* * *
Alex was more relaxed each time I came over. She stopped saying my name more than the standard amount, and began to match Casey’s description. She did talk too much. She did launch from one hobby to another so fast it was hard to keep up.
And she did want to paint me. I chalked up her odd behavior on that first morning to the overwhelming impression I’d made as a potential subject, and I was flattered.
By midsummer we’d settled into a routine. Mornings I sat for sketches on the back porch, muscles aching, but happy to let Alex and Casey entertain me.
One hot day in late July Alex had me in a stiff-backed dining room chair with my hair in a tight bun. She said she was trying to capture something in my eyes. That I was “an old soul but tried to hide it,” and she hadn’t managed to draw this to her satisfaction.
“You have a... What is it, Case? What’s in her eyes that’s so hard for me to get right? That bit of sadness mixed with... I don’t know what.”
“That’s a neck cramp mixed with the desperate need to pee. I know the feeling well.” Casey was sprawled in the sun by my feet, a paperback of Peyton Place tented above her face.
She read a section aloud: a couple writhing around, monitoring the status of the man’s erection, panting out a play-by-play of their lovemaking.
When Casey wasn’t acting out Peyton Place, making me laugh until I broke form, Alex would lecture us on her latest bird. Her birding mania had abruptly replaced a brief heirloom tomato kick. She’d even invested in binoculars and a leather journal for recording her sightings. Casey and I knew as much about the yellow-headed blackbird as the local Audubon Society.
“Their scientific name is Xanthocephalus,” Alex said from behind her easel. “And the Tahoe basin has lost hundreds in the last ten years, isn’t that awful? Their call is so unusual. Like...a rusty gate opening over and over, and—”
“Oh, my God, Mom. You’re a rusty gate opening over and over. Give it a rest.”
Alex popped her head above her easel. She had her curls piled on top of her head, and a double pine needle had fallen onto it like a hair ornament. “Laura’s interested. Aren’t you, Laura?”
“Definitely.”
“She’s just being polite. Laura doesn’t give a shit about the Xanadu birds anymore and neither do I.”
“Xanthocephalus,” I said, laughing.
“Kiss-up,” Casey said.
“Dang it all, Case, you made me mess up.” Alex had the same laugh as Casey, full-throated and coppery. “Naughty girl.”
A few days later, Peyton Place and the yellow-headed blackbird were replaced by My Sweet Audrina and the dark-eyed junco bird. The material varied, but the two-woman show did not. Alex the flighty. Casey the sarcastic.
And me. I was the audience. Sometimes the egger-on or the mediator. They each tried to get me on their side, and I loved every second of this gentle tug-of-war.
After lunch Alex would wander upstairs to her studio—painting was the one constant in her day—and it became me and Casey again, kayaking and swimming and picnicking until dinner. They invited me for every meal, but I only stayed one out of five times, figuring that this amount would not push my mother over the edge.
I told my mother the Shepherds’ car was used and they couldn’t pry the anti-Christian fish off. She hmphed at me, not buying it but not forbidding me to see them, either.
By August I’d thrown myself into the Shepherd household completely. Without a flicker of loyalty to my own slow-moving, well-meaning, predictable parents.
I kayaked across the lake every chance I got. I spent the night almost every Saturday, ignoring my mother’s hmphs, her narrowed eyes.
On Sunday, I rushed over again as soon as I ditched my church clothes. Paddling hard, like I was racing backward across the river Styx, from the land of the dead to the land of the living.
I wished school would never start.
4
The Machine
September 2
Casey and I did walk to school together the first morning, just like my mother had commanded back in June. We arranged to meet at the gazebo in the park at 7:45, and everything about it felt strange.
It was strange to see Casey on land. It was strange to see her in jeans. It was strange to see her with her hair brushed.
When I walked over I found her using a stick to pick a tile from the crumbling old mosaic inside the gazebo. “A little first-day-of-school gift for you,” she said, handing me the small green square. “For good luck.”
