Читать книгу The Fourth Summer - Kathleen Gilles Seidel - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

Caitlin did not have sex with men she had only known for an evening. It wasn’t any big moral issue. When you had sex with strangers, you didn’t know what you were getting into. The guy might turn out to be a Silicon Valley asshole or a clingy type who wasn’t going to let you catch your breath, wanting to see you on Tuesday...oh, you are busy on Tuesday, what about Wednesday? Thursday?

It had been great to be young and living in San Francisco. The city was beautiful, and there were always people on the streets, other young people ready for adventure. Caitlin liked prowling through the thrift shops, not caring about fashions or trends, but then having other girls stop her on the street asking her where she had gotten something. She could step into a crowded restaurant at brunch, and people she didn’t remember meeting would remember her and call her over, making room for her at their table.

Of course, you could go out for a long, boozy brunch every Sunday when you had a Silicon Valley paycheck. Not when you were freelancing. San Francisco was a lot better when you had money. Her apartment was tiny, tiny, tiny, but for the rent she was paying, you would think that it came with a herd of dairy cattle. She was able to get her health insurance under her father’s Navy’s Young Adult program, but that would end in another eighteen months. She had no idea what she would do then.

She stayed out of credit card debt. Too many women her age seemed to think of the money they spent on their clothes, their hair, and their bar bills as an investment, what you had to do to make sure that someday your prince would come. Caitlin viewed that as an extremely poor investment. Most princes these days had student loans to pay off.

If she had ever thought about having a prince for herself, it would have been when she was fifteen and in love with Seth. So technically this evening didn’t count as having sex with a stranger. But did she know what she was getting into? Absolutely not. Not a clue.

She had acted all cool and hip as if seeing him hadn’t mattered. But this was Seth. Seth. How could he not matter? She just didn’t know if it was going to matter good or matter bad. Really, really bad.

Her parents asked about him, but they were only mildly interested. During those years when all she wanted was to spend the summer in North Carolina, she had always tried to conceal the fact that she wanted to come because of him. Then when her dad was transferred to San Diego and she was so devastated about Seth not calling, they didn’t really know how desperate she felt because Trina was still home, sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

Her parents were more interested in her day in court. When she said that the next case was a criminal trial that seemed to be having trouble getting off the ground, her mom said, “That must be—”

Her father interrupted. “That Caitlin doesn’t follow Carolina politics is in her favor. Let’s keep it that way.”

“I don’t like the sound of this.” She looked at him. Unfortunately he had his judge face on. He wasn’t going to tell her anything. “Is this going to be some big murder case where I am going to be sequestered for a year?”

“No. Not at all. And North Carolina doesn’t sequester juries. Of course judges could, but they don’t. It’s expensive, and the current thinking is that sequestered juries render bad verdicts.”

* * * *

Her grandmother had more of a clue of how intensely Caitlin had cared about Seth back when they had been kids. So when she was driving Caitlin to the courthouse the next morning, she had questions.

“Did you have a nice evening with him?”

“Yes, I did.”

“He has turned into a very good-looking young man, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, he has.”

“I like a tall man.”

“Actually his height has been a problem for snowboarding. He is taller than most.”

“And he must be very fit.”

This conversation was getting weird. “Of course. It’s his job.”

“Your grandfather was athletic, very fit. I enjoyed that.”

Dear Lord in heaven. Was MeeMaw saying what Caitlin thought MeeMaw was saying? It didn’t matter how progressive a thinker you were, how strong your claim to being a hipster was, you didn’t want to hear your grandmother talking about your grandfather in bed. That took a bit of doing to get out of her head.

The jury coordinator was surprised to see her. “But you didn’t need to come for the informational session. You’ve already heard it. You could have waited until eight thirty. We must have told you that yesterday.”

Caitlin glanced around the room. There were a lot of familiar faces, people from the Monday group. The coordinator’s “must have” obviously meant “we were supposed to.” That was no way to run a zoo.

Seth wasn’t there. She put her laptop bag on the chair next to her, saving it for him. But when the lights dimmed for the video, he hadn’t shown up.

This was what happened after one-night stands, wasn’t it? The guy made all kind of promises and then didn’t show up the next day. Of course she had leverage that most women didn’t. If Seth didn’t appear, the court could issue a summons and throw him in jail. Too bad women everywhere didn’t have that option.

The video was exactly the same as it had been on Monday. There was still a “the” in front of “Magna Carta,” and the Clerk of the Court repeated the same parts of it that he had repeated on Monday.

At 8:26 Seth strolled in. “Hey,” he said.

MeeMaw was correct, at least about Seth. Caitlin supposed she was also correct about PopPop, but Caitlin did not want to think about that.

