The Summer List

“Well, welcome to the neighborhood.” I pulled the cake from my backpack and set it on a brown box labeled Stuff!

“I have no clue where the knives are, so here.” Casey yanked at the curly ribbon. She broke the cake in two pieces, handed me one, and knocked her hunk against mine. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“Did you know this used to be a kids’ cabin for another house that’s not here anymore, and everyone calls it The Shipwreck?” she said, crumbs on her bottom lip.

I nodded, finished chewing. “Who told you, your Realtor?”

“We didn’t have a Realtor. My mom bought the house from the owner. The guy who fixed the windows told her. When he realized my mom was the colorful type he wouldn’t stop talking about it. Flirting with her.” She rolled her eyes. “A house with real history, he said. Built in the 1920s. One of a kind.”

The colorful type. I was tempted to ask if her colorful mother knew the stir her quadruped bumper-fish had caused. “I noticed the Ariel on the dock. Did you put it there because...”

“Yes. Screw them if they think The Shipwreck is an insult, it’s cool the way it is. Look, you can still see the marks from the bunk beds.” She shoved boxes around to show me the dark rectangles in the wood floor. “There were five bunks, so I guess ten kids could sleep down here. And one babysitter had to deal with them all summer, I bet.”

“My mother grew up in our house. She says the boys who stayed here in the forties and fifties ran wild all summer. But she never told me about the bunk beds.” I bent to touch one of the marks. “Cool.”

There were no bunk beds now. The only furniture in the room was a saggy, opened-out futon against the long wall. It was unmade, the imprint from a body still visible in the swirl of sheets.

“My mom’s sleeping down here for now,” she said. “She’s using one of the rooms upstairs for her studio because the light’s better and the daybed she ordered hasn’t come yet. Come see my room.”

I followed her up the dark staircase. “So she’s an artist?”

“Ultrabizarre stuff, but people pay a ton for it because bizarre is in.” She thumped her hand on a closed door as we passed, but didn’t offer to show me any of the ultrabizarre art.

“When’s your furniture coming?” I followed her down the narrow hall.

“Our last four places were furnished so my mom’s off buying stuff.”

Last four places? As I considered this, Casey disappeared into a wall of gold. At least that’s what I thought it was until I got closer and figured out it was yellow candy wrappers stuck together in chains, dangling from her doorjamb to form a crinkly, sunlit curtain.

“I made that for our hallway in San Francisco,” she said from the other side of the swaying lengths of plastic. “I was going through a butterscotch phase.”

“I like it,” I said. Did I? I had no idea. I was just trying to step through the ropes of cellophane without breaking them. “How many wrappers did it take?”

“A hundred and eighty-eight. My mom put my real door on sawhorses in her studio, for a table.”

I could only imagine what my mother would say if I tried to replace my bedroom door with candy wrappers. When I was little, she didn’t let me take hard candy from the free bowl at the bank, saying it was a scam they had going with the dentist.

But the fact that Casey’s mom apparently didn’t worry about cavities wasn’t the weirdest part. The weirdest part was that this girl had voluntarily taken her bedroom door off its hinges, not minding that now her mother could peek in whenever. She could catch her undressed, or interrupt her when she was writing in her journal, or yell at her from downstairs right when she’d reached the best part of her book.

My bedroom not only had a door—the wooden variety—but a lock. I used it twice a day, when I transferred my good-luck charm between my pocket and my pillow.

I stashed other objects in my room, too. I had a Maybelline Raspberry Burst lip gloss tucked into the bottom of my Kleenex box. A Cosmopolitan I’d filched from the dentist hidden inside the zippered cushion of my desk chair, with 50 Tips That’ll Drive Him Wild in Bed. I had come to know well the thrill of concealing objects in my room, the secret electric charge they emitted from their hiding places. My bedroom was strung in currents only I knew about.

I didn’t tell her any of this. I’d known her only twenty minutes.

“Didn’t you get sick of all that butterscotch by the end?”

She laughed. “Totally. I threw out the last fifty.”

We sat facing each other on her unmade single bed, inside a fortress of brown moving boxes, finishing the cake. She was still wearing her wet bathing suit and towel. I would never wear a thin bathing suit like that, even in the water, and definitely not out of it. But Casey, named after the male DJ, was flat as a boy. And something told me she wouldn’t have cared about covering up even if she wasn’t.

