Three Day Summer(46)

It doesn’t matter because Evan suggests it anyway. So after rolling up our sleeping bags and gathering our meager belongings, we head on over to the water.

The lake is even more crowded than it was yesterday because I guess even some of the holdouts can’t spend three muddy days without a bath.

Amanda, Catherine, Suzie, Evan, and Rob all strip down to their birthday suits and wade in. I linger back.

When she’s only in up to her thighs, Amanda turns around and yells at me to come join them.

I’m still fully clothed and I don’t want to. I look at her stunning naked body and feel sick to my stomach. Her skin is porcelain pale, glowing in the weak sun. I have been begging her to let me see her like this for months. And now I just want to turn away.

But what excuse can I give her? Slowly, I strip down completely too and leave my clothes in a pile next to the others’. When I get in the lake, I stay closer to Evan and Suzie than I do Amanda. I don’t want to touch her in that water. It became sacred to me yesterday and I’m already ruining that.

I can see Amanda’s thinking about swimming over, though, so I dunk myself in, rub my arms a little bit, and then start to wade back out again.

“Hey . . . ,” Amanda calls.

“I’m worried about our clothes,” I lie. “I’ll go stand guard.”

I change quickly, putting on the clean jeans I brought and the Monterey shirt. Then I wait, purposely not looking out at my friends but keeping my eyes on the horizon.

Eventually, they splash out too. Amanda takes her time rummaging through my backpack for the clean dress she brought, bending over so that her ass is a hairline away from me. I look away.

Everyone gets dressed and the music still hasn’t started. Rob suggests we go to the food tents to see if we can get something to eat. It’s only then that I think to ask him what happened to the girl he was supposed to be meeting here.

“She never made it, since the roads were already closed by the time she was supposed to leave,” Rob says, and shrugs.

“Shame,” I say, thinking mostly about his flirt session with Cora from the night before. But Rob just shrugs again and grins.

The food tents are handing out more army-issued bologna sandwiches. We each get one and Catherine suggests a picnic by the lake. We go to the drinkable side.

Our picnic ends and still no music, so Suzie brings up the woods that surround the farm. “I heard they’re selling things in there.”

“What sort of things?” Evan perks up and I’m sure he’s thinking about getting more weed.

“T-shirts and stuff like that,” Suzie says.

We have nothing better to do, so we go.





chapter 55


Cora


At around one, Ned shows up at the tent. He’s volunteering today.

Turns out, he was volunteering yesterday, too. I know this because as soon as he comes in, he walks right up to me and says, “I thought you’d be here yesterday.”

“What?” I respond, a little disoriented by the lack of greeting.

“I thought we’d both be here volunteering together yesterday.”

“Oh,” I say, as I brew up some more freak-out tea. You would think all the announcements about the acid would have stemmed some of the tide of bad trips, but you’d be wrong. Maybe it only freaked me and Michael out. Or maybe we were just looking for an easy excuse to spend time together. “Anna gave me the day off,” I tell Ned. “To see the festival.” I leave it at that.

“Oh, really? How was it?”

“Great,” I say.

“Great,” Ned says to me, and smiles. “I mean, obviously, I could hear some of the music from here. But it must have been cool to watch it, right?”

“Yeah,” I say, and busy myself with pouring tea and delivering it to a couple sitting in the corner.

Ned gets some orders himself and starts to treat some minor wounds. But I notice that every time he needs something from somewhere else in the tent, he manages to find a way to walk by me and say something.

The first time it’s “Who was your favorite person you saw yesterday?”

“Janis Joplin,” I answer honestly, thinking not only of her spectacular performance but of meeting her at the hotel bar.

The next time he walks by, he’s had time to think about this response and he asks me, “Was Janis Joplin on yesterday? I don’t remember hearing her.”

“Yeah,” I say. “She was on really late.”

“How late?”

“I think around two a.m.”

He frowns, about to say something else, but I walk away to tend to a patient.

He finds a way to be where I am within five minutes. “Your dad let you stay out until two a.m.?” he asks incredulously.

“Not exactly,” I say.

“You snuck out?” he asks, and he lightly touches my shoulder for no particular reason.

I look him in the eyes then, those brown eyes that used to make me feel so warm and happy, like holding a freshly baked cookie on your tongue. “Not exactly,” I say mysteriously, and give him a small smile before I go to a young boy with a twisted ankle. The boy is slightly hysterical and therefore, thankfully, needs my full attention for a while. Ned isn’t able to get to me, but at one point, I catch him looking thoughtfully in my direction. It’s like he knows, like he can feel the sea change between us.