My Almost Epic Summer (6 page)

As soon as I’m in, I’m unimpressed. Horrendous blogs float all over cyberspace, and Starla’s is not one of the worst, but it’s bad. Shooting stars and music and loopy blue writing across the page:

This might be the only sentence that doesn’t contain spelling and grammar errors. Starla compensates for her illiteracy by accenting her prose with capital letters, exclamation marks and smileys. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was Lainie’s age.

But I’m hooked, anyway. I click on photos of Starla’s house, some close-ups of Starla’s cat, Shadow, and too-many-girls-squeezed-in-a-bunch snaps of Starla’s friends, who all look mean and sophisticated and confirm that gorgeous Starla is popular on a Paul Pelicano scale.

There’s also a black-bordered link titled “Writings of D.” These “Writings,” when I click on, consist of a lot of dubious poetry about some guy, the mysteriously named D, who used to go out with Starla. She is obviously still battling to get over him.

I can’t believe the same person who churned out a poem like this had the nerve to insult my notebook creations.

After a while, Starla’s neon blog starts to hurt my eyes, and I’m just about to close up when I glance at her most recent journal entry.

Lucrative. Even spelled right, which meant Starla looked it up and/or spellchecked it. It makes me feel the littlest bit smug, thinking that I made an impact on her after all. Even if I wasn’t mentioned by name, and even if our exchange wasn’t one hundred percent accurately recorded.

Then I see a little ticker in the corner of her page that tells me I’m Starla’s 776th visitor. That’s three quarters of one thousand visits. More hits than the number of students at Bishop Middle. It’s an impressive amount of attention, and while I don’t want to be awed by it, I guess I am, a little.

 

 

 

THAT WEEKEND, WHEN the temperature smashes heat records, the implicit mother-daughter trust that prevents me from speaking up against Roy’s “fix” on our air conditioner starts to crack.

“Even the Priors have a working air conditioner,” I hear myself grumbling over my cereal, “and they’re practically Amish.”

“Shush.” Mom looks nervously at the floor, beneath which Roy lurks in the basement, putzing around with his miniature battlefield diorama. Right now he’s working on the Battle of Thermopylae. Re-creating battle scenes in miniature is Roy’s other hobby, after clipping coupons and thinking up uninspired recipes and making (alleged) household repairs.

I walk up to the air conditioner, which is lodged in our living room’s side window and is blowing in a sliver of cold air, a gale force of outdoor air and strange rattling noises. As soon as Mom retreats to the bathroom to get ready for work, I risk Roy’s temper and clean the filters, which actually need to be replaced. This decreases the sound but doesn’t do much for the heat.

Defeated, I collapse onto the couch and rummage for a snack from the collection I keep under it. Hark, a bag of chips. I eat them lying down, letting crumbs fall greasily into my neck, as my eyes race
Jane Eyre
to its mad, burning, blinding ending.

“See?” Mom breezes in. “It
is
cooler. He
did
fix it.”

“Mmm.”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” she quotes lightly.

“Afflicted by love’s madness, all are blind,” I quote back.

“You know, Irene, you could help pick up this place,” she retaliates. “If I work a six-day week, you should be able to work a five-and-a-half-day one, don’tcha think?”

“I thought the housecleaning was Roy’s job.” Though of course I don’t risk saying this until a few moments after the kitchen door slams.

Eventually I defy my own inertia by getting off the couch, where I toss a few things into the sink, the trash can or the coat closet, depending. Cleaning up this place never seems worth the effort, probably because it’s been the same all my life and, neat or messy, I can’t see it any differently. When I get my L.A. salon, I plan to keep it immaculate, scented with vanilla-sandalwood candles and stocked with herbal tea in flavors like passion fruit or peppermint, which I will serve on doilies with paper-thin wedges of lemon. These details will become my signature style, along with my straw hat or lightweight cape that my exclusive clientele will find delightfully eccentric.

