Seeing as we couldn’t play tennis or basketball, the high school wasn’t fun; and besides, a loudmouthed eighth grader named Beckett hung out there with his friends, including the boy I had a crush on, Peter Oundle. He’d been at our school always, and when we were smaller we’d all played together at recess—tag, and four square, and touch football. Now, though, he hung out with Beckett, two years ahead of us and the leader of a gang, long-limbed, quick-footed boys with sneering mouths. Peter Oundle, only a year ahead of Cassie and me, had always felt different, the kind of boy who’d offer his hand to help you up when you fell. Skinny, pointy-nosed, but handsome: reddish-brown curls, long lashes.
The boys played pickup basketball games for hours. One or two of them wolf-whistled when we passed, and one afternoon Beckett called out to me, “Hey, Curly, what are those huge pimples on your front?” which made the other boys guffaw and me flush with shame. Cassie shouted back, “Envious, are you, Beckett? ’Cause I see you got your hair long, like a girl.”
“Aw, fuck you too,” Beckett shouted, and turned his back; but like he was embarrassed, I thought.
“I’d hug you right here,” I said to Cassie, “but that would just prove to him that we’re gay.”
“Who cares?” Cassie said. “I’d marry you over him any day.”
We’d walked on and were passing the playground when Peter Oundle caught up to us. His curls were slick with sweat, his bony chest heaving under his mesh tank (Celtics, number 9). He touched me on the shoulder, and it burned. I was sure my face was red.
“Hey.” He stood a second.
“What do you want?” Cassie sounded disgusted.
“I just wanted to apologize.”
“What?” she said again.
“Beckett can seem like an asshole sometimes.”
“No kidding.”
“But he’s not so bad. It was a joke.”
“Not funny.” Cassie glared at Peter like he’d said it himself.
“It’s okay.” I smiled. “I’ll survive. Thanks for coming over.”
Peter nodded, and turned to run back to the game; but he looked back over his shoulder as he went, and smiled outright. At me, I thought, then: he came over for me.
“Shame he’s turned into one of them,” Cassie said as we set off again.
“He’s not so bad.”
She snorted, as if to say, You wish. She knew I liked him.
The quarry was where the older kids partied in the summer, and where we went swimming occasionally with our parents and their friends who belonged. It was about a mile west of Royston off a little county road, down a dirt track between two private houses. Abandoned over a hundred years ago, the old quarry is filled with glorious rare gray-green water, a color out of an old oil painting. In some lights, the great boulders gleam gold, but the word that comes to mind is “tawny,” like a lion. The quarry itself is lion-colored, which is why the Royston Town Hall—built in the 1870s with its stones—is lion-colored also.
Strictly speaking, the quarry is a private pool. It belongs to the local Land Association, a group of trustees who bought up a bunch of acreage between Cape Ann and the New Hampshire border, and run it as a kind of nature charity. You’re supposed to have a membership. Halfway along the dirt road, a chain hangs across it; but there’s no lock on the chain, and if you’re biking or walking you can slip around it. There’s no lifeguard or caretaker, except Rudy, who also takes care of the cemetery: he drives over every so often unannounced in his dark orange pickup with his one-eyed German shepherd, Bessie, to make sure nothing crazy is going on. He’s not a bad guy, Rudy, though he looks a little scary. He doesn’t have all his teeth and his cheeks cave in on themselves as if his mouth were a pull-string. And Bessie—well, people are scared of German shepherds, and she’s a surprising sight because one eye is milky and reflects the light.
That first afternoon, we saw him on the main road, headed into town as we headed out. We were on the gravel verge, and he made a showy loop to the other side of the road as he passed us, and raised his hand in an old-fashioned country wave and nodded our way. A toothpick, or an unlit cigarette, stuck up out of his mouth, and his greasy cap was on backward, wings of hair poking out below. Bessie had her head half out the window on the passenger side, tongue lolling, eating the breeze. The sight made us laugh: “Dog joy,” Cassie said. “Wish we could get us some.”
We wanted to walk out to the quarry simply to fill the time. We couldn’t swim, or Cassie couldn’t, on account of her hand; but it seemed the place to explore, not least because we knew one of the trails through the woods from the quarry led to the old asylum. Cassie thought that was the coolest thing: if we could find our way to the asylum, who knew what we’d discover? She had some idea there’d be treasure—something hidden or left behind, something we couldn’t imagine until it was revealed.
“Maybe someone’s even living there,” she suggested, raising her eyebrows and smiling. “Somebody everybody thinks is gone.”
“That seems like a reason not to go looking.”
“Wimp.”
“I’m not. Besides, if anybody was living there, we’d know about it.”
“How?”
“That close to town? You don’t just get away with stuff like that.”
“So, we could pretend to live there. Like, for the afternoon.”
We didn’t play pretend games anymore because we were too grown-up, but secretly we missed them. A stage as big as an asylum seemed perfect: we could disappear into the woods to a secret hidey hole, and suddenly it would be okay to behave as though we were ten again, and she was a World War II Resistance fighter and I’d parachuted in from England on a secret mission; or we were the only two survivors after the apocalypse and had to live off nuts and berries and rainwater.
The woods around Royston are great for those kinds of games. There are clearings in the trees, and huge slabs of rock like tables, fallen logs to serve as benches, rocky overhangs underneath which you can build a little camp that will stay dry in all but the heaviest rainfall. They’re not impenetrable, not a Hansel and Gretel forest, but a forest where the sunlight falls green and dappled to the soft, piney ground, where surprising toadstools sprout in clumps—flat red plates or piled cream ruffles, tiny yellow shiny bulbs, almost slick—and invisible birds call to one another in the high branches overhead. Sometimes you catch the bright flash of a red-winged blackbird or a cardinal, and upon occasion, at the quarry itself, a misguided preening egret teetering on its precarious pins, stretching its great wings and arching its prehistoric neck to glare at you from a bald, glittering eye.
On that first day we tramped out to the quarry, we saw such an egret. We called her Nancy, because the name made us laugh, and whenever we saw another after that, wherever it was, we waved and shouted, “Hey, Nancy, good to see you!” We felt like she was a good omen, a sign for us.