All-Season Edie (16 page)

There's no actual danger. If there's a fire, for instance, or a flood, I could probably kick through one of the thin wooden walls or even force my way through the window, which is covered with thin wooden slats, like the slats of a blind set permanently on the diagonal. But such destruction I'll save for a true emergency, and for the first part of the evening the cabana is comfortable enough, even cosy. I eat the plate of food and read my books for a while. Then, when I get bored, I discover that by standing on the chaise longue I can see out the wood-slatted window and straight into the back window of the house. For a while I've been hearing the thumping beat of the stereo, and now I can dimly make out the figures of dancers. I try to dance along, but the chaise longue is cushioned and the satisfying clack of my shoe soles hitting the ground is missing. I try to read a little more, but I'm starting to feel anxious. The light is slowly fading from the sky, and even though I have a nice table lamp in the cabana, I'm aware of being outside on my own when everyone else is in the house. Then, after some long minutes of increasing nervousness, two things happen at once: a strange light clicks on outside, sending wavy ripples of light across the inside walls of the cabana, and I hear voices quite close by.

Mean Megan, it turns out, has been as good as her word and invited the entire class, all twenty-seven eighth-graders, regardless of hipness or coolness or squareness or geekiness or any of those usually devastating categorizations. Someone has turned on the underwater lights in the swimming pool, creating a ghostly green blue light that wobbles on the house and the deck and everywhere it touches. I can't see the speakers but can hear them very well and know they must be right behind the cabana. They're mumbling, and it's a very brief conversation.

“I changed my mind,” a girl's voice says.

“Okay,” a boy says.

There's silence for another minute or two, and then I hear them move out from behind the cabana, to the cheers of the rest of the group, who must be on the other side of the swimming pool, the side I can't see. After a minute another couple goes past. They're much quieter, but for some rustling sounds and giggling. They too emerge after a couple of minutes to whoops and cheers.

Well, this is interesting, I think.

The kids from my sister's class continue to make their way over in pairs. Mean Megan and a boy named Kalil talk the whole time, or rather Kalil does, nervously, while Mean Megan makes occasional uncharacteristic soft, shy noises of assent. It's at this point I remember Mean Megan's secretiveness with the salad bowl and the scissors and realize the game is about kissing or—in this case—not kissing.

When Dexter and Dwayne Chen, my teacher's son, come over, I can't resist. “Dwayne,” I say in my eeriest, ghostliest voice. It will be fun to make him think he's being spied on by some otherworldly being.

“There's someone in the cabana,” he says, and that's the end of that.

A moment later the door bursts open and Dexter sticks her flushed, sparkly face inside. “Shut up!” she hisses. “Shut up!”

“You locked me in,” I say.

Dwayne appears next to Dexter. “It's Edie!” he says, with a big smile. “You locked her in?” he asks Dexter.

“Freedom!” I say, doing a little dance in and out of the doorway just to bug my sister.

“Game over,” Mean Megan calls drily from her perch on the diving board.

“No!” another boy says. “It's my turn!”

“Not a chance, Ivan,” a girl with a British accent says. “Saved by a small child,” she adds. “I must thank her.”

“No!” the boy named Ivan says again. Everyone is laughing now, except one girl who has gone to the edge of the yard and is leaning over some bushes in a suspicious way. Her shoulders heave once or twice, stop, and then heave again. Ivan jumps to his feet and somehow slips and then he's falling, not to concrete but to cold water. He's slipped right into the pool. The other kids start to laugh until they see him flailing his arms and legs and realize he's panicking.

I see a girl throwing up on some bushes, and a clumsy boy fall into the pool and not start to swim, and the rest of the teens sitting around in a daze until three or four of them jump in after the clumsy boy. They drag him over to the shallow end, where he stands retching and coughing and crying and insisting it's his turn next. I see the big bottle being passed from hand to hand and I think, The cabana is not on fire, and yet. And yet.

I find the phone on the counter in the kitchen and dial the Corrigans' number, which Mom wrote on a slip of paper and tucked into my pocket for emergencies. Mr. Corrigan answers.

“It's Edie,” I say. “Is my mom there?”

“Edie!” Mr. Corrigan says and starts to sing an Irish song about his Edie, his sweet briar rose, the way he always does when he hears my name.

“IS MY MOM THERE?” I say again.

While I wait for Mom to come to the phone, I wonder if it will be a matter of weeks or months, or maybe the rest of my life, before my sister will speak to me again.

Sweet Revenge

A warm car makes a good place to sleep, even when you have to share the back seat with sleeping bags and the big orange cooler, and the kettle is on your lap, and your sister has spent the last hundred miles pretending you don't exist, and they still make you wear your seat belt. I close my eyes and let my mind wander around the last two weeks, the aftermath of the party. When Mom and Dad showed up, within ten minutes of my call to Mr. Corrigan, Dexter greeted them not with shame or outrage but with a loose, goofy ease that I knew meant she had been drinking from the big vodka bottle too. Dad got her into the car, where she sat with her head against the headrest and her eyes closed, talking vividly about nothing in particular. Mom took me inside and got me to show her where the phone was, and she began the long business of calling everyone's parents. As they arrived, white-faced with worry, Mom met them at the door and explained in an undertone what had happened. Not until the last kid had been collected did Mom turn to deal with Mean Megan.

“Where are your parents tonight?” she asked.

Mean Megan looked around. “Out,” she said. “They're out.” She seemed stunned.

“I'm going to leave them a note on the counter here,” Mom said. “I want you to come stay with us tonight. Can you go get your pajamas and your toothbrush together?”

