Shallow Pond (2 page)

Two

Jenelle's text messages had reached such a furious intensity, I had no choice but to turn my phone off completely before last period. I ran to my locker after class, pausing only long enough to grab my coat and run. I figured that if I ignored them, then there'd be no way they would be able to arrange for Zach Faraday to be my date for the winter carnival. I suppose I was something of an optimist.

The Bunting residence, a two-story house with peeling-paint siding, had a shabby, dilapidated look to it. Or, to put it another way, it looked like just about every other house in Shallow Pond. Our small side yard was coated with a thin layer of dirty brown snow, what remained from the pre-Christmas storm we'd gotten. It didn't really add very much to the ambiance of the place. I climbed up the four steps to the front door, fumbled for the key in my pocket, unlocked the door, and stepped into the living room—startling Annie, who had apparently dozed off on the couch.

“You're home early,” she said. She sat up, sending the afghan and a book she must have been reading crashing to the floor. “What time is it?”

“Almost three,” I said. “You must have fallen asleep.”

She glanced at her watch to confirm this fact, then shook her head.

“Unbelievable,” she said. “I don't know where the day went. I'm still exhausted from that cold.”

Annie got sick right before Christmas, but it seemed to be taking her forever to recover. I don't think it helped that she didn't really do anything besides read and take care of the house.

“Maybe you should go to a real doctor,” I said. She laughed at my suggestion. She'd seen Dr. Warrell, Shallow Pond's one and only physician. Let's just say he made my ancient English teacher look young. His initial prescription was bed rest and plenty of fluids. Annie had always balked at the idea of leaving Shallow Pond to see another doctor, but in my opinion she could have benefited from seeing someone whose medical license was obtained sometime
after
the close of the second World War.

“How was school?” she asked.

“Changing the subject?” I watched as Annie got up to fold the afghan and pick up her book. Her movements were stiff and slow, like she was an old lady and not someone in her twenties.

“All the parenting books say that you should have a healthy dialogue with your teenager. It's called a conversation. It works like this: I ask a question and you answer it. Care to try it?”

“You're not my parent,” I pointed out. I couldn't help but glance at the mantel where all the pictures were, dated school pictures of the three of us. We looked so much alike—same strawberry-blond hair, same crooked smiles—that it was only the style of clothes that gave us away. On the end of the mantel was my parents' wedding portrait. I used to spend hours just gazing at my mother when I was a kid; I even remember having imaginary conversations with her, as if she could hear me in heaven or wherever I imagined her to be. She was beautiful in her flowing white gown, her strawberry-blond hair in perfect round curls. The man beside her was sharp and good-looking, but it wasn't hard to see who the three of us took after.

“I am, however, your legal guardian,” Annie was saying, “and it's my job to make sure you don't run away to Mexico or get a hideously ugly tattoo or get brainwashed by some cult who worships umbrellas and is in secret conversation with space-faring aliens.”

“Would a cool-looking tattoo be okay?” I asked. “School was fine.”

“See, that wasn't so hard, was it?” Annie sat back down on the couch, as if the effort of folding the afghan and picking up the book had taken all of her energy.

“There's a new guy in school,” I said. I'm not sure why I told her. She would have found out sooner or later anyway, I suppose.

“Oh, what's he like?”

“I'm not sure,” I said, which wasn't a lie. I wasn't really sure what Zach Faraday was like. The only thing I knew about him was that he was incredibly attractive, but I didn't really know anything about who he was. Well, there was one thing. “I heard he's an orphan too.”

“Huh,” Annie said. “Well, that's unusual.”

“I guess maybe his parents died and he came here to live with some relative or something.”

My mother died when I was born. Annie says it wasn't due to complications from childbirth, that it wasn't my fault my mother was dead. She said it was something else that killed her, a disease, but I had to figure that if she was sick, having a child couldn't have been good for her. It probably weakened her, wore her out. The fact that she died right after I was born made it pretty clear to me that I probably
did
have something to do with her dying. Even if the disease would have killed her anyway, my arrival probably killed her quicker. Annie was always saying this wasn't true, but I knew that it was only to make me feel better. Annie's like that. She's always thinking about everyone else's feelings.

Gracie was only three-and-a-half when I was born, so she doesn't remember my mother either. Annie's the only one who remembers her, and the whole time we were growing up she always told us happy stories about how Mom was so sweet and loving, and how she probably still watches over us and takes care of us.

My father almost never talked about my mother. Annie said it was because he loved her so much that it hurt him to talk about her. Maybe this was true, or maybe this was just another one of those things that Annie said to make us feel better. Growing up, I was always scared of my father. He seemed like he was a million miles away; he spent most of his time in his office with the door closed. He would get mad easily and yell at us for things like talking too loud or giggling or other little things that we couldn't really help. I liked to imagine that he was a different person before my mother died, that he was happy and sweet, but then when she died he became so upset that he turned into this nasty man.

He died when I was twelve, a heart attack. I don't know if the heart attack was brought on by him always being angry or because he'd gotten so fat and out of shape. By the time he died he didn't look anything like the slim, sharp-dressed man in that wedding photo. It's weird, but even though I knew my father and never knew my mother, I missed my mother more. Anyway, when Dad died, Annie was twenty years old and old enough to be our legal guardian, so it wasn't as if all that much changed, except now we didn't feel like we had to tiptoe around the house and speak in whispers. Now it was okay to laugh once in a while. It was actually sort of a relief when my father died, which I know sounds awful, but it's true.

