The Forgotten Hours(18)
8
The lake is calm. The moonlight shimmies over the water, turning it into acres of gray silk. Katie and Lulu slip down onto the spider-riddled bottom of a canoe and lie in the middle of the lake, bored and not bored, staring up at the sky. Tonight it is crisscrossed with highways of sparkling space debris, and they count the shooting stars aloud, one after another—five, ten, thirty flashes. The very next day they are both going home.
“You know, I’m gonna miss you, Katie Gregory,” Lulu says. When summer is over, Lulu returns to her world, and Katie returns to hers. They talk now and then on the phone, but it’s nothing like when they are together, breathing the same air, egging each other on. “It’s the pits, living upstate,” Lulu adds, grabbing the bottle of Campari from Katie and sitting up so she can take another swig. A dribble of pink liquid creeps down her chin.
On long afternoons just the previous summer, they were still hanging around the grown-ups, hoping to be taken out for a sail on a Sunfish, or playing with the toddlers in the grass. But this summer the girls have no interest in grown-ups or toddlers. Weeks earlier on the very first night Lulu arrived to stay, they stole an old bottle of Southern Comfort gathering dust at the back of the linen cupboard that doubled as a bar. They drank almost half of it and ate ice cream to mask the disgusting taste. It wasn’t the first time they’d had alcohol, but it was the first time they purposefully drank it in order to get drunk. When Katie threw up in the middle of the night after her parents had tumbled into bed, she and Lulu snorted with laughter, terrified of getting caught but incapable of suppressing the joyous frenzy of discovery. They became more and more daring. At night they smoked Katie’s mother’s stolen Pall Malls under a canopy of hemlocks as the adults drank and chatted on the deck not ten feet away. Once they sneaked out of the cabin in the early morning hours and headed back to the clubhouse, stealing a bottle of wine from behind the bar and then driving the Ford Falcon around the dirt roads with the lights off as dawn began edging its way over the trees.
And then, of course, they both discovered Jack Benson. And later what Katie remembers most about lying there in the canoe that night is how guilty she felt.
Jack has been gone for almost a week: tennis camp. The ache inside Katie is unbearable. The feel of his skin on hers, the warmth and slickness of his tongue in her mouth. She thinks: We’ve barely even gotten started, and now summer is over. She thinks: Why don’t I just say something to Lulu, just spit it out? If their bond is so fragile that Lulu would turn against her for this, then what does that mean? But Katie stays quiet not so much because their friendship seems precarious but because of the wild look in Lulu’s eyes as she spins her tales, dreaming up a future for herself. A look of sudden vulnerability that surprises Katie with its fierceness and then just as quickly disappears. Katie just can’t bring herself to hurt her friend’s feelings.
The last time she saw Jack, he and Katie were again alone, the morning after the first kisses in the shed. They were on the dusty gravel behind the clubhouse saying goodbye, tripping over each other in their eagerness to talk. He was telling her about his father, the unrelenting pressure to please him; the way he only asked his son questions so he could supply the answers himself, after a millisecond’s impatient pause. She’d talked about David, how she worried that he was too quiet. That her brother sometimes hid in his closet and talked or sang to himself. That her mom was always so withdrawn, and she thought maybe it was her fault somehow. She told Jack how she loved numbers, how each number seemed to her to have a color. Without warning and in full view of anyone who might be walking by, he bent his jutting shoulders forward and brushed her lips with his, a whisper of a kiss.
Then he pulled her close and kissed her again. His body felt good against hers, the promise of something unknown in the light press of his hip bones against her stomach. In that moment, Lulu did not exist.
Afterward, when Jack is gone, Katie still does not say anything to Lulu about what’s been happening. She doesn’t mention it the next day or the next. Six days and she hasn’t said a word. Yet Lulu talks about Jack every day that he is not there, fretting about when he will return, if he will return. Each time she talks about Jack and Katie doesn’t say anything about the kisses, the door to the truth closes further until it is all but locked. Not telling her friend is no different from lying.
The Campari is almost finished, and Lulu takes a last sip, letting the final drops fall into her mouth one by one. She smacks her lips together. “I’m supposed to start thinking about, like, vocational shit,” she says. “No one even asks if I want to go to college. Like, literally no one goes to college from Blackbrooke High.”
“You’re going to move. You’ll join a band,” Katie says, trying to imagine what it’s like to live in this area year round, in a town where there is nothing to do. She’s only once been to Lulu’s apartment, and it was a disaster. Paper-thin walls and a kitchenette with stained plastic counters. Neighbors smoking and drinking on the outside walkway, leaning heavily on the railing that overlooked Mission Street. The stories Lulu told late at night in the safety of the woods seemed exciting, novel, but the reality turned out to be something quite different. “You don’t need college to be a singer, right? Blackbrooke, it’s just, I don’t know. A blip. You’ll be out of here in no time. You’ll be on some stage in some cool place, and I’ll be your roadie.”