“It’s okay.”
“They actually had that at the library in CDL?”
I shook my head. “I took the bus to Reno and got it at the main branch. A couple of months ago.”
“So tell me about this time. This ‘critical and vulnerable’ time.”
“Critical and confusing.”
“What else do you know about it?”
“That I should listen without judgment. Offer support. Not pretend I know how hard it is.”
“How long have you known?”
“A while now.”
“How?”
“Little things.”
“Such as?”
“The way you look at Ms. Maplewood in trig when she wears that purple V-neck. When Courtney was bugging you at lunch about who you liked so you finally started listing football players just to get her off your back. Bob Shipoluly was the clincher.”
The corner of her mouth twitched higher, so I ventured on. “Really, Case. Nobody’s into Bob Shipoluly. He’s like a WWF wrestler.”
Scary Sue refilled our waters, not apologizing for the pond she made on the vinyl tablecloth. When she went into the kitchen she immediately started yelling at the cook.
“Most. Embarrassing. Crush. Ever,” Casey whispered.
“Nah. She’s got a certain quality. I get it.”
Casey smiled. “You’re a weirdo. But I still love you.”
“Does your mom know?”
Casey shook her head. “She has no clue. Miss Free Spirit. I think it’s because she’s so boy-crazy herself, or maybe the way her parents were. So old-school. It just wouldn’t occur to her.”
“You know she’ll be fine with it. I mean—accepting. She’s not like...” Certain other mothers.
“I know.”
“This town. Alex not realizing. It can’t be easy. Can’t you tell her?”
She waited a long time to answer, mopping up Scary Sue’s water spill with her napkin. “For now I just want to go skating. Go fast and fall a couple times and eat junk food.”
We would laugh about that day later. We called it Pancake Day. Our code name for Scary Sue was Syrup. But if we were alone, hiking up to Raptor Rock or kayaking, Casey would say, “Remember that day you ambushed me and forced me to admit I had a crush on Scary Sue? Worst way to get someone to come out, ever.”
It was funny. But Casey had shown me a part of myself I didn’t like. An ugly streak of insecurity. Selfishness pretending to be friendship. If I was completely “fine with it” would I have tried so hard to prove I was? I wasn’t sure. I knew this, at least: I’d wanted to prove how close we were so I could sleep easier, reassured that the happiness Casey and Alex had brought into my life wasn’t going away.
* * *
We went to the rink and skated fast, and the music was so loud we couldn’t have talked if we wanted. It was Glo-in-the-Dark night, and the white printing on Casey’s I Heart San Francisco T-shirt became phosphorescent under the special lights. The heart was red so it was invisible: I San Francisco. We even played the Dice Game. I got knocked out early but Casey was one of the last skaters standing. I saved her a seat at the snack bar and watched.
He was running the game, of course. The Boy. Someone else was calling the numbers over crackling speakers, but The Boy Behind the Counter had left his counter, skating around, making sure nobody cheated, helping the little kids.
At one point he was just on the other side of the low wall from me. My table was positioned between 5 and 6, and a little girl had parked herself there, at the invisible 5.5. “You have to skate to a number every time,” he explained to her. His voice was gentle.
After three more rolls Casey won, and The Boy handed her the ticket she could exchange for a prize or free slice of pizza. She laughed at something he said as she dug through the treasure chest.
She glided up to our table waving a green stuffed giraffe on skates.
“Congrats,” I said. “I got you a Coke.”
“Thanks. And Jasper says thanks, too. This is Jasper.” She set him on the table and drained her Coke.
We swiveled and swung in our chairs, watching the rink. When The Boy skated by in his tight silver uniform shirt I said, “Want to hear something gross?”
“Jasper does.” She skated the stuffed animal across the table and pulled his ears up as if he was listening.
I watched The Boy on the rink dodge and weave. “He went behind the Dumpsters with Pauline Knowland last week. She said he took his shirt off. She was telling everybody.”
“That is gross.”
“Want to hear something grosser?” I said.
“You still like him.”
I nodded.
We watched him skating. He was too tall. His shiny black hair, flying behind him as he skated, was too long, and his silver T-shirt, glowing in the dark, seemed tighter than ever.
She smiled and said, kindly, “He has a certain quality.”
11
Yes, No, Wow
2016
Thursday night
I swiveled to face J.B. so fast he stepped back and held his hands up, a “don’t shoot” expression on his face.
“Sorry I scared you,” he said, looking past me, at Casey.
Yes, there were lines on his forehead. Yes, the hair on his temples was brushed with silver. His stomach, once concave, was now ever-so-slightly convex.
But his eyes were still wide and kind, the hair that fell across his forehead was still black and shiny. Pretty as doll’s hair, one of his elementary school teachers had called it in front of the whole class. He’d told me about this humiliation one day as I was curled up on his chest in bed, playing with his hair. Kids had teased him at recess after, for being a boy with pretty hair.
“How are you?” I said.
“Can’t complain. Can’t complain.”
“Casey told me you bought this place?”
“Crazy, huh?”
“No. I’m glad someone’s keeping it the same.”