Seth was indeed a very good-looking young man. He still had the puckish air he had had as a kid. He was clean shaven today, but in most of his pictures his chin and jaw were slightly scruffy, giving him the air of an engaging rascal. Despite his WASPy name, he had a lot of Scandinavian blood. His hair bleached quickly in the sun. His eyes were light, green with a touch of blue. His cheekbones were open, and his skull long. She had used the shape of his head in a lot of the games she animated, varying his features so that it never looked like him.

But it was a little hard to get overly giddy about seeing him when she had just wasted half an hour, and he hadn’t. “How did you know to come in late?” she whispered.

“My mom told me.”

He could have shared that information, couldn’t he? She watched as he plugged his extension cord into the wall socket.

In terms of technical activity, last night had pretty much been parking-lot sex, not that Caitlin had much experience with that given the hourly rates at garages in San Francisco. But there had been something so—could she use the word “sweet” to describe a professional snowboarder?—about him remembering their past.

He sat down and then leaned close to her, his forearm brushing hers. “I hope you need a ride when we’re done here. I threw some skateboards in the car. We could go to the park like we used to.”

“That sounds like fun.” It really did. “I’ll have to go home and change.” It was one thing to climb a tree in skirt, but skateboard in a park where the thirteen-year-old boys hung out? Ah, no. “But only if this doesn’t last all day. We’re going to have dinner at my grandmother’s.”

“It better not last all day. I will hang myself. I Googled you last night. There’s nothing about your work.”

“No.”

“Why not? You do work, don’t you?”

Did she work? She did nothing but work. “Of course I do.”

She must have snapped because he immediately apologized. “I’m sorry. Was I wrong to look you up?”

“No, it was fine. Really.” Didn’t she do online searches on people she met? She hadn’t searched on him last night because she did it a couple of times a year. “I have two sets of clients, and they don’t need to know about each other. So I use pseudonyms for both.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“It’s not.” But she explained. There was enough resentment and distrust of women in the video-game community that she identified herself to clients as “Tlin” and never spoke to them on the phone or met them in person.

The games she worked on were violent and aggressive. It was draining. So she went to the other extreme and designed covers for romance novels. It required less sophisticated computer skills and didn’t pay as well, but the covers were luxuriantly rich. Lovers embraced on green paths in front of covered footbridges. Silken dresses slid off ivory shoulders; cravats were unloosened; kilts were unbuckled. To those clients she was “Aurora.”

“Aurora?” Seth asked. “That’s so...so—”

“So lovely? Yes, it’s supposed to be. I can be lovely when I try.”

“I’m eager to see that...but aren’t you concerned that by using a male pseudonym for the video games, you aren’t doing anything to help other women get into the field?”

Was she having her feminist creds questioned by a snowboarder? Seriously? “I wanted a way out of a corporate job.” She forced herself to speak mildly. “This didn’t seem like a huge compromise.”

The Clerk of the Court was speaking again. Today there was only one criminal trial, and he said that it could be lengthy. People could be excused, the Clerk continued, if they had long-scheduled vacations or medical procedures.

“What do you think ‘lengthy’ means?” someone else at the table whispered.

Caitlin shook her head, and Seth shrugged. They didn’t know. But it didn’t sound good.

The Court would need documentation for excuses, the Clerk said. And being busy at work was not an excuse. And no, a letter from one’s boss would make no difference.

“I’m supposed to go to New Zealand on Monday.” Seth leaned toward her. “It’s work, but shall I lie and say I am going on vacation?”

“That’s on your conscience.”

“I don’t have one of those. My moral code is based on what is good for Street Boards. If it won’t hurt the company, I do it.”

Within minutes people were at front table showing the jury coordinator images from their phone and tablet screens. They were pleading, trying to be excused. About a third were allowed to pack up and leave. The rest had to sit back down.

Forty-five minutes later all the remaining people who were holdovers from Monday were called to line up. They followed a deputy to the courtroom, stopping to hand over their phones and computers.

Caitlin only knew about courtrooms from TV, but the layout was what she expected. The judge’s bench and the witness stand faced the lawyers’ tables, behind which, separated by a railing, were the benches for the observers. The jury box was perpendicular to everything else. It had two rows of chairs, and the second row was elevated. Caitlin noticed that there were eight chairs in each row, sixteen in all. They must be planning on picking four alternates.

The potential jurors filed in to sit on the observers’ bench. The judge repeated some of what had been in the video, making it now the fifth time Caitlin had heard it, although he solved the whole Magna Carta issue by not mentioning it. He then explained the procedure for the day. Sixteen people would be selected at random and questioned. Some would be accepted, some excused. This would continue until twelve jurors and four alternates had been selected.

Names were being called. “Darrell Truckee, Nancy Kingsley, Susanne Nugent, Cameron Edwards, Caitlin McGraw, Richard...”

