Famous in a Small Town(31)

The lake was not truly a lake. Acadia had a few ponds—one back by the Pritchetts’ farm, one near the highway with a little creek running into it. A dip in one of the fields by school filled up sometimes when it rained, but we figured that Megan wasn’t referring to that one. Context clues in the song led everyone to believe it was the pond that August and I were currently standing in front of—the one in Fairview Park, ringed by willows.

We tried to skip stones. August had never done it before. I managed to get three skips, and he crowed when he got two.

“Did you see that?”

“Not bad.”

“Not bad? That was expert level!”

“If you’re expert level, then what am I?”

“God level.” He tried again, and the rock sank with a thunk, sending up a small spray of water. “I’d build a monument to you, but I’m fresh out of rocks.”



* * *



Wednesday was for ice cream cones, after we both finished at work.

“Technically we’ve already done this one,” August said, and took a swipe at his mint-chocolate-chip cone.

“Yeah, well, technically, we should be alone,” I replied, looking pointedly at Terrance.

August’s eyes shone. “Sophie’s right. The song doesn’t mention a third wheel.”

“It doesn’t say there isn’t one either,” Terrance said with a grin.

“Schr?dinger’s lyric,” August said. “There both is and isn’t a third wheel until Megan confirms.”

“There’s definitely a third wheel,” I said. “I can confirm it right now.”



* * *



We went downtown on Thursday.

We were supposed to drift from one shop to the next, shooting the breeze. A number of shops lined the street downtown—the weird old antique shop; the hardware store; Mrs. Weaver’s bakery. Every small town I’d been to seemed to have something super random too, like a coin shop, or a pipe-organ store. In our case, it was a vacuum-cleaner-repair shop that was never open but somehow never went out of business. Maybe they serviced one vacuum cleaner a year and lived on that lone repair.

I told August this, and he nodded in consideration. “Could be possible.”

“Fifty grand to fix your vacuum.”

“I mean, that’s a deal. My vacuum cost twelve million dollars.”

“Really.”

“Uh-huh. Military-grade. It could drain a lake.”

I grinned. “If you aim it at the sky, it’s capable of tearing a hole in the fabric of space.”

We headed to the antique store after stopping by the Yum Yum Shoppe to try some fudge and say hi to Terrance. Thankfully, he didn’t decide to take his break and tag along.

The antique store was called Bygones. It was small but crammed with stuff divided up into little booths. Nothing really of value, to be honest, unless you were interested in old embroidered dish towels and McDonald’s toys from the early nineties. Our neighbor across the street, Mrs. Cabot, had a booth there; she’d trawl through town on garbage day, picking out any furniture she could find. She’d fix the stuff up and paint it and try to resell it. I was in there once with Brit and her mom when Brit’s mom recognized a chair she had put out for the trash a few weeks previous.

She’s charging twenty-seven dollars! For my garbage! TWENTY-SEVEN-DOLLAR GARBAGE.

Today we paused at a booth with shelves lining each side. I investigated one crammed full of paperbacks with broken spines. When I glanced over at August, he was looking at an old red-white-and-blue trophy, a little gold plastic football player stuck on top of it.

“You know, Kyle played football,” I said.

“Not surprising,” he replied, and then it was quiet, except for the whir of the floor fan at the end of the aisle.

“Have you guys gotten to do any … brother-bonding stuff?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have a brother.”

“Half brother,” he murmured, and put the trophy back.

“You say that like it means something.” Some particular kind of line that needed to be drawn. “Like he’s fifty percent less your brother.”

“It means exactly that he’s fifty percent my brother.”

“Well, yeah, genetically.” I thought of Ciara, her freshman-year biology course and the Punnett squares that could predict what color eyes her and Ravi’s kids would have. “But where it counts … it means nothing. You know, my sister, Ciara”—a pause—“my mom and her dad got married when I was a baby. Her dad—our dad—adopted me.”

“So you’re not actually related?”

“By your standards, she is exactly zero percent my sister. But by everything that counts … she’s—she—”

In second grade I remember a girl in my class—Lizzie Bowen—standing on the playground at lunch and telling me that Ciara couldn’t possibly be my sister.

“You don’t look like each other,” she said. “You have to look alike. Me and my sisters do. Dash and Terrance do.”

I looked over at Dash and Terrance, who were playing foursquare with Brit and Flora. They did have the same deep brown skin, the same brown eyes. But it was more than that—Dash was bigger, Terrance was small and skinny, but their faces were definitely similar. Two different takes on the same idea.