That Summer(29)

“My mom wants to kill me,” she said as we set out for a walk around the neighborhood and a chance to talk in private. “I heard her and my dad discussing my situation last night, on the back porch.”

“And she said she wanted to kill you?”

“No, she said she was beginning to think the only solution was to lock me in my room.” She pushed a mass of orange curls out of her face. “But then she lets me out today. I think she’s up to something.”

“You’re paranoid,” I told her.

“Last night when I called Rick he said he was getting it from his parents, too. He can’t call for a while.” She sighed, crossing her arms against her shirt, a long white polo ten sizes too big. I wondered if Rick had any clothes of his own left. I imagined him leaving 4-H camp naked, with Casey packing up everything he owned as a souvenir.

“It’s only till Thanksgiving,” I said, trying to be helpful. It hadn’t happened to me yet, this swirling mass of emotions that made all the women around me behave so erratically.

“Thanksgiving is forever away,” she whined as we took the corner and headed down the street parallel to our own. “I’m going nuts here and it’s been less than a week. I’ve got to find some way to get up there.”

“Get up where?”

She rolled her eyes. “Pennsylvania. God, Haven, aren’t you paying attention?”

“Not when you start talking like a crazy person. You don’t even drive yet.”

“I will, in two and a half weeks.” With the wedding so close, I’d forgotten her birthday was coming up. “Dad’s been taking me out every night to drive around and I know they’re going to give me my grandmother’s Delta 88. They think it’s a secret and I don’t know why it’s in the garage, but I know.”

“Even if you are about to get your license,” I said as a mass of kids on bikes passed us, all of them in helmets and knee pads, little punks terrorizing the neighborhood, “they’d never let you take off to Pennsylvania.”

“Of course they wouldn’t let me.” She said this matter-of-factly, as if I was slow and just not getting it. Since Casey had gone wild at 4-H camp, it seemed like we had less and less in common. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t go. I just slip out, see, in the middle of the night, and call them the next morning when I’m in, like, Maryland. By then they’re just so crazed with worry they’re just happy I’m alive, so they let me go on. Then I come back and get punished forever but it’s worth it because I get to be with Rick.”

I looked at her. “That will never work.”

She stuck out her bottom lip, something she’d gotten good at in the last week, and said, “Yes it will.”

“Oh, like Rick’s parents wouldn’t send you home the second you showed up. They’re not going to let you just hang out while your parents are sitting around here waiting for you to get home so they can kill you.”

She was staring at the sidewalk as I said this, making a point of not looking at me. After a minute she said in a tight voice, “You don’t understand, Haven. You couldn’t. You’ve never been in love.”

“Oh please,” I said, suddenly fed up. I was sick of hearing about Rick and Pennsylvania and camp stories. I couldn’t talk to anyone anymore. Sumner seemed like the only one who listened at all, the only one who asked for nothing and took nothing from me.

“You know what your problem is,” Casey began, her hand poised to shake at me, but then she stopped dead, sucking in her breath. She grabbed my shirt, tugging, and pointed across one of the yards.

It was Gwendolyn Rogers. Or at least the back of Gwendolyn Rogers. Her hair was pulled up in a high ponytail and she was wearing a black string bikini top, standing there in the backyard all by herself. She had her hands on her hips and was staring off across the yard, over the wall and into the next yard. She was standing very, very still.

I heard a woman’s voice, suddenly, wafting out from the open downstairs windows of the house. “Gwendolyn? Gwennie, are you down here? Gwendolyn?” It was a mother’s voice.

Gwendolyn didn’t move, so still and tall, so much like the trees around her. She was enormous, and for the first time in so long I felt small, no bigger than a minute.

Casey was still pulling on my shirt, pointing like I hadn’t seen anything and saying, “That’s her, God, Haven, look.”

I was looking. And listening to Mrs. Rogers’s voice as it moved past one window after another, growing louder, then fading. Finally she came out on the back porch, where we could only see the top of her head over the wall, being that she was normal sized. Softly, she said, “Gwendolyn?” The top of her head moved across the yard, until it was flush with the middle of Gwendolyn’s spine. I saw a hand come up, tiny, and take one of the long, thin arms. “Let’s go in, honey, okay? Maybe you should lie down for a little while.”

Her voice was very clear and soft, the kind you hear at your bedside when you’re sick and throwing up and your mother brings cold compresses and ginger ale and oyster crackers. Mrs. Rogers rubbed her hand up and down Gwendolyn’s arm, talking now in a low voice that I couldn’t make out; but Gwendolyn didn’t move a muscle. Finally, Gwendolyn turned. I saw her face then, the same one we’d seen on all those magazine covers and on MTV. But it wasn’t the same: it wasn’t bronzed, with pink lips and lashes a mile long; no hair blowing back in the wind, framing her face; no diamonds flashing out of the wild blue of her eyes. Instead, I saw just a tall girl with a blank, plain expression, thin and angular and lost. Her cheeks were hollow and her mouth small, not luscious, more like a slit drawn hastily with a marker or a child’s crayon. I don’t know if she saw us. She was looking our way, her eyes on us, but there was no way of telling what she saw. It could have been us or the trees behind us or maybe another place or faces of other people. She only looked at us for a few moments, with that haunted, gaunt expression before her mother prodded her along and she ducked into the doorway, vanishing.