Lost in the Sun

by Lisa Graff

  “Exactly!” Fallon cried. She looked like she was real proud of me or something.

  I guess I was a little proud of me, too.

  “You’d think someone would’ve noticed that,” I said.

  Fallon tucked her hands behind her head. “It’s ’cause they didn’t have me as their script supervisor,” she said.

  I didn’t think Field of Dreams was the hands-down incredible movie that my mom was always claiming it was. Actually, the plot was a little silly (ghosts playing baseball—I mean, come on). And if you thought about it too hard, it didn’t make much sense. But it was way less scary than I’d thought it was when I was six.

  About two-thirds of the way through, Fallon declared that it was time for a snack, so we got up to make popcorn while Squillo stayed zonked out on the couch, making tiny doggie snores. Fallon’s dad was still at the kitchen table, reading his tablet, and pretended to ignore us. But a giant, intimidating cop dad can only be so invisible. Fallon pretty much ignored him back, though, so I did too.

  “You like the movie so far?” Fallon asked, watching through the window of the microwave as the popcorn popped. It had that amazing fake buttery smell, and my mouth watered. “Grab a bowl from that cupboard, will you? A big one.”

  I opened the cupboard and pulled out a mixing bowl. Handed it to Fallon. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty good.”

  “I love Moonlight Graham,” Fallon said. “He’s my favorite.” And right there in the kitchen, in front of the buzzing microwave, she launched into one of the scenes we’d just watched, where the main farmer guy tracks down an ancient white-haired old ballplayer and asks him what he’d wish for, if he could wish for anything.

  “‘That’s what I’d wish for,’” Fallon said. Her voice was dropped low, just like the actor in the movie. Gravelly, like an old man. “‘A chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingle in your arms as you connect with the ball.’” She even had the exact hand movements down that the guy did in the movie, the perfect rise and fall of his voice. “‘To run the bases, stretch your double into a triple. And flop, face-first, into third. Wrap your arms around the bag.’” I swear, for a second she wasn’t Fallon Little, the girl with the big brown eyes and the dark pink scar. For a second she really was that white-haired old man. “‘That’s my wish, Ray Kinsella,’” she finished. “‘That’s my wish.’”

  That’s when the microwave beeped—perfect timing.

  “Whoa,” I said as Fallon pulled the popcorn out with the tips of two fingers to avoid the steam.

  “Whoa, what?” she said, not even turning around. But I could see her smiling, just a little, as she tugged open the bag and dumped the popcorn into the bowl. It was sort of annoying, really, asking what when you knew full well.

  But I told her anyway. Maybe it was her giant cop of a dad. Maybe it was the smell of the popcorn. Maybe I was just feeling nice.

  “That was really good,” I told her. “You’re really good.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Fallon replied as she handed me the bowl of popcorn. But that smile was still there, I could see it. Even if a tiny smidgen of it was tucked into her scar. “I’ve got a thing for movies,” she said. “I told you. Want to finish?”

  I nodded.

  The rest of the movie wasn’t bad either. I even found my very own continuity error, when a hot dog is flying out of its bun in one shot, and then when it lands on the ground, it’s back inside. (Well, I only found it because Fallon told me there was something coming up, so I should keep my eyes peeled. But it still counted.)

  I almost forgot the main reason I’d gone over there until Fallon asked me, “Hey, you want to stay for dinner? Dad’s a really good cook. Aren’t you, Dad?”

  From the kitchen, I heard her father grunt.

  I checked the clock. It said 5:05.

  “I should probably go home,” I said. I kind of did want to stay for dinner, since I was pretty sure whatever Fallon’s dad whipped up was going to be better than cereal, which is what I was probably going to end up eating. But the Dodgers were playing the Giants at 7:00, and my mom was coming home early to watch it. Anyway, I was going to be in enough hot water as it was, what with skipping dinner with Dad again. Better not push it. “This was, um, fun, though,” I said. And I wasn’t even lying.

