“And Simeon and Asher don’t get along,” Lydia was saying, “so maybe we should put them on opposite ends of the camp.”
April cocked her head to one side. “I thought they were on good terms.”
Lydia shook her head. “Not since the end of last year, when the Simeon kids accused Asher of cheating in the relay race. Remember later, some of the kids from Simeon raided Asher’s tent with water balloons?”
April nodded wearily. “Oh, yes, I remember now. Yeah, let’s put them as far away from each other as possible.”
Lydia began scribbling in her notebook again. April glanced at her from behind her sunglasses. For years now, ever since Lydia “graduated” from the VBS herself, she had been April’s right-hand girl when it came to planning, setting up, and running the thing. April dreaded the day when Lydia finally got tired of helping or decided to actually do something with her life (go to college, maybe?), leaving April to manage such delicate tasks as positioning all twelve tribes by herself. But this is my last year, she reminded herself. I won’t be doing this next summer. And then came the voice again: Then why haven’t you said anything? Why haven’t you let Pastor Eric know that after this summer, you’re done?
Again, Florida. The sun rising over the ocean, the steady sound of waves hitting the shore. April blinked, squinted out at the golf course. From where she stood, she could see Laura and Bethany on the other side of the field, setting up the poles for the portable fence that, once completed, would wrap around the church property and mark where the VBS ended and the golf course began. She’d had to implement the fence a few summers ago, after repeated incidents of kids straying away from camp and onto the fairways and greens, much to the golfers’ chagrin.
Last night, April’s daughter, Laura, who was supposed to be spending the night at Bethany’s house, had come home at three in the morning, wet, dirty, reeking of pond water and marijuana, and refusing to tell April where she’d been.
“It’s not important,” Laura had said, looking at the floor as April stood in her pajamas in front of the stairwell, blocking the path up to her daughter’s room.
“Not important?” April had repeated. “Since when do you decide what’s important in this house and what isn’t? I cannot believe you right now.”
“I’m home, aren’t I?” Laura had snapped. “I’m here in one piece! What else do you want?”
“What I want is a responsible daughter with a good head on her shoulders, which I thought I had, but I guess I was mistaken. Would you just look at yourself? Where were you?”
The argument had escalated from there, and looking back on it, April felt regret. Nothing good ever came of arguments at three in the morning—she could attest to this from those months before her divorce. The last thing Laura said before running up to her room was “I hate you!” and April had gone back to bed trying to convince herself that her daughter hadn’t meant it.
When she got up that morning, April had resolved to keep her cool. After she showered, dressed, and made her son breakfast and Laura still hadn’t stirred, April had filled a glass of water and gone up to her daughter’s bedroom. She still slept the way she had as a baby: eyes closed tight, face almost clenched, as if even sleeping was something that filled her with anxiety. April coughed, and Laura stirred and opened her eyes, blinking at her mother in confusion. “Your throat’s going to be dry,” April said, handing her the glass of water as she sat up. “Drink this and get dressed. You’re coming with me today.”
For the first few minutes of the drive to church, they sat in uncomfortable silence, April paying more attention to the road than was necessary. Then Laura suddenly blurted, “I only took one puff, and I didn’t even like it. I knew it was wrong, so I stopped. I’m sorry.”
Since their argument last night, the muscles around April’s neck had been tense. She felt something release inside her. Now she could ask in a perfectly calm voice, “Are you ready to tell me where you were last night?”
Laura explained that she and Bethany had hung out with some kids from school, who had started smoking. “But we didn’t feel comfortable with the situation,” she said, “so we left.”
“Bethany went home?”
Laura nodded quickly.
If only April could believe her daughter. If only she could leave the matter there. “Who was that who dropped you off, then?”
“What?”
April tried to keep her voice level as she stopped the car at a red light. “The car I saw that dropped you off at the house, who was that?”
“I cut across the park on the way home—that’s how I got wet; I tripped in a puddle—and Paul Frazier was driving by and he offered me a ride.”
“Paul Frazier?” It took April a moment to place the name: Sharon Frazier’s son. He had been in April’s twelfth-grade algebra class maybe three or four years ago. She remembered him as a bright but lazy student who never applied himself. Last she’d heard, though, he had moved to New York City after graduating. “I thought he went away for college.”
“He’s back. Graduated.”
April was quiet as she waited for the green light. Her daughter’s story was strange enough to be almost believable. Why else would she mention the Frazier boy?
“Are you going to tell Bethany’s parents?” Laura asked.
April bit her lip and hit the gas as the light turned green. Eric and Linda wouldn’t take the news that their daughter had been out smoking weed with strange kids as calmly as she had. It would result in a long, tedious meeting with parents and daughters, leaving no stone unturned, and then another meeting with just her and Eric and Linda, to discuss consequences and motives and what needed to be done, topped off with a long and fervent prayer session. The mere thought of it was exhausting. “Text Bethany,” she said at last. “Tell her to get her butt to church for VBS setup ASAP, if she knows what’s good for her.”
