Meet Me at Midnight

by Jessica Pennington

“You think that was easy?”

  “I’m not using them all tonight, Sid. I want to keep you on your toes.” He takes a sip of his drink and smiles, but he looks nervous. “I do have one more for you tonight.”

  “I used to stuff my mouth full of food when I was little. So full I’d panic and spit it all out.”

  He shakes his head at me, looking completely bewildered. “What?”

  “Chipmunk. That stupid nickname you and my dad torment me with. You asked me once where it came from.”

  “Not it,” Asher says.

  I shrug. “Okay, well, I’m deducting a question for that anyway, because you would have gotten around to it.”

  “I want to know why it all started.”

  I look at him blankly, hoping he doesn’t mean what I’m 99 percent sure he means.

  “The pranks, the hating me…” Asher takes a sip of his drink. “Spill.”

  THE FIRST SUMMER

  Sidney

  Once a week or so, Mom and Sylvie like to load us all up and take us to one of the little towns nearby. Quaint, cute, and cozy are words they use to describe the small streets lined with touristy shops. Windows are filled with clothes, and art, and the kind of signs you’d hang in a vacation home, with sayings like HOME IS WHERE THE LAKE IS. It’s not usually too bad—the parents don’t mind if Asher and I wander off on our own. The last trip, the two of us had lunch at one of the little restaurants where the tables on the patio are made of crisscrossed metal, and everything smells like fish from the river nearby. Asher paid for us, and I told myself it wasn’t a date, but it sure felt like one.

  But this trip is painful, because Mom didn’t invite Sylvie or Greg, or Asher. It’s just the two of us, popping in and out of shops. Mom is apparently trying to shove a summer’s worth of shopping into her last week. I get a book at the town’s little bookstore, and Mom lets me replenish my paints in the craft department of the megastore we pass on our way back to the lake. When we get back to the house I deposit my things on the kitchen table and stop in my room to see what I can do to tame my hair a little. And then I set out to find Asher.

  Asher spends most of his time—well, with me. He’s usually the one to find me, and that realization sends a little bubble of something warm into my chest. We only have four days of vacation left, but it’s not like I can’t see Asher again. Our parents usually get together every couple of months, and while we’re not usually included, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind us hanging out. Maybe they’d get together more often if Asher and I were—were what, dating? Do eighth graders actually long-distance date? It would only be a couple years until one of us could drive, and this isn’t exactly a normal situation, seeing how our parents are best friends. I bet Mom and Dad would drive me to his swim meets, and Sylvie and Greg would bring him to mine. We could text and video chat.

  I’m lost in my head, thinking about everything, when I come around the corner of Lake House A, and find Asher on the swing set. We’ve spent a lot of time on the swings. They’re tucked away behind Lake House A, with a little hedge of overgrown shrubs next to them. It’s a nice escape from our parents during the day. Or at night.

  Last week, there was a moment when I was sure Asher was going to kiss me on the swings. There was music playing on his phone—this guitar-heavy ballad about girls and cars—and he wrapped his arm around my chain, so we were right next to each other. But it didn’t happen, and I don’t know if that was me or him. Maybe we were both just waiting. For what? I don’t know.

  But right now, Asher isn’t waiting for me on the swings. He’s not even alone on the swings. Lindsay is on my swing, her seat swaying gently, as she and Asher kiss. I shouldn’t watch, but I do. Because I hope that he’ll pull away. That he’ll scream, “No, I’m saving my swing-kiss for Sidney,” and he’ll shove her into the dirt. But that’s how my twisted brain works, not his. Because he doesn’t pull away, and he doesn’t push her, but inside all I can do is scream.

  That night, I don’t go down to the fire. I tell my mom I’m not feeling good—which is true, I feel like my insides have been ripped out—and while everyone else is roasting marshmallows and smashing them between graham crackers, I get to work filling Asher’s shampoo bottle with mayonnaise, and adding cayenne pepper to his toothpaste tube.