“Thanks.” I dropped it in my pocket, next to my Ziploc.
We walked up the shoulder of East Shoreline Road to town, Casey kicking pinecones and chattering, asking about every backpacked kid we saw on the way, me dragging my feet and answering in monosyllables.
Her whispered questions started out genuine. “Are they a couple? Is that girl on the bike a freshman?”
When we were so close we could see the brick and white plaster of CDL High through the pines, she finally picked up on my death-row vibe and tried to make me laugh.
About a pasty guy in a skull T-shirt taking last-minute drags off his cigarette—“That’s the school nurse, right?”
About a sour-looking teacher in the parking lot wearing an ankle-length black skirt and a curious, drapey gray cardigan—“Ooh, I like the cheerleading uniforms.”
I could manage only a tight smile.
I’d dressed carefully, in a denim skirt and my blue peasant shirt. As we walked up the broad brick steps together, surrounded by keyed-up, tanned kids, I tucked my blouse in and tugged it out for the hundredth time.
“You look great,” Casey said. “Don’t be nervous.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“Yes, you are. You’re petrified. I’m the new girl. I’m the one who’s supposed to be nervous.”
Then, too soon, we were in the auditorium with the entire school—240 students. A puny enrollment by California standards, but we could still barely hear each other. We had to get our locker assignments and ID pictures, and I was a C and Casey was an S, so our lines were on opposite sides of the room.
“Meet me outside the cafeteria at lunch?” she shouted.
I nodded. We only had two classes together. PE and study hall, both in the afternoon.
Casey started to walk toward the R through Z line. But then she turned back to me and whispered, leaning close, “Is it your boobs?”
“What?”
“Is that what they tease you about?”
“What do you...”
She kept her voice low as the wave of kids parted around us. “You always hunch. You wear those baggy old-man T-shirts instead of a bathing suit. I know you hate school, you’ve been dreading it all summer, and you won’t talk about it. So is that it? Or is there more?”
I managed to look down at my extra-blousy blouse and say, “They don’t help.”
She didn’t laugh. She just squeezed my wrist and said, “I’ll kick their asses if they mess with you. See you at lunch.”
I nodded and let the other kids pour in between us, so relieved I could have cried.
And the morning went fine. My ID picture came out pretty. Not one person called me Sister Christian. Even Pauline, who was of course a frosh cheerleader, was in a big pond now, with diluted influence, and seemed to be more interested in trying to get attention from the upperclassmen than messing with me. We had English together but she ignored me for the whole fifty-five minutes.
I was not Carrie, the hopeless freak with the bible-banging mother. I’d never been close. And by third period I was a little mad that I’d let an idiot like Pauline get to me for so many years.
By fourth period I was almost relaxed.
Then I found out about the rally.
I was in fifth period Spanish, happily conjugating sports verbs (to
kick, to run, to swim), when Mr. Allendros said, “Tiempo para ir al gimnasio.”
Time to go to the gym.
It was still half an hour until the lunch bell, so I thought it was part of the lesson until the sophomores started getting up. The other freshmen looked as clueless as me, but we all stood and filed out the door.
“What’s going on?” I said to the girl behind me in the packed hall.
“Pep rally,” she said, her notebook knocking my elbow as she got jostled from behind. “Sorry.”
So I was swept along to the gimnasio, feeling far from peppy.
I hunted in the bleachers for a flash of red hair but I couldn’t find Casey, so I gave up and sat near the door in the first row, hoping I’d at least catch her on the way out. For something called a rally, it was pretty tedious. Announcements about elections, and football tickets, and a fund-raiser over at the skating rink/bowling alley in Red Pine.
And once again, I let myself relax.
Until ten minutes before the lunch bell, when the cheerleaders started pulling kids from the bleachers. There was to be some sort of audience participation to cap things off, and I wished desperately that I’d sat in the top row, far from their perky reach.
