by Alex Flinn
“We’ll have to look at . . .” Meredith realized what he’d just said. “You what?”
Harmon caught his breath. Then he turned away from her, hands in pockets. “I thought it was pretty obvious how I felt.”
It was. But him saying it was changing the rules, like a teacher giving a test on material they’d barely discussed. It wasn’t fair. Without him saying it, she could always pretend it was no big deal, a temporary summer fling. Now that she knew it was more to him, she had to acknowledge that it was more to her too. Was it more to her?
Then, he made it worse. He turned back and said, “Yeah. It’s so weird. At first, I only asked you out because I knew it would bug Spider. But now, I . . .” He stopped, seeing her face.
“What?”
“I mean . . .” He stepped back. “When I first saw you, that’s how I happened to notice you. But now, wow, you’ve really—”
“That’s why you liked me?” She could barely keep her voice from trembling. “I’ve been wondering what would make someone like you notice me, and the answer is that you didn’t?”
“Someone like me? What’s someone like me?”
Someone handsome. Someone obviously popular. Someone with people skills. But she couldn’t say any of that, not after what he’d just unloaded on her. She sucked in her breath. “Nothing. You’re obviously not an intellectual.”
“If intellectual means obsessed with books and nothing else, then no, I’m not.”
She couldn’t speak. She threw down the fishing pole and started away, thoughts swirling. She’d thought he was different from the boys at school, not shallow, sort of profound, like Henry David Thoreau or something. Now she saw it was all a put-on. Him and his stupid playlists. He’d probably made that playlist for another girl, for Kelly at the drive-in.
“Meredith, wait up!” He was trying to gather up the gear and follow her. “Meredith! What about the fish?”
The fish? She reached the stairs that went up the hill. She looked back at him. He had dropped one pole and leaned back to pick it up. “Eat it!”
She left him there fumbling and stormed up the hill, her anger making her step faster. She’d hoped maybe he hadn’t realized she was a huge nerd, that she’d been able to reinvent herself, just for a summer, into the type of girl someone like him would like. If that wasn’t the case, she had at least hoped that he liked her because of, rather than despite, that. As it was, her romantic summer adventure was a lie.
She knew he’d show up, and he did, an hour later. She saw him from the window, cleaner and without the fishing poles. She’d told Spider about their fight as soon as she’d gotten home. So when she saw him approaching, she said, “Can you get it, Spider?”
“Gladly,” Spider said. A moment later, she yelled up the stairs, “Meredith, there’s a person here for you. Should I tell him to screw off?”
“Aw, come on.” She heard Harmon’s voice.
“Yes, please do,” Meredith yelled down.
“God, Meredith!” he yelled up. “I said I loved you!”
Before Meredith could reply, Spider said, “She doesn’t want to speak to you.”
Meredith couldn’t hear the rest. Finally, he must have left, because she heard Spider close the door.
50
Kate
ONCE, WHEN KATE was little, her mother got a flat tire with both Kate and her brother in the car. Though Mother called the service number, they took too long. Finally, Mother opened the door, declaring, “I’ll change the tire myself!”
“Do you know how to change a tire?” Kate asked dubiously.
“You wait for Daddy to change a wightbulb,” Blake added.
“Of course I can’t change it,” her mother said. “But if an attractive woman appears in distress, some man is bound to come along and offer to help!”
Kate had rolled her eyes. Her mother always thought they lived some kind of Gone with the Wind existence and would likely start reciting the “As God is my witness” speech if this didn’t work. But before her mother even got the tire out of the trunk, a guy pulled over.
Kate didn’t know if it was because she was pretty, because people in this town were friendly, or maybe because building treehouses was fun enough for Tom Sawyer value. In any case, that was how it went with her project.
The first day, when she went to the lumberyard to buy boards, the older man working there quizzed her about her project. “What kind of saw are you going to use?”
“I don’t know.” Mrs. Steele had said she owned a saw. “Just a regular saw, I guess.”
“Not a table saw?”
Kate had no idea what that even was, but considering Mrs. Steele wasn’t a carpenter, Kate guessed she didn’t have one. “No.”
“How about a circular saw?”
“I don’t think so.”
The man shook his head. “You sure you measured these right?”
I can count. But, by this point, Kate wasn’t sure at all. “I think I did.”
“I better go with you and check.” He yelled to his helper. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
He followed Kate back to the house, took measurements, cut the boards to order at no charge, then brought them back to Kate.
Then, when she and Robert started actually working on the house, neighbors began showing up. They showed up with sandwiches. They showed up with hammers. They showed up with suggestions.
“Nah, you don’t want to use those nails,” one neighbor, Don, who said he was a carpenter, told Kate. “Let me get you some better nails.”
Then, he spent an hour ripping out the old boards and building an entirely new floor while Kate handed nails up to him and Robert.
“Are you going to paint it?” Tracy, who lived on the other side of Mrs. Steele, asked Kate. “We just painted our back fence. We had almost a whole can left.”
“Thank you!”
“I’ll bring Evie over to play with Ray-Ray,” Tracy said. “And I can bring some brushes and help you paint too. Will you be finished building it tomorrow?”
