Spin the Sky

by MacKenzie, Jill;

  “There’s one!” I shout, as if Rose hasn’t seen it. I peek over my shoulder. The kids Rose’s age are gone, replaced by a family I know I’ve seen in Deelish before. But they’re doing their own thing and not watching us at all, so I relax my shoulders and just let my insides feel the excitement at the sight of that clam. Just as I’m about to pounce on it with the narrow, curved metal blade of my shovel, Rose grabs it from me.

  “No, Mags. The gun! Use the gun!”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  I hesitate. Mom never used a clam gun. In fact, she always said that real clammers—like her mom and her mom’s mom—never, ever used clam guns. And when George’s mom gave me the gun last week, I mentioned this fact to Rose.

  “That’s because they didn’t exist back then,” Rose had said, flashing her sharp blue eyes at me. “If clam guns had been around then, trust me, every member of the Woodson family would have used them.”

  But she’s lying and we both know it. Mom never would have used one. She liked the simple things in life, like brushing with normal toothbrushes instead of electric ones, and making fritters instead of buying them at Miller’s. There’s just no way she would have used one and she didn’t use one the last time we were here. I remember it clearly. Two years ago, on the first day of Season. She had just gotten out and was feeling good, and looking good, too. She even went along with the whole charade, the mock fight me and Rose engaged in every year to be the one to use the shovel first. She loved the thing. Treated it like it was the freaking Hope Diamond. Or better. Like the stuff she pumped through her veins for happiness. No clam guns involved. No way. No how.

  “The gun, Mags, use the gun!” Rose shouts again.

  I drop to my knees and thrust the pipe deep into the sand with all my might. Dance has kept me thin but strong. Much stronger than you’d think just by looking at me. Without much effort, the gun makes suction, and I pull, pull, pull the tube out of the sand.

  “I don’t know if it worked,” I say, breathless.

  Rose takes the gun from me and twists the handle to release the suction. A pile of caked mud and sand tumbles out the tube at our feet, covering the toes of our boots. She tosses the gun to the ground, bends down on one knee, and sifts through the mound with her bare hands. I stand next to her, praying in the only way I know how that my mom’s old shovel won’t be replaced so easily.

  And then it happens. Rose jumps up and screams at the tops of her lungs, “Would you look at the size of this sucker? That took a total of ten seconds! Magnolia, would you look at this guy? It’s probably the biggest one anyone’s caught here all morning!”

  “Let me see.”

  She tosses a heap of sand at me and I run my gloved hands through it. Sure enough, there it is, and it’s huge. Most likely the biggest razor that anyone’s going to see all day. A few feet from us, the two little girl members of that family tug on their mom’s jacket and point at our score, jumping up and down, celebrating our good fortune with us. Suddenly, the gun looks brighter. Shinier. Like, not only are we going to pull more clams than we ever have before, but we’ll show every one of them that we don’t have to do it her way—do anything her way. Show them we can be Woodsons, without being her.

  “Hey.”

  The hoarse voice startles me. I lose my balance and then catch myself with one hand, digging it into the sand. My head shoots up. The mom part of that family is here, towering over me and Rose, frowning at us. “You’re those girls,” she says.

  “What?” I stutter the word.

  “You’re her daughters, aren’t you.” She crosses her arms. It’s not a question.

  I stand up. “Whose daughters?”

  “You were there when it happened.” She turns to Rose. “I know you were. Everyone says so.”

  “I didn’t—” Rose starts. “I wasn’t—” She closes her eyes. Sits back on her haunches. Swallows, and then again. Shakes her head but in a totally different way from the lady.

  “Leave us alone,” I say.

  “No. You leave us alone,” she says. “This is a good town. A safe town. You’ve got no place here.”

  I get up and point to her bucket. Inside, she’s got one pathetic clam. “Looks like you don’t belong on this beach, either.” Behind her, her girls are watching her. Watching us. No matter what she says—what they all say—we’re not the ones that put that needle into Colleen’s arm. But Mom is. To them, it’s the same damn thing.