As we ate, and she talked about San Francisco—the freezing fog, the garlic smell that would drift up the apartment air shaft from the restaurant below—I monitored a damp spot spreading out on her yellow bedspread. It expanded around her hips, like a shadow. My mother would have gone ballistic; she pressed our sheets once a week and had a dedicated rack in the laundry room for used beach towels.

By my last bite of cake I had to admit that I liked this sturdy, confident girl. And I felt bad for her. She said she’d had no idea she was moving until her mom announced it on the last day of middle school.

“We’d only been in San Francisco for a year, and I was all registered at Union High for September, then all of a sudden my mom heard about this house, and here we are. Goodbye, Union. Hello, Coeur-de-Lune High.”

“People never say that. They say CDL High.”

“Got it.”

“Which is kind of dumb since it’s exactly the same number of syllables.”

She laughed, and I realized in that second just how much I wanted her to like me. I couldn’t resist going on. “Like I said, it’s not such a great school.”

“Go, Astronauts,” she said, laughing, shaking her fists as if she was holding miniature pom-poms.

“Astros.”

“Right. Keep the insider tips coming.”

“I’m definitely not an insider, I... So why’d your mom want to move?”

“She’s impulsive like that. You’ll get it when you meet her. We lived in a bunch of places before San Francisco. Reno, Oakland, Berkeley. Then suddenly she was all about nature. Fresh air, peace and quiet so she could work and I could... I don’t know. Suck in all the fresh air.”

“Weren’t you sad? Leaving your friends in San Francisco?”

“Yeah, but...my mom’s my best friend.”

I licked crumbs from my fingers. “That must be nice. My mother is...”

Strict? That wasn’t the right word. Cold was closer to the truth, but not quite fair. My mother took my temperature when I was sick, and remembered that I liked German chocolate cake, and once said I played the piano like an angel. She asked me for my Christmas list the day after Thanksgiving. Rigid? Overly efficient? Judgmental? None of them added up to a good answer.

“She’s what?”

“She’s older than most mothers.”

“Grandma old?”

“Sixty-two. I’m adopted. And my dad’s almost sixty-four. But my mother seems older than him because she’s kind of religious.”

“Like that nutjob fanatic mom in Carrie? I have that, have you read it? It’s awesome.”

“No, but I saw an ad for the movie on TV. She’s not like that. She’s just... I don’t know. Old-fashioned.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah.”

Bummer. I liked that tidy summary of my relationship with my mother. It took something that made me feel freakish and confused and brought it into the light, transforming it into a typical teenagey complaint.

I didn’t tell Casey she was sharing her cake with Sister Christian, or about how Pauline Knowland stole my bra during a shower after gym last September, so I’d spent the rest of the school day hunched over and red-faced.

I didn’t tell her how hard it is in a small town, where you’re shoved into a role in fifth grade and you can’t escape it no matter what you do, how it squeezes the fight out of you, because everybody knows everybody and you aren’t allowed to change.

And I didn’t tell her that one of the things hidden in my bedroom was a homemade calendar taped to the inside back wall of my closet, where I crossed off the number of CDL High days I had to survive until graduation. 581.

Go Astros.

Instead I said, even though I wasn’t that interested in horror novels, “Can I borrow Carrie sometime?”

“Sure.” Casey jumped off the crumb-strewn bed and went through boxes, tossing books on the floor.

She had more books than I did, and I had a ton. I even had a first edition of Little Women. Casey had Little Women, too, I noticed, and I picked it up off the floor, about to ask if she liked it and if she’d ever read Little Men or Rose in Bloom, which could be preachy but had some entertaining parts.

Only when I looked closer I realized it wasn’t Little Women. It was The Little Woman.

And judging by the cover, it was definitely not an homage to Louisa May Alcott. It had a lady sashaying down her hallway in a skimpy white nightgown, with a gun stuffed down her cleavage. Behind her, at the other end of the hall, you could just make out a shadowy male figure.

The perfect wife is about to get the perfect revenge, it said.

“We had this fantastic used bookstore down the street from our last place,” Casey said, her head down in the moving box. “It’s one thing I’ll miss. That and foghorns. And pork buns.

