In the character notes Vera is described as intelligent and capable but prone to hysteria. (This is a part Song would love to perform.) I recite some of her lines, sounding ridiculous at first, but eventually, I begin to feel it. I feel the melodramatic Vera. My confidence starts to grow.
Acting is a lot like running. If you’re on, both allow you to escape the confines of your body, of your life.
I feel the typical nerves (hello, Fear and Doubt) as we gather to audition. But I give myself my usual pep talk—telling myself I’m prepared. And besides, this is a summer staff production, for criminy’s sake; most of us have probably had little time on a stage.
Wrong. Brita is unbelievable. She becomes another person before our eyes. Her Vera is commanding and larger than life.
Carly reads next. She’s good too! It’s as if she’s duplicating Brita but tweaking her performance in just the right places. I’m amazed. And so out of my league.
By the time my turn comes around, it’s clear I’ll probably be playing one of the men in the cast—the one who chokes in the first ten minutes. I start reading Vera’s lines, but I feel way too much like myself. It makes me mad (I didn’t sound like this when I was practicing), so I make a point to pump up the stage directions. Vera: jumpy and highly reactive.
And then something happens. It’s as if I—or, rather, the girl I’m playing—is sick and tired of being simply capable and so transforms into something else. My words are intelligent, but I can hear my voice becoming shriller—more high-strung. My hands flutter around; my body moves in ways that begin to feel totally foreign.
Everyone is laughing—I am making a total fool of myself—but I keep going. I’ve never had center stage before, and at any moment I will have to give it up. Acting over the top is scary, I admit. Really scary. But fun, too. I read far beyond the designated lines.
When I finally stop, Lucy has tears running down her face. “You’ve got it, girl,” she says. “You have got to play Vera.”
And then as an afterthought she turns to Brita and mouths, Is that okay with you? in a totally understanding and supportive way.
Brita nods back. “I’ll be Inspector Blore,” she says.
If it were possible, my whole body would be smiling. I look at Carly, knowing she’s going to tell me I’m sizzling, but she’s turned away.
“What part would you like, Carly?” Lucy asks.
She shrugs in a nonchalant way. “I’ll be the understudy.” Then she gets up and goes through the back door to our rooms.
Later she barely acknowledges my hello.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “Did I say or do something wrong?”
“I don’t know, did you?”
How am I supposed to answer this? I’m not usually this clueless. My mind sorts, frantically. The last thing in the world I want is to ruin anything between us. Is Carly pissed because I got the lead? Should I have asked if she wanted to play Vera, the way Lucy had checked things out with Brita?
“I just get tired of Lucy and Nigel running things around here.”
I can’t help thinking it’s more complicated than that. “Well, it’s only us now. What do you want to do?” I mean, What part do you want in the play? But Carly hears me differently.
Her face brightens. “You’re right. Let’s skip the beach this afternoon. Let’s do something … just the two of us. See if we can find Dom and Harrison.”
“How?” I ask, hoping to sound open-minded. “They’re working. They can’t spend time with us.”
“I know!” Carly says. “Let’s take the rowboat out on the pond! Harrison will definitely be down on the docks, and who knows, if we get really lucky, Dom’s group will be there too.”
The rowboat sounds fun. And different. But wouldn’t we look desperate?
“Don’t worry,” says Carly, reading my mind. “We’ll keep our backs turned to shore. We won’t turn around and wave or anything until they’re on a megaphone to get our attention.”
“And what’ll we be doing?”
Carly’s eyes grow wide with a new idea. “Fishing!”
“Fishing?”
“Not us. Stella!”
“Stella’s coming too?”
“Of course. Stella will love it. Her babysitter—what’s her name? She will love us for taking Stella off her hands.”
“Camp counselors!” I say, getting into it, shutting out the piece of my brain that whispers, How did we get to here?
Chapter 16
Right after lunch we’re sitting in the middle of Horseshoe Pond. I pull up the oars and attempt to untangle the line on Stella’s small fishing rod.
“But, Nola,” she says, “I need something to go on my hook. We forgot to dig up any worms.”
“Hmm, that is a problem,” says Carly, leaning over her shoulder. “You don’t have one of those fancy flies in your tackle box?”
Stella looks as if a fishing lure might suddenly appear. “Uh-uh,” she says.
“Well, drop your line and maybe the fish will bite anyway,” Carly says.
“Why?” asks Stella.
“Why what, Stella Bella?”
“Why would the fish bite anyway?”
Carly looks at me as if to say, You try.
“I have an idea,” I say. “Fish like wiggly things, right?”
“Like worms,” says Stella, nodding.
“And sparkly things?”
She thinks for a moment. “Like other little fish.”
“Then how about this?” I reach down and gently tug the hair elastic with its sparkly bobble out of Stella’s hair.
She pushes her hair away from her forehead and watches me tie the band around the hook.
“What do you think, Stella?” I ask.
Her whole face lifts. “Watch out!” she shouts, and tosses the line into the water.
The sun is shining through the tiniest wisps of clouds, glinting on the pond. Quietly, I take one oar and slip it onto the water to keep the boat from drifting too close to the Robin Hood shore.