  Fallon grinned at me. “We should do it again,” she told me. “We’ve got tons more baseball movies. A million, even. We could start a whole club.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. Fallon wasn’t the worst, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be her best friend or anything.

  She didn’t seem to hear me. “You going to be at the store this weekend?” she asked me. “Maybe I can stop by and we’ll plan.”

  “Um,” I said. This weekend was supposed to be a Dad weekend. I guess Kari had run out of excuses for not having us over at their apartment anymore, now that the room was remodeled. But I’d rather work a million free shifts at Kitch’N’Thingz than spend one night there. “Sure. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.”

  Fallon laughed and held open her front door for me. “Bye, Trent Zimmerman,” she told me.

  “Bye,” I said.

  She shut the door behind me, and I pedaled home, thinking how Fallon Little was about the weirdest person I’d ever met.

  And how, if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t really mind so much.

  • • •

  When Aaron pulled into the driveway, I was sitting on the front porch, waiting for him.

  “Did you tell Dad?” I called to him, leaping to my feet as he opened his door. “About my project?”

  Aaron didn’t answer till he was all the way up the stairs. Then he slugged me in the arm on his way into the house. “You owe me big, little brother,” he said.

  Doug followed the two of us into the house like a puppy. “Dad was real mad,” he told me. “He said if you aren’t ready to go when he picks the two of us up tomorrow morning, you’re going to be in awful big trouble. Oh, also, Dad said we could practice games for the company picnic, if it’s not raining.”

  “Wait,” I said, turning around on Doug in the doorway when what he said finally sank in. “What do you mean, the two of us? What about Aaron?”

  Aaron was already in the kitchen, devouring a granola bar like he hadn’t just gotten back from dinner. “I have lifeguarding,” he explained.

  Lucky dog. “Well, I have to work at the store,” I said. But even I could hear in my voice what a giant baby I sounded like. “Mom needs me there.”

  “You think Dad’s going to buy that one?” Aaron asked as I joined him in the kitchen. He unzipped his backpack with one hand, still munching his granola bar, and pulled out a textbook, tucking it under his arm. “You think Mom’s going to let you work just to get out of seeing him?”

  I frowned. Probably not.

  “I have to study,” Aaron said, pushing past me to get to the hall.

  “It’s Friday night,” I told him.

  “Someone has to be the responsible one in the family,” Aaron replied just before he shut his door behind him.

  “Glad it isn’t me!” I called back. But if he heard me, he didn’t bother to respond.

  • • •

  All that talk about being the responsible one was obviously garbage, because Aaron snuck out during the game against the Giants, right in the middle of the second inning. “Going out with a friend!” he told Mom as he slipped into his coat. He was out the door before she even got a chance to ask him any questions.

  “Teenagers,” Mom grumbled at the closed front door. She turned to me and Doug, who was watching with us only because Mom was letting him have ice cream if he did (her attempts to turn him into a baseball fan like the rest of us never worked out too well). “When you two get to be teenagers, don’t even think about pulling any
stunts like that one,” she said, aiming her thumb toward the door. “Your brother knows his butt is toast when he comes home.”

  “He’s out with a girl,” Doug informed us, raising his eyebrows as he slurped up his ice cream. Doug had a disgusting habit of letting his ice cream melt into soup before he ate it. He claimed it tasted better that way. “I heard him on the phone. It’s that Clarisse girl again.”

  Mom sighed. “So it begins,” she said, mostly to herself.

  • • •

  Aaron got home a little before midnight. Mom was asleep—tuckered out, she said, from mentally cursing the Dodgers for losing to those Giants on a wild pitch. (“A wild pitch!” she kept shouting from the bathroom as she was brushing her teeth.) But I was still awake. I poked my head outside my bedroom door as he tiptoed down the hallway.

  “Hey,” I whispered to him.

  “Hey.” He seemed surprised to see me. “You’re still awake.”

  I shrugged. “Were you out with Clarisse?”

  He didn’t answer that. “You going to Dad’s tomorrow?”