“Found it,” she said, lobbing a paperback of Carrie at me. “Keep it as long as you want. And take this, too. You might be into it, being adopted and all. I went through a phase where I totally imagined I was adopted because of that book. It seemed so romantic.”

“It’s not, believe me.”

The cover of Carrie, with a pop-eyed teenage girl covered in streams of blood, creeped me out. I’d probably just skim it. The other one looked pretty good, though. Lace, it said in pink, on a black lacy background. The book every mother kept from her daughter at the bottom. Which sounded promising.

This daughter would definitely keep it from her mother. Maybe I could stuff it down one of my winter boots. It was too big to conceal inside my Kleenex box.

“You’re lucky your mother lets you read whatever you want,” I said.

“My mom’s annoying, too. She can never stick to one hobby. She gets totally into something, then just when I get interested she’s onto something else. It sucks.”

It didn’t sound sucky at all. It sounded kind of great. My mother hadn’t developed a new hobby in decades. She was content with her baking and her needlepoint and her charitable bustling-around. Even my father was pretty stuck in his ways. He had his crosswords, and his never-ending house repairs, and his twice-a-week volunteer job at the Historical Society which consisted—as far as I could tell—of playing backgammon with Ollie Pedersen above the hardware store surrounded by old photos.

“Last month it was pressure valves,” Casey said.

“Like, plumbing?”

“No. This philosophy on stress relief. She got this book by some lady named Alberta R. Topenchiek and it’s all she talked about for weeks. Pressure Valves and Self-Monitoring of Wants versus Needs and Minor Stress Triggers versus Major Triggers.”

I laughed.

“I almost threw the book down our garbage chute, I got so sick of talking about it. Anyway, Alberta R. Topenchiek says everyone has to have a pressure valve. The thing they do when nothing else makes them feel good. My mom’s is her art, and mine’s swimming. What’s yours?”

“Kayaking,” I said. I’d never thought of it that way before, but of course it was.

“Will you teach me? I’ve never done it.”

I hesitated a second but I didn’t have a chance against her smile. Her smile, her ridiculous candy-wrapper curtain, her directness.

And her total confidence that the only thing separating us was a few hundred feet of lake water.

“Sure.”

I stayed at Casey’s for three hours that first day, helping her organize her books and clothes, listening to the Top 40 radio countdown CD for 1982. I’d never seen someone sing along so completely unselfconsciously to Toto’s “Africa” before. Usually people sort of mumbled it in the back of their throats, looking around as if they were worried they’d get caught.

When she wasn’t singing I tried to stick to safe topics. The principal is married to the history teacher. Hot lunch in our district is $3.60, or you can do the salad and fruit bar for $1.80.

But Casey kept steering the conversation back to exactly where I didn’t want it—me.

“So what are your friends like?” she said, folding a green sweater.

“I used to hang out with this girl Dee, but she moved to Tahoe last year.”

This was a lie. Dee and I had been friends in third grade, and she’d moved away in fifth, right when I could have used her. Fifth grade was when Pauline Knowland decided I had entertainment value.

“Are you allowed to go on dates yet?”

“It hasn’t come up,” I admitted.

“Right. It’s early.”

“What about you? Have you had a boyfriend yet?”

Casey got a funny half smile, looking at a spot over my right shoulder. She spoke slowly, as if she was in a witness box, enunciating for the court reporter. “No, ma’am. I have not had a boyfriend yet.”

With the cake polished off, she set a big pink-and-white Brach’s Pick-a-Mix bag on the bed. Root beer barrels, lemon drops, toffee, and starlight mints. No butterscotch.

“Sustenance, because we’re working so hard,” she said.

By the time I kayaked home, promising to return at ten the next morning, Casey’s closet was organized, her CDs were lined up alphabetically along one wall, and my back molars were little skating rinks of hard candy.

I ran my tongue across my teeth as I paddled, trying not to smile.

3

Alexandra the Great

I spent five hours with Casey the next day, and seven the next, and as the long summer days ran on it became easier to count the hours we were not together.

