Stalker Girl

by Rosemary Graham

  “Hey,” Brian said, but she ignored him. “Hey.” He put a hand on her shoulder. She tried to pull away, but he held firm. “Hey.”

  She turned around, steeling herself for a knowing look, a snarky smirk. But what she saw was a smile, and those eyes, looking right into hers, not mocking but concerned.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  The tears were way out of proportion to anything that had just happened. It was like she’d been saving everything up—her disappointment about Turkey, the shock of having to move out of her home of twelve years, of getting way too much information about her mother and Nick’s now-dead relationship, the humiliation of the Pink Vomit Incident.

  Carly was a sniveling mess, and she should have been embarrassed, but for some reason she wasn’t. And Brian, who should have been disgusted by the effluvia flowing from her orifices, didn’t seem to be, judging by what he did next.

  He said, “I know a really good hangover cure.” Then he took the serving spoon out of her hand and put it in Avery’s. “Finish this up, okay? This girl needs a trip to the Rock. Meet us there.”

  He took Carly by her hand and gently but firmly pulled her through the kitchen. As they passed through the back door, he shouted one more order over his shoulder. “Someone grab my board shorts.” He pulled her past the Dumpsters, past the old broken-down tables and obsolete kitchen equipment rusting under the brown tarp, onto a path through the woods.

  She followed him into the woods even though there was nothing to keep her from leaving. She never, for one second, felt like she was in danger.

  Except maybe of losing her job, which just moments before she’d been thinking of quitting, but suddenly wanted desperately to keep.

  “What about Kevin?”

  “What about him?”

  “Isn’t he going to be pissed that we left early?”

  “Kevin? Nah. He doesn’t care who gets what done, as long as it gets done. Those guys’ll make sure everything’s cool before they leave.”

  “Where are we were going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They followed a complicated route along intersecting paths until they hit a set of old train tracks, which they followed to a dirt road, which they followed to another path.

  After a while the path disappeared, and they were walking on a bed of fallen pine needles so thick that it absorbed the sound of their footsteps. Soon the dark green of the pines opened up onto a thin strip of beach.

  Two huge rocks rose out of the ground and extended far into the lake. On one of the rocks, three or four teenage girls in neon bikinis lay out on beach towels. Five or six guys in trunks stood at the outermost edge of the other rock, taking turns jumping and diving.

  A little while after she and Brian stepped into the sunlight, Liam and Avery appeared, as if out of thin air. The pine needles must have absorbed the sounds of their footsteps, too. They’d both changed into board shorts; Avery tossed Brian his.

  Together the three of them told Carly all about Baldwin Rock. Unofficial Townie Beach, accessible only through that complicated route of semisecret paths handed down through generations of locals.

  “Once in a while,” Avery said, “the Citiots hear about it and try to blend in with the locals.”

  “Citiots?”

  Citiots, they explained, were a particular breed of rich city people.

  “The ones who think that just because they spend a half a mill on an old termite-infested farmhouse . . .” Avery offered.

  “Strip it down to the studs and then spend another million,” Liam added.

  “Or two or three,” said Brian. “I heard those people who bought the old Flynn place spent three.”

  Avery shook his head. “No way. Three? On what?”

  “For starters, they went and bought two more houses up in Maine or New Hampshire or someplace like that, then wrecked ’em, just for the wood, and the sinks and light fixtures.”

  “Oh, man,” Avery shook his head. “That’s just wrong.”

  Brian nodded.

  Carly knew those people. Not those exact people, but people like them. They lived in her building. What used to be her building. Went to Bellwin. One girl in the middle school had her bathroom featured in the New York Times the year before. Her parents spent a hundred thousand dollars to make it look like a tropical paradise, complete with a fake waterfall shower, steam room, and sauna.

  “Okay, now,” Brian said, pointing to the water as he started back into the woods. “That there is the world’s best hangover cure. I recommend no further delay. I’ll be right back.”

