He gave me my kayak for my tenth birthday. My mother was just as surprised as me when he led us outside after the German chocolate cake. I’d opened up all my other gifts—two sweaters and six books and a Schumann CD I’d requested and a tin of Violetta dusting powder with a massive puff I’d not only not requested, but had absolutely no clue what to do with. My mother and I both thought the birthday was done.
Then he’d said, Might be one more thing outside.
He’d covered his surprise with a black tarp, pulling it off to reveal the sleek yellow vessel. So you can explore, he’d explained.
To my quietly fuming mother, he had said, his eyes dodging hers, Because she’s in the double digits now.
If they fought about it later—him writing such a big check without asking or, the more serious offense, the implication that he knew me best—I hadn’t heard it, and the heating duct in our small house ran right from their bedroom up to mine. I heard their whispered “discussions” all the time.
Eventually my mother grew to accept the kayak. She told her church friends that she liked me to play outdoors all summer. Sermons in stones and all of that.
The lake was small, a crescent of water only six miles around. At the narrowest, southernmost point, where we were, it was only four hundred feet wide. I could paddle across our end in two minutes without breaking a sweat.
Today I took it easy so I could size up the new neighbors as I crossed. I expected them to be outside commanding an army of painters and fix-it people, but the place seemed as run-down as ever, the gutters overflowing with pine needles, the dull wood shingles fringed in moss, the narrow dock as rickety as a gangplank. Whatever the trucks had been there for, it wasn’t visible from the back.
The house hadn’t been rented in more than six months. We were too far from the good skiing and stores, and you couldn’t take anything motorized on our little lake. Everybody wanted to live in Tahoe, or at least Pinecrest.
But there were signs of life. A rainbow beach towel draped over the dock ladder, bags of mulch stacked by the garden gate. The small square garden, to the left of the house, had been untended for years and used unofficially as a dog run. It was basically an ugly, deer-proof metal fence surrounding weeds, but obviously the new owners had plans.
Something else new—a small red spot on the edge of the dock, right at the center. Paddling closer, I saw that it was a kid’s figurine dangling from a nail. A plastic Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, her chest puffed out like when she was on the prow of the ship pretending to be a statue. It definitely had not been there the last time I’d snooped around The Shipwreck.
I wondered if the famous “daughter my age” had done it. I hoped not. It was the kind of joke I liked, and I didn’t want to like her. There was no way we would be friends, not when she found out what I was at school. The best I could hope for was that she would be what I called a Neutral. Someone I didn’t need to think about at all. Someone who didn’t make my day better or worse.
“You look exactly like an Indian princess.”
I jumped in my seat, almost losing my paddle.
A girl was swimming up to me. Her pale skin had splatters of mud on it and she had threads of green lake gunk in her hair. Red hair. The toy Ariel on the dock had definitely been her idea.
“You know, like Pocahontas or someone, with your dark braid, in your canoe?” she continued, breaststroking close enough that I could see it was freckles on her shoulders, not dirt. I’d never seen so many freckles. There were goose bumps, too, which didn’t surprise me. The lake wasn’t really comfortable for swimming until after the Fourth of July.
I composed myself enough to correct her. “Kayak.”
“Right, canoes are the kneeling ones. You coming to see us?” She tilted her head at the house.
Before I could answer, she closed her eyes and sank down into the water up to her hairline. When she popped back up, she squeezed her nostrils between her thumb and index finger to clear them.
“My mother wanted me to bring you this,” I said. I stashed my paddle in the nose of the kayak, yanked my backpack from the front seat, and unzipped it so she could see the cake under its pouf of plastic wrap. “To welcome you and your parents.”
“Parent. Singular. So you didn’t want to bring it? Your mom made you?”
I still wasn’t sure what category she belonged to, but she was definitely not a Neutral.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said.
I was starting to drift from the dock but she swam close and for a second I worried she would grab the hull and capsize me.
At the thought, I automatically gripped my shorts pocket, squeezing the familiar shape, smaller than a deck of cards, through the worn cotton. The Ziploc was only insurance. My good-luck charm couldn’t get wet.
The swimming girl’s eyes darted from my face down to the edge of my shorts, where my hand clutched. She cleared water from her ears, repositioned her purple bathing suit straps, and slicked her red hair back with both hands.
The whole time she performed this aquatic grooming routine, her eyes didn’t budge from my right hand. I forced myself to let go of my pocket and fidgeted with my braid instead.
But her eyes didn’t follow my hand. They stayed right on the zippered compartment of my shorts.
I’d have to invent a new category for this girl. She missed nothing.
I would set the cake on the dock. I’d paddle over to Meriwether Point like I’d planned and have my picnic. Lie in the sun as long as I wanted, with nobody to bug me, on my favorite spot on the big rock that curved perfectly under my back. Later I’d collect pieces of driftwood for a mirror I was making and go swimming in Jade Cove.
I had all kinds of plans for the summer.
“Well, I’ve got to...” I began.
“Do you want to...” She laughed. “What were you saying?”
“Just that I should go. I told my mom I’d help around the house.”
“Where’s your place?”
I pointed.
