Laura and Casey were once inseperable...

Coming of age in California, Laura felt connected to her best friend in every way: as they floated on their backs in the sunlit lake, as they dreamed about the future under starry skies, and as they teamed up for the wild scavenger hunts in their small lakeside town. Until one summer night, when a shocking betrayal sent Laura running through the pines, down the dock, and into a new life, leaving Casey and a first love in her wake.

But the past is impossible to escape, and now, after seventeen years away, Laura is pulled home and into a reunion with Casey she can’t resist—one last scavenger hunt. With a twist: this time, the list of clues leads to the settings of their most cherished summer memories. From glistening Jade Cove to the vintage skating rink, each step they take becomes a bittersweet reminder of the friendship they once shared. But just as the game brings Laura and Casey back together, the clues unravel a stunning secret that threatens to tear them apart...

Mesmerizing and unforgettable, Amy Mason Doan’s The Summer List is about losing and recapturing the person who understands you best—and the unbreakable bonds of girlhood.

The Summer List

Amy Mason Doan

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Amy Mason Doan 2018

Amy Mason Doan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9781474083713

For Mike and Miranda

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

1 Mermaid in the Mailbox

2 Ariel and Pocahontas

3 Alexandra the Great

4 The Machine

5 Bartles & Jaymes

6 Messy

7 The Boy Behind the Counter

8

9 Raptor Rock

10 Critical and Confusing

11 Yes, No, Wow

12 Things That Don’t Belong

13

14 Velocity

15 Stepping Stones

16 Dreaming Shepherd Books

17 Vanity

18 Sorry

19

20 More than Fun

21 Honor System

22 June Names That Tune

23 Band-Aids

24 Liquid Hiding Place

25 Gamemaster

26

27 Women’s Retreat

28 Whistle While You Work

29 The Moon and Stars

30 Doctor Mona’s Hot Springs and Holistic Spa

31

32 Another Tiny Surprise

33 Biggest Little City in the World

34 Rainbow of Glass

35

36 Sacred Institutions

37 Counting Down

38 Lost and Found

39 Again

40

41 A Pirate

42

43 Eighteen

44 Skipping Stones

45 Extreme

46

47 Fog

48

49 Weathr-All

50

51 Treasure

52 The Visitor

53 The Prize

epilogue

acknowledgments

Reader’s Guide

Discussion Questions

About the Publisher

California

July

27th day of camp

The others were mad at her again.

They clustered behind her on the sand, watching as she stepped onto the wet ledge of rocks.

“What is she doing?”

“What are you doing?”

Ignoring them, she picked her way across tide pools, careful not to hurt the creatures underfoot—quivering purple anemones that retracted under her shadow, barnacles like blisters of stone.

All she wanted was a few minutes away from them. A few minutes alone to breathe in the cold wind off the ocean before the van delivered them back to the airless cabins, the dark chapel.

There were only ten minutes left in the game, and it would take her almost that long to make her way back across the slippery outcropping. If they didn’t return in time it’d be another mark against her.

She spotted something tangled in kelp, lodged between two flat rocks near the drop-off. So close to the surf. As if it had been carried across the ocean and snugged there, at the jagged edge of the world, just for her.

Stepping closer, she crouched, then flattened herself onto her belly. Her shirt and jeans drenched, her elbow scraped, she reached out but got only a rubbery handful of kelp.

She shut her eyes. If she looked down at the sea she would fall in like the doomed man on the keep-off sign behind her, a stick figure tumbling into scalloped waves.

Salt spray stinging her face, she fumbled through the squelching mass of kelp. Until her fingers found what they wanted and it gave, escaping its wet nest with a gentle sucking sound.

She knelt on the wet rocks as she examined her prize, brushing away green muck. The driftwood was longer than her hand, curved into a C. One end was pointier than the other, and in the center the wood splintered and cracked. But imperfect as it was, the resemblance was unmistakable, miraculous: a crescent moon.

Cur-di-lune, he’d said. I grew up in a town called Curdilune.

A strange, pretty name.

He’d drawn it for her in the dusty ground behind the craft cabin that morning. His calloused finger had sketched rectangles for the buildings. Houses and a church, shops and a park, nestled together against the inner curve of a crescent-shaped lake.

Curdilune. Cur is heart in French, he’d explained. Lune is moon. So it means Heart of the Moon. Then, with a light touch on her wrist—You miss home, too?

The others had walked by then, before she could answer, and he’d erased his little map, swirling his palm over the shapes in the dirt so quickly she knew it was their secret.

If she ran back to her team now, her find might help them win—a piece of driftwood was Item 7 on the list stuffed into her back pocket.

She glanced over at them and slid the wet treasure down her pocket, untucking her shirt to hide it. She’d give it to him instead.

It was a thank-you, an offering, an invitation. A cry for help after the long, bewildering summer.

1

Mermaid in the Mailbox

June 2016

The invitation came on a Saturday.

I was taking Jett for a walk, and she was frantic with anticipation, nails skittering on the lobby’s tile floor, black fur spiking up so she looked more like a little dragon than a Lab.

“If you calm down I can do this faster, lady,” I said as I high-stepped to free myself from the leash she’d wrapped around my ankles. “Off.”

She retreated, settling under the bank of mailboxes. But right when I got my letters out, she sprang up and butted my wrist with her head. Perfect aim, perfect timing.

“Leave it, Joan Jett. Devious girl.” I tried to maintain the stern voice we learned in Practical Skills Training but couldn’t help laughing as I collected my mail from the floor. A typical assortment. White, business-sized bills. A Sushi Express menu. A slender donation form for Goodwill.

Then—not typical—a hot-pink envelope.

It had fallen facedown, revealing a sticker centered over the triangular flap: a mermaid. In pearls and sunglasses. Holding a sign saying You’re Invited!

I assumed it was for the tween girl who lived in #1. I was #7, so there were sometimes mix-ups. I was halfway down the hall to her family’s unit when I flipped the envelope over, preparing to slide it under their door.

It was for me.

Ms. Laura Christie, 7 Pacific View, San Francisco, CA 94115.

No return address.

But I knew who it was from.

I knew because of the mermaid sticker, which now made sense, and from the surge of something close to happiness in my chest.

I ripped the envelope open and pulled out a photo of two grinning 1950s girls in pajamas. Over their rollered heads, in black ballpoint, she had printed Coeur-de-Lune. My hometown.

Then dates—Thurs. June 23–Sun. June 26. Less than three weeks away.

Below that it said:

Scavenger hunt!

Crank calls!

Manicures!

Trio of cookie dough!

But seriously, please come. We’re supposed to be older and wiser. (35—how did it happen?) I promise it will be ok.

No RSVP necessary.

Casey

Casey Katherine Shepherd. I hadn’t seen her since we were eighteen.

When I ran into people from Coeur-de-Lune they inevitably asked me about Casey, and I always said, “We drifted.” They would nod, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. People drifted.

In my case it’d be more accurate to say I’d swum away. As fast as I could, trying my hardest not to look back.

I slid the card into its torn pink envelope and turned it over again, my thumb smoothing the top edge of the sticker, where it had curled up slightly.

I promise it will be ok, she’d written.

(35—how did it happen?)

I held the invitation over the recycling basket, pausing a second before letting it flutter into the mess of junk mail. I waited for the soft rustle it made on landing before I let Jett tug me to the door.

* * *

It was cool and sunny, a rare reprieve from San Francisco’s usual June Gloom.

Jett headed right on the sidewalk out of habit. Saturdays we always strolled to Lafayette Park, hitting up her favorite leisurely sniff stops on the way. But today I pulled gently on the leash, and she turned, surprised, as I led her to a crosswalk in the opposite direction, charging uphill toward Lyon Street. I needed the steep climb, something to clear my head.

Why now, Casey? After seventeen years?

My childhood home in Coeur-de-Lune was now a vacation rental, managed by efficient strangers. I’d never gone back. But my mother kept a buzzing gossip line into her church women from town, and gave me sporadic updates on Casey’s life.

She always brought Casey up when I was lulled into complacency. When we’d had a surprisingly peaceful afternoon together. When we were outside on her balcony, or sharing a piece of her peach pie like other mothers and daughters did.

Only then would she jab, a master fencer going for the unprotected sliver of my heart.

The first update, when I was twenty—Casey Shepherd dropped out of college. Back living with that mother in town.

That must be nice for them, I’d said, not meeting her eyes.

A few years later—Casey Shepherd bought the bookstore. Moronic. Might as well have thrown her money in the lake.

I was in her kitchen that morning, unloading groceries into her retirement-sized pantry. Macaroni, crackers, mushroom soup. Hands moving smoothly from bag to shelf, making sure the labels faced out.

That’ll be interesting, I’d said. My eyes were trained on my mother’s well-organized shelves, but they saw Casey’s bookcase, crammed with her beloved trashy paperbacks. Fat, dog-eared copies of Lace and Queenie and Princess Daisy.

After the bookstore news I didn’t hear anything about Casey for a long time. I had men in my life, a few friends I met for glasses of wine. I was fine. Settled. Lucky. And able to keep my face blank when my mother said, three years ago:

Casey Shepherd has a child. A girl. Adopted, foster child, something. Hmph. Surprised anyone would let a child into that house. That mother’s still there, you know.

I was thirty-two then, and after nearly a decade of blessed silence on the topic of the Shepherds, I could meet my mother’s eyes and say evenly, Casey always liked kids.

It was the first time I’d said her name out loud since high school.

* * *

I began to run, an easy jog.

Was it because of our ages? Was thirty-five the number at which a goofy card could fix everything?

(35—How did it happen?), she’d written, in that familiar, nearly illegible penmanship. Her cursive had always been sloppy, with big capitals.

Casey’s mother, Alex, had gotten into handwriting analysis one summer. According to Alex’s book, Casey was energetic and loyal, I was creative and romantic, and Alex was an aesthete with a passionate nature. If there had been something in how we looped our Ls or curved our Cs that hinted at what was to come, at less flattering traits, we’d overlooked it.

Alex would be there, if I went. Spinning around as if everything was the same, raving about her latest obsession. Celtic runes or cooking with grandfather grains. Whatever she happened to be into that week.

I sped up, though the grade was now more than forty-five degrees. One of those legendary San Francisco hills, perilous to skateboarders and parallel-parkers. Jett’s leash was slack, not its usual taut water-skiing line dragging me forward. But she pushed on loyally at my side, the plastic bags tied to her leash flapping and whistling.

Why, Casey?

Wind-sprint pace now, sloppier with each stride.

Maybe she was bored and wanted to see what I’d do if she dared me to visit.

At the top of the hill I bent over, hands on my knees. Jett panted, her black coat shiny as obsidian.

Below, the wide grid of streets and houses swept down toward the Marina, to the bright blue bay flecked with white sails, all the way to the hills of Tiburon rising from the opposite shore. To my left, I could just make out the graceful, ruddy lines of the Golden Gate holding it all in, because without it such aching beauty would escape to sea.

The dark little crescent lake where I’d grown up was nothing compared to this.

The Bay could hold thousands of Coeur-de-Lunes.

I headed slowly back downhill toward my building. My back was soaked, my chest tight. I was lucky I hadn’t rolled an ankle.

And I hadn’t managed to cardio the invite from my head. Casey’s words were still in there, burrowing deeper. I could hear her voice now. The voice of an eighteen-year-old girl, plaintive beneath her irony.

But seriously, please come.

* * *

I was sure the mermaid would be safely buried by the time we got back.

But when I passed the mailboxes, there she was, staring up at me. Her tail was covered by a Restoration Hardware catalog, the top edge perfectly horizontal across her waistline. Or finline. Whatever it was called, it looked as if someone had tucked her in for the night, careful to leave her face uncovered so she could breathe.

I reached down and, in one quick gesture, plucked the pink envelope from the basket.

I couldn’t go.

But I also couldn’t leave her like that, all alone.

Coeur-de-Lune

Thursday, June 23

That was nineteen days ago. And now I was in Casey’s driveway, trapped. Too nervous to get out of my car, too embarrassed to leave.

I blamed the mermaid.

Once she’d escaped the recycling bin, the pushy little thing had managed to secure a beachhead on my fridge.

For days, she’d perched there, peering over a black-and-white photo of a young 1970s surf god conquering an impossible wave: one of the magnets I’d designed for Sam, my favorite client and owner of Goofy Foot Surf & Coffee Shack out by Ocean Beach.

As the date grew closer, the mermaid started migrating around my apartment. She kept me company in the bathroom when I flossed in the morning, and as I ate lunch at my small kitchen table. When I couldn’t sleep at night and passed the time brushing the frilled edges of the envelope back and forth under my chin, rereading Casey’s words. Trying to figure out why she’d written them now, after so long.

I still didn’t understand.

The invitation had said No RSVP necessary, and I’d taken her up on that, so she didn’t know I was coming. Until today, I hadn’t been sure myself.

But here I was.

I tunneled my hands into the opposite sleeves of my coat, hugging myself. I’d rolled down my window a few inches, and chilly mountain air was starting to seep in. Jett was in her sheepskin bed in the back, curled into a black ball like a giant roly-poly. I was stalling. Rereading the invite as if I hadn’t memorized it weeks before.

I leaned over the steering wheel and stared up at the house as if it could provide answers. From the front it resembled one of those skinny birdhouses kids made in camp out of hollow tree branches standing on end: a wooden rectangle with a crude, A-shaped cap.

