“He’s meeting us in his truck,” Sandy whispered. “On the logging road.”
She hesitated. Summer was almost over and it seemed foolish to venture into the woods with this strange, unpredictable girl when she was so close to escape. There could be bears. The flashlight batteries could die and they could get lost.
“Come on, it’s not far.” Sandy tugged her by the elbow, her voice soft and reassuring.
“Want to tell me where we’re going?”
“The promised land. Glory, hallelujah.” Sandy did not have her gold bible with her tonight. The gold bible was a prop, a decoy; that became clear after they passed the hillside clearing with the three pine trees that marked the north edge of camp. Sandy tucked the flashlight into the waistband of her khakis and raised her arms above her head like the show-offy girls at camp, the ones who reached to the sky when they were especially overcome by the Lord, as if they were bench-pressing heaven.
She curled eight fingers down, pivoted her wrists, and, turning, pointed the two center digits in the general direction of Camp Three Pines.
* * *
The girls followed the trail to the logging road, where a red pickup idled, the passenger door open.
She hesitated but Sandy squeezed her elbow. “Don’t worry. I’ve been there before.”
Sandy climbed into the middle seat and after a second she followed.
“You made it,” the musician said, smiling.
She stared ahead, her cheeks warming. Her hand hesitated on the door pull, her right foot stayed planted on the dirt road.
“You okay missing your beauty sleep?” he said.
It was an old-fashioned expression. He looked older without his guitar, under the harsh light of the truck. She’d guessed he was in his twenties but now thought thirties was more like it.
The driftwood moon lay on the dashboard, wedged against the windshield by a crumpled take-out bag.
She had sent him a message, and he had answered.
20
More than Fun
Late July 1997
Summer before junior year
The three of us lay on the dock on the red-plaid picnic blanket. For half an hour I’d heard only the lake’s gentle lapping and the occasional whistle of Casey spitting watermelon seeds off the dock.
I’d owned my purple two-piece for less than a week, and the sun on my bare stomach felt deliciously forbidden. My mother had meetings at church or I wouldn’t have risked it.
Alex was so quiet I thought she was asleep. But when she thumped the dock with her hand and said, “Let’s talk about your party,” I realized she’d been quietly obsessing again. Casey’s birthday was all she’d talked about for weeks.
“I don’t care as long as I get strawberry cake,” Casey said, then spat more seeds.
“How about a Little Mermaid theme,” I said. “Casey wears a tail and shell bra.”
This got a laugh out of only Casey. Alex was serious about throwing Casey the perfect sixteenth birthday, a party that would shake Coeur-de-Lune up. Too bad Coeur-de-Lune didn’t know it needed shaking up.
“Be serious,” Alex said.
“Can’t the three of us just go to the Creekside like last year?” Casey said.
“You know what I would have given for a big party when I was your—”
“Mom. The six words. You promised.”
“Six words?” I opened my eyes.
Casey sat cross-legged in front of the watermelon bowl, digging for a good wedge. “What I would have given for. She agreed to stop saying it. We know all about your poor, deprived, sheltered childhood, Mom.” Maybe realizing how unkind this sounded, she softened it by reaching across the bowl and snapping the back of Alex’s blue bikini top. “But look at you now.”
Alex didn’t answer for a long time. She didn’t bat at Casey’s hand and say, “You naughty child,” laughing, like she usually would.
I watched Casey, watching Alex, lying so still on her stomach, on her third of the picnic blanket. And I knew Casey was quietly surrendering to the idea of an over-the-top party.
“Okay.” Casey sighed. “Big party it is.”
Alex sat up, smiling. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Sure, Mom. Go nuts.”
“Okay, so think.” Alex stared out at the lake as if it could offer ideas. “What’s the most fun you two’ve had recently?”
“Watching Grease 2 and making peanut-butter-cup cookie dough last night was pretty fun,” Casey said.
“We could have it at the skating rink,” Alex said. “You two used to go all the time.”
“Mom? Remember? Laura’s boy works there so she doesn’t want to go anymore.”
“He’s not my boy.”
“Right. Sorry, honey. Though I still think you should try to talk to him. How could he resist our Laura?” She tickled my knee.
“He can,” I said. “Next idea?”
“A swimming party?” Alex said. “We could decorate the dock.”
“That’d be fun,” Casey said.
“But it has to be more than fun,” Alex said. “It has to be extra special.”
“We can buy the good dip,” Casey said.
Alex didn’t acknowledge her snark. “Let’s analyze these town parties. The ones you always say are so sucky. Why do you go? How can we make yours not sucky?” She said sucky without irony, in her anthropology mode. Casey and I had accused her of secretly researching a book on teenage living in America. “Laura? Help me out.”
“We go because...because the parties are the center of things,” I said.
“But what do you do there that’s fun? Talk with your other girlfriends? Make out with boys?”
Casey shot me a look that said, I told you so—can you believe it? It reminded me not to come to her aid with any pamphlety hints. The look was resigned and a little sad, too.
