Chapter Two
I sat on the kitchen counter eating Oatmeal Squares and kicking my heels against the ugly oak cabinets. The cabbagey smell of kimchi wafted over from our neighbor’s apartment as images of last night’s show and my tour de force of social ineptitude pinballed around my brain. Mom shuffled into the kitchen in her faded pajama set, a big toe poking through a slipper, reading glasses askew, her laptop in hand. She brightened when she saw me.
“How was your night with Aunt Heather?” I took a bite of my cereal.
“She forced me to join this stupid online dating service. Look at this.”
Mom set the laptop on the counter, straightened her glasses, and clicked on her profile. “Now I have to write some BS about myself that’ll make me sound datable. You know I’m terrible with this kind of thing.” She shook her head at the screen.
I jumped down from the counter and took a look at the picture she’d added to her profile. It was a shot of her on a speedboat on Lake Michigan, taken when all of us—Mom, Dad, and me—had vacationed there years ago. “That’s one of my favorite pictures of you.” In the photo, she was squinting from the sunshine. Dad had called her name, and she’d turned with this natural, happy smile on her face.
It wasn’t right that I was going to the beach today with Dad and the step-disappointments he’d forced into my life—Dad’s new wife Barb and her son Craig. Being at the lake was supposed to be our family thing. It always used to be—and because of Mom. She’d get up early to organize bags of games and fill coolers with enough snacks to get us through a whole day.
“Is it too dated? You were, what, ten then?” Mom asked.
I nodded. That had been one of our best family trips ever. Instead of staying at a cheap motel, we’d camped, which meant I’d gotten to stay up late every night, roasting marshmallows and listening to their stories. I’d taken turns tubing with both Mom and Dad, scream-laughing our heads off. “You still look the same, except maybe your hair.”
“I’ve really let it go, huh?” Mom pulled her fingers through the roots of her hair.
“Maybe it’s time to fully accept your hair and go all silver.”
Mom narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips for a second, deciding if I was kidding or not. “Hmm, I like it. Silver cougar.”
“Ew, gross, Mom. Unless…you’re into younger guys?”
Mom shrugged, giving me a mischievous look. “I hadn’t considered it. But, thank you. Now I will.”
“Again…ew. But for real, I’ll help with this thing. Lemme see.” I took her laptop and clicked to edit her bio.
“Is it weird having my daughter write my dating profile?”
“Yes. Yes, it is. But you are beautiful and kind and you deserve love.” I kissed her cheek. “Mom, is that a tear in your eye?”
“Maybe. It’s nice to hear. Thank you, sweetie.”
“Well, it’s not totally selfless. This service comes with the condition that I get a vote before any dates are made. You know, to weed out potential super-creepers.”
She laughed. “Deal.” A shy look crossed her face. “I actually have a date tonight. Heather set me up.”
“For real? Whoa. That’s exciting.”
She shrugged again.
“Just let yourself have fun. No pressure.”
I worked on her profile until a car horn honked. Craig. “Sorry, Mom. I’ll finish this up later. The evil stepbrother is here.” I kissed her good-bye, grabbed my bag, and hurried to the sliding-glass door.
“Be nice,” she called after me. “Craig’s a good boy.”
A good boy? I resisted groaning out loud. Mom was bizarrely fond of Craig and invited him over to ruin our dinners several nights a week because she deemed it an injustice that my dad and his mom had moved to Wisconsin and abandoned him for more space and fresh cheese. His mom had gotten a dream job there, but this was Craig’s senior year and he refused to leave. He argued that he was already eighteen and going to be on his own next year anyway, and somehow Barb let that fly.
As I fussed with the sticky sliding-glass door, Craig honked again. What the hell? Didn’t he see me? I finally got the slider closed and headed for his car. In my rush, I stumbled over the edge of our “patio” (more accurately: “personal outdoor cement slab”) and felt a sharp twitch above my knee. Jogging toward the passenger door I saw that, no, he couldn’t have seen me standing there because he was looking down, elbow jammed into the steering wheel, scrolling through something on his phone.
I opened the door and got in.
“Nice Barbie Doll look,” he said, pointing to my straightened hair.
I pointed back at his thick, longish, wavy hair. “Nice Disney Princess look.”
“Eat a bag.” That was about the only comeback in his repertoire.