  “But I don’t have my suit.” It was a lame thing to say. Her cutoffs and tank top would do just fine. But no one heard her say it. Brian had disappeared, and Liam and Avery sprinted into the water.

  She’d gone swimming at the camp beach with Jess a couple times during orientation week and found the water frigid and silty. But from here the lake looked clear. It smelled sweet, too. There was no trace of the dank fishiness that hung in the air on the other side. If she couldn’t see the Stony Hollow dock with the line of kids waiting their turn on the slide directly across, she would have thought it was a different body of water.

  She took a running start and dove in.

  Floating on her back in the cool water, face to the sun, she felt the hangover drain away. She felt like she’d entered a new world. A right-side-up world where buying two extra houses so you could renovate a third with the right wood and the right sinks was seen for the crazy excess that it was; a world where people like Cameron Foster and Julia McMillan weren’t looked up to or envied or longed for but laughed at.

  A world that contained a certain blue-eyed boy. A boy who knew about the Pink Vomit Incident and had already seen her cry but seemed to like her anyway.

  This was the world she belonged in.

  11

  FOR THE next three days, Carly went to Baldwin Rock with the boys every afternoon. There was no invitation. No one said, Carly, would you care to join us? It was just somehow understood when Kevin dismissed them for the afternoon break that they were all going.

  Brian didn’t take Carly’s hand on those afternoon trips to the lake, but he did walk by her side. And on those walks they had conversations. Not superficial small talk, but real back-and-forth asking and listening about each other’s lives. By the end of those three days, Brian knew about Carly’s love of archaeology and the canceled trip to Aphrodisias and having to move out of the loft. And Carly knew the broad outlines of Brian’s life: that he’d lived in Brooklyn until his father died, then he and Avery and their mother had moved upstate to “Ernestine’s,” which is what everybody called their grandmother’s house, even now that she’d been dead for a year. Ernestine’s property bordered Stony Hollow, and her kids had worked there when they were growing up. Liam, their cousin, lived down the road, and the three of them had been playing music together in the shed behind Ernestine’s on instruments that had belonged to their fathers since before they could remember. Now they were a band called Quinn.

  “That’s it, Quinn? Just Quinn?” she asked.

  “Yup. Quinn. No s, no The, no Boys. Just Quinn.”

  The band name was Ernestine’s idea. She’d been their biggest fan. She loved that her grandsons spent hours in that shed working on their music, especially after losing Brian’s father, her first-born son. She paid for a new roof, heat, and insulation, and had it wired for electricity so they could use their amps and run their recording equipment out there. She was the only adult in the family who encouraged them to aim high, the only one who didn’t freak out about their wanting to put college off to concentrate on music.

  Before she died, Ernestine helped them negotiate The Plan: they could take one year after Liam and Avery graduated from high school to “make something happen” with the band. (Brian was a year older and had graduated the year before.) During that year, they would only have to work part-time day jobs to pay for band expenses like gas and upkeep for the van, rec
ording equipment, and instrument care. They could live at Ernestine’s for as long as they wanted to save money. Food would be paid for out of a small fund she was leaving them in her will. If there weren’t “clear signs of progress”—in the form of regular paying gigs or movement toward a recording contract—after the year was up, they would go to college or get serious, career-type jobs.

  According to Brian, they were ahead of schedule. Liam and Avery had just graduated in June, and they already had a small local following from playing frat parties around SUNY New Paltz. They had gigs that summer at the all-ages club in town and the one frat house that stayed open for summer school, but mostly they were working on their demo. In the fall they were moving back to Brooklyn to try to break into the New York scene. A booking agent had promised to get them gigs in the city if the demo came out well. Brian’s mother had rented their Brooklyn house out but kept the basement apartment open for her and the boys to use for visits to the city.

  Despite all the getting-to-know-you talk, Carly still wasn’t sure what, if anything, was going on between her and Brian until the night he invited her back to Ernestine’s.

