Alex swatted her away. “Not ’til everyone’s here.”
Finally she unveiled five brand-new Polaroid cameras with straps. One for each team. Casey and I exchanged a quick look. I wondered how much they’d cost her. But money never seemed to be a problem for Alex. I didn’t understand Alex’s work, a fusion of natural materials—sand, pinecones, stones—with garish slashes of acrylic in primary colors. To my untrained eye it looked pretty bad. But somewhere in America, people appreciated sand art.
“Something new this week,” Alex said. “Half the things aren’t things, they’re places or stuff to do. You’ll take pictures for proof.” Alex, so flighty and fluttery most of the time, was in control on Saturday nights. “You know the rules. Back by ten.”
She passed out the clues. Since the last week of June they’d been written in couplets. As everyone huddled with their teams Casey whispered, “She must’ve spent five hundred bucks on those cameras. This is officially getting out of control.”
* * *
The first summer I’d been entranced, so proud of how we’d managed to upend CDL High’s social scene. I’d recorded details in my diary. Team members. What they’d found and how they’d scored, who’d played it too safe, who’d rushed inside a minute past deadline. I’d glue-sticked in the clue sheets.
It was different now. Sometimes I remembered to grab a list from the floor at the end of the night. But just as often, I forgot.
I was still in awe of what Alex had created. Kids were even coming from other schools. The number of players continued to grow—as did the length of the after-party, and the number of beers in the refrigerator. (Only for after, Alex said. Only for after and only beer and no hard drugs and absolutely no driving. Though the week before a guy on my team had brought a flask of vodka, swigged it between clues. She also said, If your parents find out they’ll kill me.)
So maybe I wasn’t as enthralled as I’d been in the early days. But there were still moments of pure exhilaration for me, running around in the dark. It felt like we’d wrested something away from the Collier boys—their swagger, the way they strode around Coeur-de-Lune like young gods.
Casey was over the scavenger hunts, and had been for a long time.
For Casey Saturday nights, once more than fun, had become more than annoying. She worried about what would happen if someone snitched about the after-parties, or worse, if some stupid kid got alcohol poisoning on Alex’s watch. Coeur-de-Lune society wasn’t particularly fond of Alex to begin with.
Casey objected to the scavenger hunts for other, more personal reasons, but these were harder for her to articulate. She said Alex had lost it, that she was determined to ingratiate herself with a bunch of high school students because she didn’t know how to relate to adults. It was creepy, she said. Unhealthy. For a long time, I resisted Casey’s dark view, believing it was tainted by more than a little jealousy.
But when Alex started pulling those brand-new Polaroid R-2000s from the bag, I had to admit Casey was right. The scavenger hunts meant something to Alex I couldn’t quite understand, and it worried me, too.
* * *
“Come on, hurry up,” Allison Naitland yelled back as we walked—walked, it was unheard of—the last half mile to the house. Allison was approaching her first scavenger hunt with the same intensity that had propelled her to the regional Constitution Team championship in May.
Casey flipped her off behind her back. “I’m so done with this.”
“I have an idea,” I said. “If you want a break from the hunts.”
“Explain.”
“My mother’s church retreat is coming up in August, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. I love retreat week. I actually get to set foot in your house.”
“So we’ll say it doesn’t make sense to have the hunt that night because you’re sleeping at my place.”
“She’d probably organize the game without me. Definitely the party.”
“Casey. She wouldn’t. Anyway, I’ll invite her for dinner that Saturday.”
“Okay. But when your mom finds out my mom was in your house she’ll make the priest come over with a cross and holy water to disinfect it.”
“That’s Catholics,” I said, laughing. “Anyway, I think maybe we should just talk to Alex, don’t you? There’s got to be a way to explain without hurting her.”
Casey half closed her eyes, shook her head: Not worth it.
I knew she was right. I couldn’t think of a kind way to tell Alex that the Saturday nights she planned so carefully had become less than fun for Casey. There was a fragility to Alex that neither of us quite knew how to navigate.
