My sister had her back to me and was caught standing in the dirt, the wind playing with the hem of her dress, tossing it like wild rapids around her clean, bare legs. She must have felt me looking because she turned then, to give me one of her smiles. A smile for me and me only. No boys had ever seen this smile. They thought they were close enough to my sister to be loved by her, but they couldn’t, wouldn’t ever get that close—not in the way I already was.
She came in through the sliding glass door and said, “It’s Wednesday. We should watch movies.” Because on summer Wednesdays that was what we used to do, and the day after, Thursdays, we did laundry, but only if we felt like it, and on Fridays we’d do some shopping and make a pit stop at the town pool.
For now, we sat on pillows beneath the ceiling fan and flipped on the cable.
“I forgot to tell you,” Ruby said. “I don’t like you going in the backyard when it’s still light,” she announced randomly. She lifted her face to the ceiling fan, which was on high, and let it cool her cheeks.
“Why?” I said. “Afraid I’ll get sunburned?”
“No,” she said, “though good point, you do burn easily, your skin is so much fairer than mine—I bet you my dad was Latin, like from Panama or Puerto Rico, didn’t Sparrow say he spoke Spanish? I bet he went back to whatever country he came from and it’s so gorgeous and sunny down there so that’s why we haven’t seen him since. And your dad speaks only English and he’s as pale as a newborn rat.”
“Are rats pale?”
She shuddered. “They live their lives in the dark, don’t they? Just don’t go in the yard in the daytime. Anyone could see you out there. And you know what? If you go out there at night, do me a favor and stay on the veranda. You could step on a nail. Also, I don’t like that boy, why’d he ask if you were coming back out? I told him it’s Wednesday and Wednesday’s the day we watch movies so, no, you were not coming back out. Plus, please don’t answer the telephone. Let it ring like I do. And”—here, a glance at the sundress I had on, a short blue one I’d helped myself to from her closet—“you look cute in that dress. It’s yours. I want you to have it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I was still stuck on the thing about the boy who’d asked for me. But she didn’t bring him up again.
She just said, “Got it?”
And I said, “Yeah,” though I wasn’t sure I understood even half of it.
And then she rested a cold hand on my arm, and the air whipped up by the ceiling fan made it even colder, and she said, “It’s Wednesday, Chlo. What movie should we watch?”
That was how life returned fully to what it once was, this summer like other summers. The only difference was our vantage point in town. When I got up to make the popcorn—on Wednesdays, when we watched movies, we also microwaved popcorn—I could see the water, never still, always moving, if faintly, in the near distance. I could see it from every window downstairs, from each room in the house except the room Ruby called my bedroom.
And, who knew? Maybe down at the bottom, where my gaze couldn’t reach, the people of Olive were living out their own summer, seeking a breeze on the current, then running to play catch with Pete’s lost keys.
CHAPTER NINE
LONDON DIDN’T EXIST
London didn’t exist for a couple days. We never left the house, so it was easy to forget her out there, doing whatever she was doing, wherever that was.
Or, no—it was like she existed the way she used to, two years before, when I’d never considered leaving town, especially not without my sister, and when I knew London Hayes as the girl in the back of my French class and not much more. When she was just a girl, one I saw around, on the Green or in the backseats of Ruby’s friends’ cars, and when I did we didn’t even say hello to each other or anything.
Knowing she was around somewhere was enough to keep the memories at bay.