  It was my turn not to answer. “Mom said she’s going to kill you in the morning for not telling her where you were going.” I paused. “A responsible son probably would’ve asked first.”

  He looked down the hall to Mom’s closed bedroom door, like he was considering something, then shook his head. “Get some sleep, okay?” he said. He sounded real tired.

  I figured if Aaron wanted to secretly date some girl, it was none of my business. I wasn’t snoopy like Doug. I just hated when our mom was mad.

  “’Kay,” I said, giving in. “You too.”

  Aaron slugged me in the arm. “Good night, little brother.”

  “Night, Aaron.”

  SEVEN

  Mom had already left for work by the time I woke up on Saturday morning. Dad was supposed to come by to pick us up at 10:30, but while Doug was in the bathroom at 10:15, I snuck out the door and hopped on my bike.

  I decided to head over to Swim Beach, which is where Aaron worked as a lifeguard. Unfortunately, Giles, who was at the ticket office, wouldn’t let me in even though he’d met me about a bajillion times.

  “It’s me,” I told him, “Trent. I’m Aaron’s brother. You’ve met me.”

  Giles went on chewing his gum. “Five bucks for a day pass,” he said. Aaron once told me that Giles was bitter because he’d dropped out of law school and now he was a fifty-year-old man who worked the ticket booth at Swim Beach. “Park your bike over there after you pay,” Giles told me, jerking his head toward the bike rack next to the booth.

  “But I only want to talk to Aaron,” I argued. “I’m not going to go swimming. I shouldn’t have to pay just to talk to my own brother.”

  “Five bucks for a day pass,” Giles said again.

  It was no use arguing with Giles, because he always won in the end anyway. He probably would’ve made a really good lawyer.

  I handed over the single five-dollar bill I’d scrounged out of my piggy bank for breakfast money, got my neon-green wristband, and parked my bike in the rack. After that I was allowed inside the gate.

  Swim Beach wasn’t really a beach at all, since we didn’t live on the ocean. It was just a stretch of Cedar Lake that was good for swimming, and years ago someone had hauled in a bunch of sand from somewhere and lined the shore with it, so if you squinted really hard, it sort of felt like a beach, except without waves or salt water or whales. There were lake fish, though, and sometimes they’d swim right up to you while you were in the water. Once when Doug was little, we told him they were piranhas, and he wouldn’t go in the lake all summer. Mom was pretty mad about that. Anyway, this past summer Aaron worked there as a lifeguard every day, and now that school had started he was there on weekends until it got too cold for anyone to want to swim. He said it paid pretty well and was good practice for when he went to college at UC San Diego and could maybe lifeguard for real.

  I found Aaron right away. He wasn’t hard to spot, because he was one of only three people wearing a bright red hoodie that said LIFEGUARD on the back. I walked over to the lifeguard stand where he was sitting, watching the water. Since I hadn’t known I was going to end up at Swim Beach when I’d hopped on my bike, I wasn’t wearing my bathing suit or flip-flops, so I had to walk slowly so not too much sand would catch in my sneakers.

  “Hey,” I called up when I reached the bottom of the stand.

  Aaron flicked his eyes down at me, then quick back to the water. He took his job very seriously. “Trent,” he called back, like he was super disappointed in me. A really nice welcome for his little brother. “Why aren’t you with Dad?”

  I checked the imaginary watch on my wrist. “Just missed him,” I said. “So sad.”

  Aaron sighed. I could tell he was trying to figure out what he was supposed to do, as the big brother, in this situation. But I knew he didn’t have a whole lot of options. It wasn’t like he was going to ditch his job to wrestle me into his car and drive me all the way to Dad’s house, kicking and screaming.

  “You’re going to have to see him sometime, Trent,” he said at last.

  “Not if I can help it,” I replied.

  Aaron continued to stare at the water. I stared too.

  This was the first summer Aaron had lifeguarded, and he’d gotten really tan. You could hardly even tell he was related to Doug and me. He was muscly, too. I bet all sorts of girls at school were in love with him, even before they found out he was funny.

