Lana went down to the lake by herself. She wasn’t supposed to—her mom had forbidden her to cross the busy road alone, made Lana repeat what she’d said out loud, as if she were an imbecile—but Lana went anyway. She was eight years old. She could cross a stupid road. And Jasper was driving her up the wall. Like all boys her age, at least the ones who weren’t secretly girls, he was boring and annoying and wouldn’t stop spazzing around, as if everything he touched were slingshotting him across the yard. What was wrong with him? With all of them? Talk about elbows or shoulders or belly buttons, and life marched along sensibly enough, but say the word “balls” and they just about wet themselves laughing. If they weren’t giggling about balls, they were shooting themselves with toy guns, making embarrassing pew-pew noises with their mouths.
In truth, Lana felt a little bit sorry for him. She suspected he’d gotten the short end of the stick IQ-wise. The kid could barely even read. It was painful to watch him sound everything out, reminding himself that b’s have bellies and d’s have diapers. She’d had to watch him do this, because Jasper’s father had made him read aloud to everyone at lunch. From Mouse Soup. The poor dingus had actually seemed proud of himself.
This was no fault of Jasper’s mom, who was beautiful and didn’t seem to own shoes and had told Lana in the kitchen that she had “natural presence.”
Lana stared at the luscious water lapping the beach. She was dying to swim, but her mom said she couldn’t go in the lake by herself either, that she had to wait till the grown-ups had cleaned up from lunch. Lana had had a recent revelation about grown-ups. The revelation was that they were actually children. Some nasty trick had been played on them, trapped them in adult bodies, and now they couldn’t get out. Of course they didn’t want you to have fun; they were jealous. Sometimes Lana would catch her mother picking her nose, or popping some Bubble Wrap in the kitchen, but she didn’t know how to free her and turn her back into a girl.
Delicious water! It slurped at the dock, inviting her in. What a waste, to own a beach like this and be too chicken to use it. She almost went in anyway, a quick dip, but it wasn’t worth risking her mother’s wrath.
Lana decided to go back to the house, where everyone surely missed her. Where’s Lana? they were probably saying. We miss her natural presence! She walked back up the boatshed lawn and then ran across the highway and slipped on some gravel that had spilled from a truck and fell down hard in the road, ripping the knee of her jeans. Her hands stung with pain. She looked at her palm: it was raked and bloody, bits of gravel embedded in her skin, like the silver balls on a Christmas cookie.
Tears scratched at her eyes, but she refused to let them out.
As she was raising herself on all fours, getting ready to stand up, a white car cleared the bend ahead of her. Lana froze. The car sped toward her, aiming straight at her face. She couldn’t move or stand or scream. Her brain was jammed, out of service. She closed her eyes just as the tires began to screech. When she opened them again, the car had come to a stop in front of her, calm as a house, the heat from its grill warming her eyeballs. It smelled like burnt carpet. The engine hummed politely, as if waiting for her to crawl out of the way.
A man stared at her from the driver’s seat, gripping his phone with two hands. Lana had heard about cars that could stop themselves. The thing had sensed Lana, down on all fours in the road, and had braked automatically. Had decided, no doubt, she was an animal.
The man—who seemed of all things angry at her, Lana—said something. At least his lips were moving. Ignoring him, Lana stood up and walked toward the house, expecting everyone to run out and greet her, deranged with worry and concern—but the front yard was quiet. No one seemed to have noticed. They were all inside, clearing up from lunch. Lana felt very strange. Everything looked new and cheap and plasticky. Her eyes were like windows she’d only just cleaned. A mosquito landed on her arm, then stabbed around a bit with its tiny straw before flying away unquenched. She felt like an empty milkshake. She told her legs to move, to walk, but it seemed to take longer than usual for them to get the news. She stopped on the first step of the porch, hidden from the grown-ups inside. Rock music—the prehistoric kind, with real live instruments—drifted through the screen door. She heard someone laugh, so loudly it sounded like a recording. “Well, color me impressed,” her father’s voice said.
She wanted to tell her mother that she’d almost died and left the world forever, but her mom would probably scream or something, making the whole thing even more embarrassing than it was. Plus Lana would have to explain what had happened. The only thing more embarrassing than dying was being mistaken for a deer.
Also, she’d get in trouble. Cosmic, teenager trouble. Her mother would never let her do anything again.
Lana wandered around the side of the house to the patch of weedy grass leading to the orchard, hardly noticing where she was going. Jasper was lying in a hammock. The hammock drooped between two pine trees, low enough to the ground that his head brushed the dandelions. She felt certain Jasper would notice the fact that something had happened to her, something vital and important, but he just looked at her the way he had all morning, as if she were more interesting than a grown-up and less interesting than a Mountain Dew. This made her feel even stranger. She thrust her bloody hand in his face.
“I was almost just run over by a car,” she explained.
“Sure, right.”
“It’s true! See, look: my pants are ripped. Didn’t you hear those tires screeching?”
He shrugged.
“I basically just died.”
“You did not basically die,” Jasper said angrily.
Lana, surprised by this outburst, ogled him from above. She vaguely remembered something her mom had told her a while ago, that Jasper had had to go to the emergency room at the hospital for some reason; Lana didn’t remember the details, only that her mother had gotten that weird look she always got when talking about Jasper or his dad, peering behind Lana instead of at her, as if she were watching a movie and Lana was blocking the screen.
Jasper yawned at her, revealing an advent calendar of missing teeth. From above, his face looked especially flat, his slender nose poking out of it like a handle. It looked like you could maybe slide it open and take out a frozen treat. Contemplating it, Lana felt the need to inflate her own value.
“You know my mom and your dad are more than just friends,” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
“They actually got married.”
“Ha ha,” Jasper said. “Very funny.”
