That Summer(21)

“I don’t know. We haven’t talked about that yet.”

“Cool, the whole house to yourself! Man, that will be awesome. We can have a party or something.”

“Yeah. Whatever.” I tossed the pictures back to her, all the strange faces tumbling together. I didn’t know these people. It was like a whole world in a different language.

She got up and put the pictures on her desk, then tugged on her cutoffs, which dangled fringe down the back of her leg. Suddenly she spun around and said, “God! I can’t believe I forgot to tell you!”

“Tell me what?”

“About Gwendolyn Rogers.” She jumped back onto the bed, shaking it so madly that the headboard banged against the wall. Casey was always taking flight or crashing into things. My father called her the whirling dervish.

“What about her?” I had that image again of Gwendolyn walking her dog, the leash reaching far up to her hand.

“She’s back. She came home,” she said ominously (I could always tell when something big was coming), “because she had a nervous breakdown.” She sat back, nodding her head.

“You’re kidding.”

“Her mother is friends with Mrs. Oliver, who is in my mother’s walking group and was sworn to secrecy but can’t keep anything quiet so she told everyone but made them all swear not to pass it further.”

“So your mom tells you.”

“She didn’t tell me. She told Mrs. Caster next door and I overheard because I was out on the roof smoking a cigarette. They never think to look up.”

“You smoke now?”

She laughed. “I have since the beginning of the summer. I want to quit, but it’s just so hard. You want one?”

“No,” I said, still trying to catch up with all this new information. “Why’d she have a nervous breakdown?”

“Because”—she went over to her dresser, reaching far under the sweaters she never wore to retrieve a box with a rumpled pack of cigarettes and some matches in it—“she was badly hurt by a man. And the modeling industry. It’s a hard life for a small-town girl, Haven.”

Something told me these were not her own words. “What man?”

“A photographer. He took all those pictures of her that we saw in Cosmo; you know, the ones in that tight red sweater that showed her nipples.” She shook out a cigarette and put it in her mouth, then took it out. “She was going to marry him, but then she found him in bed with a sixteen-year-old girl.”

“God,” I said.

“And another man,” she added with a flourish, popping the cigarette back into her mouth. “Could you die?”

“That’s horrible,” I said. I felt guilty knowing this about a stranger, some poor girl who knew no shameful secrets of mine. With Mrs. Melvin’s mouth, it had to be all over the neighborhood by now.

“She flew in last Friday, and Mrs. Oliver said she took right to her bed in her old room and slept for forty hours straight. Poor Mrs. Rogers thought she was dying of some horrible disease ’cause Gwendolyn wouldn’t say what was wrong or why she came home or anything.” She reached over and opened the window, then lit a match and touched it to the end of the cigarette. “She woke up at four A.M. and made pancakes, and when Mrs. Rogers went downstairs to see what was going on, that was when Gwendolyn told her. Standing there at the stove flipping pancakes at four A.M. and telling this horrible story. She ate ten pancakes and burst into tears and Mrs. Rogers said she is just at a loss as to what action to take. And since then, Mrs. Oliver says, Gwendolyn hasn’t said a word.”

“Ten pancakes?” I said. This, to me, seemed like the most unbelievable part of the story.

“Haven, honestly.” Casey hated when anyone tried to take away from whatever story she was telling. “And that was when Gwendolyn took to walking.”

“Walking?”

She puffed on her cigarette, then blew the smoke out the window, where it circled across the roof and into the sky. “She walks all night long, Haven, through the neighborhood. She can’t sleep, or won’t, and Mrs. Oliver says she’s like a ghost passing on the sidewalk, long legged and freaky looking. All night long.”

Suddenly I had chills, the kind you get during the climax of a good ghost story, when you realize the scratching on the roof is the disembodied hand or that the ribbon holds her head on. I could see Gwendolyn loping along on her thin legs, casting a giant shadow across the green lawns of our subdivision. Gwendolyn Rogers, supermodel, wandering lost on the streets of her childhood and mine.

“Creepy, huh?” Casey said, taking another long drag off her cigarette and fanning the smoke outside. “Mom says she bets modeling made Gwendolyn crazy. It’s a horrible industry, you know.”

“So you said.” I thought of the Lakeview Models in their pumps and matching T-shirts, posing in front of giant fake leaves. And Gwendolyn, the town’s pride and joy, walking mad in the streets.

“It’ll be all over the papers, and People magazine, soon,” she went on, waving her hand in front of her face to fan off the smoke. “You know, it’s big news when someone like Gwendolyn goes nuts.”

“It’s so sad,” I said again. If even supermodel and beautiful hometown girl Gwendolyn Rogers could crash and burn, what would become of me ... or anyone? She’d been profiled in one of Casey’s Teen World magazines just a few months before, sharing her Biggest Secrets: her favorite food (pizza), band (R.E.M.), and beauty secret (cucumbers on her eyes to reduce puffiness after long days of shooting). And we knew these things about her, just as we did about Cindy and Elle and Claudia, girls who didn’t even need last names. Girls that could have been our friends by the details we memorized about them, or the girl next door. As Gwendolyn, supermodel and Lakeview girl, tall like me, had once been.