I swoosh the couch afghan over my shoulders and glide into the kitchen to check myself out by the reflection of the toaster oven. Could I get away with a cape? What if I’d just been commissioned to do all the hairstyles for a big studio remake of
Pride and Prejudice,
and everyone is talking about the fresh and flattering looks I’ve created? I could pull off the cape if I could also successfully throw out comments like “You’ll have to drop by the studio, darling!”

“Boo!”

I scream and jump. Roy, standing in the doorway watching me, nearly busts a gut.

“Oh, ha ha ha! Scared ya right in the middle of your play practice, didn’t I
—darling
!”

Had I said “darling” out loud? A hotness springs to my eyes.

“Roy, just—don’t,” I warn him.

“Here I was coming up for a bottle of pop, and instead it’s a Broadway show.” Roy is doubled over. Under his T-shirt, I can see his stomach jiggle.

“It’s really not that funny,” I say. “You shouldn’t creep up on people, it’s . . . insidious.”

“Sorry
—darling.
”

Of course Roy would have to kill his own joke. And I know it’s an overreaction, but for a split second I’m so furious with him that I want to grab a kitchen knife and stab dumb old Roy in the chest so that blood comes spouting out like a geyser and he falls gasping to the floor while I stand above him crowing with manic laughter like Mr. Rochester’s long-suffering first wife as I watch Roy’s eyes cloud over with the realization—too late! too late!—that he should never,
ever
have underestimated my appetite for vengeance.

Lucky for us both, the insanity passes.

Instead, I stand frozen on my feet while a thousand potential insults crackle in my head. Roy thinks he has rendered me speechless, but all I feel is the yoke of Mom’s restraining order.
Don’t Upset Roy.

But what if he is upsetting me? What about that? My eyes are pinpricks of warning, staring at him, as I make a pure, silent wish that he would just leave like all the others.

“Oh, haw haw! Oh, dang. Whew.” Roy is winding down. He rubs his eyelids with the backs of his fingers. Still chuckling, he gets his drink from the fridge and toddles back down to the basement, to his Spartans and Persians. It takes everything in me to keep from locking him in down there.

 

 

 

MONDAY MORNING, I learn that as a reward for Lainie’s day of helping out at the Plugged Nickel, Judith has bought her a king-sized inflatable tube raft. The kids have already inflated it, and want to try it out on the water immediately.

“It’s pretty cool that it’s so big,” I have to admit. “You could play a fun game with this. Like, maybe you have one person be Swamp Thing who tries to capsize the other two people.”

“Yes, yes, yes! Evan can be Swamp Thing!” yells Lainie. “And we’re both princess sisters, you and me, Irene. And we’re on the raft and he tries to push us off, but also tell Ev the rule is no splashing water in my eyes.” She wheels on her brother. “You splash my eyes like last time, Evan, and I will
not
forget to tell.”

“Except for I won’t be Evan, I’ll be Swamp Thing, and Swamp Things have to splash. That’s a rule, too,” says Evan. Lainie looks skeptical, but stops arguing.

The bike ride over feels eternal, and the day is so hot and windless that with every passing minute, it’s only the mental picture of myself submerged in cool water that keeps me going. Once we get there, though, I’m confronted with the even more powerful image of Starla, off her lifeguard chair and pacing the water’s edge. It’s hard not to watch her, but I deliberately do not. I spread out the beach towels and unpack the lunches and make a big fuss of coating sunblock all over Lainie’s shoulders. Evan has already dragged the raft out to the bank and launched himself.

“Hey! Girls, get out here!” he yells. “What are ya, scared?” Then he starts making loud Swamp Thing-y noises. Starla shades a hand to look out at him before turning to smirk at Lainie and me.

“Come on,” Lainie clamps her fingers around my wrist. She is surprisingly strong.

I yank away. “I never said
I
wanted to play!” All of a sudden, I can’t bear the idea of appearing undignified while Starla is around, spinning on a raft with two little kids as if this is my top pick entertainment of the afternoon.

“But you promised! The game takes two princesses and one Swamp Thing!”

“All I said was three people
could
play. I was being theoretical.”

“How about you come in after five minutes?” Lainie bargains.

“Maybe. When I’m ready.”

Lainie’s bottom lip sticks out, followed by her tongue. “Have it your way, then, meanie!”

