Читать книгу Lone Star - Paullina Simons - Страница 9

CHLOE SAT ALONE ON THE BUS RIDE HOME ACROSS THE TRAIN tracks, dreaming of the beaches of Barcelona and perhaps of being ogled by a lusting stranger. She was trying to drown out Blake, Mason and Hannah verbally tripping over one another as if in a game of drunken Twister as they loudly argued the pros and cons of writing a story for money. Threads of songs played their crowded lyric notes in the static inside her head. Under the boardwalk like no other lover he took my hand and said I love you forever—all suddenly overpowered by Queen’s matchless yawp Barcelonaaaaaaaaa …!

She placed her palm against the glass. The bus was almost at their road. Maybe then this psychodrama would end. Outside the dusty windows, made muddy by the flood of recent rain, past the railroad, near a clearing of poplars, Chloe spied a fading billboard of a giant rainbow, which two white-suited workmen on ladders were papering over with an ad for the renovated Mount Washington Resort in the White Mountains.

She had just enough time to glimpse the phrase on the soon to be obscured poster before the bus lunged past it. “Johnny Get Your Gun.” This left her to contemplate, alas not in perfect silence, the philosophical meaning behind a rainbow being papered over.

Just before the bus stopped, she remembered where the sign was from. It was an ad for the Lone Star Pawn and Gun Shop in Fryeburg. Remembering it didn’t answer Chloe’s larger question, but it answered the immediate one.

“What idiot thought a rainbow was a good symbol for a gun store?” Hannah’s mother had said. Soured on men and life, she had pawned her engagement ring there. Got seventy bucks for it. Took Chloe and Hannah for lobster in North Conway with the money.

They all got food poisoning afterward. So much for rainbows.

Is that what they called karma?

Or was it simply what happened next?

On the dot of 3:40 in the afternoon, the small blue bus pulled up—extra carefully and slowly—to the pine trees at the beginning of Wake Drive, a dirt road past another dirt road marked with a rock painted with a black whale. Four kids jumped off into the dust.

Because it was the merry month of May, and almost warm, they wore the clothes of the young out in the boonies—denim and plaid. Though to be fair, that’s all they ever wore, blizzard or heatwave.

In what universe could a five-minute speech by Mrs. Mencken about the annual Acadia Award for Short Fiction at the end of English period right before lunch—when there wasn’t a soul in class who was paying attention to anything but the rumble in their empty stomachs—result in Blake and Mason deciding they were suddenly writers and not trash collectors?

“Character is everything,” Chloe said doggedly into the dirt. “Character is story.”

The mile of unpaved road at the end of which they lived was all downhill between dense pines. It meandered through the thick forest, getting narrower, crossing the train tracks, hugging the small lake, ending in pine needles and disarray, not a road anymore, just dust, and that’s where they lived. Where the road ended.

Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake. Two couples, two brothers, two best friends. A short girl, a tall girl, and two brawny dudes. Well, Blake was brawny. The scrappy Mason was all about sports the last few years, ever since their dad had his back broken. Mason was a soccer midfielder and a varsity shortstop. Blake got the lumbering body of a man who lived in a rural town and could do anything: lift anything, build anything, drive anything. Blake’s wavy, bushy hair hadn’t been cut in months, his beard was weeks overgrown. The brown Timberlands were grimy. The belt was six years old. The extra large plaid shirt was his dad’s. The Levi’s were hand-me-downs. His light brown eyes darted around, dancing, laughing, full of good humor.

Next to him, his smaller brother looked like a child of prissy aristocracy. Mason’s hair was shaggy straight, but it was meant to be shaggy. It was designer shag. Unlike Blake, who rolled out of bed, hair slept on, and ran to school, Mason woke early and worked hard to make his hair just so. The girls loved his hair, and tortured Chloe about it. Oh Chloe, they chirped, you’re so lucky, you can run your hands through it any time you want. Mason shaved every day, and did not wear plaid. He wore black and gray T-shirts. He was monochrome and his jeans were washed yesterday. On his feet were sneakers. He didn’t cut wood, he played ball. He didn’t look like Blake’s brother, with his compact lean build, intense blue eyes, and his serious, gentle face. Plus, unlike Blake, he was a boy of few words. When he quietly held Chloe’s hand, it was always with kindness. He didn’t pull on her, yank her, demand action from her. He was a gentleman. Not that Blake didn’t try to be a gentleman with Hannah. Just that he was a lot like the German Shepherd he once owned. Panting, unapologetically getting mud on everyone’s floors, dripping ice cream and tomato sauce all over, loping wild through the day. You couldn’t help but feel exasperated affection at his constant antics.

