The Story of Us (26 page)

But as Amy stood there with her perfect teeth and her hair as glossy as cat fur, I could feel it inside, something bad building and spilling over. I felt some inner hand pulling me back, urging me to stop and think. Aunt Bailey was one of my own, though. Her good parts and her irritations too, they were all mine, and they deserved my protection.

“Jeez, Amy,” I said.

“What?”

“Honestly? You don’t know?” I demonstrated. I sighed and rolled my eyes the way she sighed and rolled her eyes. I crossed my arms and turned my back. Oh, it felt good too.

Ben appeared at my side. “Crick? Just, come on.” He held my elbow. We’d done this before. You learned how to get away from something like that together.

“What?” Amy said again.

“You,” I said. I felt furious. Maybe I was feeling everyone’s anger, channeling it like some psychic channels the voices of dead spirits. My face was red, I could feel it. I started to sweat. “Your
attitude
.” I dripped venom into the word, and then I sunk the word into her, same as she’d been doing with every fake smile and huff through those semi-closed lips. It felt so, so good, which I suppose is the problem with anger. Everything comes falling deliciously down, every wall so carefully constructed, every bit of polite back-and-forth, brick and mortar, destroyed. You reach a certain point, and then … No more.

Amy’s frosty, perfect exterior crumpled, and her eyes filled. “I can’t believe this,” she said. Amy stared at me. Her eyes burned with injustice and devastation. She flung down her golf club, and it clattered to the ground. She spun, took off running.

“Oh no,” I said.

The glorious kick of anger started to slink off, looking for some rock of regret to hide under. I should have known it. I should have known that Amy would crumple like that. There were two kinds of bullies. The kind like my father, who would come back swinging if you crossed him. And the other kind. The ones who went weak after their own veiled antagonism was called out. The ones who could dish it out but couldn’t take it. They got the best of both situations—they got to be strong and nasty, and then fragile enough so that whoever crossed them ended up the bad guy. Their tears always made it your fault, no matter who started what.

Dan ran up. “What happened?”

“She was being such a—” I said. He took off jogging after her. I saw his back pass the big whale and then the waterfall and the elephant at the entrance.

“God, just let her go,” Ben said to Dan, who was long gone.

“Cricket,” Mom said.

“She was making fun of Aunt Bailey,” I said. We both looked over at Aunt Bailey, who was now attempting to roll the ball through the spinning windmill. Gram was urging her on. Aunt Bailey was chuckling happily, unharmed. Grandpa and George were teeing off at the clown mouth.

“
We
were making fun of Aunt Bailey,” Mom said.

“Different,” I said.

“Whoo hee!” Hailey said.

“Oh, my God,” Mom said. She put her face into her hands. “Look.”

We did. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be up there!” Ben called.

Hailey sat on top of the paddleboat, swinging her legs. “Look what I found!” she said. She held up one of her pink balls.

“I know Oscar and Gavin are good kids. They’ve always been good kids,” Mom said. “But … is there any chance they were doing stuff out in that tent?”

I didn’t catch her meaning at first. Stuff, yeah, they were doing
stuff
. But then I got it. “Drugs? Oh, come on. No way. You know them!”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. Just … look at her!”

“They gave her their box of Snickers,” Ben said.

“Chocolate?” Mom said.

“It was
a lot
of chocolate,” Ben said. “She has no experience with the stuff.”

“Okay.” Mom breathed through her mouth like women are supposed to in childbirth. “Ben, can you get her?” she pleaded.

“Me?”

“Please.”

“Can’t you ask …” He looked around at her other options. “Fine.” Ben strode to the paddleboat. “Hailey, you gotta come down.”

“Too high,” she said. Yeah, that was an understatement. She kicked her hanging feet back and forth, same as a toddler enjoying the swingy feel of legs.

“How’d you get up there in the first place?” he called.

“I put my foot in that porthole,” she said.

“Jesus, then put your foot in the porthole to come down!”

