I glanced down at my watch. Back home, I almost never wore one, because I always had my phone with me. But aside from a few awkward text exchanges with acquaintances that I’d resorted to in extreme loneliness, my cell had been quiet. And since I hadn’t felt I needed constant proof that nobody was calling me, I’d taken to leaving it in my room, which meant that I needed some other way to tell the time. “Thirty,” I echoed. “Sure.” My dad gave me a nod before walking up the street to Henson’s Produce, no doubt on a mission to get my mother her corn.
I turned and headed toward the Clubhouse building, wishing that I’d straightened myself up a little more that morning. I was wearing what had, after only a few days, become my de facto summer uniform—cutoff jean shorts and a tank top. I was worried that this outfit, coupled with the fact that I had never held a job before, might seriously impair my chances of getting hired. But as I stood in front of the wood-paneled building, with the painted Lake Phoenix design (a phoenix rising from the lake, water dripping from its wings while the sun rose—or set—behind it) on the window, I realized that there was nothing to do but to give it a try. So I straightened my shoulders and pulled open the door.
Fifteen minutes later, I had a job. I stepped back out into the sunlight, blinking at it before I slipped my sunglasses back on, feeling a little bit dazed. I now had three white Lake Phoenix employee T-shirts (the cost of which would come out of my first paycheck), an employee handbook, and instructions to show up for work at the beach in three days. Jillian, the woman who was in charge of the hiring, had told me repeatedly, even as she looked over my application and scrolled through the options on her computer, that I was much too late in the application process to expect anything great—or, for that matter, anything at all.
The Lake Phoenix administrative offices were bigger than I’d expected—I’d never spent much time in the Clubhouse, except for when we’d occasionally gone for brunch on Sundays, Warren and I staying put for what felt like hours before getting permission to leave and running for the beach. I finally located the employment office, which placed the teenagers of the summer community in jobs around Lake Phoenix—lifeguarding, working at the beach or pool snack bar, teaching seniors yoga. Most of the kids I had known had gotten their first job—usually doing something low on the seniority ladder, which always seemed to mean cleaning bathrooms—at fourteen, and the jobs got better the older you got. If I’d continued to come to Lake Phoenix in the summers, I probably would have had my first job years ago. Instead, the “work experience” section of my application had been embarrassingly empty.
But Jillian had finally come up with a job—there was an opening at the beach. The job description had been very general, which was slightly worrying to me, but Jillian said that since I didn’t have lifeguard training or much sailing experience, it would most likely be at the snack bar. And since she hadn’t mentioned that cleaning bathrooms was in any way a job requirement, I’d accepted. I’d filled out my payroll and tax forms, and had gone from having no plans for the summer to discovering that employment comes with T-shirts.
Now, standing out in the early afternoon heat of Main Street, I realized I had some time to kill before I had to meet my father. I stopped into the tiny Lake Phoenix library, renewed my card, and checked out three paperback mysteries. I was tempted just to hang out there for a bit, soaking up the air conditioning, but also wanted a chance to wander up Main Street.
Lake Phoenix’s commercial district was pretty small, just the length of one street. There wasn’t even a movie theater. To see movies, you had to drive twenty minutes to the next town, Mountain-view, and the Outpost, a combination movie theater/miniature golf course/arcade that we’d gone to whenever it had rained. But Lake Phoenix only had a single stoplight, a gas station, and handful of stores. There was The Humble Pie, and next to it, Henson’s Produce. There was Sweet Baby Jane’s, the ice cream parlor where Gelsey had never ordered anything except a strawberry shake, and a hardware store. There was the Pocono Coffee Shop, which everyone always just called “the diner,” and a store, Give Me A Sign, that specialized in personalized signs for houses.
As I continued up the street, I found myself automatically noticing the new stores, every time one didn’t fit with what I expected to be there—but then I would also find that I couldn’t remember what had been there before. A pet store/dog grooming parlor, Doggone It!, was definitely new, but looked pretty empty, except for a redhaired girl behind the counter, turning the pages of a magazine. I had made it almost to the end of Main Street when I found myself in front of another new store, Borrowed Thyme. It looked like it was a bakery—there were loaves of bread stacked in a display in one of the plate-glass windows, and a beautiful layer cake in the other. My stomach rumbled just looking at them, and I was peering past the cake to see farther into the shop when I became aware of someone clearing their throat behind me. I turned and saw a peeved-looking older man, wearing an overlarge Phillies baseball cap and a scowl.