Before Wings (3 page)

The women gave each other sly smiles.

“Ah, she wants us to go back to where we come from,” said one.

“Wants our jobs,” said another. “Wants to work on her varicose veins.”

“It’s these lovely uniforms and hairnets,” said the third. “Everyone wants to wear them.”

“Tsk tsk tsk,” said the first. “Finish your school, then worry about a job.”

Adrien fled out among the trees where she stood, cheeks burning. Old hags. She didn’t want their lousy jobs. For all she cared, they could cook pork and sausages in every lousy camp in the entire country. Rude—they were rude. She turned this way and that, kicking at roots and flailing at mayflies until her face cooled. God, did she want a cigarette. That’s what she should do—learn how to ask for a cigarette in whatever gibberish those hags were speaking, and run that by them. She would show them. By the end of summer, she would be fluent in asking for drugs, needles, condoms and porn in
their
language. Every morning she would come up with something different.
Excuse me, but do you have the latest issue of
Playgirl
? I lent mine to the campers and they won’t give it back.

Aunt Erin was in the office. “Great,” she said, look
ing up from her desk as Adrien entered. “Today, you’ll do inventory for the store. Count stuff.” She grinned, but she looked tired, her eyes puffy. Last night’s scene at the lake passed between them, a shadow of cold wind and rain. Frowning, Aunt Erin pressed the bridge of her nose, pushing at something in her head. Pushing it away. “Leave the mayflies outside,” she said.

Adrien stepped out onto the porch. The bugs sat in a resting position, their wings folded together and pointed upward. They didn’t struggle as she pulled them off, but there was always a slight suction, as if their little buggy feet were holding on for dear life.
Yuck
, she thought, watching each one flutter away.
Putrid. Barbaric. Go thou to thy doom.

As she came back inside, a lawnmower started up. “On grass already,” Aunt Erin said. “Boy’s fast as ever.”

Boxes labeled
T-shirts—Medium
,
Sweatshirts—Large
and
Buttons
were stacked along one wall. Adrien was more interested in the ones marked
Coffee Crisp
and
Smarties
.

“No eating the merchandise,” Aunt Erin admonished, following her gaze. “I’ll show you what to do.”

“I can count.”

“There’s last summer’s records, and records from over the winter. Schools come out for the day. Church groups and conferences rent the place. Need to make sure everything’s in order. Glad you’re here to do it.”

A storage area at the back of the office held boxes stacked halfway to the ceiling. “Hope you like counting,” Aunt Erin quipped, then led her outside and around the building to where an awning opened out of the north wall. During the summer months, Tuck’n Tack operated like a
concession booth. Aunt Erin handed Adrien the key ring that unlocked the door, the cabinets and the large service window. “Lots of air conditioning,” she said. “Here’s the lever that lowers the awning.”

She demonstrated and Adrien played with it, watching the blue-and-white striped canvas yawn outward, then shrink back in. Out, in, out, in.

“Easily entertained,” observed her aunt. “Good to see.” Before Adrien could protest, she continued. “When you’re working in Tuck’n Tack, kids’ll come by with their counselors. Every cabin’s got its daily time slot.” She made Adrien practice unlocking and locking everything, then showed her where to hang the key ring on the office wall. “How many summers were you here?”

“Five.” Adrien had been booked for a sixth, but her brain had blown that June.

“Here’s the books,” said her aunt, ignoring yet another obvious opportunity for sympathy. She explained how to decipher the numbers and columns and returned to her desk. Adrien began to open boxes. There were zillions of T-shirts and sweatshirts, each with two sailboats and five tiny waves.

“These are ugly colors,” she said.

“What?” Aunt Erin looked up from her desk.

“Kids don’t like these colors.”

“Blue, green and red?”

“They’re all dark. You need neon. Lime green, laser lemon and hot pink. A bright blue. You’d sell a lot more.”

“Thanks for the suggestion.” Aunt Erin returned to her paperwork.

Heat slapped itself across Adrien’s face. She stared at
her aunt’s bent head, then said slowly, “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m not slave labor.”

“That’s right. You can go home if you want.” Aunt Erin didn’t lift her head.

“Well, maybe I will.”

“Phone’s right here. Help yourself.”

Silence pulsed between them.