But from the water it looked more like a boat, with rows of small, high windows—so much like portholes—and a long, skinny dock—pirate’s gangplank—to complete the effect. When the place started falling apart in the ’70s, some grumbly neighbor called it The Shipwreck, and the name had stuck.

It was a love-it-or-hate-it house, and the Shepherd women had loved it.

So had I. I’d once felt easier here, more myself, than in my own home. The Shipwreck hadn’t changed, but today it offered me no welcome.

There was a silver Camry ahead of me in the driveway, so someone was probably home. They could be watching, counting how many minutes I sat inside my car. Trying to gather my courage, and failing. I didn’t feel any more courageous than I had when the invitation first arrived.

“Wish me luck,” I whispered toward Jett’s snores as I got out. I shut the door a little harder than necessary, hoping the plunk would draw Casey and Alex outside. Then they’d have to say something to hurdle us over the awkwardness. “You made it!” Or “Come in, it’s getting cold!”

But the front door didn’t budge.

I walked slowly toward the house, past the Camry. The section of lake I could see beyond the house was at its most stunning, framed in pines, streaked with red and pink from the sunset. It was so ridiculously beautiful it seemed almost a rebuke, a point made and underlined twice. This is how a sunset is done.

As I got closer I noticed something about the colors on the water; most of the red shapes were dancing, but one was still. And I realized why Casey hadn’t come outside when I pulled up.

Of course. She was already outside.

I walked past the right side of the house, where the ground became a thick blanket of pine needles. I’d forgotten that spongy feeling, the way it made you bend your knees a little more than you did in the city, the tiny satisfying bounce of each step. There were places where the needles were so deep I had to brush my hand along the rough wood shingles for balance. I hoped the neighbors wouldn’t see me and decide I was a prowler. I was even wearing all black. Tailored black pants and my black cowl-neck cashmere coat, but still. I could be a fashion-conscious burglar. It would be something to talk about, at least, showing up in handcuffs.

Casey sat cross-legged on the dock, her crown of sunlit red hair just visible above the red blanket on her shoulders.

It was the same scratchy wool plaid throw we’d used for picnics. The same one we’d sprawled on in our first bikinis as teenagers. In high school I’d hidden mine in my winter boots, one forbidden scrap of nylon stuffed down each toe.

A duck plunged into the water nearby, its flapping energy abruptly turning to calm, and she said something to it that I couldn’t make out. Maybe we could do this all night. She’d watch ducks, I’d watch her, and once an hour I’d take a few steps closer.

I walked down the sloping, sandy path in the grass and stepped onto the wooden dock. It was still long and narrow, the boards as old and misaligned as ever. Cattywampus, Alex used to call them. Casey’s mom was young—sometimes she seemed even younger than us. But her speech was full of old-fashioned expressions like that. “Cattywampus” and “bless my soul” and “dang it all.”

The feeling of the uneven boards beneath my feet was so familiar I froze again.

The last time I’d been here I’d been running. Pounding the boards, racing away from the feet pounding behind me.

It was not too late to slip away. Take big, quiet steps backward. I could retreat along the side of the house the way I’d come. Return to the city and let the Shepherds sink back into memory, along with everything else in this town.

But a subtle vibration had already traveled down the wooden planks, and Casey turned her head to the side, revealing a profile that was still strong, a chin that still jutted out in her defiant way. “Is it you?”

“Yes, Case.”

I walked slowly to the end of the dock until I stood over her left shoulder, so close I could see the messy part in her hair. It was a darker red now.

The greetings I’d rehearsed, the lines and alternate lines and backup-alternate lines, had abandoned me. They’d sailed away, carried off by the breeze when I wasn’t paying attention.

But Casey spoke first, her eyes on the water. “You’ve been standing back there forever. I thought you were going to leave.”

“I almost did.”

She tilted her head up to look at me. Scanning, evaluating, and, finally, delivering her report—“You’re still you.”

Her face was a little thinner, her skin less freckled. There was something behind her eyes, a weariness or skepticism, that hadn’t been there when we were girls.

I forced a smile. “And you’re still you.”

I got, in return, no smile. And silence.

Casey made no move to get up, so I fumbled on. “And the house is still...”

“Weird,” she finished.

“I was going to say something like charming.”

“Charming? Laura doesn’t say charming. Tell me Laura has not grown up into someone who says charming.”

She wasn’t going to make this easy. I’d thought, from the cheerful humility of her invitation, that she’d at least try. When I didn’t answer, Casey swiveled her body to look back at the house, as if to evaluate it through fresh eyes the way she’d examined me.

“We haven’t done much. That tiny addition on the east side. And I managed to put in a full bath upstairs finally. It’s yours this weekend, along with my old bedroom.”

“I was going to say. I had to bring my dog. I thought it’d be crowded with all of us, Alex and your little girl and my dog. She’s kind of big, and she’s sweet with kids, but she could knock a little one down... I don’t know how old your girl is but...”

Casey looked up at me but let me stumble on.

“Anyway there wasn’t anybody renting our old place this weekend, so I’ll sleep there...”

The truth was my place had been booked solid all summer, so I’d bumped out this weekend’s renters. Some sweet family that had reserved months ago. Other property owners kicked people out all the time when they wanted to use their houses instead, and my property manager grumbled about it, but I’d never done it before. I’d felt so guilty I’d spent hours finding them another place and paid the $230 difference.

Bullshit, Casey’s eyes said.

She knew the truth: I couldn’t bear staying with her. Tiptoeing around politely in the familiar rooms where we’d once been careless and easy as sisters. But I went on, elaborating on my story—the sure sign of a lie. “Of course I couldn’t put you out...”

“‘Put you out,’” she said. “Grown-up Laura says ‘put you out’?”

I didn’t understand it, the utter disconnect between her warm, silly, lovable letter, the Casey I’d first met, and the person who was sitting here next to me, making everything a hundred times harder than it had to be.

Would the running commentary last all weekend? Laura eats with her fork and knife European-style, now. Grown-up Laura prefers red wine to white. Laura wears cuff bracelets now. Laura changed her perfume to L’eau D’Issey. Every little gesture picked over and mocked.

It hit with awful certainty: I shouldn’t have come.

Would it get better or worse when Alex joined us? I didn’t hate her anymore. Enough time had passed. She couldn’t help how she was.

With Alex to fill the silences, and Casey’s daughter around as a buffer, and me sleeping at my place, I’d just make it through the weekend. Less than sixty hours if I left Sunday morning instead of Sunday night, blaming traffic and work.

“Where’s your mom and your little girl? I’m sorry, I don’t know her name.”

“Elle. Off on a trip together. Tahoe.”

So much for the buffer.

Casey nodded at my old house across the lake. “Now. That one has changed, I hear. Modern everything.”

“Only the kitchen, really,” I said. “The rental company insisted. I’ve just seen pictures.” From across the shining water, I could make out the dark line of the dock, a flash of sunset on a window.

I’d planned to drive there first. Drop off Jett, compose myself, drink a glass of wine (or three, or four) to loosen up for the big reunion. If I had I could have kayaked over to Casey’s instead of driving.

And paddled away again the second I realized how she was going to be.

“You haven’t gone inside?” she said. “Not once?”

I shook my head. “I can do everything online. It’s crazy.”

“I thought maybe you were sneaking back at night. Hiding out in the house, staying off the lake, calling your groceries in. To avoid seeing me.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t sell it, though.”

The “why?” was there in her expression, daring me, but I didn’t have an answer. I’d always planned to sell the house. My mother didn’t care either way, and we got offers. Every year, I considered it. But I never went through with it.

I met her stare for a minute before I had to look away. My eyes landed on a spot in the lake about ten yards from the edge of the dock. I didn’t mean to look there. Maybe there was a tiny ripple from a fish, or a point in the sunset’s reflection that was a more burnished gold than the surrounding water.

She followed my gaze. And for the first time, her voice softened. “Strange to think it’s still there. After so long.”

“It’s not. It’s crumbled into a million pieces or floated away.”

Casey shook her head. “No. It’s still there.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. I feel it in my bones.”

“That sounds like something your mom would say. Used to say.”

She tilted her head, thinking. “God. It does.”

She pulled her knees close to her body and rested her right cheek on them, then looked up at me with a funny little lopsided smile.

There was enough of the Casey I remembered in that smile that I returned it.

I sat next to her, wrapping my coat tighter, my legs dangling off the edge of the dock. It felt strange, to sit like that with shoes and pants on. I should be in my old cargo shorts, dipping my bare feet in the water.

For a minute we watched the quivering red-and-gold shapes on the lake. Then I felt the gentle weight of her hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t mind my flails, grown-up Laura,” she said. “Grown-up Casey is doing her best. She’s missed you.”

The words stuck in my throat, and when they finally came out, they were rough. My eyes on the auburn lake, I reached up to clutch her hand—one quick, fumbling squeeze.

“I’ve missed you, too, Case.”

2

Ariel and Pocahontas

June 1995

Summer before freshman year

The fourth day of summer started exactly like the first three.

A second of dread when I woke up, followed by a rush of relief when I remembered it was vacation. Then the quick, glorious tally—no school for eighty-eight days. And finally the smell of vanilla floating down the hall. Yesterday it had been crumb cake, the day before it was muffins, so today was probably French toast. My favorite.

I got dressed fast, changing from my nightgown into my summer uniform: a big T-shirt and cargo shorts.

The last part of my routine was too important to be rushed. I transferred a small, silvery-gray object from under my pillow to the Ziploc I kept on my nightstand, made sure it was sealed to the last millimeter, then slipped it into my lower-right shorts pocket, the only one with a zipper. Where it always went.

Then I had the entire day free to explore the lake. French toast, and no Pauline Knowland or Suzanne Farina asking me what my bra size was up to in honeyed tones, or calling me Sister Christian just within earshot, and the whole day free. Bliss.

It only lasted the length of the hallway.

“You’ll bring that to the new neighbors after breakfast,” my mother said when I entered the kitchen. She was scrambling eggs with a rubber spatula, and she paused to point it at a pound cake on the counter. “Good morning.”

Chore assignment first, greeting second. This about summed up my mother.

She went back to parting the sea of yellow in the pan.

So not only was the vanilla smell for some other family, I had an assignment. I examined the cake’s golden surface. It was perfect, but curiously plain. No nuts, no chocolate chips, no blueberries. Not even drizzled with glaze, and it obviously wouldn’t be. My mother always poured the cloudy liquid on when her cakes were still piping hot.

Next to the naked cake she’d set out a paper plate, Saran Wrap, a length of red ribbon, and one of her monogrammed notecards. A complete new-neighbor greeting kit, ready to go before 7:30 a.m. I read the card silently. Welcome—Christies.

A stingy sort of note, nothing like the warm introduction she’d written when the Daytons moved in down the shore last year. That had included an invitation to church. Surely my mother could have spared a few more words for the new family, a the before our last name. They were right across the narrowest part of the lake from us. If they had binoculars, they could see how much salt we put on our eggs.

It seemed she’d already taken a dislike to the new people, and I set about learning why. “You’re not coming with me to meet them?”

“They have a daughter your age, you need to offer to walk to school together the first day,” she said, like this was written in stone somewhere.

Shoot me now. The last thing I needed was more complications at school. My plan was to lie low in September.

I watched the tip of my mother’s white spatula make figure eights in the skillet. How could eggs be so nasty on their own when they played a clutch role in French toast? I’d take a tiny spoonful and distribute it artfully around my plate so it would look like more.

As if she’d heard my thoughts, my mother mounded a triple lumberjack serving of scrambled eggs onto a plate and handed it to me.

I carried it to the breakfast nook and sat next to my dad, who was hidden behind his newspaper. I could only see his tuft of white hair. It was sticking up vertically, shot through with sun from the window. “Last one awake is the welcome wagon,” he said. “New household rule.”

He snapped a corner of the paper down and winked at me. “Morning.”

I smiled. “Morning.”

I pushed egg clumps around with my fork and stared out the window at the small brown shape in the pines across the lake. The junky-looking old Collier place, the one everybody called The Shipwreck. The Collier name was legend around Coeur-de-Lune, though the actual Colliers were long gone. They’d been rich, and a lot of them had died young. The small building across the lake where the Collier kids slept in summer had been falling apart since before I was born, and my mother always said they should just burn it. The Colliers’ main summerhouse, the fancy three-story one that had once been a few hundred yards up the shore, had been torn down when the land was split up decades before.

I’d seen trucks at The Shipwreck since it sold. Pedersen’s Hardware and Ready Windows. I loved the funny little house exactly the way it was, and now the new family would fix it up and ruin it.

So because they had a daughter my age my mother was totally blowing off the visit? Something was off. In her world of social niceties, frozen somewhere around 1955, new neighbors required baked goods. Not from a mix—new neighbors called for separating yolks from whites. And they definitely called for a personal appearance.

“Saw their car the other day when they were moving in,” my dad said behind his New York Times, making it shiver. There was a photo of Bill Clinton on the front page, shaking some dignitary’s hand, and when he spoke it looked like they were dancing.

My mother was transferring patty sausages from a skillet onto a plate. At his words, her elbows really got into stabbing the sausages and violently shaking them off the fork.

When she didn’t respond he continued, “Saw what was on the back bumper.”

That did it.

She dropped the plate between us with a thud and stalked into the dining room to tend to her latest batch of care packages for soldiers. They were arranged in a perfect ten-by-ten grid on the dining room table.

I forked a sausage and took a bite, burning the roof of my mouth with spicy grease.

After I swallowed I whispered, “What was on the car?” Maybe a bumper sticker my mother considered racy. Or inappropriate, to use one of her favorite words.