So there they were: two girls setting up for vacation Bible school to atone for their sins. April wasn’t sure it had been the right decision. Maybe harsher punishment was called for. Part of her wanted to let the matter go. She worried about her daughter. Laura was an anxious girl, concerned about her looks, and April had the suspicion that the only reason her daughter had been hanging out with these other kids in the first place was because one of the boys was the object of her affections.
April thought Laura was beautiful, but then, every good mother thought her own daughter was beautiful. And as a high school teacher, April didn’t have the luxury of forgetting the savage nature of a teenage girl’s life, the Darwinian struggle to survive in the social biome of lip gloss and miniskirts, texting battles and boys. These days, the girls seemed to grow up faster. By the time they’d reached April’s class, they were like miniature twenty-two-year-olds, perfect little projections of their future selves. Her daughter wasn’t overweight, but she had a certain roundness about her. Her face had a generous scattering of freckles, and the red hair she’d inherited from April was thick and often frizzy. And although Laura didn’t talk about boys, they must surely be on her mind. What fifteen-year-old girl wasn’t thinking about boys at the beginning of summer?
April made it a point to stay in shape and had miraculously been able to preserve the petite, athletic build she’d developed running track in high school. Aging had been kind to her skin as well as her figure, and she had only faint stress lines around her eyes and forehead. Not that it mattered—April hadn’t been with a man, or so much as been on a date with one, for years. There had been the initial push a year or so after her divorce, when, with sister Sarah’s encouragement, she had gone on as many as two dates a week. “Anything to get your mind off that asshole ex-husband,” Sarah had said.
Most of the men she’d gone out with had been nice, and more than a few had wanted to see her again. But every night, after they parted ways in some restaurant parking lot (at her age, it just seemed silly to have
them pick her up), and she had gone back to the safety of her own bathroom, she immediately crumbled into a hot, wet ball of anxiety. Sometimes, her lungs would constrict and she would struggle just to breathe, or her stomach would churn and she would spend half the night gazing at her toilet bowl, wondering whether she would vomit up the dinner she’d had on the date, without ever actually doing so. And sometimes, she would just cry. Sob and sob until her eyes were red and her cheeks bloated and puffy.
It wasn’t long before she decided that these dates, however pleasant, weren’t worth this sort of trade-off. It was like taking medication for migraines when the side effects included blindness or heart failure. If she were to go on a date now, April didn’t know whether the same delayed attacks of anxiety would befall her. But she was too busy these days to find out, and didn’t really see the point, anyway.
“April!” a man’s voice called out. She turned around to see Pastor Eric approaching her from the church. He smiled when he reached her. “And so it begins again.”
April nodded. “It does.”
“Excited?” Eric asked, still beaming. For a moment, April wondered whether he was being sarcastic, but Pastor Eric didn’t really do sarcasm.
“Definitely.” She nodded again, smiling and trying to match his eager tone, then feeling that maybe she had overdone it. She hoped he didn’t think she was mocking him.
But her pastor only blinked mildly. With his silver-streaked hair and stubbled chin, Eric was the sort of man who had eased into his forties as if middle age were a warm bath that one gently lowered oneself into. “Well,” he said after studying April for a moment, “I just came over to let you know Jon will be training our new recruit today.” He nodded back toward the building. April could see Jon Newman—Lydia’s brother and the church’s worship leader—standing with someone she didn’t recognize. “Sharon Frazier’s son, Paul—do you know him?”
For a second, April didn’t answer. Paul Frazier, her daughter’s late-night ride. But it was just a strange coincidence, maybe not even all that strange. In a town as small as Grover Falls, where everyone knew everyone else, such happenstances hardly even rose to the level of coincidence. “I taught him math in twelfth grade,” she said, “but that was years ago.”
“Well, I just had a nice conversation with him, and I believe it’s going to work out great. He knows his stuff, and I think working here will be good for him. I can call him over so you two can say hi.”
April shook her head a little too quickly. “Oh, no, that’s fine. Still have a lot to do here.”
Eric stifled a yawn. “I think I’ll head home, then, maybe even take a nap. Had a late night. We had some uninvited guests here around two in the morning. On the roof. Kids, I think, though I didn’t get a good look at any of them.”
“Really?” Lydia’s voice blurted beside April, who had almost forgotten she was there.
Eric nodded. “The weird thing was, I couldn’t find any sign of a break-in: no unlocked door or open windows. But they weren’t there just for the view. They left their joint behind.”
“Their what?” Lydia said.
“Marijuana,” April said. She had a sinking feeling inside her chest.
It took April only a minute to decide what to do. Then she marched out across the field to where the girls were setting up the fence, and said quite calmly, “Both of you will be helping out every day at the VBS for the entire session—no arguments, no exceptions.” They had looked up at her, wide-eyed but not protesting. They knew that she knew, and neither dared question how or argue against the stiff sentence she had just imposed.
That was that, April thought as she headed back toward the church. She wouldn’t tell Pastor Eric what she knew, and Laura and Bethany were obliged to be here, where she could keep an eye on them, every weekday until August. Blackmail? Maybe, but it was the best solution April could come up with.
