The Fourth Summer

by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

  Her father spotted Caitlin first, and when he said her name, her mother instantly did the mom thing, trying to look like she didn’t mind having pants she couldn’t sit down in.

  Mom knew about Jazzercise. Some women she knew took one of the morning classes.

  “So I thought,” Caitlin said, even though she had never planned this, it hadn’t occurred to her until this second, “since you would have to drive me there, that maybe we could take the class together.”

  “What a great idea.” Dad was instantly enthusiastic. “You were just saying that you needed to exercise more, Sharon, and to do it with Caitlin...”

  “I don’t know.” Mom was shaking her head. “I feel like I have way too much to do.”

  “But if you have to drive her anyway,” Dad said, “why not work out too?”

  Mom was still shaking her head.

  By now Caitlin was convinced that this was a good plan, a very good plan. Mom being bummed all the time was as big a problem as Dylan screaming all night. “Then will you come with me the first couple times? There won’t be any other kids in the class, and I will feel weird with all those grown-ups. Would you come just until I don’t feel so out of place?”

  “Oh.” Mom knew that she was boxed in. How could she say no to that? “Well, sure, sweetie. If you need me, of course.”

  The teacher was from Latin America, and she was using her hips and shoulders in the way that Caitlin wanted to. So Caitlin liked the most dance-type moves, but her mother was—amazingly enough—totally into the kickboxing, kicking her leg off to one side with her fists clenched up in front of her. Mom the warrior...Caitlin couldn’t have predicted that.

  Within a week her mother was going to a morning class as well and within a month was wearing her pretty clothes again. Trina started to say that she needed exercise more than anyone, but Dylan was too young for the child-care program offered at the studio. Caitlin could tell that Trina wanted Mom to drive her to the classes and then—what?—sit in the car with Dylan while Trina exercised? Even Trina wasn’t going to ask that.

  Caitlin stopped the depressed art student act. It wasn’t necessary. The high school was more than twice the size of her middle school, and being close to a military base, there was a big turnover in the student body every year. No one was very interested in what her sister had done last year. So instead she was known as the cool girl who came to school on a skateboard.

  In January Trina got her driver’s license, and their parents bought her a used car, emphasizing that she would have to share it with Caitlin when Caitlin was old enough to drive.

  Yeah, right, Caitlin thought.

  Suddenly Trina was going to the morning exercise classes while Mom was staying home with Dylan. It made Caitlin furious. What about Trevor’s family? Why weren’t they doing anything? Trevor himself was worthless. He hardly even touched Dylan, but what about his mom? She was a nurses’ aide at the hospital, but why wasn’t someone expecting her to rearrange her schedule and take care of Dylan sometimes?

  Now that she had the car, Trina was trying to connect with her old friends after school. So more and more she was asking Caitlin if she could come straight home to sit with Dylan, or, as long as she didn’t have plans on Friday or Saturday night, why couldn’t she...

  Mom and Dad stepped in. Just because Caitlin was home didn’t mean that she was available to take care of Dylan. Caitlin was to be home alone with Dylan no more than one evening and three afternoons a month.

  So instead it was Mom and Dad who took care of Dylan while Trina went to the mall. Caitlin asked why they kept giving in to Trina all the time. They didn’t have a good answer.

  One day in April her parents sat down with her. “I know you’re looking forward to go back to North Carolina, but we think it is Trina’s turn.”

  She stared at them. “You’re kidding, right? She’s going to MeeMaw’s and we’re going to be stuck here with Dylan?”

  “No, Dylan will go with her, of course. You deserve a summer at home, a summer of just being a teen.”

  “But that’s not what I want.” Caitlin felt desperate. She and Seth...they had such plans. His older sister had already agreed to drive them to the Highland Games at Grandfather Mountain. They also thought that if they took the whole day, they should be able to bike to Boone and back. Boone was a college town; Seth had already gotten a schedule of their summer concerts. And there was skateboarding and the lake, and being together...she had to go. She had to.

  “Why don’t I go and help Trina? MeeMaw shouldn’t have to do that. Let me go with them. I will help. I really, really will. I don’t mind. You can’t dump all this on MeeMaw.”

  “Trina will have her car. She can be self-reliant.” Dad was speaking in his judge’s voice. “We’ve made up our minds.”

  The poor schmucks in his courtroom at least had had some rights of appeal. Caitlin didn’t.

  She went straight into Trina’s room. “Do you want to go to MeeMaw’s?”

  “No. I’m totally pissed about it.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because they think I need to accept more responsibility for Dylan. And this was MeeMaw’s idea. She thinks that Mom is having ‘boundary issues.’ Apparently she doesn’t plan on helping me at all. They want me to manage on my own.”

  Caitlin’s strategy of offering to help had been completely wrong. She had said the worst possible thing.

  Once again she took the phone in the closet and called Seth. A lot had been happening in Seth’s family. His dad, who had always made Seth’s boards, was opening a small factory to produce both snowboards and skateboards. A snowboarding family who had a kid Seth’s age had been super encouraging, helping with the business plan, the paperwork, and the financing. Seth had said that he would need to work in the factory some.

