Authors: Sarah Dessen
Her things stayed there all afternoon: after I’d gone back to sit with Clarke, and told her everything. After we played several
hands of rummy, and swam until our fingers were pruny. After Kirsten and Molly left, and other people took their chairs. All
the way up until the lifeguard
finally blew the whistle, announcing closing time, and Clarke and I packed up and walked round the edge of the pool, sunburned
and hungry and ready to go home.
I knew this girl was not my problem. She’d been mean to me, twice, and therefore was not deserving of my pity or help. But,
as we passed the chair, Clarke stopped. ‘We can’t just leave it,’ she said, bending over to gather up the shoes and stuff
them into the bag. ‘And it’s on our way home.’
I could have argued the point, but then I thought again of her walking across the parking lot, barefoot, alone. So I pulled
the towel off the chair, folding it over my own. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Okay.’
Still, when we got to the Daughtrys’ old house, I was relieved to see all the windows were dark and there was no car in the
driveway, so we could just leave the girl’s stuff and be done with it. But, as Clarke bent down to stick the bag against the
front door, it opened, and there she was.
She had on cutoff shorts and a red T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. No sunglasses. No high-heeled sandals. When
she saw us, her face flushed.
‘Hi,’ Clarke said, after a just-long-enough-to-be-noticed awkward silence. Then she sneezed before adding, ‘We brought your
stuff.’
The girl just looked at her for a second, as if she didn’t understand what she was saying. Which, with Clarke’s congestion,
she probably didn’t. I leaned over and picked up the bag, holding it out to her. ‘You left this,’ I said.
She looked at the bag, then up at me, her expression guarded. ‘Oh,’ she said, reaching for it. ‘Thanks.’
Behind us, a bunch of kids coasted past on their bikes, their voices loud as they called out to one another. Then it was quiet
again.
‘Honey?’ I heard a voice call out from the end of the dark hallway behind her. ‘Is someone there?’
‘It’s okay,’ she said over her shoulder. Then she stepped forward, shutting the door behind her, and came out onto the porch.
She quickly moved past us, but not before I saw that her eyes were red and swollen – she’d been crying. And suddenly, like
so many other times, I heard my mother’s voice in my head:
Moving to a new place is tough. Maybe she doesn’t know how to make friends
.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘about what happened. My sister –’
‘It’s fine,’ she said, cutting me off. ‘I’m fine.’ But, as she said it, her voice cracked, just slightly, and she turned her
back to us, putting a hand to her mouth. I just stood there, totally unsure what to do but, as I looked at Clarke, I saw she
was already digging into the pocket of her shorts to pull out her ever-present pack of Kleenex. She drew one out, then reached
round the girl, offering it to her. A second later, the girl took it, silently, and pressed it to her face.
‘I’m Clarke,’ Clarke said. ‘And this is Annabel.’
In the years to come, it would be this moment
that I always came back to. Me and Clarke, in the summer after our sixth-grade year, standing there behind that girl’s turned
back. So much might have been different for me, for all of us, if something else had happened right then. At the time, though,
it was like so many other moments, fleeting and unimportant, as she turned round, now not crying – surprisingly composed,
actually – to face us.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Sophie.’
It’s funny how one summer can change everything. It must be something about the heat and the smell of chlorine, fresh-cut
grass and honeysuckle, asphalt sizzling after late-day thunderstorms, the steam rising while everything drips around it. Something
about long, lazy days and whirring air conditioners and bright plastic flip-flops from the pharmacy thwacking down the street.
Something about fall being so close, another year, another Christmas, another beginning. So much in one summer, stirring up
like the storms that crest at the end of each day, blowing out all the heat and dirt to leave everything gasping and cool.
Everyone can reach back to one summer
and lay a finger on it, finding the exact point when everything changed. That summer was mine.
The day my father got remarried, my mother was up at 6 a.m. defrosting the refrigerator. I woke to the sound of her hacking
away and the occasional thud as a huge slab of ice crashed. My mother was an erratic defroster. When I came down into the
kitchen, she was poised in front of the open freezer, wielding the ice pick, Barry Manilow crooning out at her from the tape
player she kept on the kitchen table. Around Barry’s voice, stacked in dripping piles, were all of our perishables, sweating
in the heat of another summer morning.