She peered over the side. “Can’t.” Her phone rang in her pocket, some hip-hop song done in electronic jingles. “Wait a sec,” she said. “Gotta get this.” Ben looked around nervously for some sort of miniature golf police. Ben was a good guy, and good guys followed the rules for the most part. Okay, there was that time when he and Janssen made that rocket …

Hailey answered the phone. “’Lo?” she said. “Fine, Ma. Great. Having a wonderful time.” She pointed at the phone, mouthed
My mother
to Ben. “I’m sitting on top of a boat. Uhhuh…. No, I haven’t taken
drugs
. You know, Mother, you
don’t even let me breathe. And I’m sick of it. Finished.
Fini
,” she said. She snapped her phone closed. “There. She is going to freak out. And I mean
freak.
”

Ben was up the side of that paddleboat in some Spider-Man move. He grabbed Hailey, flung her over his shoulder. “I love fireman’s carry!” she squealed.

Ben stepped over the walls of the paddleboat green. The people with the stroller were staring. Hailey’s butt was pointed at us, the skin of her back showing from where her shirt was scrunched up. “Where do you want her?” Ben asked.

“I can see the ground from here!” she said.

“Just …” Mom shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Here, I guess.”

Ben set Hailey down on her feet. “Dizzy,” she said. She wobbled.

“That woman is going to go nuts,” Mom said. “Dan’s phone is ringing this second, I’m sure of it.”

“Stay put,” Ben told Hailey.

“Guys!” Mom called to the rest of our group. “Everyone! How about some lunch!”

Gram and Aunt Bailey looked up. I could hear Aunt Bailey, even from there. “Damn. I was just getting the hang of this.”

Hailey’s golf ball missile had landed on Dan’s windshield. It now sat cradled on the wiper, but the glass had shattered in a complicated web, still together but obviously ruined. He was
standing with Amy, and she was wiping her eyes as he spoke intently to her, his arms folded. I felt embarrassed standing there, embarrassed for my own self and for the rest of our group, which hung back like the losers in high school, not knowing whether they should stick around or leave.

We group-walked over to the food stand in front of the building, and Mom took orders, and we all sat at the picnic tables on the grass. Everyone took out their wallets again, and then we unfolded our foil wrappers. Aunt Bailey and Gram chatted cheerily to George and Grandpa, but Mom was quiet. I felt shriveled with regret, like I had shattered that windshield myself. Ever since the spring of my senior year, I’d felt the gnawing, painful promise of endings. The thought of actually leaving—it held me in one place. But right then I would have been happy if some plane swooped down to scoop me up and take me away to a leafy campus where I knew no one. Not my family, not Janssen, not Ash, not anyone. Something had been whole—an idea, this idea that Dan and my mother had gotten something right this time, completely and wholly right, and what I had done was to speak and break the spell. It was a translucent bubble—beautiful, but it required care, cautious steps and gentle words, and now I’d been loud and harsh and it had popped.

“Crick, Jesus, don’t feel so bad,” Ben said. He had gone to squirt more ketchup on his hot dog. It had that pickle relish that you pump on too, which is just wrong, in my opinion. “What’d you even
say
?”

“Her attitude.” I huffed and rolled my eyes so he could judge the replay.

“You nipped her in the butt,” he said, and snickered. “Don’t try sleeping on her bed, though.”

“Oh, you’re hilarious.”

“Come on, big deal. You could have said a lot worse. Who didn’t want to? You barely said anything. People can say something and it’s not
huge
.”

“Remember when we used to do something bad? Mom would say, ‘Go to your room and think about it.’”

“Yeah, and then we’d come out two seconds later and say, ‘I thought about it.’ We’d see Mom trying not to smile, and then it was over. You don’t need to be punished for this, Cricket.”

I hated doing the wrong thing. My words had felt like roaring lions and raging forest fires and toppling buildings. But maybe he was right. Was it possible my words had just been words, not capable of permanent destruction? Mom threw her foil ball and empty cup into the metal trash can, which was set politely away from the tables. She came behind me, set her hands on my shoulders, and kissed the top of my head.

