VenCo(51)

“Good lord, Matty, just eat the damn bar.” Her mom rolled her eyes back and scurried after her husband.

“Yeah, Matt-teee, eat the damn bar,” Casey squealed, swivelling his hips and dangling a hand daintily. “Eat the pwin-cess bar.”

She chased him past their mother, who tried to grab both of them and missed. Casey threw himself into their father, who was standing at the ticket booth, stuck out his tongue, and buried his face in his paunch. She drew a finger across her throat to let Casey know he was in for it, sooner or later.

This was it, August 2—conversation day. She’d marked it in her calendar months ago. But that was before her parents announced that it coincided with the timing of their annual family vacation to Sandusky. Still, she wasn’t going to chicken out. It had been too long. She wanted to scream every time one of them called her Matthew.

“Matthew, let’s go, buddy!” Her dad waved four Play All Day bracelets above his head.

“That’s not my name,” she said into her chest, shoving the granola bar into her back pocket.

Merlin’s had seen better days. If it wasn’t for the go-kart track with questionable safety standards, it would have shut down years ago. That was about when the owners stopped repairs on the mini putt course, anyway. There were slits worn into the Astroturf greens and divots where clubs had clipped the carpet. On the fourth hole, the wand that was supposed to swing like a pendulum, back and forth over the doorway to Merlin’s castle, had a broken mechanism, so it had to be hand-operated.

“All part of the charm,” Mr. Monahan said cheerfully, taking on the job of swinger even though Casey begged to be allowed.

On the fifth hole, Mrs. Monahan grabbed Freya’s blond hair, which had grown four inches since the end of grade eleven. “Time to snip this, I think. You’re turning into a hippie.”

“Or a girl,” Casey yelled from where he was climbing a plastic rabbit emerging from a scuffed top hat.

“Casey, enough! Leave your brother alone!”

“It’s fine,” she answered. How did Casey see it and no one else did? “He doesn’t bother me.”

“Yes, I do!” Casey retorted.

Distracted by her mother’s prying fingers, she took the shot. It caught a worn patch and ran straight into the hole.

“Woo-hoo! Hole in one!” Mr. Monahan yelled, jumping up and down so that his eyeglasses slid down his nose. He held on to his bucket hat with one hand and raised his own putter in the other. “Attaboy!”

“Stop,” she whispered, slouching to disguise her considerable new height. She wanted to be small. She needed to be small. As long as she was Matthew, she couldn’t exist outside of small. “Just please . . . stop.”

Merlin’s course had nineteen holes, each one more convoluted than the last, ending in a “magical forest” that consisted of pine trees shedding needles on a litter-trampled path that separated the highway from the park. Among the trees, it was loud and quiet at the same time. The course wound around the wide trunks, so no one could finish it in fewer than five strokes. By the time the Monahan family got to it, they had been out in the sun for almost two hours. Between chasing Casey away from the Canada geese he insisted on “hunting” and helping him get through his turns, it was a real marathon game.

“Jesus, Marty, let’s just get this done. I need a tinkle.” Mrs. Monahan danced from one foot to the other in her cork espadrilles.

“We’ll be through the last hole soon enough, Sarah-Beth. Then you can find the ladies’ and I can grab a light beer.” Mr. Monahan was still in good spirits. He looked forward to this trip all year. Leaving his desk at the DMV for a whole week, driving out to Sandusky, hitting Merlin’s and Doug’s Dig Your Own Fossils, staying in a Best Western, and waking up before his family to swim laps in the chilly pool and watch the young moms in their optimistic two-piece suits pull toddlers with water wings around. This year he’d saved up enough loyalty points to upgrade them to a suite. This was only day two, and nothing could bring him down, not his morose teenager or his hyperactive seven-year-old, not even his plain wife in her fucking culottes.

Casey had spun himself in a web of pink cotton candy and dirt, streaked through with tear trails, after he skinned his knee on the eleventh hole, which was what got him the cotton candy in the first place.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” he whined. “Don’t make me!” He sat down hard on the needle-strewn ground and chewed his melting sugar. “Matty can do my shot.”

His father wasn’t about to tolerate a quitter in the family. “No, he cannot, that’s not how this is done. Every man has to play through for himself. You are a man, aren’t you? C’mon, Casey, show me those guns. C’mon.” He flexed his biceps and grunted, trying to psych up his younger son.

“Matty, show him how it’s done. Grrr!” He nudged his elder son, then snarled under his bushy mustache and lowered himself into a squat, puny arms bent and hands in fists.

“That’s not my name.” She said it louder now.

“Let’s just call it. I really need the ladies’.” Sarah-Beth was leaning against a tree trunk, wondering whether it was big enough to hide her from the road if worse came to worst and she had to go right there. She probably had some Wet-Naps in her purse . . .