And next to Blake walked Hannah.

Though Chloe herself found Hannah to be slightly androgynous with her tall, boyish body—straight hips, straight waist, small high breasts, short hair always slicked back away from her face—other people, boys especially, did not agree. Her face was opalescent and scrubbed clean, with symmetrical, correct, in-balance features and a gaze as straight as her narrow hips. Her eyes, brown and unblinking, were serious and appraising, making Hannah look as though she were engaged—as though she were listening. Chloe knew it was a ruse: the steady stare allowed Hannah to be lost inside her head. She wore makeup she could ill afford, but strived to look as though she just splashed water on her face and, voila, perfection. With fluid grace Hannah strolled like a ballerina.

At the long mirror in her room she had practiced her arabesques and soubresauts, hoping one day she would stop growing and her parents could afford ballet classes. She finally got her lessons in the divorce settlement, but by then she was five-ten and too tall to be lifted into the air by anyone but Blake, who was definitely not a ballet dancer.

With a detached elegance, Hannah walked and talked as if she didn’t belong in tiny Fryeburg, Maine. She fancied herself barely even belonging in this country. She wore ballet flats, for God’s sake! Even when she schlepped a mile through the mud and pine needles. No butch Timberlands for her. Hannah walked with her shoulder blades flung back, as though wearing heels and a Chanel blazer. She carried herself as if she was too good for the place that by an unlucky accident of birth she had found herself living in, and couldn’t wait until the moment she was sipping wine on the Left Bank and painting the Seine with other artistic, beautiful people. Her big round eyes were permanently moist. She evaluated you before she cried, and then you loved her. That was Hannah. Always crying to be loved.

Chloe in stark contrast was not moist of eye or long of limb. She didn’t care much about not being tall when she wasn’t with Hannah. But next to her reed-like friend, she felt like an armadillo.

One of Chloe’s best physical features was her brown hair, straw-straight, shining, streaked with sunlight. There was nothing she did to make it great. It just was. Every day washed, brushed, clean, unfussy, thin-spun silk falling from her head. She wore no makeup, to differentiate herself from the senior girls who were all about the heavy eyeliner, the flimsy tanks, the one size too small jeans and three-inch (or higher!) mules in which they clodded through the Fryeburg Academy halls, always in danger of falling over or tripping, and perhaps that was the point. Sexy but helpless. Both things were anathema to Chloe, so she kept her body to herself and walked in sensible shoes. Where was she going that required getting dressed up? Bowling? Italian ices? Swimming in the lake? Gardening? Exactly. And she heard the way the boys talked about the girls who dressed the way, say, that hateful Mackenzie O’Shea dressed. A lifetime of meds wouldn’t be able to erase the trauma for Chloe if she thought boys talked about her that way.

Her face, unblemished and fair, suffered slightly from this pretend plainness, but there was no hiding the upper curve of her cheekbones or her wide-set eyes that tilted slightly upward, always in a smile. She had inherited the Irish lips from her father, but the eyes and cheeks from her mother, and because of that, her face, just like her body, wasn’t quite in proportion. The ratio of eyes to lips was not in balance, just as the ratio of body to breasts was not in balance. There was not enough body for the milk-fed breasts she had been cursed with. There may have been a genetic component to the comical chaos inside her—to her math abilities colliding with her existential confusion—but there was simply no cosmic excuse for her palmfuls of breasts.

Chloe blamed her mother.

It was only right.

She blamed her mother for everything.

Look at Hannah. Everything on that girl was assembled as if hand-picked. Tall, lithe, lean, eyes mouth hair nose all the right size, not too big, not too small, while Chloe spent her life hiding under minimizer bras and one-size-too-big shirts. She was afraid no one would take her seriously if they thought of her as a body instead of a person. Who’d ever listen to her explanations about the movements of the stars or migrations of mitochondria or beheadings in a revolution if they thought she was just a pair of boobs with legs. Too heavy-breasted to be a ballerina and too short to be a bombshell.