“Why don’t you like me?” Adrien asked in a small voice. Aunt Erin sat very still, her head down. “Like has nothing to do with it,” she said. “You’re working at a job for pay. I tell you what to do and you do it. Don’t order your boss around. May as well learn that from me, or it’ll get harder for you later.”

What later?
Adrien almost asked, but the phone rang and Aunt Erin picked it up. “Camp Lakeshore,” she said calmly, looking out the window.

Paul peered through the screen door. “Coffee break. Coming?”

She knew he meant smoke break and started to get up, but Aunt Erin covered the phone and said, “Just started. Give it another hour. Then you get ten minutes.” She returned to the phone.

Paul’s eyebrows floated upward. “I’ll come back in an hour,” he said and left.

After the phone call, Aunt Erin left the office without speaking. Rigid, Adrien sat staring at the box of mediumsize, navy blue T-shirts she was counting. They were more than ugly, they were archaic. Camp Lakeshore’s logo hadn’t changed in over a decade, and the two toy sailboats and five dinky waves looked like something out of a kid’s coloring
book. Didn’t Aunt Erin know she was competing with extraterrestrials and Marilyn Manson?

She got up and wandered around the office. It held the usual boring stuff—memo pads, staplers, a calendar with scenic trees, copies of summer scheduling. There were two wall clocks, one on the east wall and one on the west, catching the sun as it came up and went down. Aunt Erin had everything clocked, organized and filed into place except Adrien, and this niece wasn’t going to fit into her aunt’s neat schemes without a fight. Maybe she would just have her final aneurysm here and now, throw up and die all over her aunt’s tidy desk. Wouldn’t that throw a wrench into things? She could just imagine Aunt Erin discovering the body, checking for a pulse, calling Mom and Dad. There would be tears, profuse apologies. Adrien explored every possible angle of “I was such a lousy aunt, I killed her with my terrible attitude.” It gave immense satisfaction for several minutes, then waned.

She fingered through a stack of papers on her aunt’s desk and her hand shifted the mat, uncovering the corner of a small photograph. Idly, she slid out the picture and scanned it. A group of girls her own age grinned at the camera. They were all in swimsuits, as was their counselor, a young woman with wheat blond hair and pale blue eyes—Aunt Erin in a Speedo, holding a life jacket and grinning as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Adrien couldn’t believe how much they looked alike. There on Aunt Erin’s face, she saw her own forehead, nose and mouth, ridged cheekbones and jutting chin. Two of the girls knelt behind her on a picnic table and draped adoring arms around her
neck. Two more had wrapped their arms around her waist. They must have been nuts.

Adrien slipped the photograph into her wallet. There was a lot of information in this picture and she wanted to study it. She would return it later. Maybe.
If
her aunt behaved herself and started treating her with respect. Adrien comforted herself with a Coffee Crisp and went back to counting last year’s ugly unsold T-shirts.

In exactly one hour she was sitting on the porch steps, waiting for her cigarette. Aunt Erin was nowhere in sight and she had counted so many T-shirts that a myriad of ugly sailboats were floating through the dazzling waters of her brain. She heard the distant sound of the mower cut off, then approaching footsteps. Mayflies exploded in every direction as Paul came into view.

“C’mon, I know a place.” He had shucked the lumber jacket. Already his tanned face was darker.

“I’m dying for one.”

He gave a slow appreciative smile. “You didn’t bring any?”

“I read the rules.”

“Yeah, I’m glad I don’t live on the grounds.”

He turned onto a path that disappeared into a shimmering dance of leaves and bug wings. Adrien swore and waved wildly around her head. “I wouldn’t do this for any other reason, y’know.”

He turned and grinned back at her. “No?”

She rolled her eyes and looked away. This was the way she handled boys at school—smoked their cigarettes and
sidestepped their comments and hands. When she was alone, she thought about the possibilities—thought about them a lot—but she never let them happen. There was something about touching, coming that close—she was sure all that heat would light up her brain like a Molotov cocktail.

“Erin not around?”

“We had a fight and she took off.”

“Already?” He ducked through two spruce and she followed, emerging in a small clearing. More mayflies. A halo of wings settled onto Paul’s hair and shoulders. “This is where they teach school kids to build lean-tos.”

“We’re going to build one and crawl in to smoke?”

