That Summer

by Jennifer Weiner

  She climbed into the passenger’s seat, pulled her seat belt in place, and said, “Where are we going?”

  Cade seemed a little startled by her assent, but he made a smooth recovery. “Uh, my place?”

  Beatrice rolled her eyes. “Uh, no?”

  She wondered if this was a plan to get her up to his bedroom and out of her clothes. The night she’d met him at the movies, Cade had held her hand, for a few minutes, when Beatrice was sure none of the other kids were looking. There’d been three other people in the car when he’d driven her home, and he’d walked her to the door but hadn’t tried to kiss her. When she sat with him at lunch, he asked her lots of questions, and she’d caught him staring at her a time or two in class, but lots of kids stared at her at Melville. What did Cade Langley want with her now?

  “Are you bringing me to your house so you can have your way with me?” she asked.

  “Have my way with you?” he repeated. “Do you always talk like you’re in a book?”

  Beatrice smiled. She was remembering a recent talk she’d had with her mother, about how she should never change herself, or dumb herself down, for some boy’s benefit. Beatrice assumed her mother had gotten the speech from some article or expert, given the fact that she herself had dropped out of college and moved to Pennsylvania for some boy—namely Beatrice’s father. But Beatrice had decided not to say so.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

  She thought for a minute, leaned forward, and punched an address into the mapping app on her phone. “Follow my directions,” she said, and pointed toward the road.

  Twenty minutes later, they pulled up in front of a large, sober-looking brick building that took up the better part of the block on Twenty-Second Street. It would be a test, she’d decided as they drove. If Cade laughed, or told her it was weird, or refused to go inside with her, she’d have nothing more to do with him. But if he could appreciate it, or even just keep an open mind, then he had potential.

  She led Cade through the wrought-iron fence, up the stairs, and right to the entrance of one of her favorite places in all of Philadelphia. By then, he’d figured out where they were.

  “The Mutter Museum?”

  “Moo-ter,” she said, correcting his pronunciation. “There’s an umlaut. Have you ever been?”

  He shook his head. “It’s, um, medical oddities, right?”

  “The only place in America where you can see the preserved skeleton of conjoined twins,” she said happily. “And a cross section of Albert Einstein’s brain!” Beatrice bounded inside, flashing her card at the guard at the front desk.

  “You’re a member?” Cade asked, then, shrugging, answered his own question. “Of course you are.”

  Beatrice grinned at him. Her sneakers squeaked on the marble floor. This was one of her happy places. Her mother had brought her here when she was a toddler, with her friend Zoe and Zoe’s mom, Hannah, so the girls could run around the big upstairs ballroom on rainy days. As Beatrice had gotten older, she’d become more interested in the actual museum, the exhibits of bodies and brains, tumors in jars and the rows of 139 skulls, collected by a single Viennese doctor when phrenology was all the rage. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go see some dead things.”

  She grabbed Cade by the hand and half-walked, half-dragged him into the atrium, which was sunny, and empty, and had a kind of indefinably museum-ish smell. To their right was an exhibit of the history of spinal surgery, complete with spines. To the left, up the stairs, was the Soap Lady, a woman whose body was exhumed in Philadelphia in 1875 and whose remains were encased, per the sign by her glass coffin, in a fatty substance called adipocere. That, she decided, was a good place to start.

  Beatrice and Cade stood, shoulder to shoulder, looking down at her: a vaguely female shape that appeared to have been turned not to soap but to stone. Her torso was a mottled brown and white; her mouth was a gaping, dark hole. Hanks of hair still hung from her scalp.

  “This must’ve given you nightmares when you were a kid.” Cade leaned forward. He had a few blemishes on his forehead, and bony wrists protruding past his cuffs, like he’d gotten taller overnight. Not perfect, in other words, which made her glad. She wouldn’t have been able to tease him if he’d been too good-looking.

  “Actually,” Beatrice said, “I thought it was kind of cool.”