That Mason didn’t agree—or said he didn’t—only spoke to his poor judgment.

The bus had been dropping them off on the same rural road for thirteen years. Kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, fancy high school.

Soon there would be no more blue buses, no more lurching afternoon rides. In a month they would all be graduating.

And then?

Well, and then, there was this:

“Don’t be hating on my story already, Chloe,” said Blake. “It just began. Give it a chance. It’s a good story. You’ll see.”

“Yeah, Chloe,” echoed Mason. Being ten months younger than Blake, he looked up to his older brother, though he did not necessarily disagree with Chloe, as evidenced by his cheerful wink. She took his welcome hand as they strolled past old Mr. Leary out on the lawn, surrounded by every bit of garbage scrap he owned, trying to make it look less garbagey so he could sell it.

“Blake, dear boy,” Mr. Leary called out, “you said you’d come by after school and help me with my block saw. I still can’t get the dang thing to turn on.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Leary.”

“Block saw?” muttered Mason. “What does that codger need with a block saw? It’s soft dirt all around him.”

“He wants to build a bomb shelter,” Blake said out of the corner of his mouth, smiling at the old man as they ambled by. “That’s why he’s collecting the cinder blocks.”

“What’s a block saw?” asked Chloe.

“Who cares,” said Hannah. “A bomb shelter? Guy’s a freak.”

“Blake, not now?” The craggy man persisted. “I have some snacks for you and your friends. Donuts.”

“Thank you, sir, but not now.”

Because now Blake was busy. He had to clear the brush from the dusty path of his own winding life.

All the trouble began when Blake turned eighteen last July and was allowed to enter the Woodsmen Day competition at the Fryeburg Fair. He entered five contests. Tree felling, crosscut sawing, axe throwing, log rolling, and block chop. He lost the crosscut and the log roll and the block chop, and you’d think he’d remember that and be humbled—that he lost three out of five—but no. He beat the best time that year on tree felling by six seconds, coming in at twenty-three seconds flat, and he set a Fair record on the axe throw with six bullseyes in a row.

You’d think his head was the bullseye: it swelled to four feet in diameter. He strutted down the dirt roads and through Academy halls like an Olympic gold medalist. Chloe would remind him that the Fryeburg Academy—which all the local kids attended for “free” through a tax deal between the school and the state of Maine—was one of the most prestigious preparatory high schools in the United States. “No one here gives a toss about your axe toss, I promise you,” Chloe would say to him, but you’d think he were deaf.

It was right after that Blake and Mason entered the business competition for Mr. Smith’s tech class—and they won! Mason was used to winning, with his dozen sports trophies lining the dresser, but Blake became impossible. He acted as if he could do anything. Like, for example, write.

It wasn’t that they didn’t deserve to win. The project was: “Create a successful business.” Who knew that Blake and Mason would take the thing they had been doing part-time and turn it into a winner. With their dad’s ancient truck, they had been going to houses around the lakes in Brownfield and Fryeburg and asking if, for a small fee, the residents would let them cart their trash away. Now, most people in this part of Maine aimed their shotguns to point the brothers in the direction of the exit to their property, but there were some—widows, the feeble-minded—who agreed to pay them a few nickels to cart away their old refrigerators, non-working snow blowers, rusty rakes, newspapers, chainsaws. The boys were strong and worked hard, and after school and on Saturdays, they would drive around and try not to get killed while they made a few dollars. After placing an ad in the Penny Saver, they discovered there was already a national junk company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK. This only fired up their cutthroat spirit. They flattered Hannah into designing their logo: THE HAUL BROTHERS HAULING SERVICES. “WE HAUL SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO.”

It looked pretty good. They got a decal made, slapped it on their father’s truck, painted the truck a hideous lime green—Blake said because it was the color farthest removed from the color of the crap they were hauling—used their rudimentary buttering-up skills to get Chloe to create a profit and loss statement, and figured out that if they worked full-time, hired two more guys, and bought another truck with a lift, they would make six figures at the end of three years. Six figures! They had an advertising plan: Yellow Pages, the North Conway Observer, local ads on TV, three radio spots—and then their dad’s Chevy died.

