Like It Never Happened (7 page)

“Three more bites,” I said, because that's what somebody once said to me. I folded the pages and searched the cafeteria for the back of Dylan's head. It suddenly made sense that he had wanted to get away from me as fast as possible. My sister, who was a bona fide lunatic, had written to me like I was one too.

Somehow the e-mail managed to embarrass me, and fill me with guilt, and make me want to roll my eyes all at the same time. For one thing, I didn't need Mary's warnings. I might have been a certain kind of mess, but not like her. I wasn't on the verge of running away or cutting myself or snorting drugs, or whatever she was insinuating.

I forced myself to take a deep breath. Dylan Larsen was a stranger. In another week and a half, I would never have to see him again.

“Are you okay?” asked Peyton. On her plate, a single baby carrot had been nibbled three times.

“You're totally shaking,” added Annelise.

“I'm fine.”

“How old do you think the zip-line boy is?” asked Peyton.

She blew her bangs out of her eyes. She looked so hopeful, like a difference of one or two years might mean he was the perfect guy: A lifetime of harnesses and happiness awaited her. I felt an unlikely surge of affection.

“I would guess he's in his twenties.” I reached across the table to steal one of her carrots.

She heaved a tragic sigh. “That figures.”

After dinner we walked in a sloppy line toward the fire pit. The sing-alongs were so popular that they had become a nightly ritual. To me they felt designed to convince us of our inexhaustible love for camp. I guess it worked on most people—at least, my campers' cheeks turned pink and they sat with their arms laced, ankles crossed. Maybe it would have worked on me if things had been very different. For example, if Charlie had ever looked at me across the flames as he led the crowd in another round of “It Ain't Me Babe.”

But he didn't.

I wanted to dismiss Mary's e-mail, exactly as you have to dismiss sappy birthday cards from your grandparents. And maybe I could have, if she hadn't mentioned Nadine. Because I did remember Nadine—but in these infuriatingly vague flashes, the way you remember a movie you haven't seen in years. Baggy jeans. A long braid against her spine. The two of them had their own scent when they were together—a sticky-sweet Christmas smell, which now I realized was definitely pot.

As far as I could remember, Nadine had always been nice to me, so I couldn't explain why her name triggered such a strong wave of anxiety.

I was sitting three feet from the fire—wedged between Peyton and Annelise—and my hands were turning cold.

On the final Friday night of camp, Charlie found me walking through the woods alone. I heard him before I saw him—a loud disruption of bushes and branches. Fearing some woodland animal, I upped my pace. I was wearing only a bikini top with my shorts because it was about a million degrees, so I felt fairly vulnerable to anything with claws.

When the source of the noise turned out to be Charlie, angry and panting and demanding, “So what'd you give him?” I wished for a mountain lion instead.

“What did I give
who
?” I asked, incredulous. Our camp troubadour wasn't so easygoing after all.

“Dylan Larsen.”

“Nothing!” I shouted, relieved to be telling the truth.

“He says he printed your e-mails.”

“He did!”

“Yeah, well, he didn't do it for free! That guy doesn't exactly do things out of the goodness of his heart. He's a troll.”

I hesitated before succumbing to Charlie's insanity. “He's a what?”

Charlie embarked on the following rant:

“All that stuff about his moderating being essential to the well-being of the World of Warcraft community? Bullshit! He has two accounts: one as a moderator, and one as Doomclan94, which he uses to ask his enemies questions like, ‘Why don't you idiot shamans ever battle rez?' Which everyone knows the shaman class isn't even capable of, so of course people get offended and start cursing, and then Dylan logs back in as moderator and suspends his opponents! Bam!”

I crossed my arms over my chest, wishing I had worn a shirt.

“He's a troll!” bellowed Charlie.

“What does this have to do with me?” I bellowed back.

“He won't tell any of us what you did! Every time somebody asks, the bastard gets all coy and acts like he's preserving your fucking honor!”

