The Summer List

“We’ll pass,” Casey said.

He opened the treasure chest and set us on either side, instructed us to put a hand on the lid. I’d stood in this exact spot with a group of girls at a birthday party once. Tina Kammerer’s eighth. Second grade. Tina in the pirate hat holding Digby, her mom shooting the photo. I’d just learned to skate backward, and I was beaming. That was all it took to make me happy.

Our photographer yelled something but all I could hear was “I will survive. Now go! Walk out the door!”

“What?” Casey shouted.

“I said, say, ‘Aaargggh!’”

I obediently mumbled, “Aar” behind my smile but Casey yelled, “Just take the damn picture, Mel. We’re not ten.”

He handed back the camera, the photo flapping out like a white tongue. “I was going to ask if you had requests, but not with that attitude.”

We waited in line at the snack bar, monitoring the image as it developed in Casey’s palm. It was overexposed, compromised by the flash bouncing off fake jewels in the treasure chest. Two women who might as well have been strangers, standing so carefully apart from each other, gingerly holding opposite corners of the treasure chest lid as if it contained uranium instead of ten-cent necklaces. My smile was tight and Casey was scowling.

If we were in the mood to write a caption in the wide white band at the bottom it would say this: What the hell are we doing here?

But I knew the white plastic would remain empty. That space was reserved for summing up happier shots.

“It’s a good one of you,” Casey said, examining the photo.

I prepared my automatic denials. I’m ten pounds heavier, I can’t wear my hair as long now, I have three lines on my forehead and a third of my left eyebrow simply vanished overnight... “Oh, please, I...”

“Stop. Can we not do that, please? Can we just agree not to do that?”

“Do what?”

“That thing some women do, looking for reassurance. That whole repetitive, tiresome thing. You look fantastic, and I look fine, and we’re thirty-five. Done.”

“Fine. So you think Alex is here? In a Farrah Fawcett wig?”

“Wouldn’t put it past her.”

We carried our burgers and Cokes to tables with little swinging chairs attached. Everyone ate while either pushing off from the table base and letting their chair return, over and over, or pivoting side to side. Even the adults did it; they just did it less vigorously. It was impossible not to. Casey was a side-to-sider and I was a pusher-offer. These chairs had probably absorbed a million man-hours of nervous energy over the decades.

“Have you seen your mom yet?” I pushed off from the table and returned, glad to have something to do with my legs. I tried to pretend I was looking for Alex, a lock of her red hair peeking out from under a blond, feathered wig. But I was looking for someone else. Someone tall, with shiny black hair and brown eyes.

Casey took pity on me. “He’s not here much. He owns a miniature golf course in Tahoe City and a couple other businesses.”

I gulped too much Coke and an avalanche of ice dislodged and fell down my chin. “That’s good,” I said, wiping my face. “I mean, good for him. He wouldn’t recognize me anyway.”

“You said that already.”

“I did?”

She waited a beat, fighting some impulse, and I wasn’t sure if she won or lost the fight but she said, so quietly I barely heard her over the music and games, the boom-clacks from the bowling alley, “He’d recognize you.”

We ate our burgers and watched the skaters, and in the long silence I wondered if Casey was thinking the same thing. That Alex had been right to give us activities. A schedule.

“They’re cute, right?” Casey said. “God, so young.”

“That one looks a little like your...” Daughter? Foster daughter? “Like Elle.” I nodded at a laughing girl skating past with long honey-brown hair.

“That’s her friend from school. Mia.” Casey waved, but the little girl didn’t notice. We watched her pack circle around. She was a bold and graceful skater, her hair flying behind her. She navigated the corners with a flick of her eyes and an imperceptible pivot of her skinny ankles.

The music stopped and a voice on the speakers announced the Dice Game. People had to stand by numbers spaced around the rink while a teenage employee rolled a fuzzy die the size of a washing machine. Anyone not standing under the number it landed on had to leave the rink. Finally, three boys at number seven prevailed, and they high-fived each other as if they’d won the lottery. Modern kids, supposedly so spoiled and warped by their video games and iPhones. Here they were excited about their trip to the plastic treasure chest.

“Why are you smiling?” Casey said.

“Was I? I was thinking I’m glad this place is still here. Swinging chairs. Digby the Pirate Duck. I’m glad it hasn’t changed.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“Me, too.”

The voice above me was older now, but unmistakable. I hooked my feet around the table leg to stop my chair from swinging.

J.B.

Also called The Boy Behind the Counter, and Skating Rink Boy.

For me, he was only, ever, The Boy. The boy who was different from all the rest. And now he was standing behind me, inches from the back of my chair.

“We’re a real time capsule,” the voice continued.

I looked up. He was leaning down over me, his black hair falling forward around his face. The only thought I could register was that even upside down and half-covered by hair, his brown eyes were kinder than any I’d ever seen.

And the only words I could manage were “It’s you.”

7

The Boy Behind the Counter

June 1996

Summer before sophomore year

The last time I’d been to the Silver Skate ’n Lanes Pauline Knowland had shoved me.