Because Alex still didn’t know. She didn’t have a clue. It bothered me, that Alex’s eyes were so restless she couldn’t see her own daughter. But Casey said it was just the way Alex was raised, with strict, religious parents and an expectation of straightness. Just the way she was raised. The same phrase my dad used to pardon my own mother.
“Laura, help me. What’s the best time you’ve had at a party this summer?”
When a certain older boy touched a one-centimeter-square section of my jaw. “I had fun playing board games,” I said.
“Games,” Alex murmured. “That’s it, you brilliant, brilliant girl.” She got up and ran down the dock to the house.
Casey and I watched her, then turned to face each other. I wondered if my smile was as fond and indulgent as Casey’s.
“It could be fun,” I said. “Pictionary. Charades...”
Casey groaned. “Please let it not be charades.”
* * *
The day of Casey’s party started off drizzly. A rare summer storm. Alex fretted, worried that people wouldn’t come, or that the rain would put a damper on the game.
She’d planned a scavenger hunt. She must have spent ten hours a day writing in a yellow Mead notebook. Obsessing over rules, what to put on the list.
“What’ll we do about the food?” she said, rearranging the furniture yet again. We’d pushed most of it against the walls because The Shipwreck’s living room was tiny.
“We’ll hold an umbrella over Laura’s head while she barbecues. Stop stressing,” Casey said, not looking up from Princess Daisy. I’d given her a huge bag of used books as a birthday gift. I’d gone to her favorite bookstore in Sacramento, and even found two of these lesbian paperbacks from the 1950s that cost sixteen dollars each. We’d pored over them that morning, fascinated, but now they were hidden under Casey’s bed.
“Why did it have to rain today?” Alex picked at her cuticles.
“There are only twelve kids coming, A
lex. We’ll make it work.”
“Mom. Chill.”
Alex walked down the dock to survey the clouds again.
“Remind me why I agreed to do this?” Casey said.
“Because she’s your mom and you love her.”
“Oh. That.”
I peeked in the fridge. Casey had made Alex promise to keep it simple. Hamburgers and chips and carrots and celery sticks. And Alex had obeyed. But there had to be four dozen hamburger patties in the fridge, carefully draped in cellophane. The peeled carrots were little fancy ones, green tassels still attached. And the celery sticks had been cut so precisely it looked like Alex had used a ruler.
“We’ll be living on hamburgers for a month,” I said.
At 4:35 it stopped drizzling, and at 5:15 Alex took her worries indoors. She filled bowls with chips. There were so many bowls that they kind of made the room look smaller, but I wasn’t about to say this to Alex.
At 6:02 Alex said, “Where are they?”
“Mom. It’s okay.”
It occurred to me that she’d never thrown a party before. My own mother oversaw parties—or what passed for parties, at church—all the time. Bible study coffee klatches and spaghetti suppers for one hundred and Palm Sunday brunches in the church’s ugly yellow banquet room, with three coffee urns glugging and ten women on the committee obeying orders. My mother managed these events with the cool confidence of a general.
At 6:04 we heard the first voices in the driveway.
At 6:14, when Taylor Rockingham said she’d thought Alex was Casey’s sister, Alex couldn’t hide her pleasure. And she started to relax. Small as it was, the house was a good icebreaker.
“This really used to be just for kids?” someone said.
Casey and I showed off the marks from the bunk beds, the hidey-holes under the upstairs floorboards where we’d found comic books and arrowheads.
We told the kids who didn’t know Coeur-de-Lune’s legends how the Collier boys and their cousins used to run free all summer, the town their playground. We told everyone how they had slept there with a babysitter, like going away to camp. We pointed out the wooden beams in Casey’s bedroom where boys had carved their initials: R.C. D.C. F.C. T.C.
So many Cs.
“A bunch of them died young, though,” I said, a bit dramatically.
Casey echoed my solemn tone. “Nobody knows why.”
This wasn’t exactly true; some were said to have moved east, or maybe it was south, and the wars and heart attacks and illness that had felled the others were perfectly reasonable, dull explanations, as my father had told us.
But reasonable and dull couldn’t compete with fantastic and ghoulish.
Mark Supringer poked his head in from the hall through Casey’s candy-wrapper curtain, draping everything below his neck in the rustling strands like a colorful mummy. Mark was on the swim team—green-tipped blond hair, an inverted triangle of an upper body. “The Collier curse,” he hissed.
He pushed through the lengths of plastic and leaned close to me, his lips humming near my earlobe. “Scary stuff.”
When I pulled away, he continued in his regular drawl as if he’d been addressing the whole group all along. “Maybe it’s the house that’s cursed. Or, like, maybe you should check for lead paint.”
My father would have chided us for exaggerating about the Colliers. The Collier curse is about as real as the lake monster, he had said more than once.
“Case? Come down, it’s almost time.” Alex’s wavery voice called up the stairs. It was almost seven; Alex had planned everything to the minute.
* * *
Alex passed out the scavenger hunt lists shyly that first time. She had none of the impresario about her—that would come later. And the list wasn’t written in clues—that would come later, too. Alex hadn’t let us help and as I read the list I worried, just for one disloyal second, that maybe the items were too easy, too childish: a restaurant sugar packet, a coupon for something frozen, a Thomas the Tank Engine item, a cowboy hat.