“Don’t look now,” whispers Carly, but of course Stella looks right away.
“Harrison!” she yells.
“Harrison, I’m fishing!” Harrison is crouched on the edge of the dock, giving instructions to a group of shivering boys. Then he blows his whistle and directs them up to the bleachers to get their towels. When the last boy has left the waterfront, Harrison walks to the end of the docks and yells to Stella.
“Caught anything?”
“Not yet. I’m feeding them hair bands!”
“Hair bands? What kind of bait is that?”
“Come see for yourself,” Carly calls.
I jump as the oar slips from the lock and crashes down on the seats.
“Such grace,” says Carly.
Harrison loosens a kayak from the end of the dock, crouches into it, and paddles out to us. No tap of paddle against fiberglass, no splashes of water in the air. He’s a reflection shimmering on the surface.
“See?” Stella says, reeling her line in to show off her bait.
“And what will you catch with that?” he asks, resting his paddle across the kayak and looking directly at me.
My flapping fish of a heart tries to leap from the boat.
“Lox,” I try.
He flicks me a wide smile.
“We’re geniuses, don’t you think?” says Carly, resting her hands on my seat and leaning closer to him. Her long hair fans against my bare shoulder. “We didn’t have bait so we improvised.”
The kayak rocks, sending ripples in all directions. “Only you, Miss Tree,” he says slowly, as if not sure what his reaction should be, “could think of something so creative.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says. “The best compliment.”
“Even though the hair band was my idea?” I ask. I’m teasing, but maybe only half teasing.
“What do you mean?” Carly asks.
“Stella probably won’t catch anything, but the thing was my inven
tion.”
“If you say so, Nola,” Carly says in the way you might pacify a child who insists she’s not tired. She shoots Harrison a look that implies I’m being a tad neurotic.
“How about you say so?”
Carly stares at me, first with disbelief and then with obvious annoyance. “You want me to say, Nola, that using a hair band was your idea?”
“Yes,” I say. Wow. Where did that come from?
“And then you will stop being so ridiculously competitive?”
“I don’t want to fish anymore,” says Stella, wrapping herself around my arm.
“Neither do I,” says Carly. She turns to Harrison and adds, “Maybe I’ll see you later.” Not maybe we’ll see you later.
Carly grabs at the oars. I move to the front seat in the boat and brace myself for what’s to come.
She rows with a vengeance. As we’re pulling the boat up onto the sand, she says in a pained, but nevertheless angry voice, “I can’t believe you attacked me out there. I would never have humiliated you in that way. Believe it or not, Nola, I care about you.”
“I wasn’t attacking you,” I say. But I’m confused. Was I defending myself? Or was I attacking?
Carly turns and heads up the hill without me.
I reach for Stella’s hand.
“It was your idea,” she whispers.
Chapter 17
“Nola!” Kevin is standing in the doorway to the kitchen with his white apron tied around his waist. “Tomorrow’s your day off, yes?”
“It is,” I say, walking over to him. I haven’t given it much thought. Without a car, there’s little to mark a day off.
“Mine too. Want to see Isle au Haut?”
“An island? Like Deer Isle?”
“No, much tinier, only a few houses. But there’s hiking trails that wind around the cliffs—you could run if you wanted—and these beaches covered in stones. You know the kind rubbed down by the ocean? Stones the size of ostrich eggs.”
Kevin, hiking? I wouldn’t have guessed. Is he asking me out? But no—there’s no nervousness, no flirting, no electricity. Everything about him says he’s just drumming up a friend.
“And on the way back,” he continues, “I thought we could eat at Fire Pond—my treat. The chef there’s from France, and there’s this dish …”
It sounds fun and I tell him so. Slowly, I’m becoming part of this place, I think, patting the script in my pocket. Each day belonging a little more. I practically skip to the barn.
And am totally shocked to see Harrison standing at the door.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey, yourself,” I say, which I think sounds quite cool considering I am about to wet my pants. I’m glad I didn’t really skip. “Where’re you headed?”
“Here. Wanted to see if you had any interest in the square dance tonight.”
“Definitely!” I say. “I mean, I’ve never done it and I’ll probably make a total ass of myself but—”
He glances up at the windows on the second floor. “That’s where you live, right?”
“Right.”
“Oh, and Carly’s invited too,” he says.
My formerly speeding heart hits a wall. So I’m not the one Harrison was hoping to bump into. “I’ll tell her.”
“Okay then,” he says, smiling, and then waves as he heads back to camp.
I go up to my room and grab my notebook—mostly to distract myself from obsessing over Harrison and what he might be thinking—and finally write to Song.
But … I let myself know the truth … I’ve been avoiding writing for days. It’s not that I don’t think about Song—I do, all the time. Will the world end if I actually own my own summer, have my life to myself for one short month or two, though? The thought shocks me. I pick up the pen and write:
Song, my Song,
This is my favorite day of the week at Rocky Cove. Instead of serving in the dining room, we have a lobster picnic on the beach. And we don’t have to wear our dreaded uniforms! We can wear short-sleeved shirts and jeans since we spend most of our time carrying platters of steaming lobsters from a big boiler to guests hanging out on the rocks.