We were the last team back. When we walked in Kip Soscia’s all-boys team was boasting about how they’d made it home before everyone else, with nine items, even though they’d wasted time skinny-dipping at Jade Cove.
Great, Casey mouthed, and I smiled in sympathy.
Alex was verifying everyone’s booty in the kitchen behind me, laying items and photos out on The Shipwreck’s narrow counter. I caught her voice over the din. “You boys.”
Only a teasing murmur and a low laugh, but something in the tone made me look back to where Alex stood, the nucleus within a cell of smiling, bare-chested, wet-haired boys. Alex handed Kip Soscia a Polaroid, shaking her head at him. Playfully scolding. He grinned and stuffed the white square down his jeans pocket. Alex had only asked each team to bring back a picture of themselves on the sand. But I guessed Kip and his friends had taken a more pornographic approach—and Alex had laughed it off when presented with the evidence.
I glanced across the room at Casey, relieved she hadn’t noticed.
When the party moved outside, Casey stayed in, curled on the sofa with her eyes closed. A protest of sorts, or another test. One Alex was failing; any time Alex’s laughter rose up above the others’ Casey stiffened.
I wandered to the fireplace mantel, sweeping up the purple nubbins from the vase of dried lavender Alex kept there. “You okay?”
“Dandy.”
I’d thought we were alone in the house but there was a sputter of male laughter from the staircase. I couldn’t see who it was; they were hidden below the angled pine half wall that ran up the stairs.
Casey muttered, “Isn’t it time for their mommies to pick them up?”
“I’ll ask them to go outside.”
It was Kip and Mark Engles. Two of the big winners from the skinny-dipping team. They were hunched on the third step, a small collection of Polaroids laid out between them like trading cards. I hovered over their bent heads, and they were so occupied, studying and sorting, they didn’t notice me. Their hair, damp from the lake, emitted a puppyish smell.
The first photo I saw was of three boys knee-deep in dark water, mooning the camera. Their butts looked sort of sad and undernourished in the harsh flash.
It could have been much worse. It wasn’t frontal, at least. But one boy had his legs apart slightly more than his friends did. I leaned closer, holding my breath, and noticed there was a ruddy curve below the shadowy cleft of his buttocks that made the picture less innocent.
There was a photo of Alex, too, in her pink peasant blouse. Her heart-shaped, laughing face was turning away from the camera, and she’d extended one arm in graceful protest. It was taken in the kitchen before the game, because Alex had her hair in the low ponytail she’d worn earlier in the night.
Kip picked up the skinny-dipping photo and hovered it facedown over the Alex one, lowering and raising it, crying in grotesque falsetto, “Uh, uh. Fuck yeah. More.”
“You wish.” I let the lavender buds in my hand fall to the steps so I could scoop up the pictures. “Is this all of them?” I spoke quietly, peeking over the staircase wall. Casey was still curled on the couch, thank God.
The boys, drunk and shocked to realize I’d been looming over them, nodded.
&nbs
p; “Swear to God?” I said. “I’ll find out if you’re lying. And...” And what? I’d tell my parents? Their parents, who’d shut down the parties?
“I’ll tell Alex,” I whispered. “And I’ll make sure you’re never allowed back here.”
“Swear,” Mark said. “This is all of them.”
“Go,” I said.
They stood unsteadily, still stunned, leaving me holding the contraband like a school principal. Mark opened the front door, contrite. I enjoyed a heady moment of victory at their obedience.
I wasn’t just the principal. I was the party’s 120-pound bouncer. Alex’s savior. Casey’s protector.
But Kip looked back, checking that Casey was still on the couch. He smiled, leaned close. “Anytime you want to skip the game...”
“What?” I said.
Mark punched Kip in the arm, yanked him out the door. “Nothing. He’s had three beers.”
“What’s going on?” Casey called.