Oh, that was her. Caitlin stood up. Apparently she had been the tenth juror called. Her seat was in the back row second closest to the front wall. From his place on the observers’ bench, Seth gave her a fake Cheshire-cat grin.

That keeps you in the parking lot, boy-o. Bedroom sex requires more.

One of the lawyers stood up and introduced himself as the prosecutor and explained what a prosecutor and a defense lawyer did. None of it was new information to anyone who had ever watched one minute of television.

They were first asked if they knew personally the defendants or the lawyers. Could they disregard any media accounts that they had read? That was easy for Caitlin. She had no idea what the case was about. Did they know anyone in law enforcement? Caitlin raised her hand and said that her father was a retired navy judge. Would that influence her decision? No, she answered honestly.

The lawyers gathered to talk among themselves. A man and a woman remained seated at the defendants’ table. They must be the defendants. They were both middle aged, well preserved, and well groomed. The man had thick silver hair and looked like a successful executive. The woman looked equally successful in a nicely cut black suit with a feminine white blouse. Her necklace was a twisted rope of silver and pearls.

Caitlin didn’t want to have to judge these people. Or anyone. She didn’t belong on a jury. Why hadn’t she lied and said that her father had always said that all defendants were always guilty? Why hadn’t one of the lawyers asked her something that would reveal that she really had no right to claim North Carolina residency, that she was defrauding the state of California, and that she should be the one to need a jury of her peers?

Eventually the lawyers were finished, and the judge began calling names, “Darrell Truckee, Susanne Nugent....” Was it good or bad to have your name called? None of them knew. He droned on and then finally said, “If I have called your name, you have been excused. Thank you for your service.”

Her name hadn’t been called. She and the man in the first seat in the front row were the only ones left. Did this mean she was on the jury? Yes, it must. She had been selected, empaneled. Sixteen down to two, and she had been one of the two. How had this happened? Last night she and Seth were so sure that they wouldn’t be chosen.

Why had they thought that? Because they were too young? They weren’t. She had started voting at eighteen and legally drinking at twenty-one. Wait, what about renting a car? If she was too young to rent a car without a premium, surely she shouldn’t be on a jury.

She looked at Seth. He grimaced in sympathy.

He’s twenty-five. He can rent a car. Pick him.

Except there was no way they would ever select him. Forget the age thing. Who would want a snowboarder deciding their innocence or guilt? And even more important he was part-owner of the town’s biggest employer. Street Boards had taken over the furniture factory when it closed. Wouldn’t having a Street on the jury throw off the negotiations?

Fourteen more names were called. They were questioned, and then twelve of them dismissed.

The woman to Caitlin’s right was still seated at the end of that round. “They didn’t call my name,” she whispered to Caitlin. “What does that mean?”

Caitlin turned to look at her. She was younger than Caitlin, and the slant of her thin chin gave her face a weak backwoods quality. “It means you have been selected.”

“But that can’t be.” The girl was shaking her head. “I have a terrible time making up my mind about anything...why would they take me?”

Caitlin couldn’t answer that.

Seth was going to be able to go home pretty soon, and she would be stuck here. No skateboarding today. And what about the rest of the week? Was he going to stick around and fly to New Zealand from here, or go back to Oregon?

It didn’t really matter, did it? Not really. She would miss out on some fun, but “friends with benefits”—when did that ever work? She’d seen people try it. Sometimes your “friend” was suddenly picking out china patterns with someone, leaving you feeling like a loser. Or neither one of you tried very hard to find someone else, and then whenever you were together, you both felt like failures.

Why would she want to put herself through that? A one-night stand might be a better choice.

* * * *

They only had two weeks together during their second summer.

By the time Caitlin got home from the first summer, her family knew that Trina was going to have a boy. Caitlin expected that Trina and Mom would have gone crazy decorating the fourth bedroom with rocket ships or little blue ducks. The two of them had always done all those things together, choosing paint color, sewing new throw pillows. The family’s furniture was very neutral, and each time they moved, her mom would pick out a bold color for the walls so each place felt exciting and not at all like a place you were only going to be in for three years. Caitlin was always dragooned into helping with the actual painting, but she never went to the paint store or the fabric store. Trina and Mom took forever to make up their minds, and they clearly had a good time taking forever, whereas Caitlin spoiled all the fun because she knew immediately that that white had too much yellow in it and that that wallpaper would make everyone dizzy if the ceilings and walls weren’t perfectly plumb.

But when she got back from MeeMaw’s at the end of the summer, instead of the back bedroom being an explosion of baby froufrou, it still had her father’s desk and the pullout sleep sofa. The baby—his name was going to be Dylan—would sleep in Trina’s room.