“I’m serious. They had a wedding and everything. But then my mom ran away with my dad and left your father bereft.”
“That’s not true.”
“ ‘Bereft’ means ‘lonely and abandoned.’ ”
“You’re making that up.”
“I’m not. He almost drowned himself,” she lied.
“My dad hates drowning. He won’t let me in the boat without a life preserver, even if it’s on the lift.”
“Ask him yourself, if you want.”
Jasper looked at her resentfully, as though wondering whether to believe her or not, then turned his attention to the sky. Lana climbed into the hammock with him, which basically set them on the ground. He lay there stiff as a board, staring at the twiggy tops of the trees while she examined his face. She’d discovered only recently that faces had a way of growing more appealing the longer you looked at them, especially if there weren’t any others around to compete with them. Boys’ faces, she was talking about. Anyway, he let Lana stare at him. It felt like an autopsy.
“Did you know your face kind of looks like a door?”
Jasper scooted a bit farther away from her in the hammock—or tried to. He was both almost her brother and not her brother at all, which made her feel squirmy and amiss, as if she’d put on something backward.
“I just feel kind of weird right now,” she said. “Since I almost died.”
“You were weird before that too.”
Lana ignored this. She reached over and grabbed Jasper’s nose.
“Cut it out!” Jasper said.
“I can’t be the first person to grab your face,” she said, letting go of him. “It was basically designed for it.”
“At least I don’t have a thing on my lip.”
“That’s not a thing. It’s a beauty mark.”
“Looks like a mole,” Jasper said.
“You should look up ‘mole’ in the dictionary. Once you can read.”
“Why are you shivering like that?”
“I don’t know.”
He regarded her suspiciously, then stared back at the treetops. Lana, who really didn’t understand why she was shivering so much, worried that she’d been killed for real on the highway and had actually become a ghost. Why else would that mosquito have rejected her arm? It didn’t help that Jasper found it so easy to ignore her.
“What’s so interesting about those stupid trees anyway?”
“They’re not stupid,” Jasper said. “They’re dying.”
“So what?”
“See all the needles missing up there? They’re being suffocated by pine beetles. We’ll have to chop them down soon.”
“You only know that because your dad told you.”
“I know everything because my dad told me.”
He said this openly, without shame. Lana had to respect this. Maybe he wasn’t as immature as she’d thought. Also, most boys her age didn’t give a flying crap about trees, especially dying ones; definitely they didn’t spend their time gawking at them for no reason.
“Geez, stop shivering, will you? You’re making the whole hammock shake.”
Lana scooched over so that her arm was touching Jasper’s, feeling the warmth of his body. She felt slightly better. She scooched a bit farther, then a bit farther, using him like the warm sand on a beach. The hammock tilted perilously to one side, threatening to dump both of them on the ground and tipping Lana more or less on top of him. But that wasn’t the actual crazy part. The actual crazy part was how she felt being there. It was a little bit like lying on top of herself. He was sort of what could have been her, if Lana’s mom had married the person she was supposed to.
She felt something against her ear, up near Jasper’s collarbone. A lump. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“There’s something beneath your shirt.”
Jasper lay there like Gulliver on the beach, gripping the hammock with two hands. Lana pulled down the neck of his T-shirt and saw the outline of something under his skin, a little bulge with rounded corners, like a cigarette pack rolled up in someone’s sleeve. It was the first interesting thing a boy had ever shown her.
“I like it,” she said.
“You do?”
Lana poked it. Jasper stopped gripping the hammock so hard—or seemed to. There was a scar, pink as an earthworm, above the lump. Lana touched this too.
“It’s a pacemaker,” he said defiantly.
“Will I mess it up?”
“Only if you wave a magnet at it. Or a chain saw. Chain saws make it confused.”
“What disease do you have?”
“It’s not a disease! I can do everything you can.”
“What not-disease do you have?”
“Sick sinus syndrome,” he said, glancing at her. “The nonsurgical kind. It’s extremely rare in children.”
Lana creaked with envy. She asked him what the syndrome felt like, and Jasper told her how he’d started fainting for no reason, like in the middle of recess, then how on the way to school one morning his heart had slowed down so much that it had nearly stopped and his father had had to race him to the ER. So he was a ghost too. Sick-sinus-syndrome, Lana repeated to herself, like a poem or a spell. The sound of it did something to her day. It made her ambitions for it seem kind of pointless. Her dad had promised to take her to the pet store in Kalispell, to get a bearded dragon—she’d been so excited she couldn’t sleep—but now bearded dragons suddenly seemed like a scam. They were lizards that ate cockroaches. She kissed Jasper on the cheek, and then, when that failed to live up to the song in her head, she moved on to his mouth, imagining that she was saving his life. She was giving him CPR. Jasper’s mouth tasted like Mountain Dew and for some weird reason those little tabs they make you bite on at the dentist during an X-ray—Jasper so stiff and motionless it seemed like he really was dead—and it felt to Lana when she closed her eyes like she was falling inside his face, possessing him even, kissing him from within instead of without, as if she’d have a life with this boy who could have been her and another one with everyone else, even though they barely knew each other. She’d had one life up to this point, and now she would have two. Already she knew this life would be long: that they’d see each other next summer, and the next. A woodpecker drummed somewhere nearby—tok-tok-tok-tok-tok—like a clock going at triple speed, and Lana would come to think of this as summertime, or rather summer time, which operated by different rules entirely, so that the days she spent with Jasper at the lake every summer seemed somehow continuous—just seemed to magically pick up again where they’d left off. They moved through Summer Time, in which days were really years.