‘Oh, good morning, Haven.’ She turned when she saw me, wiping her brow with the ice pick still in hand, making my heart jump
as I imagined it slipping just a bit and taking out her eye. I knew that nervous feeling so well, even at fifteen, that spilling
uncontrollability that my mother brought out in me. It
was as if I were attached to her with a tether, her every movement yanking at me, my own hands reaching to shield her from
the dangers of her waving arms.
‘Good morning.’ I pulled out a chair and sat down next to a stack of packaged chicken. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Me?’ She was back on the job now, scraping. ‘I’m fine. Are you hungry?’
‘Not really.’ I pulled my legs up to my chest, pressing hard to fold myself into the smallest size possible. It seemed like
every morning I woke up taller, my skin having stretched in the night while I slept. I had dreams of not being able to fit
through doors, of becoming gigantic, towering over people and buildings like a monster, causing terror in the streets. I’d
put on four inches since April, and showed no signs of letting up. I was already five eleven, with only a few more little
lines on the measuring stick before six feet.
‘Haven.’ My mother looked at me. ‘Please don’t
sit that way. It’s not good for you and it makes me nervous.’ She stood there staring at me until I let my legs drop. ‘That’s
better.’ Scrape, scrape. Barry sang on, about New England.
I still wasn’t sure what had brought me down from my bed so early on a Saturday, aside from the noise of my mother loosening
icebergs from our Frigidaire. I hadn’t slept well, with my dress for the wedding hanging from the curtain rod, fluttering
in the white light of the street lamp outside my window. At 2 p.m. my father was marrying Lorna Queen, of ‘Lorna Queen’s Weather
Scene’ on WTSB News Channel 5. She was what they called a meteorologist and what my mother called the Weather Pet, but only
when she was feeling vindictive. Lorna was blonde and perky and wore cute little pastel suits that showed just enough leg
as she stood smiling in front of colourful maps, sweeping her arm as if she controlled all the elements. My father, Mac McPhail,
was the sports anchor for Channel 5, and he and the Weather
Pet shared the subordinate news desk, away from the grim-faced anchors, Charlie Baker and Tess Phillips, who reported real
news. Before we’d known about my father’s affair with the Weather Pet, I’d always wondered what they were smiling and talking
about in those last few minutes of the broadcast as the credits rolled. Charlie Baker and Tess Phillips shuffled important-looking
papers, worn thin from a hard day of news chasing and news delivering, but my father and the Weather Pet were always off to
the side sharing some secret laugh that the rest of us weren’t in on. And when we finally did catch on it wasn’t very funny
after all.
Not that I didn’t like Lorna Queen. She was nice enough for someone who broke up my parents’ marriage. My mother, in all fairness,
always blamed my father and limited her hostility to the nickname Weather Pet and to the occasional snide remark about my
father’s growing mass of hair, which at the time of the separation was receding with great speed and
now seemed to have reversed itself and grown back with the perseverance and quickness of our lawn after a few good days of
rain. My mother had read all the books about divorce and tried hard to make it smooth for me and my sister, Ashley, who was
Daddy’s pet and left the room at even the slightest remark about his hair. My mother kept her outbursts about that to a minimum,
but I could tell by the way she winced when they showed my father and Lorna together at their subordinate news desk that it
still hurt. Before the divorce my mother had been good at outbursts, and this quietness, this holding back, was more unnerving
than I imagined any breakdown could be. My mother, like Ashley, has always cultivated the family dramatic streak, started
by my grandmother, who at important family gatherings liked to fake horrible incidents if she felt she were not getting enough
attention. No reunion, wedding or funeral was complete without at least one stroke, heart attack or general collapse from
Grandma at which time
everyone shifted into High Dramatic Mode, fussing and running around and generally creating the kind of chaos that my family
is well known for.
This always made me kind of nervous. I hadn’t inherited that flair for the stage that Ashley and my mother had, this snap
ability to lose control in appropriate instances. I was more like my father, steady and worried all the time. Back then, we
had it down to a science: Mom and Ashley overreacting, thriving on crisis, my father and I standing calm, together, balancing
them out. Then my father left and, like a table short a leg, things had been out of whack ever since.