Annie must have gathered up enough strength to make dinner, because when I came downstairs a couple of hours later I could smell potatoes and pot roast cooking in the kitchen. My stomach remembered that I'd deprived it of half its lunch and growled angrily.

“Need help with anything?” I asked as I stepped into the kitchen.

“Do you want to set the table?” Annie said. “Gracie should be home any minute.”

As if she'd been waiting to be announced, Gracie stepped in the back door, shaking a few snow flurries from her hair. The phone began to ring and Gracie pounced on it. She didn't say much on her end besides “Hello,” and a few “yeahs” and “I knows” and such. I assumed she was talking to one of her friends until about five minutes later, when she held the phone out to me and said, “Babie, it's for you.”

I sighed loudly through my teeth and snatched the phone from her hands. We'd talked about this before. Gracie had been expressly forbidden from pretending to be me on the phone.

“What?” Gracie said. “She didn't even give me a chance to say who it was—she just started talking.”

“Sorry about that,” Jenelle said. “I thought it was you. Hey, what's wrong with your phone? I tried calling you.”

“I turned it off. What did you tell her?”

“Nothing, really, only that Dave talked to Zach about you and the carnival and Zach thinks you are like totally cute, but he thinks maybe you don't really like him or something. What's that about? What did you say to him?”

“Nothing really, but I already told you I don't want to go to the carnival with him.”

“Why not? It would be so much fun! Dave says Zach really wants to go with you.”

I could feel both of my sisters watching me. It probably would have been more convenient to just have left my phone on and talked to Jenelle privately, not in the middle of our kitchen.

“I've got to go. We're about to eat dinner,” I said, and hung up.

“So, who's this new guy?” Gracie asked. “Jenelle says he's got the hots for you.”

“Jenelle is prone to exaggeration,” I said. “He's just some guy.”

“An orphan,” Annie added, not especially helpfully. “Sit down, let's start with some salad.”

I thought maybe the spotlight would be off me once Gracie's mouth was full of salad, but I'd underestimated my sister.

“Is he cute?” she asked around a mouthful of lettuce.

“He's all right,” I said.

“
Let me explain something about the opposite sex,” Gracie said. “You have to practically beat them over the head to get them to notice you. So, it wouldn't hurt to show a little interest.”

“Let her be,” Annie said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I'm just saying,” Gracie said, “it's about time this one got herself a boyfriend.”

“Enough,” Annie said, and amazingly Gracie actually listened. We got through the rest of our salad in silence. As it turned out, she was just biding her time before dropping her bomb.

I had only stuck the first forkful of pot roast into my mouth when Gracie said, “Guess who I ran into today at Mr. K's?” Mr. K's was Shallow Pond's one and only grocery store. Like the town itself, it was small and pathetic. It was also where Gracie worked as one of the cashiers.

She had an eager look on her face, like she actually ex-pected Annie and me to make guesses. We didn't. Then she couldn't hold it in any longer: “Cameron Schaeffer!”

I looked over at Annie. I thought she was going to choke on her food, but she swallowed it down and chased it with half a glass of water. It had been seven years since Cameron Schaeffer was a subject of conversation in our house. After he dumped Annie, we'd pretty much stopped speaking about him, as if he'd ceased to exist.

“How's he doing?” Annie said. I could tell she was trying very hard to make her voice sound light and casual.

“Oh, all right, I suppose,” Gracie said.

“Home visiting his mother for a bit, I guess,” Annie said.

“Actually, he's moved back in with her,” Gracie said.

“What?” Annie and I asked the question in unison. It seem-
ed unthinkable to me that anyone who had successfully moved out of Shallow Pond would move back.

“Is his mother sick or something?” I asked, thinking that maybe Cameron had come back to take care of her.

“I don't think so,” Gracie said. “Yeah, it was so funny. I was out on the floor, helping Wanda with a bakery display, and this guy who I didn't even recognize came over to me and goes ‘Annie?' and I go, ‘No, I'm Gracie.' And then I realized it was Cameron Schaeffer. I mean it's been so long since I've seen him, and he looked a little different and everything.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Annie had gone quiet. She was still eating, but she was chewing as if she couldn't taste the food, staring off at something in the distance. I tried to get Gracie's attention, to indicate that she should shut the hell up, but she was worse than Jenelle sometimes.

“Yeah, so he and I started talking about things and stuff, and of course he was asking how you were doing, Annie, and you too, Babie, and I told him Dad had died. He said he'd heard something about that, and that he was sorry, but I don't think he really was sorry, you know, because of how Dad was to him and all, and, well, I said since he was back living here, he really should come over and visit with us one day.”

Annie reached for her glass of water but managed to knock it over instead. As she scrambled to grab it up, it slipped off the table and shattered into a thousand pieces on the floor.

“Oh,” she said.

“I'll get it,” I said, jumping up from the table to grab the broom and dustpan. I began sweeping up the broken glass before Annie could protest. I tried making eye contact with Gracie while I did so, but she was oblivious.

“Anyway, he said he would love to come by,” Gracie said. “He's going to stop by this week some time.”

“I'll be right back,” Annie said. She nearly ran out of the room, and I heard her feet pounding up the stairs. The bathroom was directly above the kitchen, and the sounds of Annie throwing up in the toilet were unmistakable.

“Well, that's completely unappetizing,” Gracie said as she put her fork down.

“What's wrong with you?” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Gracie asked.

“This guy completely broke her heart seven years ago, and now you're talking about him la-la-la and inviting him over to our house like nothing ever happened. Did it ever occur to you that she may not want to see him?”

“Don't you see, this is the perfect opportunity for a second chance. We throw them together and it'll be like nothing ever happened. They can start all over again.”