The day wasn’t blissfully free anymore, but at least it was getting interesting.

A new girl my age, just across the water, with parents who’d slapped an inappropriate bumper sticker on the family wagon. Maybe one of those Playboy women with arched backs and waists as tiny as their ankles, the ones truck drivers liked to keep on their mud flaps.

My dad set his paper down and started working the crossword. He did the puzzle in the Times only after finishing the easier ones in the Reno Statesman and the Tahoe Daily Journal. I liked to watch his forehead lines jump around when he worked on the Times crossword. I could tell when it was going well and when he was stumped, just by how wavy they were in the center.

He tapped on the paper with the tip of his black ballpoint the way he always did when he was struggling. He must have thrown in one or two extra taps because I glanced down. Above the “Across” clues he’d drawn a fish with legs. Ah. That would do it. According to my mother’s complicated book of social equations, one of those pro-Darwin anti-Christian fish with legs on your rear bumper meant you got a red ribbon, but only tied around a no-frills pound cake, and you got a duty visit from her daughter, but not from her.

My dad scribbled over the drawing and cleared his throat, then sent me a quick wink. I nudged my scrambled-egg plate closer to him and he took care of them for me in three bites, one eye on the dining room entryway as he chewed.

He went back to his crossword, and I got up to wrap the cake, curling the ribbon to make up for the terrible note. The unwelcome note. But as I was returning the scissors to the drawer I saw the black pen my mother had used. I’d mastered her handwriting years before. (Please excuse Laura from Physical Education, her migraines have been simply terrible lately.)

Quickly, expertly, I revised her words.

Welcome—Christies became Welcome!!—The Christies. We’re so thrilled you’re here!

Okay, maybe I went overboard. It was the kind of note Pauline Knowland’s and Suzanne Farina’s mothers would write, a message anticipating years of squealing hellos at Back-to-School night.

I tucked the note in my pocket, returned the pen to the drawer, and by the time my mother bustled in again I was at the table sipping orange juice, innocent as anything.

* * *

I dipped my paddle, breaking the glassy surface of the lake. I was the only one out on the water this early—the only human at least. The gentle ploshes and chirps and ticks of the lake felt like solitude; I knew them so well.

It was chilly on the water but warmth spread through my shoulders as I set my short course for The Shipwreck. My dad liked to speak in jaunty nautical terms like this; he always asked when I came home after a day on the lake—How was your voyage? Or—Duel with any pirates?

He gave me my kayak for my tenth birthday. My mother was just as surprised as me when he led us outside after the German chocolate cake. I’d opened up all my other gifts—two sweaters and six books and a Schumann CD I’d requested and a tin of Violetta dusting powder with a massive puff I’d not only not requested, but had absolutely no clue what to do with. My mother and I both thought the birthday was done.

Then he’d said, Might be one more thing outside.

He’d covered his surprise with a black tarp, pulling it off to reveal the sleek yellow vessel. So you can explore, he’d explained.

To my quietly fuming mother, he had said, his eyes dodging hers, Because she’s in the double digits now.

If they fought about it later—him writing such a big check without asking or, the more serious offense, the implication that he knew me best—I hadn’t heard it, and the heating duct in our small house ran right from their bedroom up to mine. I heard their whispered “discussions” all the time.

Eventually my mother grew to accept the kayak. She told her church friends that she liked me to play outdoors all summer. Sermons in stones and all of that.

The lake was small, a crescent of water only six miles around. At the narrowest, southernmost point, where we were, it was only four hundred feet wide. I could paddle across our end in two minutes without breaking a sweat.

Today I took it easy so I could size up the new neighbors as I crossed. I expected them to be outside commanding an army of painters and fix-it people, but the place seemed as run-down as ever, the gutters overflowing with pine needles, the dull wood shingles fringed in moss, the narrow dock as rickety as a gangplank. Whatever the trucks had been there for, it wasn’t visible from the back.

The house hadn’t been rented in more than six months. We were too far from the good skiing and stores, and you couldn’t take anything motorized on our little lake. Everybody wanted to live in Tahoe, or at least Pinecrest.

But there were signs of life. A rainbow beach towel draped over the dock ladder, bags of mulch stacked by the garden gate. The small square garden, to the left of the house, had been untended for years and used unofficially as a dog run. It was basically an ugly, deer-proof metal fence surrounding weeds, but obviously the new owners had plans.

Something else new—a small red spot on the edge of the dock, right at the center. Paddling closer, I saw that it was a kid’s figurine dangling from a nail. A plastic Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, her chest puffed out like when she was on the prow of the ship pretending to be a statue. It definitely had not been there the last time I’d snooped around The Shipwreck.

I wondered if the famous “daughter my age” had done it. I hoped not. It was the kind of joke I liked, and I didn’t want to like her. There was no way we would be friends, not when she found out what I was at school. The best I could hope for was that she would be what I called a Neutral. Someone I didn’t need to think about at all. Someone who didn’t make my day better or worse.

“You look exactly like an Indian princess.”

I jumped in my seat, almost losing my paddle.

A girl was swimming up to me. Her pale skin had splatters of mud on it and she had threads of green lake gunk in her hair. Red hair. The toy Ariel on the dock had definitely been her idea.

“You know, like Pocahontas or someone, with your dark braid, in your canoe?” she continued, breaststroking close enough that I could see it was freckles on her shoulders, not dirt. I’d never seen so many freckles. There were goose bumps, too, which didn’t surprise me. The lake wasn’t really comfortable for swimming until after the Fourth of July.

I composed myself enough to correct her. “Kayak.”

“Right, canoes are the kneeling ones. You coming to see us?” She tilted her head at the house.

Before I could answer, she closed her eyes and sank down into the water up to her hairline. When she popped back up, she squeezed her nostrils between her thumb and index finger to clear them.

“My mother wanted me to bring you this,” I said. I stashed my paddle in the nose of the kayak, yanked my backpack from the front seat, and unzipped it so she could see the cake under its pouf of plastic wrap. “To welcome you and your parents.”

“Parent. Singular. So you didn’t want to bring it? Your mom made you?”

I still wasn’t sure what category she belonged to, but she was definitely not a Neutral.

“I didn’t mean that,” I said.

I was starting to drift from the dock but she swam close and for a second I worried she would grab the hull and capsize me.

At the thought, I automatically gripped my shorts pocket, squeezing the familiar shape, smaller than a deck of cards, through the worn cotton. The Ziploc was only insurance. My good-luck charm couldn’t get wet.

The swimming girl’s eyes darted from my face down to the edge of my shorts, where my hand clutched. She cleared water from her ears, repositioned her purple bathing suit straps, and slicked her red hair back with both hands.

The whole time she performed this aquatic grooming routine, her eyes didn’t budge from my right hand. I forced myself to let go of my pocket and fidgeted with my braid instead.

But her eyes didn’t follow my hand. They stayed right on the zippered compartment of my shorts.

I’d have to invent a new category for this girl. She missed nothing.

I would set the cake on the dock. I’d paddle over to Meriwether Point like I’d planned and have my picnic. Lie in the sun as long as I wanted, with nobody to bug me, on my favorite spot on the big rock that curved perfectly under my back. Later I’d collect pieces of driftwood for a mirror I was making and go swimming in Jade Cove.

I had all kinds of plans for the summer.

“Well, I’ve got to...” I began.

“Do you want to...” She laughed. “What were you saying?”

“Just that I should go. I told my mom I’d help around the house.”

“Where’s your place?”

I pointed.

She paddled herself around to face the opposite shore. “Cool. We can swim that, easy. We can go back and forth all the time.”

She was so sure we’d be friends. She was sure enough for both of us.

“Come in and we’ll eat the whole cake ourselves,” she said, completing her circle in the water to face me. “My mom’s in Tahoe. She won’t be back ’til late.”

“I wish I could.” Stop being so nice. I can’t afford to like you.

“Are you going to be in ninth?” she went on, panting a little as she tread water.

“Yeah.”

“Me, too. You can say you were telling me about the high school. That’s helpful.”

“There’s not much to tell about the school. It’s tiny. It’s not very good. The football team is the Astros, because everyone around here is seriously into the moon thing.”

“See? I need you. Come on.”

I didn’t offer the most valuable piece of advice—If you want to make friends at CDL High, don’t hang around with me.

“Please. Tell your mom I totally forced you to eat a piece of cake and help me unpack.” The girl grinned, sure of her charm.

It was a wide grin that stretched out the freckles on her nose, and I couldn’t resist it.

* * *

Her name was Casey.

“Casey Katherine Shepherd, named after Casey Kasem, that old DJ,” she said, sprinting ahead of me up the dock to her house. She wrapped the rainbow beach towel around her bottom half as she ran. “My mom was obsessed with him,” she called back, leaping onto the sandy path in the sloping, scrubby patch of lawn behind the house. “She has CD box sets of radio countdowns from 1970 to 1988. What’s your name?”

“Laura. Named after a great-great-aunt I never met. But I’m guessing she wasn’t a DJ.”

Casey turned so I could see she was laughing, but she didn’t stop running. She didn’t rinse her feet off, though there was a faucet right there by the back door, but pounded up the rotting wood steps, opened the screen door, and walked inside, tracking muck.

I’d always wanted to go inside The Shipwreck. When I was little, I’d imagined wood walls, hammocks, ropes dangling from the ceiling. Maybe a captain’s wheel.

But it was only an ordinary room crammed with moving boxes. The small windows and dark green paint made everything gloomy.

“Well, welcome to the neighborhood.” I pulled the cake from my backpack and set it on a brown box labeled Stuff!

“I have no clue where the knives are, so here.” Casey yanked at the curly ribbon. She broke the cake in two pieces, handed me one, and knocked her hunk against mine. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“Did you know this used to be a kids’ cabin for another house that’s not here anymore, and everyone calls it The Shipwreck?” she said, crumbs on her bottom lip.

I nodded, finished chewing. “Who told you, your Realtor?”

“We didn’t have a Realtor. My mom bought the house from the owner. The guy who fixed the windows told her. When he realized my mom was the colorful type he wouldn’t stop talking about it. Flirting with her.” She rolled her eyes. “A house with real history, he said. Built in the 1920s. One of a kind.”

The colorful type. I was tempted to ask if her colorful mother knew the stir her quadruped bumper-fish had caused. “I noticed the Ariel on the dock. Did you put it there because...”

“Yes. Screw them if they think The Shipwreck is an insult, it’s cool the way it is. Look, you can still see the marks from the bunk beds.” She shoved boxes around to show me the dark rectangles in the wood floor. “There were five bunks, so I guess ten kids could sleep down here. And one babysitter had to deal with them all summer, I bet.”

“My mother grew up in our house. She says the boys who stayed here in the forties and fifties ran wild all summer. But she never told me about the bunk beds.” I bent to touch one of the marks. “Cool.”

There were no bunk beds now. The only furniture in the room was a saggy, opened-out futon against the long wall. It was unmade, the imprint from a body still visible in the swirl of sheets.

“My mom’s sleeping down here for now,” she said. “She’s using one of the rooms upstairs for her studio because the light’s better and the daybed she ordered hasn’t come yet. Come see my room.”

I followed her up the dark staircase. “So she’s an artist?”

“Ultrabizarre stuff, but people pay a ton for it because bizarre is in.” She thumped her hand on a closed door as we passed, but didn’t offer to show me any of the ultrabizarre art.

“When’s your furniture coming?” I followed her down the narrow hall.

“Our last four places were furnished so my mom’s off buying stuff.”

Last four places? As I considered this, Casey disappeared into a wall of gold. At least that’s what I thought it was until I got closer and figured out it was yellow candy wrappers stuck together in chains, dangling from her doorjamb to form a crinkly, sunlit curtain.

“I made that for our hallway in San Francisco,” she said from the other side of the swaying lengths of plastic. “I was going through a butterscotch phase.”

“I like it,” I said. Did I? I had no idea. I was just trying to step through the ropes of cellophane without breaking them. “How many wrappers did it take?”

“A hundred and eighty-eight. My mom put my real door on sawhorses in her studio, for a table.”

I could only imagine what my mother would say if I tried to replace my bedroom door with candy wrappers. When I was little, she didn’t let me take hard candy from the free bowl at the bank, saying it was a scam they had going with the dentist.

But the fact that Casey’s mom apparently didn’t worry about cavities wasn’t the weirdest part. The weirdest part was that this girl had voluntarily taken her bedroom door off its hinges, not minding that now her mother could peek in whenever. She could catch her undressed, or interrupt her when she was writing in her journal, or yell at her from downstairs right when she’d reached the best part of her book.

My bedroom not only had a door—the wooden variety—but a lock. I used it twice a day, when I transferred my good-luck charm between my pocket and my pillow.

I stashed other objects in my room, too. I had a Maybelline Raspberry Burst lip gloss tucked into the bottom of my Kleenex box. A Cosmopolitan I’d filched from the dentist hidden inside the zippered cushion of my desk chair, with 50 Tips That’ll Drive Him Wild in Bed. I had come to know well the thrill of concealing objects in my room, the secret electric charge they emitted from their hiding places. My bedroom was strung in currents only I knew about.

I didn’t tell her any of this. I’d known her only twenty minutes.

“Didn’t you get sick of all that butterscotch by the end?”

She laughed. “Totally. I threw out the last fifty.”

