by Deb Caletti
Every morning, I took Mom to work in case we needed her car, so I headed for her Honda Accord parked at the curb and that’s when I saw Mr. Martinelli with the black-and-red FOR SALE sign gripped in his teeth, his hands holding two fat strips of silver duct tape. He had on jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. I don’t think I’d ever seen Mr. Martinelli in something so festive before. He usually wore tan button-up sweaters and serious janitor-green pants. Maybe he had found it in the back of his closet during all the cleaning.
The set of silver stairs that allowed you to reach the door of the Pleasure Way was already set out, looking like a step-right-up welcome to future buyers. Mr. Martinelli took the sign out of his mouth and slapped it onto the side of the RV.
“You’re selling it?” I shouted.
“It’s a beauty,” he said. But there wasn’t anything like regret in his voice. In fact, it was as happy as a dozen cupcakes.
“I thought you were going to go to Montana this summer to see your daughter.”
“Who wants to sit in that tank for twenty-two hours?” he said.
“I thought you guys loved the Pleasure Way,” I said. Something was going on there. If I saw a sign on their house next, I’d really get worried.
“Love,” he scoffed. “Maybe you want to take a tour? You know someone who might like all the comfort of home on wheels? Leather seats? It has more storage than you’d think.” He reached over the front tire, where I knew he kept the key. He waved it around at me enticingly.
“I’ll spread the word,” I said.
“I’m going to get her shined up,” he said. He patted her side. Bamp bamp.
I could hear the far-off cheerful, tinkling music of Joe the ice-cream man, at an hour when no one would yet want ice cream. When he passed, he looked morose and hungover and had a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth.
“Good luck,” I said to Mr. Martinelli. I got into Mom’s car. When I drove down the street, I saw Kevin Frink in his Volkswagen, a few doors down from the Saint George house. In the small dome of the car, I saw him lean forward and blow out a lit match. I felt a strange but strong uneasiness, a wrongness that seemed silly and paranoid. Information from our most important guide ever, our instinct, too often bumped up against our favorite belief that everything was fine and under control. I headed to Nicole’s house. I put every warning sign of all that might happen right into the garbage can of my self-deceptive brain. Then, I turned the music up.
Nicole’s mom, Theresa, dressed in more fashionable clothes than Nicole did. Short skirts, tight layered tops. You could tell she wanted to be seen as “the cool parent”—at least, cooler than Nicole’s dad, whom she called Jack even though his name was Dennis. Jack, as in jackass. Nicole lived in dual-personality divorce land, where at one house (Theresa’s) there was every junk food possible and lax rules and “fun,” and in the other (Dennis’s) there were rules for everything and an insistence on a “healthy” lifestyle, which meant you were a shameful, weak loser if a Dorito passed your lips. If Theresa wanted to be cool, Dennis wanted to be … a jackass.
“You girls going to hang out by the pool and check out all the cute guys?” Theresa asked. This was another box to check on Theresa’s internal cool list—talking about “guys” and more specifically “cute guys.” Maybe she thought this was a way to be one of us, even though it didn’t work for me. I never really understood the general discussion of “cute guys” as if they were all interchangeable, as if their cuteness mattered more than any other quality. She didn’t ask us if we were going to the pool to check out nice guys, or smart guys, or funny guys. It made you understand how she had ended up with “Jack,” who looked a little like he had stepped out of a men’s magazine, but whom you really didn’t want to spend more than five minutes with. It made you also understand the shoes she herself had on—high narrow heels that looked good but that probably killed her feet.
“I only have eyes for one,” Nicole said. “The sole and only reason I’ve spent half my summer at the pool when I don’t even like to swim that much.”
“You’ve given up on Jesse?” I asked. I was surprised and maybe a little relieved. I couldn’t see him hanging out at the pool. If he didn’t even want to stay in our cafeteria, he wasn’t likely to be found straddling some deck chair next to Evan O’Donnell and Jake Tafferty as they flung their wet heads around trying to splash girls.
“Give up? Giving up is for pansies. At least that’s what my father says.”
