The Forgotten Hours(11)
“You mean, like, parents eating their kids?”
“Yeah, animals, like fish and voles and spiders and things.”
Katie laughs. Sometimes she wishes she could step into her friend’s shoes and see the world through her eyes. The whiskey is creating a glow inside her, a growing ember that makes her want to run or shout or swim. She’s lying on the grass near the boathouse. “So what are you trying to say? My mom hates me so much she wants to eat me?”
Lulu lies down on the ground next to her. “No, I’m saying parents are weird; everyone’s parents are weird. I’m saying you’re perfectly delicious. And I’m saying, let’s go have some fun and forget about everything else!” She always knows what to say, Lulu, and what she says always makes Katie feel better.
The sky is covered in stars like powdered sugar. A few of the teenagers are lingering around the dock. It’s a boring night, a weeknight. The minutes are ticking by steadily, but no one knows what to do. Katie can hear the bats swooping blindly overhead.
“Hey, listen,” Brad says finally, running his hands through his reddish hair. “Let’s take a ride in the Falcon. That’s yours, uh . . . right?” He looks at Katie but seems to have forgotten her name.
“Hands off, big guy. That’s her dad’s car,” Lulu says.
“Dibs on driving,” some other boy shouts.
“Wait—he’ll kill me,” Katie says, sitting up straighter. Her father keeps the keys in the glove compartment, but there is no way she can let anyone drive it. He adores that car.
“Don’t rain on my parade, man,” Brad says.
“No way, José,” Lulu interrupts. The smoke from her cigarette is gauzelike, diffusing around her lips. She won’t let them bulldoze her, and she won’t let Katie be bulldozed either. How many times has Lulu lightly placed an arm around her friend’s shoulders, not in a possessive or domineering way but so that Katie becomes infused with a stronger sense of self, as though by osmosis? Over the years, Lulu’s protectiveness has been both shield and sword. “That car’s a stick shift, and I’ll bet not a single one of you knows how to drive a stick. Am I right?”
Jack drains a water bottle filled with vodka and Gatorade. He chucks it on the ground by his feet. “Don’t you wish summer would never end?” he asks no one in particular. “Like, what the hell good is winter?”
“You go skiing and stuff, don’t you?” Lulu tugs on her T-shirt, stretching it over her rounded breasts. All summer she’s been trying to trap Jack into admitting how rich he is. She pretends to sniff at it, but she’s impressed. It’s her way of flirting. Katie, on the other hand, flirts by ignoring him. Her face has eagerness written all over it, she’s sure, whereas Lulu is so damn cool. “Don’t you hit the slopes in Aspen or wherever?”
“Sugarbush,” Kendrick says.
“That place sucks,” Brad says. “You gotta go out west.”
Lulu turns her head toward Katie. “You hear that? We gotta go ‘west.’” She pantomimes quotation marks with her fingers. “Once we’ve got our pad in Manhattan and our big jobs, we’ll take a ski vacation every winter. What d’you say? Head to Vale or Vancouver or wherever it is the rich and famous hang out.”
“Nah, the Bahamas,” Katie says, falling into her friend’s reveries with ease. “We’ll go somewhere warm.” They’ve talked about their lives until their eyes were heavy and their throats dry. Katie’s life is boring—what excitements have ever befallen her? But Lulu is full of stories she spins idly as they lie side by side in the woods or stacked on bunks in the cabin. She has a great-uncle who lives in Paris and cousins in the Deep South. Friends from school who hunt all winter long and clean and mount their own prey. She recounts high school intrigues that leave Katie short of breath, as though she’s devouring the end of a romance novel. When Lulu talks, it’s best to let her tales unwind uninterrupted. Her voice is a cashmere blanket of multihued scraps. And they talk about the future too. In Lulu’s telling, the future assumes a promising pellucid shine: she knows exactly what she wants. To get out of Blackbrooke. To be a famous singer. To have a pair of shoes named after her. But she also listens as Katie half-heartedly tries on the various possibilities her future holds, showing no impatience with her friend’s lack of certainty. Whatever Katie dreams up, Lulu believes it can come true.
“Tahiti,” Jack says. “Or Bora-Bora.”
Katie looks over at him and thinks he might be smiling at her. He kissed her a few nights ago—quickly, badly, in the boathouse. No one saw, and it almost seems as if it never even happened. The grass prickles her thighs. It is so hot, even at night. “Saint John’s . . .” she says. She stands up and pats her backside to get rid of the itchy shreds. There’s music coming from the clubhouse, some terrible eighties tune.
“We can take a yacht to Corfu. I’ll be captain,” says Lulu, standing up as well. “You and me, girl. You and me.”
5
Katie is eight years old. There’s a girl in the aisles at Walmart wearing a pair of dirty dungarees that drag on the floor behind her, trailing threads. But it isn’t her clothing that catches Katie’s eye; it’s that she seems so completely happy all by herself, surrounded by teens with violet rashes on their cheekbones and old ladies dimpled with fat, leaning heavily on their shopping carts. Katie is both bored and anxious. Her mother is supposed to be buying conditioner, but she’s gotten caught up looking for something else. This happens a lot. Her mother will often linger blankly while doing a chore, her open eyes strangely shuttered. For once she’s taken Katie out to run errands in Blackbrooke, just the two of them, and yet where is she?