“Winnie, I don’t want to go to Germany,” Lars said. “This isn’t something I’m choosing to do.”
“But you’re not choosing not to,” I said.
“We don’t leave until June fifteenth. We’ll have two full weeks of summer, two full weeks to spend with each other after school lets out.”
“Two whole weeks! Wh-hoo!”
He massaged his temples. I was making him feel bad, and that made me feel bad. Only it also made me feel better, in a bitter pill sort of way.
“Come back and sit by me,” he said. “I miss you.”
“You can’t ’miss’ me,” I said. “I’m on the other end of the sofa, not in a whole different country.”
He reached for me. I resisted at first, then relented, because I missed him, too, despite his upcoming trip to stupid Germany.
He pulled on my arm, and I let my body slump like a felled tree until my cheekbone met Lars’s lap. I shuffled baby Maggie so that she lay sideways, too, spooned against me with her head tucked beneath my chin. I was careful of her soft spot.
Lars finger-combed my hair. It felt like heaven, not that I was about to tell him.
I am the mommy and you are the daddy and this is our baby, I thought despondently. The words hovered at the edge of consciousness.
Then Maggie pooped. It was a long, spluttering, ptttpttt-pttt of a poop.
Lars’s hand stilled. “I think ... um ...”
I pushed myself up with a groan. “Yeah.” I held Maggie a few inches away from my body, because Maggie’s diapers sometimes leaked.
“Come on, Stinky,” I said to her. “Let’s get you changed.”
“Hey now,” Lars said, pretending to be offended. “Who are you calling Stinky?”
I looked at him—the first full-on look since Germany invaded—and said, “Ha ha.”
He was visibly relieved at our eye contact. “I’ll e-mail you. Every day.”
“Great,” I said flatly.
And now he was less relieved. I could tell by the way his Adam’s apple jerked up and down. But instead of feeling bad for worrying him, or sad that this was happening, I felt the urge to pull away from him.
“We’re good, right?” he said, and if I were in the right mood, I would be touched by his concern. He didn’t want to go with his family to Germany. I believed him. He would miss me. I believed that, too. But while I could see all that sweet-Lars angst, it didn’t exactly ... make its way to my heart.
“Of course we’re good,” I said, as if the topic was rather boring. “Things don’t always go according to plan. That’s just the way it goes.” I gave a wry smile and lifted Maggie’s smelly bottom for emphasis. “Poop happens.”
He laughed too hard. I mean, I was funny, but not that funny.
“Maybe I’ll go to leadership camp with Dinah after all,” I threw out. “I mean, as long as you’re going to Germany.”
“Really?” Lars said, obviously startled. He smoothed his expression to hide it. “I mean, sure. Why not?”
Sure, why not? Excuse me, but who was he to give me permission?
“As long as it’s not fire-walking camp,” he said, laughing in a way that, to me, sounded forced.
I regarded him stonily. “I could learn to walk on fire.”
“Or teen nudist camp,” he said with more hardy-harhars.
“I don’t know. A full-body tan might be nice.”
His hardy-har turned into a nervous chuckle, which turned into another up-and-down jerk of his Adam’s apple. “Okay, how about this. Just no camp that’s coed. Cool?”
I cocked my head.
“Winnie, I’m kidding.”
Hmm. I didn’t think he was.
In my arms, baby Maggie truly reeked. I shifted her into the crook of my arm and headed out of the room.
“I might be a few minutes,” I said over my shoulder.
“No worries,” Lars said. But he sounded worried. “I’ll be right here. Waiting.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll just, uh ... yeah.”
How pathetic that my “romantic” night was ending in poop and stupid fighting—because even if it didn’t look like we were fighting, we were. And to think that I’d started the night feeling so mature, when I wasn’t mature at all. I was a baby playing house. A dumb baby at that.
“Hurry back!” he called. His voice cracked, and I felt a remote pity for both of us.
Do Something to Help the World
IN A WEEK, the seniors would graduate. Two weeks later, the school year would end for the rest of us, and two weeks after that? Bye-bye Lars.