  “I will too,” Caitlin had promised. “I don’t know what needs doing, but I am an awesome housepainter.”

  But it was Trina who was going to North Carolina. Caitlin called Seth to tell him.

  “Shit,” he said. “Shit. Shit.”

  “And she doesn’t even want to go. That’s the bitch.”

  “Can’t you talk to your folks? Explain how important it is. You could stay with us. I’ll ask my mom. I’m sure it will be okay.”

  “Oh, right. Your mom is going to be totally on board with helping me to disobey my mom.”

  “Oh...”

  They were powerless. There was nothing they could do. They were kids.

  Her parents had her ask her art teacher about summer programs. The teacher was not very enthusiastic about her abilities. She could draw meticulously, but apparently she didn’t have “original vision” or “her own voice.” Caitlin wondered if he would have thought that if she had continued to wear black and eat lunch alone.

  She should, he suggested, aim for a career as a commercial graphic artist. She knew that he intended it as a putdown, but after she had read about that kind of work, she decided that it sounded pretty awesome.

  The photography course the teacher recommended was full, so she signed up for a class about computer programming because the description had the word “graphic” in it. She couldn’t imagine herself being interested in computer programming, but at least she got a cell phone out of her parents feeling bad.

  The class was clearly a summer camp for nerds. There were no other girls. Not one. Caitlin did not understand a single word of what the teacher said in the first hour. After he assigned them to individual computer stations, he came over to Caitlin. He squatted down next to her, his hand on the edge of her desk. “Your paperwork says that your art teacher recommended you?”

  Caitlin glanced down at his hand. She wished that he would move it. “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, if you find this is not the right class, you have a week to withdraw and get your fee back.”

  “Yes, sir.”r />
  Withdraw? Give up?

  I’m not my sister. And she wasn’t thinking about the pregnant Trina, the depressed teen mom, but Trina as she had been before, the pretty one, the happy one, the B student who expected, who needed, everything to come easily.

  Caitlin was not a quitter. She was so not a quitter. The first few days were unbelievably hard. Her dad thought he might be able to help her, but he was even more lost than she was. So she focused on the vocabulary, trying to understand the words that everyone was slinging around. Then there was some grunt memory work. She could do that, but there was so much that she simply didn’t understand.

  She wasn’t about to ask the teacher for help. He would just suggest that she withdraw. There were two guys in the course who were better than the rest of them. One was an arrogant preppy type. Caitlin hated him. He was a Seth-gone-wrong, too big, too bold, too bright, a Seth who didn’t give a shit about anyone else as long as they were watching him. The other guy was East Asian Indian, slender and quiet, nothing like Seth except that he was willing to explain the stuff he was good at. She chose him.

  They did their final project together at the end of the session, and it was the best in the class. Of course, the teacher assumed that Dev had done it all, and while he had done the trickiest programming parts, the design had all been Caitlin’s. Commercial graphic art might be the thing for her.

  There would still be three weeks left to the summer after nerd camp was over. Her parents asked her if she would like to spend two of them in North Carolina.

  “Yes, yes, of course. That would be great.”

  “We haven’t forgotten how generous you were to offer to help with Dylan. We think Trina needs it.”

  So the big experiment had failed, and now Caitlin the babysitter was going to the rescue. Oh well, if it got her down there to see Seth...

  She flew to Charlotte and then took a bus the rest of the way across the state. MeeMaw had some kind of committee meeting, so Trina and Dylan came to the bus station to pick her up.

  “You know why you’re here, don’t you?” Trina asked as soon as Dylan was back in his car seat.

  Caitlin fastened her seat belt. “To help with Dylan.”

  Trina nodded. “MeeMaw wanted to send me home. I’m just no good with him. Now that he’s crawling, you have to watch him all the time. He doesn’t want to be in the stroller so I can’t even take him for a walk. I’m sixteen and I feel like my life is over.”

  Trina had been saying that ever since she found out that she was pregnant. “What did you do all summer?” Caitlin asked. “Did you make friends?”

  “Who is going to be interested in me?”

  Caitlin might be really sick of hearing Trina whine about how her life was over, but sometimes she would remember what her sister had been like before, glowing, gorgeous, and graceful. Caitlin might have resented all that glowing gorgeousness, but she didn’t want to see her like this. Then they turned the corner, and on MeeMaw’s front walk she could see Seth’s bike, a skateboard tied to the little rack, and sitting on the front steps, a backpack at his feet, was Seth himself.

  She was out of the car before Trina had turned off the engine, dashing up the sidewalk. Seth was coming toward her, and she threw herself at him, hugging him just as she had hugged Dev a few days before.

  But he wasn’t Dev. He was nothing like Dev. She pulled back. “You’ve gotten so tall.”

  “I grew five inches. It was a bitch. My center of gravity changed every week.”

  It was so strange standing next to him having to look up. She almost felt a little awkward.

  “Come get your suitcase,” her sister called out. “I want to lock up the car.”

  “Oh, right.” She started back to the car.

  “I’ll get it,” Seth said.

