Stalker Girl (10 page)

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s cool. It’s cool.” The look of disgust on his face and the way he practically shoved her onto her bed said it wasn’t.

SHE WOKE
up dizzy and nauseous and humiliated, wishing she’d chosen to spend her summer among the juvenile delinquents and Amish of Ohio. She dragged herself to the kitchen and tried not to gag when she walked into a cloud of sausage-flavored steam.

The hair-netted ladies were chirping away over their bubbling vats; the dishwasher guys were quiet, each plugged into his own iPod.

Kevin gave her a list of stomach-turning tasks she needed to finish by the midafternoon break. It started with scrambling the liquid-egg equivalent of two hundred eggs and ended with dishing out that night’s dessert of artificially flavored banana pudding. In between, she was supposed to spread two hundred previously frozen chicken legs out on four giant baking dishes.

The chicken legs brought her seriously close to vomiting for the second time in less than twelve hours. She hadn’t so much as touched a cooked chicken leg in a couple of years. The raw ones, with their pink-gray flesh under all that saggy, yellow skin, were just too much. After laying the first fifty out in five rows of ten, she had to go outside for air.

When she came back in, all four baking dishes were lined with legs. The bags they’d been in were nowhere to be seen, and the stainless-steel counter had been cleaned to Kevin’s exacting standards.

Carly looked around the kitchen, trying to figure out who had come to her rescue. The dishwasher guys were busy with the pots and pans the hairnetted cooks kept delivering to them. The hairnetted cooks were way too busy trying to keep up with the lunch line. Kevin was nowhere to be seen.

She moved on to the pudding. That was a lot easier because she didn’t have to have any actual contact with the stuff. As long as she could avoid breathing in through her nose and thereby avoid the too-sweet smell of artificial banana flavoring, she’d be okay.

While she was scooping the pudding, she caught sight of Cameron in the dining room through the conveyor-belt window. He was laughing it up with the beautiful Julia McMillan, head girls’ counselor.

“Ah, the other half.” She hadn’t heard him come up behind her. But there was Brian, standing to her left, looking out at Cameron and Julia.

“See how they live,” said Avery, standing on Carly’s other side.

“What?” she scooped faster and tried to act like she didn’t know what they were talking about.

“The beautiful people. They’re so . . .”

“Bee-oo-ti-ful,” said Avery, in falsetto, holding his arms out to the side like some maniacal ballerina. He clasped his hands together, pressed them to his cheek, and batted his eyelashes at Brian. “Oh, Sailor Boy, what
strong tanned arms
you have.”

Brian stuck his chest out and held his arms stiffly at his sides. His rendition of Cameron’s smirk was dead-on. He deepened his voice to a mock manly man’s. “Yeah, well. Comes with the territory, honey. Did you know I’ve won several national sailing competitions, including the Single-Handed Championship? And, by the way, there’s no ‘team’ in ‘Single-Handed.’”

Carly laughed. This tidbit of Cameron Foster’s biography—along with the news that he’d be entering Columbia in the fall—was prominently featured on the Stony Hollow Web site below a picture of him turning about or lowering the boom or whatever it is that Single-Handed Sailing Champions single-handedly do.

Twenty-four hours before, she’d been swooning over the details of his résumé while using the wireless connection in her mother’s office. Now, with Brian reciting it, it all sounded silly.

“Really?” Avery widened his eyes and put a hand on each cheek. “That’s such a coincidence! Did you know that I hold the scoring record in field hockey for the National Independent Schools Athletic Association and will be attending a prestigious liberal arts college in New England in the fall?”

These facts could also be found on the camp Web site, under a close-up of Julia’s beautiful, lightly freckled face.

Maybe these townie guys weren’t so bad. Maybe working in the kitchen would turn out to be fun.

Avery disappeared, and Brian asked how she was feeling.

“Fine,” she said, as the blood rose to her cheeks.

“Really? Working with food isn’t exactly the best cure for a hangover.”

“Tell me about it.” Wait. How did he—? “How did you know?”

“Saw you.”

