“Sure.” Better to get out of here than to get roped into unpacking boxes. Mom packs like we’re never leaving here. In reality, I think I could survive with my swimsuit and a towel. And my paints. Maybe a small library of books. Okay, I need afewthings. But still not as many as Mom.
Dad looks up at me from where he’s hunched over a box in the dining room. “Don’t forget,” he says, giving me a wink. Dad’s here for almost two weeks before he has to check in at the office for a few days, and then mostly he’ll be here, working remotely, like he has for the last five years or so. I glance out the window to where our little boat is already tied alongside the dock that juts out into the still water. Mom hates driving the boat, but Dad and me, we’ve always lived out on the water,the wake misting our arms, wind burning our cheeks. Driving it still makes me nervous though, and I usually opt to let someone else do it. Boats steer funny; they’re not like cars, which turn exactly when you want them to. Asher says I think too much to drive a boat properly. As if thinking is ever a bad thing.
Down the road from us, there’s a tiny convenience store called The Little Store—its actual name, I swear—that also doubles as one of the town’s two pizza places. It’s dark, like the walls of our house; like the mossy insides and writhing bodies inside the white container of worms my father sends me to retrieve on the first day of vacation every year. When I was twelve, I would ride my pink bike—balancing the plastic container precariously on my handlebars the whole way home.
Now, I steal Dad’s car keys from the little nail by the front door, and give a quick “I’ll be back” as the screen door slams behind me. Through the open kitchen windows I can still hear the rustle of paper bags as Mom unpacks a week’s worth of groceries from the local market twenty minutes away, where she grumbles about everything costing twice as much as at home.
I walk alongside the house, down the little cement sidewalk that runs to the gravel driveway. Straight ahead of me is the monstrosity—as my parents call it—that is Nadine and Charlie’s house. They own Lake House A and B, and until two years ago, they also owned four more tiny shoebox rentals, before they tore them down to build their dream house. Technically, this place is called Five PinesResort,but with two houses left to rent it hardly qualifies, if you ask me.
Charlie is quiet and short, light on words but always quick to smile if you happen to see him out and about fixing something, which is rare. He works a full-time corporate job at a bank an hour away. Nadine is the opposite. She’s loud and eager to talk to you, though never about anything good. Her blond hair is wild and she always looks like she’s about to board a cruise ship to some exotic locale. Her clothes are loose and flowing andbright, and her lips are always hot pink or red. It’s hard not to look at her, though I’m well practiced at it, now that she’s around entirely too much. It’s a little strange, spending your summer vacation in someone’s backyard.
While the lake houses are small and plain, the home that looms over them is like Nadine—tall and wide, and strange in a way you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s the color of a blueberry—not quite blue, not quite purple—with pale green shutters and a white porch that wraps around the front. It looks like something that should be sitting out on a farm, not a lake.
Last summer, when the house seemingly sprouted out of nowhere during the off-season, there were a handful of yard decorations that sprang up with it. A gnome with a red hat at one corner, a whimsical green toadstool by the back stairs leading down into the yard that faces A and B. The strangest was a rooster, almost up to my chin, positioned near the front door. But this year the house seems to have spawned a whole army of tacky ornaments. They’re littering the gardens that circle the house, dotting the mulch with dogs, tiny girls in frilly dresses, and geese. I can’t catalog them all without staring, and the walk to my dad’s car is over before I can appreciate even a fraction of them. What is going on at Nadine and Charlie’s house? And how could their daughter—pretty, fashionable, always-put-together Lindsay—let this happen?
My dad’s car—a silver SUV with dark windows and shiny chrome—is sitting along the backside of the little house, in front of a massive wall of firewood that lines the driveway. Beyond it, the old metal swing set is bordered by tall grass, which Charlie has clearly given up on trimming. It makes my twelve-year-old heart a little sad to see it neglected. My phone buzzes, pulling me out of my lawn-gnome-and-swing-set-induced haze, and I swipe the screen to life as I open the door and push it with my hip. Not even out of the driveway, and already my mom has texted me three more things she forgot. And I’m not findingthem at The Little Store—I’m going to have to drive into town, to the “big” market that is still little by normal standards. Texting my mom a quickok,I drop into the seat and twist the keys in the ignition. Without warning, the car is filled with a deafening jolt of drums and screaming. My hand flies for the volume knob, my heart in my throat.What the…
“Dammit, Asher,” I mutter, just as a messy mop of brown hair pokes up over the back seat. I startle again, not expecting that he’d beinthe car. He cocks his head to the side and his blue eyes twinkle as a smile spreads across his face.