  And that was weird too. She could carry her own suitcase. She had gotten herself from the airport to the bus station. But he was already at the car, lifting it out of the trunk with one hand, slamming the lid with the other.

  Trina and Dylan were in the room she had had last summer, so she was in a smaller room at the other end of hall. That was fine with her.

  “Do you want to unpack or something?” Seth asked after he put her suitcase on the bed.

  “No. Let me just get out my skateboard. I took the wheels off, so we will have to put them back on, and then let’s go.”

  She handed Seth the sweatshirt-swaddled board while she fished around the suitcase for the wheels.

  “You’ve used this a lot,” he said once he had unwrapped the board.

  “I love it. I would have been lost this year without it. It’s how I got every place on our side of town.”

  “Are you going to the skate park?” Trina was at the door, Dylan on her hip. “I would like to come.”

  “Ah...” Caitlin did not want Trina to come. “We were going to bike over.”

  “I can drive us. I just have to change Dylan and fix a bottle.”

  Caitlin knew that that could take forever. “How about if we meet you there?”

  Out in the garage Seth pumped up the tires of the bike while she put the wheels back on her board and blew the dust off the bike helmet. “I’m sorry about my sister,” she said. “I guess she’s had a pretty crappy summer. I may be babysitting a fair amount.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll babysit with you. “

  There was a new sign hung along the skateboard park’s fence, advertising Seth’s family’s business. The logo had “STREET BOARDS” in clean black type—Helvetica, Caitlin now knew that it was—but then inserted in red between the two words was a caret and “& Snow.” The red letters looked like graffiti, as if someone had whipped it onto the logo with a can of spray paint.

  Caitlin stopped in front of it. “Oh my God, that is so awesome. I love it.”

  “So do I. It was my mom’s idea, but it took her forever to get the graphic artist to understand what she wanted.”

  “They probably had to design the font, but it was only four letters, and there are no ascenders and all the letters have a similar mass.” She was holding her hands up as if she were curving her fingers around the letters, getting a feel for them.

  Seth was staring at her.

  She dropped her hands. “Some of us do go to school, you know.”

  She had told him that she wouldn’t have room in her suitcase for pads. One of his sisters had dropped off a set the day before. He went behind the counter and got them, coming out with a new skateboard as well.

  “I told my dad that you were focusing on footwork. He said that you should try this board. You can keep it if you like it.”

  Caitlin hadn’t realized how scuffed, even nicked, her old board was until she looked at this sleek one with the wonderful Street & Snow Boards logo.

  She couldn’t wait to try it. She pulled the pads on and tightened the strap on her helmet. “Now you have to tell me everything I am doing wrong. I want to get better.”

  It had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t be a great teacher. He would tell her to change something, and of course she would mess up at first because she would be concentrating so hard on the new thing that she would do everything else wrong, but then suddenly everything would feel right and he would be clapping and laughing. It was wonderful, and it seemed impossible to imagine that they hadn’t seen each other in a year.

  Then Trina showed up.

  She took Caitlin’s pads and helmet, and Seth had to show her the basics while Caitlin sat with Dylan. It was no fun.

  Trina didn’t want Caitlin to babysit. She didn’t have any place to go. She wanted to tag along with Caitlin and Seth. It was almost as if she were the bratty little sister. Caitlin did put her foot down about one thing. Trina could come to the skate park with them—it was a public place—but she could not ask Seth to teach her. It wasn’t fair to him. If Trina wanted to
learn, she should go to the park on her own, rent equipment, and pay for lessons. Caitlin would stay home with Dylan.

  So Trina stopped trying to learn, but she still came to the park. She didn’t have anything else to do. If Caitlin and Seth were biking out to the lake, she would drive and meet them there. In the evenings she would try to get them to stay home and watch a movie with her.

  The only time she couldn’t try to join them was when Seth’s mother invited Caitlin to supper. But then, of course, they were with his family. They were almost never alone. And there didn’t seem to be much they could do about it. They were kids.

  One night toward the end of her stay she had stayed at the Streets’ until after dark, and she didn’t have lights on her bike. Seth loaded the bike into his mother’s station wagon, and the two of them sat on the old swing set, waiting for his sister to drive Caitlin home. The lights from the kitchen windows etched white bars on the dark grass, but if Caitlin turned her head, she could see the fireflies flitting near the bushes.

  “What’s the strangest thing that happened to you this year?” Seth asked.

  She had been turning around in her swing, letting the chains twist overhead. She dug a heel into the ground to hold still. “I suppose deciding to be the tragic art student.” But he knew all about that. “What about you?” He would have asked the question for a reason.

  “I had sex.”

  “What?” She must have lifted her foot because suddenly the swing was whipping her around, house, bushes, garage, house, bushes, garage. Even when the chains had untwisted, the swing kept going, the chains wrapping around each other in the other direction. She had to put both feet on the ground. “With who? Why?”

  “Why did I have sex? Why do you think? Because I could.”

  “You have a girlfriend? Why haven’t you said anything about her?”

  Seth with a girlfriend? She didn’t like that. And him having sex, him taking his pants...she didn’t want to think about it. Not at all. No.

  “She wasn’t really my girlfriend.”