  I manage to avoid Asher for a full twenty-four hours, but the next day I fall on my face when my flip-flops are glued to the stairs outside our deck. Asher thinks he can kiss Lindsay and knock me on my ass? Anger coils inside me. If he wants war, I’ll give it to him.

  DAY 49

  Sidney

  “How are you two liking the house?” Mom is looking at Sylvie and Greg, but it’s obvious she’s talking to me and Asher. “I know you were skeptical about sharing. The house. The bathroom.” She does look at me now. “But it seems like it worked out.” Yes. Somehow, against all odds, this has all worked out.

  This feels like the moment. The one I’ve been waiting for, where we’re presented with footage of our morning breakfasts and late-night couch snuggles. We’ve gotten a little braver since our overnight at Asher’s house. I’m sleeping in his bed more often, sometimes all night. Because there’s something really comforting about being in the same space as Asher. And even though the doors are locked and our parents are long asleep, and most nights we start a strategic load of laundry in the little room between his room and his parents’, sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that they must know there are two people breathing in that room. Bionic parent hearing, or something.

  While I’m mentally panicking, Asher says, cool and calm, “Sidney isn’t as bad of a housemate as I would have expected.”

  I smile and roll my eyes. I don’t even have to pretend when I say, “Ditto.”

  Mom takes a bite of her burger and when she puts it down on her plate I can feel that something is coming. But there’s no confrontation. There’s just a glance exchanged, from Mom to Dad. An eyebrow raise from Sylvie, and a nod from Greg.

  It’s Sylvie who speaks first, her shoulders rising a little as she announces, “We’re buying the house.”

  “This house,” Greg adds, in case Asher and I are feeling extra slow this evening. But there is nothing slow about my brain right now. If anything, it just got a serious adrenaline jolt and is running laps around the room. Buying this house. I love this house.

  Everyone is talking at the same time, my Dad saying what a good price they’re getting, Sylvie suggesting they rent the house out for a few weeks a summer, since “the kids” won’t want to hang out with them for an entire summer anymore. “Maybe if we bribe them,” Mom says, giving me a soft smile. “Free food all summer,” Sylvie says, with a glance at Asher. Greg wants to turn the laundry room into a second master bathroom.

  Asher isn’t saying anything, he’s just eating his burger and sneaking glances at me. And it’s like I can see right through him. To the fears that finally have a concrete location in my mind. These are the rooms that it will happen in—when it’s all over, this is where Asher and I will be forced to coexist. It won’t be a dinner here and there shared at each other’s house, it will be all of this. The couch where we crossed out of enemy territory, the bed where he kissed me, the kitchen where I made him pancakes. Someday I won’t just have to see him, I’ll have to marinate in these memories. And how many new memories—bigger memories—will there be by then? Asher smiles at me, and I push it all away. I look at the happy faces that surround the table, and I let mine join in.

  Asher

  I like to think I couldn’t have made it through the last five years without knowing how to read Sidney, but she’s not giving anything away tonight. When we leave the dinner table I’m braced for the meltdown. The announcement that our parents are buying this house together seems like the ultimate fuel for Sidney’s particular brand of panic. But dinner ends and dishes are washed, and I don’t get one. As the silence stretches on into the evening, I can’t help but wonder if this is worse than a freakout. If all of this silence means she’
s thinking up scenarios worse than I could ever imagine. What we need is a distraction. Something to take our minds off of this wonderful—but also horrifying—new development.

  “Let’s go to Nadine’s tonight.”

  Sidney’s face is pressed against my arm, and she pushes herself up off the couch. Last night we were in my bed, but tonight we’re back to the couch. “Tonight?”

  “We bought everything already. And trash day isn’t for two more days, so Dad’s got frozen fish guts in the freezer.” Sidney’s nose scrunches up and I wonder if she’s as traumatized by fish as I am. “Let’s just do it.” It feels like I have to do something, and this is the only thing I can think of. Our war on Nadine is what brought us together. Maybe it can keep us from falling apart.