  About fifty feet away, Mark stands up from where he’s sitting on fold-up beach chairs with Abby and Quinn, their own guns and pails plopped in the sand. Their eyes are all on us, giving us these sympathetic kind of looks. But it’s Mark that pushes off his chair and strolls toward us, his arms crossed against his chest. His shoulders are back and square. Even from here, I can see how dark his eyes are.

  “Mags, you guys okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I say. “We’re fine.”

  But he doesn’t stop walking. I shake my head. It slows him down. I don’t need him to come here and rescue us. I thought he was mad at us too, but it doesn’t look that way anymore. It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing he could do for us, even if he wanted to.

  The woman glares at me and then Mark. She turns her back on us and picks up both kids, one in each arm. Mumbles something to her weaselly looking husband, who didn’t budge when Mark jumped up. The four of them stomp off to the far side of the beach, as far as they can get without smacking into the cliffs.

  “Magnolia,” Mark says.

  I wave him away. I am fine. We’re fine. We took care of this like we always do. He stands there a second but when I don’t say anything else, he jogs back to Abby and Quinn, and the three of them resume whatever they were talking about before we Woodsons made things interesting.

  I put one hand on Rose’s shoulder. She opens her eyes. Still clutching Mom’s shovel with one hand, I try to smile. I shake the gun in front of her because maybe it will make her happy like she was a few minutes ago. “You were right about the gun. I can’t believe how fast it is.”

  She blinks a few times, the spell mostly broken. It should relieve me. It doesn’t. She can’t keep zoning in and out when it suits her. That’s what Mom did. Participated in life only when she felt like it.

  “We’re going to have a feast tonight,” she says. “You and me. When I’m off work, we’ll make a big batch of fritters, and I’ll get some beer bread from Millers and—”

  “I work today at six.”

  “Oh. I guess we could do it before that.”

  “I have dance before that.” I pretend to check my watch. Across the beach, the woman chases her screeching kids, tackling them with tickles. My jaw flexes. “I have to be at Katina’s soon. You know how she is about us being late.”

  “But it’s Sunday. You don’t usually practice on Sundays.”

  “Now I do. Katina thinks George and I should bump rehearsals up to seven days a week, morning and night, to get ourselves in prime shape this summer.” I stare at my feet. Unlike the other kids around here with college plans and backpacking-across-Europe plans, I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with my life come fall. “I won’t be home until at least ten, but you could make the fritters without me.”

  “Oh.” Rose stares at our clam for a long time. I watch her gaze dart toward the family, halting just feet from where they are. Stopped by the wall she’s building to keep every one of them out.

  She walks a few steps toward the lapping sea and rinses off the remaining globs of mud, tossing the clam into our metal bucket. “I guess you’ll just have to eat when you come home.” Her smile sags and my insides ache. “I’ll save some for you. It’s no biggie.”

  But it is, and we both know it. That’s not how it’s done on the first day of clam-digging season. On the first day, you’re supposed to flour-n-fry your first batch of clams together. As a family. Like that family. Like any freaking family in Summerland but ours.

  But even when we had one, ours was never like th
e kind you see on TV. Rose and I were both born when Mom was back on the streets in Portland, “working” for money to buy the kind of things she needed to keep her alive.

  When we were little, we used to beg and plead for Mom to tell us what our daddy was like. If he was tall or short or fat or thin or if he liked working indoors or preferred building things in the cool, salty air, like the air in Summerland. As we got older and our relentless pleas turned to the occasional careful inquiry, Mom still refused to talk about why one of her daughters was tall and lean with caramel hair while the other was short and curvy with black hair that swooshed around, silently, like total darkness. Still, even back then we always sort of knew that it takes two pretty different sets of genes to make sisters look this opposite.

  Sure, we had Mom for a lot of our years, and Grandma, too, before she died. But we still knew what was missing.

  “Come on,” Rose says. “Let’s get out of here.” Rose grabs Mom’s shovel, still tucked under my arm, and drops it at her feet. I go to pick it up but she says, “Leave it for the tourists. They need it more than we do.”