“I’m sorry,” I said. But what I wanted to say, what felt urgent, was what I didn’t say.
Please marry Dan anyway, even if the windshield is cracked.

Dan’s windshield held together in spite of those spindly lines in the glass. We drove back to Bluff House. In Grandpa’s car the drive was quiet, except for the soft radio and the occasional snap-pop of Gram’s gum.

It was quiet inside the house too. I didn’t know where everyone had gone, but John and Jane and Baby Boo had taken off somewhere, and the old people weren’t around, and even Ted’s truck was absent from the driveway. I found Jupiter lying on Cruiser’s pillow downstairs in the living room. I didn’t know where Cruiser was either, but Jupiter trotted over when she saw me, wagging. I clipped on her leash and took her out for a pee and then carried her up the stairs to my room. I closed the door behind us. I lay on my bed. Jupiter stretched her paws out in front of her, butt up, then butt down. She stared at me.

“Want up?” I said. That always felt like a treat for both of us.

I patted the bed, and she hopped up.

“I don’t know,” I said to her. I held her in my lap. I could only see the back of her, her silky head and her ears and her long back with the white spot. I took off her collar for a minute. I would have liked to have had that thing off, if it were me. I scratched her neck. I kissed her head.

She shifted around. She got into a nice ball beside me, and set her chin on my leg. “I don’t even want to open that fucking computer,” I told her. “He’s probably run off with Alyssa because I’m too stupid to make up my mind.”

She kept her opinions to herself, which was especially smart under the circumstances. It was good to be by myself but not alone. She was good and respectful company. We stayed that way until my foot started to fall asleep. I shifted her, and she leaped off the bed, sniffed the clothes spilling from my bag. “Where’s your jingle, huh?” I asked. It was funny when she walked around without her collar and her tags, her very own sound. She looked out the window for a while, which she loved to do. I stretched out on my bed, and then she came over, and I patted the spot beside me, and she jumped up again. I put her collar back on so she could go back to being herself. She sniffed around the pillows and licked some spot on my bedspread where I’d spilled some Diet Coke, and then she finally got settled. It took some doing, but she stretched out too, her chin on her paws, her deep brown eyes watching me.

“I wish you could talk,” I said. I waited. Sometimes I forgot
that I wouldn’t get a response from her. She held my eyes. “Do you think I’m with Janssen for the wrong reasons? Or the right ones?” I asked. “I hate to even say that. Because I do love him.” We kept on looking at each other. Maybe it was stupid, but I felt she heard me and understood me and was responding in the way she could.

“What do you think, huh, Woof?”

Of course she couldn’t answer me. But her eyes said,
Everything is all right
. Her eyes kept on saying,
I am here for you.

“Cricket!” Mom pounded on my door.

“What? God, what’s the matter?”

I opened the door. My mother’s eyes were frantic, and her purse was over one shoulder as if she was heading out, wearing only socks. “We’ve gotta … Cruiser knocked over Mr. Jax while we were gone. He’s been lying out in the garden for who knows how long. We just found him! He’s crying in pain. God. Do you know where Ben is? Dan doesn’t want to drive his car around with that windshield. We need Ben’s car to take him to the emergency room.”

“He’s probably out with the guys in the tent,” I said. “I can run and get him.”

“That’s okay.” Mom raced to the top of the stairs, yelled, “Dan? He’s at the beach. In the tent!” I saw it all, as if it had already happened. Ben, not in the tent after all. Dan, pulling back the tent flap. Hailey with her blouse unbuttoned, sitting in Gavin’s lap. “No wait!” I said. “No, no—”

I shoved past Mom. “Cricket?” she said.

I heard the back door close, and I knew Dan was already on the way down the boardwalk. By the time I got down the stairs, Ted was walking in the front door with another bag of groceries. It seemed like all he ever did was go to the grocery store, but there was no time to wonder about that. Ted. Car. “They need you,” I said to him. “They need you to drive. Just a sec,” I said.