‘What?’ she said to me. I could see myself reflected in the lenses of her glasses, small and out of perspective. ‘What are you looking at?’
I felt my face flush, as it did any time anybody raised their voice at me. I was entirely too sensitive to tone, so much so that even TV court shows could get me upset – I always had to change the channel when the judge ripped into anyone. ‘Nothing,’ I said, and turned back round.
A moment later, the high-school guy working the snack bar waved me up with a tired look. While he poured my drink I could feel the girl behind me, her presence like a weight, as I smoothed my two bills out flat on the glass beneath my fingers, concentrating on getting out every single crease. After I paid, I walked away, studiously keeping my eyes on the pocked cement of the walkway as I made my way back round the deep end to where my best friend, Clarke Reynolds, was waiting.
‘Whitney said to tell you she’s going home,’ she said, blowing her nose as I carefully put the Coke on the pavement beside my chair. ‘I told her we could walk.’
‘Okay,’ I said. My sister Whitney had just got her licence, which meant that she had to drive me places. Getting home, however, remained my own responsibility, whether from the pool, which was walking distance, or the mall one town over, which wasn’t. Whitney was a loner, even then. Any space around her was her personal space; just by existing, you were encroaching.
It was only after I sat down that I finally allowed myself to look again at the girl with the orange bikini. She had left the snack bar and was standing across the pool from us, her towel over one arm, a drink in her other hand, surveying the layout of benches and beach chairs.
‘Here,’ Clarke said, handing over the deck of cards she was holding. ‘It’s your deal.’
Clarke had been my best friend since we were six years old. There were tons of kids in our neighbourhood, but for some reason most of them were in their teens, like my sisters, or four and below, a result of the baby boom a couple of years previously. When Clarke’s family moved from Washington, D.C., our moms met at a community-watch meeting. As soon as they realized we were the same age, they put us together, and we’d stayed that way ever since.
Clarke had been born in China, and the Reynoldses had adopted her when she was six months old. We were the same height, but that was about all we had in common. I was blonde-haired and blue-eyed, a typical Greene, while she had the darkest, shiniest hair I’d ever seen and eyes so brown they were almost black. While I was timid and too eager to please, Clarke was more serious, her tone, personality and appearance all measured and thoughtful. I’d been modelling since before I could even remember, following my sisters before me; Clarke was a total tomboy, the best soccer player on our block, not to mention a whiz at cards, especially gin rummy, at which she’d been beating me all summer.
‘Can I have a sip of your drink?’ Clarke asked me. Then she sneezed. ‘It’s hot out here.’
I nodded, reaching down to get it for her. Clarke had bad allergies year-round, but in summer they hit fever pitch. She was usually either stuffed up, dripping, or blowing from April to October, and no amount of shots or pills seemed to work. I’d long ago grown used to her adenoidal voice, as well as the omnipresent pack of Kleenex in her pocket or hand.
There was an organized hierarchy to the seating at our pool: the lifeguards got the picnic tables near the snack bar, while the moms and little kids stuck by the shallow end and the baby (i.e., pee) pool. Clarke and I preferred the half shaded area behind the kiddie slides, while the more popular high-school guys – like Chris Pennington, three years older than me and hands-down the most gorgeous guy in our neighbourhood and, I thought then, possibly the world – hung out by the high dive. The prime spot was the stretch of chairs between the snack bar and lap lane, which was usually taken by the most popular high-school girls. This was where my oldest sister, Kirsten, was stretched out in a chaise, wearing a hot-pink bikini and fanning herself with a Glamour magazine.
Once I dealt out our cards, I was surprised to see the girl in orange walk over to where Kirsten was sitting, taking the chair next to her. Molly Clayton, Kirsten’s best friend, who was on her other side, nudged her, then nodded at the girl. Kirsten looked up and over, then shrugged and lay back down, throwing her arm over her face.
‘Annabel?’ Clarke had already picked up her cards and was impatient to start beating me. ‘It’s your draw.’
‘Oh,’ I said, turning back to face her. ‘Right.’
