Meet Me at Midnight

by Jessica Pennington

  Mom is unpacking bags and boxes, setting our toaster and a few pans onto the little counter—apparently all of us were a little lazy when we got in later than usual last night. Two months is too long for garage-sale pots and pans, Mom said the second summer we came here. She swore in the kitchen a lot that year. That summer, it was mostly just her and me. Mom working on her stained glass, and me turning into an almost-literal fish. We came up as soon as school let out and Mom had been set free from her classroom. Dad came up for a few sporadic weeks, and most weekends. That year, Lake House B was occupied by a nice older couple, who sat on their porch and brought freshly baked cookies out to the bonfire at night. The Wortmans.

  I’m about to hit the door when Mom’s voice stops me. “Hey.” I pause, hoping I haven’t missed my chance at a clean break from unpacking, but knowing I have. “Can you run out and get me a few things from the store?”

  “Big or little?”

  “Little,” Mom clarifies.

  “Sure.” Better to get out of here than to get roped into unpacking boxes. Mom packs like we’re never leaving here. In reality, I think I could survive with my swimsuit and a towel. And my paints. Maybe a small library of books. Okay, I need a few things. But still not as many as Mom.

  Dad looks up at me from where he’s hunched over a box in the dining room. “Don’t forget,” he says, giving me a wink. Dad’s here for almost two weeks before he has to check in at the office for a few days, and then mostly he’ll be here, working remotely, like he has for the last five years or so. I glance out the window to where our little boat is already tied alongside the dock that juts out into the still water. Mom hates driving the boat, but Dad and me, we’ve always lived out on the water, the wake misting our arms, wind burning our cheeks. Driving it still makes me nervous though, and I usually opt to let someone else do it. Boats steer funny; they’re not like cars, which turn exactly when you want them to. Asher says I think too much to drive a boat properly. As if thinking is ever a bad thing.

  Down the road from us, there’s a tiny convenience store called The Little Store—its actual name, I swear—that also doubles as one of the town’s two pizza places. It’s dark, like the walls of our house; like the mossy insides and writhing bodies inside the white container of worms my father sends me to retrieve on the first day of vacation every year. When I was twelve, I would ride my pink bike—balancing the plastic container precariously on my handlebars the whole way home.

  Now, I steal Dad’s car keys from the little nail by the front door, and give a quick “I’ll be back” as the screen door slams behind me. Through the open kitchen windows I can still hear the rustle of paper bags as Mom unpacks a week’s worth of groceries from the local market twenty minutes away, where she grumbles about everything costing twice as much as at home.

  I walk alongside the house, down the little cement sidewalk that runs to the gravel driveway. Straight ahead of me is the monstrosity—as my parents call it—that is Nadine and Charlie’s house. They own Lake House A and B, and until two years ago, they also owned four more tiny shoebox rentals, before they tore them down to build their dream house. Technically, this place is called Five Pines Resort, but with two houses left to rent it hardly qualifies, if you ask me.

  Charlie is quiet and short, light on words but always quick to smile if you happen to see him out and about fixing something, which is rare. He works a full-time corporate job at a bank an hour away. Nadine is the opposite. She’s loud and eager to talk to you, though never about anything good. Her blond hair is wild and she always looks like she’s about to board a cruise ship to some exotic locale. Her clothes are loose and flowing and bright, and her lips are always hot pink or red. It’s hard not to look at her, though I’m well practiced at it, now that she’s around entirely too much. It’s a little strange, spending your summer vacation in someone’s backyard.

  While the lake houses are small and plain, the home that looms over them is like Nadine—tall and wide, and strange in a way you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s the color of a blueberry—not quite blue, not quite purple—with pale green shutters and a white porch that wraps around the front. It looks like something that should be sitting out on a farm, not a lake.

