“OKAY, MEL, YOUR TURN. ‘What gooey toy was sold in a plastic egg?’”
“Oh, easy,” Mel replied. “Silly Putty. We used to have some. Remember, Dee? But Mom and Dad made us throw it out after we left it on the chair in the living room and Dad sat on it and ruined his plaid bathrobe.”
Dee and Jeanmarie laughed. “You’re on a roll, kid,” said Dee. “Go again.”
Mel rolled the dice and moved her piece around the Trivia Chase board. “All right.” She sighed. “This is for a piece of the pie. Hit me with an arts and literature question.”
Jeanmarie withdrew a card from one of the boxes. “‘Who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame?’”
“Oh, thank goodness. Another easy one. Victor Hugo.”
Jeanmarie turned the card over and checked the answer. “She’s right!” she said to Dee. “How does she know all this stuff?”
“All she does is read.”
Mel rolled again. “All right. I just need the geography piece and my pie will be full.”
Mel was ahead of both older girls, which pleased her, but, quite truthfully, she was bored. And anxious. It was Tuesday afternoon. It had been raining since Monday morning, and Lacey hadn’t spoken to Mel since Sunday evening. Mel was glad for the company of Dee and Jeanmarie, but she missed Lacey, and Justin as well. Besides, she felt as if she’d been playing Trivia Chase for two solid years, instead of just off and on for two days.
When Mel finally missed a question, she leaned back against the sofa and closed her eyes.
“Everything all right?” her sister asked.
“I guess.”
“We know you and Lacey had a fight,” said Jeanmarie. “Lacey can be pretty stubborn. Just ignore her. She’ll come to her senses.”
“It’s hard to ignore her. She’s my best friend.”
“Well,” said Dee, “things always work out.”
“No, they don’t,” replied Mel soberly. “They really don’t. Not always. People have fights and never make up. People move away and say, ‘I’ll write,’ and never do. People go away and say, ‘I’ll come back,’ and never do.”
“Those are cheery thoughts,” said Dee.
Mel sighed. “I think I’ll take a walk.”
“Oh, come on. It’s pouring out there. At least finish the game. I’m about to catch up with you.” Dee rolled the dice gleefully.
So Mel finished the game, beating Dee and Jeanmarie, and then put on her slicker and headed to the beach for a barefoot, misty walk. She reached the dunes, turned right, and trudged through the damp sand, the wind and spray in her face, the cold gray water biting her feet.
Words were funny, she thought. If the weather were nice and the ocean blue, she would probably imagine that the water was kissing her feet, not biting them.
She walked alone along the water’s edge until she realized she was standing opposite Justin’s house. She could barely see it through the mist and rain, but there it was. For some reason, Mel felt comforted by the sight of it, even though she knew Justin wasn’t in it.
She stared at it for several moments, jumping slightly when a light was switched on in a second-story room. Then she turned and walked back to Moonrise House.
Trivia Chase was still going on. Dee and Jeanmarie had been joined by Timmy, Jackie, Mrs. Braderman, and Mrs. Reeder. They were playing on teams, the Bradermans versus the Reeders.
“Come on and join us, honey,” Mel’s mother said as Mel hung up her dripping coat.
“Thanks, Mom, but then your teams would be uneven.”
“Well, go get Lacey,” suggested Mrs. Reeder. “She’s been moping around since the rain started.”
Mel shook her head. “No, thanks. I think I’ll do some writing.”
She saw her mother and Mrs. Reeder exchange knowing looks as she headed for the bedroom.
Once in the bedroom, Mel picked up her journal and decided to write some poetry. She turned to a blank page, put the end of her pen in her mouth, and sat thoughtfully. After several minutes she wrote:
Blackbird, fly away.
Then she crossed it out.
She wrote:
Violet petals on the wind.
She crossed that out, too.
She wrote:
Good-bye, Lacey.
Good-bye, Fire Island.
That was very depressing, but she didn’t cross it out. Instead, she closed her journal with a snap, lay down on her bed, fell sound asleep, and dreamed one of the oddest dreams she could remember having.