Lana opened her eyes. They were lying on the ground, between two mossy stumps. There was nowhere to hang the hammock but they’d still ended up here, on their favorite bed of dandelions. Jasper’s braces were barnacled with gunk. A blush of pimples stained one cheek. He had his shirt off, one arm stretched above his head, and you could see the weedy slick of hair in his armpit, giving off a rank new smell. They weren’t supposed to be outside—the Air Quality Index was in the red—but they’d snuck out the back door anyway, eyes stinging so badly they had to squint. Glacier was on fire, as well as part of Jewel Basin. The sun was like a flashlight through a blanket. But they didn’t care. They’d been waiting for this basically all year long. They’d emailed and FaceTimed and even sent each other actual live packages, filled with stupid things meant to remind them of the lake—cherries and Monopoly money, splinters and bug spray and skipping stones—knowing they’d get to see each other in person only once a year, like they had the past five summers. Once a year. For a few days at a time. She thought of Jasper and herself as those pretend cosmonauts, the ones who went into space at light speed and returned to find a world of strangers who’d aged without them. The strangers were themselves, when they weren’t together.
Lana rolled off Jasper and lay beside him in the dandelions. A swirl of tiny umbrellas ascended, Mary Poppins–style, on the breeze. “I wish we had our own house,” she said, staring at the dim bulb of sun. “Then we could visit each other whenever we wanted to.”
“Where?”
She shrugged. In truth, she couldn’t imagine them anywhere but where they were. “Somewhere without smoke.”
“Equatorial Guinea,” he said. “I did a presentation on it in fourth grade.”
Lana took out her phone and googled houses for sale in Equatorial Guinea, keeping it away from Jasper’s pacemaker in case it caused electromagnetic interference. She’d gotten the phone on her thirteenth birthday and was still besotted with it, as if someone had given her one of those magic objects in a children’s book: a knife that cuts through worlds. Still, it seemed ridiculous to think it could do anything to Jasper’s heart. Sometimes she forgot he had a pacemaker at all. The thing was harder to see than it used to be, maybe because he was less skinny—just the back end of it sticking up a bit near his collarbone, like a tiny car sinking into a lake. The scar was less visible too, except when Jasper got too much sun and it turned a kind of beautiful scarlet. Lana found it beautiful, at least. She still liked to touch it, imagining the scar was something she could unzip. She wanted to reach inside of him and grab some deep forbidden prize in her hand. Lana understood this was not a normal thing to want. She understood, too, that it was entirely possible she didn’t want this at all, possible that the scar actually wigged her out a bit, because saying it to herself—I want to reach inside of him—was not necessarily about what she truly wanted but what she wanted to want, or at least wanted the eccentric version of herself who was listening to think she wanted.
“Kiss me, brother dear.”
This was their joke to each other, that they were some kind of pervy siblings. Jasper kissed her on the lips for a while. His tongue was slimy and amphibious, but at least he moved it around now instead of jamming it halfway down her windpipe as if he were getting a throat culture. They’d been kissing every summer since they were eight. It had become a kind of calisthenics. Lana wondered if they’d ever do anything more. She was bleeding again—every month, she prayed she wouldn’t, that it would miraculously skip her the way the angel of death had skipped the Israelites—and could not imagine ever getting used to the strangeness down there or feeling bored enough to allow foreign objects inside what had come to seem more and more to her like a wound. Did anybody want that?
“You’re getting better,” she lied. “Have you been kissing other girls?”
“No.”
“Boys?”
He shook his head.
“I bet the guys in your class are jealous of you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve got a Zephyr 600.”
This was the name of his pacemaker. Jasper looked at her suspiciously. “Why do you always want to talk about that?”
“I don’t.”
“Actually, they make fun of me sometimes. They call me ‘C-3PO.’ Once, I had to be skins in soccer practice and these guys were all like pretending to be robots behind my back.”
Lana frowned. She wished he hadn’t told her that. She felt both closer and less attracted to him at the same time. She had no trouble picturing the boys in her class making fun of him, but she had the idea that people in LA were more enlightened.
“Is it scary?”
“What?”
“Having a pacemaker. Knowing it’s keeping you alive.”
Jasper shrugged. He wouldn’t look at her. Lana had the astonishing impression she was the first person ever to ask him this. Why were the most important questions precisely the ones people never asked?
“I get scared all the time,” she said conversationally. “Sometimes I’m lying in bed, after the lights are out, and I think about what it’s going to be like to be dead. To be nothing. It makes me feel like one of those frogs that hop around even after their heads are crushed.” Just talking about it made her skin ice up.
“You won’t remember what it was like not being nothing.”
“Exactly!”
“It’s stupid to even think about,” Jasper mumbled.
“Tell that to my brain.”
He looked at her finally. He did not wear glasses, but sometimes it seemed as if he’d been wearing some and had just taken them off. “When my heart almost stopped, they put me on pacer pads. In the ICU. They’re like two halves of a bun with you inside it. They jolt you over and over, to keep your heart going.”
“What did it feel like?”
“Imagine you’re a door and someone’s trying to kick you in. As hard as they can.” He looked away again. “I still have nightmares about it.”
“Do you wake up screaming?”
“I wish,” Jasper said. “I can’t even talk.”
Lana had an exotic feeling she identified as shame. She’d never thought about what it would actually be like for your heart to slow down, or to have a syndrome, or to need a pacemaker for the rest of your life. She put her arms around Jasper, not in a kissy way but in the way you might hug someone after a nightmare. He was trembling, which surprised her. It might have been Lana’s imagination. She couldn’t tell where the trembling ended and she began.
She let go of him. Jasper made a cartoony face—a dead one, his head flopped back and his eyes crossed—and Lana laughed. He was the only thirteen-year-old more interesting to her than her own loneliness. She made a dead face back. Jasper made a worse one, a real death-by-Medusa face, and then Lana returned the favor. Why was this a million times better than kissing? She used to think that having a boyfriend was about curing it, your loneliness, because that’s what she’d read in books. But maybe it wasn’t about curing your loneliness. It was about doubling it.
