A Million Junes

  One corner of his mouth curls up. “Agreed. Far less humiliating.”

  “The bigger concern is that you used the word wingman and it’s not 1986.”

  Saul’s eyes narrow, but his grin widens. “Wow, you do hate me, don’t you, Jack O’Donnell IV?”

  My stomach turns inside out at the sound of my name in his voice. This isn’t how he’s supposed to be, and it’s definitely not how I’m supposed to be with him.

  Saul swears and grips the lap bar as we jolt up another notch to let more people board below. Nate’s and Hannah’s feet dangle over us, swaying in the lake wind, but Saul’s just staring at the ground. “Not a big fan of heights?” I say.

  “What gave it away? The fine sheen of cold sweat that just sprang up all over my body?”

  “Actually it was your white-knuckling.” I flick his hand with mine.

  His fingers latch on to my hand and hold it there. “Hey, sorry about your hand,” he says, tightening his grip. “Turns out I need it now, so you’re going to have to find a new one.”

  I laugh. I warm. I burn. Guilt springs up in me. “I have something more effective than a hand in my purse, if you’ll let me go,” I say. When he does, I fish out the flask.

  His smile now looks like how his laugh sounds: inviting, warm, uneven. I pass him the whiskey and watch his throat move as he chugs a little. He wipes his chin with the side of his hand and passes back the flask. “Thanks. Aren’t you a little young to have that?”

  “No, haven’t you heard? They’ve changed the drinking age since your childhood here thirty-five years ago.”

  “Hilarious. So funny.”

  “I can tell you think so by your raucous laughter, Saul.”

  “I have to admit,” he says, “I’m a little surprised it’s true.”

  “What’s true?”

  “You O’Donnells hate us.”

  Heat rushes into my face. After making it this far without broaching the feud, I’d expected to finish the night without acknowledging it. “Oh, deeply,” I answer, unsure whether I’m kidding or serious. Right now I don’t hate Saul Angert. Nor do I want him to know I ever thought I did. “And you guys hate us too, right?”

  He nods solemnly. “I’d wish you dead, but we don’t need another ghost in that house.”

  I don’t laugh. I can’t. His gaze has me frozen. Like he’s a Gorgon and I’m the sap who wandered into his temple. I’m worried I’ve lost track of the silence, that maybe we’ve been sitting here like this much longer than appropriate. “My house isn’t haunted,” I say.

  “Glad to hear it,” Saul answers.

  “It’s magic, but not haunted.”

  His face remains neutral. “Magic.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Okay, Junior.” He braces himself against the bar as we rise higher. “What’s magic about your house?”

  “You don’t have to call me that,” I tell him.

  “What would I call you?”

  “June, Jack, Jackie, whatever you want.”

  “I want to call you Junior.”

  “Fine.”

  “But I like Jack too.”

  “Whichever.”

  “And June’s cute.”

  “Adorable,” I agree. “Makes me sound like a tiny golden retriever puppy.”

  We surge upward one last time, straight to the top of the Ferris wheel, and again Saul locks my hand against the bar with his, and again I like it more than I should.

  “So, June.” His voice is taut as he pries his gaze from the asphalt below. “What’s magic about your house?”

  I shift my hand in an attempt to free it, but instead Saul slides his fingers through mine and grips them for dear life.

  “Well, what have you heard?” I ask.

  “The coywolves.” He closes his eyes. “That if you leave shoes in the yard, the coywolves take them.”

  “One hundred percent. Every time.”

  His dark eyes open to find mine. “You’re messing with me.”

  “I’m not. You really never left flip-flops in our yard when you were a kid? I thought everyone did that.”

  “Everyone did,” he says. “I didn’t. What else?”

  “The coywolves never—or almost never—kill our chickens. Dad said it’s always been that way, since Jonathan Alroy O’Donnell first came here.”

  Saul fixes me with another serious stare. “That can’t be true.”

  “Dad called our woods a thin place, where the world and heaven overlap. He said that’s what made our house magic—why that first cherry tree Jonathan planted grew overnight and the animals would lie down together.”