They could have targeted the leadership types, but no. They recruited poor Dan Novacek, a boy I’d known since kindergarten who rarely bathed, and Ellie Jacobs, who always wore a fishing cap, and a sweet, gray-bobbed teacher who’d been standing by the exit minding her own business.
Still, I thought I might be safe. The morning had gone okay. I shrank down and sat very still.
But Pauline found me. Pauline, with her new Rachel hairdo and her old taste for cruelty.
She gripped my elbow and I shook her off, smiling wildly, unfocused. But I was pushed, pulled, prodded by others who were relieved they hadn’t been singled out. Until I was onstage.
Not a stage exactly. The gym floor. But it might as well have been the Roman Forum. There were eight of us that the cheerleaders were arranging in various poses. I grasped that we were to act out some sort of cute chain reaction.
I was the first link in the chain. Someone handed me a fake coin the size of a small pizza, made of foam and wrapped in tinfoil. On my left was the teacher, who had to stand with her elbows locked together and her forearms up in a V, making a kind of receptacle. I was to pivot from right to left and set the tinfoil coin in her arms. The teacher/coin slot seemed about as happy about this as I was.
After I gave her the coin she had to shout “Beep” and turn to her left. Dan Novacek, who just for kicks had an inflated inner tube around his waist, had to spin and pat the girl next to him on her head, and she had to toss a football up and catch it. And so on.
When the chain reaction was over the cheerleader at the end yelled, “Go,” and the audience had to shout, “Astros.”
I did my part correctly every time, which wasn’t easy since I was trying to keep my elbows pinned close to my sides to minimize what the bra companies call “wobble and bounce.” The teacher did okay, too, and so did Dan in his inner tube. But the girl down the line kept fumbling the football, and when the crowd half-heartedly yelled, “Astros” the third time, I heard an “Assholes” mixed in.
I wondered where Casey was. Up in the bleachers, pity mixed with revelation. Seeing me clearly for the first time, as a victim. And there was nothing to be done.
We were all rattled, and while the football-tossing girl got it together, two kids at the end of the human contraption kept messing up. So by the fifth time there were almost as many voices yelling, “Assholes” as “Astros.”
It was not how I hoped the day would go.
But as I turned with the weightless coin one more time, praying it would be the last, someone snatched it from my hands.
There was a ripple of confused laughter from the bleachers.
I caught a flash of Irish setter red hair. Casey had stolen the quarter. Casey had mucked up the machine.
She was running around the gym and the crowd was loving it. As if she’d planned it for weeks, she ran to a cluster of basketball players and handed the quarter off to Mitch Weiland, a popular senior. The basketball team never got as much attention as the football team, so this was a stroke of brilliance. He sprinted to the basketball net and inserted the quarter in a gorgeous dunk shot right as the bell rang.
* * *
“What was that?” I said, as Casey and I walked to the cafeteria.
She shrugged. “It was pissing me off. You looked so miserable, it just came to me.”
“You’re crazy.” I smiled.
Later, after Pauline Knowland high-fived Casey on our way to the lunch line, pretending she’d found her improv as hilarious as everyone else, and four juniors asked to sit with us, I whispered, “Thank you.”
“You’d do it for me. We’re best friends, right?”
“Best friends.”
5
Bartles & Jaymes
2016
Thursday evening
Casey and I sat on the dock and watched the sky until there was only a delicate tracing of red around the mountains. One by one, people flicked their lights on, ringing the dark lake in dots of glowing yellow.
“I forgot how beautiful it is,” I said.
“It’s changed, though. Not as quiet as it used to be.”
“I go to sleep to the sounds of the #1 California Muni bus,” I said. “It makes these horrible groaning noises as it struggles up the hill. I feel like one day they’re going to ask me to come out and help push.”
“Did you drive in through town or did you take I-5 and Southshore?”
“Southshore.”