Like most epic rivalries, it would be impossible to pinpoint the exact reasons I loathe Asher Marin. Maybe it’s the way he walks into my family’s cabin each summer—the one identical to his next door—and smiles at my mother as if he’s thrilled to see us all. As if he hasn’t been dreaming of tormenting me for the last ten months, the way I’ve been dreaming of all the things I’ll do to him. It could have been the self-tanner he put in my sunscreen when I was fourteen, or my frozen swimsuits when I was sixteen, or last year’s crowning glory, the cayenne pepper he laced my toothpaste with.
But those all came after. And there are so many that it doesn’t even matter what started it anymore. All that matters is that this summer, the summer before I go off to college—probably the last summer I’ll have to see Asher Marin for eight weeks straight—I’m going to finish it.
“Happy first day of summer, Sidney.” He meets my narrowed eyes and laughs, deep in his throat. And just as he clears the door and steps aside, I put the car in drive and peel out of the driveway, a bright red brontosaurus craning its neck around the house as I leave them behind me.
DAY 2
Sidney
Riverton is only four hours from where I live, but it’s like another world up here. One with grocery stores that take checks but not credit cards, and close at five o’clock sharp. All of the houses have names, like Blue Thunder, Copper Cove, and Lake House A. Where random businesses crop up out of the woods, and instead of parking lots, everyone just parks on the side of the road for a quarter mile in either direction.
As I pull up to River Depot in my dad’s car the next day, cars are everywhere, even on a Monday. I see the swarm of red shirts down by the canoes as I cross the little bridge over the river. It feels like forever before I find a break in the cars and can wedge myself between two with out-of-state plates, and set out for the big brown building. River Depot is a small, brown log building from the street, but beyond its doors it opens into multiple rooms and levels built into the hill that slopes from the road to the river.
This is the third summer Kara has worked the desk at River Depot. Her grandma lives three houses down from Five Pines—a little cabin passed down through Kara’s family from back before the lake became a trendy tourist spot. We met my first summer here when I was twelve, and I accidentally stole her inner tube.And bystole,I mean it washed up on our beach one morning after a bad storm, and with no way of knowing where it came from, Kara found me two days later, lying on the hot-pink plastic tube where I had tethered it to the end of our dock.
She dumped me off of it while I lay there with my eyes closed, and when I surged out of the water, completely bewildered, she laughed at me like a wild little water pixie. Which turned out to be a pretty accurate description of Kara. She’s tiny—barely four foot nine—and even though she makes me feel like a giant at five foot eight, she’s one of my favorite people in the whole world.
We were inseparable that first summer—the only summer Asher’s family wasn’t with us. Kara brought her float to our dock, and we strapped it next to the yellow version my parents bought me at The Little Store down the road. She crashed dinners when her grandma let her, and the two of us were wild little summer pixies together, covering our toes in glittery polish on the deck and pretending to fish out of a little rowboat, even though neither of us ever caught anything and would have been too freaked out to pull a fish off of a hook even if we did. Some days, we’d be joined by Nadine and Charlie’s daughter, Lindsay, who was a year older than us, and would get dropped off to swim and drive around the WaveRunner docked at Five Pines. But by the next summer, Kara had turned fourteen and was working at River Depot in the afternoons, and when Lindsay made an occasional appearance she was more interested in my new neighbor, Asher.
By the time I make it to River Depot I’m sweaty and hot. I find it hard to believe any canoe trip can be worth this kind of dedication, but the massive lines outside the gazebo where they sign people up tells me I must be wrong. I push past the crowds and into the gift shop, which is dead and deserted compared to outside.
“Yesssss,” Kara squeals from behind the counter as I round arack of postcards and shot glasses, all covered in the iconic images of a Michigan summer—lighthouses and waves and towering golden sand dunes. “Nowit’s summer!”
She wraps tiny arms around me from across the counter, ignoring someone approaching with a box of graham crackers and a bottle of lighter fluid. “When did you get in?” she asks.
“Saturday night.” I glance at the man next to me, but Kara isn’t fazed.
She gives me a quick up and down, like she’s checking me out. “You’re still in one piece,” she says, looking amused with herself. “A whole day in, and no serious damage yet?”
“We’re too busy unpacking,” I say, wondering what Asher has planned for me this summer.
“You stocked, or should I dig up some bottles of hot sauce and hair remover?”
I smile. Deep down, I think Kara lives vicariously through my ongoing escapades with Asher. She can barely temper her amusement with the two of us. “I’m good.”
“I work all week.” She sticks her tongue out like she’s going to gag and makes a desperate sound deep in her throat. “But there’s a party Friday. Promise me you’ll come?” Her voice is high and whiny. “Justonce?” she begs, her head tipping into a pleading dip at her shoulder.
On my left, Graham Cracker Guy clears his throat.