  Again all true, except, of course, when the dark ghost appeared. But that seems like a tally in the yes, definitely haunted column, so I don’t mention it. A chill rolls through me at the thought of the writhing darkness I imagined tonight.

  “And do you have proof of this, Jack?”

  “We’ve never kept our chickens in their coop. We just let them roam the hill.”

  “Wild.” Saul stares vaguely at our hands as the Ferris wheel begins to twirl in earnest. Cool wind ripples over us, carrying the contented noise of carnival-goers upward, and he relaxes a little. “What about the ghosts?” he says. “I remember kids used to go to your house at midnight, try to see ghosts in the yard.”

  “There are two of them, and anyone can feel them, but my dad said only Jacks could see them. He called them sprites. We don’t really know what they are.”

  “And the Window Whites?”

  He’s talking about the little white puffballs that float in our windows and doors, like sentient, unblown dandelions. No one knows what they are or why they sometimes drift listlessly in our doorframes and other times disappear for weeks.

  “They land on the glass and move around for a while, then float back into the woods,” I tell Saul now. “My mom thinks they’re just blossoms or pollen.”

  “And the rearranging hallways and rearranging woods?”

  I shrug and look down at Saul’s hand and mine. My stomach dips. “You think it’s all just made up?”

  “I think Five Fingers likes its stories.”

  I laugh. “You don’t sound like someone who was born here.” He says nothing, and I continue: “I have some hazy memories of opening a door and finding myself back in the room I thought I’d just left, and a dozen memories of walking straight out from my house through the woods toward the setting sun, only to end up back at the hill. And there’s this massive tree Dad called O’Dang! We’d go looking for it all the time and only find it, like, ten percent of the time. We always knew, though, that if we stepped into the forest and the sky was misty but sunlit, we could find it.”

  As the words spill out, all my blood feels like it’s freezing and breaking through my veins. I try not to think about the tree. I try not to think about the woods, because the next thought I have is always of the Worst Day.

  All the minuscule details stored in perfect vividness by my eight-year-old brain: the dryness of the air and dirt that week, the blue petals that fell in a perfect circle from Mom’s hydrangea, the weeks when she fed me only Froot Loops and macaroni, either because she was too sad to cook or because I was too sad to eat anything real.

  If our house were haunted, there’d be more than two ghosts fluttering on our hill. If it were haunted, Dad wouldn’t be gone.

  “I’d like to see it.” Saul’s husky voice brings me back to the humming night.

  “The tree?”

  “The house,” he says. “All of it.”

  I study him for a long stretch during which neither of us blinks. “You really never sneaked over? Not once?”

  “Once I got as far as the woods.” He shakes his head. “I remember when you did, though. When you got stung by the bees?”

  I stare down
at the purple stripes of a psychic’s tent. “Yeah?”

  That was the day I started to believe that being close to the Angerts was dangerous. It was also the day Hannah’s crush on Saul reached legendary heights. Hannah and I were seven, so Saul must have been about ten. She and I had snaked through the woods out toward the Angerts’ summer home. We found Saul and Bekah building a tree house—or, rather, she’d been nailing boards to a trunk, hanging on them to check their strength before climbing up to nail the next one, and Saul had been taking pictures with a clunky film camera that looked like a prop from a movie set.

  Hannah and I crept close to get a look at the kids I wasn’t allowed to play with—she knew them a bit through her neighbor Nate. Saul had his back to us as he crouched in the mud, snapping photographs of something we couldn’t see.

  I study him in the Ferris wheel’s light, comparing him to the boy I saw on that day. “Your ears were bigger back then.”

  Saul’s head tilts back, and the corners of his eyes crinkle in laughter. “Actually, I think they were the exact same size they are now, but the rest of me was considerably smaller.”