The next afternoon, the girl was back, this time in a silver bathing suit. When I got there, she was already set up in the same chair my sister had been in the day before, her towel spread out, bottled water beside her, magazine in her lap. Clarke was at a tennis lesson, so I was alone when Kirsten and her friends arrived about an hour later. They came in loud as always, their shoes thwacking down the pavement. When they reached their usual spot and saw the girl sitting there, they slowed, then looked at one another. Molly Clayton looked annoyed, but Kirsten just moved about four chairs down and set up camp as always.
For the next few days, I watched as the new girl kept up her stubborn efforts to infiltrate my sister’s group. What began as just taking a chair escalated, by day three, to following them to the snack bar. The next afternoon, she got in the water seconds after they did, staying just about a foot down the wall as they bobbed and talked, splashing one another. By the weekend, she was trailing behind them constantly, a living shadow.
It had to be annoying. I’d seen Molly shoot her a couple of nasty looks, and even Kirsten had asked her to back up, please, when she’d got a little too close in the deep end. But the girl didn’t seem to care. If anything, she just stepped up her efforts more, as if it didn’t matter what they were saying as long as they were talking to her, period.
‘So,’ my mother said one night at dinner, ‘I heard a new family’s moved in to the Daughtrys’ house, over on Sycamore.’
‘The Daughtrys moved?’ my father asked.
My mother nodded. ‘Back in June. To Toledo. Remember?’
My father thought for a second. ‘Right,’ he said finally, nodding. ‘Toledo.’
‘I also heard,’ my mom continued, passing the bowl of pasta she was holding to Whitney, who immediately passed it on to me, ‘that they have a daughter your age, Annabel. I think I saw her the other day when I was over at Margie’s.’
‘Really,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘She has dark hair, a bit taller than you. Maybe you’ve seen her around the neighbourhood.’
I thought for a second. ‘I don’t know –’
‘That’s who that is!’ Kirsten said suddenly. She put down her fork with a clank. ‘The stalker from the pool. Oh my God, I knew she had to be way younger than us.’
‘Hold on.’ Now my father was paying attention. ‘There’s a stalker at the pool?’
‘I hope not,’ my mother said, in her worried voice.
‘She’s not a stalker, really,’ Kirsten said. ‘She’s just this girl who’s been hanging around us. It’s so creepy. She, like, sits beside us, and follows us around, and doesn’t talk, and she’s always listening to what we’re saying. I’ve told her to get lost, but she just ignores me. God! I can’t believe she’s only twelve. That makes it even sicker.’
‘So dramatic,’ Whitney muttered, spearing a piece of lettuce with her fork.
She was right, of course. Kirsten was our resident drama queen. Her emotions were always at full throttle, as was her mouth; she never stopped talking, even if she were well aware you weren’t listening to her. In contrast, Whitney was the silent type, which meant the few words she uttered always carried that much more meaning.
‘Kirsten,’ my mother said now, ‘be nice.’
‘Mom, I’ve tried that. But, if you saw her, you’d understand. It’s strange.’
My mother took a sip of her wine. ‘Moving to a new place is difficult, you know. Maybe she doesn’t know how to make friends –’
‘She obviously doesn’t,
’ Kirsten told her.
‘– which means that it might be your job to meet her halfway,’ my mother finished.
‘She’s twelve,’ Kirsten said, as if this was on par with being diseased, or on fire.
‘So is your sister,’ my father pointed out.
Kirsten picked up her fork and pointed it at him. ‘Exactly,’ she said.
Beside me, Whitney snorted. But my mom, of course, was already turning her attention on me. ‘Well, Annabel,’ she said, ‘maybe you could make an effort, if you do see her. To say hello or something.’
I didn’t tell my mother I’d already met this new girl, mostly because she would have been horrified she’d been so rude to me. Not that this would have changed her expectations for my behaviour. My mother was famously polite, and expected the same of us, regardless of the circumstances. Our whole lives were supposed to be the high road. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Maybe I will.’
‘Good girl,’ she said. And that, I hoped, was that.