She paddled herself around to face the opposite shore. “Cool. We can swim that, easy. We can go back and forth all the time.”
She was so sure we’d be friends. She was sure enough for both of us.
“Come in and we’ll eat the whole cake ourselves,” she said, completing her circle in the water to face me. “My mom’s in Tahoe. She won’t be back ’til late.”
“I wish I could.” Stop being so nice. I can’t afford to like you.
“Are you going to be in ninth?” she went on, panting a little as she tread water.
“Yeah.”
“Me, too. You can say you were telling me about the high school. That’s helpful.”
“There’s not much to tell about the school. It’s tiny. It’s not very good. The football team is the Astros, because everyone around here is seriously into the moon thing.”
“See? I need you. Come on.”
I didn’t offer the most valuable piece of advice—If you want to make friends at CDL High, don’t hang around with me.
“Please. Tell your mom I totally forced you to eat a piece of cake and help me unpack.” The girl grinned, sure of her charm.
It was a wide grin that stretched out the freckles on her nose, and I couldn’t resist it.
* * *
Her name was Casey.
“Casey Katherine Shepherd, named after Casey Kasem, that old DJ,” she said, sprinting ahead of me up the dock to her house. She wrapped the rainbow beach towel around her bottom half as she ran. “My mom was obsessed with him,” she called back, leaping onto the sandy path in the sloping, scrubby patch of lawn behind the house. “She has CD box sets of radio countdowns from 1970 to 1988. What’s your name?”
“Laura. Named after a great-great-aunt I never met. But I’m guessing she wasn’t a DJ.”
Casey turned so I could
see she was laughing, but she didn’t stop running. She didn’t rinse her feet off, though there was a faucet right there by the back door, but pounded up the rotting wood steps, opened the screen door, and walked inside, tracking muck.
I’d always wanted to go inside The Shipwreck. When I was little, I’d imagined wood walls, hammocks, ropes dangling from the ceiling. Maybe a captain’s wheel.
But it was only an ordinary room crammed with moving boxes. The small windows and dark green paint made everything gloomy.
“Well, welcome to the neighborhood.” I pulled the cake from my backpack and set it on a brown box labeled Stuff!
“I have no clue where the knives are, so here.” Casey yanked at the curly ribbon. She broke the cake in two pieces, handed me one, and knocked her hunk against mine. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
“Did you know this used to be a kids’ cabin for another house that’s not here anymore, and everyone calls it The Shipwreck?” she said, crumbs on her bottom lip.
I nodded, finished chewing. “Who told you, your Realtor?”
“We didn’t have a Realtor. My mom bought the house from the owner. The guy who fixed the windows told her. When he realized my mom was the colorful type he wouldn’t stop talking about it. Flirting with her.” She rolled her eyes. “A house with real history, he said. Built in the 1920s. One of a kind.”
The colorful type. I was tempted to ask if her colorful mother knew the stir her quadruped bumper-fish had caused. “I noticed the Ariel on the dock. Did you put it there because...”
“Yes. Screw them if they think The Shipwreck is an insult, it’s cool the way it is. Look, you can still see the marks from the bunk beds.” She shoved boxes around to show me the dark rectangles in the wood floor. “There were five bunks, so I guess ten kids could sleep down here. And one babysitter had to deal with them all summer, I bet.”
“My mother grew up in our house. She says the boys who stayed here in the forties and fifties ran wild all summer. But she never told me about the bunk beds.” I bent to touch one of the marks. “Cool.”
There were no bunk beds now. The only furniture in the room was a saggy, opened-out futon against the long wall. It was unmade, the imprint from a body still visible in the swirl of sheets.
“My mom’s sleeping down here for now,” she said. “She’s using one of the rooms upstairs for her studio because the light’s better and the daybed she ordered hasn’t come yet. Come see my room.”
I followed her up the dark staircase. “So she’s an artist?”
“Ultrabizarre stuff, but people pay a ton for it because bizarre is in.” She thumped her hand on a closed door as we passed, but didn’t offer to show me any of the ultrabizarre art.
“When’s your furniture coming?” I followed her down the narrow hall.
“Our last four places were furnished so my mom’s off buying stuff.”
Last four places? As I considered this, Casey disappeared into a wall of gold. At least that’s what I thought it was until I got closer and figured out it was yellow candy wrappers stuck together in chains, dangling from her doorjamb to form a crinkly, sunlit curtain.
“I made that for our hallway in San Francisco,” she said from the other side of the swaying lengths of plastic. “I was going through a butterscotch phase.”
“I like it,” I said. Did I? I had no idea. I was just trying to step through the ropes of cellophane without breaking them. “How many wrappers did it take?”
“A hundred and eighty-eight. My mom put my real door on sawhorses in her studio, for a table.”
I could only imagine what my mother would say if I tried to replace my bedroom door with candy wrappers. When I was little, she didn’t let me take hard candy from the free bowl at the bank, saying it was a scam they had going with the dentist.
But the fact that Casey’s mom apparently didn’t worry about cavities wasn’t the weirdest part. The weirdest part was that this girl had voluntarily taken her bedroom door off its hinges, not minding that now her mother could peek in whenever. She could catch her undressed, or interrupt her when she was writing in her journal, or yell at her from downstairs right when she’d reached the best part of her book.