  Last summer, when the house seemingly sprouted out of nowhere during the off-season, there were a handful of yard decorations that sprang up with it. A gnome with a red hat at one corner, a whimsical green toadstool by the back stairs leading down into the yard that faces A and B. The strangest was a rooster, almost up to my chin, positioned near the front door. But this year the house seems to have spawned a whole army of tacky ornaments. They’re littering the gardens that circle the house, dotting the mulch with dogs, tiny girls in frilly dresses, and geese. I can’t catalog them all without staring, and the walk to my dad’s car is over before I can appreciate even a fraction of them. What is going on at Nadine and Charlie’s house? And how could their daughter—pretty, fashionable, always-put-together Lindsay—let this happen?

  My dad’s car—a silver SUV with dark windows and shiny chrome—is sitting along the backside of the little house, in front of a massive wall of firewood that lines the driveway. Beyond it, the old metal swing set is bordered by tall grass, which Charlie has clearly given up on trimming. It makes my twelve-year-old heart a little sad to see it neglected. My phone buzzes, pulling me out of my lawn-gnome-and-swing-set-induced haze, and I swipe the screen to life as I open the door and push it with my hip. Not even out of the driveway, and already my mom has texted me three more things she forgot. And I’m not finding them at The Little Store—I’m going to have to drive into town, to the “big” market that is still little by normal standards. Texting my mom a quick ok, I drop into the seat and twist the keys in the ignition. Without warning, the car is filled with a deafening jolt of drums and screaming. My hand flies for the volume knob, my heart in my throat. What the …

  “Dammit, Asher,” I mutter, just as a messy mop of brown hair pokes up over the back seat. I startle again, not expecting that he’d be in the car. He cocks his head to the side and his blue eyes twinkle as a smile spreads across his face.

  Like most epic rivalries, it would be impossible to pinpoint the exact reasons I loathe Asher Marin. Maybe it’s the way he walks into my family’s cabin each summer—the one identical to his next door—and smiles at my mother as if he’s thrilled to see us all. As if he hasn’t been dreaming of tormenting me for the last ten months, the way I’ve been dreaming of all the things I’ll do to him. It could have been the self-tanner he put in my sunscreen when I was fourteen, or my frozen swimsuits when I was sixteen, or last year’s crowning glory, the cayenne pepper he laced my toothpaste with.

  But those all came after. And there are so many that it doesn’t even matter what started it anymore. All that matters is that this summer, the summer before I go off to college—probably the last summer I’ll have to see Asher Marin for eight weeks straight—I’m going to finish it.

  “Happy first day of summer, Sidney.” He meets my narrowed eyes and laughs, deep in his throat. And just as he clears the door and steps aside, I put the car in drive and peel out of the driveway, a bright red brontosaurus craning its neck around the house as I leave them behind me.

  DAY 2

  Sidney

  Riverton is only four hours from where I live, but it’s like another world up here. One with grocery stores that take checks but not credit cards, and close at five o’clock sharp. All of the houses have names, like Blue Thunder, Copper Cove, and Lake House A. Where random businesses crop up out of the woods, and instead of parking lots, everyone just parks on the side of the road for a quarter mile in either direction.

  As I pull up to River Depot in my dad’s car the next day, cars are everywhere, even on a Monday. I see the swarm of red shirts down by the canoes as I cross the little bridge over the river. It feels like forever before I find a break in the cars and can wedge myself between two with out-of-state plates, and set out for the big brown bui
lding. River Depot is a small, brown log building from the street, but beyond its doors it opens into multiple rooms and levels built into the hill that slopes from the road to the river.

  This is the third summer Kara has worked the desk at River Depot. Her grandma lives three houses down from Five Pines—a little cabin passed down through Kara’s family from back before the lake became a trendy tourist spot. We met my first summer here when I was twelve, and I accidentally stole her inner tube. And by stole, I mean it washed up on our beach one morning after a bad storm, and with no way of knowing where it came from, Kara found me two days later, lying on the hot-pink plastic tube where I had tethered it to the end of our dock.

  She dumped me off of it while I lay there with my eyes closed, and when I surged out of the water, completely bewildered, she laughed at me like a wild little water pixie. Which turned out to be a pretty accurate description of Kara. She’s tiny—barely four foot nine—and even though she makes me feel like a giant at five foot eight, she’s one of my favorite people in the whole world.