“Yes, Mrs. Snow,” Mean Megan said and went slowly upstairs.

“Go with her, Edie,” Mom said, “and come get me if you think she's going to be sick,” so I followed Mean Megan upstairs and watched her get a few things together, slowly, slowly, and then sit on her black bed as though she had just run a marathon and couldn't move another inch. I couldn't tell if she had been drinking like the others or was just overwhelmed by the disaster her party had become. I went downstairs.

“What's she doing?” Mom asked.

“Sitting on the bed,” I said.

Mom went upstairs and came down a few minutes later, helping Mean Megan, who was leaning her head against Mom's shoulder, looking exhausted. I followed them out to the driveway, where Dad was holding back Dexter's hair while she puked into the bushes. Mom and Dad exchanged a grim look. Dad got Dexter into the back seat again while Mom settled Mean Megan in the front, and then Dad got in and started the engine while Mom squatted in front of me on the driveway.

“Where were you all this time?” she asked, smoothing my hair back from my forehead the way she usually only did with Dexter.

I almost felt guilty telling because I knew Dexter was in enough trouble as it was. But the night had been split open, stripped bare; there could be no half-truths. “Locked in the cabana,” I said, and Mom's mouth went so tight it almost disappeared.

“You're sure they didn't give you any drinks?” Mom asked for about the eleventh time, and I said no, I was sure. Then Mom got in the back seat next to Dexter, and I squeezed in next to her and we all went home. I was dimly aware of more sickness and crying in the night, long after I had been given a cup of warm milk and sent off to bed.

The next morning, Mean Megan's parents came by to pick her up. The four parents sat in the kitchen for a long time, talking, and then there was yelling, briefly, between Dad and Mean Megan's dad. Then Mean Megan's family went slamming out of the house. From my bedroom window I saw them pile into their car, looking furious, and drive away.

And that had been the last of Mean Megan, and the beginning of Dexter's torment. She was not allowed out of the house, not allowed to watch
TV
or videos, not even allowed to go to her ballet classes, and certainly not allowed to spend the holidays at Mean Megan's house, as she had last year. It was impossible to take any pleasure in Dexter's misery, though, because Mom and Dad seemed as miserable as she did, hurt and disappointed, like those cartoon characters with little black scribbly clouds hanging over their heads. Dad even talked about canceling our holidays that summer, but Mom said we all needed some cheering up and it wasn't fair to punish everyone because of Dexter. Then she said that I would be terribly disappointed if we didn't go. Which was interesting, I thought. I wasn't supposed to have heard this conversation but happened to be playing spelunker behind the sofa when it began and didn't come out fast enough to show I was eavesdropping by accident instead of on purpose. Interesting because, though I hadn't realized it, I
would
have been terribly disappointed, and it was clever of Mom to know something about me that I didn't know myself. After a while they went away and I could come out from behind the sofa without them ever knowing I had been there.

That evening at supper, Mom and Dad began to talk about our two weeks' vacation and where we should go. This, too, was mightily interesting, since I knew they had already decided. “The lake?” I said tentatively, because this felt a bit like cheating on a test.

“That's a good idea,” Dad said, as though it hadn't occurred to him. “We had a good time last year, didn't we?”

“Would you like to see the lake, Dexter?” Mom said.

“Why are you even asking me?” Dexter said. “Why are you even pretending you care what I think?” and then she started to cry again.

Mom put her arm around Dexter's shoulders and Dexter cuddled against her, crying harder. “Dexter will come to the lake,” Mom said. “We'll all have a good time together and get past all this.”

“We can go fishing,” I said, and Dad gave me a thumbs-up, but it was hard to know if Dexter heard, because she had her face mashed into Mom's shoulder.

Things didn't really get any better, though: Dexter was still not allowed any of her privileges, and she still acted as though this was all my fault. This mostly took the form of ignoring me, walking out of the room when I spoke to her and refusing to play games with me. I played a lot of Junior Scrabble against myself. In the car, Dex declared she didn't want to go to the lake after all, and there was an argument about that. Now, as we pull into the parking lot, she's pretending to be asleep so she can be grumpy when she's “woken” and made to get out of the car. So she misses the first moments back at the lake, the first moments when it seems like we've time-traveled because everything is the same as it was last year: the damp, the fog, the quiet, even the keening bird. Now that I'm a year older, the bird sounds less frightening than sadly familiar, the expression of a mood it seems our family has been living with since Grandpa's death. I feel older. When Dad comes around to my side of the car, I tell him I feel one hundred years old.

“Me too,” he says. He hugs me and together we look at the smoke-colored lake while Mom wakes Dex as gently as she can. Tonight we stay in our cabin while the smoky fog licks and creeps through the trees and along the edges of things. We eat the soup I heat on the stove, and afterward we play cards, not talking much. When it's time for bed, Mom says, “You girls sleep in tomorrow. You both look like you could use it,” and I realize I'm exhausted, as though I've been awake for as long as I've been alive.

The next morning I take Dexter down to the office to show her where to get a boat key. The old man behind the counter says he remembers me even though I'm taller than last summer. Down at the jetty, I show Dexter how to unhook our pedal boat. She still isn't talking much, but she watches everything I show her and doesn't tell me to shut up. We're just climbing into our boat when a voice calls, “Don't forget your pee-eff-dee!”

I turn around. Jogging down the slope to the shore is a boy about Dexter's age, tall and slim and tanned, both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It takes me a second before I call back, “Robert!”

He lands lightly on the jetty and jogs over to us, grinning broadly.

“You're not fat!” I say.

Dexter buries her face in her hands.