Week 4 – Sunday
9:15 pm
“You have a lot of emo on your iPod,” I said to Ka at the picnic on Sunday. It was the Fourth of July and Betsy had made each kid a cookie in the shape of the flag, decorated with red, white, and blue icing--she’d dyed it with berry juice. We were digesting the cookies and also our progress assessment scores--the Drivers and Meyer-Hincheys got eights, the Puchinskis got a ten, but we didn’t break six because we still hadn’t eaten Pumpkin.
Ka looked at me like she didn’t know which end of my statement she should take a bite of. And then her brain figured out the most important part. “How did you get my iPod?” she said. “Do you have it? Can I see it?”
“Nora has it,” I said, nodding in her direction. She was bringing a bucket of cold water out from the kitchen for people to take drinks from if they were thirsty.
“Nora?” Ka breathed. “I didn’t think she even knew what an iPod is.”
“Oh, she knows,” I said.
And then I told her. About stumbling upon the electricity shack. About seeing Nora sitting at the computer inside. About going back when my cell-phone battery died.
“Wait,” Ka said. “You have a cell phone? Here?”
“I haven’t told anyone about it,” I said. “I didn’t even think I was going to use it.” I explained how my mom gave it to me the night before we left, how I’d snuck it in, if only to be able to look at it. “I just text my friends,” I said. “It makes it easier. To be able to tell someone else what’s going on.”
“Wow,” Ka said. “So what happened when you went back?”
I told her about Caleb’s being there and Nora’s kicking me out and how Caleb only sort of stuck up for me. About the Diet Coke. “Oh!” I said. “And I finally know what Ron and Betsy were doing before they came here.” I passed on everything Nora had told me about their past—their real past—and how I almost felt sorry for Nora, being stuck out here for the last ten years.
While Ka and I were talking, we were sitting on a log at the edge of the woods. The Doll Club girls were setting up some kind of a doll hospital or school—or maybe it was a school for very sick kids who sometimes had to be put in bed for a long time. Gavin, Bryn, and Erik were teaching Katie how to play the rock-throwing game. Ka had just finished telling me about how Katie and Matt got to go berry picking after dinner the night before while she’d had to say behind and finish the dishes. She and Katie alternated meals but Ka thought it always seemed like the nights when it was her turn to do the dishes, something conveniently fun came up for everyone else.
“And by the way,” Ka said. “The Dashboard Confessional? The Yellowcard? That’s Katie’s music. She forgot her iPod for the plane ride and my mom made this big deal in the airport of making me download some albums for her to listen to. It was her way of trying to get Katie to like her.”
“Oh, man,” I said.
“I actually like a few of the Yellowcard songs,” she said. “But not their new stuff.”
“Yeah,” I said, though I had no idea what she was talking about. Suddenly I wondered if I was even remotely cool enough to be Ka’s friend outside Camp Frontier.
“So what do you think?” I said. “About the shack?”
“What do I think?” asked Ka. “I think let’s go.”
“Let’s go?” I said. “But if I show my face there again, Nora will tell her parents about my phone.”
Ka stared at me in disbelief. She waited a few seconds, as if what she had to say was so obvious, she was trying to give my brain a second to get there on its own and save her the effort of explaining. “Nora’s not going to rat you out,” she said. “She’s bluffing. She can’t.”
“She sounded pretty convincing the other night.”
“But if she tells on you, what’s to keep you from telling on her?”
I was starting to see Ka’s point.
“You’re both holding knives to each other’s throats,” she added.
“Isn’t that a little overdramatic?”
“Oh, my God, I can’t wait to check my e-mail!” Ka squealed.
After the picnic, my parents, Gavin, and I were making our way home when I heard footsteps behind us. It was Caleb, running. I assumed he had somewhere he needed to get to fast, so I stepped off the trail to let him pass. I was still so embarrassed about what had happened in the electricity shack, I didn’t want to talk to him. Sort of.
But then he came to a stop where I was standing. “Hey,” he said, brushing his hair off his forehead. I could see the necklace he wore poking up over the buttoned collar of his shirt. “I didn’t realize you were leaving.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I was asleep,” he said.
I said “Yeah” again. I didn’t say how I’d seen him drift off while his sister, Stephanie, was putting tiny braid after tiny braid into his hair or how, after he’d fallen asleep, Stephanie slept too, using his arm as a pillow.
“Why do you have to go so early?” he asked. He still had corn-rows mixed into his hair.
“Jezebel gets really ornery if she isn’t milked right at four thirty,” I explained. I was being funny—I hope he got that—but I was also speaking the truth. If you don’t milk a cow at the same time every day they start to make these funny noises, roll their eyes, paw the barn floor, and generally look angry.
“Good point,” Caleb said. “I mean, think how you’d feel, if no one was letting you pee?”
“It’s not pee.” I laughed. “We’re not drinking her pee.” The second Caleb’s eyes lit up into a smile, I felt my knees melt.
He said, “Look, about the other night. Nora’s not that bad. I know she’s a little rough around the edges, but she’s a good kid.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering why he was defending her to me. Was she his girlfriend? I didn’t have the courage to ask.
“The swimming hole my dad and I have been working on is almost done,” he said. “Maybe you can come out and swim in it with us sometime?”
“Okay,” I said although I didn’t know who “us” was. Him and Nora? Him and his dad—the guy chewing on straw and nodding with a Southern accent? I certainly didn’t want to go swimming with Caleb’s dad, but the idea of hanging out with Nora was worse. Maybe I’d get lucky, and Caleb and I would swim with the Loch Ness monster.
I must have been smiling at my own Loch Ness monster joke, because suddenly Caleb was smiling back at me, looking puzzled but happy. I didn’t know what else to do but keep smiling, and we stood that way until Gavin yelled, “Gen, come on,” and Caleb said, “Swimming, right?” and I turned around and kind of skipped down the path to where my family was waiting.
Week 4 – Sunday
3:45 pm
Skipped? I know. It’s totally embarrassing, and yet it is also true.