Craig Kowalski wasn’t your average Northglenn senior. At six-foot-five he was the tallest guy in school who didn’t play sports. He always wore a black leather jacket—and not in that bringing-back-the-eighties way. For real. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and an even darker soul.
Well, maybe he didn’t have a dark soul, but he was a reminder of my parents’ divorce and all that had gone wrong this summer with my dad getting remarried and moving out of state. Of course, Craig probably had it worse. At least I had my mom to depend on.
“Dude, you’re sitting on my magic.” He reached under my butt and started pulling out sheets of music I must have sat on.
I rolled my eyes. “Uh, your magic?”
Once his sheet music was in order, he said, “You wouldn’t believe the tunes we laid down last night. Luke and I are gonna shake things up in the industry.” And then he did his air guitar act. It really blew my mind that half the female population of our school swooned over him when he did that and said things like “tunes we laid down” in earnest.
“Good for you.” I punched him on the shoulder. “Is this heart-to-heart over now?”
He clicked play on his phone, and out pumped music heavily laden with electronic synthesizer sounds. It started with a steady drumbeat, and then a kind of screechy-slidey violin was layered on top of that, followed by someone panting in short staccato breaths.
“What do you think?” He actually looked eager for my answer.
“It’s really…different,” I said, hoping a lukewarm response would end this conversation. No luck. He waited for more. “Honestly, those sounds made me uncomfortable.”
“Exactly.” He slammed his hand on the wheel, his face wild with enthusiasm. “That’s what we’re about, aggressively experimenting with how music can make you feel.”
“You want people to feel an aversion to your music?”
“Well, not only that, but, yeah, we want people to be woken up by what we’re creating.”
“Won’t it be hard to create a fan base like that?”
“It’s inspired. I mean, the lame-ass music execs probably won’t get into it, but Luke’s got a buddy in the city who is friends with a guy at an independent label, so we’re gonna bring this to him and try to get the underground appeal. Or, we’ll stream it for free and create our own buzz. It’ll connect people who are looking for an experience deeper than the pop crap designed to lull the masses.”
I stared at him. “It’s a million degrees out. I’m sweating. Can we just get to the beach?”
He clicked to the next track and finally drove out of the parking lot.
Each time a new track started he’d fill me in on the inner genius at play. I hoped for something that would make me feel good. But after five or six tracks, I gave up.
Craig’s Barbie Doll remark grated on me. I had, quite recently, become one of those girls. One who spent an inordinate amount of time on her hair. And while it was hard for me to believe it had happened, I also couldn’t get over how much better I looked. I’d regrettably received the skin-and-hair genes from the wrong side of the family. Instead of my mom’s dewy skin and gleaming hair, I’d gotten my dad’s blond, curly, dry DNA. Though my dad’s genes were the recessive ones, they were infused with the cruel determination of our Viking heritage. Other than allowing me the one gift of slightly olive skin tone that kept me from burning every summer, the Scandinavian genes had viciously overpowered Mom’s Italian perfection, leaving me with a frizzy, pale ’fro.
A few weeks ago, Mom somehow scraped together enough money to get me a top-of-the-line straightening iron as a gift for starting senior year. I tried the iron and fell in love with the transformation as my curls surrendered one by one. Thus, I became completely addicted to hair vanity. I started getting up thirty minutes early to blow out my curls and suppress them into a luminescent mane that, sadly, brought me more pride than my 4.0 GPA.
“Hey, nerdling, did you get totally tranced out from our sounds? That’s kick-ass.” Craig finally turned down the “music,” and I snapped out of my reverie.
“No, I was in a deep meditative state, training my mind to be like a supple reed in the tortuous winds of your madness.” I scrolled through his music, until I found a band called Lords of Misrule under his most-played list and risked it by pressing play.
“Good choice,” he said. “I love this singer and her loop pedal wizardry.”
I didn’t know what a loop pedal was, but I was already smitten with the music. Not that I would share that fact. “Let’s just get to the lake.”
We pulled into the parking lot of Tower Beach, barely able to find a spot in the farthest corner. It was chaos. Our school had unjustly started two weeks ago in mid-August, but now it was Labor Day weekend, when everyone swarmed to the beach before it closed for the season. I prayed we wouldn’t run into anyone from school while I was stuck with my pseudo-family.
On the plus side, Lake Michigan was looking particularly majestic with the sun sparkling against the soft waves. I couldn’t wait to jump in and get a break from Craig, my family, and my undefined future.