  Sid looks a little groggy, like maybe she had fallen asleep against me. It’s hard to tell when she hasn’t really talked to me all evening. “I guess.” She rubs her eye with her palm and smooths her hand over her hair as she sits up. “We have everything?”

  Sidney

  An hour later, close to 2 a.m., we’re pulling into the driveway a few houses down from Nadine, where Kara’s grandmother lives. I like to think we have a standing invitation to park here, since it’s too late for me to call Kara so she can give her grandma a heads-up. But it’s so late there’s no way she’s going to even notice us here, unless we’re loud. And that’s the opposite of what we’ll be.

  I open the back trunk and start tearing open the white cardboard containers filled with plastic forks. Five boxes later, I dump them into a brown paper bag, and then get to work on the next five. Asher thinks we’re going to need at least twenty boxes to finish. Tonight’s prank is our last, our pièce de résistance. While I fork the yard, Asher will Saran Wrap Nadine’s car with enough layers that it will take her hours to untangle it all. And between the layers, he’ll wrap in frozen fish guts, courtesy of our dads’ fishing trips. They won’t be frozen by the time she has to unwrap it. I can’t help thinking—again—how much I wish we had a camera out here, so we could see her reactions. Our imaginations will have to be enough of a reward for this one, though.

  With a brown bag of ammo in each of our arms, Asher and I cross through the two yards that separate us from Nadine’s.

  “I forgot the Saran Wrap.” Asher stops where he is and looks back toward the car. “You start, and I’ll be right back.”

  I nod—not wanting to talk any more than we have to—and lay the bags of plastic along the driveway, taking a handful with me onto the grass. I shake the can of orange spray paint—the special kind of bottle used to mark lawns with—and point it down at the ground, spraying it over the grass in long sweeping motions as I walk. Thankfully I remembered to wear my crappy old shoes, because even though I can’t see it in the dark, I’m sure a fine spray of paint is dusting the edge of my right foot.

  As I shove forks into the lawn, tracing the lines of spray paint first, and then filling in the gaping middle with hundreds of forks, I lose track of time. I’m sticking the forks into the grass with surprising speed, but it still feels like it’s taking forever. We should have done a test section at the house, timed it, and figured out how long the entire hand would take us.

  My fourth bag of forks is almost gone, and we have a few more in the car, but I haven’t even started on the top half of the hand or the finger yet. I’m really glad we didn’t attempt something this intricate with potatoes. What a train wreck that would have been.

  I’m filling in the lower half of the middle finger when I hear the jangling of metal and the yip of a dog. Before I can react, Nadine’s tiny little terrier is at my feet, nipping and barking, and jumping at my knees. I drop the paper bag in my arms and turn toward the house. Nothing. I didn’t hear a door, don’t hear anything now, but I can’t risk it. And I can’t risk going back the way I came, along the driveway, where the side door is, so I take off for the lake.

  When I’m halfway across the yard, just a few feet from Lake House A, Nadine’s voice carries across the yard. “If you run I’ll just have the police come to your house,” she yells. I take two more long strides and come to a halt. I can see where the car should be, through the trees, in Kara’s grandma’s driveway. But there’s nothing there. I’m not running toward anything, because Asher took the car. Asher took the car. He’s been gone for almost an hour. It should have taken him less than fifteen minutes to drive to our house and get back. Nadine knows it’s me, so what’s the sense in running? When I turn to face her, she has her cell phone pressed against her ear. I stand at the edge of the trees, knowing I should do something, but unable to make myself move even an inch. I have never been paralyzed with fear like this before. The plastic forks clenched in my hand dig into my palm as I finally make myself walk back toward the dark yard spotted with white. Toward the ridiculous house and its eccentricities, Nadine, and the police car slowly pulling into the driveway. Alone.