Except he didn’t sleep. He had to be jiggled. He needed motion to calm him down. One time, out of frustration, their dad had put him in his car seat and went on a drive, but Trina didn’t have her driver’s license. At night she had to jiggle him. Sometimes she would come into Caitlin’s room and wake her up. “Please, I can’t do this anymore, but don’t tell Mom and Dad.” Caitlin was stronger and so jiggling a baby didn’t tire her out, and honestly—although it made her feel pretty heartless—she could block out Dylan’s crying even when it was right in her ear.

Trina was being homeschooled. The county sent a tutor a couple of days a week, but mostly it was on Mom, and so she had to nag Trina both to do her schoolwork and to get Dylan on a firmer schedule. Trevor, Dylan’s father, came over twice a week even though he clearly didn’t want to. His mother had to drive him, and she always came in. Before her visits there was a frantic forty-five minutes of tidying up, the sort of thing that they had never had to do in the past because before Dylan had been born, Caitlin’s mom had never been one to leave dishes in the sink or the newspaper on the kitchen table.

Caitlin felt ignored by everyone in the family. If she hadn’t had the skateboard Seth’s father had made, she wouldn’t have been able to do anything or go anywhere. She started wearing black to school, hanging out in the art room, eating lunch alone. Finally one day about a month into school, her mother was handing her a load of laundry to put away when suddenly Mom stopped. “Caitlin, how are things with you?”

“Fine,” Caitlin snapped and reached for the laundry basket.

Mom wouldn’t let her have it. She put it back on top of the washer. “But this is your first year of high school, and we haven’t signed you up for any activities. Do you want to take ballet again? I could call the studio.”

“No, I do not want to take ballet.”

“What about that skateboarding that you’re doing? Would you like to see if I can find lessons?”

“I already looked into it. The closest decent place is sixty miles away. Everything around here is all little kid shit.”

“Caitlin!” Mom’s voice was stern. “I know that this is hard on everyone, but there’s no call for that kind of language.”

Oh, for God’s sake. Her sister had gotten pregnant, and Caitlin was being scolded for saying “shit”?

“Oh, I am sorry,” Mom apologized instantly. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“But you did.” Caitlin grabbed the laundry basket and stormed out of the room.

She and Seth usually just kept in touch by trying to be on computers at the same time, but that night she took the family’s phone into the front hall closet and called him on the cell phone he and his mother shared.

“I’m not having kids, not ever.” Dylan had a cold, and his nose was almost as disgusting as his butt.

“Okay,” he said. “But you should get something out of this. Your mom feels guilty. If you want something, ask. She’s going to be a soft touch.”

“I want everything to go back to normal, to how it was. That’s what I want.”

“Well, good luck with that one. You want your own phone, don’t you?”

“I don’t want anything from them,” she grumbled.

“What about some other kind of dancing? Did you want to do that?”

She did. She wasn’t trying to get herself to a competitive level at skateboarding. Even if her parents would have been willing to drive sixty miles—and there was no way they felt that guilty—she was starting too late and, in truth, she didn’t have the competitive fire, the drive to win that Seth did. What she wanted from skateboarding was to practice and get better and to be awesome, scarily awesome. She remembered how Seth had looked at her the first time she stopped trying to skateboard like him. She wanted people to watch her and be blown away, even if it were only the moms at the birthday parties.

Ballet had made her graceful, but she wanted to develop style, something like those sexy Latin dancers she’d seen on TV. She knew that Jazzercise was aerobics for people her mother’s age, but it seemed like her best option to learn something different. The classes weren’t as expensive as ballet, but they were in the evening and on the other side of town. Her parents would never let her cruise over on her skateboard.

She waited until Trina was putting Dylan to bed. Her parents had already gone into their room, but the door was open. Her mother had her back to the full-length mirror, twisting her head over her shoulder to look at what she called her fanny.

Her pants were too tight. Even Caitlin could see that. It was strange. Mom was gaining weight. Here she was, this superdisciplined navy wife, and she couldn’t fit into her pants.

She must hate that. She must really, really hate that.

Caitlin was the weird art student who wore black. She was the one who was supposed to be depressed, except she was—she knew perfectly well—playing at being depressed in order to punish her parents. But her parents didn’t seem to be noticing...probably because her mother actually was depressed.

Her father spotted Caitlin first, and when he said her name, her mother instantly did the mom thing, trying to look like she didn’t mind having pants she couldn’t sit down in.

Mom knew about Jazzercise. Some women she knew took one of the morning classes.

“So I thought,” Caitlin said, even though she had never planned this, it hadn’t occurred to her until this second, “since you would have to drive me there, that maybe we could take the class together.”

“What a great idea.” Dad was instantly enthusiastic. “You were just saying that you needed to exercise more, Sharon, and to do it with Caitlin...”