She proved to be a quick study on the kayak but I still sat in back, where I could take over if things got dicey. She liked to go fast. We’d be floating along, lazy and destinationless, and she’d shout, “Let’s do warp speed!” and we’d fly, enjoying a windblown rush for a minute until we inevitably knocked paddles and collapsed into laughter.

I showed her my favorite spots on the lake. The flat, sunny rock at Meriwether Point, where I’d always picnicked alone, and shady little Jade Cove, where tiny fish tickled your ankles and there was a downed pine tree that made a good, bouncy diving board.

One day I took her to Clark Beach on the North shore. We ate cheese-and-sourdough sandwiches and drowsed in the sun, and it would have been another perfect day if I wasn’t slightly on edge, worrying that Pauline Knowland and her pack of blow-dried minions would show up. I hadn’t taken Casey anywhere so public before. But Pauline didn’t come. She spent most of her summer afternoons at the mall or at Pinecrest Lake Beach, where there was more action. Action was in short supply around Coeur-de-Lune.

Sitting behind Casey in the kayak day after day, I got to know the pattern of freckles on her shoulders. She didn’t brush her hair before we met by her dock each morning so the back rose up in a snarled mat, revealing the flipped-up size tag of her purple bathing suit.

Freckles on pink skin, a tangle of red hair, an upside-down Jantzen Swimwear size six label: these are the strongest visual memories of that summer before high school.

I had a journal my dad gave me when I was seven, a puffy pink thing with A Girl’s First Diary on the cover in gold script. I hid it inside a hollowed-out copy of Silas Marner on my bottom bookshelf, and concealed the key in a mint tin in my third-best church purse.

I wasn’t a dedicated diary writer. My entries were sloppy and I sometimes went weeks without turning the key in the little gold lock. But on June 13, seven days after I met Casey, I wrote:

A summer friend. Ariel. She’s...disarming.

TGTBT

Disarming. (One of my PSAT words.) TGTBT. Too good to be true.

The acronym—such an obvious attempt to sound like other fourteen-year-olds—wasn’t the most pathetic part. It’s that I was afraid she’d vanish if I wrote her real name.

It’s not that I didn’t think she liked me. I knew she did. I made her laugh, not polite laughs but snorty diaphragm laughs. I didn’t talk much about my life at school, but my family was safe material. I told her how my dad and I once secretly replaced the gritty homemade apricot fruit leather in my mother’s charity care packages with Snickers bars. How he always saluted me if we met in the upstairs hallway, because of my vaguely military cargo shorts.

“You’d like my dad,” I said.

We were swimming in Jade Cove, floating on our backs, Casey in her purple one-piece, me in my loose black T-shirt and underwear, once again pretending I’d forgotten to bring a suit. I’d carefully rolled up my shorts in a towel and set the bundle on a rock, far from the water.

Disarming. She had disarmed me. I rarely separated myself from the charm I kept in my pocket, but for her I did. I wasn’t ready to tell her about it, though.

“Would he like me?” Casey said, eyes closed, arching her back to stay afloat so her stomach made a little purple island. The skin on her nose was bright pink, and the freckles there merged closer every day.

“Definitely.”

“Hey. Why do you always wear them?”

“Hmm?”

“Your cargos. I’ve never seen you in anything else. Not that I mind.”

“I just like them. The pockets are good for collecting things. Hey, I have oatmeal cookies in my backpack. Are you hungry?” I splashed over to the beach.

* * *

Two weeks into summer we still hadn’t met each other’s parents. We rendezvoused at Casey’s dock every morning and stayed on the water all day.

I said my mother got on my nerves and Casey accepted this. She kept me out of her house, too, telling me her mom wanted to fix the place up before inviting me over.

“She’s dying to meet you, though,” she said. “She just wants to get the house done first. She was mad you saw it before it was finished.”

“Does this mother of yours really exist?” I teased. I could tease her by then.

“She’s in some kind of retro homemaking phase. Yesterday she drove all the way to Twaine Harte for an antique firewood holder. I just hope she puts up my bedroom curtains before she gets bored with antiquing and moves on to rock climbing or whatever.”

Casey scattered crumbs like this about her mother all the time. I stored them up, greedy for more. I was as fascinated by her fond, indulgent tone of voice as I was by the composite picture they created of this person I hadn’t met yet.

On June 26 I wrote in my diary:

Ariel’s mother—Alexandra Shepherd

Only 36.

