The Forgotten Hours(10)
Years later, an image of Jack still comes to Katie at unexpected moments: eddies of dust at his shins, the broad swing of his arm as it arcs through the air until his racket meets the ball. The stunning relentlessness of the movement. Is Jack at the root of the problem? She can’t shake the idea that this might be true.
The older boys: Kendrick, a sophomore at Ohio State. He is friends with Tommy, who’s running the snack bar in the clubhouse. Two of the boys Katie doesn’t know very well (she thinks they are the Hartney twins, from Pennsylvania), but the other one has been coming to the lake since he was little. Brad. His jeans are threadbare at the knees. He’s probably eighteen years old, with the build of a backstroke swimmer, his bare shoulders bulging with well-formed muscles, clearly defined under freckly skin.
Brad points to the rope dangling over the water. “You don’t think I can make that? You kidding me?” he asks Lulu.
“Said you were too chicken to jump for it, not that you couldn’t do it,” Lulu answers, not bothering to look up from her perch on the Adirondack chair.
Before she finishes her sentence, Brad stretches his arms out and makes a leap for the rope. His tanned feet drag on the water as he swings, head tilted back, and then he kicks to propel himself back onto the shore. He grabs onto the edge with his toes, and the other boys promptly start pushing him out over the water again.
Lulu refuses to look over at them. Instead, she studies her fingernails. Chipped yet somehow lovely. Her skin is deeply tanned, her arms covered in the finest minky hairs. She’s wearing jean shorts and a tight black T-shirt with a picture of Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. It seems as though she doesn’t care much what she looks like, as though the boys are of no interest to her. Katie knows this is not true. Earlier in the bunk room at the cabin, Lulu was almost in tears about the summer coming to an end. “I’ll probably never see Jack again,” she said. “This is it—this is my only chance.” She needs to find a way to make him notice her. Katie’s heart sinks, and she thinks, Yes, I know exactly what you mean.
“Hey!” Brad yells at his friends. “Traitors!”
The boys’ energy pummels Katie. They are raucous, their laughter full bellied. The way they play with each other makes them seem younger than they really are. Jack sits on a chair nearby, watching them. It’s hard to tell what he might be thinking. Is he one of them or not? To Katie, the college boys are like zoo animals: intriguing yet alien. Now as she watches them, she notices their big hands, the way their mouths open too wide when they laugh. The playful punching that is, at the same time, vaguely aggressive. For the first time ever, Katie feels part of the action, as though they are all the same species after all, recognizable to one another.
Lulu sits on the arm of the chair, one ankle angled over her knee. Suddenly she looks up. “Let’s show them,” she says to Katie, jumping up. “Round-robins! Okay, y’all, let the girls show you how it’s done.” She runs to the tree and beckons her friend, Come on!
The Adirondack chairs that line the lakeside are full of people sunning themselves. John and Charlie Gregory sit side by side reading paperbacks with water-stained pages. Katie’s brother, David, just ten years old, is playing with much younger kids over by the sand. His hair is too long for his age, an affectation his parents can’t get him to shed. He likes to let it hang over his eyes, thinking this makes him less visible. He’s one of the in-betweeners, a kid who has no playmates his age, but this summer he’s had fun ordering the little guys around, discovering his inner dictator.
The bigger boys start hooting at Lulu, as though playing with the rope is in some way daring or dramatic, when really it’s totally run of the mill. Katie understands this is because of the heat, because of the late-summer energy; they all feel time running out. Each minute brings them closer to the end of the season. Each day that passes marks a win for winter, a loss for freedom.
The girls pretend to be warming up, stretching their slender arms above their heads, rolling their shoulders back and forth one at a time, touching their toes. They keep poker faces; Katie looks to see whether Jack is watching them and catches his eye. She’s too scared to smile, in case Lulu notices.
Lulu lassoes the bigger rope that now dangles, inert, and pulls it toward her. After grabbing it, she takes a deep breath and begins running along the concrete lip of the lake. When she can’t go farther without letting go, she holds on tight and flings herself out in a wide arc over the water, heading back in a half circle under the overhanging branches till she reaches the water’s edge again and lands nimbly on the concrete where she started, completing the circle. Barely breaking stride, she slips the rope to Katie, who grabs it and runs, just as Lulu did, to the edge, swinging herself out over the water before landing again on the concrete.
Each time Lulu throws herself out over the water, her T-shirt lifts up and her tan belly flashes above her shorts. Again and again. All eyes are on them now—everyone’s, even Jack’s.
The girls are itching for more. Itching to do something, but what does that even mean? Katie and Lulu steal a bottle of Southern Comfort from the Big House. It’s disgusting, but the warmth firing through their bellies is good. Katie is upset with her mother (years later, she won’t remember why—isn’t she always upset with her mother for one reason or another?), and Lulu has been listening to her, nodding with great intent. “I read somewhere about filial cannibalism,” she says. “Heard of that?”