Kate glanced at Don, who said, “We should be finished today.”
“Thank you. You’ve all been so kind,” Kate said.
Tracy shrugged. “We’ve all been wanting to do something for the family, but they won’t take any help.”
“It’s true,” Don said, reaching for another nail.
Kate grabbed him one. “But why won’t they?”
“Pride, I suppose. Or shame.” Don started hammering again.
“Which is silly,” Tracy yelled above it. “I mean, it’s terrible that Angie had that problem, but every family has problems. And neighbors should help, not judge.”
“You’re absolutely right.” Kate thought of her own family, her own neighbors. What if she had woefully misjudged them? Maybe they wouldn’t all ostracize Kate. After all, Blake was apparently still friends with them. What if her mother was the only one who was awful to people, so Mother just assumed others would judge?
“What happened exactly?” Kate asked Tracy. “I never got the whole story.”
Tracy looked around, as if to make sure no one was listening. “The girl came home from school and found her mother on the floor. Thankfully, Ray-Ray was all right. She called an ambulance, but they couldn’t revive her.”
“That’s why Ray-Ray said his mother was asleep,” Kate said.
“Right. She was in a coma for a week, and now . . .”
“Brain damage,” Robert said, even though Kate hadn’t thought he was listening.
“I feel so bad for that girl,” Tracy said. “At first, no one knew what to do. I didn’t contact them because I didn’t want to seem nosy. Maybe that’s why they’re mad at us.”
“True.” Don had stopped hammering.
Kate thought about how her friends hadn’t texted those first days. Since then, she’d gotten some texts on her phone, one from Marlowe asking how she was, another from Greer saying to call her, inviting her to a barbecue she was having. But she’d ignor
ed them, assuming it was just gawking. Or schadenfreude. Was she judging them too harshly?
“Look!” Robert said.
Kate got out of her thoughts and looked. The treehouse was finished, except the paint.
“Racecar, look!” Robert yelled.
Ray-Ray came running up to them. “Is it done? Can I go in?”
Kate was about to say no, they still had to paint it. Then she thought better of it. “Okay, but we still have to paint it, and once we start, you can’t go in until tomorrow, when it’s dry.”
“Can I paint it?” he asked.
Kate hesitated, but Tracy said, “I have some old clothes for him. He could do a little.”
“Okay,” Kate said.
“Yay!” Ray-Ray scrambled up the ladder. Kate tried to take his hand, but he said, “I don’t need help!”
He and Tracy’s daughter played for a while as Tracy went next door and got the paint. Kate guided Ray-Ray’s hand while he helped apply the first coat.
That was when Lizzie showed up.
“Kate? What are you doing here?” She looked at Kate, who had some green paint on her hands. “Ray-Ray, what—?”
“Lizzie! Lookit my treehouse!” Ray-Ray yelled.
Lizzie ran over to him and grabbed his hand. “Ray-Ray, let’s go home. And you . . .” She gestured toward Kate. “You need to leave and not come back.”
“But—”
“I trusted you. I trusted you with my little brother. I shouldn’t have.”
She tugged on Ray-Ray’s arm. “Come on!”
Ray-Ray started to cry, but Lizzie led him away.
“Darn,” Tracy said. “I feel really bad.”
Kate watched them go. “Me too.” Kate wondered what Lizzie was going to do for childcare now. Part of her said she shouldn’t care. After all, Lizzie and her father were rejecting help. But she knew from personal experience it was hard to admit you needed people.
51
Meredith
AN HOUR AFTER Meredith’s fight with Harmon, Ruthie knocked on the door.
“Someone brought this.” She held out an envelope. “It was stuck in the screen door.”
Meredith opened the envelope. In it were two photographs, the one Harmon had taken of them with the timer and another, the swirling star-filled sky from that night.
With it, he’d left a note. It said:
GO ON AND TEAR ME APART. JUST GIVE ME ANOTHER CHANCE.
It took Meredith a second to recognize the lyric from the Coldplay song he’d had on that night. She didn’t tear the photos apart. But she didn’t give him another chance either. She tucked the photos into the lining of her suitcase, deep inside her closet.
Then, half an hour later, she took them out and looked at them again.
She put them back, deeper inside her closet, farther down inside the suitcase.
She looked at them again.
She did that five more times before she left the room and found Britta. “Maybe we should all do something together tonight.”
Weirdly, Britta threw her arms around Meredith.
Then she said, “Good idea.”
52
Britta
EVERYONE WAS IN a bad mood. Britta knew the reason for her own bad mood, the usual reason: because she had done something without considering all the consequences and now, someone was mad at her. Maybe everyone was.
Ruthie was mad about her stupid, thoughtless idea of making the video.
Spider was mad that she’d wasted her time. Of course, she was always mad. Still, Britta thought they were becoming friends. So much for that now that Britta had wrecked Spider’s relationship with Ruthie. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Britta snuggled against the chipmunk pillow on her bed and thought about what Meredith had said. They should all do something together. But what?
Meredith was also in a bad mood. Probably because of Bat Boy. But, with Meredith, it could also be something like not having gotten perfect scores on all her AP exams.
