More than anything, I didn’t want my mother to read the “our” part of Alex’s note on the leaf place mat. I knew what she’d think. Presumptuous.
“There are perfectly nice leaves in the gazebo park,” Casey called. “This is brutal.”
“They’re really special leaves.”
Alex would appreciate the glossy, six-pointed leaves from the top of the hill. But they were just an excuse.
I was going to show Casey what was inside my pocket, and Raptor Rock felt like the perfect place. Private, quiet. A little dramatic.
I’d decided after the skating rink; a stranger had handled it and my world hadn’t collapsed.
I walked quickly, anxious to get it done.
Casey, hot and cranky as a toddler, was dragging. “You have to entertain me since you forced me on this death march. Truth or Dare.”
“Truth.”
“Do you have a crush on him?”
“Who?”
This time the pinecone hit my back. “I have a pocket full of these so answer or I’m turning back.”
“You have to clarify. Who is him? There are so many crush prospects in this town. It’s hard to keep them straight.”
“J.B.”
“Who’s Jamie? Ouch!”
“You know exactly who J.B. is. The guy at the rink everybody but you stares at.”
I held out my water bottle. “You have to hydrate.”
She gulped, wiped her mouth. “Don’t think you can distract me.”
“What kind of name is J.B. anyway?” I said. “Sounds like some businessman from the ’50s. Or a dude ranch. And those T-shirts. I think they’re getting smaller.”
“This is not how you play Truth or Dare. Answer.”
“He’s not my type.”
“You don’t trust me. And I tell you everything.”
Neither statement was true, but I let this slide. Casey told me almost everything. But she hadn’t told me one of the most important things. Same as me, until today.
Casey hooked a finger into my back middle belt loop. “Be my towrope.” Linked together, we huffed up the hill.
At the top, Casey pulled down a branch to inspect its leaves. “Are these the ones?” she panted.
“They’re pretty, aren’t they? Like stars.”
They were thick and glossy, chartreuse green. Casey didn’t strip the branch—I’d trained her well—but she collected some leaves from the ground and tucked them into her cutoffs. “She’d better appreciate this.”
A few more steps and we were at the clearing and the big, flat piece of granite called Raptor Rock.
“No dinosaurs.” Casey stared at the sky.
“Dinosaurs?”
“Raptor Rock. Those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.”
“You’re thinking of velociraptors.”
“Velocity. Fast dinosaurs, right?”
“Right. But raptors are a family of birds. Small eagles, hawks. I don’t see any but maybe they’re resting in the shade today.”
“They’re smarter than us.”
We ate our peanut-butter-and-marshmallow sandwiches. I wasn’t a fan but I’d made them for Casey since it was a special occasion. Then we lay side by side on the warm rock.
“Case, know what today is?”
“The hottest day in Coeur-de-Lune history?”
“It’s exactly one year since we met.”
“Is it? Of course. You in your kayak.”
“Yep.”
“And you brought us here to celebrate. I’m an idiot.”
“If you were I wouldn’t show you this.” I sat up and reached into the front pocket of my shorts. They were cargos, but at least they were size eights. I’d bought weapons-grade safety pins from the fabric store—the big ones people put on kilts. My best system yet: three kilt pins secured the chamois bag perfectly.
Casey sat up. “Oh, my God, oh, my God. You’re showing me, finally?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been so good, not asking. Haven’t I?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve thought of a zillion possibilities. Drugs. But I know you too well now, there’s no way. Then I thought maybe crystals. My mom went through a major crystal phase. Then I decided it was something boring like a rabbit’s foot.”
“It’s not crystals or a rabbit’s foot.” I took it out of the chamois bag, unsealed the Ziploc, and set my charm between us.
Casey scrunched her nose. “It’s a rock.”
It did look like a rock. Not even a pretty one. Small, less than four inches across. And roughly oval, speckled gray-on-white. Against the granite of Raptor Rock it almost disappeared.
Casey tried to be respectful. She scanned my face for clues and examined my precious thing again. “Um, it’s beautiful?”
I smiled. “It’s not a rock. See this?” I held the driftwood up and tilted it so the thin silver hinges glinted in the sun and she could see that it had been split in half lengthwise to form a case.
“What is it?”
I opened it. My talisman.
My music box.
I only let myself open it on very special occasions. I knew exactly how much to wind it so it would play one time. I was afraid one day I’d overwind it. Then I’d either have to entrust it to some horrible clumsy jewelry repair shop or live with its cold muteness forever.
I wound the small silver crank four and a half times.
The tune was simple. Eighteen cascading notes, like a stone skipping on water. I knew the notes by heart now, sometimes played them on the piano—only if I was alone in the house.
“It’s beautiful.”
“I think so.”
“What song is it?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did.” I’d listened to the radio for hours, the classical stations, the jazz stations, hoping to hear it. But I never had.
“Where’d you get it?”
“It was my mom’s. My real mom’s.”