  * * *

  To be fair, I don’t think the officer wanted to arrest me. Maybe it was the fact that I almost puked, I was so horrified at what was unfolding. Or that I just stood there silently as Nadine recalled the potatoes and the fleeing yard sculptures, and the “horrific” fish incident that got us kicked out in the first place. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was the first person to ever try to open my own police car door, to let myself in.

  Officer Jennings is a nice guy. Younger, probably in his midtwenties. Sitting in the car, he tells me Nadine will have to come to the station tomorrow to file actual charges. That until she does, he won’t have to take me in.

  He drops me at the end of my driveway, and comes around the car to let me out. Why? Because I’m a criminal who sits behind handle-less doors, that’s why. Even though I know there’s only a 2 percent chance any of the parents would be awake at 4 a.m., I’m not risking it. Not when I haven’t even figured out how I’m going to tell my parents that I’m going to potentially face criminal disorderly conduct charges. My stomach twists again at just the thought of it.

  I know in my heart that Nadine is going to press charges. She called the police. I think she would have done it then and there if Jennings had made it easier for her. The look in her eyes said she wanted to see me driven away in handcuffs.

  And I want to be mad at her, but I’m madder at myself. What was I thinking? Lurking around late at night, vandalizing homes? This isn’t me. I could be kicked off of the swim team if I have a criminal record. Oh my god. The thought comes to me like a flash of lightning, and right behind it come the tears.

  By the time I reach the house, walking past the spot where the Marins’ car should be, my face is soaked. I am such an idiot. I risked everything I’ve worked for since I was nine, and for what? What would possess me to do something so stupid?

  Asher.

  Asher, who convinced me to turn my skills on someone else. Who lured me into the idea that this was all for fun—that we’d be making a better choice this summer not tormenting each other. Asher, who made me feel like he cared. Who wasn’t there tonight. Who left me alone exactly when I needed him. Exactly when I needed him.

  As I open the door to my quiet room, and wipe my hand across my damp face, I know, finally, that everything I feared might actually be true: Asher Marin pulled off the greatest prank yet. He was never my friend, or my boyfriend; he is and has always been my nemesis.

  Asher

  I’ve sent Sidney eight texts, and she hasn’t answered one of them. But she’s read them all. Is it possible that her phone is dead and it’s just some sort of glitch? Nadine’s yard was empty when I finally got back to the house. I hadn’t expected to find my dad sitting at the kitchen table at 3 a.m. It would have been hard to explain why I was coming home that late just to leave with a giant bag of Saran Wrap. Instead I pretended I was just getting in for the night, and then waited until he went to bed to climb out my bedroom window.

  I have to admit I never imagined I’d be utilizing windows as much as I have this summer. It was o
ver an hour before I got back to Nadine’s, and I expected to find Sidney almost done with our fork mural—a giant hand, middle finger raised—but instead, I found nothing but the forks. I look at my phone again and the string of texts.

  And as I pass her bedroom door, a soft light filtering under the crack like her bedside lamp is on, I send one more.

  It’s exactly the kind of thing I expect from Sidney, but it still feels off. I wish we were actually talking so I could figure out if she was being sarcastic or snarky. With her, there’s an important difference.

  When there’s no snarky reply, I know deep in my gut something is wrong.

  I send message after message, not even sure what I’m hoping to accomplish, but feeling like I’m fixing something.

  Fix us? Inside the bathroom, I knock on her door, loudly once, then quietly, when I remember it’s the middle of the night and we shouldn’t be awake.

  When I reach the dock she’s already there, waiting for me. She’s bathed in a circle of light from the lamp pole next to the stairs, but otherwise it’s dark out here. And silent. I wish it was going to stay that way, because I know the things we’re about to say aren’t going to be good; I can feel it in the way she’s looking at me as I step out onto the dock.

  She doesn’t say anything, just stands there and looks at me, like she’s expecting something from me.

  “What happened?”

  No one rolls their eyes like Sidney. And this one is A+, it’s like her whole head rolls with it. “As if I have to tell you.”

  “You do, because I wasn’t there. And I’m not a mind reader.”