  Cade looked down at the woman, then sideways, at Beatrice. “Cool? She looks like the Crypt Keeper.”

  Beatrice rocked from her heels to her toes, trying to think of how she could explain. “I guess I liked the idea that you could be dead but still interesting. That people would come and look at you.”

  Cade put his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know,” he said. “If you want people to care about you after you die, you could write a song, or a book. You could invent something.”

  “True. But don’t you think that dying in just the right place for just the right set of circumstances to turn your body into soap is a lot easier?”

  “You might be onto something there.” He was smiling, looking at her like she delighted him, was more interesting than anything in the museum.

  “Want to see the collection of inhaled and swallowed objects?” she asked.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  She made her eyes wide. “Oh, I never kid about inhaled and swallowed objects.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, and tucked her arm into his.

  * * *

  “You probably think I’m a weirdo,” she said, as they took their seats in a booth at the Silk City Diner on Spring Garden Street. Her original plan had been to ask him to bring her back to school by lunch, but they’d ended up spending the whole morning in the museum. Cade had been fascinated by the replica of conjoined twins Cheng and Eng, and Beatrice had asked if he’d read the novel about them, which led to a discussion of their favorite books, with Beatrice passionately insisting that The Magicians was much better on the page than it was on TV, and Cade telling her about Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer graphic novels.

  “No,” said Cade, straight-faced. “I think you’re a perfectly normal teenage girl.”

  Beatrice laughed as the waitress slapped menus down on the Formica. When she looked up from her menu, Cade was staring at her again.

  “What?” she said, hoping that she didn’t have something on her face or stuck between her teeth.

  “I’m just trying to figure you out.”

  “Well, you can’t,” she said. “I’m a mystery wrapped in an enigma. What do you want to know? How I got to be so stylish?” She batted her eyes. “So fascinating?”

  He paused, looking down. With his eyes on his menu. “Brave,” he said quietly. Beatrice felt her face flush with pleasure, but before she could fully absorb the compliment, he said, “Like, you don’t care that nobody else dresses the way you do, or looks the way you do, or likes the same kind of music, or whatever.” He looked at her earnestly. “Everyone else I know, especially the girls, all they want is to be the same as everybody else. Even the stuff they do to be bad, or stand out, it’s all the same.”

  “Stuff like what?”

  Cade shrugged. “Julia vapes. And Emma’s got a tattoo. But even stuff like that, it’s like…” He picked up his fork, held it between his thumb and forefinger, and tilted it back and forth. “… like they googled ‘how to be a rebellious teenager,’ and just did whatever popped up.” He looked at Beatrice. “All of our parents say the same stuff to us—how you can do anything you want, be anything you want. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who acts like she believes it.”

  She stared at him, not saying a word, thinking that this was, by far, the best compliment she’d ever been paid, the nicest thing that anyone, boy or girl or parent, had ever said to her.

  “You two ready?” asked the waitress.

  Beatrice got her favorite fig and pear salad. Cade got the turkey BLT. “And I’m definitely getting a milkshake for dessert,” Beatrice said.

  “Will you share?” he
asked.

  “I will if you share your fries. So what’s your favorite museum?” she asked. Cade admitted that he didn’t have one.

  “I used to like the Franklin Institute,” he said. “Have you been in the giant heart?”

  She shook her head a little at his cluelessness. “Everyone’s been in the giant heart. Have you ever been to the Edgar Allan Poe house?”

  He told her that he hadn’t, but that he had read “The Tell-Tale Heart.” They talked about horror stories until the food came. After a few bites of salad, Beatrice asked, “What about you?”

  Cade knew what she was asking and answered with a self-deprecating gesture that encompassed his blue polo shirt and khakis.

  “Okay, but that’s just your clothes. What do you think about? What music do you like? What do you want to do after high school?”

  He inhaled, shoulders rising, then shook his head. “I always thought I wanted to get into a good college, and play lacrosse, and go to law school, like my father. But I never thought about it much.”