“You saw me?”

“Actually heard you first. Me and my brother were on our way home, and we heard this girl kind of yelling, and we were worried. So we followed the sound, and then we saw you and Sailor Boy and Tennis Guy. Man, you’re a loud drunk.”

Usually when Carly was about to cry, her body gave her enough advance notice to prepare. Her nose tingled and the back of her throat tightened and her ears would get really, really hot. But this time, there was no warning.

“Hey,” Brian said, but she ignored him. “Hey.” He put a hand on her shoulder. She tried to pull away, but he held firm. “Hey.”

She turned around, steeling herself for a knowing look, a snarky smirk. But what she saw was a smile, and those eyes, looking right into hers, not mocking but concerned.

“I didn’t mean to—”

The tears were way out of proportion to anything that had just happened. It was like she’d been saving everything up—her disappointment about Turkey, the shock of having to move out of her home of twelve years, of getting way too much information about her mother and Nick’s now-dead relationship, the humiliation of the Pink Vomit Incident.

Carly was a sniveling mess, and she should have been embarrassed, but for some reason she wasn’t. And Brian, who should have been disgusted by the effluvia flowing from her orifices, didn’t seem to be, judging by what he did next.

He said, “I know a really good hangover cure.” Then he took the serving spoon out of her hand and put it in Avery’s. “Finish this up, okay? This girl needs a trip to the Rock. Meet us there.”

He took Carly by her hand and gently but firmly pulled her through the kitchen. As they passed through the back door, he shouted one more order over his shoulder. “Someone grab my board shorts.” He pulled her past the Dumpsters, past the old broken-down tables and obsolete kitchen equipment rusting under the brown tarp, onto a path through the woods.

She followed him into the woods even though there was nothing to keep her from leaving. She never, for one second, felt like she was in danger.

Except maybe of losing her job, which just moments before she’d been thinking of quitting, but suddenly wanted desperately to keep.

“What about Kevin?”

“What about him?”

“Isn’t he going to be pissed that we left early?”

“Kevin? Nah. He doesn’t care who gets what done, as long as it gets done. Those guys’ll make sure everything’s cool before they leave.”

“Where are we were going?”

“You’ll see.”

They followed a complicated route along intersecting paths until they hit a set of old train tracks, which they followed to a dirt road, which they followed to another path.

After a while the path disappeared, and they were walking on a bed of fallen pine needles so thick that it absorbed the sound of their footsteps. Soon the dark green of the pines opened up onto a thin strip of beach.

Two huge rocks rose out of the ground and extended far into the lake. On one of the rocks, three or four teenage girls in neon bikinis lay out on beach towels. Five or six guys in trunks stood at the outermost edge of the other rock, taking turns jumping and diving.

A little while after she and Brian stepped into the sunlight, Liam and Avery appeared, as if out of thin air. The pine needles must have absorbed the sounds of their footsteps, too. They’d both changed into board shorts; Avery tossed Brian his.

Together the three of them told Carly all about Baldwin Rock. Unofficial Townie Beach, accessible only through that complicated route of semisecret paths handed down through generations of locals.

“Once in a while,” Avery said, “the Citiots hear about it and try to blend in with the locals.”

“Citiots?”

Citiots, they explained, were a particular breed of rich city people.

“The ones who think that just because they spend a half a mill on an old termite-infested farmhouse . . .” Avery offered.

“Strip it down to the studs and then spend
another
million,” Liam added.

“Or two or three,” said Brian. “I heard those people who bought the old Flynn place spent
three
.”

Avery shook his head. “No way. Three? On what?”

“For starters, they went and bought
two
more houses up in Maine or New Hampshire or someplace like that, then wrecked ’em, just for the wood, and the sinks and light fixtures.”

“Oh, man,” Avery shook his head. “That’s just wrong.”

Brian nodded.

Carly knew those people. Not those exact people, but people like them. They lived in her building. What used to be her building. Went to Bellwin. One girl in the middle school had her bathroom featured in the
New York Times
the year before. Her parents spent a hundred thousand dollars to make it look like a tropical paradise, complete with a fake waterfall shower, steam room, and sauna.