We sat facing each other on her unmade single bed, inside a fortress of brown moving boxes, finishing the cake. She was still wearing her wet bathing suit and towel. I would never wear a thin bathing suit like that, even in the water, and definitely not out of it. But Casey, named after the male DJ, was flat as a boy. And something told me she wouldn’t have cared about covering up even if she wasn’t.

As we ate, and she talked about San Francisco—the freezing fog, the garlic smell that would drift up the apartment air shaft from the restaurant below—I monitored a damp spot spreading out on her yellow bedspread. It expanded around her hips, like a shadow. My mother would have gone ballistic; she pressed our sheets once a week and had a dedicated rack in the laundry room for used beach towels.

By my last bite of cake I had to admit that I liked this sturdy, confident girl. And I felt bad for her. She said she’d had no idea she was moving until her mom announced it on the last day of middle school.

“We’d only been in San Francisco for a year, and I was all registered at Union High for September, then all of a sudden my mom heard about this house, and here we are. Goodbye, Union. Hello, Coeur-de-Lune High.”

“People never say that. They say CDL High.”

“Got it.”

“Which is kind of dumb since it’s exactly the same number of syllables.”

She laughed, and I realized in that second just how much I wanted her to like me. I couldn’t resist going on. “Like I said, it’s not such a great school.”

“Go, Astronauts,” she said, laughing, shaking her fists as if she was holding miniature pom-poms.

“Astros.”

“Right. Keep the insider tips coming.”

“I’m definitely not an insider, I... So why’d your mom want to move?”

“She’s impulsive like that. You’ll get it when you meet her. We lived in a bunch of places before San Francisco. Reno, Oakland, Berkeley. Then suddenly she was all about nature. Fresh air, peace and quiet so she could work and I could... I don’t know. Suck in all the fresh air.”

“Weren’t you sad? Leaving your friends in San Francisco?”

“Yeah, but...my mom’s my best friend.”

I licked crumbs from my fingers. “That must be nice. My mother is...”

Strict? That wasn’t the right word. Cold was closer to the truth, but not quite fair. My mother took my temperature when I was sick, and remembered that I liked German chocolate cake, and once said I played the piano like an angel. She asked me for my Christmas list the day after Thanksgiving. Rigid? Overly efficient? Judgmental? None of them added up to a good answer.

“She’s what?”

“She’s older than most mothers.”

“Grandma old?”

“Sixty-two. I’m adopted. And my dad’s almost sixty-four. But my mother seems older than him because she’s kind of religious.”

“Like that nutjob fanatic mom in Carrie? I have that, have you read it? It’s awesome.”

“No, but I saw an ad for the movie on TV. She’s not like that. She’s just... I don’t know. Old-fashioned.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah.”

Bummer. I liked that tidy summary of my relationship with my mother. It took something that made me feel freakish and confused and brought it into the light, transforming it into a typical teenagey complaint.

I didn’t tell Casey she was sharing her cake with Sister Christian, or about how Pauline Knowland stole my bra during a shower after gym last September, so I’d spent the rest of the school day hunched over and red-faced.

I didn’t tell her how hard it is in a small town, where you’re shoved into a role in fifth grade and you can’t escape it no matter what you do, how it squeezes the fight out of you, because everybody knows everybody and you aren’t allowed to change.

And I didn’t tell her that one of the things hidden in my bedroom was a homemade calendar taped to the inside back wall of my closet, where I crossed off the number of CDL High days I had to survive until graduation. 581.

Go Astros.

Instead I said, even though I wasn’t that interested in horror novels, “Can I borrow Carrie sometime?”

“Sure.” Casey jumped off the crumb-strewn bed and went through boxes, tossing books on the floor.

She had more books than I did, and I had a ton. I even had a first edition of Little Women. Casey had Little Women, too, I noticed, and I picked it up off the floor, about to ask if she liked it and if she’d ever read Little Men or Rose in Bloom, which could be preachy but had some entertaining parts.

Only when I looked closer I realized it wasn’t Little Women. It was The Little Woman.

And judging by the cover, it was definitely not an homage to Louisa May Alcott. It had a lady sashaying down her hallway in a skimpy white nightgown, with a gun stuffed down her cleavage. Behind her, at the other end of the hall, you could just make out a shadowy male figure.

The perfect wife is about to get the perfect revenge, it said.

“We had this fantastic used bookstore down the street from our last place,” Casey said, her head down in the moving box. “It’s one thing I’ll miss. That and foghorns. And pork buns.

“Found it,” she said, lobbing a paperback of Carrie at me. “Keep it as long as you want. And take this, too. You might be into it, being adopted and all. I went through a phase where I totally imagined I was adopted because of that book. It seemed so romantic.”

“It’s not, believe me.”

The cover of Carrie, with a pop-eyed teenage girl covered in streams of blood, creeped me out. I’d probably just skim it. The other one looked pretty good, though. Lace, it said in pink, on a black lacy background. The book every mother kept from her daughter at the bottom. Which sounded promising.

This daughter would definitely keep it from her mother. Maybe I could stuff it down one of my winter boots. It was too big to conceal inside my Kleenex box.

“You’re lucky your mother lets you read whatever you want,” I said.

“My mom’s annoying, too. She can never stick to one hobby. She gets totally into something, then just when I get interested she’s onto something else. It sucks.”

It didn’t sound sucky at all. It sounded kind of great. My mother hadn’t developed a new hobby in decades. She was content with her baking and her needlepoint and her charitable bustling-around. Even my father was pretty stuck in his ways. He had his crosswords, and his never-ending house repairs, and his twice-a-week volunteer job at the Historical Society which consisted—as far as I could tell—of playing backgammon with Ollie Pedersen above the hardware store surrounded by old photos.

“Last month it was pressure valves,” Casey said.

“Like, plumbing?”

“No. This philosophy on stress relief. She got this book by some lady named Alberta R. Topenchiek and it’s all she talked about for weeks. Pressure Valves and Self-Monitoring of Wants versus Needs and Minor Stress Triggers versus Major Triggers.”

I laughed.

“I almost threw the book down our garbage chute, I got so sick of talking about it. Anyway, Alberta R. Topenchiek says everyone has to have a pressure valve. The thing they do when nothing else makes them feel good. My mom’s is her art, and mine’s swimming. What’s yours?”

“Kayaking,” I said. I’d never thought of it that way before, but of course it was.

“Will you teach me? I’ve never done it.”

I hesitated a second but I didn’t have a chance against her smile. Her smile, her ridiculous candy-wrapper curtain, her directness.

And her total confidence that the only thing separating us was a few hundred feet of lake water.

“Sure.”

I stayed at Casey’s for three hours that first day, helping her organize her books and clothes, listening to the Top 40 radio countdown CD for 1982. I’d never seen someone sing along so completely unselfconsciously to Toto’s “Africa” before. Usually people sort of mumbled it in the back of their throats, looking around as if they were worried they’d get caught.

When she wasn’t singing I tried to stick to safe topics. The principal is married to the history teacher. Hot lunch in our district is $3.60, or you can do the salad and fruit bar for $1.80.

But Casey kept steering the conversation back to exactly where I didn’t want it—me.

“So what are your friends like?” she said, folding a green sweater.

“I used to hang out with this girl Dee, but she moved to Tahoe last year.”

This was a lie. Dee and I had been friends in third grade, and she’d moved away in fifth, right when I could have used her. Fifth grade was when Pauline Knowland decided I had entertainment value.

“Are you allowed to go on dates yet?”

“It hasn’t come up,” I admitted.

“Right. It’s early.”

“What about you? Have you had a boyfriend yet?”

Casey got a funny half smile, looking at a spot over my right shoulder. She spoke slowly, as if she was in a witness box, enunciating for the court reporter. “No, ma’am. I have not had a boyfriend yet.”

With the cake polished off, she set a big pink-and-white Brach’s Pick-a-Mix bag on the bed. Root beer barrels, lemon drops, toffee, and starlight mints. No butterscotch.

“Sustenance, because we’re working so hard,” she said.

By the time I kayaked home, promising to return at ten the next morning, Casey’s closet was organized, her CDs were lined up alphabetically along one wall, and my back molars were little skating rinks of hard candy.

I ran my tongue across my teeth as I paddled, trying not to smile.

3

Alexandra the Great

I spent five hours with Casey the next day, and seven the next, and as the long summer days ran on it became easier to count the hours we were not together.

She proved to be a quick study on the kayak but I still sat in back, where I could take over if things got dicey. She liked to go fast. We’d be floating along, lazy and destinationless, and she’d shout, “Let’s do warp speed!” and we’d fly, enjoying a windblown rush for a minute until we inevitably knocked paddles and collapsed into laughter.

I showed her my favorite spots on the lake. The flat, sunny rock at Meriwether Point, where I’d always picnicked alone, and shady little Jade Cove, where tiny fish tickled your ankles and there was a downed pine tree that made a good, bouncy diving board.

One day I took her to Clark Beach on the North shore. We ate cheese-and-sourdough sandwiches and drowsed in the sun, and it would have been another perfect day if I wasn’t slightly on edge, worrying that Pauline Knowland and her pack of blow-dried minions would show up. I hadn’t taken Casey anywhere so public before. But Pauline didn’t come. She spent most of her summer afternoons at the mall or at Pinecrest Lake Beach, where there was more action. Action was in short supply around Coeur-de-Lune.

Sitting behind Casey in the kayak day after day, I got to know the pattern of freckles on her shoulders. She didn’t brush her hair before we met by her dock each morning so the back rose up in a snarled mat, revealing the flipped-up size tag of her purple bathing suit.

Freckles on pink skin, a tangle of red hair, an upside-down Jantzen Swimwear size six label: these are the strongest visual memories of that summer before high school.

I had a journal my dad gave me when I was seven, a puffy pink thing with A Girl’s First Diary on the cover in gold script. I hid it inside a hollowed-out copy of Silas Marner on my bottom bookshelf, and concealed the key in a mint tin in my third-best church purse.

I wasn’t a dedicated diary writer. My entries were sloppy and I sometimes went weeks without turning the key in the little gold lock. But on June 13, seven days after I met Casey, I wrote:

A summer friend. Ariel. She’s...disarming.

TGTBT

Disarming. (One of my PSAT words.) TGTBT. Too good to be true.

The acronym—such an obvious attempt to sound like other fourteen-year-olds—wasn’t the most pathetic part. It’s that I was afraid she’d vanish if I wrote her real name.

It’s not that I didn’t think she liked me. I knew she did. I made her laugh, not polite laughs but snorty diaphragm laughs. I didn’t talk much about my life at school, but my family was safe material. I told her how my dad and I once secretly replaced the gritty homemade apricot fruit leather in my mother’s charity care packages with Snickers bars. How he always saluted me if we met in the upstairs hallway, because of my vaguely military cargo shorts.

“You’d like my dad,” I said.

We were swimming in Jade Cove, floating on our backs, Casey in her purple one-piece, me in my loose black T-shirt and underwear, once again pretending I’d forgotten to bring a suit. I’d carefully rolled up my shorts in a towel and set the bundle on a rock, far from the water.

Disarming. She had disarmed me. I rarely separated myself from the charm I kept in my pocket, but for her I did. I wasn’t ready to tell her about it, though.

“Would he like me?” Casey said, eyes closed, arching her back to stay afloat so her stomach made a little purple island. The skin on her nose was bright pink, and the freckles there merged closer every day.

“Definitely.”

“Hey. Why do you always wear them?”

“Hmm?”

“Your cargos. I’ve never seen you in anything else. Not that I mind.”

“I just like them. The pockets are good for collecting things. Hey, I have oatmeal cookies in my backpack. Are you hungry?” I splashed over to the beach.

* * *

Two weeks into summer we still hadn’t met each other’s parents. We rendezvoused at Casey’s dock every morning and stayed on the water all day.

I said my mother got on my nerves and Casey accepted this. She kept me out of her house, too, telling me her mom wanted to fix the place up before inviting me over.

“She’s dying to meet you, though,” she said. “She just wants to get the house done first. She was mad you saw it before it was finished.”

“Does this mother of yours really exist?” I teased. I could tease her by then.

“She’s in some kind of retro homemaking phase. Yesterday she drove all the way to Twaine Harte for an antique firewood holder. I just hope she puts up my bedroom curtains before she gets bored with antiquing and moves on to rock climbing or whatever.”

Casey scattered crumbs like this about her mother all the time. I stored them up, greedy for more. I was as fascinated by her fond, indulgent tone of voice as I was by the composite picture they created of this person I hadn’t met yet.

On June 26 I wrote in my diary:

Ariel’s mother—Alexandra Shepherd

Only 36.

+ Once a card dealer in Reno.

+ Makes lots of $ off her art. Scandalous art?

+ Let her boyfriends sleep over til Casey asked her not to.

= Exact opposite of Ingrid Christie

* * *

One afternoon in late June, as I was showing Casey how to make a hard stop-turn in the kayak, I got an official nickname, too.

“Slow down, Pocahontas, I didn’t quite get that,” she said.

Pocahontas. The four syllables were a sweet drumbeat in my head for the rest of the day. Casey had sort of called me Pocahontas the first day we met. But this was different. I’d never been given a nickname by a friend.

When I left her dock a few hours later, she sat on the edge to see me off, legs dangling over the silvery-gray wood. I was late for dinner and was already paddling hard when she called out, feet now churning the water, “I almost forgot, come early tomorrow. My mom wants you for breakfast.”

I showed off my stop-turn. “Really?”

“The house is done so she wants to meet you. Nine, okay?”