“You have two hours,” Alex said. “Back by nine or you’re disqualified.”
“What’s the prize?” Mark called.
“You’ll find out later,” Alex said.
Casey seemed unconcerned, but I thought how awful it would be for Alex, if at nine o’clock nobody bothered to come back.
But everyone huddled, concentrating harder than they ever did in class.
* * *
Casey and Will Benton and I got five things. We ran back ten minutes before the deadline, sure we’d won. Sure, I guess, that nobody else would have taken the game seriously.
But not only was the house full, another team had gotten eight items. Alex checked the hauls carefully, beaming, listening to her sweaty young guests laughing and recounting their successes and failures. She handed out the prizes—twenty-dollar gift certificates to Tower Records in Tahoe City—and was rewarded with Mark Supringer’s official stamp of approval. Cool. Alex had done everything right.
Alex pulled Casey’s cake from the fridge and we sang, and Casey’s eyes shone, and she clutched Alex’s hand in a thank-you after she set the fiery rectangle in front of her.
Before Casey made her wish, she smiled at me.
Kids didn’t linger after. Not that first time. A game and a cake, then time to leave. Like in kindergarten, back when the game was musical chairs or pin the tail on the donkey.
I knew, of course, that people like Mark were off to other parties. Less innocent ones.
But Alex had tapped into something the town needed. Something more than fun.
* * *
Everyone asked if we were having another scavenger hunt the next weekend. They kept calling.
Alex pretended to resist at first. “They’re just being polite.” But she couldn’t hide her pleasure, and it didn’t take much urging to get her to agree.
Fourteen kids came to the second one. I remember we lost again. I remember searching desperately in someone’s pantry for a container of real vanilla extract. They only had artificial. My mother had real, but I hadn’t wanted to ask her.
The next weekend fifteen kids showed up.
By the middle of August there were so many kids The Shipwreck’s living room felt close and stuffy until everyone burst out into the night at the start of the game.
And Alex’s clues had started to show signs of genius.
Sometimes the items were linked, so you had to plan ahead. One night near the end of August we had to get a kids’ menu crayon from the Creekside before we could do a grave rubbing in the cemetery. Scary Sue handed a red crayon over to Casey silently and Casey and Monica Eblingshire and I ran to the church.
It was a warm night, the warmest of summer so far, and we were all a little loopy at that point. Summer was coming to an end and we’d been tearing around town for nearly two hours, trying to hold on to the last days of freedom. It was almost time to run back to Casey’s house.
As the headstones came into view, the three of us stopped running. I peeled the wrapper off the red crayon as we walked through the stone archway.
“Well, this is creepy,” Casey whispered. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Totally. Laura, why aren’t you freaked out?”
“My dad takes me here all the time.” I held the clue list against the closest headstone and started rubbing, wishing I had masking tape and an oil pastel and a bigger piece of paper to do it properly.
Letters began to emerge in white on a background of red:
C O L L I E R
RUPERT T. COLLIER II
1892–1944
Loving husband and father
I whispered as I worked. “Case, look.”
“Sorry to disturb you, Rupert,” she whispered.
“I don’t think he minds,” I said softly. “He was a fun father, letting his
sons and nephews sleep in a separate cabin all summer.”
“Maybe he couldn’t deal with the racket,” Monica said. “Parents were like that back then. Drinking their martinis away from the kids.”
We sprinted home. We had the fake tattoos, the baseball, the crayon, the grave rubbing, the pool noodle. Monica had stuffed it down the back of her jeans, and it bobbed as she ran, like a pink tail.
As we passed the back of the hardware store I glanced up. I knew my dad was up there, playing backgammon with Ollie in the cluttered storage room that served as the Historical Society’s headquarters. The society would be drinking coffee and eating my mother’s blueberry cake, reading old newspaper articles aloud between games.
My dad always said the town’s settlers were self-important because when they shoved out the Native Americans they changed the Washoe name for the area, Tibye-Talyawi, or Black Moon, to Coeur-de-Lune, Heart of the Moon—as if the lake had no soul until white people began to live out their little dramas within its arc. But he liked nothing more than studying these lives.
If I hadn’t glanced up at the window I would have run right past him.
Him. Standing by a pickup truck on the concrete loading bay that led to the back of the store.
No chance of him mistaking me for a mature college girl this time. I was running like a crazy person, a unicorn tattoo on my cheek. His mouth opened as I passed.
So what if he thought I looked like an idiot. I sped up, running so fast I had to keep my hand down my pocket to make sure my music box wouldn’t pop out. I was experimenting with a new system—Velcro tabs—but it hadn’t been tested in extreme conditions before.
“Hey, High School!” he called.
I slowed down. Only a little.
“Hey, High School. Where’s the fire?”
I jogged back to J.B., letting Casey’s and Monica’s laughter recede ahead of me.
“Scavenger hunt,” I panted, hands on my knees.
“You’re always playing games when I see you. You winning?”
“Maybe.”
“What do you have to get?”
The Summer List Page 15