Theresa snorted the snort she gave whenever Nicole’s dad was mentioned. It was like in the psychology books, the way Pavlov’s dogs salivated whenever they heard the bell ring. Theresa fingered one of the many stacks of legal documents on their dining room table, as if her fingers couldn’t bear to be away from the conflict for long.
“Jesse doesn’t go to the pool,” I said. I was guessing.
“Doesn’t go. He works there. He’s a lifeguard.”
“A lifeguard?” A lifeguard? I had one of those moments where your thoughts seem to freeze and race at the same time. A lifeguard. A rescuer of things maybe. Maybe even someone who apologized to dogs.
I didn’t have time to think about this, because Jasmine arrived then, and after a flurry of lunch packing and towel finding, we all got into Mom’s car and drove to the pool. It was pretty much what I pictured. Leo Snyder and Quentin York wrestled each other in the water and Caroline Dale sat on Renny Williams’s lap on a deck chair and Melissa DeWhitt was putting lotion on Casey Chow’s back as she held up her long hair with one hand. High school reunion, mixed with little kids in droopy bathing suits holding their mothers’ hands and the slapping sounds of bare feet on wet cement. We found a spot to lay out our towels on a grassy slope near the shallow end, and I looked up at the lifeguard chair. No Jesse, only a senior girl who was in band whose name I didn’t remember. She looked bored in her red bathing suit.
“He starts work at noon on Wednesdays,” Nicole said. She’d been watching my eyes. Her words were sure and proprietary. She might as well have been some wife ordering for her husband in a restaurant. We watched two little girls on the pool steps play with their Barbies in miniature bathing suits and we had one of those conversations when no one was really listening to anyone else. Jasmine kept checking her phone for Christine Fhara (cello, second chair) to call, and Nicole kept watching that lifeguard chair, and I realized Jasmine and I were just props—we’d be the reason Nicole laughed loudly and shook her hair around and gestured dramatically. I guess it was just too hard to get someone to notice you when you were quiet and sitting alone and not performing in your own personal play.
Twelve o’clock came and went and Nicole “went to the bathroom” and came back too soon, meaning she’d just taken a lap to look for Jesse. I was feeling irritated, and things didn’t improve when, a few moments later, Reilly Ogden showed up. He came over and stood in front of us while we sat, and this provided us with a clear and terrifying view of his mostly naked body. White, soft baby flesh; tight bathing suit with tropical flowers stretched over the cheerless triangle that was his pelvis. Just above eye level was the knuckle of flesh that was his outie belly button.
“I knew I’d find you here,” he said. He had his glasses off, which gave his face an unfamiliar and empty look.
“You forgot your glasses,” Jasmine said. She’d noticed too.
“Contacts,” he said. This was not the movies, though, where Reilly would have gone through some transformation now that he was minus his eyewear. Get contacts, add some new hairstyle, and he’s a stud in disguise—nope. Like most people, Reilly would always and forever be mostly just himself. In fact, the absence of glasses made things worse. There was less between him and you. His eyes made a direct hit, and it was somehow unsettling.
“Hello, Reilly,” I said. Once again, I hoped my tone would say all it needed to. It was a disappointed hello. An oh-there-you-are-again-too-bad hello.
“I assume you’ve been thinking about my proposal?” He scratched the ba
ck of his calf, where there was the red lump of a mosquito bite.
“Proposal?” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
“Three months? Trial period? Never mind.” He sighed, and then looked around and back to us again. “I’ve taken up photography.”
“That’s great, Reilly.”
“I thought we could go out on a shoot together.”
“I’ve given up photography,” I said.
“I’ve just spent three hundred dollars on photographic equipment,” he said.
“Good for you. Wow, look at the time,” Nicole said. “Twelve thirty, time for you to move on.”
“It’s a free country. This is a public place.”
“Personal conversation,” Nicole said. “Vamoose.”
“Summer becomes you,” he said to me, and then walked off, his towel under his arm. He arranged himself on a stretch of bare cement at the other end of the pool not far from the diving board, a sure place to get continually splashed by anyone jumping in or kicked by fast-passing legs excited from the awesome dive they’d just made.