“You’re the only one I ever take my shirt off in front of,” Jasper said. “Except my parents, of course. I mean, to be born with a normal body, and then suddenly not to—to be embarrassed all the time about it. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“Oh yeah?”
Lana stuck her hand into her shorts and underwear, past her pad, then pulled it out again. Her finger was quilled in blood. Jasper looked at her in alarm. She wrote her initials over his heart, the real one, using her own blood. LM. It took a couple attempts. She tried to do one thing every day that nobody had done before, at least in Montana.
Jasper was trembling for real now—with admiration or disgust, Lana couldn’t tell.
“Let’s do something historic,” she whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“Something we’ll talk about when we’re old.”
“I know where my dad keeps all his wine and stuff.”
“Where?”
“In the basement.”
They stood up together and headed back to the house, quick with purpose. Lana had never drunk alcohol intentionally before, though she’d once had some eggnog by accident at a Christmas party and felt a strange giddy supermarket feeling like her mother was looking for her but didn’t know where she was. Jasper was bare-chested, leading the way, sweatshirt tied around his waist. Now that he’d admitted he was ashamed, he seemed to want to prove himself wrong. They walked around the side of the house, where Ziggy, the Margolises’ dog, came bounding up to them, leashed to a fence post. Jasper bent down to quiet him, but the dog seemed mostly interested in the blood on his chest, sniffing hungrily at it, as if he wanted to eat Jasper’s heart.
She followed Jasper around the porch and then through the door to the basement, which was kept perpetually unlocked. Nobody from Montana kept their doors unlocked, but Californians believed they did, which inspired them to buy homes here and leave them open to intruders. Jasper led the way into the dank cavern of the basement, past the sporting-good shelves; past the boiler, where cobwebs drizzled her face; then turned the corner where Lana supposed the wine was kept. Her heart thumped in her chest. Her brain was in constant rebellion, but her heart was still an obedient organ that craved her parents’ approval. It lounged in the prison of their trust. She hoped there were enough bottles that the Margolises wouldn’t notice one was missing.
Jasper stopped suddenly. Some people were there already, blocking the door to the wine closet. Lana’s mom and dad. Except it wasn’t her dad. It was Jasper’s. The two of them were hugging. Lana pulled Jasper behind the boiler, where they could peer around the metal duct without being seen. Her mother and Mr. Margolis just stood there, clutching each other without moving. Her mother’s back was turned but Lana could see Mr. Margolis’s face, which looked new to her, groggy and doll-like, the way people look groggy and doll-like underwater. He was gripping her mother’s shirt—had fistfuls of it in his hands, as if he were holding on for dear life.
Lana and Jasper backed away and then left the basement and ran around the house in the direction they’d come. They didn’t speak or look at each other or in any way acknowledge what they’d seen. Ziggy jumped at Jasper again and tried to lick his chest, but Jasper grabbed the leash and yanked the dog away hard, sending him yelping. Lana followed behind, Mr. Margolis’s face still shining in her brain. It was creepy and ridiculous-looking and his eyes were closed. She hadn’t seen her mom’s face, but Lana was willing to bet it was just as creepy-looking, still as a mannequin’s. That was the worst thing: how still they were. They’d both looked frozen, as if they’d been like that for years and were waiting for someone to unlock a spell.
Lana and Jasper were like that too: under a spell. Years went by, and also no time at all. Their bodies changed when they blinked. At one point the world literally stopped—they didn’t see each other at all that summer, Covid numbers were through the roof—and then it started up again, presto, as if no one had died and nothing especially noteworthy had happened. Lana followed Jasper across the orchard and through the crazy neighbor’s property and then into the forest behind the house, where they weren’t supposed to go even when the air was clear. They weren’t wearing masks. How strange it felt, after wearing one for so long. Strange and erotic. She’d come to think of her face, approvingly, as obscene. To be honest, she’d kind of liked wearing a mask, getting jeered at by maskless men in pickup trucks as they drove down Main Street—baa-aa-aa, they’d bleat at her, to tell her she was a sheep—because it confirmed that Lana was a different species than they were. She didn’t belong in Montana at all. Sometimes she dropped to all fours and baaed back. It wasn’t the mask that bothered them, Lana suspected, but the fact that she was carrying a concealed weapon, one whose value they couldn’t appraise.
Lana spread the velvet blazer she’d been wearing on a patch of fleabane, not too far from some bear scat Jasper hadn’t seemed to notice, and they lay down on top of it. A ridiculous thing to wear to the lake, but she’d wanted to seem new and exciting. Remodeled. Anyway, she was relieved to put it to practical use. Lana hovered over him, mooning him with her face. She could have licked his nose. She had not been this close to anyone for a long time, Jasper or otherwise; it felt like maybe the sexiest thing she’d ever done.
“Sneeze in my face,” she commanded.
“Why?”
“I want you to. We’re vaccinated. Then I’ll sneeze on yours.”
Jasper didn’t seem too crazy about the idea. Nonetheless, she closed her eyes and waited for his sneeze. It was a bit anticlimactic: more wind than rain. Still, it felt like a baptism. To repay the favor, Lana took a deep breath through her nose, cocking it with a fake sneeze, and then something miraculous happened. She sneezed for real. Jasper, on the receiving end, got drenched.
“Hey!” he said, afraid to open his eyes. He looked like he’d just hatched from an egg.
“Do you believe that your face is the Son of God?” Lana intoned. “That it died and was raised back to life?”
“What the fuck,” Jasper said, wiping his face with his T-shirt. “Why do you have to be such a freak?”
