close in age—only a little over a year apart. Also partly because he was a boy and I’m a girl. No clothes or Barbies to fight over. But I think the real reason we got along so well was the fact that from the day I was born, our father told us that we had to get along. There wasn’t a choice involved. If Ash got invited to a birthday party, so did I. If I had skate night with my friends, Ash could come along. He was my best friend—even when I was eight and I crashed his secret scout campout, making it so he had to walk me home in the dark while everyone else got to tell ghost stories and eat s’mores. And even when he was a senior and I sprayed his car with shaving cream for graduation and the cream accidentally started eating away at his paint job before we could get it all washed off. Even when I went with my parents down to Yale for Parents’ Weekend and I got food poisoning from warm potato salad at the picnic and ended up puking on his roommate’s bed.
Ash was always the smart one. The one who could always make me laugh. The one all my girlfriends had crushes on. It’s safe to say I practically worshipped him. That’s not to say he didn’t have faults. He was a slob. He couldn’t make a peanut butter and jam sandwich without making the whole kitchen sticky. He was often hard to read—off in his own world, his own head, barely there. I sometimes wonder if that was why he had the accident. If maybe he was thinking about an exam he just took or about a girl he just met, or even just dreaming about nothing in particular. Letting himself drift as he slid along the dark forest road until a deer jumped out or an icy spot hooked his wheel and his car flipped clear off the road and down the slight rise before it came to rest at the base of an old pine tree.
The police officer told my parents that he died instantly, that he didn’t feel a thing, but I suspect they tell everyone that. They say it was about half an hour before another car drove along that same bit of road, the back way from Ellsworth to Machias. That it was another twenty minutes before the volunteer firemen from Cherryfield could get to the site of the accident and cut a hole through the side of the car so they could pull Ash free from the wreck. I hope it was like that—instantaneous. That he didn’t have to sit there and slowly fade away, because I know what he would have been thinking about then. I know while lying there in the cold darkness, drifting, he would have been thinking about me.
“Do you know who speaks Elvish?” Amy spears a kiwi wedge with her fork.
“Need a translator?” I ask. I’m trying to stuff breakfast into me and leave before I run into Luke or Mark or Cassie.
“It was on one of the cards,” she says around her bite of kiwi. “I’m thinking Robin Hood.”
“You know you’re either going to have to reopen the game or burn those cards, don’t you?” I take another bite of oatmeal.
“I like knowing everyone’s secrets,” Amy says, spearing another bite of fruit, a strawberry this time.
“It’s not like you know who they all belong to.”
“Some. The rest I’m working on.”
I take a sip of my coffee and look up as the door opens again. A couple of the Merry Men walk in.
“You done?” I ask, pointing to Amy’s plate, which is still half-full. She squints at me, but when I don’t say anything, she just nods. We walk over to the plastic tubs along the back wall. One for scraps. One for
silverware. One for plates and mugs. We go out into the courtyard. Early in the morning is the only time it’s even half-pleasant out. Beside me Amy munches on an apple she took out of her sweatshirt pocket.
“You’re not supposed to take food out of the cafeteria,” I say, heading toward the picnic table under the trees. “I think that’s rule number seven.”
“You obviously didn’t read the memo with the cafeteria rule addenda,” she says, climbing on top of the table and resting her feet on the seat. “It said that portable food could be taken out of the cafeteria in an emergency.” I sit beside her and pull my sunglasses out of the kangaroo pocket of my sweatshirt and put them on.
“Is this an emergency?” I ask.
“You tell me.” We watch a seagull pick at the remains of what looks to be a slice of pizza.
“It’s complicated,” I say, resting my palms on the table and leaning back.
“Love always is.” She pitches her apple core toward the trash can. It misses, bouncing into the grass. Her voice is soft, almost carried away by the breeze. “Ella, let me ask you something.” She turns to look over her shoulder at me, and I nod. She looks forward again, watching the seagull peck at the apple core, trying to free its seeds. “If you had a choice to make between doing something safe and doing something that could either make you really happy or completely blow up in your face, what would you do?”
I watch the seagull try to fly with the core in its beak, dropping it each time it gets more than a few feet off the ground.
“I guess it depends.”
“On what?”
“I’d do a cost analysis on it. You know, figure out what I would stand to gain versus what I would stand to lose.”
“What if it’s everything either way,” Amy asks. “And it doesn’t depend on you, but on something you can’t control?”
“Sounds like a bad risk,” I say. The seagull grabs at the core again, pressing it into the ground for leverage.
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