On our way to the concession stand I waved at two sophomore girls who had done props for the Music Man last year when I played Marian the Librarian. We walked past members of Northglenn’s swim team. And then, further down the beach, I recognized a few of the Porter improvisers we’d seen in Scared Scriptless last night. What if Jason is here, too? The possibility made me squirmy. I had to get him out of my head. It was one stupid improv scene. I couldn’t let myself get all agitated over a guy I barely knew.
When we were almost at the snack stand, I stopped in my tracks. At the end of the line, pointing at the large menu above the counter, was Jason. He was with some beautiful girl with long silky hair who was wearing a tiny white bikini. White. Her hand was on Jason’s shoulder, and she was leaning into him. My eyes froze open and a short grumble-moan escaped from my throat.
At least I was wearing the blue bikini Quinn brought back for me from her vacation in Greece this summer. She’d handed it to me then marched over to my dresser and stole all my full-piece swimsuits and said, “No more grandma suits for you,” making it my only option for the family hangout today. Over the suit, I wore jean shorts and a thin white tank top so the plunging bikini top was still visible. It was no teeny white bikini, but better than my usual.
I grabbed Craig’s arm to hold him back. “Hey, let’s, um, go meet our parents first, then get snacks. See if they want any.”
He looked to where my gaze had been. Crap. I was caught.
“What, you know them?” He looked back and forth between us. “Bet you have a thing for that guy, huh?” I rolled my eyes. He raised his eyebrows. They begged to be pulled out, hair by hair. “Now, Ellie, it’d be rude to ignore a friend.”
“He’s not a friend.”
“A crush.”
“No, I just…we…”
“Acquaintance? It’s cool. I’ll pretend for your sake that one of them is nothing more than an acquaintance. It’s the girl you’re into, then, isn’t it?”
“You’re impossible. I met that guy for a second at the show last night. Can we go now?”
“Of course not. It’d also be rude to ignore an acquaintance.”
My Ice Princess glare did nothing because he pulled me into line, too close to Jason and his most-surely-a-model girlfriend.
They turned around at the same time. I can hardly explain the double take Jason gave me. It was like an emotional sundae—two scoops of fear with a sprinkle of huh? and a dollop of awkward with excitement on top.
“Wow, Ellie, hi. Crazy running into you. You guys took off so quickly last night I didn’t get a chance to thank you for doing the show.”
“Yeah, well, you know freshmen and their pesky curfews.”
He nodded. I nodded back. That torso. Smooth and tan and apparently filled with a billion bio-magnets, because the entire organ that was my skin gravitated toward it.
Craig piped up, overenthusiastically, “Hey. I’m Craig, and you two are?”
“Sorry, sorry, hey, I’m Jason and this is Marissa.”
“I heard you guys had some fun skits last night. That’s so great,” Marissa said. I winced at our improv set being called skits.
“Thanks, yeah, Scared Scriptless is a talented team. Very meshy and swirly,” I said. Realizing how weird that must have sounded, I quickly added, “And funny.”
Jason wore only his board shorts and flip-flops. I’d hoped my feelings last night were a result of the high from the show making everything shinier. But now, in the light of day, he looked even more irresistible than I remembered. Cheers and curses to the world of fashion for making low-riding board shorts a staple in guy’s swimwear.
I wondered if Craig was having a similar fight to not look at Marissa’s bikini-clad chest.
But he simply stared despondently at the menu choices.
I looked back at Jason. At the particular darkness of his choppy-but-not-shaggy brown hair, the way he rocked back and forth on his heels, and again at his shirtlessness. Stop it. It’s just a comedy crush. It’ll pass.
“So, did you see their show last night?” Marissa asked Craig.
He brought his eyes back from the menu and shook his head no.
“Yeah, me either. I mean, I think it’s so great Jason and Mark and those guys can use their natural sense of humor, but I’m not a big fan of comedy. I’m more into the dramatic arts. Like Shakespeare and Brecht. That’s what I do.” She was trying to be nice, but made it sound like we were clowns with no actual skill involved in what we do. We just run around stage being our naturally wacky selves.
Craig nodded at her once and looked back up at the menu. For the first time, I wanted to hug him. You could tell Marissa was not used to this response from guys.