“I don’t know.” Mom was shaking her head. “I feel like I have way too much to do.”

“But if you have to drive her anyway,” Dad said, “why not work out too?”

Mom was still shaking her head.

By now Caitlin was convinced that this was a good plan, a very good plan. Mom being bummed all the time was as big a problem as Dylan screaming all night. “Then will you come with me the first couple times? There won’t be any other kids in the class, and I will feel weird with all those grown-ups. Would you come just until I don’t feel so out of place?”

“Oh.” Mom knew that she was boxed in. How could she say no to that? “Well, sure, sweetie. If you need me, of course.”

The teacher was from Latin America, and she was using her hips and shoulders in the way that Caitlin wanted to. So Caitlin liked the most dance-type moves, but her mother was—amazingly enough—totally into the kickboxing, kicking her leg off to one side with her fists clenched up in front of her. Mom the warrior...Caitlin couldn’t have predicted that.

Within a week her mother was going to a morning class as well and within a month was wearing her pretty clothes again. Trina started to say that she needed exercise more than anyone, but Dylan was too young for the child-care program offered at the studio. Caitlin could tell that Trina wanted Mom to drive her to the classes and then—what?—sit in the car with Dylan while Trina exercised? Even Trina wasn’t going to ask that.

Caitlin stopped the depressed art student act. It wasn’t necessary. The high school was more than twice the size of her middle school, and being close to a military base, there was a big turnover in the student body every year. No one was very interested in what her sister had done last year. So instead she was known as the cool girl who came to school on a skateboard.

In January Trina got her driver’s license, and their parents bought her a used car, emphasizing that she would have to share it with Caitlin when Caitlin was old enough to drive.

Yeah, right, Caitlin thought.

Suddenly Trina was going to the morning exercise classes while Mom was staying home with Dylan. It made Caitlin furious. What about Trevor’s family? Why weren’t they doing anything? Trevor himself was worthless. He hardly even touched Dylan, but what about his mom? She was a nurses’ aide at the hospital, but why wasn’t someone expecting her to rearrange her schedule and take care of Dylan sometimes?

Now that she had the car, Trina was trying to connect with her old friends after school. So more and more she was asking Caitlin if she could come straight home to sit with Dylan, or, as long as she didn’t have plans on Friday or Saturday night, why couldn’t she...

Mom and Dad stepped in. Just because Caitlin was home didn’t mean that she was available to take care of Dylan. Caitlin was to be home alone with Dylan no more than one evening and three afternoons a month.

So instead it was Mom and Dad who took care of Dylan while Trina went to the mall. Caitlin asked why they kept giving in to Trina all the time. They didn’t have a good answer.

One day in April her parents sat down with her. “I know you’re looking forward to go back to North Carolina, but we think it is Trina’s turn.”

She stared at them. “You’re kidding, right? She’s going to MeeMaw’s and we’re going to be stuck here with Dylan?”

“No, Dylan will go with her, of course. You deserve a summer at home, a summer of just being a teen.”

“But that’s not what I want.” Caitlin felt desperate. She and Seth...they had such plans. His older sister had already agreed to drive them to the Highland Games at Grandfather Mountain. They also thought that if they took the whole day, they should be able to bike to Boone and back. Boone was a college town; Seth had already gotten a schedule of their summer concerts. And there was skateboarding and the lake, and being together...she had to go. She had to.

“Why don’t I go and help Trina? MeeMaw shouldn’t have to do that. Let me go with them. I will help. I really, really will. I don’t mind. You can’t dump all this on MeeMaw.”

“Trina will have her car. She can be self-reliant.” Dad was speaking in his judge’s voice. “We’ve made up our minds.”

The poor schmucks in his courtroom at least had had some rights of appeal. Caitlin didn’t.

She went straight into Trina’s room. “Do you want to go to MeeMaw’s?”

“No. I’m totally pissed about it.”

“Then why—”

“Because they think I need to accept more responsibility for Dylan. And this was MeeMaw’s idea. She thinks that Mom is having ‘boundary issues.’ Apparently she doesn’t plan on helping me at all. They want me to manage on my own.”

Caitlin’s strategy of offering to help had been completely wrong. She had said the worst possible thing.

Once again she took the phone in the closet and called Seth. A lot had been happening in Seth’s family. His dad, who had always made Seth’s boards, was opening a small factory to produce both snowboards and skateboards. A snowboarding family who had a kid Seth’s age had been super encouraging, helping with the business plan, the paperwork, and the financing. Seth had said that he would need to work in the factory some.

“I will too,” Caitlin had promised. “I don’t know what needs doing, but I am an awesome housepainter.”

But it was Trina who was going to North Carolina. Caitlin called Seth to tell him.

