Seth was staring at her.
She dropped her hands. “Some of us do go to school, you know.”
She had told him that she wouldn’t have room in her suitcase for pads. One of his sisters had dropped off a set the day before. He went behind the counter and got them, coming out with a new skateboard as well.
“I told my dad that you were focusing on footwork. He said that you should try this board. You can keep it if you like it.”
Caitlin hadn’t realized how scuffed, even nicked, her old board was until she looked at this sleek one with the wonderful Street & Snow Boards logo.
She couldn’t wait to try it. She pulled the pads on and tightened the strap on her helmet. “Now you have to tell me everything I am doing wrong. I want to get better.”
It had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t be a great teacher. He would tell her to change something, and of course she would mess up at first because she would be concentrating so hard on the new thing that she would do everything else wrong, but then suddenly everything would feel right and he would be clapping and laughing. It was wonderful, and it seemed impossible to imagine that they hadn’t seen each other in a year.
Then Trina showed up.
She took Caitlin’s pads and helmet, and Seth had to show her the basics while Caitlin sat with Dylan. It was no fun.
Trina didn’t want Caitlin to babysit. She didn’t have any place to go. She wanted to tag along with Caitlin and Seth. It was almost as if she were the bratty little sister. Caitlin did put her foot down about one thing. Trina could come to the skate park with them—it was a public place—but she could not ask Seth to teach her. It wasn’t fair to him. If Trina wanted to learn, she should go to the park on her own, rent equipment, and pay for lessons. Caitlin would stay home with Dylan.
So Trina stopped trying to learn, but she still came to the park. She didn’t have anything else to do. If Caitlin and Seth were biking out to the lake, she would drive and meet them there. In the evenings she would try to get them to stay home and watch a movie with her.
The only time she couldn’t try to join them was when Seth’s mother invited Caitlin to supper. But then, of course, they were with his family. They were almost never alone. And there didn’t seem to be much they could do about it. They were kids.
One night toward the end of her stay she had stayed at the Streets’ until after dark, and she didn’t have lights on her bike. Seth loaded the bike into his mother’s station wagon, and the two of them sat on the old swing set, waiting for his sister to drive Caitlin home. The lights from the kitchen windows etched white bars on the dark grass, but if Caitlin turned her head, she could see the fireflies flitting near the bushes.
“What’s the strangest thing that happened to you this year?” Seth asked.
She had been turning around in her swing, letting the chains twist overhead. She dug a heel into the ground to hold still. “I suppose deciding to be the tragic art student.” But he knew all about that. “What about you?” He would have asked the question for a reason.
“I had sex.”
“What?” She must have lifted her foot because suddenly the swing was whipping her around, house, bushes, garage, house, bushes, garage. Even when the chains had untwisted, the swing kept going, the chains wrapping around each other in the other direction. She had to put both feet on the ground. “With who? Why?”
“Why did I have sex? Why do you think? Because I could.”
“You have a girlfriend? Why haven’t you said anything about her?”
Seth with a girlfriend? She didn’t like that. And him having sex, him taking his pants...she didn’t want to think about it. Not at all. No.
“She wasn’t really my girlfriend.”
In fact, she wasn’t even a girl; she was in her early twenties, one of the established pros. Apparently she and one of her girlfriends had been joking about his friend Nate and him, and it wasn’t quite a bet, maybe more like they dared each other. “It wasn’t romantic or anything. Some people were hanging out in one of the condos, and she grabbed my hand and took me into one of the bedrooms.”
Caitlin didn’t want to hear about this. “At least I hope you were smart about things.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You didn’t use a condom?” Caitlin stood up from the swing. “Seth, are you kidding? Don’t—”
“Don’t I know about your sister? Yes, I do. I didn’t think about it. But apparently she told some other people about it afterward, and one of older guys came and talked to me, saying that she knew that she was okay, on the pill, and tested for stuff, but that I shouldn’t assume that that was always true.”
“You were really stupid.”
“I know that, and it wasn’t much fun having everyone know about it either. “
He clearly wanted to—well, confess or something like that. It had been a crappy experience for him, but she couldn’t listen. It was all too... What had actually happened? Had they undressed all the way? No, why was she thinking that way? She didn’t want to know.
Her phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her pocket. It was Trina. She didn’t always answer her sister’s calls, but anything was better than sitting here trying not to look at Seth’s crotch.
Dylan was asleep, and MeeMaw was home. Trina could come over and pick Caitlin up. Then they could go to the Dairy Queen or something.
“I’ve got my bike,” Caitlin told her, something that Trina knew perfectly well. “It’s too hard to fit it into your car. And Becca’s got to take a friend of hers home anyway.”
“She doesn’t give up, does she?” Seth asked when Caitlin had hung up.
Caitlin shoved her phone back in her pocket. She might have been bitching about Trina the whole time she had been here, but for someone else to be criticizing her... “You can’t blame her. She’s lonely.”
“But it’s not fair to you, that everything is about her all the time.”
“Well, what about you and your sisters? Isn’t everything about you and snowboarding?”
“They don’t mind.”
“How do you know that? How did they feel about your mom being gone so much? I treat my mom like she is the enemy, but I would have died if I’d had to go to my dad when I started my period, and I bet that your sisters had to.”
He muttered something. She wasn’t fighting fair. What could he possibly say about his sisters’ periods?
Well, he had had sex, hadn’t he? “And what about the money?” she demanded. “Aren’t your sisters in the same boat as me? Only a lot more so. All your skateboarding has to have cost tons more than Dylan does.”
He glared at her. “You’re wrong. I got all my expenses paid this year, and on top of that—”
“But you’ve been doing this for years, and your family never said that you had to quit, and they could have. We can’t quit. We can’t tell Trina to stop being a mom and turn Dylan over to Social Services. We can’t do that.”
Just then the kitchen door opened. More light flooded the grass. His sister and her friend were ready to leave. Becca asked Seth if he wanted to ride with them, but he said that he needed to help their dad with something.
Trina was waiting on the front porch. She still wanted to go to the Dairy Queen.
“Won’t it be closed?” Caitlin did not want to go.
“No, I called. They’re open until ten.”
Caitlin was suddenly weary. I can’t fix this. I can’t make you like you used