The Rest of the Story(37)

“Hey,” Roo called out. I turned. “See you later?”

I told myself it was just what they said here. And yet. “Yeah,” I said. “See you.”

I had to jog to catch up with Bailey, leaving me breathless. Finally I reached her, the lights of Campus dimmer now behind us. “Hey,” I said. “You okay?”

“No,” she replied, still walking. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

We walked in silence for a bit, passing the back of the Tides—PRIVATE! GUESTS ONLY! said several signs—as well as the boardwalk, which was pretty much deserted. It was clear that North Lake and Lake North had many differences, but neither was a late-night town.

“I wasn’t going to take the boat home, just so you know,” she said suddenly as a gated neighborhood called Bellewether came up on our left.

I didn’t say anything.

“Seriously! I wasn’t.” She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “I figured Roo would bring them over, Jack would take our boat back, and we’d catch a ride with someone. It would have worked out fine if he’d just not been such a jerk. But lately he’s always a jerk because my dad is putting all this pressure on him about taking over the Station.”

A car was coming toward us now, moving slowly, headlights bright in my eyes. I started to move out of the road, but then it turned, leaving just us and the dark again.

“I’ll be honest,” I said. “I don’t really understand what happened back there.”

She sighed, shoving her hands in her pockets. “Jack’s the oldest of all of us. He knows that what he does, everyone else will do. He’s hung out with Rachel and Hannah before on our side. If he’d come over here in good faith, it would have been just like any other night. Only the setting is different.”

“But he didn’t do that,” I said, clarifying.

“Of course not. He had a chip on his shoulder, the way he always does about guys from the yacht club, and everyone from Lake North, for that matter.”

“And it probably doesn’t help if they’re into his little sister,” I added.

She glanced at me. “That’s irrelevant. He’d rather I date a certified douchebag from our side than a saint from over here.”

“Is there really a verification process for that?”

She rolled her eyes. “Ha, ha.”

I smiled. “So maybe he’s biased. But it seems like what you were actually about to come to blows about was the whole drinking-on-the-boat thing.”

“Because he knows that subject negates anything else!” she replied, loudly enough so I stopped walking for a second, startled. “Sorry. It’s just we’ve heard about that accident our whole lives. It’s the cautionary tale of all cautionary tales and had nothing to do with all this. And the fact that he brought it up in front of Roo just makes me look more like a jerk, because . . .”

She trailed off, her flip-flops slapping hard against the pavement as we passed a third gated neighborhood in a row, by my count, on this tiny deserted road. What were they keeping out? Civilization?

“Because it was his dad,” I finished.

“Which, again,” she shot back, “had nothing to do with Jack sabotaging my night and this thing I had going with Colin!”

“I know,” I said carefully, holding up a hand. “I’m new here, remember? I’m just trying to catch up.”

She ducked her head down, not saying anything for a minute. Up ahead, the road was widening as we approached an intersection, a single red blinking light above it.

“Your mom never talked about it?” she asked me finally.

“The accident?” She nodded. “No. She told a lot of stories, but not that one.”

“Whereas my mom,” Bailey said, “couldn’t forget. Everything was a reminder. The summer starting, their group hanging out together, even the lake itself. It was like a ghost, haunting her.”

“What happened?”

We were almost to the light now. Just beyond it, there was a sign: NORTH LAKE 3 MILES. An arrow pointed the way.

“You really want to hear it?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

We passed under the light. Blink. Blink. Blink.

“All right,” she said. “So it happened in July.”





Nine


July 9, 2000, was my mom’s twenty-first birthday. She’d been with Dad for a year by then, dating long-distance during the school months. By Christmas, they’d be engaged, and she’d be pregnant with me.

But in June, as summer began, she didn’t know any of this. She was just missing her boyfriend, and more nervous than she wanted to admit about starting a new life almost two hours west. She dealt with it the way she did most things, back then. She tried to forget.

Most lake kids liked to party—in that small of a town, there weren’t a lot of entertainment options—but even with this as the norm, my mom had always stood out. Whatever she liked to do, she did to excess. What she was best known for, though, was her disappearing act.

The gist was this: they’d all be out on the water at night, having a few beers at the raft, when someone would notice she was gone. The first time, of course, panic ensued, especially when despite zigzagging the water and yelling, she couldn’t be found. Until Celeste, near hysteria, got back to the shore to call 911 and found my mom sitting there wrapped in a towel, sucking on a cold Pop Soda. She’d swum all the way back, in darkness, then sat and watched as they searched for her.