“Shit,” he said. “Shit. Shit.”

“And she doesn’t even want to go. That’s the bitch.”

“Can’t you talk to your folks? Explain how important it is. You could stay with us. I’ll ask my mom. I’m sure it will be okay.”

“Oh, right. Your mom is going to be totally on board with helping me to disobey my mom.”

“Oh...”

They were powerless. There was nothing they could do. They were kids.

Her parents had her ask her art teacher about summer programs. The teacher was not very enthusiastic about her abilities. She could draw meticulously, but apparently she didn’t have “original vision” or “her own voice.” Caitlin wondered if he would have thought that if she had continued to wear black and eat lunch alone.

She should, he suggested, aim for a career as a commercial graphic artist. She knew that he intended it as a putdown, but after she had read about that kind of work, she decided that it sounded pretty awesome.

The photography course the teacher recommended was full, so she signed up for a class about computer programming because the description had the word “graphic” in it. She couldn’t imagine herself being interested in computer programming, but at least she got a cell phone out of her parents feeling bad.

The class was clearly a summer camp for nerds. There were no other girls. Not one. Caitlin did not understand a single word of what the teacher said in the first hour. After he assigned them to individual computer stations, he came over to Caitlin. He squatted down next to her, his hand on the edge of her desk. “Your paperwork says that your art teacher recommended you?”

Caitlin glanced down at his hand. She wished that he would move it. “Yes, sir.”

“Well, if you find this is not the right class, you have a week to withdraw and get your fee back.”

“Yes, sir.”

Withdraw? Give up?

I’m not my sister. And she wasn’t thinking about the pregnant Trina, the depressed teen mom, but Trina as she had been before, the pretty one, the happy one, the B student who expected, who needed, everything to come easily.

Caitlin was not a quitter. She was so not a quitter. The first few days were unbelievably hard. Her dad thought he might be able to help her, but he was even more lost than she was. So she focused on the vocabulary, trying to understand the words that everyone was slinging around. Then there was some grunt memory work. She could do that, but there was so much that she simply didn’t understand.

She wasn’t about to ask the teacher for help. He would just suggest that she withdraw. There were two guys in the course who were better than the rest of them. One was an arrogant preppy type. Caitlin hated him. He was a Seth-gone-wrong, too big, too bold, too bright, a Seth who didn’t give a shit about anyone else as long as they were watching him. The other guy was East Asian Indian, slender and quiet, nothing like Seth except that he was willing to explain the stuff he was good at. She chose him.

They did their final project together at the end of the session, and it was the best in the class. Of course, the teacher assumed that Dev had done it all, and while he had done the trickiest programming parts, the design had all been Caitlin’s. Commercial graphic art might be the thing for her.

There would still be three weeks left to the summer after nerd camp was over. Her parents asked her if she would like to spend two of them in North Carolina.

“Yes, yes, of course. That would be great.”

“We haven’t forgotten how generous you were to offer to help with Dylan. We think Trina needs it.”

So the big experiment had failed, and now Caitlin the babysitter was going to the rescue. Oh well, if it got her down there to see Seth...

She flew to Charlotte and then took a bus the rest of the way across the state. MeeMaw had some kind of committee meeting, so Trina and Dylan came to the bus station to pick her up.

“You know why you’re here, don’t you?” Trina asked as soon as Dylan was back in his car seat.

Caitlin fastened her seat belt. “To help with Dylan.”

Trina nodded. “MeeMaw wanted to send me home. I’m just no good with him. Now that he’s crawling, you have to watch him all the time. He doesn’t want to be in the stroller so I can’t even take him for a walk. I’m sixteen and I feel like my life is over.”

Trina had been saying that ever since she found out that she was pregnant. “What did you do all summer?” Caitlin asked. “Did you make friends?”

“Who is going to be interested in me?”

Caitlin might be really sick of hearing Trina whine about how her life was over, but sometimes she would remember what her sister had been like before, glowing, gorgeous, and graceful. Caitlin might have resented all that glowing gorgeousness, but she didn’t want to see her like this. Then they turned the corner, and on MeeMaw’s front walk she could see Seth’s bike, a skateboard tied to the little rack, and sitting on the front steps, a backpack at his feet, was Seth himself.

She was out of the car before Trina had turned off the engine, dashing up the sidewalk. Seth was coming toward her, and she threw herself at him, hugging him just as she had hugged Dev a few days before.

But he wasn’t Dev. He was nothing like Dev. She pulled back. “You’ve gotten so tall.”

“I grew five inches. It was a bitch. My center of gravity changed every week.”

It was so strange standing next to him having to look up. She almost felt a little awkward.

“Come get your suitcase,” her sister called out. “I want to lock up the car.”

“Oh, right.” She started back to the car.

“I’ll get it,” Seth said.