I hadn’t planned to say it out loud. I was giddy from the day, the breakfast invite, and my diary name for Casey just slipped out at the last second. “Okay. Goodbye, Ariel.”

But when I felt myself saying it I got shy, and her nickname came out so soft it got lost crossing the water.

“What?”

I gathered my courage and repeated it, louder this time. “I said, goodbye, Ariel.”

She stilled her legs and tilted her head, considering. Then she grinned, kicking out a high, rainbowed arc. “I love that.”

As I started to paddle away again, Casey pulled the Disney figurine off the nail by her legs and waved it.

“Twins,” she yelled. Then she set it on her shoulder and made a goofball face.

I smiled all the way home.

But in my diary that night, I wrote:

65 days til school. Wish there were zeros at the end. Infinite zeros. 00000000000000000000

Before I slipped the diary back inside Silas Marner, I filled in the string of zeros, making each oval into a sad face.

It’s not that I thought she’d instantly transform on September 2. Change into someone cruel, from a fourteen-year-old who could still make dumb jokes about Disney princesses into a sneering wannabe grown-up like some of the high school girls I’d observed. I knew she was better than that.

It’s just that she didn’t know what a machine school could be. I’d already been processed through the machine, because our town was so small sixth through twelfth were in the same building complex, the high school separated only by a covered walkway. My reputation as Sister Christian had already traveled down that walkway, I was sure of it.

And the machine had decided that I didn’t deserve a friend.

I had this fantasy that Casey would say she wasn’t going to CDL High after all, that her mother would have an overnight religious conversion and send her to the Catholic girls’ school four towns over. It would solve everything, and it wasn’t completely ridiculous. I knew all about her mom’s impulsive nature. If I scattered some pamphlets about St. Bridget’s and maybe some enticing religious icons on her futon, I could probably make Catholicism her next obsession.

But even if I could pull it off, judging by what Casey had told me, her mother would end her fling with the Lord long before first-day registration.

Casey was definitely bound for CDL High.

It was bad enough, worrying about the time limit on Casey’s friendship. Then I met Alex.

* * *

The morning of the breakfast, I wore my hair loose, and though I wasn’t willing to alter my Ziploc-inside-cargos arrangement on my bottom half, I went fancier on top, with a light blue peasant blouse. It was the one nice shirt I owned that was sufficiently baggy.

Halfway across the lake I could see them waiting for me on their dock. Both of them short, with bare legs. Both with sun glinting off their red hair.

But as I got closer I could spot the differences between them. Casey’s hair was shoulder length and bone straight; her mother’s fell in spirals past the waist of her cutoffs. Casey was sturdy and slightly bowlegged, giving the impression that she was firmly planted on the ground. Her mother, though no taller, was fine-boned. All jumpy vertical lines. Alexandra was like Casey, made with more care. And though she was thirty-six, she could have passed for a college girl.

She reminded me of one of the redheads in my European art book, a full-page print I’d tried (unsuccessfully) to copy. Not the woozy Klimt lover, who looked like she’d been folded to pack in a trunk. I liked this painting better: a modern Russian oil of a young auburn-haired dancer surrounded by chaotic brushstrokes, her eyes defiant, her arms so fluttery they seemed to disturb her painted background. That’s what Alexandra was like.

“Need help?” Alexandra darted across the dock as I tied up. To Casey she asked, wringing her hands, “Does she need help?”

“She’s fine, Mom. Laura’s a pro.”

I climbed up the ladder, self-conscious under her steady gaze. When I tried to shake her hand she pulled me in for a hug, speaking close to my ear. “Alexandra Shepherd, but call me Alex, of course.”

My dad’s version of a hug was one palm rapping me on the back like I was choking on a chicken bone, and my mother limited her displays of affection to awkward shoulder pats.

This was a full-body squeeze, and the force of it, coming from someone so little, unnerved me. When she finally let go she didn’t really let go. She only leaned back, still so close I could count the freckles on her nose. She didn’t have as many as Casey.

“Laura,” she said, cupping my jaw in both warm hands.

“Mom.”

“Oh, I’m just excited. Your first friend in the new town. I’m sorry, Laura.”

“It’s okay.”

It wasn’t exactly okay, though. I didn’t know where to look. She still had both hands under my chin and her gray eyes were darting and circling, scanning my features.

“Careful, Laura, she wants you to sit for her. When she analyzes someone’s face like that, she’s making plans. And it sucks, believe me.”

“You caught me.” Alex dropped her hands and stepped back. “Laura, you’re welcome here anytime.”

Some people pronounced my name Low-ra, and some people said Laah-ra, and neither was correct. It was just Laura, standard pronunciation.

Alex said it like there were three syllables, not two, adding a breathy cascade within the vowel. Lau-aura. She said it like a declaration, like I couldn’t possibly be anyone else, and like meeting me confirmed that I was just as wonderful as Casey had said.

“I’m starved and you’re freaking out my friend.” Casey was already running to the back door. She was barefoot, wearing her purple bathing suit, but she’d pulled on cutoffs for the occasion.

Alex didn’t speak as we walked up the path together, and as she held open the screen door, she watched me closely again, her eyes monitoring my face for a response as I took in the fixed-up house.

She’d transformed it. Newly white walls brightened up the long room and set off the blue of the lake and the green of the pines coming through the small, high windows and screen door. There were the antiques I’d heard about—a circular wooden table and chairs near the tiny kitchen, a deep armchair on a braided oval rug next to the fireplace, and a low yellow daybed had replaced the futon in one corner. But she hadn’t sanded away the marks in the floor from the old bunk beds, I was relieved to see.

“Like it, Laura?” she said, fidgeting with the hem of her white eyelet tank top.

“It’s perfect.”

“You did a good job, Mom,” Casey said from the kitchen table, a croissant hanging from her mouth. “Now can you two please stop being so freaking polite so we can eat?”

* * *

When Alex was in the kitchen slicing an almond pastry, Casey whispered across the small table, “I’ve never seen her so quiet. She must really want to paint you. Watch out.”

“I don’t mind.”

* * *

Alex was more relaxed each time I came over. She stopped saying my name more than the standard amount, and began to match Casey’s description. She did talk too much. She did launch from one hobby to another so fast it was hard to keep up.

And she did want to paint me. I chalked up her odd behavior on that first morning to the overwhelming impression I’d made as a potential subject, and I was flattered.

By midsummer we’d settled into a routine. Mornings I sat for sketches on the back porch, muscles aching, but happy to let Alex and Casey entertain me.

One hot day in late July Alex had me in a stiff-backed dining room chair with my hair in a tight bun. She said she was trying to capture something in my eyes. That I was “an old soul but tried to hide it,” and she hadn’t managed to draw this to her satisfaction.

“You have a... What is it, Case? What’s in her eyes that’s so hard for me to get right? That bit of sadness mixed with... I don’t know what.”

“That’s a neck cramp mixed with the desperate need to pee. I know the feeling well.” Casey was sprawled in the sun by my feet, a paperback of Peyton Place tented above her face.

She read a section aloud: a couple writhing around, monitoring the status of the man’s erection, panting out a play-by-play of their lovemaking.

When Casey wasn’t acting out Peyton Place, making me laugh until I broke form, Alex would lecture us on her latest bird. Her birding mania had abruptly replaced a brief heirloom tomato kick. She’d even invested in binoculars and a leather journal for recording her sightings. Casey and I knew as much about the yellow-headed blackbird as the local Audubon Society.

“Their scientific name is Xanthocephalus,” Alex said from behind her easel. “And the Tahoe basin has lost hundreds in the last ten years, isn’t that awful? Their call is so unusual. Like...a rusty gate opening over and over, and—”

“Oh, my God, Mom. You’re a rusty gate opening over and over. Give it a rest.”

Alex popped her head above her easel. She had her curls piled on top of her head, and a double pine needle had fallen onto it like a hair ornament. “Laura’s interested. Aren’t you, Laura?”

“Definitely.”

“She’s just being polite. Laura doesn’t give a shit about the Xanadu birds anymore and neither do I.”

“Xanthocephalus,” I said, laughing.

“Kiss-up,” Casey said.

“Dang it all, Case, you made me mess up.” Alex had the same laugh as Casey, full-throated and coppery. “Naughty girl.”

A few days later, Peyton Place and the yellow-headed blackbird were replaced by My Sweet Audrina and the dark-eyed junco bird. The material varied, but the two-woman show did not. Alex the flighty. Casey the sarcastic.

And me. I was the audience. Sometimes the egger-on or the mediator. They each tried to get me on their side, and I loved every second of this gentle tug-of-war.

After lunch Alex would wander upstairs to her studio—painting was the one constant in her day—and it became me and Casey again, kayaking and swimming and picnicking until dinner. They invited me for every meal, but I only stayed one out of five times, figuring that this amount would not push my mother over the edge.

I told my mother the Shepherds’ car was used and they couldn’t pry the anti-Christian fish off. She hmphed at me, not buying it but not forbidding me to see them, either.

By August I’d thrown myself into the Shepherd household completely. Without a flicker of loyalty to my own slow-moving, well-meaning, predictable parents.

I kayaked across the lake every chance I got. I spent the night almost every Saturday, ignoring my mother’s hmphs, her narrowed eyes.

On Sunday, I rushed over again as soon as I ditched my church clothes. Paddling hard, like I was racing backward across the river Styx, from the land of the dead to the land of the living.

I wished school would never start.

4

The Machine

September 2

Casey and I did walk to school together the first morning, just like my mother had commanded back in June. We arranged to meet at the gazebo in the park at 7:45, and everything about it felt strange.

It was strange to see Casey on land. It was strange to see her in jeans. It was strange to see her with her hair brushed.

When I walked over I found her using a stick to pick a tile from the crumbling old mosaic inside the gazebo. “A little first-day-of-school gift for you,” she said, handing me the small green square. “For good luck.”

“Thanks.” I dropped it in my pocket, next to my Ziploc.

We walked up the shoulder of East Shoreline Road to town, Casey kicking pinecones and chattering, asking about every backpacked kid we saw on the way, me dragging my feet and answering in monosyllables.

Her whispered questions started out genuine. “Are they a couple? Is that girl on the bike a freshman?”

When we were so close we could see the brick and white plaster of CDL High through the pines, she finally picked up on my death-row vibe and tried to make me laugh.

About a pasty guy in a skull T-shirt taking last-minute drags off his cigarette—“That’s the school nurse, right?”

About a sour-looking teacher in the parking lot wearing an ankle-length black skirt and a curious, drapey gray cardigan—“Ooh, I like the cheerleading uniforms.”

I could manage only a tight smile.

I’d dressed carefully, in a denim skirt and my blue peasant shirt. As we walked up the broad brick steps together, surrounded by keyed-up, tanned kids, I tucked my blouse in and tugged it out for the hundredth time.

“You look great,” Casey said. “Don’t be nervous.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“Yes, you are. You’re petrified. I’m the new girl. I’m the one who’s supposed to be nervous.”

Then, too soon, we were in the auditorium with the entire school—240 students. A puny enrollment by California standards, but we could still barely hear each other. We had to get our locker assignments and ID pictures, and I was a C and Casey was an S, so our lines were on opposite sides of the room.

“Meet me outside the cafeteria at lunch?” she shouted.

I nodded. We only had two classes together. PE and study hall, both in the afternoon.

Casey started to walk toward the R through Z line. But then she turned back to me and whispered, leaning close, “Is it your boobs?”

“What?”

“Is that what they tease you about?”

“What do you...”

She kept her voice low as the wave of kids parted around us. “You always hunch. You wear those baggy old-man T-shirts instead of a bathing suit. I know you hate school, you’ve been dreading it all summer, and you won’t talk about it. So is that it? Or is there more?”

I managed to look down at my extra-blousy blouse and say, “They don’t help.”

She didn’t laugh. She just squeezed my wrist and said, “I’ll kick their asses if they mess with you. See you at lunch.”

I nodded and let the other kids pour in between us, so relieved I could have cried.

And the morning went fine. My ID picture came out pretty. Not one person called me Sister Christian. Even Pauline, who was of course a frosh cheerleader, was in a big pond now, with diluted influence, and seemed to be more interested in trying to get attention from the upperclassmen than messing with me. We had English together but she ignored me for the whole fifty-five minutes.

I was not Carrie, the hopeless freak with the bible-banging mother. I’d never been close. And by third period I was a little mad that I’d let an idiot like Pauline get to me for so many years.

By fourth period I was almost relaxed.

Then I found out about the rally.

I was in fifth period Spanish, happily conjugating sports verbs (to kick, to run, to swim), when Mr. Allendros said, “Tiempo para ir al gimnasio.”

Time to go to the gym.

It was still half an hour until the lunch bell, so I thought it was part of the lesson until the sophomores started getting up. The other freshmen looked as clueless as me, but we all stood and filed out the door.

“What’s going on?” I said to the girl behind me in the packed hall.

“Pep rally,” she said, her notebook knocking my elbow as she got jostled from behind. “Sorry.”

So I was swept along to the gimnasio, feeling far from peppy.

I hunted in the bleachers for a flash of red hair but I couldn’t find Casey, so I gave up and sat near the door in the first row, hoping I’d at least catch her on the way out. For something called a rally, it was pretty tedious. Announcements about elections, and football tickets, and a fund-raiser over at the skating rink/bowling alley in Red Pine.

And once again, I let myself relax.

Until ten minutes before the lunch bell, when the cheerleaders started pulling kids from the bleachers. There was to be some sort of audience participation to cap things off, and I wished desperately that I’d sat in the top row, far from their perky reach.

