3 · Lucy
After lunch, Emily and I climb up to the tree house. Seven rickety two-by-fours nailed to the trunk of a box elder tree in the backyard lead to a platform with mismatched plywood walls and an upside-down V for a roof. Her dad, John, and his brother, Tom—Trixie’s dad—built the tree house when they were kids and there haven’t been many improvements to it since.
My foot slips on the loose step halfway up, but I take a deep breath and continue the climb. This is nothing. I’ve done this a thousand times. If I can climb the Fire Tower, I can do this. I tighten my grip on the wood.
Emily’s already dealt out a game of Go Fish by the time I pull myself up onto the platform. I sit across from her. From here, I can see down the hill to the resort, can see Ben as he walks up from the lake. My heart does its usual nosedive. Crash and burn.
Ben was the first boy I ever loved. The only boy I’ve ever loved.
My first kiss.
I always thought that Trixie would be around for that, Trixie who had watched me fall more in love with her brother every day. But she wasn’t.
There are Trixies I don’t tell Emily, like the one about the day she died.
The four of us—me, Trixie, Ben, and my brother, Clayton—are lying on the float. The sun is strong. I’m sleepy and hazy and in love with the boy lying next to me, so close our hands almost touch.
“It’s hot,” Trixie says. I feel her sit up next to me. “Let’s swim out to the island.”
“No,” Ben says. “I’m sleeping. Go away.”
“You’re not sleeping,” Trixie says. “I know you’re not. Now Clayton—he’s sleeping. Listen to that snore.”
I don’t open my eyes. The insides of my eyelids are red, red, red from the sun. I wish Ben and I were here alone. I would stay all day.
Trixie doesn’t ask me to swim to the island. She knows how much I hate the weeds that snake out of nowhere to tangle around your ankles. It was hard enough for me to swim out to the raft.
“Should we go home?” she asks.
Now I sit up. I angle to face her and pull my knees up, put my arms around them.
“No,” I whisper. “I’m not ready to go home.”
She winks at me, then nudges Clay’s ankle with her foot. “Clayton? Race you to the island?”
My brother pops up. “What? What did I miss? You want to race me, ya little punk?” He reties the drawstring on his trunks and jumps into the water, a cannonball, splashing water across the swim float. The cool spray feels refreshing on my hot skin.
“It’s a good day to have a good day.” She leans in close to me and whispers, “BRB, Lucy. Promise me.”
“The best day,” I say. “I promise.”
Trixie dives into the lake. Ben and I are quiet. I can hear both our breaths, our heartbeats, even over the noise of the lake, the splashing, the laughter.
Ben sits up.
He reaches out and tugs at my ponytail.
Then he runs his hand down the side of my arm. I gasp; shivers overtake me in the hot, hot sun.
“Lulu,” he says. “Look at me.”
But I don’t. I can’t.
I hold my breath as Ben strokes his index finger against my arm again. “Lulu, I’ve been wondering if—”
He is cut off by the sound of Clayton shouting from the lake.
Ben dives into the water and swims toward the island, toward Clay, toward where Trixie should be. Ben resurfaces, shouts, I can’t see her, call for help. I splash to shore, crying, shaking. A woman puts a towel around my shoulders, says she’s already called 911, tells me to breathe.
Breathe.
I don’t tell Emily this story, but someday I will. Someday she will want to know all the sad parts, too, not just the happy, silly stories of two girls growing up.
When Tami gets home from running errands, Ben’s car is no longer in the driveway. She asks if I’d like a ride home since it’s been drizzling off and on the last couple of hours, but I tell her I’ll swing by the Full Loon and catch a ride with my mom.
“You’ll be lucky if they don’t toss you an apron and put you to work,” Tami says. “It’s opener weekend. And your mom told me that Rita quit.”
I roll my eyes. “Not much of a loss, if you ask me.” Mom had called me in countless times to cover for Rita at the last minute, but she completely freaked out when her most veteran waitress left them high and dry.
The Full Loon Café, the restaurant that’s been in my mom’s family since the 1940s, isn’t far from the resort. Nothing’s far from anything in this town. The café parking lot is crowded; even the overflow lot behind the Oasis gas station is packed with vehicles. A half-dozen people crowd onto the two wooden benches next to the front door, waiting for a table. Saturday night, fishing opener, Mom’s down a full-timer, and her summer part-timers are new and green.
I should go in, grab an apron, and help them out of the weeds.
But I don’t.
I keep walking, past the café and the Oasis, through our touristy downtown with its candy store and T-shirt shop and old-fashioned, single-screen movie theater.
I speed up as I walk past Ben’s house. The house where he grew up with Trixie. The house where I spent so much time—sleepovers and birthdays and special days and ordinary days—like I was part of their family.
There have been days since when I walk past that house and wish, wish, wish that I were brave enough to stop, to touch the wheels of Trixie’s bike, still hanging on its hooks in the garage, to have tea with Jane, Trixie’s mom. To ask her for the Book of Quotes, the notebook Trixie and I filled with lyrics and quotations and poems.
Brave enough to talk to Ben, more than the tense, polite things we say to each other when it can’t be avoided. More than the shallow “How’ve you been,” when really I want to reach into his heart and ask him everything.
He told me once that I could ask him anything, one night last summer before Trixie died—a game we played to keep me from freaking out as we climbed the one hundred thirty steps of the Fire Tower.
“What’s your middle name?” I asked.
“Alistair. Didn’t you already know that?” He stood close behind me on the steps, like he’d block me from falling backward.
I did know. His full name, Bennett Alistair Porter. His birthday, April 11.
“Were you named for anyone?”
“Yes. My grandfather’s name is Alistair.”
“Favorite meal?”
“Mum’s fish-and-chips.”
“Favorite candy?”
“Maple fudge.” I could hear the smile in his words.
At this, I stumbled a little, and he put his hands on my waist to steady me. I was glad that he was behind me, that he couldn’t see my face, hot with embarrassment and from his touch.
Now, down the block from the Porters’ house, I sigh with relief that no one was home. I wouldn’t have been brave enough to stop anyway.