“We do an improv scene called Shakespeare,” I said. “Where we make up a scene but speak as if we’re in a Shakespearian play. Like…” Looking for inspiration, I pointed to the frozen yogurt machine and, affecting a dramatic British accent, said, “So soft, what delight through yonder fro-yo snakes?”
Marissa wrinkled her button nose, but Jason and Craig smiled, and I took it as a victory. Shifting her focus to Craig, Marissa said, “The guys are having a party at Jason’s tonight. You two should come, right, Jason?”
“Definitely, of course, both of you should come.” Jason gestured to include Craig.
“Thanks, yeah. They mentioned that last night.” I nodded, noncommittally. If that party was going to be a Marissa-Jason love fest, no thanks.
“The guys and I have a great spot on the beach. We could all…” Marissa pointed to the spot where they’d set up camp.
My eyes widened in horror. I tried to recover by matching her enthusiasm. “Oh that’d be great. But we’re meeting our parents, so, we can’t.”
“Craig’s your…brother?” Jason asked, looking back and forth between us.
Craig chuckled. “What, did you think me and Ellie were a thing? I could see how she might give off the vibe that she’s totally hot for me, but of course, I wouldn’t allow it. That would be so wrong, wouldn’t it, sis?” He side-hugged me into him hard, squishing my cheek into his already-sweaty bare chest. When did he take off his T-shirt?
“It wouldn’t be wrong. He’s not my brother. I mean, it would be wrong, but not because of bloodlines. What I mean is, it would be spiritually, chemically, emotionally, physically wrong. Anyway. We better find our parents—one of his and one of mine. He’s my stepbrother.” With that Toast-Masters-worthy speech I wriggled out of his bear clasp and turned around. Then I turned back, remembering to be polite, gave a wave and added, “Bye.”
Marissa gave me a confused, smiley look. Jason started to raise his hand like he was going to wave good-bye as I marched out of the snack stand. Craig followed.
“You say you perform? Maybe I should come see a show. Because if you’re typically as eloquent as you were just now, I bet I would laugh a lot.”
“Eat a bag, Craig.”
“She’s finally taking after her big brother.”
I didn’t even bother with my usual response to that brother word. We trudged along looking for the purple plaid umbrella Barb had texted about.
After a few yards, Craig nodded back toward the snack stand. “What’s with the meltdown over seeing those two?”
“Nothing.” My flip-flops sank into the hot sand over and over again in rhythm—trudge, lift, stomp, crush. “They’re just so beautiful and shiny and rich and sunny and full of perfectly perfect perfectness…and Jason and I had maybe the most mind-altering scene together I’ve ever had in improv—even though it was also incredibly embarrassing—but, of course, he has a kind and lovely girlfriend. It’s nothing.”
“Easy there, tiger. Those two are dating? You sure?” Craig walked leisurely, his long legs easily keeping pace with me.
“Yeah, I mean look at them.” I flung my hand back, pointlessly gesturing at the snack stand.
“Yeah,” he said, mimicking my tone. “I did. Hence, the question. They don’t look like they’re dating. And that Melissa girl was checking me out.”
“Marissa,” I corrected, not sure if she actually had checked him out and I should feel hopeful, or if that was just Craig speaking through his Craig-centric lens of life, where he assumed all girls were in love with him.
“I really did want a slushy,” Craig grumbled.
Finally, the purple-and-green plaid umbrella stood before us. It was the worst umbrella ever, and I resisted a deep and desperate need to hurl it into the lake.
Further down the beach, my dad was kneeling in the sand close to the water building an elaborate wet-drip sandcastle complete with arches, turrets and bridges. I vowed to be nice to Barb. Maybe even Craig since he hadn’t lost his brain around Marissa.
“Hey, you guys.” Barb sprang from her lounge chair and scampered to us, which—due to the sand tripping her up—was hilarious. She was wearing a bright-purple, skirt-attached swimsuit with a visor that matched the umbrella. What kind of person matches her swimwear to her beach umbrella? Her curled, orangeish-brown-dyed hair puffed from the top of her visor like a crispy tumbleweed. Her cheeks were red from the heat. This was the woman who replaced my mother? Don’t glare, don’t roll your eyes, don’t tell her she deserves to be hurled into the lake with her aggressively obnoxious umbrella.
“I’m so happy to see you two. Come here, big guy.” She got on her tiptoes and planted several kisses on Craig’s cheek. “I missed you.”