“Oh, Laur. Of course.”
“She left it with me before she ran away.”
The chunk of driftwood had been hollowed out to hold the small tin mechanism, like the kind that might go inside a little girl’s ballerina jewelry box. The hinges were only simple ones from a hardware store, and the music box unit glued inside was cheap—even I could tell that. But the case had been made with care. I wound the small tin key four and a half times and played it again.
When the last note faded away, and we could only hear the birds, Casey said, “Your parents gave it to you when they told you you were adopted?”
I shook my head. “They told me when I was five but my dad didn’t give it to me ’til I was ten. Only my dad. She doesn’t know I have it.”
“Why would she keep it from you?”
“She doesn’t want me obsessing over her. Because she was a druggie. She was into bad stuff and she OD’d.”
“Laur.” She touched my hand.
“Guess nobody saves the dirty needles or crack pipes or whatever for the family scrapbook. But at least they saved this.”
“I don’t understand your mom. Adopted mom, I mean.”
“That makes two of us. She has her ways, as my dad says.” He used these four words, and a certain look in his eyes—half defeat, half apology—whenever he tried to explain something inexplicable about my mother. Like why she’d keep this strange, wonderful thing, the one object I knew my real mom had handled, had valued, from me. Whenever I said that—real mom—he scolded me. You have a real mom, he’d say. A real mom who loves you.
“They fight about it,” I said. “How much to tell me about her. I’ve heard them through the heating duct.”
“What else do you know?”
“So the official story is she ‘made bad choices’ and ‘passed away.’ But I’ve heard my m
other whisper things like ‘dredging up the past’ and ‘drug-affected’ and ‘prostitution.’”
Casey’s eyes widened in shock before she could help herself. “She was...?”
“It doesn’t make her a bad person.”
“I know.”
“She made bad choices. I think they agreed on the wording—bad choices. I think my mother was hoping I’d have more problems so she could be a martyr. All I had was low birth weight, and she’d signed on for fetal alcohol syndrome, brain damage, whatever.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Anyway. After the official speech my dad said she loved me, because she must’ve stopped using when she was pregnant, but my mother didn’t say a word. Not a word.”
“You could talk to her.”
I shook my head. “What’s the point?” I opened the driftwood case again. Just to see the music box’s workings shining in the sun.
“So anyway,” I said. “The summer I was ten, when my mother was on a church retreat, my dad gave it to me. He said he and my mother ‘were of different minds’ about it. But he thought I was old enough, and he wanted me to know that everybody has beauty in them.”
“I like that.”
“So now you know as much as me.”
“You have to find out what the song is,” Casey said.
“I’ve gone to seven different antique dealers. And you know that syndicated radio show on KZSY Classical? June Names That Tune? Where people try to stump her, humming part of a song?”
“You know that’s not exactly my station.”
“How embarrassing is this? I used to call in. Every Sunday night at ten, I’d hide in the pantry with the phone and hit Redial. I finally got through when I was thirteen but when it was my time to go on the air I panicked and hung up.”
Casey’s eyes had gone so glisteny I couldn’t look at them. I stared off at the view. “I had the portable radio on really low, and I heard June make this joke. Without missing a beat. She said, That’s an easy one. It’s ‘Static,’ composer unknown, 1994.”
“I can see why you wouldn’t want to do it on the radio. Too public.”
“I’ve tried record stores. Everyone says it sounds familiar, but they can’t place it.”
“Some dumb teenager in a record store wouldn’t know. We’ll go to a music professor. Or we’ll... I don’t know. We’ll think of something.”
This was why I loved Casey. This was why I’d needed to show her.
We.
I sealed the box inside its bags and slipped it in my pocket, fastening the giant safety pins.
Casey squeezed my hand and scooched off the rock. She stayed close, though. I could see her, gathering leaves, occasionally glancing over to check on me. She waited for me to wipe my face with my sleeve, and take a long drink of sun-warmed water from my bottle, and tell her when I was ready to go. We were quiet the whole way down.
* * *
The next Sunday morning, while Casey was sleeping, Alex and I sat on the dock and I showed Alex the music box, too.
“Thank you,” she said, practically in tears as she examined the swirls and knots in the driftwood cover. “Thank you for showing me.”
“I could have ended up like that,” she said, when I told her about the drugs that killed my birth mom. “You fall in with one wrong friend, date one wrong boy.”
“My mother thinks she was weak.”
“She doesn’t understand.”
That night I wrote in my diary—
For a second I had a stupid idea. If only it were true.
10
Critical and Confusing
The Creekside Café
Last Saturday of August 1996
We sat at the good window table at the Creekside, waiting for our two short stacks of brown-sugar pancakes. We had an hour to kill before the next bus; Alex couldn’t drive us to the rink tonight because she had a date.
We knew the men who picked Alex up only by their cars. The blue Pontiac, the black Porsche, the gray Camry, the white Lexus. Some cars only came once. Some came a bunch of nights in a row, then, just when it seemed Alex was about to declare the impossible—that she had a steady boyfriend—they disappeared from the rotation.