  “How about when you were little?” she asked. “Did you want to be a fireman? Or a vet? A ballet dancer?”

  He ate a few French fries and said, with a smile of surpassing sweetness, “I wanted to be a taxi driver.”

  “Really!” said Beatrice.

  When he nodded, a tuft of hair bounced against his forehead. She wondered what it would be like to touch it, how it would feel between her fingers. “We went to New York once. I don’t even remember where we were going, but we were late, and my dad said he’d give the guy a twenty-dollar tip if he could get us where we were going in under ten minutes. And this cabdriver, he just…” Cade was smiling, eyes bright, lost in the memory. “It was like being on a rocket ship, the way the guy drove. He made every light. He’d use every lane, moving around the slower cars. It was like…” He paused, waving his fork again, looking for a word. “Like a dance,” he said. His smile faded. “I told my dad that’s what I wanted to do, and he said, ‘Oh, you want to be a race car driver,’ and I said, no, I wanted to drive a taxi, in New York.” He looked down at his plate unhappily. “That was not what my dad wanted to hear.” He picked up another wedge of his sandwich, devouring it in three quick bites. Beatrice nibbled a slice of pear. She thought he’d ask what she wanted to do with her life, and she’d tell him how she wanted to go to school for art or drama if she went at all, and live in New York, and make things with her hands. She’d tell him that if her Etsy store was earning enough, she’d just do that full-time, living at home, if she had to, until she had enough money saved to move to New York City.

  Instead, Cade said, “Did you really get kicked out of boarding school? I mean, I know you said that’s what happened.”

  “Do you think I was lying?”

  “No!” He lowered his voice. “I’m just wondering if it happened how you said it did.” He was looking at her carefully, brows knitted, eyes intent.

  Beatrice nodded. “I had a friend. She’d hooked up with this guy a few times. One night he showed up at our dorm. She didn’t want him there. She didn’t want anything to do with him. But he wouldn’t leave her alone. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “And the school? The dean, or whatever? They didn’t believe her?”

  “She wouldn’t tell.” Beatrice could still remember how Tricia had cried, whispering, No one’s going to believe me, because I slept with him before. Beatrice and a few other girls in the dorm had tried to convince her that people would listen, that she should tell, but Tricia couldn’t be persuaded. She had stayed in bed for the rest of the weekend, crying. On Monday morning in chapel, Colin, the guy who’d done it, sat right beside her, even putting his arm around her. He’d had the nerve to look perplexed, then disappointed, when she stood up and walked away.

  “He kept bothering her,” Beatrice said. “After it happened, when she was crying and telling him to leave. He just acted like there was nothing wrong.”

  “Do you think maybe he was… I don’t know, confused?” Cade asked.

  Beatrice glared at him. “Do you think ‘no’ means something else in New Hampshire?”

  Cade shook his head. “It sounds like he was getting mixed messages.”

  Beatrice huffed out a sigh. “Look, just because a girl agrees to something once doesn’t mean she’s signed, like, a permanent permission slip. That isn’t how it works. We’re allowed to change our minds.”

  Cade reached across the table and took her hand. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t be mad at me. I’m just trying to understand.” His hand was warm; his eyes were locked on her face. She wished that there wasn’t a table between them; that she was on his side of the bench and could lean against him. She bet he smelled good, and wondered if, at some point soon, she’d have a chance to find out.

  21

  Diana

  Diana had come to dinner on Friday night, just like they’d planned, on a night when Hal had stayed in town, having his monthly dinner with the partners. Diana had arrived with wine and chocolates. She’d admired Daisy’s home, unerringly zeroing in on the kitchen, and the fireplace and the skylight as the most beautiful parts of the room, and had praised Beatrice’s jewelry, a beetle with brilliant green wings that hung in a glass pendant that dangled from her neck. “Where did you find it?” Diana had asked, and Beatrice had explained that she did all her shopping on Etsy, that she never gave money to corporations if she could help it, but instead supported her fellow creators, the same way they supported her. Daisy had worried about how her daughter would behave, but Beatrice had seemed impressed with Diana, actually volunteering information about school, and her crafts, and the kids she’d met in class.