The next afternoon, though, when Clarke and I got to the pool, Kirsten was already there, lying out with Molly on one side and the new girl on the other. I tried to ignore this as we got settled in our spot, but eventually I glanced over to see Kirsten watching me. When she got up a moment later, shooting me a look, then headed towards the snack bar, the new girl immediately following her, I knew what I had to do.
‘I’ll back in a second,’ I told Clarke, who was reading a Stephen King novel and blowing her nose.
‘Okay,’ she said.
I got up, then started round by the high dive, crossing my arms over my chest as I passed Chris Pennington. He was lying on a beach chair, a towel over his eyes, while a couple of his buddies wrestled on the pool deck. Now, instead of sneaking glances at him – which, other than swimming and getting beaten at cards, was my main activity at the pool that summer – I’d get bitched out again, all because my mother was insistent we be raised as the best of Good Samaritans. Great.
I could have told Kirsten about my previous run-in with this girl, but I knew better. Unlike me, she did not shy away from confrontation – if anything, she sped towards it, before overtaking it completely. She was the family powder keg, and I had lost track of the number of times I’d stood off to the side, cringing and blushing, while she made her various displeasures clear to salespeople, other drivers or various ex-boyfriends. I loved her, but the truth was, she made me nervous.
Whitney, in contrast, was a silent fumer. She’d never tell you when she was mad. You just knew, by the expression on her face, the steely narrowing of her eyes, the heavy, enunciated sighs that could be so belittling that words, any words, seemed preferable to them. When she and Kirsten fought which, with two years between them, was fairly often – it always seemed at first like a one-sided argument, since all you could hear was Kirsten endlessly listing accusations and slights. Pay more attention, though, and you’d notice Whitney’s stony, heavy silences, as well as the rebuttals she offered, few as they were, that always cut to the point much more harshly than Kirsten’s swirling, whirly commentaries.
One open, one closed. It was no wonder that the first image that came to mind when I thought of either of my sisters was a door. With Kirsten, it was the front one to our house, through which she was always coming in or out, usually in mid-sentence, a gaggle of friends trailing behind her. Whitney’s was the one to her bedroom, which she preferred to keep shut between her and the rest of us, always.
As for me, I fell somewhere between my sisters and their strong personalities, the very personification of the vast grey area that separated them. I was not bold and outspoken, or silent and calculating. I had no idea how anyone would describe me, or what would come to mind at the sound of my name. I was just Annabel.
My mother, conflict-averse herself, hated it when my sisters fought. ‘Why can’t you just be nice?’ she’d plead with them. They might have rolled their eyes, but a message sank in with me: that being nice was the ideal, the one place where people didn’t get loud or so quiet they could scare you. If you could just be nice, then you wouldn’t have to worry about arguments at all. But being nice wasn’t as easy as it seemed, especially when the rest of the world could be so mean.
By the time I got to the snack bar, Kirsten had disappeared (of course), but the girl was still there, waiting for the guy behind the counter to ring up her candy bar. Oh well, I thought, as I walked up to her. Here goes nothing.
‘Hi,’ I said. She just looked at me, her expression unreadable. ‘Um, I’m Annabel. You just moved here, right?’
She didn’t say anything for what seemed like a really long while, during which time Kirsten walked out of the ladies’ room behind her. She stopped when she saw us talking.
‘I,’ I continued, now even more uncomfortable, ‘I, um, think we’re in the same grade.’
The girl reached up, pushing her sunglasses further up her nose. ‘So?’ she said, in that same sharp, snide voice as the first time she’d addressed me.
‘I just thought,’ I said, ‘that since, you know, we’re the same age, you might want to hang out. Or something.’
Another pause. Then the girl said, as if clarifying, ‘You want me to hang out. With you.’
She made it sound so ridiculous I immediately began backtracking. ‘I mean, you don’t have to,’ I told her. ‘It was just –’
‘No,’ she cut me off flatly. Then she tilted her head back and laughed. ‘No way.’