It was in fifth grade, right when things started to go south for me at school.

“Watch out,” Pauline had said, in a tone wholly without fear or apology, seconds before her palms smacked the small of my back and sent me flying. I’d tried to slow down by dragging my orange toe stopper, a piece of cylindrical rubber like a giant pencil eraser. Instead I’d fallen facedown in front of the snack bar.

I hadn’t been back since.

Casey thought it was time for me to face my fears. The shabby skating rink/bowling alley in Red Pine had become cool again ever since Erin Simms threw a Roller Boogie–themed Sweet Sixteen. Now every girl in our class was talking about some college guy who worked there. He’d gone out back, behind the Dumpsters, with Debbie Finch. Debbie described this as if it were the most romantic thing in the world.

Alex was driving us to Red Pine so we could see what all the fuss was about. She clearly wanted to join us and dropped hints the whole way. “I’ve always been curious about bowling, do people really wear matching shirts like on TV?” Two miles down the road—“You two are so brave, I’d probably be a total klutz on skates.”

Never been bowling, never been skating. I added these to my list of facts about Alex. Didn’t know what a friendship bracelet was, never heard of the game Red Rover. These gaps in her childhood education didn’t surprise me anymore. Her parents had been strict, she’d said. Strict was always the word she used to describe them when I asked. Then she’d change the subject.

Casey was in the back seat, not speaking. I turned to her and raised my eyebrows, pleading silently. We have to invite her.

She shook her head. Casey was punishing Alex for something. But to me, even their rare fights were something to envy; they were the fights I imagined sisters had.

“She’s mad at me for turning a pair of her jeans into cutoffs,” Alex said. “I’m getting the silent treatment. You can wear anything in my closet, baby. You, too, Laur.”

I smiled, unsure what to say, and looked out the window.

“That’s a pretty song, what’s it called, Case?” Alex blasted the radio.

Another fact: Alex hadn’t been allowed to listen to pop music when she was younger. Now she didn’t enjoy it so much as study it like someone cramming for an exam. Casey told me this was why she’d devoured the Casey Kasem countdown CDs, worshipped the guy enough to name her child after him.

Casey not only knew the exact name of the slow, hypnotic song Alex liked, she owned it. “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star. We’d both bought the CD the weekend before. But she didn’t name the tune. I smiled at Alex apologetically.

“I’ll listen for the title after I drop you off.” Alex grinned at me—don’t mind her—but quickly turned her eyes back to the road.

Alex was a cautious, nervous driver, never going more than a few miles over the speed limit, her hands always gripping ten and two o’clock on the wheel. She’d only gotten her license a few years before. Her parents hadn’t let her take driver’s ed when she was in high school, Casey had said, so Alex hadn’t gotten around to learning until recently.

When we pulled into the parking lot and Casey and I scrambled out, Alex called a little too cheerfully, “I want a full report.”

I watched her leave by herself like all the other mommy chauffeurs. “She so wanted to skate with us,” I said. “And that was kind of mean about the song. You’re really that mad about some jeans?”

Casey shook her head. “She was flirting with this boy at the car wash who squeegeed our windshield. He was like sixteen.”

“I get that it’s annoying but she’d never—”

“Don’t. Don’t even defend her. I know it’s not her fault. Her parents screwed her up royally. But she has to learn she’s not in high school anymore.” Casey swung open the door to the Silver Skate, releasing throbs of music.

I tugged at her jacket, suddenly nervous. “Case. Don’t you want to hang out at your house instead? Cookie dough and Grease 2?”

“We can do that any night.”

“If Pauline’s here I’m going to kill you.”

“Repeat this to yourself. ‘I’m not that girl anymore,’” Casey said as we stepped into the dark, disco-lit world of the rink.

“What girl am I?”

“You’re Laura Christie. Sophisticated Mystery Woman,” Casey shouted over the music, pulling me into line.

“Say that three times fast.”

The woman behind the register sealed circlets of glow-in-the-dark pink plastic around our wrists and we shoved through the turnstile.

“My tracking bracelet, so I can’t escape,” I said.

Casey laughed but stopped abruptly, clutching my arm. “Oh, no no no. It’s too good. Look.”

There he was. The famous Boy Behind the Counter, handing out skates. The rental counter was elevated, and by a trick of the overhead fluorescents, it seemed he was under a spotlight. His black hair caught the light as he glided between the counter and the shelves of skates behind it. Our small-town god. On wheels.

Morgan Schiffrin and some of her friends (girls we called the Hair Petters because they compulsively ran their hands down their long hair) were clustered near the rental counter, even though they already had their brown-and-orange skates. It was like an altar.

“He’s obviously loving the attention,” I whispered as we lined up. “That is the tightest T-shirt I’ve ever seen.”

“Maybe he accidentally shrank it in the dryer.”

“Please.”

“Maybe he had a late growth spurt and can’t afford to buy a bigger one.”

“He’s rich. Related to the owner, supposedly.”

“No offense, Laur, but you’re nobody to judge someone by the fit of their shirt.”

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