Tonight she was going out with some guy she’d met in a pagan store in Sacramento called Moonshadow. She’d come back with bags full of herbs and seeds, a mortar and pestle, a book on “good witch” gardening, and a date with a guy in a beat-up Nissan. We called him The Warlock.
We were playing Things That Don’t Belong, the game you played at the Creekside. It was just a regular diner, but had once been a fish-and-chip joint, and the current owners had embraced the nautical theme. The ceiling was strung in fishing net with stuff artfully hung throughout—treasure chests, plastic starfish, an octopus. Right above our heads was the lake monster everyone called Messy.
Along with a water-themed word search and a drawing of Messy for coloring, the kids’ menu had a section where you wrote down the Things That Don’t Belong once you spotted them overhead. There were always ten nonaquatic things up in the ceiling net, and they got rotated every month.
“Kazoo. Near the ladies’ room,” I said.
“Stuffed lion by the door.” Casey craned her neck. “Pink high heel.”
Before we got all ten, Scary Sue dealt us our plates, banging the syrup jar down between us without a smile. Casey poured on a ton of syrup, until her pancakes were surrounded by a gooey brown moat, but I was used to her sweet tooth by now and didn’t say anything.
When Scary Sue passed us a minute later, delivering biscuits and gravy to the next table, Casey said to her yellow-uniformed back, “When you have a sec could we have another syrup please?”
Scary Sue thumped another bottle down without looking at Casey.
“Nice try,” I said.
“I thought I’d at least get a smile out of her.”
Casey was going to “break” Scary Sue, like the guards at Buckingham Palace. She’d been trying for a year.
“She’s pretty,” I said.
Casey stopped chewing and covered her mouth with her hand. “What does that mean?”
“It means she’s pretty.”
She swallowed, stared at me. I wished that instead of saying Scary Sue was pretty, I’d pointed out that Messy’s tail was wrapped around a plastic ice-cream cone. It would be our fifth item.
“It means much more than that, and you know it.”
I don’t know why I said it. I hadn’t planned to. Ever since I’d shown Casey the music box, I’d waited for her to tell me the secret she carried around with her every day. I guess I’d gotten impatient. I was anxious to show her how fine I was with it.
And the stupid thing was I already knew how totally self-centered this was, and how common. I’d read about it. All my pamphlets said—don’t push. If Casey didn’t want to talk about it now, if she wasn’t ready for or receptive to the conversation, I wasn’t supposed to force it. You were never supposed to force it.
I’d figured it out months before, after a hundred clues. Her expression one time when I asked her if she thought Daniel Day-Lewis was cute in Last of the Mohicans. Why she was the only girl in our class who wasn’t nervous around the skating rink guy. Why she changed the subject if anyone asked who she liked.
I knew when we finally talked about it I’d say everything right and we’d become closer than ever, like with my music box.
She clattered her fork down and said, “I’m not that hungry.” Pink spots blossomed on her cheeks, the spots Alex called her angry clown look. The last time I’d seen them was in the hall at school after Mr. Travertini, our geography teacher, asked her if Alex was dating anyone.
“Case. I only wanted you to know that...that I know, and of course I’m fine with it, and we can talk about it anytime you want.” Seeing her
tense jaw, her red cheeks, I blathered on, going way off-script. “I read about the Kinsey scale, and I’m probably a one, maybe even a one and a half, because I haven’t liked a girl in real life but I think my first crush was on Julie Andrews. I mean. Mary Poppins.” I finished limply.
“You know, I’m actually pissed,” she said. “You’re fine with it? You’re maybe even a one and a half? Well. Lucky me.”
“I’m messing this up.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be,” she said. “Not everything is about you.” She stared out the window, and I followed her gaze. An old man was shuffling from the bait shop to his truck, a white Styrofoam cooler in his arms. Casey waited until he folded himself into the seat and drove off before turning to me with a sigh. “How many times did I ask you what you keep in your pocket?”
“Never.”
Scary Sue was slamming down plates of fried chicken two tables over so I lowered my voice before continuing. “I read this pamphlet from the library that said I was supposed to let you know I was available for an honest conversation. So this is me, Case. Being available. And being an idiot. I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.”
I took a bite, but my pancake, delicious a second ago, was now flavorless.
For a few minutes Casey stared at the ceiling as if she was still playing the game. Concentrating hard, cataloging things that belonged and things that didn’t.
Finally she sighed and looked at me. “You have a pamphlet?”
I nodded. “From PFLAG. That’s Parents and—”
“I know what it is. What’s the title of the pamphlet?” The pink circles in her cheeks had faded a little.
“It’s called Let’s Talk: Supporting Gay Youth During a Critical and Confusing Time. I have more but that’s the best one.”
“Sounds like a page-turner.” One corner of her mouth curled up.
The Summer List Page 9