I watch her skip off determinedly. The water looks so blue, so fresh, that I can hardly bear not being in it. But if I go in for a dip, the kids will be all over me. So I stretch out and open to the first page of my next book,
A Confederacy of Dunces,
a Dan Prior recommendation that I found waiting for me on his kitchen table this morning, along with a friendly note from Dan about how it’s his favorite book in the world. I’d never have picked up this book on my own, but I feel the tug of employee obligation. Also, Dan will be really happy if I actually do read it. And Dan is cool, right down to his baggy-butt jeans and the human rights bumper stickers on his truck. The few times Dan has driven me home from babysitting, I liked pretending that other people on the road thought he was my father.

So far, the novel is about a fat guy named Ignatius who wears a “green hunting cap squeezed [on] the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.” The only hair described is what is sticking out of Ignatius’s ears. From a style perspective, that’s not promising.

I’d be able to enjoy the story more if Starla’s presence didn’t overwhelm me. Trying to ignore her makes my eyes hurt. But it’s not until the kids are back on land, shivering and refueling on peanut butter and honey sandwiches, that Starla pivots in our direction and starts marching toward me. She has on her sunglasses and her visor is pulled low. She looks like someone who is famous, or at least someone who acts like she is.

Once Evan realizes that his dream girl is heading our way, he leaps, choking on his sandwich, and runs off. Starla’s life-saving kiss evidently has turned him into a lovesick idiot.

Her toes stop at the edge of the towel. “Got my tenner?”

I look up, pretending to be startled. As if I hadn’t been aware of every step she took to get here. The speech I’ve been mentally preparing doesn’t come out as breezily as I’d hoped, but I don’t shy away from it. “If you’d mentioned in advance that you were charging a fee for that sketch,” I begin, “then I’d pay up, no problem. But you didn’t, and since that’s pretty much the definition of a swindle, I don’t think I owe you anything.”

She is silent. Then she grins. “Nerd!” She shakes her head. “What, you think I need money so bad? You can have my picture for free if it means that much to you.”

Which makes me feel extremely Humbert-esque, but all I say is “Fine.”

“Anyway,” she says through a yawn, “I’m on lunch, and I came over because I want to show you something.”

“Show what?” pipes up Lainie.

Starla throws Lainie a sugary smile that most kids would find patronizing. Except that when you look like Starla, the rules change. “Don’t worry about it. Guess what? We’re going to Shady Shack. Ask your nerd babysitter if she’s coming with.”

“Shady Shack!” Lainie jumps up and pulls my arm. “Can we get some candy? Please, please?”

I really don’t appreciate being called a nerd or a nerd babysitter, especially because I doubt that Starla is being ironic. But to protest nerdishness pretty much dooms a person to that very category.

“I don’t need anything from there. But if Lainie wants to go . . .”

“I want to go! And if I get some candy, you won’t tell Mom, right, Irene? Right?”

“We’ll see.” I signal over to Evan, who shouts for us to get him cheese curls.

Shady Shack is set back in the pines behind the Larkin’s Pond parking lot. It’s bigger than a shack and no question it’s shady, although better adjectives would be
dusty, overpriced
and
poorly stocked.

Starla sails ahead of us, barely greeting the handful of admiring kids who are hanging out on the porch. One of them says, “Howarrya, Tara,” which gets her a punishing stare. I guess not
everyone
has learned that Starla Malloy no longer answers to Tara.

Once inside, Starla jostles my elbow. “We used to go out. Look but don’t look, got it?”

I follow her eyes to the kid sitting behind the register. Just by the way that Starla is breathing, I know this is D of the infamous “Writings of D.” I’m surprised, because D doesn’t look anything like I’d pictured—no piercing eyes and tumbling locks and gloomy, Mr. Rochester charms. This D is tall and skinny. He lets his hair fall in his eyes and he presses the buttons of the register with a single, hesitant finger—as if one wrong key might cause the whole machine to explode. He’s an accidental, everyday hero. You could find a D anywhere. Working the pump at the gas station. Mowing your lawn. D as in
Dozens like him.