  “It might be boring, listening to us record. But hey, if you like archaeology, the shed’s got stuff going back to before Ernestine’s was Ernestine’s. You could poke around there if you get bored.”

  “Okay.” Carly didn’t think she was going to get bored, but she liked that Brian was thinking about what might make her happy. It had been a while since anyone had done that.

  Later that evening she was sitting in a dusty old armchair crammed between an amp and a cobwebbed window in the shed behind Ernestine’s. Brian and Avery and Liam were busy plugging guitars into amps, amps into extension cords, extension cords into extension cords. Testing connections, running scales.

  As much as she liked Brian by then, she wasn’t expecting much. She figured they were just another trio of wannabe rock-star boys, one of thousands of bands messing around in garages, basements, and sheds all over the country.

  Then she heard that first song and she knew they were good.

  Really good.

  They made her think if Nick, who, whenever he talked about music would go on about “clean and tight rock ’n’ roll you got with just a guitar, bass, and drums” like his favorites, The Ramones. Not that their music was anything like the Ramones’. Quinn’s was lighter, more playful and melodic. But raw, somehow, too.

  Avery had the chops and the looks and the stage presence of a sexy front man. He sang into the microphone like it was a lover, even when there was no one but his brother and cousin and this girl who scooped pudding in a camp kitchen there to see him.

  Liam wailed on drums.

  But Brian was the one to watch. The only one Carly wanted to watch. Head down, eyes closed, fingers dancing over the long neck of his bass, giving the music its pulse.

  The songs were his, too. He wrote all the originals. Some of them were funny/sweet tributes to everyday people, like “Mailman”:

  You got to be there

  Six days a week

  And “Lunch Lady”:

  Ladles her love

  On ev-er-y-one.

  Others, like “Everybody Does It,” which was about a girl who gets caught shoplifting a shirt she thinks will make her beautiful, told whole stories. In addition to these originals, they played an eclectic mix of covers from the seventies and eighties. Everything from Bruce Springsteen to Queen to R.E.M. to Talking Heads, Blondie, the Clash, and assorted disco favorites in quirky arrangements. They’d slow fast songs down, speed the slow ones up, add a reggae beat here, a rap riff there, and three-part harmonies where you’d never expect to find them.

  After practice Brian took Carly on a tour. Ernestine’s had lots of small, weirdly shaped rooms, some with numbers on the doors because, he explained, it had originally been a boardinghouse for workers building the aqueduct, the huge underground tunnel system that carries water from the mountains to the city.

  Brian’s room was number nine. The only one up on the third floor. It was small, with sloped walls. Carly wasn’t a neat freak, and she wouldn’t have held it against him if it had been a mess, but she was relieved to see that the futon on the floor was made, with two pillows side-by-side. No stray underwear to avert her eyes from. No socks in strange places.

  “You gotta see my view.” He walked to the window, gesturing for her to follow. He slid the screen up, sat on the windowsill, swung his legs around and over it, and scrambled out onto the roof. He sat down and patted the spot next to him. “Come on out.”

  “Uh—” Carly sat on the sill with her feet firmly on the floor, and looked down three stories to the weathered picnic table below. “That’s okay.”

  It was the end of dusk. The trees made a thick, leafy silhouette against the orange-pink sky.

  “It’s perfectly safe. I wouldn’t let you if it wasn’t.”

  “I believe you.” She did. The roof’s slant wasn’t steep. It looked like it would actually be hard to fall off. But she couldn’t talk her heart out of pounding, or her head out of imagining herself splayed out on the table below. She would have liked nothing more than to be sitting on the spot where his hand was. But “I just can’t,” she said. “At least not right now.”

  He scooted back toward the window, and she thought he was going to try to talk her into it, but he didn’t. Instead he leaned against the window frame and pointed.

  “See the clearing over there?”

  She followed his pointing hand to the woods across the road.

  “Not really. All I see are trees.”