“Ah, but it’s not the same. We have veggie burgers now. How was your food?” He checked my plastic serving basket. It was the closest he’d come to looking at me.
“It was great.”
“Great. Great.” He was answering everything in duplicate. His smile was too wide, his eyes wouldn’t rest anywhere.
He was nervous, too. Confirming this made me feel a tiny bit less nervous myself.
“What else is different?” I said.
He knelt between my chair and Casey’s so we could hear him better over the music. I had imagined the theme song from Elvira Madigan. Or maybe that wistful Italian string piece they played at the end of A Little Romance.
But because we don’t get to choose these things, my reunion with J.B. played out to the tune of “Shake Your Booty.”
“Let’s see, we have compostable paper plates available for the birthday parties.” He drummed the table with his fingers. “Digital music. Queer skate night. This one’s a regular. Or she was before Elle.”
“Don’t blame her,” Casey said. “It’s because you insisted on all those atrocious fix ups.”
“So ungrateful.”
“Please,” Casey said. “That last chick was into NASCAR. NASCAR, J.B.”
“I thought you’d hit it off.”
“You have the worst taste in women, ever.”
They both laughed. I pretended to. We were going to power through this mess with laughter. We’d be world champion laughers.
Then all three of us realized the implications of Casey’s comment at once and stopped laughing. I stared at the ketchup bottle, my smile frozen.
J.B. tried to undo her goof, speaking fast. “We have another one in three weeks, so come, okay? No setups. I promise.”
Now all three of us were staring at the center
of the table, the condiments becoming some sort of safe zone for our eyes. “Disco Inferno” was on.
Burn, baby, burn.
I could take the most direct route to the exit—hurdle over the blue-carpeted half wall in front of us and run straight across the crowded rink. I’d shove aside toddlers, the gang of tough-looking older women zooming past in matching black satin jackets that said Hell on Wheelz, whoever. But I was an adult now so I only smiled harder.
Then Casey did what she always did. She couldn’t just let the moment pass. She had to try to neutralize it by calling it out. “Sorry. That was awk, as Elle and her friends say.”
“What does ock mean?” J.B. said. He was, as they say, strenuously avoiding looking at me. I’d never really understood the expression until that moment. It was actually a perfect description. Because such avoidance takes exertion. I was worn-out from it, and I was only an observer.
“Awk,” I said. “As in awkward.”
He turned his head toward me at last. I smiled and shrugged a little, meaning it was okay. It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.
Casey watched us. Missing nothing. “No more setups, okay? Your setups are...what’s the word?”
“Awk?” I said.
They laughed, relieved I’d attempted a joke, lame as it was.
“You stay home every Friday and Saturday night,” J.B. said to her.
“Suits me fine.”
They went on like this, teasing, lobbing inside jokes across the Formica table. And while I knew they were only doing it to take the pressure of conversation off me, I could tell that their friendship was genuine. So Casey and J.B. had gone on without me, getting closer each year. It was astonishing. In my mind, they’d stopped having any contact after I left. What did I think, that the whole town had been frozen like Pompeii for the last seventeen years?
That age-old internal complaint, insistent and tiresome. Me, me—it’s all about me! I worked my napkin in my hands, pulling it as tight as my smile.
Finally, Casey said, “Did you know about this little scheme of my mom’s?”
“Scheme?” J.B. said.
“Tricking Laura into coming? The scavenger hunt she set up?”
“Scavenger hunt, huh? Are you doing it?” His expression way too innocent.
“So you did know,” Casey said. “We’re not sure yet. We’re only trying it out.” Casey pulled the Polaroid from her pocket and handed it to him.
He examined the picture for a long time and I wondered what he was thinking, studying this overexposed image of me and Casey posing on either side of his plastic treasure chest. He handed it back to her. “So what’s she got you doing besides coming here?”
Props. Thank God for props. I pulled the list of items from my purse. “We’ve done two out of ten.”
J.B. leaned over my shoulder, close enough that I felt his breath on my neck. “Poems, no less.”
I remembered, too late, the line in the roller rink clue about winning a heart. On hoofs of brown and orange you’d win / A game, a heart, a key...
“You should finish it,” he said abruptly.
“Why?” said Casey.
“You just should. Trust me.”
Why should I trust you, J.B.?
And yet I wanted to. After everything, I wanted to.
“Spill it,” Casey said.
“No. But I’ll contribute this.” He picked up a purple plastic birthday goody bag from the floor and set it on the table. “Use it for your loot.”
Casey slipped the Polaroid into the bag. I reached into my pocket for the blue tile and dropped it in.
“You should finish.” J.B. looked at me again and walked away.
“Well,” I said.
I studied the goody bag, which hadn’t changed since I was in grade school. It had a picture of Digby the Pirate Duck doing a skating trick where you drop down with one leg extended in front of you and hold your ankle as you roll along, like you’re aiming a hunting gun. The trick was called Shoot the Duck. Kind of twisted for a kid’s birthday goody bag. A duck doing Shoot the Duck. And the design was cluttered, the purple background clashed with the yellow Digby and made it hard to see his pirate hat.