It was over twenty years old. Burt Haul had bought the V8 diesel powerhouse in 1982, before he knew he’d be having sons who a generation later would need it to start a fake business. Burt loved that truck so much that even after the accident that nearly ended his life, he refused to let it go and spent his own scarce money rebuilding it. “I drove your mother home from our wedding in that truck,” Burt told his sons. “The only reason I’m alive today is because of that truck. I ain’t parting with that thing.”

But now the truck engine was like Mr. Leary’s gas-powered block saw. Defunct.

No one had money for a new truck, even a used one. Burt and his boys were being shamefully carted around in Janice Haul’s Subaru. Were they even men?

Hannah and Chloe tried to console their disappointed boyfriends by reminding them that their business wasn’t really a business, it was just a business on paper, which is no kind of business at all. But Blake and Mason had fallen too far into the trap of a dream. Chloe knew something about that. The Haul boys had been so sold on their own pseudo-company that they decided to drop out of school in the middle of senior year and work until they got the money together to buy a truck, figuring that in their line of work a high school diploma was about as useful as watering grass during a downpour.

It was a challenge for the girls to keep their boyfriends in school. It was Chloe who had finally hit on the winning combination of words: “Do you think my mother and father would ever allow me to hang out with high school dropouts?”

That worked, though not as instantly as Chloe had hoped, alas.

So … the senior year passed, truck still broke, and Janice not only had to drive to work and shop for the family, but share her inadequate station wagon with two restless boys with divergent friends, interests and schedules. To make money, the boys shoveled snow, cut grass, did shopping for the infirm, Blake mostly, because Mason was at varsity. Fast forward to today when they were hopping off buses and yammering on about dreams. You had to hand it to them. Those two were single-minded in their pursuits. All their pursuits.

“Chloe, speak up. Listen to what I’m saying. Why isn’t it a good story?” Blake always got irked by her tight-lipped approach to his shenanigans.

“Because so far you haven’t told me anything I’d want to read,” she said.

“I haven’t stopped speaking!”

Chloe opened her hands in a my-point-precisely. “Who are the main characters?”

“It doesn’t matter who they are. Can I finish before you judge?”

“You mean you haven’t finished? And I’m not judging.”

“You so judge. That’s your biggest problem.”

“I’m not—”

Blake put his finger out, nearly to her mouth. “The premise of my story is—are you listening? Two dudes run a junkyard.”

“That part I got.”

“They do say write about what you know.”

“I. Got. That. Part.”

“Two dudes run a junkyard and one day they find something awful.”

“Like what? All you cart away is Wise potato chips and Oreo wrappers.”

“And condom wrappers.” Blake grinned, slowed down, and threw his big arm around Chloe’s shoulder.

“Hannah, control your boyfriend.” Chloe pushed him away. “But okay, even still. Where is the story?”

“Can there be anything more full of story possibilities than a ninety-year-old woman throwing out a Hefty bag full of used condoms?” Blake laughed.

“Not used condoms,” Mason corrected him. “Condom wrappers.”

Chloe glanced at the silent Hannah for support. “Can we move on? What else have you got?”

“We don’t know yet,” Mason said. “Hannah, you think it’s good so far, don’t you?”

“So far there’s nothing!” That was Chloe.

“He wasn’t asking you!” said Blake.

They had ten minutes before they reached home to hammer it out. It wasn’t enough time. Blake pulled them off road, away from home and onto the train tracks that ran through the woods and divided their small part of the lake from the better, larger part. Arms out, backpacks on, they balanced on the rusty tracks and skipped on the ties.

Writing a story for money! What a thing. Acadia’s first prize was ten thousand dollars. Chloe knew the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction had been around longer and was certainly more prestigious, but it paid only a thousand dollars, and you had to write at least forty thousand words for it. No matter how bad one was at math, dividing forty thousand words into a thousand bucks was an awful return. “All work and no pay,” said Mason, and laughed for five minutes at his own joke.

But here—ten thousand dollars for a novella. Blake didn’t even know what a novella was until Chloe told him. To the brothers, a sum that large was the lottery. It was a new truck and the start of their own business. It was the rest of their lives. They acted as if they found it lying under a tree in a suitcase. All that was left to do was count the money.

