Another fact: Alex hadn’t been allowed to listen to pop music when she was younger. Now she didn’t enjoy it so much as study it like someone cramming for an exam. Casey told me this was why she’d devoured the Casey Kasem countdown CDs, worshipped the guy enough to name her child after him.
Casey not only knew the exact name of the slow, hypnotic song Alex liked, she owned it. “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star. We’d both bought the CD the weekend before. But she didn’t name the tune. I smiled at Alex apologetically.
“I’ll listen for the title after I drop you off.” Alex grinned at me—don’t mind her—but quickly turned her eyes back to the road.
Alex was a cautious, nervous driver, never going more than a few miles over the speed limit, her hands always gripping ten and two o’clock on the wheel. She’d only gotten her license a few years before. Her parents hadn’t let her take driver’s ed when she was in high school, Casey had said, so Alex hadn’t gotten around to learning until recently.
When we pulled into the parking lot and Casey and I scrambled out, Alex called a little too cheerfully, “I want a full report.”
I watched her leave by herself like all the other mommy chauffeurs. “She so wanted to skate with us,” I said. “And that was kind of mean about the song. You’re really that mad about some jeans?”
Casey shook her head. “She was flirting with this boy at the car wash who squeegeed our windshield. He was like sixteen.”
“I get that it’s annoying but she’d never—”
“Don’t. Don’t even defend her. I know it’s not her fault. Her parents screwed her up royally. But she has to learn she’s not in high school anymore.” Casey swung open the door to the Silver Skate, releasing throbs of music.
I tugged at her jacket, suddenly nervous. “Case. Don’t you want to hang out at your house instead? Cookie dough and Grease 2?”
“We can do that any night.”
“If Pauline’s here I’m going to kill you.”
“Repeat this to yourself. ‘I’m not that girl anymore,’” Casey said as we stepped into the dark, disco-lit world of the rink.
“What girl am I?”
“You’re Laura Christie. Sophisticated Mystery Woman,” Casey shouted over the music, pulling me into line.
“Say that three times fast.”
The woman behind the register sealed circlets of glow-in-the-dark pink plastic around our wrists and we shoved through the turnstile.
“My tracking bracelet, so I can’t escape,” I said.
Casey laughed but stopped abruptly, clutching my arm. “Oh, no no no. It’s too good. Look.”
There he was. The famous Boy Behind the Counter, handing out skates. The rental counter was elevated, and by a trick of the overhead fluorescents, it seemed he was under a spotlight. His black hair caught the light as he glided between the counter and the shelves of skates behind it. Our small-town god. On wheels.
Morgan Schiffrin and some of her friends (girls we called the Hair Petters because they compulsively ran their hands down their long hair) were clustered near the rental counter, even though they already had their brown-and-orange skates. It was like an altar.
“He’s obviously loving the attention,” I whispered as we lined up. “That is the tightest T-shirt I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe he accidentally shrank it in the dryer.”
“Please.”
“Maybe he had a late growth spurt and can’t afford to buy a bigger one.”
“He’s rich. Related to the owner, supposedly.”
“No offense, Laur, but you’re nobody to judge someone by the fit of their shirt.”
“This is a medium.” My new shirt was actually a M/L, but I pulled the hem away from my hip to show Casey how little excess fabric there was compared to my old XLs. “And these pants are slender. They even say so on the tag. Slender cut.”
“Hey, wear a potato sack if you want. Go back to your cargos. I’ll still love you.”
I’d had to ditch my Ziploc-in-pocket routine for my new, more fitted wardrobe. It seemed that the small front pockets in all my new pants were just for show, and the Ziploc kept creeping up. So I’d rigged up a new system. I kept the Ziploc inside an old chamois drawstring bag of my dad’s, where he’d stored his silver dollar collection until I had it mounted for his sixtieth birthday. I safety-pinned the drawstring of the bag inside the bottom right leg of my pants. The system had worked well for me all year. I couldn’t touch my charm as often, but I felt it there against my leg, its gentle weight in the velvety fabric a comforting presence throughout the day.