He took off his shirt and threw it in the fleabane, as if disgusted by it. He was no longer embarrassed by the scar on his chest and in fact you couldn’t see a bump at all, since he was on a rock climbing team and always working out. This was the excuse he’d given for not texting Lana back sometimes: he was too busy, though when she’d googled his climbing gym in LA it seemed to be closed. Or had been, like everything else. When he wasn’t supposedly climbing, he was writing songs on his acoustic guitar and then posting videos of himself singing them on YouTube. Lana found the songs touchingly bad, filled with dopey platitudes and one-syllable rhymes, like “brain” and “pain.” A lot of them seemed to be about his dad and what an asshole he was. In one video—“Sensory Isolation,” 316 views—he’d played the entire song with a pillowcase over his head, as if about to be executed.
Jasper had smuggled some edibles on the plane from California, and they shared a gummy bear without speaking, Lana decapitating it with her teeth. She was wary about eating too much on an empty stomach. Also, there were strange people in the house, some friends of the Margolises who’d come along with them from LA. The strangers included Mr. Margolis’s new girlfriend, who had adult braces; Lana’s mom had made sure to mention this little detail to Lana, grinning like she’d been popping gummies herself. Her mother always acted kind of moose-tits when her dad was away. If she wasn’t talking about people’s teeth, she was crying over some book she was reading. Lately it was Like Leaves, Like Ashes, which Lana called Like Twigs, Like Acorns because it drove her mom nuts. Last night she’d caught her mother staring at the author’s photo on the book jacket, as if the author, Gail Tippler, were hosting a Zoom.
Jasper seemed sort of distracted, or at least focused on something that wasn’t Lana’s face. To get his attention, she undid the knot of his swim trunks and reached under the waistband and felt him unlatch in her hand. He had hair on his chest, faint vortexes of fur around his nipples. Lana wasn’t sure where the hair had come from—it had just appeared, like a werewolf’s—but she liked it, just as she liked the curdled-mushroom-soup smell coming from his armpits. It didn’t matter if he’d swum all morning or sat around playing those dumb killing games on his phone, the smell would be there, making her a bit crazy. She’d heard about someone who was so poor and hungry he tried to eat his own fingers. She’d been with other people too—okay, two girls, and a boy with death-metal acne—but their smells did not make her want to eat her own hand.
“Do you like that, dear brother?”
“Yes,” he said in his lovely deep voice.
Lana pulled his trunks down and took him into her mouth. She’d watched a number of blow jobs on her phone, but it had not occurred to her a real one would be so dimensional. It was more slobbery than she’d imagined, and closer to throwing up, and though it turned her on somewhat there was also a trace of far-from-home despair she tried to ignore. Jasper groaned and thrust into her. Lana wanted him to feel the best he’d ever felt, and then maybe even better than that. She’d seen a clip on the internet where a guy, a porn star, died while getting a blow job. It had become infamous, at least among her classmates in tenth grade. One of those awful demented clips you vow not to watch and then do. Somehow the guy’s heart had stopped right in the middle of a scene, except the people making the porno didn’t know that. They just thought he was doing some understated blow job acting and kept right on filming. Eventually the woman in the clip—the starlet—realized he was dead and completely wigged out.
Lana let herself imagine what it would be like to make Jasper feel so wonderful that he died. To kill him with pleasure, his Zephyr 600 exploding like a bomb. He’d already had the battery replaced once, which was why his scar looked bigger than it used to.
Afterward, Jasper put his fingers inside her and made her go on a sunken journey. It was like heading deeper and deeper into a fiendish maze, wanting to get lost forever. She bucked against his hand and emerged only when he stopped, his fingers half-broken. At the age of sixteen, he’d already had five girlfriends. He texted Lana about them sometimes from LA. Somehow he’d become cooler, more sexually experienced, than she was.
“Is your dad coming over later?” Jasper asked.
“Nope—just Mrs. Wolverine. He’s in the field.”
He frowned. “I like it better when your dad’s here too.”
“He always does the same thing before he leaves. It’s like a shtick. He winks at me, grandpa-style, and says Be back before you know it.”
“At least he doesn’t sneeze in your face.”
“If you think about it, though, it’s kind of a weird expression. He used to say it in the car too, when I was a little girl. We’ll be home before you know it. It kind of creeped me out. Like he was going to wave a wand and we’d be home somehow, ta-da, before I even realized we were there. But then this one time it actually happened! I must have fallen asleep or something, because I woke up the next day in my bed, poof, like totally astonished to be home.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Lana blushed. What she wanted to say was there was magic in the world, people got sick and died but they felt wonderful sometimes too—that even though she felt bored and lonely a lot of the time, so ugly even the dogs she saw pitied her, she felt astonished sometimes and Jasper made her feel that way too, when he put his fingers inside her. (Just last week, wandering through the park on a windy day, she’d seen a Frisbee fly out of one tree and get stuck in another.) But she got the sense that Jasper didn’t understand her as well as he used to. She’d felt this even before the pandemic: that he didn’t look forward to the lake quite as much. Or maybe it was just his parents’ divorce that had changed things.
“What’s your dad’s new girlfriend like?” Lana asked.
“Horrible.”
“Why?”
“You met her in the house. She’s dumb as a rock. You know that song ‘Beast of Burden’? She thought the lyrics were ‘I’ll never leave your pizza burnin’.’ ”
“A mondegreen,” Lana said.
“What?”
“It’s called a mondegreen. When you mishear a song. Like when people think ‘a girl with kaleidoscope eyes’ is ‘a girl with colitis goes by.’ ”
“Why are you defending her?”
“I’m not!”
“I just don’t see how he can stand her.”
Lana shrugged. “Maybe he likes her breasts.”
Jasper scowled and rolled out from under her. He retied the strings of his swimsuit into a dainty bow. “Is everything just a stupid joke to you?”