“So you didn’t see how fancy we are now. We have two espresso places and a Chef’s Choice. You know, so you don’t have to haul all the way to Tahoe City for your triple-shot latte and your ten million kinds of chèvre.”
“And there’s a fantastic bookstore, I hear.”
“Who told you, your mother?”
“Yeah, she—”
“Right. Like she would use the word fantastic to describe anything remotely associated with me.”
“She doesn’t—”
“Stop. Don’t even try. So. Speaking of goat cheese. I think it’s time to move this wild party indoors. Unless you think we’ll be too crowded.”
* * *
Jett was still sleeping when I opened the car door. I clipped her leash on before she was alert enough to go nuts. “Wake up, sweet girl.”
She shook herself, jingling her tags, and perked up the second she got out, excited by new smells. I let her pee and sniff her way down the driveway while Casey switched lights on behind us.
My phone rang and Sam’s face flashed on my screen. Sam was the “goofy foot,” the famous surfing lefty, from his café’s name. The picture I’d programmed in, though, was Sam as I knew him, not the cocky young surf-punk from the past that I emblazoned on his T-shirts and magnets and mugs, but forty pounds heavier and forty years older. Big and weather-beaten, kind of like an aging Beach Boy. I liked that Sam best.
He knew I’d been considering visiting my hometown this weekend. He was the only person I’d told, and he’d urged me to go, to take a risk. His exact words were You need more friends besides that hyper mutt and some old has-been fatty ex-surfer.
“I shouldn’t have come,” I whispered into the phone. “It’s beyond awful. Are you happy?”
“I think the question is ‘are you happy?’” He spoke in his best Yoda imitation. Which was a pretty poor one. There was a fine line between Yoda and Fozzie Bear from the Muppets, and Sam always veered too Fozzie.
“Don’t psychoanalyze me, Sam. I’m not up to it right now.”
“Sorry, sorry. But keep me posted. And if you wimp out and come home early, you’re fired. Anyone can slap some doodles on a T-shirt. You’re totally re
placeable.”
“Supportive as always, Sam.”
“Email me. I want to live vicariously.”
“This is all about you, then.”
“Naturally.”
“Bye.”
Jett was about as eager to go inside as I was but I tugged her leash. “Time to go in, JJ-girl.”
Time to trade one unfamiliar landscape for another.
Casey had told the truth; she and Alex hadn’t made many changes to The Shipwreck. Though there was evidence of a child—a fairy book, glittery purple sneakers on the floor, one of which I had to wrestle away from Jett as Casey walked over from the kitchen.
“Behave, Jett. Sorry.”
“She’s all right.” Casey scratched her under her collar. “Jett, you said? As in Joan? Right, the spiky black hair.”
I waited for Casey to give me just a little more. For her voice to warm a few degrees as she said, Remember the poster you gave me? That CD you used to hide at my house?
“She’s a troublemaker like her namesake,” I said.
“She’s a sweetheart. I love Labs.”
“Thanks. And how old is your little girl? Elle, you said? Not that I mean she’s the same as a pet...” I needed to stop talking. Or at least rehearse every sentence in my head a minimum of three times before letting it exit my mouth.
Casey waited for me to stop. No “no worries,” an expression it seemed the rest of the world used ten times a day. No “don’t be silly.”
“She just turned ten. She’s been with us since she was five.”
“Can I see her picture?”
Casey pointed to the photos hung on the stairwell. “You can see dozens, we’re running out of room.”
I walked up the stairs to examine the pictures while Casey crouched and scratched Jett’s stomach. Jett was in textbook passive pose, on her back, paws limp. Casey had already won her over. At least she was making an effort with my pet.
I didn’t have to hunt long for the little girl’s face. She was all over the wall. A plump child with wavy brown hair and brown eyes, younger in the photos closer to the center, older in the ones crammed around the edges. There she was with a smiling Casey, fishing. There she was with her face red from a Popsicle. Carrying a backpack in front of my old elementary school.
The Summer List Page 5