The rental line was long, so I had time to get nervous again, watching the skaters whip around the rink. No sign of Pauline, thank God.
I tried to distract myself by observing The Boy. Twitching arm muscles, teeth shining as bright as his silver T-shirt, too-long black hair tucked behind his ears.
The girls in front of us found excuses to talk to him, coming back for skates with extra-long laces, asking him how to request a song, even though the song request clipboard was right where it always was on the wall behind the DJ booth. I heard Darla Semmler say she was a size five when she was at least a seven.
When it was finally Casey’s turn she asked, in a breathy voice, “Can I have a newer pair, please? Something with ankle support? Because I have extremely delicate ankles.”
“Ankle support. I’ll see what I’ve got back there.” He skated deep into the racks.
“Casey. You’re horrible.”
“I got carried away. It’s all very Cinderella, isn’t it?”
“Very.”
To his credit, the orange-and-brown skates he slid over to Casey didn’t look quite as beat-up as the others.
“What size can I get you?” he said, slapping the counter in front of me.
“Nine,” I said, without looking up at him. Take that, Prince Charming.
He rolled my skates over the blue-carpeted counter, but when I grabbed them he wouldn’t let go. “No special requests? Extra-long laces? Blue brakes instead of orange? Double-shot of antifungal foot spray?”
“These are fine.” I pulled at the skates, annoyed that he was messing with me. Even more annoyed that my hands were trembling, and he’d think it was because of him.
“Hey,” he said, under his breath, leaning down. “Hey you.”
He gripped the skates until I looked up.
“Stick close to the sides and you’ll be fine.”
Just as I met his brown eyes, he turned to the girl next to me and slapped the counter. “Size?”
I joined Casey, who was lacing up on a circular bench covered with blue carpet. Everything at the Silver Skate ’n Lanes was covered in blue carpet. The floors, the benches, the counters, the walls, the ball racks in the bowling alley. They hadn’t changed anything since the ’70s.
“You’ve got the Hair Petters in a tizzy,” Casey said.
I glanced over as I unlaced my Nikes. Morgan and her crew were clutching each other, pretending to fall, laughing like mad. And, yes, a couple of them were looking over at us. I’d engaged The Boy in conversation. Me, in a T-shirt as loose as his was tight. Me, with my unpetted hair yanked into a ponytail.
“This town,” I said.
“Was he hitting on you?”
“He asked if I wanted antifungal foot spray.”
“That’s hot,” Casey said, laughing. “No, seriously. Let them think he was all over you. You’re prettier than those bots with their lime-green bra straps.”
I did up my skates and we clomped onto the rink. “Do not abandon me.”
“You’ve got this.”
We took it slow. I was scared at first, as tentative as a kid, and headed for the sides at the least sign of trouble. But after four cautious laps, “Greased Lightning” came on, and Casey flashed her sideways grin, her red hai
r flying, and it was all so wonderfully silly I forgot I’d been afraid. I skated a little faster each time around. We did a mini crack-the-whip. And I didn’t fall.
* * *
Two older girls offered us a ride home. Soon, Casey was sure, we’d get asked to one of the house parties. The keggers and ragers that were usually upper grade only.
We were on our way out, wobbly after skating for three hours. For a second, I thought that’s why my legs felt funny.
Then I realized, sick, that the chamois bag was gone.
“Case, we have to go back.”
“We’ll miss our ride, they’re already out the door...”
“It’s gone.” I patted my pants leg, rolled it up, and saw only one open safety pin and loose threads where the other had ripped off. All that skating, bending my knees as I took corners, the bottom of my pants rubbing against the top of my skates, had been too much for my latest system.
“What’s gone?”
But as her eyes slid down my pants leg, she realized. I’d slept over at her house too often for her not to spy the chamois bag. She still didn’t know what I kept inside it.
“I’ll help you look.”