Lana’s eyes stung. She hadn’t meant to be funny. It was just a statement of fact. It seemed obvious to her that some men married women because of their breasts, in the same way that swallows chose a mate based on the length of its tail feathers. But she was beginning to realize, more and more, that she couldn’t tell anyone what she really thought. Even Jasper. People didn’t really want the truth. Especially boys. They wanted to be agreed with, or soothed, or made to feel like folkloric beasts, dangerous but adored.
“Anyway, he’s more interested in her face,” Jasper said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you notice how much Becky looks like your mom?” He eyed her almost accusingly.
Lana laughed. “She does not!”
“She’s even got that stupid dimple thing on her chin.”
He made a face, as if he’d eaten something gross but didn’t know where to spit it out. The truth was, Lana had noticed the resemblance herself, at lunch, though she hadn’t fully processed it at the time. Their coloring was different—Mr. Margolis’s girlfriend had freckles on her shoulders—but they had the same build and the same Sharpie-thick eyebrows and, yep, now that she thought about it, the same stupid dimple on their chins. Lana had always been glad to have her father’s chin, but now she wondered if she was somehow missing out.
She picked a burr from Jasper’s trunks. They’d never talked about what they’d seen in the basement that one time. Not even once. Sometimes Lana wondered if it had actually been a dream. But clearly it had not been a dream to Jasper; it was as real as her mother’s face.
“Anyway, my dad’s a fuckhead,” Jasper said. “They deserve each other.”
“He seems so…”
“Nice?”
Lana nodded. She was going to say “shipwrecked.”
“Ha. Tell that to my friends in LA.” Jasper glanced toward the house. “I snuck out one time during Covid, when we were supposed to be sheltering in place. Met up with some friends on the beach to do acid. My mom called my dad, and he went completely apeshit. Drove out to Hermosa Beach in his scrubs and found us. Told everybody I had a pacemaker, that they were endangering my life. Imagine tripping your balls off, it’s a deserted beach, and someone in a face shield starts yelling at you—a face shield and goggles—calling you a murderer.” He pulled another gummy from the pocket of his trunks and popped the whole thing in his mouth. “None of my friends’ parents even cared that much.”
Lana thought: But none of your friends have a Zephyr 600. Your dad was just scared. Also: acid? Also: Do you really need another gummy bear? Aren’t I stimulating enough?
“Did he know you were on drugs?”
“On drugs?” Jasper said, laughing. “What are you? A public service announcement?”
Lana flushed with shame. Who was this person, whose penis she’d just had in her mouth? The far-from-home feeling she’d had earlier, its nip of forlornness, had spread into her limbs.
“What’s the matter?” Jasper asked, staring at her. “Are you stoned?”
“I’m just feeling some hiraeth.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s Welsh. For a particular kind of feeling. There’s no word for it in English.”
He snorted. “Come on. There’s a word for every feeling.”
This was such a profound misunderstanding of the human condition that Lana was taken aback. Speechless, really. In fact, her speechlessness—tinged with the peculiar kind of sadness she used to feel as a girl, watching a helium balloon disappear into the sky—had no real translation. Hiraeth, she thought. Fiddelsküt etch-wilder schadensplat.
“Think we’ll still be doing this when we’re seventy?” she asked, trying to blunt the feeling.
“Doing what?”
“Meeting once a year. Fooling around.”
Jasper shrugged. “We won’t be vacationing in this dump.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll be famous.”
Lana laughed, thinking this was a joke—but Jasper seemed to be serious. “What kind of famous?” she asked.
“You know how Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize?”
“Ha ha. Good one.”
“It’s true!” Jasper said. “I’m going to be the next singer-songwriter to get one.”
Lana, who had only a vague idea who Bob Dylan was, stifled another laugh. Jasper rolled away from her and lay on his back, scowling at a tree branch wagging in the breeze, as if it were a hand he refused to shake.
“What’s your dad think of your videos?” Lana said.
“Are you kidding? I don’t even show them to Téa.”
“I wonder what we’ll look like when we’re old,” she said, changing the subject.
Lana opened the AgeUp app on her phone and took a selfie, then selected the year 2080. She tapped the little twinkling wand and…presto! A gray, wrinkled woman. She shook the phone and it switched between the two Lanas: old and young, young and old. Her stomach lurched a bit every time. Lana never got tired of this; in fact, she was a little bit addicted to it. Her phone was crammed with pictures of herself at various ages, as if she’d lived a full life already and were merely retracing its steps.
She studied her seventy-four-year-old face, its gray mutant eyebrows and lopsided smile. Maybe she looked more like her mother than she realized.
She scooched back and took a picture of Jasper, whose face looked less doorlike than she remembered, as unremarkable as a regular boy’s. Like she couldn’t open it even if she tried. Lana selected 2080, feeling strangely gun-shy, and then tapped the magic wand. The screen froze. Went completely black for a second or two before the whole app crashed.
“It doesn’t like you,” she said, laughing. She reopened AgeUp to try again.
“Don’t.”
“It’s just a game. To see what we’ll look like.”
“I said cut it out!”
Jasper snatched the phone away from her hands and tossed it in the weeds. He refused to look at her. What the hell was his problem? Lana lay there on the ground, stranded between her two favorite things on earth. She was about to crawl over and retrieve the phone when something snapped nearby.
“Who’s there?”
She sat up. Jasper did too. Was it one of her Older Selves? Lana felt their presence sometimes, come to check up on her. Sure enough, somebody giggled.
“Hey!” Jasper said. “Come out of there.”
Téa emerged from behind some stinging nettles, smiling innocently at Jasper. From behind her crept Pranavi, the girl who’d come along with her on vacation. They were supposedly best friends. Pranavi was wearing ballet flats and some kind of beaded, pint-sized dress she must have filched from a costume department. Also, bohemian feather earrings. Also—was it possible—lipstick?