I didn’t like thinking about that: first, this, then this then this, with good-byes every step of the way.
So don’t, I told myself. Focus on today! It was good advice, because this very today was sunny and perfect, and Dinah and I were relaxing on the steps of Pressley Hall, chatting as we watched the junior guys set up wooden folding chairs on the quad. It was an excellent day to simply ... absorb.
Only I was constitutionally incapable of simply absorbing, it seemed. My brain kept jumping forward, no matter how many times I told it no no no. On different days, my thoughts circled around different things. My right-this-moment obsession? THE BEACH.
I’d gotten permission from Mom and Dad to do a camp-enrichment thing with Dinah—which made Dinah all shades of happy—but I was only going to do it if we could find the right one. It needed to be fun, but also cool, in a “this matters” kind of way. It also needed to accept late applicants, since we were coming up fast on summer.
Last night, I found the perfect camp. A camp that would let me do something good for the world, like on my list of goals. My task now was to bring Dinah around.
“How about somewhere at the beach?” I asked Dinah casually.
“Like what?” Dinah said. “And how would it count as leadership-ish?”
“Hmm,” I said. I pretended to consider. “Lifeguards?”
“Like ’em,” Dinah said. “Don’t want to be one.”
Dinah wasn’t a strong swimmer, it was true.
“Swimsuit models? Like, at a surf shop?”
She looked at me like, Are you on drugs?
I decided it was time to hit her with the real one. “Well ... hey, I know. How about something volunteer-ish? Like involving the ecosystem, maybe?”
“The ecosystem?” Dinah echoed. “As in nature?”
“Not nature nature,” I said quickly. “I’m talking about the beach, not ticks and bears and water moccasins.”
Dinah shuddered. Snakes creeped her out, as did spiders and ticks and basically all insects except “pretty” ones, like ladybugs. I, myself, took pride in not being scared of that stuff, because c’mon. A snake was not going to jump out at you from behind a door and say, “Boo!” As long as you left snakes alone, then snakes would leave you alone. Same with spiders and ticks, for the most part.
The only creepy-crawly thing I was afraid of were cockroaches. Cockroaches gave me the heebie-jeebies. They scuttled, and they squirted green ooze when you smacked them with a shoe, but smacking them with a shoe was no simple feat given their aforementioned horrible scuttling ability.
Worst of all? The cockroaches we had here in Atlanta were different than run-of-the-mill roaches. They were called German cockroaches, and They. Could. FLY. That’s right, fly—right into your ear or hair or mouth, if, say, your mouth was formed into a horrified O like that famous painting “The Scream.”
These days I saw German cockroaches as just one more thing to resent about our Germanic neighbors. Trot on off and frolic with authentic German cockroaches, I told Lars in my mind. I’ll pass, thanks very much.
“There are no snakes or cockroaches in South Carolina, I’m pretty sure,” I said. I wasn’t sure at all, but that was a small point.
“Huh?” Dinah said. “I’m sorry ... South Carolina?”
“The summer beach program I’m talking about. Keep up, lady. Sheesh!”
She scratched her head and came away with a bit of d
andelion, which she examined with confusion.
“It’s called DeBordieu,” I said. I pronounced it just like the website said to: Debbie-Doo. “It’s near Pawleys Island, where I went with Amanda once. You probably don’t remember. We weren’t friends yet.”
She shuffled her fingers to get rid of the dandelion fluff. “We weren’t? Why weren’t we?”
“It was the summer after fifth grade, and you and I didn’t get to be friends until sixth grade.” In my mind, I saw little me and little Amanda getting sandy and tan and slurping Grape Nehis at the end of the pier. Amanda wore her first-ever bikini, I remembered. It was white with splashy purple flowers.
Would thinking about Amanda always give me a pang, like a small-but-permanent sliver in my heart?
“We almost got eaten by jellyfish,” I murmured. I caught Dinah’s expression and backpedaled. “Not that there are jellyfish at DeBordieu. I’m sure there aren’t jellyfish at DeBordieu.”
