We decided the party would take place the first Thursday of June, our very last day of school. The Hodsons had a migratory pattern identical to most of the tourists—fudgies. They came up to northern Michigan for a couple of weeks during Christmastime and then again for spring break. After that they were gone until the summer. As soon as the clock struck twelve on Labor Day, Kewaunee and Coral Springs were back to their townie selves. My mom kept the Hodsons’ schedule on our calendar, the dates of their comings and goings drawn over the squares in a glittery silver, a color she must have chosen, consciously or not, because it symbolized how valuable they were. Our activities were written in regular old Sharpie black. The Hodsons wouldn’t be back until the middle of the month—that left more than enough time for us to get away with the party.
Back in April, Marlena had helped my mom and me clean the Hodsons’ after their spring CancerCare fundraiser. We lifted strings of tinsel off the banisters, deposited cheese rinds and expensive cloth napkins stained with lipstick and red wine into trash bags we carried from room to room. Marlena had a great respect for the old house, for the ceiling beams and the obese sculptures of nudes and the backyard that turned into a private beach when it hit the water. I was careful not to leave her alone too long and let myself be separated from her only once, when I had to go to the bathroom. After, I couldn’t find her for a long time. I wandered up to the third floor and there she was, cross-legged on the carpet before a painting of a thatch-roofed house drifting in a sea of flowers. “Isn’t this beautiful,” she said. “That’s where I want to live.” I didn’t think it was beautiful, and I assumed the Hodsons didn’t either—otherwise why would they hide it all the way up there?
“There?” I said. “I wish I lived here.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But there, no one could find you.”
It is true that I trailed her all day because I thought she might steal. She did check inside every medicine cabinet and bedside table drawer. But having lied and stolen doesn’t mean you’re a liar and a thief, and Marlena was not a thief at heart. Maybe out of boredom or necessity, but not in spirit. Until I saw her thumbing through Mrs. Hodson’s cashmere sweaters with interest instead of the bitterness I felt when I saw that ridiculous closet, I hadn’t realized how different she was, from me, about having no money. The only reason I didn’t steal from the houses Mom cleaned, from the very, very rich, is because I was afraid of getting caught. Marlena didn’t steal because she didn’t see the point. You can’t steal a whole new life.
*
I, she had said. Not we.
*
It snowed on the last day of school, spastic flurries that came and went as the day dragged on. Mrs. Tenley propped the main doors open anyway, as per annual tradition, and the air inside felt full of knives. Snow in June, can you believe it, everyone said, feeling stunned and a little scared. Some of the older teachers stood at their classroom windows, nodding—this was not so rare, they said. They’d seen it before. The snowflakes vanished the instant they crashed into the tiled halls, and between showers the sun dribbled a muted, useless yolk. We knew an omen when we saw one, even if we didn’t know what it meant—aside from the obvious, which was that the weather was more evidence of our shitty luck.
“It’s really true this year, I know it,” Marlena said. We were, as usual, smoking—this time in a copse of trees near the tennis courts. “Summer’s never coming back. It quit us.”
“Suck a dick, summer,” Greg shouted at the treetops. A handful of birds dispersed into the confused sky. “We don’t need you anyway.”
“These don’t even look like snowflakes,” Tidbit said. She held out her palm and a few evaporated against her skin. “They’re more like ash.”
We walked back to school arm in arm. We were all in love with each other because of the party. On the last days of school past, I’d never felt much. What did I have to look forward to? Going to the mall with Haesung. Mostly reading—that’s how I muddled through time, the last page of one book opening onto the first page of the next, so that I lived in a kind of amended super-book, alongside Anne Shirley and Hermione and Bunny and Heathcliff.
But not this summer. I hadn’t once gone back to the library.
Ryder was going to pick the four of us up after school. His paranoia had only increased, and over the past weeks Marlena’d worked hard to convince him to come. We needed Ryder. We needed his car and his seemingly endless supply of cigarettes, and I think Marlena needed him for her pills. He didn’t want to be seen near KHS, so we were to meet him at the BP station a half mile away. He’d ordered us to take the longer route through the backyards by school instead of going as the crow flies, along the main road out of town.
“I cannot be seen with any of you,” he’d said. “You have that through your skulls?”
“Yes, yes,” Marlena said. “You have a stalker, we get it.”
Ryder’s first stop would be mine and Marlena’s, so that Marlena and Tidbit and I could check in on Sal for the night, feed him, tuck him in, change into our nighttime outfits, and retrieve Jimmy and his car. According to Marlena it was absolutely necessary for us to have two vehicles, in case something happened and we needed to make a getaway. “Really?” I asked her, opening the door, I thought, for a confession—if one was due. “It’s really because we need two cars?”
“Really,” she said, looking at me like, What the? I half-believed that Jimmy was going to rat us out, or stop us from going the instant before we left, but when I bugged him about it—you’re really not going to ruin this, I texted—he wrote back, if you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna do it. someone who’s not an idiot should be there.
We’d rehearsed the plan a thousand times. Everyone had their favorite part—Tidbit was obsessed with the pit stop at mine and Marlena’s because she had some idea that if she wore the tiny black Charlotte Russe dress I’d outgrown in eighth grade she’d finally look as skinny as she so desperately needed to be, Marlena was fixated on making sure we got Jimmy/the potential getaway car, Greg had drawn up a little map of the route to the house and the route back (for some reason, they had to be different), and I wanted to make sure we didn’t run out of cigarettes. It’d taken only a few months to develop a half-pack daily habit. Ryder was on beer duty—easy for him, since all he had to do was give his mom some money and our order, and she would pick it up from the store. I was proud of their excitement. I’d seen them do a million more dangerous things—but this, from the breakin to the grandness of the house, this was next-level, and it had been my gift, my first real contribution.