“We’ll see him on the news someday. Fucking psycho,” Jasmine said.
She was likely right, but watching him made me feel bad inside, as if I were somehow responsible for his bad luck in life, or at least responsible for changing it. We ate lunch, although the bad feeling stayed with me. Nicole lost her buzz of energy as the afternoon went on with no Jesse in sight. I wondered why we were still there, and I guess so did she.
“He must be sick or something,” she said.
“I’ve got to meet Christine in an hour,” Jasmine said.
We gathered up our towels and our lunch garbage and headed back to the parking lot. Nicole grabbed my arm.
“There he is. Look. In the ticket booth. Oh God oh God oh God. Well, that explains things.”
I looked over, and sure enough, Jesse Waters was handing orange entrance tickets to a father and his two boys, one who was jumping around and holding his crotch like he had to pee. Jesse looked up and noticed us, smiled, and I gave a little wave. There—I hoped the trip was worth it to Nicole now.
“God,” she breathed. “He’s so cute.”
I jingled my keys. Her comment annoyed me. She made him one-dimensional, and he wasn’t. “Stalking time now officially over,” I said.
“Ow, ow, ow,” Jasmine said. She hadn’t put her sandals back on. The asphalt was hot. “Jesus Christ, unlock the door already.”
“Hey! Scarlet!” Jesse emerged from the ticket area behind us. He wore baggy red swim shorts and a towel around his neck. He gestured me over. I didn’t even think. Or maybe that’s a lie too. I did think, but I went anyway.
“Just a sec, guys,” I said.
I trotted over to see Jesse. I was glad to see him. Maybe not in the two hundred percent way that I was glad to see Hayden, every day, every time, from the moment I’d see him making toast, to hearing his car drive up. It was more of a ninety-five percent happy, which was a pretty good happy anyway.
“Been to any garage sales lately?” I said.
“Every time I see a sign, I stop. Just hoping for a turquoise tie clip to match my cuff link.”
“That would be so handsome,” I said.
“Maybe you might want to come with me sometime. Look through people’s old junk. Rusty garden stuff, playpens …”
“Creepy neckties,” I said, but didn’t answer him about going. He held the ends of his towel and looked at me with an open smile. I didn’t want to give him the wrong idea, though. I could already feel Nicole’s anger crawling under my skin from back where she stood or maybe that was my own guilt. And there was Hayden, too. “Why is it that garage sales always make me want to wash my hands?” I said instead.
“I went to a Goodwill once and breathed through my mouth the whole time,” he said.
I laughed. “A lifeguard,” I said.
“I hate to see little kids drown. Ruins my day.”
“I’ve got to go.” I hooked my thumb in the direction of Nicole and Jasmine.
“See ya,” he said. Two kids waited in line and were looking his way, but he still seemed to be waiting too. His question hung there between us.
“Back to work,” I said.
“All right, then.” He tugged on the ends of his towel twice and turned back. I rejoined Nicole and Jasmine. The air between Nicole and me was thick and jagged. Jasmine had put on her sandals, but the straps hung free.
“He speaks,” Nicole said.
“An actual real person,” I said. Maybe that was hard for her to understand.
We heard the gunning of an engine, the supposedly impressive rev of an engine as it sat still. Jasmine scanned the parking lot.
“Guess who?” she said. I saw the car. A BMW. I couldn’t read the bumper sticker from where we stood, but I could see it. I knew what it said, anyway. I’M PROUD OF MY 4.0 STUDENT. Reilly Ogden. His parents’ car.
“Oh God.”
“He’s telling you how big his engine is,” Jasmine said.
I socked her arm. “I’m all his now.”
Nicole didn’t join in. She was silent the whole way home. When we got to her house, she opened the car door. She turned and spit the words.
“I thought you were my friend.”
She flung the door closed, and it slammed so hard that a pen on the tray of Mom’s dashboard jumped out and hid on the floor. I felt that slam way down inside. Helping people, being good to them, was who I most was. It felt completely and utterly wrong to be anything but that person.