  Over the past four weeks, Daisy and Diana had gotten in the habit of cooking on Tuesdays, at Diana’s apartment, and meeting, on Friday afternoons, for a walk along Forbidden Drive, one of Daisy’s favorite places in the city, a spot she’d been eager to show off for her new friend. She’d offered to meet Diana after work, even if it meant fighting rush-hour traffic, but Diana explained that being a consultant gave her the flexibility to set her own hours.

  On those walks, they’d talked about everything from Diana’s boyfriend, to Daisy’s father, to how Daisy felt about being a mother and why Diana had chosen not to become one. The fourth Friday was a gorgeous afternoon, the spring air mild and fresh, the sun shining and the trees dressed in fresh, pale green, but Daisy was struggling to appreciate it. She was still bewildered by what had happened at the cocktail party the weekend before, the way Hal had threatened Mireille, and how he’d been drinking. Her husband’s mood had not been improved by the latest #MeToo casualty of another, this one a prominent local politician who’d gotten in trouble for salacious emails sent to his subordinates. All through dinner the night before, Hal had muttered that the women were only trying to leverage notoriety into money, or better jobs, which segued into a complaint about the mandatory sexual harassment training his firm had recently held.

  “Half the people in the firm have dated each other,” he’d said. “I can name three different guys, and one woman, who’ve married summer associates. And now you can get in trouble for—wait, let me get this right.” He’d rummaged through his briefcase, pulling out a sheaf of papers and flipped through them until he’d landed, triumphantly, on the phrase “Unwelcome sexual advances to colleagues or subordinates.” “Do you know what that means? Flirting.”

  “Well,” Daisy had ventured, “maybe not everyone wants to be flirted with at the office.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Hal had told her. When Daisy related the story to Diana, the other woman had shaken her head, a thin smile on her face. “I’ve met a lot of men who feel that way.”

  A trio of runners blew past them, young men in skimpy shorts, their pale legs flashing. They watched them go, and Diana said, “I bet a lot of guys feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh,” said Diana, whose sleek, high-tech ex
ercise gear made Daisy, in sweatpants and an ancient T-shirt, feel especially frumpy, “just that the world was one way, and now, all the stuff they could get away with, all the stuff nobody even noticed, now it’s all, as they say, problematic.” Diana looked sideways at Daisy. “Do you ever worry about Beatrice?”

  “Only all the time.” Daisy sighed. “Sometimes I think that all these rules are going to take all the romance and the mystery out of sex. Like, if she’s with a guy and he’s asking for permission for every single thing he’s doing, that doesn’t seem very exciting. But then I think about her being with a guy who wouldn’t ask permission, or who wouldn’t take no for an answer…” Her voice trailed off, and Diana didn’t pick up the ball that Daisy had dropped. She just kept walking, quickening her pace as a woman running alongside a gray pit bull made her way past them.

  At the top of the trail, at a wide spot in the Wissahickon, there were ducks you could feed, and a restaurant with a snack bar. Daisy had come here with Beatrice, and Hal, when Beatrice was a toddler. Daisy felt disheartened as she counted backward, the months, then years, since she’d been on a walk with her husband.

  She could hear the river’s burble, and could see sunshine glinting off its surface, dappling the ground as it filtered through the trees. Diana stretched her arms over her head, then grasped one elbow and pulled her arm behind her neck.

  “You know,” she finally said, “I told you about meeting Michael at a kind of low point in my life.” Daisy nodded. She hadn’t wanted to push Diana for details about the boyfriend she hardly ever mentioned, but, at their last lesson, Diana had talked about feeling adrift when she was younger, not sure about where she wanted to live or what she wanted to do.

  With her back toward Daisy, her feet planted on the grassy ground, Diana said, in a low, dull voice, “It was a little more than just being confused about my choices, actually. I’d been raped.”