“Were you spying on us?” Lana said furiously.
“Only for a second.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing!”
This had to be true. They were too young to be perverts, though Pranavi, staring at the shirtless Jasper, looked like she’d been clunked on the head with a brick. Clearly she had a crush on him; hence the evening wear. Somehow he’d gone from being a reject-droid on the soccer field to being some kind of sex object—at least to eleven-year-olds.
“Hello, my little wild prawn,” Jasper said to Pranavi. He made no effort to put on his shirt. In fact, he had a funny sort of look on his face, as if he’d only just noticed her for the first time and was imagining what she might look like in four or five years. Lana, who tended to believe that other people’s lives resumed only when she entered them, the way you might flick on a TV, realized she’d stepped into a drama that had already been happening, while the TV was off. It was Pranavi’s parents who were in the house; the two families had traveled here together.
“Dad and Becky had a fight,” Téa said. “She threw a gin and tonic at him.”
Jasper grinned. “What were they fighting about?”
“Becky thinks we’re spoiled. We never put anything away and she stepped on a little Battleship boat.”
Jasper’s face hardened. It was like he was trying to turn himself into a horse, beginning with his nostrils.
“She made us stare at her foot,” Téa said, “where it broke the skin. She’s got plantar warts.”
“My mom had athlete’s face once,” Lana said, because no one was paying attention to her.
Jasper turned on her. “Not everything’s about your stupid mother, okay?”
Lana stared at him. She thought maybe he was kidding. Was he kidding?
“She also threatened to take away my phone,” Téa said. “We’re not supposed to use devices in Montana. Devices are reprogramming our brains. Are we using the device, or is the device using us?”
“What did you do?”
“I said she was using a rhetorical device, which was strictly verboten.”
Jasper laughed, shedding his horse face. Who was this girl? His actual brainy sister, which ruined everything. Probably she’d just learned about rhetorical devices in school; she’d been waiting to use that line for weeks.
Lana began to feel a larger threat at work, a mobilization of forces. She touched Jasper’s leg, proprietarily, but he stiffened in a way that made her pull her hand back. Something got in her eye. A bug maybe. How was it that one minute you were giving someone a blow job and the next minute you couldn’t even imagine holding their hand, so faraway did they seem? You might as well cross the isle of death.
“Also, we stole Becky’s phone,” Téa said. She pulled an iPhone from the pocket of her jeans and showed it to them.
“Holy shit,” Jasper whispered, as if it were the Crown of Lombardy. Printed on the back of the case, in Edwardian-looking font, were the words Girl Boss. “How did you get it?”
“It was locked in Dad’s bedroom, right next to Dad’s. Did you even know the door locked? I climbed the extension ladder and got in through the window.”
“If only we knew the password,” Jasper said.
“Try Dad’s,” Téa said. “It’s our street address.”
“They’re not going to have the same one!” Lana said with disgust.
“I know the password,” Pranavi said in a too-loud voice. It was the first time Lana had heard her speak.
“You?”
“She let me use her phone on the plane.”
“Wild Prawn,” Jasper said, smiling in a way that showed off his expensive teeth. He reserved them for special occasions, like a flasher. “Have I told you how wonderful you are?”
Pranavi blushed through her ridiculous makeup. She told Jasper the password, and he opened Becky’s phone with a flourish. “We’re in,” he said in a movie voice, and Pranavi giggled. Lana stewed while they discussed various modes of sabotage. She suggested programming a new passcode so Becky couldn’t use her phone. Téa said that was useless; Becky could just erase her phone and make a new one. Jasper nodded, as if the opinion of an eleven-year-old were superior to her own. Lana was beginning to feel like she had when she was eight, after almost getting hit by a car. Like she’d turned into a ghost.
She scowled at Téa, who had Jasper’s thin-nosed face but none of its attendant beauty. The girl looked even plainer standing next to Pranavi. Lana hated them both. Especially Pranavi, whose red lips looked like those wax ones you could eat. Her dress was sliding down one arm, probably because there was nothing happening body-wise to keep it up.
“Let’s send a greeting to Charlie Margolis,” Jasper said, opening Becky’s messages. He tapped on his father’s name. “What’s the worst thing you can text somebody?”
“That you’re dumping them,” Téa said.
“How about ‘I’ve got AIDS’?” Pranavi said.
Lana regarded her gravely. “Do you know how many people have died of AIDS?”
“She’s just joking,” Jasper said.
“What about Covid? Or brain cancer? Is that funny too? Because my grandmother died of that before I was born.”
“Everything isn’t always about you,” Jasper said, his eyes like cuts. “Why don’t you go inside and wait for your mom?”
Lana gawked at him, speechless. Was he really sending her into the house? Throwing her into the weeds like her phone? She turned to Pranavi, baby skank, who glanced away quickly. Jesus, was there sympathy on her face?
“It’s got to be believable,” Jasper said, returning to Becky’s phone. “Not too extreme. Like something that will make her look cringey.”
“I know a cringey song,” Lana said quietly.
She snatched the phone from Jasper and looked up his YouTube video, the one with the pillowcase over his head. Jasper was too surprised to react. Lana turned up the volume, then held the phone at arm’s length for Téa and Pranavi to see. It was even worse than she remembered. Jasper sat on a chair in an army jacket, strumming a slightly out-of-tune guitar, the corners of the pillowcase poking from the top of his head like the ears of a Chihuahua. I scream but nobody can hear me, he sang. Everything inside me comes out queerly. It was like a mondegreen, but on purpose.
“Oh my god,” Téa said. “Is this a joke?”
Pranavi giggled. “Is he talking about his poop?”