But behind the bad feeling sat something else. Anger. The part of me that looked after myself, only myself—it wanted to be heard. I could talk to whoever I wanted, be friends with whomever I wanted, even love whomever I wanted.
Right then, I realized that other people’s “needs” were sometimes only big nasty demands, in a soft disguise. It was no different from those deer hunters in their camouflage outfits. I’m a nice peaceful tree. Ignore the gun on my back.
I thought it had worked for me, looking after everyone else. I thought it had. But it didn’t. Not anymore.
“Don’t ask me,” Jasmine said.
Chapter Nineteen
They just can’t fucking do this,” Kevin Frink said. His big face was red. His eyes were squinched. He looked like he might cry.
“Jeez, Kevin. What?” Kevin Frink had rung our doorbell again and again. It was lucky I was the only one home. Zeus would have gone nuts.
“They want her to go to Yale. Those freaky parents of hers. She doesn’t even want to go to Yale. She wants to go to art school. Here.”
“She got into Yale?” I didn’t even think Fiona Saint George ever went to class.
“She’s brilliant, you hear me? Brill-iant. Smart enough to fucking know what she fucking wants to do with her life.” It was a hot day, the kind of steamy hot that made it hard to breathe and he was sweating. Big dark rings under the arms of his T-shirt, drops gathering on his forehead.
“God, I’m sorry,” I said. “She’s not going to go, is she?”
He let out a sound. An exhale of protest that might have been the start of a sob. “Does she have a choice? Do you know what those people said? They won’t help with her education at all unless she goes there. They used the biggest lie of all time. For your own good. WHOSE good? THEIR good. Not HER good. What kind of parents do that, huh? Tell me that.” I’d always had the idea that Kevin’s mother ignored him altogether. Certainly, she wasn’t the parental role model who was part of his activities and interests, supporting his goals of blowing things up. Kevin hit the door frame with his palm. I should have invited him in, but something told me that was a bad idea. I didn’t think we had enough room for that much anger in our house.
“Kevin,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“There’s nothing okay about this. Nothing.”
“She’ll work it out with them.” I’m not sure if I believed that, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
�
��You know she can’t do that on her own. You know how alone she is. She needs me to help her.”
I remembered the dark hair over Fiona Saint George’s eyes, the chalk paintings of vampire parents. Maybe he had a point. I had thought she needed that help too; it was dark in vampire land. “Yale,” I said. I still couldn’t believe she got in.
“Would you stop going on about fucking Yale!” he hissed.
It was the kind of anger that makes you shut up, fast. I felt an eerie, electric shiver go through me. I switched over to some voice I imagined that FBI agents used with kidnappers.
“It’s okay, Kevin. Everything’s going to be okay.”
He looked at me, and right then as he stood sweating on our front porch, I saw the real him down in there. I saw way, way past that big head and angry eyes and tight fists. He seemed very small and scared. The small and scared that you are when you finally decide to hand your love over only to find out exactly how unsafe that leaves you.
“You’re okay,” I said.
I wasn’t so sure about that at all.
I saw the letter because the mailbox was left open. When I saw it there and saw whom it was addressed to, I felt it was my duty to look further. Call it a fateful intervention by me, caught before the mailman arrived to pick it up and send it on its wrong way.
I ripped it open on the spot.
Buddy—
Why are you ignoring me? Why did you change your e-mail address? I thought we promised never to do that, no matter what.
Buddy, why?
Anger lit in me as quickly as fire on dry wood. I let it fill me, maybe because I also felt something else, some sort of sadness I didn’t want to feel. Some sense of her desperation, when she wasn’t a person whom I truly thought could feel that. It wasn’t just her bad behavior that was letting me down. She was being too human, and there are some people we don’t want to see this in—mothers and older sisters, fathers, people we rely on for some sense of firm ground, because there aren’t many places to go for that. Juliet always had everything, and shouldn’t that mean you sat somewhere beyond despair? I brought the note inside, but she wasn’t there. I wasn’t going to let her off the hook this time.