In the beginning of the dream, she was walking along the beach in the mist, the water biting her toes. Only it actually hurt, and after a while, Mel realized she ought to stay away from it. She kept moving farther and farther back toward the dunes, but the water drew farther and farther up as the tide came in.
“Stay away!” Mel cried.
The biting water turned into thousands of pairs of chattering teeth, the kind sold in joke shops. The teeth had minds of their own, and clickety-clacked after her as she ran up a flight of wooden steps and along a boardwalk. She had to find Justin, and she ran right to his house, but when she reached the back door, she realized it was Starfish House instead. Lacey slammed the door in Mel’s face.
“Let me in!” shouted Mel. “Let me in!”
Something was shaking her shoulder. Oh, no, Mel thought. What now? What’s behind me? “Go away!”
“It’s dinnertime.”
“Go away!”
“Mel, come on. Dinner.”
Mel woke up with a start to find Dee bending over her. “Come on,” she said again. “It’s six-thirty. You’ve been asleep for two hours.”
Mel groaned. “I don’t feel well. I’m not hungry.”
She slept fitfully that night, but by the next morning seemed to have recovered.
So had the weather.
Mel awoke to a clear, cloudless, brilliantly sunny sky. She raced to the beach and spent the better part of the day there.
Lacey studiously ignored her all morning and afternoon, but that evening she came over to Moonrise House just as Mel was heading out for the ice-cream stand.
Mel couldn’t imagine why she had come over. “Jackie’s not here,” she said. “He and Timmy went to the bay.”
Lacey looked at the ground. “I didn’t come for Jackie. I came to see you.”
“Me? The summer spoilsport? The one who’s using you?”
“Mel, I came to apologize. I’m really sorry I said all those things. I didn’t mean them. Well, maybe I thought I did at the time, but I didn’t really. I mean…Oh, you know what I mean. I’m sorry.”
Mel smiled. “Want to go get ice cream?”
Lacey pulled a dollar bill out of the pocket of her sweat pants. “I was hoping you’d ask. I came prepared.”
The girls bought their cones at the stand, then walked out to the end of one of the docks in the bay. It was the same dock where Justin had found Mel four nights earlier, but Mel didn’t tell Lacey that.
They sat on the end, their feet hanging over the side, and licked at their cones. “You know what’s funny?” said Mel. “I’m fourteen and you’re fourteen, but you’ve always seemed older than me. More sophisticated, I guess. You look older, too.”
“So?” Lacey prompted her.
“So isn’t it funny that I’d be the first one of us to find a boyfr—a boy I like?”
Lacey looked at her wavery reflection in the lapping water. “Yeah.”
“Have you ever liked a boy?” asked Mel.
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know?”
Lacey shrugged. “I just don’t know.”
“Well, have you ever been interested in a boy?”
“I don’t really want to talk about this, okay?”
Mel took a long look at Lacey, who sat with her head bent, toying with the remainder of her ice-cream cone. “Hey, Lacey, you’re not afraid of boys, are you?”
Another shrug. “It’s not so much that I’m afraid of them. It’s more that I’m afraid they won’t like me.”
“How could anyone not like you?”
“Oh, Mel, that is such a mother thing to say. Talk to me as a friend, not as a mother. One mother is enough. You know perfectly well how someone could not like me.”
“But you’re so sophisticated. I mean, you dress the same way in New York that you do here, don’t you? And I just wear jeans and sweats and stuff, and Justin likes me.
“Somehow I think there’s more to it than that. You know how to talk to people, which I guess includes boy-people. And I don’t…Do you think Justin is going to change us?”
“Change you and me?” asked Mel. “Well—”
“I mean, boys were bound to come up sometime. And I suppose one of us was bound to be ready for them before the other one…”
“It’s not easy,” said Mel slowly. “And I guess maybe Justin—or whoever—will change things between us. But we’ll always be friends, won’t we?”
“Oh, I hope so,” Lacey said, finally turning to look at Mel. “I hope so.”