I looked up at the canopy of trees and swallowed my urge to laugh in his face. I had never seen him so upset. “Charles Lamb,” I said, “you've been played.”

Charlie inhaled deeply through his nose. “Pardon me?”

“I gave Dylan Larsen nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Charlie blinked. “So he—”

“Asked me for
nothing,
so that he could imply
everything
.” I was pretty proud of this analysis.

Charlie frowned at his sandals. “That's stupid,” he said quietly.

I smiled and put my hands on my hips. “It worked on you.”

“Troll,” he whispered bitterly.

I turned and walked away. Beneath whatever amusement I felt at Charlie's expense simmered a summer's worth of rage. He didn't deserve my company. Not anymore.

“Rebecca.” Charlie chased after me, planting a clammy hand on my arm. I threw him off as hard as I could.

“What business is it of yours whether I do Dylan Larsen, or anyone else, any favors? You've been pretending I don't even exist. You've been pretending
Charlie
doesn't even exist. It's like your body's been possessed by an imbecilic summer camp enthusiast who—”

Charlie was turning red from his cheeks to the tips of his ears, which were sticking out through his overgrown mop of hair.

“—doesn't even have a shred of interiority! Since when do you even play video games? The Charlie I know doesn't have time for video games! And, I mean, ‘Free Fallin' by Tom Petty and the freaking Heartbreakers? I thought you loved Cat Power and Elliott Smith! Oh, and,
Tacoma
?”

I shouted that last part, like the city itself was a lewd act.

“Leave Madeline out of this,” muttered Charlie.

“Like you left me out of your whole summer?” I was sweat-slicked, tear-slicked, kicking dirt at Charlie's perfect legs.

He averted his eyes, showing me the backslash of his cheekbone. “I'm sorry,” he said, suddenly sounding sorrier than anyone had ever been. “I thought”—and his voice went deep and gravelly—“it would be fun or something to take a break—”

“From me?”

“From my whole life! From treating everything like it's my job! Hank told me I take myself way too seriously.”

“Who the hell is Hank?” I asked.

“The guy in charge of the zip-line. He has an Xbox in his cabin. He's awesome.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “I like you better when you're serious.”

Charlie lowered his chin. “Serious like you?”

I had never thought of myself as serious. But serious sounded good, like it was Charlie and me against a non-serious world. “Yes,” I whispered.

He stepped closer. Charlie put his hands on my waist, and I let him.

“You're not going to lick me, are you?”

He froze. His posture conveyed disgust. “Lick you?”

“The pact. Never to kiss, grope, lick . . .”

“Oh, that.” He pressed against me. I felt his damp T-shirt on my skin. In that moment I could not remember if the pact was important or if it was more of a joke. I tried to weigh it against the urgency of his approaching lips.

“Did you ever think it was an elaborate scheme to get inside your pants?” His breath was hot.

“No,” I answered honestly.

I thought of two things before I let Charlie Lamb kiss me.

I thought of my sister crawling into my bed when I was six years old. Her hair smelled sweet and smoky. She said, “Rebecca, I have discovered the reason for breathing.”

And I thought of Mr. McFadden, shipping us both off to the most miserable excuse of a performing arts camp.

I would have to remember to thank him.

C
harlie and I sat together on the bus back to Portland. None of his camp friends happened to be on our bus, but I think he would have sat with me anyway. He seemed somewhat relieved to have finally cut the act. Most counselors sobbed through their farewells, but Charlie doled out hugs with dry eyes. I guess it always feels good to go back to your real life—even if your real life requires playing classical guitar for the elderly, and sometimes retaking calculus exams because you got a ninety-eight percent.

I kept trying to find the words for the question I needed to ask him, which was something like, “What the hell are we going to tell our friends?” But I couldn't—partially because Charlie kept kissing me, and partially because I had no idea what I wanted. His lips were all loose and raw with something. Probably not love; it was too early for love. But with enthusiasm, and an obvious willingness.

