I’ll probably drop dead after a quarter mile, wind up lying there like a fat, flattened raccoon on the side of the road.
But I want to run.
My mom’s drinking coffee in the breakfast nook when I come downstairs but—wisely—decides not to comment on my sudden emergence from the third-floor tower, watching wordlessly as I clip Oscar’s leather leash onto his collar. “Be easy on him, will you?” is all she says, probably the first time she’s asked anyone to be easy on anyone else in her entire life. “He doesn’t get much exercise.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I mutter, sticking my headphones into my ears and making for the back door. I wave at Alex, who’s trimming the rhododendrons, and head down the driveway toward the street. “Neither do I.”
I ran track all through middle and the first three years of high school; sophomore year Bristol tried to recruit me for their track team, which is how I found out about them to begin with. By the time I actually went to Tempe after everything happened, though—the longest, fastest run of my whole life—I was finished. I spent senior year parked on the bleachers, mostly motionless. Now I feel like a pale, doughy Tin Man, creaking stiffly back to life.
I make my way along the rocky bike path that’s parallel to Route 4, which eventually narrows and becomes Star Lake Road. Patrick and I used to run this route all the time—when it was warm like this but also in the winter, the edges of the lake frozen over and snow coating the delicate-looking branches of the pine tree overhead. He got a bright green pullover for Christmas sophomore year and I remember watching him as we hoofed it through the drab gray landscape, standing out like some exotic bird. I watched him all the time, his fast elegant body—Patrick and I were both serious enough runners back then, I suppose, but mostly our treks around the lake were an excuse to be alone. We’d been dating since the previous fall, but everything still felt new and exciting and secret-amazing, like nobody had ever lived it before us.
“Gabe told me he and Sophie Tabor went skinny-dipping out here in the fall,” he told me when we were done with the loop one afternoon, his bare hand reaching for my gloved one.
I tucked both our hands into the pocket of my jacket to get warm. “They did?” I asked, distracted by the feeling of having him so close. Then I wrinkled my nose. “Don’t you thinkskinny-dippingis a gross phrase? There’s something about it that’s, like, off-putting to me. Likemoist.”
“Orpanties.”
“Don’t saypanties,” I ordered.
“Sorry.” Patrick grinned at me, bumping his shoulder against mine as we followed the frozen curve of the lake. A weak halo of sunlight peeked through the winter clouds. “We should try it, though.”
“What?” I asked blankly. Then: “Skinny-dipping?” I looked at the hard crust of snow covering the ground, then back at him. “We should, huh?”
“Well, not now,” Patrick clarified, squeezing my hand inside my pocket. “I’d like to get to graduation without my junk freezing off, thank you. But when it gets warmer, yeah. We should.”
I looked over at him in the chilly white light, intrigued and curious; a shiver skittered through me. So far all we’d done was kiss. “This summer,” I agreed, and popped up onto my toes to peck the corner of his mouth.
Patrick turned his head and caught my face between two hands. “Love you,” he said quietly, and I smiled.
“Love you back.”
I don’t know if it’s the memory or the physical exertion that knocks the wind out of me, but either way it’s less than one wheezy mile before Oscar and I have to stop and walk a bit. The roads are woodsy and winding back here, only an occasional car rolling by. The trees make a canopy over the blacktop, but still I’m sweating inside my V-neck T-shirt; the morning air’s beginning to warm. When we pass the turnoff for the Star Lake Lodge, I tug the leash on a whim, making my way down the familiar gravel pathway toward the clearing where the old resort slouches, the Catskills in the distance and the lake itself glittering at their feet.
I worked at the rumpled Lodge for three full summers before I left here, handing towels out lakeside and manning the register at the tiny gift shop off the lobby—a lot of people from school did, waiting tables in the dining room or teaching swim classes at the pool. Patrick and Julia would come visit between their shifts at the pizza place; even Imogen temped here for a few months sophomore year, when French Roast was closed for renovations. It was fun in a shabby kind of way, all faded cabbage-rose carpet and an old-fashioned elevator that hadn’t worked since before I was born. The whole place was perpetually on the verge of closing, and it looks like that’s exactly what finally happened: The main parking lot is deserted, and the front lawn is speckled with goose poop. The rocking chairs on the sagging front porch sway creepily in the breeze coming off the water. There’s a light on inside, though, and when I try the main door it swings wide open into the empty lobby, full of the same faded, floral-print furniture I remember.
I’m about to turn around and get out of here—it’s spooky, how abandoned this place seems—when a little boy in light-up sneakers darts through the lobby like something out ofThefreakingShining, bouncing off one of the brocade sofas before careening away down the hallway that leads to the dining room. I gasp out loud.
“Fabian! Fabian, what did Ijustsay to you about running in here?” A tall, thirtyish woman in skinny jeans and an NYPD T-shirt strides into the lobby, stopping short when she finds me hovering in the doorway like a lurking freak. “Oh. Are you the new assistant?” she asks me, glancing over her shoulder toward the hallway Fabian ran down. She sounds irritated. A riot of tight, springy curls surrounds her face. “You’re late.”
“Oh, no.” I shake my head, embarrassed. It was weird of me to come in here. I don’t know what I keep doing since I got back, showing up one place after another where I’m not wanted. It’s like my new hobby. “I’m sorry; I used to work here. I didn’t realize you were closed.”
“Reopening this summer,” the woman tells me. “Under new management. We were supposed to open Memorial Day, but that was a fantasy if ever I’ve had one.” I watch her take in my sweaty clothes and sneakers, my damp ponytail, my blotchy red face. “What did you do?”
For one insane second, I think she’s talking about Gabe and Patrick—that’s how knee-jerk the guilt is, like even this total stranger can smell it on me—but then I realize she means when I worked here, and I explain.
“Really,” she says, looking interested. “Well, we’re hiring. Personal assistant to the new owner. Actually, we hired one, but she’s late, and here you are. I’m gonna take that as a sign. That’s a thing I do now, I take signs. It makes my kids really nervous.”
I smile, I can’t help it. I definitely wasn’t looking for a job—especially not one where it’s entirely possible I’ll run into a whole glut of people who hate me—but there’s something about this lady that’s winning, that kindles the same lick of anticipation I felt when I ran into Gabe at the gas station the other day. “Who’s the new owner?” I ask.
The woman grins back, bright and wry like she’s got a secret and really likes to share it, and she’s glad that I’m here so she can. “Me.” She sticks one smooth brown hand out and shakes mine, confident. “Pennsylvania Jones. Call me Penn. Can you start tomorrow?”
Day 8
My first shift as Penn’s assistant consists mostly of locating and compiling the fourteen hundred to-do lists she’s made and then lost all over the entire property, scribbled on cocktail napkins at the bar and taped to the stainless steel fridge in the kitchen. I find one that just saysCHLORINEscrawled on the activities chalkboard by the pool. By the time I’m pretty sure I’m found them all I’ve filled seven pages of old Star Lake Lodge stationery, back and front.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Penn says when I knock on her office door and hand them over, her desk buried under a jumble of purchase orders and receipts. There’s a trace of New York City in her exasperated voice. She and her kids—six-year-old Fabian plus a little girl named Desi who can’t be more than four and said not one word the entire time I was in the room—moved here from Brooklyn last spring, she told me this morning. She didn’t say anything about their dad, and I didn’t ask. “Okay. I’ll look at these after the staff meeting, all right? Come on, I told everyone two in the lobby. I meant to get donuts. Did I say that to you, or did it just languish in my brain all day?”
“You told me,” I promise, following her out the door of the office and down the dim, wood-paneled hallway. “I ran out and picked them up at lunch.”