A No, definitely, on the Yes, No, Wow spectrum I learned about in art school. (If a design worked, it was a Yes. If it didn’t, it was a No. And then there were Wows—rare, brilliant, elusive. What we all aimed for but almost never reached.)
Maybe J.B. had inherited a lifetime supply of the goody bags when he bought the place. He had better taste than that, or at least he used to.
I smiled at Casey. “That went fine, don’t you think? We were very civilized.”
“He’s not married.”
“I’m surprised. He’s a good guy.”
“He was living with someone, five, six years ago. But nothing’s lasted.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Is it?”
“What about you? Anyone serious?”
“I lived with someone in Tahoe. In my late twenties, but she moved to Boston ages ago. J.B.’s not dating anyone right now.”
“So what d’you think? Should we keep going?”
“He’s definitely in on it.”
“Definitely.”
We looked across the rink, but he’d disappeared behind the sea of gliding skaters. “Night Fever” was playing, rainbow lights strobing in time to the Bee Gees’ plaintive falsettos. A portly man did an impressive Shoot the Duck spin in the center, under the disco ball.
“I’ll keep going if you will,” I said.
Casey swiveled to face me, her eyes narrowed. “Is he why you want to stick around?”
I waited a long time to answer. Seeing him had been intense. Yes, No, Wow all at once. But J.B. was only one reason I wanted to stay. There were others, some so small I’d feel foolish offering them out loud—the smell of the skating rink, the satisfaction of rocking back and forth in my chair, the way the light hit the lake.
But most of all Casey, looking at me, not letting me get away with anything.
I didn’t want to go home yet. “I’d like to know what your mom’s up to. Aren’t you curious?”
“It could be a disaster.”
“You’re right.”
“It could be a disaster of epic proportions.”
“Could be.”
“Oh, hell. What’s the next clue?”
Clue 3
Well-planned clutter overhead
To distract the hungry young
You searched long after others stopped
Noticing what had been hung
One child of the sea dives from the nest; free her from the rest
“The Creekside.” Casey pushed back from the table triumphantly. “The junk on the ceiling for the Things That Don’t Belong game.”
“Child of the sea. They still have those mermaid toys?”
12
Things That Don’t Belong
The Creekside’s waiter was male, and friendly. When we ordered only two hot teas to go he scolded Casey. “You should have your visitor try our brown-sugar pancakes.” He pointed at me. “You’d love ’em, specialty of the house!”
Punk. I’d eaten hundreds of brown-sugar pancakes at the Creekside before he was even born.
“Just the tea, Griff,” Casey said.
After he’d walked away I said, “So no more Scary Sue?”
“Long gone. Moved to Arizona.”
“I’m sorry.”
A hint of a smile. “I was not, I repeat, not pining away for Scary Sue all these years.”
“Got it.”
“You spot one of those mermaids?” Casey said, yawning, scanning the ceiling. “I’m pretty wiped.”
I pointed above the ladies’ room door, where a mermaid plush toy’s fin poked
out through the net.
I crossed the small restaurant and glanced around dramatically, as if I was about to commit a Class C felony, while Casey observed from the entry, her yawn turning into a smile. Reassured that nobody was watching, I stood on my tiptoes and plucked Clue 3’s fin from the netting. The mermaid slipped out easily, as if she’d been waiting there seventeen years for me to rescue her.
* * *
We stood on Casey’s porch. Her tired face was sepia-colored in the glow from the single, old-fashioned lamp over her head. She took her keys from her pocket, studied them. “Well,” she said, the word almost lost under the high, insistent vibration of the cicadas.
“Well.” I pulled the mermaid plush toy from my waistband and held her up to the light so her cloth fin sparkled. “Three down.”
Casey took the purple goody bag from her pocket and handed it to me. I dropped the mermaid in.
“We’re good at this,” she said.
“We’ve done it before.”
She jangled her keys. “This is pretty strange, huh?”
“Yes.”
I wanted to ask her if she felt like I did, if the years when we’d been friends still seemed more important than anything that had happened since.
But I feared she didn’t feel the same. Maybe for Casey, this was merely strange. A weekend of forced déjà vu that would go as quickly as it came. An awkward, tricky, emotionally exhausting weekend, sure. But no more.
Casey unlocked her door and Jett burst out. She pushed her nose at Casey’s hand, reminding her of her scratching ability.
“She likes you,” I said. “She went for you before she hit the bushes.”
“I’m honored.” Casey dug her fingers into the precise spots behind Jett’s ears that made her eyes go blank with pleasure.
The door was wide-open, the lights shining in The Shipwreck’s living room. My place would be dark, and cold, and uninviting.
“We have Clue 4 tomorrow.” I rattled the goody bag.
“Raptor Rock, isn’t it? A hike.”
“We should start before it gets too hot. What time should I pick you up?”
“Stay here tonight.”
“Don’t be silly, you don’t have to...”
“It’s almost midnight, you’re tired, the dog’s tired. You probably don’t even have food in your fridge. If we’re going to do this thing we should do it right and start early. So...stay here. And don’t call me silly.”
The Summer List Page 10