“What? I’ve done it since I was a little kid. It’s nice.”
“What did you wish for?” Claire asked her. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d made a wish on a star. She supposed she always made a wish on her birthday candle, though, so she couldn’t criticize. Usually it was simple:no dying this year.Though she’d obviously lie to assembled relatives and say she’d wished for a date to the prom or world peace or something.
“You’d better have wished for a rescue,” Reyva said.
“Actually I wished for an original exhaust manifold and white-wall tires,” Mariana said. “I’m restoring a ’55 Corvette. She’s beautiful.” Her voice got dreamy. “Pure white finish, red leather interior, chrome-plated valve covers. They only made seven hundred of them. She’s one of the first of her kind wired with a twelve-volt system.”
Claire propped herself up on her elbow to see Mariana better. She was layered in shadows, but Claire thought she could see the hint of a smile on her lips. “Do you have your license?” She’d assumed they were the same age. Her parents had only just allowed her to get her permit. They weren’t sure she was “ready,” they’d said. They refused to even practice with her until she finished Driver’s Ed. Given her history—that was how they’d put it, her “history”—they thought it wise to be extra cautious. Driving could be stressful, after all.
“Pfft.” Mariana waved her hand in the air, causing the bracelets on her wrist to clink like a wind chime. “Who needs a license when you have dreams?”
“You didn’t really wish for that, did you?” Claire asked.
“Obviously not,” Mariana said. “A wish won’t come true if you tell. But I do want the tires. I’m expecting a text from a parts dealer with a price estimate. Maybe when I don’t text him back, he’ll realize something is wrong and send a rescue.” Rolling onto her side to look at Claire, she asked, “What would youwish for? Aside from the obvious. Say it has to be a wish that has nothing to do with being here.”
She’d wish she hadn’t come to the Lake House. She’d wish it hadn’t burned. She’d wish the director wasn’t dead. She’d wish she had a satellite phone. She’d wish she had a boat. Or a car and a road. But if it couldn’t be a relevant wish... Claire racked her brain. She knew that technically there was no right answer, but it still felt like a trick question.Think of something that won’t make you sound messed up, she ordered herself. “I’d wish to have a class with George Balanchine. He’s considered the father of American ballet.” As an explanation, she added, “I do ballet.”
“Isn’t he dead?” Reyva asked.
“A class while he was alive,” she clarified.
“Good, because that would be—”
Mariana cut her off. “Obviously she didn’t mean that. Don’t disrespect the dead.” To Claire, she said, “My parents made me take ballet. I was terrible at it. Also, gymnastics, soccer, and volleyball. Only let me quit when I made a deal: I’d ace the tenth-grade geometry final, and they’d let up. I was in ninth grade and not taking geometry so they thought it was a safe bet. Showed them. Not that it mattered, as it turned out, but that’s another story.”
“Mine too,” Reyva said. “Not the geometry thing, but forced ballet, gymnastics, and soccer. I switched to mixed martial arts in fifth grade, but it wasn’t enough. They still insisted I join the school track team in junior high.”
Mariana laughed. “Mixed martial arts? Like, full-contact cagefighting? Was that before or after you became a runaway with a checkered past? Rather violent for elementary school, don’t you think? No one lets ten-year-olds become MMA fighters.”
“My parents own a gym,” Reyva said, “and they offer plenty of junior MMA classes. I was the junior league second-place champion at the Northeast Regionals, and the look of disappointment on my parents’ faces was classic. They didn’t raise me to be second place—their exact words.”
“I’m sorry,” Claire said.
“Don’t actually care what they think.”
Even with the moonlight, Claire couldn’t see Reyva’s expression well enough to guess if she was telling the truth or not. She wasn’t sure Reyva would let her feelings register on her face regardless.
“I guess we all have parents who wanted to raise overachievers,” Mariana said. “I suppose that’s not a surprise, given that we all have parents who thought shipping their children off to an ‘enrichment retreat’ for the summer was a spectacular idea. Wonder if they knew each other when they were here. They probably overachieved together.”
They lay quiet again.
Claire remembered the day she’d gotten her first pair of pointe shoes. She’d just turned eleven, and her mother had taken her to the dance supply store. She’d seen all the posters of ballerinas posed with the silk ribbons crisscrossing their ankles, and she’d imagined herself executing the perfect fouetté turn. Of course, she’d known it would be painful, in a theoretical kindof way, to adjust to pointe, but she hadn’t expected her toes to feel as if they’d been mashed into a wooden box. After her first practice with them, she’d left specks of blood on the lamb’s wool inside. After a week, she’d wanted to quit. But the look in her parents’ eyes... At least when she danced, they saw a daughter who wasn’t so broken, even while she bled into her shoes.
In retrospect, it would have been more useful if she’d picked MMA instead of ballet.
Claire broke the silence. “If you know self-defense, maybe we stand a chance.”
Reyva snorted. “Against someone with a gun? I’ve only fought controlled bouts in a ring with referees and rules. That doesn’t qualify me to protect anyone in the real world.”
“You’re more qualified than a ballerina and a mechanic,” Claire pointed out. “You know how to throw a punch.”
“You can’t punch a gun,” Reyva said.
There wasn’t any good response to that.
Claire listened to the crickets. It was kind of comforting, the undercurrent of the chirps. It rose and fell in a rhythm, a bit like a heartbeat. The forest’s heartbeat.
A twig snapped. She stiffened and held her breath.
