Even though I hadn’t been back in five years, I had still been able to anticipate every turn on the drive up. My parents had bought the house before I was born, and for years, we spent every summer there, leaving in early June and coming back in late August, my father staying in Connecticut alone during the workweek and coming up on the weekends. Summers used to be the highlight of my year, and all throughout school I would count down until June and everything that a Lake Phoenix summer promised. But the summer I was twelve had ended so disastrously that I had been incredibly relieved that we hadn’t gone back the next year. That was the summer Warren decided that he needed to really start focusing on his transcript and did a pre-college intensive program at Yale. Gelsey had just switched ballet teachers and didn’t want to stop classes for the summer. And I, not wanting to go back to Lake Phoenix and face the mess I’d made up there, had found a summer oceanography camp (there had been a brief period when I’d wanted to be a marine biologist; this had since passed) and begged my parents to let me go. And every year since then, it seemed like there was always something happening to prevent us from spending the summer there. Gelsey started going to sleepaway ballet camps, and Warren and I both started doing the academic-service-summer-program thing (he built a playground in Greece, I spent a summer trying—and failing—to learn Mandarin at a language immersion in Vermont). My mother started renting our house out when it became clear that we were all getting too busy to take the whole summer off and spend it together in Pennsylvania.
And this year was supposed to be no exception—Gelsey was planning on going back to the ballet camp where she was the rising star, Warren had an internship lined up at my father’s law firm, and I had intended to spend a lot of time sunbathing. I was really, really looking forward to the school year ending. My ex-boyfriend, Evan, had broken up with me a month before school ended, and my friends, not wanting to split up the group, had all taken his side. My sudden lack of friends and any semblance of a social life would have made the prospect of heading out of town for the summer really appealing under normal circumstances. But I did not want to go back to Lake Phoenix. I hadn’t even set foot in the state of Pennsylvania in five years. The five of us spending the summer together was something nobody would have even considered until three weeks ago. And yet, that was exactly what was happening.
“We’re here!” Warren announced cheerfully as I felt the car slow down.
I opened my eyes, sat up, and looked around. The first thing I saw was green. The trees on both sides of the road were bright green, along with the grass beneath them. And they were densely packed, giving only glimpses of the driveways and houses that lay behind them. I glanced up at the temperature display, and saw it was ten degrees cooler here than it had been in Connecticut. Like it or not, I was back in the mountains.
“Finally,” Gelsey muttered from the front seat.
I stretched out my neck from the awkward position I’d been sleeping in, for once in full agreement with my sister. Warren slowed even more, signaled, and then turned down our gravel driveway. All the driveways in Lake Phoenix were gravel, and ours had always been the way I’d measured the summer. In June, I could barely make it barefoot from the car to the porch, wincing every step as the rocks dug into my tender, pale feet, sheltered by a year of shoe-wearing. But by August, my feet would be toughened and a deep brown, the white of my flip-flop tan lines standing out in sharp relief, and I would be able to run across the driveway barefoot without a second thought.
I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned forward between the front seats to get a better look. And there, right in front of me, was our summer house. The first thing I noticed was that it looked exactly the same—same dark wood, peaked roof, floor-to-ceiling windows, wraparound porch.
The second thing I noticed was the dog.
It was sitting on the porch, right by the door. As the car drew closer, it didn’t get up or run away, but instead starting wagging its tail, as though it had been waiting for us all along.
“What is that?” Gelsey asked as Warren shut off the engine.
“What’s what?” Warren asked. Gelsey pointed, and he squinted through the windshield. “Oh,” he said a moment later, and I noticed that he was making no move to get out of the car. My brother denied it, but he was afraid of dogs, and had been ever since an idiotic babysitter let him watch Cujo when he was seven.
I opened my door and stepped out onto the gravel driveway to get a closer look. This was not the world’s most attractive dog. It was smallish, but not the tiny kind that you could put in your purse or might accidentally step on. It was golden brown with hair that seemed to be standing out from its body, giving it an air of surprise. It looked like a mutt, with biggish, stand-up German Shepherd-y ears, a short nose, and a longish, collie-like tail. I could see it had a collar on with a tag dangling from it, so clearly it wasn’t a stray.
Gelsey got out of the car as well, but Warren stayed put in the front seat and cracked the window as I approached him. “I’ll just, um, stay behind and handle the bags,” he muttered as he passed over the keys.
“Seriously?” I asked, raising my eyebrows at him. Warren flushed red before quickly rolling up his window, as though this small dog was somehow going to launch itself into the front seat of the Land Cruiser.
I crossed the driveway and walked up the three porch steps to the house. I expected the dog to move as soon as I got close, but instead it just wagged its tail harder, making a whapping sound on the wooden deck. “Go on,” I said as I crossed to the door. “Shoo.” But instead of leaving, it trotted over to join me, as though it had every intention of following us inside. “No,” I said firmly, trying to imitate Randolph George, the bespectacled British host of Top Dog. “Go.” I took a step toward it, and the dog finally seemed to get the message, skittering away and then walking down the porch steps and across the driveway with what seemed like, for a dog, a great deal of reluctance.