  We were inseparable that first summer—the only summer Asher’s family wasn’t with us. Kara brought her float to our dock, and we strapped it next to the yellow version my parents bought me at The Little Store down the road. She crashed dinners when her grandma let her, and the two of us were wild little summer pixies together, covering our toes in glittery polish on the deck and pretending to fish out of a little rowboat, even though neither of us ever caught anything and would have been too freaked out to pull a fish off of a hook even if we did. Some days, we’d be joined by Nadine and Charlie’s daughter, Lindsay, who was a year older than us, and would get dropped off to swim and drive around the WaveRunner docked at Five Pines. But by the next summer, Kara had turned fourteen and was working at River Depot in the afternoons, and when Lindsay made an occasional appearance she was more interested in my new neighbor, Asher.

  By the time I make it to River Depot I’m sweaty and hot. I find it hard to believe any canoe trip can be worth this kind of dedication, but the massive lines outside the gazebo where they sign people up tells me I must be wrong. I push past the crowds and into the gift shop, which is dead and deserted compared to outside.

  “Yesssss,” Kara squeals from behind the counter as I round a rack of postcards and shot glasses, all covered in the iconic images of a Michigan summer—lighthouses and waves and towering golden sand dunes. “Now it’s summer!”

  She wraps tiny arms around me from across the counter, ignoring someone approaching with a box of graham crackers and a bottle of lighter fluid. “When did you get in?” she asks.

  “Saturday night.” I glance at the man next to me, but Kara isn’t fazed.

  She gives me a quick up and down, like she’s checking me out. “You’re still in one piece,” she says, looking amused with herself. “A whole day in, and no serious damage yet?”

  “We’re too busy unpacking,” I say, wondering what Asher has planned for me this summer.

  “You stocked, or should I dig up some bottles of hot sauce and hair remover?”

  I smile. Deep down, I think Kara lives vicariously through my ongoing escapades with Asher. She can barely temper her amusement with the two of us. “I’m good.”

  “I work all week.” She sticks her tongue out like she’s going to gag and makes a desperate sound deep in her throat. “But there’s a party Friday. Promise me you’ll come?” Her voice is high and whiny. “Just once?” she begs, her head tipping into a pleading dip at her shoulder.

  On my left, Graham Cracker Guy clears his throat.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say, but we both know I’m not going. I hate parties. The small talk with strangers, and not knowing what to wear with a bunch of people I don’t know. And one thing I’ve learned over the years is that everything in Riverton happens just a little differently than I expect it to. I hate being unprepared, and while one party would remedy that, I just can’t seem to rip off that bandage.

  “I’ll text you the address,” she says.

  “Miss?” Graham Cracker Guy has more patience than I would have expected. It must be the beginning of his vacation—I’ve seen other tourists have total meltdowns for a lot less than being ignored for three whole minutes.

  Kara’s head snaps to her right as if she just noticed someone was there, and a smile lights up her face. She’s all white teeth, blond hair, and sparkle. I notice the tiny pink stone that glitters in her nose, new from the last time I saw her. “Is this going to be all?” she asks the man as I walk out a side door and onto the deck that stretches out toward the river. I stop at one of two windows cut into the wooden wall to my left, THE GRILL painted in white above them. Arriving at the lake is the official start of summer, and nothing says summer like ice cream.

  “What can I get you?” a friendly voice says, pulling my attention away from the river and to a pair of brown eyes housed in a very pretty face. An almost too pretty face. The kind with cheekbones I could trace with my finger, and a jaw as sharp as the awkwardness stabbing me in the chest right now.

  “Ice cream?” I say, suddenly unsure why I even stepped up to the window. Ice cream. It was definitely ice cream I came here for.

  “Any particular flavor,” he asks with a smile, “or should I surprise you?”