Downstairs, a door slammed so hard that Britta jumped. Then another slam. Kate’s bedroom door. Kate was back and, from the sound of it, her day hadn’t gone well either.
Britta put down the pillow. She went downstairs and knocked on Kate’s door.
No answer. Had Britta been mistaken about Kate being back? She knocked again and yelled, “Hello?”
Still nothing. She started to walk away when a small voice came from inside. “Yes?”
Now it was Britta’s turn to hesitate. She didn’t know Kate as well as she knew the other two, and approaching her was a bit like touching a pot on the stove if you weren’t sure if it was hot. Still, she’d knocked. She turned the doorknob.
Kate was sitting on the bed, reading a magazine. But something told Britta she wasn’t really reading, probably the fact that she was staring at a perfume ad with a picture of Rihanna.
“Hey,” Britta said.
“Hey.” Kate stared at the ad some more. What was wrong? At the beginning of the summer, Kate had seemed distant, almost sullen. But lately, she’d been in a good mood. Britta had even heard her singing that morning.
“Can I help you?” Kate asked.
“I just . . . are you okay? I heard the door.”
“Oh, sorry. It slipped.”
“Sure.” Britta didn’t know what to say. She barely knew Kate. What would make her think Kate would confide in her? Just another example of Britta acting rashly.
“Um . . .” She remembered Meredith’s request. “Meredith thought it would be fun if we all did something together tonight. I mean, if you’re available.”
Kate frowned. “Of course I’m available. What did you want to do?”
Good question. Britta glanced around the room for something to give her an idea. She found one. It was a photo of a family around a campfire, parents and two kids. The photo was too old, and the shorts too unfashionably long, to be Spider’s family. Maybe it was her dad, which meant the mom in the photo was Ruthie.
Ruthie.
Britta said, “We’re having a campfire tonight at eight.”
Kate seemed to accept this. “Sounds fun.”
Britta started to close the door, then thought of something else. “Bring something to burn.”
Kate squinted. “Something to burn? Like . . . wood?”
“No. I’ll take care of the wood. Bring something you want to forget.”
Then, before Kate could ask any more questions Britta couldn’t answer, Britta closed the door and ran upstairs to tell Spider her plan and borrow the car keys.
53
Spider
EXT. CABIN — DAY
Spider is fighting a pile of brambles that have grown around what used to be a fire pit. The branches are winning and threaten to drag Spider down to their hell.
“SHIT!” THE BRANCH Spider was wrestling with wouldn’t budge.
They hadn’t used the fire pit since they were little kids. Half of the rocks had rolled down the hill. Spider thought reviving it sounded like fun, so she tried to unearth it from its branchy crypt. Britta was buying marshmallows or something. Spider knew she should wait for her to come back, but she wanted something to take her mind off things. So she tugged and pulled and, lacking a saw, tried to break the branches. They weren’t too cooperative, though.
Just as she was struggling with that, a voice called from the road. “Need help?”
She jumped. Harmon. “Go away!”
To Harmon’s credit and Spider’s surprise, he did. He must just have been asking to be polite. Or to bug her. The branches fought back until she was covered with dirt and pine needles and little scratches all over. And, just as she was dying this death of a million paper cuts, stupid Harmon returned to witness her humiliation. This time, he got out of his truck.
“I said go away!” she yelled.
He didn’t answer. He walked around to the truck bed and pulled out pruning shears, gloves, and a long, skinny electric saw of some kind.
He stalked over and
offered her the gloves. “Are you sure you don’t want help?”
“I’m fine. Get off my property!”
He surveyed the area. “Planning a campfire?”
“None of your business!”
“When? September? October? That’s how long it’s going to take to clear this without tools. People have been using tools since the stone age.”
Spider scowled and dug her toes into the dirt. She tugged on the branch, which snapped, finally, sending her soaring back. God, why did she suck at life?
Harmon suppressed a laugh. “Maybe don’t think of it as help? Think of it as the country folk doing their country work so that your city mind is free to solve the world’s problems.”
“You’re such a douche canoe.”
He donned the gloves, walked over to an as-yet-unmolested section of brambles, far from where she was standing, and started up his power tool.
“Stop it! That’s so loud!”
“What?” he yelled. “I can’t hear you over this! It’s loud!”
“I said it’s loud! Stop it! Stop it!”
She gave up and walked away. She wasn’t about to get near an idiot with a chain saw. Okay, not exactly a chain saw in the Texas Chain Saw Massacre sense of the word, but still, a scary electric tool. He could murder her and say it was an accident.
He didn’t murder her. Within minutes, the section was all cut. Harmon stopped, and the silence was as bright as the light between the trees. “If you want, you could make a pile to use for kindling.” He moved on to another area.
Begrudgingly, Spider started to do that. “You’re not invited to our campfire.”
“I figured it was a girl thing.” He pulled aside some branches. “Is Meredith going?”
Spider shrugged but said, “Yeah. But she doesn’t want to see you.”
“So she told me.”
Spider walked away. Harmon went back to his cutting. When all the branches around the firepit were cut down, he started moving the rocks into the circle.
“You don’t have to do that! I can . . .” She stopped. He was actually being really helpful.