  His hair was longer then too, but just as neat. Bekah was the opposite, hair wild and limbs muddy and thorn-scratched. As I watched the mysterious Angert twins that day, a fallen branch cracked under my foot, and when Saul spun toward the noise, I stepped onto a collapsed log. It made a hollow sound beneath my sneaker, because it was hollow, or mostly hollow, give or take a hornets’ nest.

  The wasps swarmed at once. Hannah started screaming and ran toward the Angerts’ cabin. Bekah and Saul both came toward me, like they were going to fight the things off with their hands, but even in my earth-splitting panic I knew: The wasps hadn’t just attacked me for stepping on their house; they’d attacked me for getting too close to the Angerts.

  Going toward the twins for help would only make things worse, not to mention the trouble I’d be in when Dad found out.

  I turned and ran. Through the woods all the way back to my house, the hornets trailing me the whole way. Mom saw me hurtling toward her from where she was sitting out front, reading on a papaya-yellow blanket beneath the cherry tree. She stood and came running full speed. She swept me off the ground and over her hip, barreling for the front door. Inside, she dumped me into the tin tub downstairs and cranked the faucet to full blast. As the icy water spit from the showerhead, I watched the hornets die in the pool forming around me, the beating of their wings slowing to a fizzle and then nothing, no movement at all.

  I spent the rest of the day in a Benadryl haze, covered in calamine lotion, and Dad had had to pick up Hannah from the Angerts’ cabin, which had him more furious with them than me.

  When he got back, I heard him and Mom talking in the hallway outside my room. Angert girl got hurt too, he said, and I could tell from his voice that he thought this was only fair. Completely covered in poison ivy. I mean, eyes swollen shut, everything. Mom’s heavy sigh disapproved of his obvious glee, but she didn’t say anything. That was how it was. He couldn’t be talked out of anything, and he could talk other people into anything.

  “That was the first time I saw you up close,” Saul says beside me. The breeze lifts my hair from my shoulders, and goose bumps wriggle up where Saul’s gaze just glanced off my neck.

  “No it wasn’t.”

  He lifts his eyes to mine. “What do you mean?”

  “The hornets were the second time. The first time was at the YMCA pool. I couldn’t have been more than five years old. We showed up after you, and your dad made you leave. On your way out, you dislocated your shoulder. Like an hour later, I nearly drowned. That was the day my dad first told me about your family.”

  Saul tilts his face skyward and shakes his head as if addressing the stars directly.

  “What?” I press.

  “Nothing. It’s just . . .” He slumps into the bench again. “What a convenient concept. That every bad thing that happens to you was caused by the person you hate.”

  “So you don’t think bad things happen when our families cross paths?”

  “June,” he says. “Every single outdated, low-budget, under-repaired ride we’ve taken tonight not only could have but should have killed us, O’Donnell and Angert or not, and yet here we are. Together.”

  “I’m honestly kind of surprised the guy who’s currently drawing blood from my hand with his fingernails as we dangle three stories above an asphalt parking lot would be willing to jinx us like that, but okay.”

  He faintly grins. “You already bit my collarbone and got your just reward when you plowed into a mirror that’s probably never, in its forty years of life, been cleaned. Even if we were to be disciplined by the universe for speaking to each other, I think we’ve gotten enough punishment for the night.”

  “How did you know the mirror was the same age as you?” I ask somberly. “Were you born in the same hospital? Hey, what was the world like before the Internet?”

  “How old, exactly, do you think I am?”

  “I don’t know—what’s the last year a person could’ve been born and still know what a fortnight is?”

  “It was one thing when you took wingman from me. I won’t let you disparage fortnight too.”

  “Seriously, though,” I say. “What about the thing at the YMCA? I mean, you left in an ambulance, and an hour later a pimply lifeguard was hunched over me, forcing water out of my lungs.”

  Saul lifts one dark eyebrow. “That shoulder’s been on the fritz my entire life—all forty? Fifty years of it? Loose ligaments. Ended my baseball career before it ever began. I’d call that a blessing, not a curse. No, Jack O’Donnell IV, I don’t believe your mere presence dislocated my shoulder. I believe our great-grandfathers pissed each other off and this town turned it into something big and impossible and legendary because this is Five Fingers, and everything has to be big and impossible and legendary. It’s a coping mechanism for our ungodly winters.”