Quickly, I sifted through the small stack. Two more skinny-dipping photos, neither as bad as the first one I’d seen.
Another of Alex in her pink blouse in the kitchen, laughing and feinting at the camera with her slender arm.
And one picture that made me sink down onto the bottom step.
Of course. That odd, snickering emphasis on the you in Kip’s offer.
Anytime you want to skip the game.
“What was that about?” Casey called, walking over.
I was concealed by the low staircase wall and had just enough time to stuff the photo down my back shorts pocket, to rearrange my features into a mask of normalcy, before Casey appeared at the base of the stairs.
“What are those?” she said, nodding at the stack of pictures on the step.
“Just idiots. Idiots naked. They took pictures of the skinny-dipping.” I handed her the Polaroids.
All except the one in my back pocket, in which Alex was up against the big fir behind the house, kissing Stewart Copley.
His skinny body pressed close, his hands tangled in her red hair. Awkward, nervous Stewart Copley in his olive green canvas jacket. He was a year younger than me. He’d been in my precalc class. His jaw was always raw and rashy from clumsy shaving.
He could have caught Alex off guard. Kip or whoever had taken the picture, returning early from the hunt, might have gotten lucky, pressing the red button seconds before Alex pushed Stewart away.
She could have been joking around.
But it didn’t look like it, and I wasn’t about to show Casey. She was furious enough about the images in her hand. “Goddamn it,” she said, pushing past me and taking the stairs two at a time.
When I entered her bedroom she was already hard at work with the scissors. She cut the pictures in pieces, tore off each segment’s top layer, and rubbed at the sticky middle. Until the only traces left of the bare-assed boys in Jade Cove, and laughing Alex in her pink blouse, were the black smudges on her fingers and the pile of curly plastic shreds in her trash basket.
She threw the scissors at the wall, creating a deep pockmark. A spider against the white paint.
“Those boys watch her like she’s a dirty joke,” she said. “You know she doesn’t have one female friend her age in this town? Not one.”
I could feel the photograph of Alex and Stewart Copley through the thin cotton of my shorts. “She didn’t ask them to do it. She wasn’t swimming with them.”
No. She was back here, doing God knows what with another boy.
Stewart had stayed behind with Alex, opting out of the scavenger hunt. By invitation?
I thought over recent Saturdays, trying to remember if there was always a boy who ran to home base early, or didn’t play at all. But maybe Kip was just being filthy. Jealous, because he wished it had been him pressing Alex against the tree.
“She wasn’t with them,” Casey said. “But she’s letting things go too far.”
I sat on the floor next to her, touched her knee. “We can talk to her.”
“Like that’ll help.”
“And you got rid of the pictures. Without them it’s just rumors.”
“Rumors are enough in this town.”
“Would you rather have a mother like mine? Bake sales and bible study?”
“Stop defending her!”
“I’m not, I’m only saying you shouldn’t worry so—”
“You can’t see her, Laur! You never will.”
But I could see her. I saw her, and perhaps felt a small, vicarious thrill at her daring, at becoming the custodian of her secrets.
* * *
When Casey finally fell asleep I tiptoed down the hall to Alex’s studio. The light was on, and Alex was looking over some flat lake stones she’d gathered. They were spread out on one of her sawhorse tables, in columns sorted by color, darkest to lightest.
She turned with a warm smile. “Can’t sleep, sweetie?”
I shut the door behind me gently and joined her by the table. “What are you going to do with these?”
“No idea,” she said, laughing, tapping a stone the dirty gray of a rain cloud.
“I’m sure it’ll be great,” I said. “So I...I need to tell you something.”
“Are you okay? Is it Casey?”
I shook my head. “She’s fine. We both are. It’s... Were you joking around with Stewart Copley tonight? The thin boy in the green jacket. Did he try to kiss you or something?”
She had the grace to flush, to close her eyes.
“It’s okay, I won’t tell anybody, but a couple of the other boys...took a picture. I got it back. Want to see it?”