As the bus lumbered down the highway, Charlie explored me with his hands. He rubbed circles on my back, and on my neck, and on the corner of my jaw. He dared to splay one hand across my stomach, so that his fingertips pushed against the underwire of my bra. Charlie's own skin was calloused from a summer-long affair with a canoe. If I closed my eyes, I could easily imagine he was somebody else, somebody older.

It was occurring to me that Charlie, as a person, wasn't exactly consistent. For our teachers at Bickford Park he was tirelessly studious; for the bros of summer he was all noise and sportsmanship; for his campers he played the clown. Still, our world onstage meant something to him. The Essential Five meant something to him. Maybe I didn't trust Charlie, entirely, but I trusted that part of him.

Now he was searching my back pocket. Paper crinkled.

“What's this?” he whispered.

Damn. I had forgotten to throw out Mary's e-mail.

What really bothered me about it was the reference to my “wild heart.” Like my sister knew me, just because I was sixteen and she had been sixteen once. Like because I was in high school it followed that I was deliberately cruel to everyone, and melodramatic, and prone to collapsing in hallways.

My sister was not a normal person. By the time she was fourteen she had thrown out all her clothes in favor of one oversized Joy Division T-shirt. By the time she was seventeen she had run away from home. As far as I could tell, she spent the in-between years sneaking out of windows and getting stoned and crying in the shower and screaming at our father.

When I closed my eyes I could still hear the pitch of her scream, the way you remember an ambulance's wail. Dad and Mary screamed at each other like howler monkeys, or like people on daytime television. I didn't know what they were fighting about. I guess it never occurred to me to ask. Even when they weren't making the windows rattle, the silence between them was loud. At the table in the mornings they braced themselves against their chairs, like they were just hoping to survive each other.

The night she left home, the screaming woke me up. I crept into the hall and watched them through the rungs of the banister. Mary was sobbing pathetically, like a child in the toy aisle of Target. Dad slapped her cheek and she cried harder. On his second attempt, Mom seized his wrist. “I will divorce you if you do that again,” she said, so calm it was almost creepy.

I was seven.

Maybe my memory was not entirely accurate. For one thing, when I pictured the scene I saw hair cascading down Mary's back, but my sister never had long hair. It was always cut into a bob and parted down the middle, curls sticking up in odd directions. More importantly, our father wasn't the slapping kind. I had seen movies about abusive families. They had boats in their front yards, whereas our house bore a plaque from the National Register of Historic Places. We even hugged, sometimes.

I had overheard enough relatives describe Mary as a “troubled girl.” But at seven years old, I couldn't have drawn the same conclusions I drew now—about substance and sex and downward spirals. As a kid, the most I could gather was that Mary was extra-charged. Something besides blood coursed through her veins and kept her heart beating fast.

After she ran away, she disappeared completely for a few years. I didn't know anything about it; the details were whispered far from my ears. But when I was ten she showed up unannounced, looking a little less grungy and—according to Dad—looking for money.

After that, Mary was around sometimes. Not often, and only about half the times she promised. But now we knew things about her life. At least enough so that when Mom ran into people at the supermarket, she could pretend to be on speaking terms with her firstborn. Mary lived in Northern California. She worked as a waitress and was some kind of artist. Naturally.

As for her missing me, I didn't exactly grant her the right. My sister didn't know the first thing about me. We might have shared ninety-nine percent of our DNA, but who really cares, when that one percent clearly determines everything?

We had survived Mary and she had survived us.

“It's nothing,” I told Charlie. I didn't want him to read Mary's e-mail. Either he would make fun of me for having a crazy sister or he would be attracted to her craziness. Either way, I didn't want him making the comparison.

Charlie might have heard things about me—people might talk in locker rooms—but from firsthand experience, he knew me strictly as a drama nerd, a director's pet.