  I stare at him, trying to decide whether or not I agree. Five Fingers might be a town of tall tales, but that’s because enough of us have seen enough of it—the stuff that’s worth repeating until it becomes a tall tale—to believe in it. Dad said we lived in a magic house, and we do. He said the Angerts were dangerous to us—do I really draw the line there?

  And then there’s the thing too big to ask about: If our bad things don’t turn into their bad things and vice versa, then what about what happened to Dad and Bekah? Ten years ago, he was totally healthy, then weeks after she was diagnosed, he was gone.

  And three years ago, when she . . . on the day they lost her . . . my foot plunged through the porch and I broke a bone for the first time in my life.

  We’re silent for the rest of the ride, and when the car touches down, Saul disentangles his hand from mine, and we step off to meet Nate and Hannah. Talking about all this has stirred up memories I do my best to leave settled on the floor of my mind, and it’s impossible to pack them away so quickly.

  As the four of us make our way toward the Meijer parking lot, I feel empty, like a wrung-out sponge. I don’t have the energy to care when Saul and Hannah walk ahead of us, though I do notice Nate’s disappointment now. And I don’t care that the only goodbye Han and I exchange with them is a walking wave, like, Probably see you never!

  I don’t care when I see Saul loiter against Nate’s passenger door, watching us climb into Hannah’s Subaru, or when he calls scratchily, “Have a good fortnight!”

  Because I’m Jack O’Donnell IV, and for at least three reasons, I have no business having a crush on Saul Angert.

  Seven

  “WELL, I hate to say it,” Hannah sighs, as we cruise into the blue-green forest that hides my house, “but a night with Saul Angert was hardly worth the moon.”

  I will myself not to blush, to stamp out the traitorous hope in my chest. “What about the tracker I’ll have to wear on my ankle if m
y parents find out about it? Was it worth that?”

  “He used to seem . . . sparklier, didn’t he?”

  My insides twist and snag. “Yeah, super sparkly. Like a tiara for a Barbie doll. I thought you were having fun.”

  “With no help from him. What a wet blanket. Almost makes you appreciate the Nates of the world.”

  I think my face is on fire, or maybe just crawling with fire ants.

  “But still.” Hannah bumps the volume up a couple hundred decibels and cranks the windows down so the heat can beat and roar against our ears. “He is fine, isn’t he?”

  “Just not Barbie-tiara fine,” I shout.

  The moon shines through the foliage cupped around the rawboned road, turning everything silver and sublime. “There, June!” Hannah cries pointing up at the sky. “Your gift in all her glory. Please accept this as payment for causing your perfectly good night to be Angerted.”

  “Do I still get to kick Nate in the crotch?”

  Hannah’s laughter gets lost between the layers of sound, and I laugh too, because that’s the way the lake air works: It carries the feelings you exhale into someone else’s inhalations, it syncs your heartbeats, connects you to everyone else who loves it like you do.

  That’s what Dad used to say, anyway: Lake people are sponges; we all absorb the same mix of life and minerals. We recognize it in each other and share it when one of us gets dried out. You’re a sponge, Junior, like me. When you’re dry, you have to go back to the water to survive.

  Hannah sings along, her right arm flinging out to gesticulate wildly and her wispy hair flaring around her face. She’s most beautiful when she’s this relentless kind of happy. Maybe that’s when everyone is their most beautiful, especially to those who love them.

  I thrust my right arm out the window and catch Hannah’s hand with my left. We sing until our throats fray, and for a while, everything is how it should be.

  By the time we rumble past the shabby gatehouse to the grassy hill my home sits on, I’m starting to feel full again. Hannah parks beside the green-trimmed garage Dad built, and the motion sensors catch the car’s hood, triggering the porch lights. A flutter of moth wings stipples the ghostly glow of the bulbs, and my eyes skim the windows, the Whites bobbing in their corners.