They could have targeted the leadership types, but no. They recruited poor Dan Novacek, a boy I’d known since kindergarten who rarely bathed, and Ellie Jacobs, who always wore a fishing cap, and a sweet, gray-bobbed teacher who’d been standing by the exit minding her own business.

Still, I thought I might be safe. The morning had gone okay. I shrank down and sat very still.

But Pauline found me. Pauline, with her new Rachel hairdo and her old taste for cruelty.

She gripped my elbow and I shook her off, smiling wildly, unfocused. But I was pushed, pulled, prodded by others who were relieved they hadn’t been singled out. Until I was onstage.

Not a stage exactly. The gym floor. But it might as well have been the Roman Forum. There were eight of us that the cheerleaders were arranging in various poses. I grasped that we were to act out some sort of cute chain reaction.

I was the first link in the chain. Someone handed me a fake coin the size of a small pizza, made of foam and wrapped in tinfoil. On my left was the teacher, who had to stand with her elbows locked together and her forearms up in a V, making a kind of receptacle. I was to pivot from right to left and set the tinfoil coin in her arms. The teacher/coin slot seemed about as happy about this as I was.

After I gave her the coin she had to shout “Beep” and turn to her left. Dan Novacek, who just for kicks had an inflated inner tube around his waist, had to spin and pat the girl next to him on her head, and she had to toss a football up and catch it. And so on.

When the chain reaction was over the cheerleader at the end yelled, “Go,” and the audience had to shout, “Astros.”

I did my part correctly every time, which wasn’t easy since I was trying to keep my elbows pinned close to my sides to minimize what the bra companies call “wobble and bounce.” The teacher did okay, too, and so did Dan in his inner tube. But the girl down the line kept fumbling the football, and when the crowd half-heartedly yelled, “Astros” the third time, I heard an “Assholes” mixed in.

I wondered where Casey was. Up in the bleachers, pity mixed with revelation. Seeing me clearly for the first time, as a victim. And there was nothing to be done.

We were all rattled, and while the football-tossing girl got it together, two kids at the end of the human contraption kept messing up. So by the fifth time there were almost as many voices yelling, “Assholes” as “Astros.”

It was not how I hoped the day would go.

But as I turned with the weightless coin one more time, praying it would be the last, someone snatched it from my hands.

There was a ripple of confused laughter from the bleachers.

I caught a flash of Irish setter red hair. Casey had stolen the quarter. Casey had mucked up the machine.

She was running around the gym and the crowd was loving it. As if she’d planned it for weeks, she ran to a cluster of basketball players and handed the quarter off to Mitch Weiland, a popular senior. The basketball team never got as much attention as the football team, so this was a stroke of brilliance. He sprinted to the basketball net and inserted the quarter in a gorgeous dunk shot right as the bell rang.

* * *

“What was that?” I said, as Casey and I walked to the cafeteria.

She shrugged. “It was pissing me off. You looked so miserable, it just came to me.”

“You’re crazy.” I smiled.

Later, after Pauline Knowland high-fived Casey on our way to the lunch line, pretending she’d found her improv as hilarious as everyone else, and four juniors asked to sit with us, I whispered, “Thank you.”

“You’d do it for me. We’re best friends, right?”

“Best friends.”

5

Bartles & Jaymes

2016

Thursday evening

Casey and I sat on the dock and watched the sky until there was only a delicate tracing of red around the mountains. One by one, people flicked their lights on, ringing the dark lake in dots of glowing yellow.

“I forgot how beautiful it is,” I said.

“It’s changed, though. Not as quiet as it used to be.”

“I go to sleep to the sounds of the #1 California Muni bus,” I said. “It makes these horrible groaning noises as it struggles up the hill. I feel like one day they’re going to ask me to come out and help push.”

“Did you drive in through town or did you take I-5 and Southshore?”

“Southshore.”

“So you didn’t see how fancy we are now. We have two espresso places and a Chef’s Choice. You know, so you don’t have to haul all the way to Tahoe City for your triple-shot latte and your ten million kinds of chèvre.”

“And there’s a fantastic bookstore, I hear.”

“Who told you, your mother?”

“Yeah, she—”

“Right. Like she would use the word fantastic to describe anything remotely associated with me.”

“She doesn’t—”

“Stop. Don’t even try. So. Speaking of goat cheese. I think it’s time to move this wild party indoors. Unless you think we’ll be too crowded.”

* * *

Jett was still sleeping when I opened the car door. I clipped her leash on before she was alert enough to go nuts. “Wake up, sweet girl.”

She shook herself, jingling her tags, and perked up the second she got out, excited by new smells. I let her pee and sniff her way down the driveway while Casey switched lights on behind us.

My phone rang and Sam’s face flashed on my screen. Sam was the “goofy foot,” the famous surfing lefty, from his café’s name. The picture I’d programmed in, though, was Sam as I knew him, not the cocky young surf-punk from the past that I emblazoned on his T-shirts and magnets and mugs, but forty pounds heavier and forty years older. Big and weather-beaten, kind of like an aging Beach Boy. I liked that Sam best.

He knew I’d been considering visiting my hometown this weekend. He was the only person I’d told, and he’d urged me to go, to take a risk. His exact words were You need more friends besides that hyper mutt and some old has-been fatty ex-surfer.

“I shouldn’t have come,” I whispered into the phone. “It’s beyond awful. Are you happy?”

“I think the question is ‘are you happy?’” He spoke in his best Yoda imitation. Which was a pretty poor one. There was a fine line between Yoda and Fozzie Bear from the Muppets, and Sam always veered too Fozzie.

“Don’t psychoanalyze me, Sam. I’m not up to it right now.”

“Sorry, sorry. But keep me posted. And if you wimp out and come home early, you’re fired. Anyone can slap some doodles on a T-shirt. You’re totally replaceable.”

“Supportive as always, Sam.”

“Email me. I want to live vicariously.”

“This is all about you, then.”

“Naturally.”

“Bye.”

Jett was about as eager to go inside as I was but I tugged her leash. “Time to go in, JJ-girl.”

Time to trade one unfamiliar landscape for another.

Casey had told the truth; she and Alex hadn’t made many changes to The Shipwreck. Though there was evidence of a child—a fairy book, glittery purple sneakers on the floor, one of which I had to wrestle away from Jett as Casey walked over from the kitchen.

“Behave, Jett. Sorry.”

“She’s all right.” Casey scratched her under her collar. “Jett, you said? As in Joan? Right, the spiky black hair.”

I waited for Casey to give me just a little more. For her voice to warm a few degrees as she said, Remember the poster you gave me? That CD you used to hide at my house?

“She’s a troublemaker like her namesake,” I said.

“She’s a sweetheart. I love Labs.”

“Thanks. And how old is your little girl? Elle, you said? Not that I mean she’s the same as a pet...” I needed to stop talking. Or at least rehearse every sentence in my head a minimum of three times before letting it exit my mouth.

Casey waited for me to stop. No “no worries,” an expression it seemed the rest of the world used ten times a day. No “don’t be silly.”

“She just turned ten. She’s been with us since she was five.”

“Can I see her picture?”

Casey pointed to the photos hung on the stairwell. “You can see dozens, we’re running out of room.”

I walked up the stairs to examine the pictures while Casey crouched and scratched Jett’s stomach. Jett was in textbook passive pose, on her back, paws limp. Casey had already won her over. At least she was making an effort with my pet.

I didn’t have to hunt long for the little girl’s face. She was all over the wall. A plump child with wavy brown hair and brown eyes, younger in the photos closer to the center, older in the ones crammed around the edges. There she was with a smiling Casey, fishing. There she was with her face red from a Popsicle. Carrying a backpack in front of my old elementary school.

“She’s adorable,” I called.

“Thanks.”

Alex had started the wall the September after she and Casey moved in, first with a handful of framed photos clustered where they were easily visible from the middle step. The collection had grown outward, the spacing tightening over the years as real estate got scarce.

I knew so many of the images. Casey blowing out birthday candles at three and four and seven, her cheeks round, her eyes bright. Casey jumping off dive blocks at swim meets, her age only discernible by the length of her blurry legs. Casey and Alex on the trip to Mexico when Casey was fifteen, toasting with their margarita glasses in some awful spring-break club. Casey in the garden, pretending to mash herbs with Alex’s mortar and pestle, her raised eyebrows showing just what she thought of Alex’s pagan phase. Alex at her pottery wheel, squinting into the sun, her cheeks and forehead flecked with white clay. Alex as a toddler on the beach in San Francisco, the ruins of the Sutro Baths behind her. I looked at that one closely, trying to identify the old Victorian up the hill that Sam had turned into his shop, years after the photo was taken. But I couldn’t find it.

I’d once been on the wall, too. Prominently featured. By senior year I was in ten pictures. My favorite had been positioned eight steps up. Me and Casey in the kayak, raising our paddles over our heads and laughing, water pouring down in shining streams around us.

But that one was no longer there, and neither were any of the others. I’d been curated out of the gallery.

I walked down the stairs, smiling so Casey wouldn’t know what I’d been thinking.

“My mom still has them.”

“Has what?”

“The pictures of you. She keeps the one of us in the kayak in her studio.”

I nodded. What was I supposed to say? No worries?

“So,” Casey said, walking to the kitchen. “Wine? Rosé all right? And I wasn’t kidding about the cheese. I didn’t know what you’d like so I got it all. Hard, soft, everything in between.”

“What, no cookie dough?” I followed Casey across the living room.

“Cookie dough?”

“You know, trio of cookie dough.”

She turned to face me.

“Trio of cookie dough,” I said. “Manicures. Crank calls?”

“What are you talking about?”

And I realized it even before my hand closed around the invitation in my pocket.

The invitation Casey hadn’t sent.

I’d handled the hot-pink envelope so much over the past three weeks it had gotten soft. I passed it to Casey and she pulled the card out. After one glance she walked over to the rolltop desk in the corner, so fast I didn’t have a chance to read her expression.

She handed me a piece of filmy blue stationery. “We’ve been had.”

The handwriting’s resemblance to mine was impressive.

“‘Dear Casey, I’ve been thinking about our friendship a lot lately, and missing you. Would you mind if I came for a visit? I’ll be in town on...’”

I didn’t need to read any more.

“Your mom,” I said.

“I’m going to strangle her.”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Do you want to go?”

* * *

When Casey stomped to the refrigerator for the rosé she found it had been replaced by a six-pack of Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers with a fat manila envelope taped on top. Girls, it said on the outside, in Alex’s unmistakable curly handwriting.

Alex had even remembered our flavor preference from senior year. Junior year our favorite had been Snow Creek Berry, but by the fall of 1998 we’d transitioned to Peach Bellini, and that’s what she’d bought.

We sat on the sofa with our drinks, Alex’s envelope between us. Casey studied her bottle’s label, circling the round B&J logo with her index finger.

“Do you want to open it?” I said.

“You’re the guest, you should have the honor.”

“I need a minute.”

“She turned in a pretty goddamned good performance of acting surprised when I showed her the letter,” Casey said. She swigged her Peach Bellini, her grip on the bottle so tight her knuckles blanched. “I mean, Golden Globe–worthy.”

“She took that acting class in Pinecrest,” I said softly. When was it? Sophomore year? It didn’t matter, but it was all I could handle at the moment, that one fact, so I concentrated hard until I pulled it from my memory. Spring of sophomore year. Endless monologues from Uncle Vanya and Streetcar.

“Right. Then suddenly she said it would be better if she wasn’t here, if the two of us had ‘quality time’ together. And today she blew town with Elle.” Casey’s cheeks had reddened. Her angry clown look, Alex had always called it.

I could leave.

But Casey hadn’t kicked me out. She’d hot potato’d the question of what to do right back at me.

In the Stay column, at least Casey was sharing a piece of furniture with me.

In the Go column—she could not be farther away. The sofa had two big seat cushions, and while I sat in the middle of mine, Casey was so far away, wedged against the opposite arm, that she’d made her cushion lift up in the center of the sofa like she was raising a little padded drawbridge between us.

Another for the Go column—she was gripping her wine cooler so tight I could see the raised outline of the delicate center bone inside her wrist.

I sipped my sickly sweet peach drink.

Jett settled on the floor between us. Casey stretched her leg out so her heel could rub circles around Jett’s fluffy midsection. I put the fact that she was petting my dog in the Stay column. “Let’s at least open the letter.”

“You do it, I’m too pissed.” Casey took another swig of her drink and set it on the coffee table. She squeezed her left hand into a ball, then radiated her fingers out again like a magician in the “abracadabra” moment of the act. A de-stressing technique I used myself sometimes.

I set my bottle down a respectful distance from hers and tore open the envelope. Alex had taped a hundred-dollar bill to the top of a handwritten note. I carefully peeled off the cash and waved it.

“What’s that for?” Casey said.

I scanned the letter. It was all so perfectly, ridiculously Alex I couldn’t help smiling in spite of everything.

“What’s funny?” Casey said.

“You’re not going to like it.”

“The hundred’s a bribe? It’s not even a decent one.”

“It’s not a bribe, listen,” I said. “‘Girls. I know you must be a little angry, and...’”

“Ha. Just a little.”

“...‘and I don’t blame you. Okay, maybe you’re more than a little angry.’

“‘But remember you’re angry at me, not at each other. It was always that way, wasn’t it? I was to blame then, too. I was the adult.’”

Casey snorted.

“‘Correction. I was supposed to be the adult.’ Supposed to be is underlined...” I tried to meet Casey’s eyes but she wouldn’t look at me. She was staring at her bottle.

