What Happens Now(18)
6
Kendall had finally learned to make the soft serve end in a perfect point. Last summer, they always flopped over no matter how hard she tried. Now, when she leaned down through the order window at Scoop-N-Putt and handed me my chocolate-vanilla swirl in a sugar cone, I didn’t even want to lick it, it was such a work of art.
“I’m not done until nine,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said, sliding my money across the counter. “I’m just happy to hang. Mom’s at work and Richard told me to go out and do ‘teenage things.’”
“It’s on me.” Kendall pushed the money back. “Take advantage of the perks.”
I sat down at a picnic table with my copy of Silver Arrow: Velocity Matters spread open flat so nobody could see the cover. A moment to appreciate the fact that it was eight thirty, yet the sky was still light enough to read by. The beauty of ice cream that melted exactly as fast as I could lick it. The gnome over there at Hole 1, always with the broken fingers on one hand that made it look like he was flipping you off.
Half an hour later, Kendall was done with her shift. She came out of the building wiping her hands on her shorts.
“I’ve started dreaming about ice cream,” she said. “But not in a good way.”
“Like, nightmares?”
“Yeah. Like, The Blob.” She sat down next to me, but facing the other way, with her legs out. She pulled one knee to her chest in a stretch.
“Do you have to go straight home?” I asked.
“Not really, if I’m with you. What did you have in mind?”
“Remember last summer when we weren’t allowed to drive at night yet, and we kept fantasizing about taking a ride somewhere after dark?”
Kendall smiled knowingly. “Your car or mine?”
“I’ve got Richard’s, with the moonroof.”
Once we were driving west toward the mountains, our hair whipping and snapping, Kendall kicking off her shoes to press her blue toenails against the windshield, I turned the radio up. Night air, finally dark and thinning out, puffed through the car and we simply lived in it for a few minutes.
This was an okay silence. It was the silence of knowing how to be with someone.
“Tell me some gossip,” I finally said. “You must get premium dirt through this job.”
“You don’t really care about that stuff, do you?”
“But you do. This is me making an effort.”
Kendall smiled mischievously. “Okay. Well. Chris Cucurullo’s brother got arrested for DUI. That’s the latest good one.”
I hated Chris; he was a walking stereotype with his varsity jacket and excessive use of the word bro.
“I have to admit that neither surprises nor upsets me.”
“It makes you a little glad, right? I hear the brother’s a bigger douche bag than Chris. See, now you’re getting the whole point of gossip.”
We laughed.
“I talked to Camden yesterday.” That just came out. I hadn’t even been sure I wanted to tell her yet.
“A conversation?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. “Not like, I’m sorry I’m in the men’s room and we accidentally urinated together?”
“A real one. Several minutes long. He helped Dani learn to dive off the dock.”
“So . . . what? You’re obsessed with him again?”
I shrugged. I’d had a Camden Dream the night before. In it, we were sitting side by side, reading the same book. Who has lame-ass dreams like this?
“You don’t know anything about that guy,” said Kendall.
“I know enough.”
“Oh, right. Dashwood and the pink church and his painter mom.”
“Lavender. You said it was lavender, or turquoise.”
Kendall closed her eyes and held them there. She seemed exasperated.
“And his mom isn’t a painter,” I added. “She’s a fabric artist.”
“He told you that?”
“I Googled it.” We were quiet for a few moments. Not the good quiet, anymore. “I’m sensing disapproval coming from that side of the car.”
“I’m remembering how much it hurt you last summer to see him with that girl, how pissed off at yourself you were for not doing anything when you had the chance. Or in your case, a whole shitload of chances.”
That made me wince. “He’s not with that girl anymore. He may be with someone else, I have no idea. But I need to at least investigate further. I don’t want to have any regrets like last summer.”
Kendall stared at me for a moment, then nodded and said, “Fair enough.”
Suddenly a song by the Shins came on the radio, a song we both loved. It was one of those moments when radio karma finds you when you need it most. I turned up the volume and Kendall started tapping her feet against the windshield, making her hands dance to the chorus, and just like that we were rescued from the intensity of the conversation.
“So where are we going?” I asked.
“Let’s head up to the lookout.”
We drove through town and into the cornfields, past the farm market and the orchard nobody liked, toward the place where the road dead-ended into another road that would take us up the mountain. One hairpin turn, and then we were there. A scenic overlook for the tourists that offered only a stone wall separating you from certain death down a vertical rock face.