He gave me a putout look, but you could tell by the way he hugged his mom back that he was happy to see her, too—just seriously more contained.
I was next. Barb hugged me so hard her floral perfume particles were already leaping onto my hair and clothes with a sticky vengeance. I would have to jump in the lake to get rid of the odor. How could my dad stand it?
“Ellie, you get more beautiful all the time. Isn’t she just a stunner?”
This was exactly what annoyed me about Barb. She was the aspartame kind of sweet: promises of sweetness, but ultimately leaving you empty inside with a bad taste in your mouth. Look at her decision to abandon her son in his senior year. How many parents did Craig need to be abandoned by in one lifetime? And she’d revealed her true inner monster at the wedding when Dad wasn’t looking—hollering at me because I’d spilled the stupid sparkling apple juice on my dress seconds before the ceremony.
I set my stuff down, kicked off my sandals, and joined Dad at his castle. He smiled, not taking his eyes off the tower-dripping procedure.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Why, hello there, you.”
More silence and wet-sand-dripping. I started making a carriage house next to his castle. Okay, I guess I could have gone for some artificial sweetness. A pat on the upper arm maybe?
“Barb says you had a performance last night.”
A. Why did she know and not him? B. Why didn’t they drive down a day early to see it? C. Was this his way of asking how it went?
“I did.” I waited for the appropriate follow-up question, but it didn’t come. “It went really well, thanks for asking.” He either didn’t get the sarcasm, or he wasn’t listening.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The sunshine highlighted Dad’s white hair. No traces of blond left. At least he still had a full, thick head of it.
“How are your new students?” I asked.
He looked at me for the first time since I got there. He seemed to have a whole new landscape of wrinkles. A grumbling noise came from the back of his throat. “Eh, there are fewer attitudes, and the maturity level is a welcome change.”
He’d loved teaching at the prestigious private high school in Chicago, and it still baffled me that Barb had convinced him to move to Wisconsin, away from me and the job he loved.
My sand carriage house was looking more like a melted tomb. “Do you want to go for a walk along the beach?”
He clapped the sand from his hands. “Sure do.”
We stood up, and he put his arm around me as we walked along the shore. This was more like it.
“How are the college applications coming along? Any chance we can get you at Madison? In-state potential there.” University of Wisconsin did have a great biology program. But who knew if I really was going to major in that?
I wasn’t about to tell him it wasn’t even in the college pros-and-cons spreadsheet I was making. Taking in a deep breath of the warm Lake Michigan air, I gathered courage to tell him about my first choice. “I want to go to the University of Colorado at Boulder.” I quickly added, “They have a highly-rated biology program. Plus, they have an improv group already established on campus.”
“Ellie, you are not going to college for an extracurricular activity. It is time to focus.”
I stuffed down the screams, moved out from under his arm, and went to skip a stone. I chucked it into the lake and it skipped along almost to where Marissa, Jason, Mark and some others from Porter were playing in the water—dunking, splashing, laughing—like a freaking sunscreen commercial.
“Dad, I forgot to put on sunscreen, let’s head back.”
We walked back in silence. I grunted at Barb and Craig, flopped down on the blanket, and put my shirt over my face. The Freeze scene with Jason replayed in my mind, but this time there wasn’t an audience, and in the final moment when I was hovering over him onstage, instead of laughing—
“Ellie? Are you under there?”
Holy crap. I bolted upright, throwing the shirt off my face, trying to smooth my hair in a casual way.
“Jason? Hi,” I said, overanimated, feeling like he must be able to guess my reverie about him.
“Hey. I figured as long as we were a few hundred yards from each other on the same beach, I could give you the info for my party tonight now?” He said this as a question, his face crinkling up in the most adorable way. The sun was at his back so he looked like he was glowing—his hair shimmering, droplets of water running down his face. No fair providing special effects, Nature.
“Yeah, that’d be great, thanks.” I reached for my phone. He kneeled down next to me, his thigh brushing against mine. It took all my focus to enter in his address, my thumbs forgetting how to type.
He smiled, his dimple a talented wingman. “I really hope you can make it,” he said as he stood back up, leaving a noticeable absence on the spot where his leg had pressed into mine.
My words left along with his touch. I nodded instead, realizing there had been a lightning-quick debate between my body and my brain, and my body had won. There’s no way I’m missing this party.