The thing is, if it had just been me there, that would have been it. I would have turned round, face flushed, and gone back to Clarke, game over. But it wasn’t just me.
‘Hold on,’ Kirsten said, her voice loud. ‘What did you just say?’
The girl turned round. When she saw my sister, her eyes widened. ‘What?’ she said, and I couldn’t help but notice how different this, the first word she’d ever said to me, sounded as she said it now.
‘I said,’ Kirsten repeated, her own voice sharp, ‘what did you just say to her?’
Uh-oh, I thought.
‘Nothing,’ the girl replied. ‘I just –’
‘That’s my sister,’ Kirsten said, pointing at me, ‘and you were just a total bitch to her.’
By this point, I was already both cringing and blushing. Kirsten, however, put her hand on her hip, which meant she was just getting started.
‘I wasn’t a bitch,’ the girl said, taking off her sunglasses. ‘I only –’
‘You were, and you know it,’ Kirsten said, cutting her off. ‘So you can stop denying it. And stop following me around too, okay? You’re creeping me out. Come on, Annabel.’
I was frozen to the spot, just looking at the girl’s face. Without her sunglasses, her expression stricken, she suddenly looked twelve, just staring at us as Kirsten grabbed my wrist, tugging me back to where she and her friends were sitting.
‘Unbelievable,’ she kept saying, and, as I looked across the pool, I could see Clarke watching me, confused, as Kirsten pulled me down onto her chair. Molly sat up, blinking, reaching up to catch the untied straps of her bikini.
‘What happened?’ she asked, and, as Kirsten began to tell her, I glanced back towards the snack bar, but the girl was gone. Then I saw her, through the fence behind me, walking across the parking lot, barefoot, her head ducked down. She’d left all her stuff on the chair beside me – a towel, her shoes, a bag with a magazine and wallet, a pink hairbrush. I kept waiting for her to realize this and turn back for it. She didn’t.
Her things stayed there all afternoon: after I’d gone back to sit with Clarke, and told her everything. After we played several hands of rummy, and swam until our fingers were pruny. After Kirsten and Molly left, and other people took their chairs. All the way up until the lifeguard finally blew the whistle, announcing closing time, and Clarke and I packed up and walked round the edge of the pool, sunburned and hungry and ready to go home.
I knew this girl was not my problem. She’d been mean to me, twice, and therefore was not deserving of my
pity or help. But, as we passed the chair, Clarke stopped. ‘We can’t just leave it,’ she said, bending over to gather up the shoes and stuff them into the bag. ‘And it’s on our way home.’
I could have argued the point, but then I thought again of her walking across the parking lot, barefoot, alone. So I pulled the towel off the chair, folding it over my own. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Okay.’
Still, when we got to the Daughtrys’ old house, I was relieved to see all the windows were dark and there was no car in the driveway, so we could just leave the girl’s stuff and be done with it. But, as Clarke bent down to stick the bag against the front door, it opened, and there she was.
She had on cutoff shorts and a red T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. No sunglasses. No high-heeled sandals. When she saw us, her face flushed.
‘Hi,’ Clarke said, after a just-long-enough-to-be-noticed awkward silence. Then she sneezed before adding, ‘We brought your stuff.’
The girl just looked at her for a second, as if she didn’t understand what she was saying. Which, with Clarke’s congestion, she probably didn’t. I leaned over and picked up the bag, holding it out to her. ‘You left this,’ I said.
She looked at the bag, then up at me, her expression guarded. ‘Oh,’ she said, reaching for it. ‘Thanks.’
Behind us, a bunch of kids coasted past on their bikes, their voices loud as they called out to one another. Then it was quiet again.
‘Honey?’ I heard a voice call out from the end of the dark hallway behind her. ‘Is someone there?’
‘It’s okay,’ she said over her shoulder. Then she stepped forward, shutting the door behind her, and came out onto the porch. She quickly moved past us, but not before I saw that her eyes were red and swollen – she’d been crying. And suddenly, like so many other times, I heard my mother’s voice in my head: Moving to a new place is tough. Maybe she doesn’t know how to make friends.