We ran back down the long, tunnel-like hall. It was dark and my eyes were fixed on the glowing rink, where I hoped my charm had fallen. Halfway down the hall I smacked into something warm and solid.
“Whoa, you okay?”
The Boy. No longer a giant now that he’d descended from his platform. In his shoes he was only a few inches taller than me.
“Is there a lost and found? I’ve lost something, please, I...”
“This?” He pressed something into my hand, and at the caress of the velvety pouch and the familiar weight I was so relieved I could have hugged him. The bag was open; maybe he’d uncinched the drawstring a little and peeked inside. But it was still heavy. Still full.
“It was inside your skate,” he said. “Must’ve dropped in when you were pulling it off.”
“You have no idea... I was sure it was...” I finished, simply, “Thank you.”
“No problem. What is it, a pet rock?” He laughed, but not in a mean way, and vanished down the dark hall.
I slipped the bag up my sleeve before Casey and I joined the other girls, who were now looking at me like I was someone to contend with. Casey got a big kick out of it, especially when Donna Kellerman said we should come to her older brother’s party the next weekend. We should totally come. There would be a keg and Everclear, secured through a complex network that involved someone’s twenty-two-year-old cousin.
But I didn’t care about Donna Kellerman’s brother’s alcohol connections. I didn’t care about our social coup. I cared only about the soft weight of the bag concealed in my sleeve.
8
Morning, 35th day of camp
She’d hidden the length of curving driftwood up her blouse sleeve, tucking and rolling the cuff tight so it wouldn’t slip out. It was a new hiding place; for more than a week, she’d kept the driftwood concealed inside her pillowcase.
She hoped the other girls wouldn’t notice that she was working one-handed, or that her left sleeve belled out like a pirate’s. The wood felt both awkward and strangely comforting against her forearm, like the splint she’d worn when she fractured her wrist trying to do a back handspring at recess in sixth grade. Her mother had been so gentle with her that day, propping her arm on pillows when they got home, offering her raspberry Jell-O as if she had a stomachache, not a broken carpal bone. They’d watched hours of junk TV together. Mork & Mindy, The Love Boat.
It had been a long, tiring, expensive day at the doctor’s, but after they were both so happy and relieved, curled on the couch together in their pilled flannel nightgowns. They stayed up for Fantasy Island. One woman chose to go back in time to meet Jack the Ripper, then had to be rescued before becoming one of his victims.
Why, her mother had said, laughing, her eyes streaming. Why would she pick that? When she could choose anything?
They have to keep it exciting, Mom. There has to be, you know. Drama.
Smarty-pants, her mom had said, swatting her gently on the bottom. A feather of a smack. Drama, my twelve-year-old daughter says.
* * *
When, exactly, had her mother started to get sad? So sad that she needed to abandon her here?
She blinked hard, shook off the thought.
She was on boring a.m. canteen duty, as she was three mornings a week, but she had a special mission today.
Every other morning, for the thirty-five days since her mom had parked her here, she’d thrown handfuls of forks and knives into their cylindrical plastic holders as hard as she could, enjoying the crashes, like a series of tiny car wrecks, the extra clatter when a utensil skidded across the long metal table. More than anything, she enjoyed the irritation that bloomed on the other girls’ faces.
Not today. Today she filled containers with cutlery as if she was arranging roses. She smiled at the others as she gently set white plates into the steam table’s spring-loaded wells.
The others smiled back, each anxious to prove she was the most charitable and forgiving. They smiled at each other, relieved, and hovered around her. One offered to reverse-French-braid her hair before Scripture study. Another asked to sit next to her in the van on Wednesday, when Miss Cooke drove them to their weekly scavenger hunt on the beach.
She’d overdone it. Soon everyone else would arrive. He would arrive. And it would be too late to deliver her gift.
The girls were finally heading back to the kitchen. Now or never.
Pretending to double-check the head table, she backed her way to the front corner of the canteen, where the band stowed its gear.