“I’m so convinced,” Dinah said.
One of the guys on the quad called out to us. He was old-school Westminster-style preppy, wearing a pink Oxford with the sleeves rolled up. But he pulled it off because of his longish boy-band hair.
“You girls want to grab us some more chairs?” he asked, wiping the sweat off his brow.
His buddy, not nearly so cute and wearing loafers without socks, looked at us expectantly.
“No, thanks!” I told them.
Dinah blushed, because she wasn’t used to saying no period, and especially not to junior guys. “Winnie!”
“What?”
The pink-shirted junior regarded us disdainfully. I waved. He shook his head and got back to work.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Dinah, “but we don’t have time to be their slave girls right now. Do you know why?”
She regarded me apprehensively.
“Because, dearest Dinah, I happen to be busy sitting with my dear friend—that would be you—making plans to go to the beach. And the best part about this particular program? Are you ready?”
“Hold on. Were there never any lifeguards in this summer beach scenario?”
“I don’t know. There might be lifeguards. But we”—I widened my eyes and nodded, hoping to get her nodding, too—“we will be saving endangered sea turtles.”
She narrowed her eyes. She didn’t nod.
“I know, right? Coolest camp ever, right?”
“Sea turtles,” Dinah said, rolling the words around in her mouth like a suspicious new food.
I smiled, reminding myself to play it calm. I’d scared her off too many times already with brochures from spelunking camp, Indian cooking camp, and even trapeze artist camp, which had as its slogan, “Be a Circus Star—or Just Fly through the Air Like One!”
“No,” Dinah had said to that one, refusing to even hear about the amazing tricks we’d learn. “No camps with spangles.”
“Sea turtles are endangered,” I explained. “Did you know that? So we’d be doing stuff to help them, like, not be.”
She looked disgruntled, but she didn’t say no. “How?”
“Well, we’d patrol the shores and look for eggs and stuff. And nests. Sea turtle nests.”
She looked at me with one eye. She one-eye squinted at me.
“Seriously, Dinah, it sounds so cool.” My hopefulness came through my voice. “We might even see hatchlings.”
“What are hatchlings?”
“Teensy little, cute little sea turtles, that’s what. Like ... kittens! Only scaly!”
“I like kittens,” she said slowly.
“I know you do. See?”
She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “Are turtles actually scaly? When I think about turtles, I don’t think of them as scaly.”
“Ah. Interesting. Let’s find out!” I grabbed her hands and pulled, using our combined leverage to raise us both to our feet.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“Media center. I’ll show you the site.”
“I’d rather go to a kitten rescue camp.”
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Alas, no such thing.”
“There might be.”
“There isn’t. Only sea turtles.” I towed her along behind me. “But, Dinah, for real. You’re going to love it.”
Sandra’s graduation ceremony was beautiful, and I cried. Mom did, too, and Dad, and even baby Maggie. Not in a bad, disruptive baby way, just soft whimpers that meant she’d rather be chilling in her bouncy seat.
Ty was the only one in our family who didn’t cry. He secretly played Pocket God on my iPhone, and Mom let him, because there was a lot of boring speech-making going on.
When it was time for the diplomas to be handed out, I reached over and turned it off.
“It’s time,” I whispered when he protested.
“Oh,” he said, sitting up straight and tugging at his tie, which he was exceedingly proud of.
Since Sandra’s last name was Perry, she was near the end of the procession line. So was Bo, whose last name was Sanders. When the headmaster called Sandra’s name, she blew Bo a kiss before starting across the outdoor stage. My chest rose and fell. My smile wobbled.
Lifting her chin, Sandra accepted her diploma. Her blond hair spilled out from beneath her mortarboard, and she was my sister, and I had a sudden vision of her navigating a busy city sidewalk on the way to a snazzy job, wearing heels and a tailored suit and maybe even a wedding ring.
Mom handed me a fresh Kleenex, and I leaned forward to blow my nose. I stayed down there for a while, just sniffling a little and gathering myself, until I felt a papery wisp on the bare skin between the bottom of my blouse and the top of my gray skirt. I glanced over my shoulder to see Ty holding his program over the back part of me.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
“I don’t want anyone to see your bottom crack,” he whispered back.