  I grab the magic gun and walk—half a step behind her—away from the shore where the tide’s already withdrawing from us. I glance over my shoulder at the discarded shovel that lies in the sand, but I don’t go back for it.

  I’m sort of grateful for my sister’s commute to Portland. I’m almost glad she’ll spend nine hours working her lame job at Urban Outfitters because most of the “fine Summerland folks” wouldn’t dare hire a Woodson girl. Because I know that when she’s gone, I’ll sneak back out here and pick up the shovel.

  It’s worth nothing to the other clammers around here with its rusted tip and rotting handle, so I know no one will take it. And it means nothing to Rose, either—that much is clear. But I’ll take it anyway. Because when I win that ten grand and make our town famous, no one’s gonna care that the shovel I’m using to pull my clams used to belong to the biggest disgrace Summerland’s ever known.

  THREE

  George presses his nose against the glass case that holds our newest flavors: Mac ’n’ Cheese and Buttered Popcorn. “Come on, Magnolia, just one taste. Please?”

  I toss my ice cream scoop in the container of warm water and wipe my hands on my apron. “No way. Forget it. You know the rules: no freebies during Season.”

  George’s bottom lip juts out and I can’t help but see four-year-old George all over again. It’s still adorable. He still knows it. “When did you become such a stickler for rules, anyway? It’s so not fun.” He clucks his tongue. “No fun at all.”

  “Your mom gave me strict instructions to limit you to one free cone a day, which you gobbled up precisely fourteen minutes ago. If she told me to limit the freaking president to one cone a day, I would. I like my job. And I need it.” I brush a piece of hair off my face. “We both know that.”

  George gets so pissed whenever I talk about the horrible job-hunt ordeal that Rose went through last summer. Old Lady Miller, who owns half of Main Street including Summerland Liquors, the Pic ’N’ Pay, and Xanadu Mini Golf, was not shy about letting Rose know that we Woodson women were not to be trusted.

  “Those people suck. My mom and dad know that. That’s why they hired you and would have hired Rose too, if she would have let them. They love you guys to pieces.”

  I squeeze my mouth shut, never having much to say about love when it doesn’t involve George and me living happily forever, bound by law in holy matrimony.

  He tilts his head to one side. “You’re nothing like her, you know.”

  George’s words make my limbs limp. He stares at me like he’s not just reading my mind, but reading my breath and blood, too. But when his phone bellows out some Taylor Swift song in lieu of a respectable ringtone, his eyes free themselves from mine all too easily.

  Fact: George has other friends. Unlike me—who only has Rose and him and sort-of Mark unless he’s with Abby and Quinn, which he almost always is, ever since they bonded over adjoining lockers in eighth grade and became this inseparable trio—George is friends with pretty much every other person in Summerland. So it’s not weird when other people call him like other people do. It’s only weird that he’s studying the name scrolling across the front of his phone like he’s studying for his SATs. Across the counter, I stand on my toes, straining to see what—or who—has captivated him this way. The name starts with an “M,” that much I’m sure of. And I’m positive the next letter is an “A.” But just as I’m trying to confirm the “R” that follows, and the “Y” that I’m pretty sure comes after that, George spins away from me so there’s no way I can see his screen. “Sorry, Mags. I gotta take this. Private call, if you get my drift.”

  I shrug my shoulders like I so don’t care and pretend to restock the taster-spoon cup. Pretend to wipe the back counter. Pretend that I’m doing anything but listening in on George’s “private” call.

  “Hey, babe,” he breathes into his phone. “I thought you might call tonight.”

  I watch as George’s whole body warps. He stands up straighter and puffs out his chest. Fiddles with a rogue piece of hair that’s fallen in front of his forehead. Licks his lips, after each and every sentence.

  Blinding stars blur my eyes. I mean, what’s happening here? Hey, babe? I’ve never known George to be a “hey, babe” kind of guy. And definitely not for any Mary.