And little naysay-y Chloe was not allowed to even mention that:

1 They had no story.

2 They were not writers.

3 There would be at least five hundred other applicants, who a. might have a story and b. were writers.

4 One of those applicants might be Hannah who most certainly had stories, a number of them.

5 A new truck was more than ten thousand dollars.

Chloe couldn’t help herself. She had to say something. If only she could learn to keep quiet, like Hannah, or Mason, things would be so much better in her life.

“Who are the junkyard boys?” she asked.

“We are. Blake. Mason. We’re ambling along, asking for no trouble, and suddenly—wham! Trouble comes.”

“Wham,” said Chloe.

“Blake’s right,” Mason said. “We’ve found some awful things.”

“Like what?”

“Dead rats.”

“Rats are good,” she said. “But then what? Someone not wanting dead rats in their house is hardly a story. It’s more like a truism.”

“We found some jewelry too once.”

“Jewelry is good. Then what?”

“Okay, maybe not jewelry, then. Something else.”

Chloe glanced at Hannah, walking on the side of the tracks, away from the three of them, barely listening. Blake jackhammered away at Chloe’s concrete skepticism. “They discover something awful. Something that changes everything. Mason, what can they find that is so monumental and terrible that it changes everything?”

“True love?” Chloe smiled.

“It’s not that kind of story, my dear Haiku,” Blake said with twinkling amusement. “This is a man’s story. No room in it for lurv, no matter how terrible and true. Right, cupcake?” Jumping off the rail, he jostled Hannah along the pebbles.

“Right,” she said.

Mason had new suggestions. “We found an old suitcase once. It was full of snakes. And once we found a live rabbit.”

“Yes,” Blake said. “He was delicious. But Chloe is right. We need a story, bro.” He smacked his forehead. “Got it. How about a human head in the trash?”

Chloe didn’t even blink this time. Almost as if she’d seen a human head in the trash before. “Nice,” she said. “And then?”

Blake shrugged. “Why do you care so much what happens next?” he asked.

She could tell he wasn’t taking it seriously. What the boys did for a living—that was work. Here, all they had to do was come up with a few words and place them in the sweet order that assured victory. Blake was convinced it was child’s play.

“You’re right, we’re all Philistines with our slavish devotion to plot,” Chloe said. “Be that as it may.”

“Yes. The writer drones on about what happens next and as soon as you the reader guess what’s coming, you either fall asleep or want to kill him.”

“So the trick is what? Never give the reader what she wants?”

Blake shook his head. “No. Give her what she didn’t even know she wanted.” He acted as if he knew what that was.

They turned for home. “They find a human head,” he went on, as he and Chloe ambled down the narrowing pine path leading home, Hannah and Mason behind them. A few hundred yards downhill, the dirt road tapered to one lane on which a truck or a car or people could pass—one at a time. “But not a skull.” Blake glanced back and widened his eyes at Hannah. “A head. That’s been recently separated from the body. It still has flesh on it. And they don’t know what to do. Do they investigate? Do they call the cops?”

“I think they should investigate,” Mason said, running up. “Investigations are fun.”

“There’s danger in it.”

“Danger is good,” Hannah said from behind. “Danger is story.”

No, Chloe wanted to correct her uncorrectable friend. Danger is danger. It’s not story.

Blake went on ruminating. “What if asking too many questions of the wrong people puts them in mortal danger?”

Chloe wondered if there was any other kind.

“Someone needs to shut them up. But who?”

“Obviously those who separated the head from the body.”

“But why would someone separate the head from the body?” Mason asked.

“I don’t know yet. But I really think we got us something here. Haiku, what do you think?”

“I say keep working on it.” Chloe used her most discouraging tone.

“Wait! I got it!” Blake exclaimed. “What if they find a suitcase? Yes, a mysterious suitcase! It’s blue. Oh my God, I got it. That’s my story.” Blake stopped and turned to the girls, beaming, his whole face flushed and thrilled. “The Blue Suitcase. What do you think?” He clapped. “It’s flipping awesome!”

Hannah smiled approvingly.

Chloe caught herself shrugging. “It’s a good title for a mystery,” she said. “But a title is not a story. What’s in the suitcase? Once you figure out that part, Blake, then you’ll have yourself a story.”

