—
THE EARLY MORNING boat excursion ends up being just me, Pfeff, Major—and Penny, who turns up on the dock at the last minute, holding a warm strawberry sheet cake with a tea towel and wearing a bikini and an old plaid flannel shirt that belongs to Harris.
“Erin wouldn’t get up,” she says. “Lazy wench.”
“Is that cake?” asks Major.
“It’s just out of the oven,” says Penny. “I might have stolen it.”
“Doesn’t Tipper want that for after supper?” I ask.
“I dunno,” says Penny, shrugging. “She wasn’t in the kitchen.”
We motor out, Pfeff driving. The boys have towels and thermoses. Penny and I share my thermos of coffee. Or rather, she takes it from me without asking, drinks half of it, and sets it down between her feet.
When we get out a ways, Pfeff cuts the motor. “This is it,” he says.
And we sit. Feeling the glow of the early sun. Watching some seagulls overhead. Beechwood seems far away.
“It’s kinda boring,” says Penny, after a few minutes.
“Well,” says Major. “It helps when you’re high.”
Penny slaps his leg. “Are you high?” she says. “Like right now, before breakfast?”
“Maybe,” says Major, laughing.
“Just a little,” says Pfeff. “To better appreciate nature.”
“So this is a wake-and-bake situation,” says Penny.
“It just—everything seems so much brighter.” Pfeff grins.
“God, they’re delinquents,” says Penny.
She stands and shrugs off her flannel, then jumps into the sea. Major pulls off his sweatshirt and does the same. “Oh hell,” he shouts when he surfaces. “So cold.”
“It always is,” says Penny. “It’s the stupid ocean, city boy.”
I watch them paddle around for a minute.
“You going in?” asks Pfeff.
“Too chilly this morning.”
He nods. We sit in silence. “Hey, Carrie,” says Pfeff, finally. “Can I tell you a story?”
“Yeah. All right.”
“Well. Once upon a time, Baby Lawrence Pfefferman, that’s me, was given his dad’s name, which was his grandfather’s name. So I’m Lawrence the third. And they called me Lor, ’cause my dad was Larry and my grandad was Lawrence. And that was the idea, you see? That I would be like them.”
“Okay.”
“So. Lawrence the first went to Amherst and became a lawyer. And Larry went to Amherst and became a lawyer. And when Baby Lor got big, they wanted him to go to Amherst.”
“And become a lawyer.”
“Well, they’re open to a few other professions. But that’s the general idea.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Well,” says Pfeff, “you’ve made it pretty clear that you think I’m a butthead.”
I shrug. I do think that. But I still find him magical, and funny. I still want to touch him any time he’s this close to me.
“There are extenuating circumstances,” he adds.
“Did Sybelle tie you up so you couldn’t get to the dock in Edgartown?” I ask. “Because ‘I decided to spend the afternoon fornicating in a historic landmark house’ is not really an extenuating circumstance.”
He laughs. “That’s not it. I just— Look. I’m a bogus student.”
“So?”
“I don’t like school. I want to—I don’t know, I want to travel. I’d like to go to Mexico or Italy, and learn the language, and just meet people. I would get off on eating some nice food, hanging out with friends. It’s not that I don’t want to work. I don’t mind work, actually. Last year I bussed tables at this burrito bar on weekends, and the days were long, and people yelled at me, but I was into it—the scene at the restaurant, the rush of customers.”
At this point, Penny climbs wetly up the ladder, followed by Major. “Oh my god,” she says. “You don’t need to be high for that to be an amazing start to your day.” She grabs a towel and turns to me. “I feel like Supergirl now. Or Wonder Woman or whatever. Can I have your sweater?” I take it off and give it to her. She puts it on, wraps her towel around her waist, and picks up my thermos of coffee. “Why are we not doing this early morning thing?” she asks me. “Why did we have to wait for these bozos to think of it?”
“I need breakfast, now,” says Major. “Can we go back?”
“Oh!” Penny is delighted with herself and grabs the strawberry sheet cake, covered in foil, from its resting spot.
“Penelope,” says Pfeff. “I think I love you. Quite a lot, actually.”
“Don’t call me Penelope,” says Penny.
And just like that, I hate him all the way again. I think I love you. Does he really have to make every single person adore him? Does he have to flirt with everyone, including my sister? Quite a lot, actually. Is he trying to make me jealous?
I ignore Pfeff for the rest of the boat ride. We unwrap the pan and cut slices of cake with a Swiss Army knife. Vanilla batter with swirls of strawberry jam and small chunks of hot strawberry. Sticky. Fragrant. We eat and then motor back, Pfeff driving.
I think about our half-finished conversation. Poor little rich boy, Lawrence the third, you think it makes you special that you don’t want to go to college and you liked your summer job? You think feeling that way makes you one of the people? You imagine you’re unique because you want to travel and bum around drinking beer? Everyone wants to travel. No one wants to go to college.
But then—people do want to go to college. At least, the people I know. My friends at school do. Major and Yardley and George do. And I am sure lots of people want to go who cannot.
But I don’t.
I want what Pfeff wants. To make things. To work. To see more of the world.
And unlike him, I’ve never done it. I haven’t had any job, ever. I haven’t left my family for the summer like he is doing now. I certainly haven’t worked long hours in a burrito bar or fallen off a cliff in the Canyonlands while in the middle of a torrid love affair.
We arrive at the family dock. Tie up. Penny and Major race each other up to Clairmont, where no doubt people are gathered now, eating breakfast on the front porch.
I am last to climb out of the boat, because I’m collecting the empty cake pan that no one thought to take. When I look up, Pfeff is waiting for me.
“Carrie.” The wind whips through his T-shirt. His hair is in his eyes.
“What?” I try to sound neutral, uninterested.
“You can tell I’m a fake, right? I feel like a fake all the time,” he says. “You can see through me.”
“Because I called you a dick?”
“Maybe.” He looks at his feet. “I just—I’d like someone else to know the truth. Besides my parents. And I feel like you kind of already know. You look at me like you can tell what a liar I am.”
I wait.
“I didn’t get into Amherst,” he says finally.
“But you’re going,” I say. “Right? With Major?”
“Yeah. But I didn’t get in, because it’s really hard to get in, and my grades suck, and mostly I partied my way through high school. Actually, I didn’t get in anywhere.”
He is looking down, kicking the old board with the nails sticking out of it that Harris still hasn’t replaced. He pokes his sneaker into the gap in the dock where the board used to be.
“So my dad made a phone call,” he goes on. “Or something. I don’t know. He made a couple calls and maybe made a big donation to the school, and suddenly, I had a letter saying I was in off the wait list.”
“Wow.”
“But I was never on the wait list,” says Pfeff. “And I was ashamed, you know? Ashamed of having messed up so badly that nobody wanted me. And I didn’t want to take the spot they were offering. But my dad had done whatever he did, and it had been months and months of my parents being—well, really pretty angry at how I messed up the college process.”
“So you’re going.”
“Yeah. I’ll show up at Amherst, and I’ll be just like everybody else. There’s no stamp on my forehead saying ‘Loser.’ I’ll just go.”