My bedroom not only had a door—the wooden variety—but a lock. I used it twice a day, when I transferred my good-luck charm between my pocket and my pillow.
I stashed other objects in my room, too. I had a Maybelline Raspberry Burst lip gloss tucked into the bottom of my Kleenex box. A Cosmopolitan I’d filched from the dentist hidden inside the zippered cushion of my desk chair, with 50 Tips That’ll Drive Him Wild in Bed. I had come to know well the thrill of concealing objects in my room, the secret electric charge they emitted from their hiding places. My bedroom was strung in currents only I knew about.
I didn’t tell her any of this. I’d known her only twenty minutes.
“Didn’t you get sick of all that butterscotch by the end?”
She laughed. “Totally. I threw out the last fifty.”
We sat facing each other on her unmade single bed, inside a fortress of brown moving boxes, finishing the cake. She was still wearing her wet bathing suit and towel. I would never wear a thin bathing suit like that, even in the water, and definitely not out of it. But Casey, named after the male DJ, was flat as a boy. And something told me she wouldn’t have cared about covering up even if she wasn’t.
As we ate, and she talked about San Francisco—the freezing fog, the garlic smell that would drift up the apartment air shaft from the restaurant below—I monitored a damp spot spreading out on her yellow bedspread. It expanded around her hips, like a shadow. My mother would have gone ballistic; she pressed our sheets once a week and had a dedicated rack in the laundry room for used beach towels.
By my last bite of cake I had to admit that I liked this sturdy, confident girl. And I felt bad for her. She said she’d had no idea she was moving until her mom announced it on the last day of middle school.
“We’d only been in San Francisco for a year, and I was all registered at Union High for September, then all of a sudden my mom heard about this house, and here we are. Goodbye, Union. Hello, Coeur-de-Lune High.”
“People never say that. They say CDL High.”
“Got it.”
“Which is kind of dumb since it’s exactly the same number of syllables.”
She laughed, and I realized in that second just how much I wanted her to like me. I couldn’t resist going on. “Like I said, it’s not such a great school.”
“Go, Astronauts,” she said, laughing, shaking her fists as if she was holding miniature pom-poms.
“Astros.”
“Right. Keep the insider tips coming.”
“I’m definitely not an insider, I... So why’d your mom want to move?”
“She’s impulsive like that. You’ll get it when you meet her. We lived in a bunch of places before San Francisco. Reno, Oakland, Berkeley. Then suddenly she was all about nature. Fresh air, peace and quiet so she could work and I could... I don’t know. Suck in all the fresh air.”
“Weren’t you sad? Leaving your friends in San Francisco?”
“Yeah, but...my mom’s my best friend.”
I licked crumbs from my fingers. “That must be nice. My mother is...”
Strict? That wasn’t the right word. Cold was closer to the truth, but not quite fair. My mother took my temperature when I was sick, and remembered that I liked German chocolate cake, and once said I played the piano like an angel. She asked me for my Christmas list the day after Thanksgiving. Rigid? Overly efficient? Judgmental? None of them added up to a good answer.
“She’s what?”
“She’s older than most mothers.”
“Grandma old?”
“Sixty-two. I’m adopted. And my dad’s almost sixty-four. But my mother seems older than him because s
he’s kind of religious.”
“Like that nutjob fanatic mom in Carrie? I have that, have you read it? It’s awesome.”
“No, but I saw an ad for the movie on TV. She’s not like that. She’s just... I don’t know. Old-fashioned.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah.”
Bummer. I liked that tidy summary of my relationship with my mother. It took something that made me feel freakish and confused and brought it into the light, transforming it into a typical teenagey complaint.
I didn’t tell Casey she was sharing her cake with Sister Christian, or about how Pauline Knowland stole my bra during a shower after gym last September, so I’d spent the rest of the school day hunched over and red-faced.
I didn’t tell her how hard it is in a small town, where you’re shoved into a role in fifth grade and you can’t escape it no matter what you do, how it squeezes the fight out of you, because everybody knows everybody and you aren’t allowed to change.
And I didn’t tell her that one of the things hidden in my bedroom was a homemade calendar taped to the inside back wall of my closet, where I crossed off the number of CDL High days I had to survive until graduation. 581.
Go Astros.
Instead I said, even though I wasn’t that interested in horror novels, “Can I borrow Carrie sometime?”
“Sure.” Casey jumped off the crumb-strewn bed and went through boxes, tossing books on the floor.
She had more books than I did, and I had a ton. I even had a first edition of Little Women. Casey had Little Women, too, I noticed, and I picked it up off the floor, about to ask if she liked it and if she’d ever read Little Men or Rose in Bloom, which could be preachy but had some entertaining parts.
Only when I looked closer I realized it wasn’t Little Women. It was The Little Woman.
And judging by the cover, it was definitely not an homage to Louisa May Alcott. It had a lady sashaying down her hallway in a skimpy white nightgown, with a gun stuffed down her cleavage. Behind her, at the other end of the hall, you could just make out a shadowy male figure.
The Summer List Page 3