And that was weird too. She could carry her own suitcase. She had gotten herself from the airport to the bus station. But he was already at the car, lifting it out of the trunk with one hand, slamming the lid with the other.

Trina and Dylan were in the room she had had last summer, so she was in a smaller room at the other end of hall. That was fine with her.

“Do you want to unpack or something?” Seth asked after he put her suitcase on the bed.

“No. Let me just get out my skateboard. I took the wheels off, so we will have to put them back on, and then let’s go.”

She handed Seth the sweatshirt-swaddled board while she fished around the suitcase for the wheels.

“You’ve used this a lot,” he said once he had unwrapped the board.

“I love it. I would have been lost this year without it. It’s how I got every place on our side of town.”

“Are you going to the skate park?” Trina was at the door, Dylan on her hip. “I would like to come.”

“Ah...” Caitlin did not want Trina to come. “We were going to bike over.”

“I can drive us. I just have to change Dylan and fix a bottle.”

Caitlin knew that that could take forever. “How about if we meet you there?”

Out in the garage Seth pumped up the tires of the bike while she put the wheels back on her board and blew the dust off the bike helmet. “I’m sorry about my sister,” she said. “I guess she’s had a pretty crappy summer. I may be babysitting a fair amount.”

“That’s okay. I’ll babysit with you. “

There was a new sign hung along the skateboard park’s fence, advertising Seth’s family’s business. The logo had “STREET BOARDS” in clean black type—Helvetica, Caitlin now knew that it was—but then inserted in red between the two words was a caret and “& Snow.” The red letters looked like graffiti, as if someone had whipped it onto the logo with a can of spray paint.

Caitlin stopped in front of it. “Oh my God, that is so awesome. I love it.”

“So do I. It was my mom’s idea, but it took her forever to get the graphic artist to understand what she wanted.”

“They probably had to design the font, but it was only four letters, and there are no ascenders and all the letters have a similar mass.” She was holding her hands up as if she were curving her fingers around the letters, getting a feel for them.

Seth was staring at her.

She dropped her hands. “Some of us do go to school, you know.”

She had told him that she wouldn’t have room in her suitcase for pads. One of his sisters had dropped off a set the day before. He went behind the counter and got them, coming out with a new skateboard as well.

“I told my dad that you were focusing on footwork. He said that you should try this board. You can keep it if you like it.”

Caitlin hadn’t realized how scuffed, even nicked, her old board was until she looked at this sleek one with the wonderful Street & Snow Boards logo.

She couldn’t wait to try it. She pulled the pads on and tightened the strap on her helmet. “Now you have to tell me everything I am doing wrong. I want to get better.”

It had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t be a great teacher. He would tell her to change something, and of course she would mess up at first because she would be concentrating so hard on the new thing that she would do everything else wrong, but then suddenly everything would feel right and he would be clapping and laughing. It was wonderful, and it seemed impossible to imagine that they hadn’t seen each other in a year.

Then Trina showed up.

She took Caitlin’s pads and helmet, and Seth had to show her the basics while Caitlin sat with Dylan. It was no fun.

Trina didn’t want Caitlin to babysit. She didn’t have any place to go. She wanted to tag along with Caitlin and Seth. It was almost as if she were the bratty little sister. Caitlin did put her foot down about one thing. Trina could come to the skate park with them—it was a public place—but she could not ask Seth to teach her. It wasn’t fair to him. If Trina wanted to learn, she should go to the park on her own, rent equipment, and pay for lessons. Caitlin would stay home with Dylan.

So Trina stopped trying to learn, but she still came to the park. She didn’t have anything else to do. If Caitlin and Seth were biking out to the lake, she would drive and meet them there. In the evenings she would try to get them to stay home and watch a movie with her.

The only time she couldn’t try to join them was when Seth’s mother invited Caitlin to supper. But then, of course, they were with his family. They were almost never alone. And there didn’t seem to be much they could do about it. They were kids.

One night toward the end of her stay she had stayed at the Streets’ until after dark, and she didn’t have lights on her bike. Seth loaded the bike into his mother’s station wagon, and the two of them sat on the old swing set, waiting for his sister to drive Caitlin home. The lights from the kitchen windows etched white bars on the dark grass, but if Caitlin turned her head, she could see the fireflies flitting near the bushes.

“What’s the strangest thing that happened to you this year?” Seth asked.

She had been turning around in her swing, letting the chains twist overhead. She dug a heel into the ground to hold still. “I suppose deciding to be the tragic art student.” But he knew all about that. “What about you?” He would have asked the question for a reason.

“I had sex.”

“What?” She must have lifted her foot because suddenly the swing was whipping her around, house, bushes, garage, house, bushes, garage. Even when the chains had untwisted, the swing kept going, the chains wrapping around each other in the other direction. She had to put both feet on the ground. “With who? Why?”