  “I like surprises.” I hate that I said it. That somehow my filter has been disabled by his brown eyes, and everything is just falling out of my mouth unchecked now. I said it nervously, but it sounded flirty. I give myself a mental pep talk. You can do this, Sidney. Just keep it up. You’re on vacation now; the mysterious, worldly girl from somewhere else. He doesn’t know you paint rocks for fun, or that you can’t ski for your life. You can be anyone this summer.

  But who I actually am is a girl staring like a weirdo at a guy who is clearing his throat and asking—maybe not for the first time—if she wants a cup or a cone. “Waffle cone.” I smile. “Sorry, big decision. Not college-decision big or anything, but, you know … big … ish.” Oh good, the nervous rambling has started.

  He laughs. I’m not sure if he’s laughing at me or with me, but I laugh, too, just to convince myself it’s the latter. “Done,” he says, taking a step away from the counter, toward a long white freezer that runs along the opposite wall.

  I give myself a mental pat on the back for being wild and letting some random hot guy pick out my ice cream. You’re a regular summer wild-child, Sidney Kristine Walters. When he comes back he has a massive cone topped with three different colors.

  “Wow,” I say. “That may be more ice cream than I’ve eaten in my whole life combined.”

  He points to the scoops one at a time. “Superman.” He looks from the colorful swirl of ice cream to me, and I nod my approval. “Strawberry.” I give another approving nod. “And brown butter bacon.” My face scrunches up without even thinking, because I’m one of the only people in the entire world who doesn’t like bacon-flavored things. “Yeah.” He shakes his head. “Took a risk with that one.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, reaching for the cone with a smile. But before I can grab it, he has a spoon in one hand and knocks the offending scoop into a container.

  “I’ll give that to Ellis later; he’ll eat anything. Let me take another shot at it.” He walks back to the freezer and reaches down into it. I’m not sure if he’s flirting with me, or he just really loves his job.

  “I like anything chocolate,” I offer.

  He comes back to the window with a swirl of brown and white topping my colorful cone. “S’more,” he says, giving me a skeptical look. “Chocolate, marshmallow, and candied graham cracker bits.”

  I smile. “Perfect.”

  He smiles at me like he just aced a test.

  “I’m Sidney,” I say. It bursts out of me almost beyond my control. “I have a friend who works here—” I nod back toward where I can see Kara at the desk, her eyes fixed on us. “So you’ll probably see me around. I’m on vacation. I have no life,” I offer as an excuse. Shut
up, Sidney.

  “I’m Caleb.” He hands me the ice-cream cone as I pass a ten-dollar bill—my mom’s grocery store change from yesterday—across the counter. “So I guess I’ll see you around, Sidney.”

  I take my change with a nod and a smile, and head back toward Kara, licking at the dribble of blue ice cream that’s now escaping down my cone. Holy hell, this is going to be a giant puddle by the time I make it to my car.

  “Yummy, huh?” Kara says as I approach the counter.

  I have a feeling she’s referring to more than the ice cream, and I have to agree. “Very.”

  “What if I told you the party was at his house?”

  “Is it?”

  “No.” She smiles and I smack her shoulder. “But he’ll be there.”

  “I’ll think about it.” And as I walk out to my car, I am definitely thinking about it. Because seeing Caleb at the party seems like a better option than making daily ice-cream trips.

  Asher

  Sometimes I think our parents are in on this whole Ash-and-Sid-prank-each-other-into-fiery-oblivion thing. Or that they have their own game, where they see how long they can go without acknowledging the tension between us. Like, they each get a point for not smiling at something snarky we say to each other. Two points if they keep talking right through it. Money could be passing under the dinner table for all we know. I wonder if they pick a winner each summer, or if the longevity of their game is only surpassed by ours. Sure, we do our best to plaster smiles onto our faces in front of them, and keep our mouths shut, but you’d have to be completely oblivious to not notice the twisted game we’ve had going on for years.

  And yet, our normally capable parents haven’t acknowledged our feud since the first summer it started, when we were fourteen. That was the second year my family came up with Sidney’s, and back then the pranks didn’t feel like the norm. Sometimes I barely remember what things were like before all of this, that first summer when Sidney and I were on the same team, but there was a before.