  “What time is it?” he asked me, eyes still on the water.

  I checked my imaginary watch again. “Probably, like, ten forty-five,” I told him.

  “I’m on bathroom duty at eleven,” he said, “and then I get a break. Want to hang out with me then?”

  “Sure,” I said. And then I left him to his job, because Aaron didn’t like to chat too much when he was on the stand.

  Since I didn’t have a towel to sit on the sand, I found a seat over by the snack stand. The tables weren’t too crowded today, since the summer was over.

  “Hey, Trent!” the girl at the snack stand, Melinda, called over to me. I turned to look at her, and she checked to make sure her boss wasn’t looking and then tossed me a bag of chips. She smiled and held a finger to her lips, like I should keep it a secret.

  Thanks, I mouthed. She nodded. At least someone here was nicer than Giles.

  While I munched on my chips and waited for Aaron, I watched the swimmers in the lake. It was mostly little kids, but there were some parents with them, too. They all stayed in the area that was marked off by buoys. There was a floating platform you could swim to if you felt like it, and some girls about my age (but the ones who would never talk to me, ever) were hogging it, lying on top sunbathing and shooing away the little kids who wanted to dive off the edge.

  Far in the distance, way beyond the buoys in the larger part of the lake, was a tiny island, just big enough for about a hundred trees. Sometimes I thought about what it would be like to swim all the way to the island. What you’d find there, besides the trees. Aaron said sometimes the lifeguards went there in their off time to explore, even though they weren’t supposed to, but I liked to imagine that the island was one of the few places on earth that no human being had ever set foot on. We could see it, but it was still completely unexplored. A mystery.

  Aaron came and got me before he had to do bathrooms, and I went with him to the cleaning shed, where we picked up the mop and the bucket and the other supplies. Aaron strapped on a pair of thick purple gloves and went inside the men’s room first, and I set up the yellow CLEANING IN PROGRESS sign outside and talked to him through the open door.

  “Did you have to rescue anyone today?” I asked Aaron through the doorway. I had to speak loudly, because of the sloshing and water running.

  “No,” Aaron called back. “Thank goodness.”

&nbs
p; So far Aaron hadn’t had to rescue anyone. He’d had a few times, he said, when he’d had to leap into the water because it looked like someone was in distress, but they’d all been false alarms, except for once when another lifeguard got to the person before him and Aaron didn’t have to do CPR or anything.

  I know Aaron didn’t actually want to need to save anyone, because that would be incredibly scary. But I always secretly hoped that he would. Because, for one thing, I knew that he could do it. Aaron was an amazing swimmer, and he’d aced his CPR class, too. And for another, well, I know it didn’t actually work that way, but I couldn’t help thinking that if Aaron saved somebody’s life, maybe it would even things out with me and Jared.

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Thank goodness.”

  While Aaron was in the women’s room, I had to shoo away three moms with little kids, because apparently having a little kid who’s screaming that he’s about to pee himself makes you incapable of reading big yellow signs. They just ended up using the men’s room, which I didn’t tell Aaron in case they messed it up and he’d have to clean it again.

  After cleaning the bathrooms, it was Aaron’s break. We went to the snack stand, where Melinda tried desperately to give us free nachos, even though Aaron insisted he didn’t want to ruin his appetite for lunch. In the end, I got the nachos, because I didn’t care about my appetite, but Aaron made me refuse the free soda.

  “I think Melinda has a crush on you,” I told Aaron when I was pretty sure she was out of earshot.

  He flicked a chip at me, so I ended up with cheese on my shoulder. “You’re the one with the free nachos,” he said. “Maybe she likes you.” But I noticed his cheeks had gone a little pink. “Anyway, she has a boyfriend.”

  I wiped the cheese off my sleeve with a napkin. “She could have a boyfriend and still have a crush on you,” I said. I knew about this stuff from TV.

  Aaron didn’t say anything to that.

  “Does she know about Clarisse?” I asked.