“‘So please see this for what it is: my attempt to make things right.’

“‘Or see it as one last scavenger hunt. They were fun, weren’t they? At least at first? I want this to be fun for you, too.’”

I waited for Casey’s comment.

“Fun. God, I’m going to kill her... Sorry, sorry.” Casey held up her free hand in apology. “Keep going.”

“‘I’ve made up a list.’” I fished out another piece of white paper, this one printed from a computer and folded in half. I held it up for Casey, who had inched closer. I didn’t open it. I set it between us, facedown, so it bridged our couch cushions.

“‘There are ten things. Five photos to take and five things to find, just like when you were in high school. I put a lot of thought into choosing the items. I couldn’t find the right film for the old Polaroids so I got you a new instant camera at the Sharper Image...’”

“Unreal.” Casey closed her eyes. “Doesn’t she realize we can take pictures with our phones now? Not that we’re going to be taking pictures anyway...”

“Wait, listen... ‘I realize you can take pictures with your phones now...’” I pointed at Casey and gave her a chance to get her sarcasm in. We had a nice rhythm going.

“Because that makes this totally reasonable,” she said.

“...‘but I thought it’d be more fun this way. More like old times, you know? The camera is in the top left drawer of my dresser. A couple of these clues will take you out of town (hint, hint) so the money is for gas and incidentals.’”

“My mom did not write incidentals. What is she, a corporate accountant all of a sudden?”

“She did write incidentals.” I tilted the letter so she could see.

“‘I’ll be monitoring your progress so no cheating. This will only work if you do it right.’

“‘When you’ve finished all ten things on the list I’ll trade you for something you’ve both wanted for a long time. Something I probably should have given you years ago.’

“‘Please trust me one last time. I know that’s a lot to ask. But you have to complete this game before I give you your prize. You’ll understand Sunday, I promise.’”

“That’s it?” Casey said.

“No. She signed it. ‘Love, Alex.’”

I unfolded the paper and skimmed the first few clues. They were written in rhymes, but didn’t seem too hard. Not by Alex’s old standards. “Want to know what’s on the list?”

“Let me guess. A syrup jug from the Creekside. The mayor’s watering can. A picture by the drinking fountain at school.”

“You’ve got the basic idea. A guided trip down memory lane. It’s all summer stuff.”

“Adorable.”

“So what do you think the prize is? Something we’ve both wanted for a long time.”

“Right now I want to throw a Sharper Image novelty Polaroid camera at her face. No, I want to punch her in the face.” Casey clenched and unclenched her fist again, as if imagining the satisfaction she’d get from delivering the blow.

She grabbed the list, crumpled it up without reading it, and tossed it, aiming for the wall opposite us. It barely cleared the coffee table. Jett bounded over and returned it to her, wagging her tail. “She even got your dog into the act.”

I patted my knees. “Give it, Jetty.”

I unfolded the damp paper on my lap. “She wrote the clues in rhymes. Five-line rhymes.”

“Those are called quintains. You missed the morbid poetry phase she got into after 9/11.”

“The clues seem pretty easy,” I said. “Listen to this one:

“‘Here you used to glide and spin

Young and swift and free

On hoofs of brown and orange you’d...’”

Casey interrupted. “The skating rink. Tough clue, Mom.”

“I don’t think she wants the clues to be hard. I don’t think that’s the point this time.”

Casey pressed her bright cheek against the side of her wine cooler. “She was good, I’ll give her that. Acting as surprised as me when your letter showed up. Talking me into how great it’d be if you came and I should at least give it a chance, how hard it must have been for you to reach out after all this time...” She broke off. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” I picked up the sheet of blue stationery from the coffee table. Until half an hour ago Casey had thought I’d sent it. And I noticed something that I hadn’t the first time. “My” letter had a tracery of lines in it. Casey had crumpled it up, too. Maybe Alex even had to fish the balled-up letter from the garbage. I couldn’t blame Casey; I’d resisted, too. But it hurt.

“She outsmarted us,” I said.

“Those handwriting samples we did junior year...” Casey said.

“Sophomore year.”

“Was it? Anyway, I can’t even deal with that part right now, the idea of her holing up in her studio, plotting this twisted fiesta when I thought she was painting. She was up there copying our handwriting while I was down here reading Lemony Snicket with Elle, totally oblivious.”

“She thought we needed an activity,” I said. “Like toddlers.”

“This says it all.” Casey picked up the manila envelope and punched the word Girls, denting the paper.

I nodded, though I knew Casey was getting worked up for reasons that had nothing to do with being treated like a child.

The scavenger hunts Alex masterminded when we were in high school weren’t just party games to keep us entertained. Maybe they’d started off that way. But they’d become something else, and the final prize, for both of us, had been the end of our friendship. Alex couldn’t make that right with an apology and ten bad poems.

We sipped our drinks. Casey petted Jett with her foot and I read Alex’s list.

Most of the items were in town. Walking distance, even. The only item that would take some effort was the last one.

Not that we were doing it.

The grandfather clock struck eight and after the final, resounding bong it felt even quieter than before.

“So I get that she wants us to make up,” I said. “But why now?”

Casey shook her head, focusing on a spot in the air above my head. She whispered something.

I tapped her knee, then, startled by the familiarity of the gesture, pulled my hand back. “Did you say no?”

Casey cleared her throat. “I said, ‘I know.’” She shook her head as if to reset her thoughts. “I know why she’s doing it now.”

“Why?”

She smiled, but her eyes were glazed. Jett whimpered and snuffled into her lap.

“Because you have your little girl?” I said.

She shook her head.

“Then it’s...because we’re thirty-five? Or I am, and you will be in August. And thirty-five is, I don’t know, the age you miraculously become older and wiser and able to get over the past according to your mom?”

“No.”

“So tell me.”

Casey’s hand trembled as she set her drink down. She shook her head again. Then, so fast I hardly knew what was happening, she was gone. Out the front door. Barefoot, launching herself into the cold night.

I waited five minutes. Ten. Long enough to feel the cool air coming in through the open door. I reread Alex’s list, trying to find clues between the clues. Why now, Alex? The answer tried to burrow into my thoughts, but I couldn’t latch onto it.

Jett whimpered, her nose pointed at the front door.

“Should we go after her, Jetty?”

She thumped her tail, and then ran to the door, where I clipped on her leash. At the last second I returned for the clue list.

6

Messy

Even before I saw Casey’s green sweatshirt in the light of the gazebo, I knew that’s where she’d be.

We’d dreamed away so many hours under its rotting roof, every morning before school and after every party.

The bright gazebo looked like a stage in the shadowy park, which was otherwise lit only by one weak streetlamp. Casey sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the lower wall with her eyes closed. “Sorry about that,” she said, not opening them.

“It’s okay. Jett was worried, though.”

Casey held out her hand and let Jett snuffle into it. “I’m sorry, Jett. Your mom’s old friend is crazy.”

“No. It’s been a crazy day.”

I looked around. In my time the small park by Casey’s house had been scrubby and neglected, but now it was spruced up. The grass was groomed and there was a red play structure on one of those rubbery black surfaces that kept kids from breaking their arms when they plummeted off the monkey bars.

The gazebo had been fixed up, too, repaired and painted a glossy white.

The upper wall of the gazebo was plain white lattice, curving into a domed roof. But the lower wall had always been special, even when it was falling apart. I knelt so I could examine the mosaic running around the bottom. It was whole again, a fantastical lake scene for small children to enjoy, built at their eye level. Swimmers, fish, swaying underwater plants, and the imaginary friendly water creature everyone called Messy. Loch Ness had Nessie, Lake Tahoe had Tessie, and we had Messy.

I crawled along the floor, running my hand on the cold tiles. “They did a good job on this.”

“What? Oh, shit, I forgot. Are you okay being here?”

“Sure. It’s beautiful.”

A brass plaque by the steps stated that the gazebo was built in 1945 in memory of Lieutenant Rupert Collier II, who had died in Normandy during World War II. A shinier plaque below said the gazebo had been “restored in 2012 thanks to a generous gift from the Coeur-de-Lune Historical Society in honor of William T. Christie.”

My dad. I’d sent checks to the Historical Society on his birthday every year. I’d donated an extra-large sum on what would have been his eightieth, four years ago.

“They had an artist out of Truckee do it,” Casey said. “She spent months matching colors. So many tiles were missing.”

“I wonder why.”

“Some hooligans had been prying them off.”

“How terrible.”

She smiled, wiping her shiny cheek with her sleeve.

“Did you give her the tiles?” I said.

“I sneaked over in the dark and left them in a shoebox.”

“And she used them?”

“All fifty-seven.”

Fifty-seven blue tiles. Casey had counted them, and remembered.

Fifty-seven nights, sitting here in the dark, picking off loose tiles, talking over whatever we’d done that evening. As innocent and free and unaware of time as the creatures swimming in the mosaic.

“I want to see it in daylight,” I said.

“What?”

“I want to see the old tiles against the new, in daylight. So I can decide if this so-called artist matched them up right. My dad would’ve wanted me to make sure. Will you show me, tomorrow?”

“You mean it? You actually want to stay?”

I nodded. “I’m here. I’ll take your mom’s dare, for a while at least. I’m in if you are.”

“But you always picked Truth and I always picked Dare,” she said.

“I know. But say we did give it a try. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“You know whatever my mom has planned for us at the end of this, this...whatever this is...is going to be nuts. She hasn’t changed.”

“I still want to try it.”

“Why, though? It’s not so you can see what they did with your donations.”

I shrugged, touching the cold, thin line of new grout between the restored tiles. “Jett likes the fresh air. And I need to check on the house.”

“Right.” Casey took a deep breath. “I’ll try it for now. Whatevs, as Elle says. On one condition.”

“Okay.”

“You can’t ask me why I’m doing it.”

“You asked me why. Not exactly fair.”

“Your answer was bullshit.”

I nodded, slowly. “Okay.”

“We’ll see how it goes.”

“Anyway we’re already doing it. Your mom’s psychic. Listen to Clue 1:

“‘This little lacy room was not

True shelter from a storm

But the perfect place to shade yourselves

On summer days so warm

Bring me one square of blue, it’s the least you can do.’”

I tapped the mosaic. “We’re supposed to pry a tile off and bring it to her.”

“My mother’s such a delinquent.”

“Unlike you. Anyway I paid for it. We can borrow one tile.”

“What was that line about ‘monitoring our progress’? You think she’s watching from the bushes with night-vision goggles?”

“Bought at the Sharper Image with the Polaroid.”

We stared out at the dark.

“We know you’re out there,” Casey called.

No answer except from the frogs. Casey walked down the steps, rooted in the bushes, and came back with a stick. She knelt and dug at the grout, trying to dislodge a tile near the base. “This grout is way stronger than the old stuff. I’m not making a dent.”

I commanded Jett to sit, and after a minute she settled enough so I could split the flimsy ring of her collar with my fingernail and pull off the rabies tag. I handed the thin silver medallion to Casey. “Try this.”

While Casey scraped I scooted to the center of the gazebo where the light was brightest. I pulled the hundred-dollar bill from my pocket. “We could make her pay for dinner. She owes us that, at least.”

“But what about our gas and incidentals? Dare we risk not having enough funds for the incidentals?”

“I’m starving.”

“Me, too.”

“What are the options these days? Josefina’s Pizza or the Creekside?”

“They’ll be madhouses. Tourists up for the weekend.”

“The Greek place?”

“Became a Taco Empire four years ago, then closed for health violations. We could do the skating rink clue and eat at the snack bar. Kill two birds with one stone. Except.”

“The food? I can handle fluorescent orange nachos for dinner. It actually sounds fantastic.”

“No. The food’s not bad these days. But...”

“But what?”

Casey stopped scraping and glanced over her shoulder. “He owns it now.”

“Who?” I examined the hundred. It was a 2008. Someone had carefully outlined the triangle above the pyramid, the one holding the eye, with blue pen.

I studied the bill, reading Latin over and over (Annuit cœptis, Novus ordo seclorum), but I could tell by Casey’s silence that I hadn’t fooled her. I knew who He was. She knew I knew who He was. There was only one He in Coeur-de-Lune, for me.

And it wasn’t the He worshipped in my mother’s old church.

I looked up from the bill. “So he’s been here this whole time?”

“He has a house in Red Pine.”

“You’ve been there? To the rink?”

“Elle loves it. We have every birthday party there.”

“She’s a good skater, then?”

Casey turned back to work on the tile, speaking to the mosaic wall as she scraped. “Is that really the question you want to ask me right now?”

Hardly. I could think of a dozen that interested me more than little Elle’s aptitude for gliding around on eight wheels—Is he married? What does he look like? Does he have kids?

Does he ever talk about me?

Casey answered only the question I’d spoken aloud. “She’s a good skater.” She paused, but couldn’t resist adding, “J.B. helped me teach her.”

Jett whimpered. I’d wound her leash around my wrist so tight she couldn’t move.

“Finally!” Casey stood and held out the small blue tile triumphantly. “A little chipped in one corner but it’ll work.”

As we walked back to Casey’s house, she said, “You’re sure you’re up for the rink? You don’t want to work up to it?”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Got it.”

“We’re all grown-ups.”

* * *

I drove us to the rink. If I’d been alone I would have done some serious primping in the rearview mirror first. Lip gloss, extra mascara. I would have taken my hair out of its twist and done a Level Three hair brushing, which required flipping my head upside down in pursuit of what my stylist called “volume at the crown.”