Blake laughed with characteristic lack of concern for details. He was a big picture guy. “James Bond always goes to a foreign country to solve mysteries and catch the bad guys,” he said. “Some fantastic exotic locale full of drink and women and danger.”

Chloe made a real effort not to rub her forehead. She had a lot of practice hiding exasperation from her mother, but this was on a different scale altogether. “James Bond is a government spy. He kills for money. He doesn’t rummage through the trash for severed heads.”

“Foreign country!” Mason exclaimed. “Blake, you’re a genius.”

Blake’s entire peacock tail opened up in kaleidoscope green.

“But wait,” Mason said. “You and I have never been to a foreign country.”

Blake blocked the girls’ way, smiling meaningfully at them. “Not yet,” he said.

The girls remained impassive. Only Chloe twitched slightly. Oh no! she thought. He doesn’t mean …

“We’ll go to Europe with you,” Blake said. “Mason’s right, I am a genius. The answer to our mysterious suitcase is in Europe. Oh man, this is going to be fantastic. And we’ve only been at it for five minutes. Imagine how good it’ll be when we spend a few days on it.” Blake thumped his flannel plaid chest. “We could win the book prize.”

“What book prize would that be, Blake?” Chloe said.

“I don’t know, Chloe. The prize they give the best book of the year. The Oscar for books. The Grammy, the Emmy.”

“The Pulitzer?”

“Whatever. That’s not the important part. To write something people will love, that’s the important part.”

Chloe leaned in to Hannah. “Did your crazy boyfriend just say he wants to go to Europe with us?”

“I’m sure that can’t be right,” Hannah, her expression frazzled, whispered back. “I’ll talk to him—”

Blake pulled Hannah away from Chloe. “Hannah, when are you two flying to Barcelona?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah replied. “Chloe, when are we flying?”

“I don’t know,” mumbled Chloe.

“Mason, that’s where we go, bro. Barcelona! Our story will climax there.” Blake laughed. The brothers high-fived and bumped shoulders.

“I thought you said it wasn’t that kind of story,” Chloe cut in.

“If it ends in Barcelona, Haiku, it’ll have to be a story for all seasons. Isn’t that where they have the running of the bulls?”

“Oh dear God. No. That’s Pamplona.”

“Wait,” Hannah said. “Blake, you’re not seriously thinking of coming with us?”

“We’re done thinking. We’re coming, baby!”

Mason looked shocked. “We’re going to Europe? You’re bullshitting me.”

“Mason, do I come up with the best ideas or what?”

Mason was at a loss for words.

“Blake …” Finally Hannah became actively engaged in the conversation. “Think about it for a minute. You’re not serious about writing a story, are you? The contest is open to all Maine residents. That’s a lot of competition. Just from our school, there’ll probably be at least a hundred entries. Everyone on our literary magazine is submitting a story.”

“Hannah, have you read the literary magazine?” said Blake, swinging his arms around, bouncing down the road. “It’s called Insanity’s Horse, for heaven’s sake.” He laughed. “Just for that title alone, those fools should be disqualified from participating. Do you remember the magazine’s April thought of the month? The pastiche of the pyramids implementing primal passion is a prolix representation of all phallic prose. I got your phallic prose right here. Yeah,” he said, merry and intense. “I’m not worried.”

How did this happen? One minute ticked by, and before it was up, Blake and Mason had climbed aboard the girls’ slow-chugging teenage dream.

Hannah stopped listening. She pulled on Chloe to slow down. “Now I really have to talk to you,” she said. “Come by before dinner?”

“Is it about Barcelona?” Chloe looked up into Hannah’s flat expression.

Hannah blinked. “No and yes. Do you have your passport yet?”

Chloe didn’t reply.

“Chloe! I told you—it takes two months to get a passport. Come on. Do you want to blow it?”

“Of course not. But that’s easy for you to say—you’re eighteen. I have to ask my parents to sign for my passport.”

“So?”

“Well, I’ll have to tell them I’m going first, won’t I?”

“I can’t believe you haven’t told them!”

“Yeah, well.” Chloe couldn’t believe a whole bunch of things.

