The house, which had yellow shingles and a white gazebo to the right of the garage, was landscaped immaculately. Dozens of blown-glass figurines and wind chimes dangled from a grove of birch trees to the left of the house. I stood on the front lawn while Gordie rang the bell.
“Mom! Mom! Gordie’s here,” a man shouted from behind the open windows on the first floor. The front door flew open, and a tall, gangly guy stepped out. He high-fived Gordie.
“What’s up, Gordie?” the guy said, pressing his hands flat against Gordie’s cheeks.
“I wanted you to meet my friend Sadie.”
He turned and followed Gordie down the steps.
“Sadie, this is Keith. Keith, this is Sadie.”
Keith extended his hand. “Nice to meet you, Sadie. I have a birthday coming up.”
He shook my hand and dropped it abruptly.
“Really, when?” I said, trying to figure out the connection between Keith and Gordie.
“Next week, on Tuesday. I’ll be twenty-seven years young.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“Gordie’s taking me and David and my girlfriend, Zoe, to Speakeasy after ice cream cake at Turtle Trail.”
Gordie took the bag of corn out of the backseat. “We can only stay five minutes, okay, bud? We brought you some sweet corn.”
A lady with fluffy white hair and a powder-blue housedress stepped onto the front porch.
“Frances, this is my friend Sadie. She works at the farm stand,” Gordie said. “We brought you some fruits of her labor.”
“Lovely to meet you.”
“How do you guys know each other?” I said as Frances gave me a warm hug.
Gordie draped his arm around the lady’s shoulders. “Frances is my nanny. Keith and I have been buddies since I was a baby, huh, Keith?”
“Gordie and Sadie have to leave in two minutes,” Keith said.
“That’s okay, love,” said Frances.
“Gordie can’t shuck with me this time, huh?”
“He’ll be back.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow at eleven thirty at Turtle Trail, right?” Keith said.
“Eleven thirty sharp,” Gordie said. Keith set down the bag of corn and hugged Gordie.
“Bye, Sadie. You look like Princess Jasmine.”
When we were in the car, Gordie said, “Keith has a bit of a Disney princess fetish.”
“I’ve been called worse,” I said. “He’s sweet.”
“Yeah. When I saw how well he was doing at Turtle Trail, I decided I needed to work there. And according to half our school, Keith and I have been dating for years.”
It took a minute to register. The whole Gordie Harris is gay rumor started when the ruffians saw Gordie “hooking up” with some guy. The “some guy” was Keith. And the hookup… wasn’t.
He stared at the road as we drove through the maze of hedgerows.
“So are you or aren’t you gay?” I said it. I had to lay it out there.
“No. I’m not gay.”
“Oh.”
Silence.
“Aren’t you a little old to have a nanny?”
Gordie laughed. “I’ll never be too old to have a nanny.”
“Where were you guys? I’m so overwhelmed right now.” Val was drenched in sweat and trying to prop open a heavy barn door. “It’s miserably hot in there. Jean’s late and Alice is just sitting on a bucket.”
We followed Val into the barn turned school-supply-stockpile warehouse.
“We need to sort the stuff into piles and box it up before the mice start getting at it,” Val said. “A guy from the Rotary is donating backpacks, but I want to get it all sorted first.”
The barn smelled like hay and tractor fuel. It was cluttered with rusty tools and stacks of old billboards. “Biscuits and honey, five cents,” Gordie read. “I could go for a biscuit with honey right about now.”
“Can we focus?” Val was in worker-bee mode. She scurried around barking orders. Gordie and I were the only ones working. Jean was stuck at his job and Alice didn’t move from her perch on an upside-down bucket. She held a stick in her right hand and her phone in her left. She drew suck it with her stick in the sawdust. She cleared that suck it and wrote a larger, neater suck it.
“Alice, get up. We need your muscles,” I said. She wouldn’t get up.
“Gordie, do you have any latex gloves in the back of your junkyard car?” Val called from the front of the barn. “I keep thinking a spider’s going to eat my hand.”
“No. But I have condoms. You could fashion a glove,” Gordie called back.
Gordie Harris wasn’t gay. Gordie Harris kept condoms in his car. It was getting more intriguing by the minute.
Jean arrived in cargo shorts and a fedora. “It’s sweltering and I’m only helping if you scare those pigeons away.” He lingered outside the barn door.
“We have a lot of neuroses to deal with here, don’t we?” Gordie said.
“Oh, so you’re not afraid of anything?” Val said, shoving a three-ring binder into an already full box.
“Being obsolete, maybe,” Gordie said. He tossed a stack of notebooks into a clear plastic bin and lifted his gray ARMY T-shirt to wipe his face. I tried really hard not to notice his stomach and thought of how Alice had banned the word fluttery from our lexicon.
Alice dug the stick into the thick wood floor so violently it left a shallow gash; she still refused to move from her perch or join in our sorting. Even without her, we got a lot done. By the time we had sorted the mountain of supplies and boxed up the notebooks and binders, colored pencils, rulers, and other glaring reminders that yet another back-to-school was around the corner, it was dusk. And we were hot and filthy.
“Let’s go find some biscuits with honey,” Gordie said, lifting a plastic bin.
“Where are we going to find biscuits with honey?” I said. “This isn’t Georgia.”
Jean tried to push Alice to Val’s car while she was still seated on the bucket, but she toppled face-first onto her impressive string of suck its.
“Ahh. Cut the shit, Jean,” she yelled, scrambling to get up from the barn floor.
“Ha. Now you’re as gross as the rest of us,” Val said. “We need to swim.” Val put her hands on her hips and raised her eyebrows at Gordie.
“Nope. My parents are having a party.”
We stood around drinking water and trying to decide whether we should drive all the way to the beach or just go home and shower like normal people.
“Wait, I know where we can go,” Jean said.
“Where?” Val said. “I’m not going to the town pool.”
“My girlfriend’s house. She has a great swimming pond.”
“Good one,” Val said.
“Not kidding,” Jean said.
“How have you not mentioned you have a girlfriend?” I said, wondering if he was serious.
“Or that you know people with ‘swimming ponds’?” Val added.
Jean just smiled and jumped in the car.
We navigated the back roads in near darkness and tried to keep up with Jean’s crazy driving.
Alice didn’t say much from Val’s backseat. She checked her phone and bit her nails and sighed a lot. But at least we got her out of her house and away from her dark arts and dark thoughts.
We finally pulled behind Jean on the side of a back road and walked single file down a path in a heavily wooded area. The path led to an unkempt lawn that stretched up a steep hill.
“I don’t feel like swimming. I just want to go home,” Alice said. She lagged behind the rest of us and held her long white-and-navy-striped skirt in a bunch near her knees.