 

“Okay, now,” Brian said, pointing to the water as he started back into the woods. “That there is the world’s best hangover cure. I recommend no further delay. I’ll be right back.”

“But I don’t have my suit.” It was a lame thing to say. Her cutoffs and tank top would do just fine. But no one heard her say it. Brian had disappeared, and Liam and Avery sprinted into the water.

She’d gone swimming at the camp beach with Jess a couple times during orientation week and found the water frigid and silty. But from here the lake looked clear. It smelled sweet, too. There was no trace of the dank fishiness that hung in the air on the other side. If she couldn’t see the Stony Hollow dock with the line of kids waiting their turn on the slide directly across, she would have thought it was a different body of water.

She took a running start and dove in.

Floating on her back in the cool water, face to the sun, she felt the hangover drain away. She felt like she’d entered a new world. A right-side-up world where buying two extra houses so you could renovate a third with the right wood and the right sinks was seen for the crazy excess that it was; a world where people like Cameron Foster and Julia McMillan weren’t looked up to or envied or longed for but laughed at.

A world that contained a certain blue-eyed boy. A boy who knew about the Pink Vomit Incident and had already seen her cry but seemed to like her anyway.

This was the world she belonged in.

FOR THE
next three days, Carly went to Baldwin Rock with the boys every afternoon. There was no invitation. No one said,
Carly, would you care to join us?
It was just somehow understood when Kevin dismissed them for the afternoon break that they were all going.

Brian didn’t take Carly’s hand on those afternoon trips to the lake, but he did walk by her side. And on those walks they had conversations. Not superficial small talk, but real back-and-forth asking and listening about each other’s lives. By the end of those three days, Brian knew about Carly’s love of archaeology and the canceled trip to Aphrodisias and having to move out of the loft. And Carly knew the broad outlines of Brian’s life: that he’d lived in Brooklyn until his father died, then he and Avery and their mother had moved upstate to “Ernestine’s,” which is what everybody called their grandmother’s house, even now that she’d been dead for a year. Ernestine’s property bordered Stony Hollow, and her kids had worked there when they were growing up. Liam, their cousin, lived down the road, and the three of them had been playing music together in the shed behind Ernestine’s on instruments that had belonged to their fathers since before they could remember. Now they were a band called Quinn.

“That’s it, Quinn? Just Quinn?” she asked.

“Yup. Quinn. No
s
, no
The
, no
Boys
. Just Quinn.”

The band name was Ernestine’s idea. She’d been their biggest fan. She loved that her grandsons spent hours in that shed working on their music, especially after losing Brian’s father, her first-born son. She paid for a new roof, heat, and insulation, and had it wired for electricity so they could use their amps and run their recording equipment out there. She was the only adult in the family who encouraged them to aim high, the only one who didn’t freak out about their wanting to put college off to concentrate on music.

Before she died, Ernestine helped them negotiate The Plan: they could take one year after Liam and Avery graduated from high school to “make something happen” with the band. (Brian was a year older and had graduated the year before.) During that year, they would only have to work part-time day jobs to pay for band expenses like gas and upkeep for the van, recording equipment, and instrument care. They could live at Ernestine’s for as long as they wanted to save money. Food would be paid for out of a small fund she was leaving them in her will. If there weren’t “clear signs of progress”—in the form of regular paying gigs or movement toward a recording contract—after the year was up, they would go to college or get serious, career-type jobs.

According to Brian, they were ahead of schedule. Liam and Avery had just graduated in June, and they already had a small local following from playing frat parties around SUNY New Paltz. They had gigs that summer at the all-ages club in town and the one frat house that stayed open for summer school, but mostly they were working on their demo. In the fall they were moving back to Brooklyn to try to break into the New York scene. A booking agent had promised to get them gigs in the city if the demo came out well. Brian’s mother had rented their Brooklyn house out but kept the basement apartment open for her and the boys to use for visits to the city.