Quickly, she slid the slender arc of driftwood from her sleeve and set it across the lip of the music stand. She had written it in the center, in wobbly upper-case letters, so he would remember their talk behind the craft cabin:
CURDILUNE
The name of his little town beside the crescent-shaped lake. It had been eight days since he’d drawn Curdilune for her in the dirt, and he hadn’t spoken to her again, though once she thought he’d smiled at her in afternoon prayer.
When the girls called to her, swinging the kitchen door open and beaming as if it was the gate to heaven—“You coming?”—she was innocently confirming that everyone at table twelve had a water glass. But her heart was pounding.
* * *
Her cheeks warmed as he entered the canteen, his black guitar case slung over his shoulder. She lingered by the kitchen door, watching.
He dragged a stool to the section of floor at the front of the room that served as a makeshift performance space. He set the microphone into place, flicked it on.
Then the music stand. He pulled it by the base while talking over his shoulder to Miss King, the earnest middle-aged volunteer soprano who made up the second half of the band.
Her offering fell off the music stand, whatever sound it made as it hit the floor lost in the clatter of two hundred campers talking, grabbing utensils and dropping them on trays, shoving chairs across hardwood.
She feared the fall had damaged it. The driftwood was less dense in the middle, perhaps where the once-living branch had been weakened by insects, or an animal, or time. After she had rescued it, the driftwood had dried so the tips were almost white, remaining slate-colored only in the center. From across the room it looked like a bone.
She flushed, as if it was part of her own body up there on display.
She’d give him one minute to notice it. She squeezed her dishrag and counted. One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi.
He sat, a honey-colored curl falling across his forehead as he began tuning his guitar. She could just hear the sunny string of notes over the chatter, the settling-in at tables. When Miss Haskins walked to the microphone and tapped it they would hush ins
tantly, but they were allowed a few minutes of conversation before Grace.
He always bit his upper lip when he tuned.
Five-Mississippi. Six-Mississippi. On seven-Mississippi he glanced down, reaching into his case.
Yes. There, inches from your right foot.
He shifted his guitar to his hip and picked it up. He examined the curving driftwood, looking puzzled until he turned it over and saw what she’d inscribed in pencil:
CURDILUNE
He smiled when he read the name of his hometown. He set the driftwood on his knees and searched the cafeteria, his eyes sweeping the rows of round tables, the campers edging down the buffet past the oatmeal and hash browns, the too-pale orange wedges. She squeezed her dishrag until cold water trickled down her wrist.
He found her. Smiling, he raised the driftwood as if toasting her—quickly, a gesture for only her to see—and in that second, to her, after the long, lonely summer, he might as well have hung the moon.
9
Raptor Rock
June 1996
Summer before sophomore year
“Are we there yet?” Casey panted.
“Almost.”
Something hit my shoulder. “Ow. Stop throwing pinecones at me.”
“It’s too hot to hike.”
“I promised your mom we’d bring her leaves from this tree at the top.”
Alex had been into leaves for four days now. She had a book called LeafCraft! The Joy of Working With Nature’s First Fabric by someone named Gemini Duquet. So far she’d made six coasters, eight place mats, and a hat. The coasters and place mats worked out but the hat was less successful. The brim kept splitting.
Alex had given me four place mats, one inscribed on the back:
For Laura, our sweet girl. Love, Alex.
I’d hidden them in my bottom desk drawer. They were too beautiful to get stained. Alex had matched up the color gradations in the brown leaves perfectly, so they looked like burnished wood. And I could only imagine how my mother would mock them.
She tolerated me hanging out at The Shipwreck as long as I kept my grades up and didn’t neglect my piano practice, but the Coeur-de-Lune Church Women’s Auxiliary (Ingrid Christie, President) wasn’t exactly an Alex Shepherd fan club. Alex had an anticreationist fish on her bumper, she went to the grocery store in cutoffs, and there was no husband in the picture. That seemed to be enough information for them.
The Summer List Page 8