He grinned again, scanning her face. Adrien rolled her eyes emphatically, realizing how she had set herself up. “Give me a smoke,” she said, delicately picking wings off her shirt front. Fluttering on her breast. How embarrassing.

He pulled out the pack. “So, what did you fight about?”

Impatient, she shrugged. “I just told her she needed to sell T-shirts in better colors. She bit off my head.”

He handed her a cigarette. “Doesn’t sound like her.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like her much.”

“Why?” He lit her cigarette, then his own.

“She’s bossy.”

“She’s the boss.”

“I don’t like being bossed.” Adrien wandered to the edge of the clearing, watching bugs rise through shafts of sun that cut through the trees. How could air color itself like that, green shadows and gold streams of light? Even the bugs looked pretty out here. She pulled one off her throat and watched it flutter off.

“Tough city girl.”

She turned to find him assessing her, eyes traveling slowly. “Stop that.” She waved her hand, breaking his gaze, and he turned to look into the woods. “I’m not easy, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, Angel, nothing about you is easy.”

“Stop calling me Angel. You want me to call you ...” She searched for an appropriate name. “Darth Vader?”

Unexpectedly, he laughed. “Darth Vader and Angel— that’d make a great team. Cover all the angles.”

“Do you
always
think about death?”

“Do you?”

She paused, considering. “The possibility is always lurking.”

“Isn’t it for everyone?”

“Not like me.”

“That makes two of us, eh?”

This time she assessed him, the broad face, thick eyebrows, wide mouth. His nose beaked slightly, his hair was shaggy, down to his collar. Lower than that she was not going to look now, but just wait until
his
back was turned.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Sixteen this July. You?”

“November. So how d’you get your smokes?”

“There’s always someone who’ll sell to minors.”

“Yeah.” No matter how many signs were posted, teenagers found out who was open for business. “You do anything else?”

“Drugs?” He shot her a look. “I got enough shit happening in my head. You?”

“Someone spiked my pop at school once, but I’ve never done anything on my own.”

“You want to?”

“It was too weird.” She had been terrified at the sudden lights happening in her head, and had crawled into a bathroom corner to sweat it out. After that, she had never shared another can of pop. “What d’you think happens, y’know, when you die?”

“Pain,” he said softly.

“Yeah, but I mean is there overwhelming darkness or do you go to a place of light?”

“I don’t know. I never get to the actual moment of dying. All I see is another way it’s gonna happen, coming straight at me.”

“I think it’s light,” she said. “That’s how it was for me the first time. I had a brain aneurysm two years ago. My whole head exploded with light.”

“So, what was it like ... meeting God?”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t God. More like a star dying in my brain. Y’know how they explode when they go out? It’s like that—a huge explosion, nuclear bomb, the end of the world. Boom!” She snapped her fingers. “Lots of people walk around with a blood vessel bulging in their brain and they don’t even know it. Sometimes you don’t feel any symptoms. It just ruptures, and you drop dead.”

He stood quietly on the other side of the clearing. “So that’s the way it’ll be for you, eh?”

She took a quick breath. “Yeah.”

“At least you know how you’re going,” he said.

three

Late morning, the sky clouded over. Sharp gusts of wind kept slamming the screen door. Two core staff who worked year-round at the camp returned from a day off and stood bantering with Aunt Erin on the office porch as if they actually enjoyed her company. Adrien watched suspiciously, alert for any signs of suck-up or kiss-ass, but there didn’t seem to be any. Brain slumming, she decided. In order to survive, no,
like
her aunt’s tyrannical leadership, they had tossed mental efficiency out the window and reduced to low gear. Well, that didn’t mean she had to. At noon, she recorded her current total of small ugly red sweatshirts, and stood. “I’m going for lunch.”

“Be back at one,” Aunt Erin said.

As if Adrien couldn’t figure that out. She banged the screen door and ran heavily down the steps, then stood letting the wind hit her full in the face. From here she could see clear across the freshly cut lawn to the lake, which rolled and heaved under an approaching storm. Thunder rumbled faintly in a slate gray sky. An eerie fork of lightning flickered low to the water, and a small shiver of white echoed through the inside of Adrien’s head. Again, lightning forked the entire horizon. It was like watching her own brain, the knife lines of electricity that sliced through its heavy mass. Calling, the sky was calling her into the gray pulp of its brain, the dazzle of its forked currents.
Come, we know you, come and be with us.