Some of them pretend to be incapable “flatlanders” and ask their waitresses to shell their lobsters. Most attempt to have the true Maine experience, but they eventually give up on the messy process and leave claws or even the tails sitting on their plates. The moment the last guest has made his or her way up the hill, we jump in and feast on the remains. I know this probably sounds disgusting to someone who’s a vegan, but when you get better, Song, I’m treating you to your first.
Gotta go. It’s off to the square dance at the Bucks Harbor Yacht Club. A counselor from the boys’ camp, Harrison, asked me. I know, stop laughing. Me, square dancing, does make a pretty insane picture.
Oh, and there’s more! Did I tell you that we’re putting on a play? Guess who got the lead? Me!
Lots of love,
Nola
Cracking crustaceans
Difficult. But watch this girl
Come out of her shell
Chapter 18
As we walk into the yacht club, Harrison, pretending to be a host on some nature show, gives us the distinguishing features and habitat of the crowd: Club members can be sighted at the doors greeting people and generally looking like they own the place; tourists arriving on schooners are frequently found gathered on the porch in navy blazers and sundresses, talking loudly about their boats; Rocky Cove and Robin Hood staff cling to the back walls as if in junior high; and die-hard square dancers (women in petticoats, men in country-style shirts with lanyards) do-si-do across the floor.
And I discover, to my surprise, that Pete and Susanna are serious square dancers.
Harrison and Dominic hang by me and Carly—or should I say, more honestly, both boys circle around her. Although Carly and I often mention the two guys’ names, usually when we’re joking around, we have never actually shared our feelings about them. Which one does Carly want? Dominic? I’d originally assumed so, since they’d had so much fun together when we cooked mussels and she took him up on his invitation for a lobster dinner. On the other hand, it was Carly who made sure Harrison went too. I thought she was doing me a favor—wanted me along on the excursion—but what if she’s more interested in Harrison? Shut up, Nola. Some friend you are. But still …
Once, for about five minutes, my cousin Georgia and I liked the same guy. Neither of us said a word to the other. If we had, we’d have had to admit we were competing. One of us would have felt compelled to fold. So we let the guy pick. Didn’t pick either of us! Maybe Carly and I are playing the same game.
At that moment she reaches out and takes my hand. “Come on, Nolie. If these two guys aren’t going to ask us to dance, we’ll dance together.”
Harrison doesn’t miss a beat. He takes Dominic’s elbow and leads him out on the floor. Dom plays the bashful female as we create our square. As it turns out, none of us has a clue when it comes to square dancing, but at the yacht club no one really cares—not even the diehards who smile in that “remember the first time we tried?” way.
We’re out on the porch waiting for the guys to bring us punch (how scrapbookish) when I tell Carly about Kevin’s invitation.
“You can’t go!”
“Why not?”
“Lucy offered to cover for me tomorrow since most of my tables asked for picnic lunches. And I’m borrowing Mariah’s car—I want to show you Castine.”
“What?”
“It’s a fishing village. You’ll love it, Nola.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted to surprise you.”
Nice gesture, but what about Kevin? As usual, Carly knows what I’m thinking.
“Tell him you changed your mind.” She makes it sound so simple. But it feels bad.
No, wait. I have a thought. “Why don’t we ask Kevin to come with us. To Castine?” I’m hoping there’s a restaurant equal to the Fire P
ond there.
Carly pouts. “I want it to be just the two of us,” she says.
Suddenly, I feel owned. Why can’t she just step back for one moment and ask what I want?
Carly slips her arm through mine. “Don’t you think, Nola, you might be inflating your importance when it comes to Kevin? I’m sure he asked you out of kindness—you’re the new girl, you have the same day off, and you’ve never seen Isle au Haut or gone to the Fire Pond. It was nice. But he’s not going to care if you change your plans.”
Now I feel ridiculous.
“He does have other friends, you know.”
Dominic suggests we leave the dance to climb Lookout Hill. Why not? Something significant might happen—something that will change the order of things—and I suddenly, desperately want to know what the new order will be.
We don’t have a flashlight, but navigating our way by moonlight isn’t hard. Carly, who drank from a flask offered by a hopeful but unlucky sailor, seems less sure-footed and keeps reaching out for one of the guys. “Where are you leading us?” she asks.
“Come with me,” Dominic says. He wraps his arm around her waist and leads her to the top of the hill.
Did the guys plan this? The spray of stars across the sky and the dancing lights from boats below make the night seem surreal.
“Come see,” Dominic says to Carly, pulling her back down another path.
“There’s a sort of cave down there,” Harrison says, parking himself on a rock. “Guys call it ‘the grotto.’”
I sit next to him.
“Do you run cross-country for school?” he asks, recalling our first meeting up here.
“Yup.”
“Three-mile races?”
“Three point one.”
“Your best time?”
“Eighteen.”
I can see him calculating in his head. “No way!”
I smile.
“You’re kiddin’ me. That’s, like, a five point—”
“Five point eight.” I love people being surprised. I guess I don’t look (dress? act?) like the typical athlete.
“How long you been running?”