“Why did I have sex? Why do you think? Because I could.”

“You have a girlfriend? Why haven’t you said anything about her?”

Seth with a girlfriend? She didn’t like that. And him having sex, him taking his pants...she didn’t want to think about it. Not at all. No.

“She wasn’t really my girlfriend.”

In fact, she wasn’t even a girl; she was in her early twenties, one of the established pros. Apparently she and one of her girlfriends had been joking about his friend Nate and him, and it wasn’t quite a bet, maybe more like they dared each other. “It wasn’t romantic or anything. Some people were hanging out in one of the condos, and she grabbed my hand and took me into one of the bedrooms.”

Caitlin didn’t want to hear about this. “At least I hope you were smart about things.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You didn’t use a condom?” Caitlin stood up from the swing. “Seth, are you kidding? Don’t—”

“Don’t I know about your sister? Yes, I do. I didn’t think about it. But apparently she told some other people about it afterward, and one of older guys came and talked to me, saying that she knew that she was okay, on the pill, and tested for stuff, but that I shouldn’t assume that that was always true.”

“You were really stupid.”

“I know that, and it wasn’t much fun having everyone know about it either. “

He clearly wanted to—well, confess or something like that. It had been a crappy experience for him, but she couldn’t listen. It was all too... What had actually happened? Had they undressed all the way? No, why was she thinking that way? She didn’t want to know.

Her phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her pocket. It was Trina. She didn’t always answer her sister’s calls, but anything was better than sitting here trying not to look at Seth’s crotch.

Dylan was asleep, and MeeMaw was home. Trina could come over and pick Caitlin up. Then they could go to the Dairy Queen or something.

“I’ve got my bike,” Caitlin told her, something that Trina knew perfectly well. “It’s too hard to fit it into your car. And Becca’s got to take a friend of hers home anyway.”

“She doesn’t give up, does she?” Seth asked when Caitlin had hung up.

Caitlin shoved her phone back in her pocket. She might have been bitching about Trina the whole time she had been here, but for someone else to be criticizing her... “You can’t blame her. She’s lonely.”

“But it’s not fair to you, that everything is about her all the time.”

“Well, what about you and your sisters? Isn’t everything about you and snowboarding?”

“They don’t mind.”

“How do you know that? How did they feel about your mom being gone so much? I treat my mom like she is the enemy, but I would have died if I’d had to go to my dad when I started my period, and I bet that your sisters had to.”

He muttered something. She wasn’t fighting fair. What could he possibly say about his sisters’ periods?

Well, he had had sex, hadn’t he? “And what about the money?” she demanded. “Aren’t your sisters in the same boat as me? Only a lot more so. All your skateboarding has to have cost tons more than Dylan does.”

He glared at her. “You’re wrong. I got all my expenses paid this year, and on top of that—”

“But you’ve been doing this for years, and your family never said that you had to quit, and they could have. We can’t quit. We can’t tell Trina to stop being a mom and turn Dylan over to Social Services. We can’t do that.”

Just then the kitchen door opened. More light flooded the grass. His sister and her friend were ready to leave. Becca asked Seth if he wanted to ride with them, but he said that he needed to help their dad with something.

Trina was waiting on the front porch. She still wanted to go to the Dairy Queen.

“Won’t it be closed?” Caitlin did not want to go.

“No, I called. They’re open until ten.”

Caitlin was suddenly weary. I can’t fix this. I can’t make you like you used to be. I can’t.

But she could go to the Dairy Queen, couldn’t she?

Trina just ordered a Diet Coke, so it wasn’t as if she wanted ice cream. Caitlin went full out with a banana split, three scoops of ice cream with three different toppings and whipped cream. Caitlin didn’t know what thrilling things Trina thought would happen—the kids hanging out in the DQ parking lot were the sort that Trina wouldn’t have said two words to back home—but they sat at one of the picnic tables, and Caitlin ate slowly so they could stay until the place closed.

Her phone buzzed. It was Seth. He must be calling to apologize. Caitlin longed to talk to him, but no, this was her sister’s time. She couldn’t see that sitting here was doing Trina any good, but Caitlin taking a call from Seth would make it worse.

She called him the instant she got back to her room.

“I don’t like fighting with you,” he said.

“No. Me neither.”

“You’ve got to try to come back for longer next summer.”

“It’s not up to me. You know that.”

“This really sucks. It seems like we never get to see each other. Why can’t we decide things for ourselves?”

“Because we can’t. Because we’re kids.” Caitlin was feeling sick. She hadn’t finished the banana split, but she had eaten too much of it. “But you go to more places and do more things than most kids.”

“But they don’t involve seeing you.”