“Oh...”
They were powerless. There was nothing they could do. They were kids.
Her parents had her ask her art teacher about summer programs. The teacher was not very enthusiastic about her abilities. She could draw meticulously, but apparently she didn’t have “original vision” or “her own voice.” Caitlin wondered if he would have thought that if she had continued to wear black and eat lunch alone.
She should, he suggested, aim for a career as a commercial graphic artist. She knew that he intended it as a putdown, but after she had read about that kind of work, she decided that it sounded pretty awesome.
The photography course the teacher recommended was full, so she signed up for a class about computer programming because the description had the word “graphic” in it. She couldn’t imagine herself being interested in computer programming, but at least she got a cell phone out of her parents feeling bad.
The class was clearly a summer camp for nerds. There were no other girls. Not one. Caitlin did not understand a single word of what the teacher said in the first hour. After he assigned them to individual computer stations, he came over to Caitlin. He squatted down next to her, his hand on the edge of her desk. “Your paperwork says that your art teacher recommended you?”
Caitlin glanced down at his hand. She wished that he would move it. “Yes, sir.”
“Well, if you find this is not the right class, you have a week to withdraw and get your fee back.”
“Yes, sir.”
Withdraw? Give up?
I’m not my sister. And she wasn’t thinking about the pregnant Trina, the depressed teen mom, but Trina as she had been before, the pretty one, the happy one, the B student who expected, who needed, everything to come easily.
Caitlin was not a quitter. She was so not a quitter. The first few days were unbelievably hard. Her dad thought he might be able to help her, but he was even more lost than she was. So she focused on the vocabulary, trying to understand the words that everyone was slinging around. Then there was some grunt memory work. She could do that, but there was so much that she simply didn’t understand.
She wasn’t about to ask the teacher for help. He would just suggest that she withdraw. There were two guys in the course who were better than the rest of them. One was an arrogant preppy type. Caitlin hated him. He was a Seth-gone-wrong, too big, too bold, too bright, a Seth who didn’t give a shit about anyone else as long as they were watching him. The other guy was East Asian Indian, slender and quiet, nothing like Seth except that he was willing to explain the stuff he was good at. She chose him.
They did their final project together at the end of the session, and it was the best in the class. Of course, the teacher assumed that Dev had done it all, and while he had done the trickiest programming parts, the design had all been Caitlin’s. Commercial graphic art might be the thing for her.
There would still be three weeks left to the summer after nerd camp was over. Her parents asked her if she would like to spend two of them in North Carolina.
“Yes, yes, of course. That would be great.”
“We haven’t forgotten how generous you were to offer to help with Dylan. We think Trina needs it.”
So the big experiment had failed, and now Caitlin the babysitter was going to the rescue. Oh well, if it got her down there to see Seth...
She flew to Charlotte and then took a bus the rest of the way across the state. MeeMaw had some kind of committee meeting, so Trina and Dylan came to the bus station to pick her up.
“You know why you’re here, don’t you?” Trina asked as soon as Dylan was back in his car seat.
Caitlin fastened her seat belt. “To help with Dylan.”
Trina nodded. “MeeMaw wanted to send me home. I’m just no good with him. Now that he’s crawling, you have to watch him all the time. He doesn’t want to be in the stroller so I can’t even take him for a walk. I’m sixteen and I feel like my life is over.”
Trina had been saying that ever since she found out that she was pregnant. “What did you do all summer?” Caitlin asked. “Did you make friends?”
“Who is going to be interested in me?”
Caitlin might be really sick of hearing Trina whine about how her life was over, but sometimes she would remember what her sister had been like before, glowing, gorgeous, and graceful. Caitlin might have resented all that glowing gorgeousness, but she didn’t want to see her like this. Then they turned the corner, and on MeeMaw’s front walk she could see Seth’s bike, a skateboard tied to the little rack, and sitting on the front steps, a backpack at his feet, was Seth himself.
She was out of the car before Trina had turned off the engine, dashing up the sidewalk. Seth was coming toward her, and she threw herself at him, hugging him just as she had hugged Dev a few days before.
But he wasn’t Dev. He was nothing like Dev. She pulled back. “You’ve gotten so tall.”
“I grew five inches. It was a bitch. My center of gravity changed every week.”
It was so strange standing next to him having to look up. She almost felt a little awkward.
“Come get your suitcase,” her sister called out. “I want to lock up the car.”
“Oh, right.” She started back to the car.
“I’ll get it,” Seth said.
And that was weird too. She could carry her own suitcase. She had gotten herself from the airport to the bus station. But he was already at the car, lifting it out of the trunk with one hand, slamming the lid with the other.
Trina and Dylan were in the room she had had last summer, so she was in a smaller room at the other end of hall. That was fine with her.
“Do you want to unpack or something?” Seth asked after he put her suitcase on the bed.
“No. Let me just get out my skateboard. I took the wheels off, so we will have to put them back on, and then let’s go.”
She handed Seth the sweatshirt-swaddled board while she fished around the suitcase for the wheels.
“You’ve used this a lot,” he said once he had unwrapped the board.
“I love it. I would have been lost this year without it. It’s how I got every place on our side of town.”
“Are you going to the skate park?” Trina was at the door, Dylan on her hip. “I would like to come.”
“Ah...” Caitlin did not want Trina to come. “We were going to bike over.”
“I can drive us. I just have to change Dylan and fix a bottle.”
Caitlin knew that that could take forever. “How about if we meet you there?”
Out in the garage Seth pumped up the tires of the bike while she put the wheels back on her board and blew the dust off the bike helmet. “I’m sorry about my sister,” she said. “I guess she’s had a pretty crappy summer. I may be babysitting a fair amount.”
“That’s okay. I’ll babysit with you. “
There was a new sign hung along the skateboard park’s fence, advertising Seth’s family’s business. The logo had “STREET BOARDS” in clean black type—Helvetica, Caitlin now knew that it was—but then inserted in red between the two words was a caret and “& Snow.” The red letters looked like graffiti, as if someone had whipped it onto the logo with a can of spray paint.
Caitlin stopped in front of it. “Oh my God, that is so awesome. I love it.”
“So do I. It was my mom’s idea, but it took her forever to get the graphic artist to understand what she wanted.”
“They