Still, something was bothering her. It took her a moment to remember about Paul Frazier. This morning, Laura had told her it was Paul who gave her a ride last night, and now here he was, working at the church. Coincidence or not, she wondered how much Paul knew about her daughter’s little escapade and whether he was the sort of guy who would keep something like that to himself. She tried to remember him from her class years ago. He had been quiet but popular, definitely no Boy Scout. All the girls’ eyes had strayed off the whiteboard whenever he entered or left the classroom. It struck April as both funny and a little sad that now she was worried about this boy ratting her out to her pastor. It wasn’t just that, though. She didn’t like the idea of Paul—or anyone, for that matter—thinking she was your typical oblivious mom, with no clue what her children were up to. Call it vanity, though she preferred to think of it as image management. She decided it wouldn’t hurt to say hello to Paul Frazier, see what sort of person he had turned into.
She found him on the plywood stage that three of the dads had erected on the lawn just outside the church building. He had his back to her, kneeling in front of an amplifier. She knew it was him. Jon had told her where to find him, and she still recognized that unruly mop of dark hair from back in algebra class. He had to know there was someone standing behind him, must have heard her coming up onto the stage, but he didn’t turn around—just kept fiddling with the wires connected to the amp.
After a few seconds, April cleared her throat. “Paul?”
He turned his head slowly, squinting, with one hand shielding his eyes from the late-morning sun that blazed down from behind her head. “Yeah?”
“Hi, it’s April. April Swanson. Do you remember me?” she asked, feeling foolish but also a little indignant—kids never remembered their teachers anymore.
But then Paul stood up. The hand dropped to his side, and the blank look disappeared, replaced with a smile. “Oh, hey! How are you? Sorry, I couldn’t see you with that sun in my eyes.”
Should she believe him? Was this really the reason he hadn’t recognized her until she introduced herself? She decided, seeing that smile on the boy’s face, that she was too old not to accept his excuse or to hold anything against him. “How have you been?” she asked as they shook hands.
“Okay.”
“I hear you’re taking over running the sound here.”
“That’s the way it appears.”
Young people could never just give you a straight answer. “You were in the city, weren’t you, for school?”
Paul nodded.
“How was that?”
He didn’t say anything, just looked at her.
April smiled uncomfortably. “Sorry, I guess you’re sick of people asking you that, huh?”
“Asking me what?”
“How school was.”
Paul shook his head. “You’re the first, actually.”
Was he being sarcastic? She cleared her throat again. “So I just came over to welcome you aboard. I run the Bible school, so we’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other this summer.”
Paul wiped sweat from his brow and nodded.
“All right, then,” April said. She stuck her hands in the back pockets of her shorts and half turned away, then twirled back around on the balls of her feet to face him. “So I heard you gave my daughter a ride last night,” she said.
“Yeah, I did.” He smiled. “She’s an interesting girl.”
“I just wanted to let you know that I did become aware that she was out that late. Her behavior was dealt with. There were consequences.”
“Okay.”
“I just didn’t want you to think, like, that I’m an irresponsible mother, or anything—that I’m not on top of things.”
“I would never be dumb enough to think that, believe me.”
Was he making fun of her? He was making fun of her. April didn’t know what to say, so she just stood there smiling stupidly from behind her sunglasses.
“Alth
ough, if I were you,” Paul said, “I’d be careful with those consequences.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just think it has a way of fanning the flames. Like, if you tell your kid over and over not to do something, then odds are, when they get the chance, that’ll be the first thing they do. It’s teenage nature.”
April crossed her arms. “So you’re saying I should have kept my mouth shut, just let my daughter roam the streets till all hours without any repercussions?”
“Not necessarily. I’m speaking hypothetically.”
“Well, at my age you can’t really afford to be hypothetical anymore. Everything’s pretty real.”
Paul shrugged. “Just my opinion.”
April was suddenly infuriated, by his little half shrug and half smile, by his smug opinions, vague answers, and the way he just stood there looking at her, sweat glistening on his forehead. “Yeah, well,” she almost snapped, “you let me know how that works out for you when you have your own kids, okay?”
She was surprised when he laughed. It sounded like genuine laughter. “I’ll do that,” he said. “We can get together and compare notes.”
April didn’t know whether she should laugh along at her unintended joke. She settled for giving him a faint smile and then taking a step back. “Well, I’d better get back to work. It was nice to see you again, Paul.” Turning and heading off the stage, she could feel his eyes on the back of her neck, watching her go.
LAURA
There were times I thought my mom was psychic. Just when I thought I had gotten one over on her, I would find her one step ahead of me. The morning after my swamp adventure, on the ride to church, I gave her my version of events. Though untrue, it had contained just enough truth that I thought she might buy it. So I was surprised later in the morning, as Bethany and I were setting up that stupid fence for VBS, to see my mom come marching across the green toward us. I could tell by her resolute stride that it wasn’t going to be good. And sure enough, she told us that we would be expected to help out at Bible school every day until it ended. She had found out more about the night before—how, I had no idea. I was stunned.
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