  “Ah. That’s ’cause you’re looking through city eyes.”

  “City eyes?”

  “Yeah. I had city eyes before we moved up here full-time. Used to all be one big green blur.”

  “That’s pretty much what I’m seeing. A big green blur.”

  “Seeing in the woods is like seeing in the dark. Takes a while. But once your eyes get adjusted, you see so much more. Like I bet right now you can’t see those deer across the road.”

  She looked where he was pointing but still saw nothing but trees. She shook her head.

  “Just past that first row of trees, see? How the green blur opens up a bit?”

  “Nope. Still a blur.”

  It was true. It wasn’t a ploy to get Brian to move closer. But he did move closer. Close enough that he could put his hand on the underside of her cheek and direct her gaze. His fingertips were rough. Dried out from washing dishes and calloused from the strings of his bass. Carly liked the feeling of his scratchy skin on hers.

  “See?”

  “Yeah.” Now she saw the break in the trees. It ran parallel to the road and disappeared over a small hill.

  “That’s the footpath that runs over the aqueduct. Now look down, just to the right of that—” Gently he pulled her face downward, and she saw something moving under the trees. She squinted and three small deer came into focus. They were feeding on the grass and brush.

  “I see them!”

  It was getting darker. Fireflies sparkled among the trees.

  “Let’s go over there.”

  Ernestine’s living room had an incredibly low ceiling. Brian’s hair brushed against it as they made their way toward the kitchen, where his mother stood at the sink, her long red hair clipped in a haphazard twist. Between the sound of running water and the radio blaring a baseball game, she didn’t hear them until Brian half-yelled, “Hey, Ma. What’s the score?”

  Without turning around, she said, “It’s 4-2 Chicago. A-Rod dropped a pop fly that should have been a double play.”

  Brian scowled, shook his head. “That guy better start earning his salary.”

  She turned around, a huge head of dark green and purple lettuce in her hand. She was pretty. Younger than Carly’s mother. Or maybe just better rested. Freckly and blue-eyed. Brian and Avery must get the dark from their father’s side.

  “Tell me about it.”

  She held
the lettuce over the sink and shook out the water before placing it next to two smaller heads on a blue-checked kitchen towel spread on the counter. On the other side of the sink there was a handbasket full of tomatoes, cucumbers, and various leafy, stalky things. Next to that, a colander of dark red cherries. She reached over and turned the game down to where the crowd’s roar sounded like static.

  “So?” She smiled at Carly. It was the same broad smile as her sons’, but with some sadness visible in her eyes. “You going to introduce us? Or do I have to do it myself?”

  “Oh, sorry. Ma, this is Carly. Carly, this is my ma, Sheryl Quinn.”

  “Hey, Carly,” she said, offering her cool, slightly damp hand.

  “Hi, Sheryl.”

  “Carly works at the camp with us.” He stepped over to the counter and grabbed a handful of cherries. “Wow,” he said, tipping his head toward the basket of vegetables. “Did you pick all this?”

  “Yup,” Sheryl said, smiling. “I think we finally foiled the rabbits.”

  “We did, huh? ”

  “Yup. Thanks to the brilliant fence building of my sons, of course.” Sheryl reached a hand up to Brian’s shoulder. Brian put an arm around his mother’s waist and squeezed her close.

  Carly found herself blushing at this display of mother-son affection, and she looked down so they could have their private moment. But when she looked up, Sheryl and Brian were leaning back against the counter together, each still with an arm around the other. Each smiling at her.

  “So, Carly, you from around here?”

  Carly shook her head. “The city.”

  Brian reached out and dangled a cherry in front of Carly’s mouth by its stem. She was too embarrassed to bite standing there talking to his mother and instead took it with her hand.

  “What part?”

  Carly put the cherry in her mouth, letting the cool, smooth skin rest on her tongue for a second before biting. It was juicier and sweeter than any she’d had all summer. Possibly her whole life.