  Competing with guys seemed bad enough. Impossible, really, when I don’t have that anatomy. But the possibility that I may have to fight for him with girls, too? My insides cringe while, five feet away from me, George is all over his phone, cupping his hand around it so that his words are totally inaudible to me. But I can see his face. His eyes are all twinkly and dancing while his mouth stretches into a grin, true and beautiful and alive.

  “Really?” he says. “You’re not seriously going to do that, are you?”

  He pauses. One. Two. Three seconds. Smiles again, his eyes rounding and widening and clearing like a June moon in Summerland. “Promises, promises!” he says in this awful, awful singsongy voice. And every time Mary says something to him on the other end, George giggles.

  I creep back to the tables and feign like I’m scraping old gum from under them, needing to get closer to George and that conversation. But he knows me and knows what I’m up to. He wanders over to the farthest end of the shop, almost totally out of earshot. Almost.

  “No way. I’ve got to see you before you do.” He slaps his phone off, stares at it for another two seconds with flushed cheeks.

  “Who was that?”

  “No one,” he says. “What were we talking about before?”

  I shrug. Slink down, crouching behind the counter so he can’t see my own cheeks, burning like a clambake fire. “Something about me not wanting to get axed on account of your freeloading butt, I think.”

  George leans over the counter to flash me one of his killer grins. “How many times do I have to tell you? You’re not going to get fired for giving me the occasional tester. Or for anything else for that matter. My parents love you like you’re their own.”

  “You don’t know that.” I check the cake order sheet, hiding from him and that hideous phone call, still wafting through the air like the world’s greatest fart. I touch my left shoulder to make sure my pillowcase piece is still securely tucked under my bra strap. Then I hoist myself on the back countertop and rest my feet on the ledge below. We’ve been totally packed in here since my shift started at six, but now the place is empty except for George, and me, and eighteen delicious cream-and-sugar varieties. Which is a good thing because whenever he’s here while I’m working I get all rattled and thrown off my game.

  The truth of it is, half of me wants him here, wants him anywhere I am. But the other half of me wants him gone so I can put my head down and work, undistracted by the kinds of things I thought couldn’t change. Her name pricks my eyeballs, like needles—no, knives. Mary. Ugh. Mary.

  “Okay,” George says. “I’ll make you a
deal.”

  Armed with a bottle of Windex, I push myself off the countertop and begin wiping the tables at the far corner of the shop.

  He follows on my heels. “You want to hear it or not?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m listening.”

  “If you give me one more cone, the plain kind, not even a waffle one, I promise never to ask you for another one. And I’ll give you the one thing on earth that’s going to make you happy.”

  I stop dead in my tracks. Turn around, slowly. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know. The thing that’ll make this all go away. I’ll go to Mayor Chamberlain’s house. I’ll tell him you had nothing to do with Colleen’s—”

  “George, no.”

  “Why? I’ll tell him Rose had nothing to do with it, too. Tell him that he can’t ostracize you guys like that forever.”

  “It’s not even him that does it.” I swallow. “He probably doesn’t even know. He’s been gone since it happened, remember?”

  “He’s back.”

  “What?”

  “I heard my dad say it yesterday.” He shrugs. “Or maybe it was a couple days ago.”

  I shake my head, stunned. “Even if you go, he won’t listen to you. He probably won’t even open the door.”

  “He will too. I’ve known him since I was like twelve.”

  “She was his daughter. You think he actually cares how anyone in this place treats us? She died in our house, because our mother gave her the drugs. Got her hooked. Killed her. That’s all that matters to them.” I kick a tester spoon that’s fallen to my feet across the floor. “Everyone loves Mayor Chamberlain. And they loved Colleen, too.”

  “Um, hello? Are you actually working here, or are you like on a break or something?”

  Both of our heads shoot up in time to see the same little freshman from Katina’s, smooshed between two other girls I recognize, gawking at me. I can’t believe I didn’t hear the bell ring when they came in. I hate it when I’m too preoccupied with George and all things George to hear a warning bell when it practically hits me over the head.