+ Once a card dealer in Reno.

+ Makes lots of $ off her art. Scandalous art?

+ Let her boyfriends sleep over til Casey asked her not to.

= Exact opposite of Ingrid Christie

* * *

One afternoon in late June, as I was showing Casey how to make a hard stop-turn in the kayak, I got an official nickname, too.

“Slow down, Pocahontas, I didn’t quite get that,” she said.

Pocahontas. The four syllables were a sweet drumbeat in my head for the rest of the day. Casey had sort of called me Pocahontas the first day we met. But this was different. I’d never been given a nickname by a friend.

When I left her dock a few hours later, she sat on the edge to see me off, legs dangling over the silvery-gray wood. I was late for dinner and was already paddling hard when she called out, feet now churning the water, “I almost forgot, come early tomorrow. My mom wants you for breakfast.”

I showed off my stop-turn. “Really?”

“The house is done so she wants to meet you. Nine, okay?”

I hadn’t planned to say it out loud. I was giddy from the day, the breakfast invite, and my diary name for Casey just slipped out at the last second. “Okay. Goodbye, Ariel.”

But when I felt myself saying it I got shy, and her nickname came out so soft it got lost crossing the water.

“What?”

I gathered my courage and repeated it, louder this time. “I said, goodbye, Ariel.”

She stilled her legs and tilted her head, considering. Then she grinned, kicking out a high, rainbowed arc. “I love that.”

As I started to paddle away again, Casey pulled the Disney figurine off the nail by her legs and waved it.

“Twins,” she yelled. Then she set it on her shoulder and made a goofball face.

I smiled all the way home.

But in my diary that night, I wrote:

65 days til school. Wish there were zeros at the end. Infinite zeros. 00000000000000000000

Before I slipped the diary back inside Silas Marner, I filled in the string of zeros, making each oval into a sad face.

It’s not that I thought she’d instantly transform on September 2. Change into someone cruel, from a fourteen-year-old who could still make dumb jokes about Disney princesses into a sneering wannabe grown-up like some of the high school girls I’d observed. I knew she was better than that.

It’s just that she didn’t know what a machine school could be. I’d already been processed through the machine, because our town was so small sixth through twelfth were in the same building complex, the high school separated only by a covered walkway. My reputation as Sister Christian had already traveled down that walkway, I was sure of it.

And the machine had decided that I didn’t deserve a friend.

I had this fantasy that Casey would say she wasn’t going to CDL High after all, that her mother would have an overnight religious conversion and send her to the Catholic girls’ school four towns over. It would solve everything, and it wasn’t completely ridiculous. I knew all about her mom’s impulsive nature. If I scattered some pamphlets about St. Bridget’s and maybe some enticing religious icons on her futon, I could probably make Catholicism her next obsession.

But even if I could pull it off, judging by what Casey had told me, her mother would end her fling with the Lord long before first-day registration.

Casey was definitely bound for CDL High.

It was bad enough, worrying about the time limit on Casey’s friendship. Then I met Alex.

* * *

The morning of the breakfast, I wore my hair loose, and though I wasn’t willing to alter my Ziploc-inside-cargos arrangement on my bottom half, I went fancier on top, with a light blue peasant blouse. It was the one nice shirt I owned that was sufficiently baggy.

Halfway across the lake I could see them waiting for me on their dock. Both of them short, with bare legs. Both with sun glinting off their red hair.

But as I got closer I could spot the differences between them. Casey’s hair was shoulder length and bone straight; her mother’s fell in spirals past the waist of her cutoffs. Casey was sturdy and slightly bowlegged, giving the impression that she was firmly planted on the ground. Her mother, though no taller, was fine-boned. All jumpy vertical lines. Alexandra was like Casey, made with more care. And though she was thirty-six, she could have passed for a college girl.

She reminded me of one of the redheads in my European art book, a full-page print I’d tried (unsuccessfully) to copy. Not the woozy Klimt lover, who looked like she’d been folded to pack in a trunk. I liked this painting better: a modern Russian oil of a young auburn-haired dancer surrounded by chaotic brushstrokes, her eyes defiant, her arms so fluttery they seemed to disturb her painted background. That’s what Alexandra was like.