“Maybe if he took the sack off his head, people could hear him better.”
The chorus arrived—Command me, reprimand me / Just don’t seek to understand me—and the girls clutched at their hearts. Téa pretended to shoot herself in the head.
Meanwhile, Jasper had gone perfectly still, as if an insect were crawling on his face. Or rather: like his own face was an insect. He didn’t want to awaken it. Téa, noticing him for the first time, must have put two and two together, because she froze and went insect-faced as well and looked at the ground. Pranavi—still grinning, lipstick smeared across her teeth—dropped her hand from her chest.
Lana stopped the video and stuck the phone in her pocket, even though it was Becky’s. No one seemed to mind. She felt very strange, inside out, as if her heart were beating into a microphone and everyone could hear it. Jasper retrieved his shirt from the fleabane and put it on, refusing to look at her. Lana picked up her velvet blazer, which was warm from his body. It smelled like sperm and BO. No one met her eye, not even Pranavi, and yet Lana had the Instagram-y feeling of being watched, as if the woods were crawling with people. Her Older Selves. They’d escaped from her phone all at once. She would live this moment again and again; it would never be over; she would return to it throughout her life.
The sprinklers in the orchard switched on, abracadabra, because they did that.
Lana headed through the orchard, trying not to get soaked. She didn’t know what she was going to do—only that the phone in her pocket didn’t belong to her. She would put it back where it belonged. If she did that, if she restored it to its rightful place, somehow everything would go back to how it was. Jasper would adore her again. Out on the lake a speedboat buzzed past the dock, towing a water-skier who was struggling to get up on his skis, dragging his ass across the lake. He looked like a dog with worms. What might have struck her as funny yesterday, or even an hour ago, seemed as repellent as she was.
Voices drifted from the porch, the loudmouth laughter of grown-ups who’d been drinking. She hurried around the side of the house, skirting the compost, then stopped at the ladder still leaning against the second-story window. Lana looked at it grimly. She had her mother’s fear of heights. Someone shouted her name from the orchard. Jasper. His voice sounded funny, both loud and not loud, as if he’d swallowed something harsh.
Lana mounted the ladder and began to climb. She’d never been on anything higher than a stepstool before. The ladder shifted under her, as if it wasn’t anchored to the ground—which, being a ladder, it wasn’t. Lana tried not to think about this, or about the fact that she was basically climbing the wall of the house, if the wall were balanced on two feet and doing yoga. A mosquito whined in her ear. Lana let go of a rung to wave the thing away and the ladder tipped toward her, leaving its point of contact with the roof.
It stood there straight as a pole. Balanced on nothing. Lana held her breath, afraid to disrupt the miracle. She couldn’t look down. The ladder wobbled, tilting one way and then the other, as if trying to make up its mind. Clutching the rails of the ladder for dear life, she looked down at last.
Someone was moving it. Jasper. He held her straight up in the air, gripping the ladder with two hands, as if he might shake her down. Though of course he wouldn’t. Would he? She felt suddenly unsure. His face was red, splotchy, contorted by the stiff cords of his neck. He looked like a stranger. And yet he wasn’t a stranger. He was her summer ghost-brother, who’d told her about his nightmares and once trembled in her arms. She knew things about him no one else did: that electric fences terrified him, that he liked breaking the smooth top inside a new jar of peanut butter, that once on a school camping trip he’d jerked off into an empty bag of Cheetos.
She wanted to make a face at him, a cartoony dead one, but he was too far away. Did he even remember doing that together? Whatever was wrong with him seemed bigger than Lana, a whole lot bigger, immeasurably big.
Lana closed her eyes, awaiting her fate. Uneventfully, the ladder tilted back to the house.
Jasper called to her, his voice softer now, but she climbed into the room where Mr. Margolis and Becky slept, pulling herself through the window by walking on her hands. Lana rose to her feet, shakily, then closed the window and locked it, afraid Jasper might follow her up the ladder. She’d been in this room several times before, back when Mr. and Mrs. Margolis were still together, and it had always looked like the rest of the house: appealingly ransacked. Now it looked like a B & B. The comforter was tucked under the mattress of the bed, as if ready for inspection; on the dresser, piles of neatly folded sweaters had been sorted by color. Rather than stinking of mothballs, the place smelled “April fresh,” like the restroom of a dentist’s office. Through the air vent in the floor, Lana could hear Pranavi’s mom talking about someone’s girlfriend, who was in a “nude skydiving club.”
Something rattled outside—the ladder?—but she didn’t go to the window to check.
Mr. Margolis’s phone was sitting beside a glass of water on the bedside table. At least Lana assumed it was his. She set Becky’s phone carefully beside it. Mr. and Mrs. Phone. They were back where they belonged. Lana felt a surge of relief that surprised her. It occurred to her, maybe, that climbing up here and returning the phone wasn’t only about Jasper. There was the song of your life and then there was the mondegreen of it, politely known as adulthood.
She sat on the Margolises’ bed, suddenly exhausted. How weird life was. Weird and sad and schadensplat. Trees played catch.
She was maybe feeling the gummy more than she’d thought.
Mr. Margolis’s phone buzzed. She thought about looking at it—what had Téa said? That his password was their address—but resisted the temptation.
There was a noise outside, like a pebble hitting glass. Lana returned to the window. The ladder was gone, removed entirely from sight; in its place stood Pranavi, half-soaked from the sprinklers, staring up at Lana from the dappled shade of a pine tree. In her hand was a cell phone: Lana’s own, which she’d left in the weeds. Pranavi proffered it in the air. How small she looked from the window! Just a little girl, wishing desperately to be older. Her feathered earrings flickered in the breeze. Lana wanted to comfort her, to ask why she was in such a rush to grow up—because it would happen, ta-da, before she knew it.