She shook her head, eyes still closed. “I’m mortified.” Her lids fluttered open. “It was a stupid, stupid thing to do. He surprised me.”
“I thought it was something like that.”
“I stopped him before it went too far. Of course I stopped him. It’s just that he’s so shy. So sweet.”
“I know.”
“I knew it was a mistake the second it was over. And it was just a second, honey. We’d been talking while we waited. He wasn’t in the mood for the game, he said. He’s having a hard time at home and...” She rubbed her temples. “Oh, God, tell me Casey doesn’t know.”
“No. I didn’t tell her. She was already so mad about that team going skinny-dipping. The town might not understand...and... Anyway, you should talk to her tomorrow.”
She nodded. “I’d never—”
“I know. Just...maybe...” I couldn’t meet her eyes. She was so wan and sad in the unflattering light of her studio lamp, I almost didn’t say the next part. I didn’t want to be like the church people I loathed, the ones who judged her.
But there was Casey, sleeping in the next room, trusting me even though I’d lied to her about the picture. I had to make my lie okay.
I said it fast. “Just be more careful.”
“Of course.”
“We don’t have to talk about it anymore.” I turned away.
She gathered a handful of my T-shirt in one hand, pulled me toward her. “No. We do, Laur. Let me say this.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I do. Listen. You know how Casey makes her jokes, saying I have Peter Pan syndrome. How I’m trying to redo my teenage years. Because of my...how I was raised?”
I nodded.
“I’m not saying it’s a good excuse.” Her eyes were wide, contrite. She clutched the fabric of my T-shirt with both hands, leaning forward on her stool like she was praying. “I guess what I’m saying is I’ll do better from now on.”
I smiled. “Good.”
“Now go get some sleep.” She tapped my nose.
I was near the door, my back to her, when she spoke again.
“Laura. The picture?”
“I’ll get rid of it.”
“My sweet girl. Thanks for understanding.”
* * *
I didn’t want to embarrass her further, so I didn’t bring it up again.
And I had my own theory about why Alex had fallen into the kiss with Stewart. It wasn’t just because she had uptight parents and couldn’t go to parties when she was a teenager, no matter what she said.
That could be part of it. But Alex was also a little lost, a little scared right now. Casey was growing up and would be gone in a year; before Alex passed out the lists tonight Casey’d spent half an hour talking to a girl whose sister went to UCLA. Grilling her about housing and majors and the best places to live. Alex had overheard and joined in, forced a smile. She had to be sad about it.
So Alex was clutching at whatever was closest. Even skinny Stewart Copley.
The next morning after I finished cleaning up from the church bake sale, I cut up the picture in the dark Sunday School room, using stubby purple child’s scissors. I sliced the Polaroid into pieces smaller than my pinky nail so that Alex’s transgression was reduced, on each sliver, to a color: the pink of her blouse, the green of Stewart’s jacket.
I took perverse satisfaction in disposing of the scraps. I tossed a few down the white feminine-hygiene canister in a ladies’ room stall, a couple in the leather waste bin of the library, two in the kitchen garbage, one in the big granite trash can behind the sanctuary, near the pansy-lined path to the cemetery. My mother had raised the six hundred dollars for that trash can.
Alex knew she’d screwed up. And summer would be over before we knew it.
26
42nd day of camp
12:30 a.m.
The musician’s house was a few towns away from camp, on the other side of the mountain. She recognized the gas station they passed when they pulled off the main road.
It was the same Arco Quik-Stop she’d run into for Cokes and Fritos, the afternoon back in June when she and her mom had driven here from San Francisco.
Might be our last chance for decent junk food, her mom had joked, and they’d giggled, imagining the deprivations of camp: powdered eggs and Tang. Like astronauts, she had continued, laughing, making it sound like an adventure. Not realizing that camp really was another planet, a terrible one. She couldn’t have known.
The Summer List Page 18