More than any of that, I wished I could try out reactions in the rearview mirror. Practice molding my face into various bland masks. Oh, hey, J.B., I’d say. Neutral, composed. Over it. A “no worries!” tone.

But I could only manage the lip gloss. I did it stealthily, transferring a dot to my finger, then my lips, while we were at a stoplight and Casey was calling Alex.

Casey put her phone on speaker. “Hey, it’s Alex! Sorry I missed you. Don’t take it personally.”

“Mom. You total sneak. We got your list, and we’re maybe going along with it. Maybe. But only so we can figure out how soon we need to check you into the asylum. So don’t think you’re not in trouble. Laura’s furious. I’m furious. Call.” A pause. “And don’t forget Elle’s multivitamins and calcium. One of the clear gummies and one of the opaque sugarcoated gummies a day. Goodbye, liar.”

I’d always envied the effortless way Casey talked to her mom, like they were girlfriends. Even when they were fighting, there was an easiness between them.

Casey sighed. “Elle worships her, naturally. It’s my mom who found her, at this place where she was volunteering.”

“An orphanage?”

“Tutoring center. She was born drug affected. But now she’s doing brilliantly. It’s the next turnoff.”

“I remember.”

* * *

Casey swung open the door to the Silver Skate ’n Lanes, unleashing a familiar mix of throbbing bass and arcade beeps. The rink smelled the same, too. Sweaty rental skates, overly sweet first perfumes, fake-butter popcorn.

“You’re sure about this?” she said.

“It’s no big deal. He wouldn’t recognize me anyway.”

Here’s where she was supposed to say, Of course he would, you look exactly the same. You look fabulous. But she was silent, walking ahead of me down the dark, carpeted hall to the counter. I lingered for a minute by the entrance, watching kids play with the gleaming metal marble run on the wall. It was all in perfect order.

The middle-aged cashier smiled at Casey. “You skating? No Elle?”

“We’re just getting a snack, Deb.”

“Session’s over soon. No charge.” She taped glow-in-the-dark bracelets around our wrists. “Disco night, God help us.”

We pushed through the turnstile to the rink. “Disco Duck” was blasting. The smiles on the faces whipping by said, Yes, we’re doing this silly thing, but isn’t it glorious? The wind, the hundreds of tiny near misses, the satisfaction of a graceful turn, the soothing repetition of it. The rink was as effective as any monk’s meditation labyrinth.

“Let’s see that clue again,” Casey said.

We read silently by disco light:

Here you used to glide and spin

Young and swift and free

On hoofs of brown and orange you’d win

A game, a heart, a key

Visit the ancient chest of tin, take a picture to bring to me

“Is it the same one?” I looked around for the silver treasure chest. Automatically, illogically, because he would be forty now, I searched for another gleam of silver: a metallic uniform T-shirt, and The Boy with black hair who wore it.

“Still over there by the DJ. The prizes haven’t changed, either.”

The chest held the prizes you could pick if you won the Dice Game or the Shoot the Duck contest or did the most impressive Hokey Pokey. Someone in silver would glide out and hand you your prize ticket with a picture of Digby the Duck holding a key. Digby the Pirate Duck: the rink’s unloved mascot. Tickets were redeemed for something in the snack bar or for a cheap carnival treasure. Cockeyed stuffed animals, paddleball games whose tethers broke on the second whomp of the ball, plastic glitter bracelets.

Casey asked the DJ, a stocky man in a Jimmy Cliff T-shirt named Mel, if he would take a picture of us in front of the treasure chest. “Sure, Case, I’m on autopilot ’til the next block of requests,” he said, stepping down from his elevated booth. “You want to wear the pirate hats? Want me to get the giant Digby? He’s in the storeroom, but I can—”

“We’ll pass,” Casey said.

He opened the treasure chest and set us on either side, instructed us to put a hand on the lid. I’d stood in this exact spot with a group of girls at a birthday party once. Tina Kammerer’s eighth. Second grade. Tina in the pirate hat holding Digby, her mom shooting the photo. I’d just learned to skate backward, and I was beaming. That was all it took to make me happy.

Our photographer yelled something but all I could hear was “I will survive. Now go! Walk out the door!”

“What?” Casey shouted.

“I said, say, ‘Aaargggh!’”

I obediently mumbled, “Aar” behind my smile but Casey yelled, “Just take the damn picture, Mel. We’re not ten.”

He handed back the camera, the photo flapping out like a white tongue. “I was going to ask if you had requests, but not with that attitude.”

We waited in line at the snack bar, monitoring the image as it developed in Casey’s palm. It was overexposed, compromised by the flash bouncing off fake jewels in the treasure chest. Two women who might as well have been strangers, standing so carefully apart from each other, gingerly holding opposite corners of the treasure chest lid as if it contained uranium instead of ten-cent necklaces. My smile was tight and Casey was scowling.

If we were in the mood to write a caption in the wide white band at the bottom it would say this: What the hell are we doing here?

But I knew the white plastic would remain empty. That space was reserved for summing up happier shots.

“It’s a good one of you,” Casey said, examining the photo.

I prepared my automatic denials. I’m ten pounds heavier, I can’t wear my hair as long now, I have three lines on my forehead and a third of my left eyebrow simply vanished overnight... “Oh, please, I...”

“Stop. Can we not do that, please? Can we just agree not to do that?”

“Do what?”

“That thing some women do, looking for reassurance. That whole repetitive, tiresome thing. You look fantastic, and I look fine, and we’re thirty-five. Done.”

“Fine. So you think Alex is here? In a Farrah Fawcett wig?”

“Wouldn’t put it past her.”

We carried our burgers and Cokes to tables with little swinging chairs attached. Everyone ate while either pushing off from the table base and letting their chair return, over and over, or pivoting side to side. Even the adults did it; they just did it less vigorously. It was impossible not to. Casey was a side-to-sider and I was a pusher-offer. These chairs had probably absorbed a million man-hours of nervous energy over the decades.

“Have you seen your mom yet?” I pushed off from the table and returned, glad to have something to do with my legs. I tried to pretend I was looking for Alex, a lock of her red hair peeking out from under a blond, feathered wig. But I was looking for someone else. Someone tall, with shiny black hair and brown eyes.

Casey took pity on me. “He’s not here much. He owns a miniature golf course in Tahoe City and a couple other businesses.”

I gulped too much Coke and an avalanche of ice dislodged and fell down my chin. “That’s good,” I said, wiping my face. “I mean, good for him. He wouldn’t recognize me anyway.”

“You said that already.”

“I did?”

She waited a beat, fighting some impulse, and I wasn’t sure if she won or lost the fight but she said, so quietly I barely heard her over the music and games, the boom-clacks from the bowling alley, “He’d recognize you.”

We ate our burgers and watched the skaters, and in the long silence I wondered if Casey was thinking the same thing. That Alex had been right to give us activities. A schedule.

“They’re cute, right?” Casey said. “God, so young.”

“That one looks a little like your...” Daughter? Foster daughter? “Like Elle.” I nodded at a laughing girl skating past with long honey-brown hair.

“That’s her friend from school. Mia.” Casey waved, but the little girl didn’t notice. We watched her pack circle around. She was a bold and graceful skater, her hair flying behind her. She navigated the corners with a flick of her eyes and an imperceptible pivot of her skinny ankles.

The music stopped and a voice on the speakers announced the Dice Game. People had to stand by numbers spaced around the rink while a teenage employee rolled a fuzzy die the size of a washing machine. Anyone not standing under the number it landed on had to leave the rink. Finally, three boys at number seven prevailed, and they high-fived each other as if they’d won the lottery. Modern kids, supposedly so spoiled and warped by their video games and iPhones. Here they were excited about their trip to the plastic treasure chest.

“Why are you smiling?” Casey said.

“Was I? I was thinking I’m glad this place is still here. Swinging chairs. Digby the Pirate Duck. I’m glad it hasn’t changed.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“Me, too.”

The voice above me was older now, but unmistakable. I hooked my feet around the table leg to stop my chair from swinging.

J.B.

Also called The Boy Behind the Counter, and Skating Rink Boy.

For me, he was only, ever, The Boy. The boy who was different from all the rest. And now he was standing behind me, inches from the back of my chair.

“We’re a real time capsule,” the voice continued.

I looked up. He was leaning down over me, his black hair falling forward around his face. The only thought I could register was that even upside down and half-covered by hair, his brown eyes were kinder than any I’d ever seen.

And the only words I could manage were “It’s you.”

7

The Boy Behind the Counter

June 1996

Summer before sophomore year

The last time I’d been to the Silver Skate ’n Lanes Pauline Knowland had shoved me.

It was in fifth grade, right when things started to go south for me at school.

“Watch out,” Pauline had said, in a tone wholly without fear or apology, seconds before her palms smacked the small of my back and sent me flying. I’d tried to slow down by dragging my orange toe stopper, a piece of cylindrical rubber like a giant pencil eraser. Instead I’d fallen facedown in front of the snack bar.

I hadn’t been back since.

Casey thought it was time for me to face my fears. The shabby skating rink/bowling alley in Red Pine had become cool again ever since Erin Simms threw a Roller Boogie–themed Sweet Sixteen. Now every girl in our class was talking about some college guy who worked there. He’d gone out back, behind the Dumpsters, with Debbie Finch. Debbie described this as if it were the most romantic thing in the world.

Alex was driving us to Red Pine so we could see what all the fuss was about. She clearly wanted to join us and dropped hints the whole way. “I’ve always been curious about bowling, do people really wear matching shirts like on TV?” Two miles down the road—“You two are so brave, I’d probably be a total klutz on skates.”

Never been bowling, never been skating. I added these to my list of facts about Alex. Didn’t know what a friendship bracelet was, never heard of the game Red Rover. These gaps in her childhood education didn’t surprise me anymore. Her parents had been strict, she’d said. Strict was always the word she used to describe them when I asked. Then she’d change the subject.

Casey was in the back seat, not speaking. I turned to her and raised my eyebrows, pleading silently. We have to invite her.

She shook her head. Casey was punishing Alex for something. But to me, even their rare fights were something to envy; they were the fights I imagined sisters had.

“She’s mad at me for turning a pair of her jeans into cutoffs,” Alex said. “I’m getting the silent treatment. You can wear anything in my closet, baby. You, too, Laur.”

I smiled, unsure what to say, and looked out the window.

“That’s a pretty song, what’s it called, Case?” Alex blasted the radio.

Another fact: Alex hadn’t been allowed to listen to pop music when she was younger. Now she didn’t enjoy it so much as study it like someone cramming for an exam. Casey told me this was why she’d devoured the Casey Kasem countdown CDs, worshipped the guy enough to name her child after him.

Casey not only knew the exact name of the slow, hypnotic song Alex liked, she owned it. “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star. We’d both bought the CD the weekend before. But she didn’t name the tune. I smiled at Alex apologetically.

“I’ll listen for the title after I drop you off.” Alex grinned at me—don’t mind her—but quickly turned her eyes back to the road.

Alex was a cautious, nervous driver, never going more than a few miles over the speed limit, her hands always gripping ten and two o’clock on the wheel. She’d only gotten her license a few years before. Her parents hadn’t let her take driver’s ed when she was in high school, Casey had said, so Alex hadn’t gotten around to learning until recently.

When we pulled into the parking lot and Casey and I scrambled out, Alex called a little too cheerfully, “I want a full report.”

I watched her leave by herself like all the other mommy chauffeurs. “She so wanted to skate with us,” I said. “And that was kind of mean about the song. You’re really that mad about some jeans?”

Casey shook her head. “She was flirting with this boy at the car wash who squeegeed our windshield. He was like sixteen.”

“I get that it’s annoying but she’d never—”

“Don’t. Don’t even defend her. I know it’s not her fault. Her parents screwed her up royally. But she has to learn she’s not in high school anymore.” Casey swung open the door to the Silver Skate, releasing throbs of music.

I tugged at her jacket, suddenly nervous. “Case. Don’t you want to hang out at your house instead? Cookie dough and Grease 2?”

“We can do that any night.”

“If Pauline’s here I’m going to kill you.”

“Repeat this to yourself. ‘I’m not that girl anymore,’” Casey said as we stepped into the dark, disco-lit world of the rink.

“What girl am I?”

“You’re Laura Christie. Sophisticated Mystery Woman,” Casey shouted over the music, pulling me into line.

“Say that three times fast.”

The woman behind the register sealed circlets of glow-in-the-dark pink plastic around our wrists and we shoved through the turnstile.

“My tracking bracelet, so I can’t escape,” I said.

Casey laughed but stopped abruptly, clutching my arm. “Oh, no no no. It’s too good. Look.”

There he was. The famous Boy Behind the Counter, handing out skates. The rental counter was elevated, and by a trick of the overhead fluorescents, it seemed he was under a spotlight. His black hair caught the light as he glided between the counter and the shelves of skates behind it. Our small-town god. On wheels.

Morgan Schiffrin and some of her friends (girls we called the Hair Petters because they compulsively ran their hands down their long hair) were clustered near the rental counter, even though they already had their brown-and-orange skates. It was like an altar.

“He’s obviously loving the attention,” I whispered as we lined up. “That is the tightest T-shirt I’ve ever seen.”

“Maybe he accidentally shrank it in the dryer.”

“Please.”

“Maybe he had a late growth spurt and can’t afford to buy a bigger one.”

“He’s rich. Related to the owner, supposedly.”

“No offense, Laur, but you’re nobody to judge someone by the fit of their shirt.”

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