I frowned at him, like what the ... ? Yes, I had a few pairs of jeans that sometimes crept down too low, especially if I squatted or leaned over. But the waistband of my skirt didn’t do that, I was ninety-nine percent sure.
“Ty,” I whispered, “no one can see my bottom crack.”
He patted my leg with the hand not holding the program. “I know. You’re welcome.”
Afterward, Sandra began a long day of celebration, because at least ten different seniors were hosting garden parties. I saw in my mind the senior girls in their white dresses and the senior guys in their slacks and dress shirts, their ties loosened or stuffed in their pockets. It made me melancholy, because already Sandra was leaving us. Already her line-up of parties was more tempting than hanging with her family, not that I blamed her.
“Can y’all believe that Sandra is a high school graduate? ” I asked Dinah and Cinnamon after I, too, ditched my family. We were hanging out at the Peachtree Battle Baskin-Robbins. I’d changed from my skirt and blouse into cut-offs and a Krispy Kreme T-shirt, though I still smelled fancy from Mom’s Chanel Number Five.
“I know,” Dinah said. “In four years, that’ll be us.”
“Unless we die,” Cinnamon said grouchily.
“What?!” I said.
“Well, unless we die, which odds are we won’t.” She slurped a sip of her root beer float. “I’m just keeping it real, that’s all.”
I scrutinized her expression. Dinah and I had filled out our sea turtle paperwork and sent in our deposits, and we were leaving for DeBordieu on June tenth. Cinnamon had been grumpy ever since we told her.
“Speaking of keeping it real,” she went on, “check out that girl’s cleavage.” She jerked her chin to indicate a super-skinny girl at the ice-cream counter. Super-skinny, but with super-big boobs.
“Whoa,” I said.
“Is that possible in the natural world?” Cinnamon said, not bothering to lower her voice. “She has to have had a boob job, right?”
“Cinnamon ... shhh,” I said.
She met my gaze and scowled. Uh-oh.
&nbs
p; “You have nothing to worry about, though, Winnie. Nobody’s ever going to accuse you of having had a boob job.”
I didn’t take the bait, as I had no desire to discuss my lack of cleavage. I also thought she was being a jerk, and that it wasn’t cool, even if she was bummed about being left by herself in Atlanta.
“Or maybe I’m wrong,” she went on anyway. “Maybe you’ll have a freak growth spurt in the next four years.”
My face grew hot. “Shut up,” I said, pushing at my ice cream with my spoon.
“Cinnamon?” Dinah said. “Do you remember that talk we had, about how you were going to stop making jokes about things that actually hurt people’s feelings?”
“No,” Cinnamon said, but she was lying. Before she and Bryce broke up, Dinah and I had had to do an intervention with her because she kept making Dinah the butt of unfunny remarks, just to make Bryce laugh.
Now she was making me the butt of her jokes, but no one was laughing.
“Cinnamon,” Dinah said.
“Fine,” Cinnamon said. She sighed. “I’m sorry, Winnie, and your boobs are perky and adorable.” And then, as if she couldn’t help herself, “I’m sure the sea turtles will worship them. They’ll think they’re like ... lily pads.”
“I knew that’s what this was about,” I said. “Just stop being a baby about it and come with us. Jeez.”
“Yeah, only I can’t,” she said, “because I have to stay in Atlanta.” She glared at me. “And you said you were staying in Atlanta, too. Traitor.”
“Just quit your babysitting job,” I said. “If you told your boss right now, she’d have plenty of time to find someone else.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Cinnamon said.
“Seriously,” Dinah said. “It’s going to be so fun—we might even get to see hatchlings, which would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience!”
“I’d appreciate it if you would stop bringing up those stupid hatchlings,” Cinnamon said.
I did an internal inventory, trying to decide whether I’d forgiven the cleavage remark. I hadn’t, not quite, but enough to feel sorry for her. It was never fun to be left behind.