‘So are you going?’ That was Ashley, standing in the kitchen doorway in a T-shirt and socks. Just looking at her made me acutely
aware of my own height, the pointedness of my elbows and hipbones, the extra inch I’d put on in the last month. At twenty-one
my sister is a petite five-four, with the kind of curvy, rounded body that I wish I’d been born with;
tiny feet, perfect hair, small enough to be cute but still a force to be reckoned with. At my age she had already been voted
Most Popular, dated (and dumped) the captain of the football team and been a varsity cheerleader. She was always the one at
the top of the pyramid, tiny enough to be passed from hand to hand overhead until she stood high over everyone else, a bit
shaky but triumphant, before letting loose and tumbling head over heels to be caught at the bottom with a sweep of someone’s
arms. I remembered her in her cheerleading uniform, short blue skirt, white sweater and saddle shoes, grabbing her backpack
to run out to a carful of teenagers waiting outside, squealing off to school with a beep of the horn. Back then, Ashley seemed
to live a life just like Barbie’s: popular and perfect, always with a handsome boyfriend and the cool crowd. All she needed
was the Dreamhouse and a purple plastic Corvette to make it real.
Now, my sister just scowled at me when she caught
me looking at her, then scratched one foot with the other. She had a good tan already, and on the inside of her left ankle
I could see the yellow butterfly tattoo she’d got in Myrtle Beach when she’d got drunk after high-school graduation two years
earlier and someone double dared her. Ashley was wild, but that was before she got engaged.
‘No. I don’t think I should go,’ my mother said. ‘I think it’s in bad taste.’
‘Go where?’ I said.
‘She invited you,’ Ashley said, yawning. ‘She wouldn’t have done that if she didn’t want you there.’
‘Where?’ I said again, but of course no one was listening to me. There was another crash as a block of ice fell out of the
freezer.
‘I’m not going,’ my mother said solidly, planting a hand on her hip. ‘It’s tacky and I won’t do it.’
‘So don’t do it,’ Ashley said, coming into the kitchen and reaching across me to pick up a pack of frozen waffles from the
table.
‘Do what?’ I said again, louder this time because in our house you have to make a commotion to even be heard.
‘Go to your father’s wedding,’ my mother said. ‘Lorna sent me an invitation.’
‘She did?’
‘Yes.’ This fell into the category of whether Lorna, the Weather Pet, was either downright mean or just stupid. She did a
lot of things that made me question this, from telling me it was okay to call her Mom once she married my father to sending
my mother a framed picture of an old family Christmas card she’d found among my dad’s junk. We’d all sat round the kitchen
table, staring at it, my mother holding it in one hand with a puckered look on her face. She’d never said a word about it,
but instead went outside and ripped up weeds in the garden for forty-five minutes, handful after handful flying over her head
in a massive horticultural tantrum. I believed Lorna was mostly mean, bordering on stupid; my mother
refused to even voice an opinion; and because Ashley couldn’t bear to criticize anything about Daddy she said Lorna was just
stupid and left mean out of it altogether. All I knew was that I would never call a woman only five years older than Ashley
Mom and that that framed Christmas card was what Ann Landers would call In Quite Poor Taste.
So my mother was not with us as we set off for the church that afternoon, in our matching shiny pink bridesmaid dresses, to
see our father be bonded in holy matrimony to this probably stupid but quite possibly just mean Weather Pet. I’d felt sorry
for my mother as she lined us up in front of the mantel to take a picture with her little Instamatic, cooing about how lovely
we looked. She stood in the doorway behind the screen, waving as we walked out to the car, the camera dangling from her wrist,
and I realized suddenly why Ashley might have wanted her to come, even if it was tacky. There was something so sad about leaving
her behind, all of a sudden, and
I had an urge to run back and take her with me, to pull that tether tight and hold her close. But I didn’t, like I always
don’t, and instead climbed into the car next to Ashley and watched my mother waving as we pulled away from the house. At every
wedding someone stays home.