Well, I guess now he knew me in one other way.

Lazily, as if by accident, his thumb slipped beneath the waistband of my shorts.

Charlie and I said sterile good-byes in the parking lot. We still hadn't discussed the issue of the broken pact.

“You'll call me later?” I asked, filthy duffel bag slung over my shoulder. But Charlie was already jogging toward his parents' car, eager to resume his role as the perfect son, I imagined.

Sinking into my own father's arms, I was briefly, overwhelmingly happy to be home.

“Did they feed you?” Mom's brow furrowed as she reached for me. “You look awfully thin.”

I was exactly the same size as always, but her concern was endearing.

Then I climbed into the backseat of the SUV, which still somehow smelled like a new car, even though it was approximately half my age. Dad started the engine, inched toward the road, remembered his turn signal, and batted my mother's hand away from the air conditioner controls. My eyes glazed over. I had been gone for practically the entire summer, but everything was the same.

We got stuck in traffic on Grand Street, right by the vacuum cleaner museum. I wasn't exactly well traveled—I had basically never left the West Coast—but I thought I might someday like to live in a city where there was no vacuum cleaner museum. It seemed like a reasonable goal.

My mother asked me a series of mundane questions about the girls in my cabin, and the types of food served in the mess hall, and our performance of
Seussical the Musical.
Abruptly, she turned in her seat with an “Oh!”

“What?” I asked, without lifting my head from the window.

“I ran into Hadley Clarke's mother at Whole Foods!” Like it was big news.

I barely knew Hadley Clarke, even though she had played small parts in both
The Crucible
and
The Seagull.
Outside of theater, Hadley belonged to a group of girls who wore vintage clothes and called each other
doll
. Unfortunately, our mothers had attended birthing classes together in the previous century and still maintained the belief that Hadley and I shared some kind of bond.

“Is Hadley the one with the inappropriate T-shirt?” asked my father.

“That's Tess,” I said. For the record, the T-shirt said
I
♥
MY
VAGINA
. Tess wore it constantly, on the grounds that it was a feminist thing.

My father went, “Hmmm.”

Mom continued, “You know Tess. Her family took Rebecca to the beach last summer, before the girls had their little falling-out.”

My father looked amused. “What did you fall out about?”

“Ask Mom,” I said. “She seems to know everything.”

“Oh, I don't know. Perhaps a boy?” Mom theorized.

I flopped back against my seat and groaned. It had been over a year, but discussing the beach trip never appealed to me. “So what happened with Hadley Clarke's mother?” I asked, just to change the subject.

“Oh!” Mom switched back to her gossipy voice. “Well, according to Diane, Hadley thinks she has a shot at getting the lead this year.”

“Why would she think that?” I asked.

“Well, why wouldn't she? She's got all that blond hair, and such pale skin. She's perfect for it.”

“Perfect for what?” I practically spat.

“Blanche DuBois from
A Streetcar Named Desire
?” prodded my mother. “They announced the fall play in the school newsletter.”

My mother had a habit of burying the lede. It provided her with some sick pleasure.

I commenced freaking out while she chuckled to herself. I didn't even know anything about
A Streetcar Named Desire
—except that it was another nonmusical, and something you might study in English class, just like all the plays Mr. McFadden chose.

“You don't think your director might want to give the part to a fresh face?” asked Mom.

“No,” I said firmly. Although apparently the lead required blond hair. Maybe I could dye mine. Not playing Blanche was obviously not an option.

Sighing, Mom resumed fussing with the controls. Dad reached across the center console to lightly rest his hand on her thigh—and even though it was a completely perverse train of thought, I flashed back to the bus. For the last hour of the ride, Charlie had held me with his thumb pressed against the underside of my left breast.

For a second, I forgot all about the play and focused on the memory of that pressure.

Eventually I realized my father was staring at me in the mirror. “What?” I asked. I had been thinking about sex. Wondering if Charlie and I would be having it.