Blake was in front of them, panting, eyes blazing, his body heaving. “So what do we have to do to get a passport?”

“Go to the post office,” Hannah said. “But take Chloe with you, because she doesn’t know how to get one either.”

“I know how. I just …”

Hannah batted her lashes. “Are you guys really going to come with us? Because don’t get our hopes up and then not come. That’d be mean.”

“I never disappoint you, pumpkin, do I?” Grabbing the slender Hannah, Blake pretended to dance with her and stepped on her feet. She yelped.

“Blake, you do know where Barcelona is, right?” Hannah said, her arms around his neck. “In Spain. And you know where Spain is, right? In Europe. As in—on another continent. As in, you need not just a passport, which costs upward of a hundred bucks, but also a plane ticket, and train tickets, and maybe, oh, I don’t know—some lodging and food money.”

Mason began to look doubtful, but Blake shrugged with gleeful indifference. “You know what they say, babycakes.” He squeezed her. “You gotta spend money to make money. It’s like the ten grand I’m getting for my story. We can’t start our own business till we win this thing. And we can’t win this thing till we do this other thing.”

“This other thing,” said Chloe, “meaning horn in on my lifelong dream?”

“Exactly. Mase, let’s jet. We gotta go get ourselves some passports. We have no time to lose.” As they sped up, their boots kicked up dust in a bee cloud. “Where’s this post office, anyway?” Blake called back.

“Are you joking? You’ve never been to the Fryeburg post office?”

Hannah poked Chloe. “You’ve never been there either, missy.”

Chloe poked Hannah back. “Yes, I have, stop it.”

Blake pulled on his brother. “Let’s hoof, bro. Should we pick you up, Chloe?” The Hauls lived three houses up from Chloe, around the pond through the scraggly pines and birches.

“Yeah, Chloe,” Hannah said, sticking a finger into Chloe’s back. “Should they pick you up to go get your passport?”

“It’s okay,” said Chloe, swatting Hannah’s fingers away. “I’ll have my mom take me.”

The girls gazed after their young men, and then resumed walking. Hannah shook her head—in distress? In wonderment? Chloe couldn’t tell. “I guess I’ll be going to Spain with my boyfriend and your boyfriend, but not with you.”

“Har-de-har-har.”

“You think I’m being funny? You can’t start your adult life being such a chicken, Chloe. What are you afraid of? Be more like me. I’m not afraid of anything.” She said it as if she didn’t mean it.

But all Chloe heard was be more like me. Ain’t that a kick in the teeth, she thought, stiffening. They were almost at the clearing in front of Chloe’s green bungalow. Hannah slowed down, as if she wanted to linger, but Chloe sped up as if that was the last thing she wanted. “I have to be diplomatic,” she said. “I need their permission to go. I can’t just present them with an I’m-going-to-Europe vaudeville routine.”

“If you don’t start acting like an adult, why should they treat you like one?”

How much did Chloe not want to talk about it. It wasn’t that Hannah was wrong. It was that Hannah always said obvious things in such a way that made Chloe not only think her friend was wrong, but that she wanted her friend to be wrong.

“I’ll talk to them tonight,” she said, hurrying across her pine needle clearing.

“I wouldn’t tell them about Mason and Blake just yet.”

“Ya think?”

Since Mrs. Haul and Lang went shopping on Fridays, Chloe had a feeling that her silence on the subject might be short-lived.

“Okay,” Hannah said, “but start slow. Don’t make your mother go all Chinese on you. You always make her nuts. First dangle our trip, then wait. The boys might be pie in the sky anyway. Where are they going to get the money from? It’ll pass, you’ll see.”

Chloe said nothing. Clearly Hannah had no idea who her boyfriend was. There was no talking Blake out of anything. Short fiction indeed! And as if to prove Chloe’s point, Janice Haul’s Subaru came charging toward them from around the trees, Blake rolling down his window, slowing down, honking.

“We’re off to get our passports!” he yelled. “See ya!”

Chloe turned to Hannah. “You were saying?”

“All right, fine. But don’t tell your mom about them yet.”

“What did you want to talk to me about?” Chloe asked. Only a flimsy screen door separated Chloe’s mother’s ears from Hannah’s troubles.

Hannah waved her off. “Just you wait,” she said, all doom and gloom.