He could handle stress. Pressure, fear...bring ’em on. But boredom? He wasn’t so good at that. He wanted out of here. He’d take Caitlin with him if he could, but most of all, he wanted—he needed—to leave. Snowboarders weren’t supposed to be model citizens. They were rebels, outsiders, countercultural iconoclasts, not jurors.
But Seth was the public face of his family’s company, Street Boards. It manufactured snowboards and skateboards. His parents, his sisters, and his brothers-in-law worked there; it supported all of them. So there was no way that Seth could be a jerk here in the jury assembly room. If the moms and dads of America thought Seth Street was an asshole, they wouldn’t let their kids put his poster up on their bedroom walls, and they certainly wouldn’t buy a Street Board to put under the Christmas tree. Seth had to act like a good citizen even if it was driving him nuts.
There was a beverage station at the back of the room, just coffee and water. Seth didn’t drink much coffee, but he kept getting water just to have something to do. Caitlin was still working.
By two thirty people were saying that if you didn’t get called for a trial on the first day, you weren’t likely to have to come back.
At three o’clock there was activity in the front of the room. The Clerk came back in and started talking softly to the jury coordinator. Surely they were going to be dismissed. A trial wouldn’t start at three, would it? People at the tables started to put away their stuff, clear up their trash.
But when the jury coordinator stood up, she asked them to line up by the door as she called their names. She kept calling name after name until everyone in the room was standing in a line that snaked toward the back of the room. Caitlin’s name had been called before his. She was too far ahead in line for them to talk.
And then they waited. And waited some more. Someone stepped out of line to get chairs for the older ladies. Seth winced. He should have thought to do that.
At three thirty, the jurors were all told to sit back down. At four o’clock, they were excused for the day. They could go home as soon as they signed for the little brown envelopes with their twelve-dollar payment. But the coordinator emphasized that they had to call the hotline or check the website later in the evening to see if they had to come tomorrow.
“But we won’t have to come back, will we?” someone asked. “If you don’t get a trial the first day, you’re done, right?”
The coordinator said that that was not necessarily so and that they needed to check with the hotline or the website. Seth didn’t like the sound of that.
“I came thinking that this might be kind of interesting,” Caitlin said as they walked to the parking lot. She was carrying her computer in a messenger bag crafted out of an old Cub Scout backpack and a worn leather bomber jacket. “It wasn’t.”
“You got a lot of work done.”
“It probably looked like it, but what do you know about the trajectory of bullets on a gravity-heavy planet?”
“Me? Nothing.”
“The guy who designed the game apparently didn’t either. Now it’s too early for dinner. Do you just want to get a cup of coffee or something?”
No, he didn’t want to get a cup of coffee. He wanted to spend the evening with her. He had already made a plan. That was one thing about three guys hanging out together. Someone needed to have a plan, or you never got out the door. “You remember the lake?”
“No. Why would I?”
She was being ironic. Of course she remembered the lake. “Let’s pick up some barbecue and go out there. My parents have a lake house now.”
“Their own place? So we don’t have to trespass and eat on someone else’s dock?”
“No.” Or have sex on a blanket back among the trees.
Except they hadn’t “had sex.” They had made love. They had been in love.
That last summer he and Caitlin had been together, he had feelings for her that he had never felt again. Of course it was probably that your first love always did feel the most intense, the most consuming, but still...
* * * *
They had had three summers together from the time he had been fourteen and she thirteen, until he was sixteen and she fifteen.
He had grown up in the High Country of North Carolina and had started snowboarding when his uncles still had to lift him over the drifts at the edge of the parking lots. He had been a little meat torpedo in those days, fearless about height and speed, clueless about danger. At fourteen he had already been competing professionally for a few years. At the time he didn’t—he couldn’t—appreciate what sacrifices his family was making for his snowboarding. His dad worked in the furniture factory; it was a nonunion shop, and there wasn’t ever any overtime. His mom had done alterations for the local bridal shop.
He had developed so quickly and so early that a lot of doors had opened for him. His mother had been great at negotiating tuition-free deals for him, but there was still travel and living expenses for both of them. In those days, few programs were set up for unescorted school-aged kids, so his dad had outfitted a pickup with a camper, and she made endless long drives, preparing meals in the little camper while he worked his way through the homeschooling curriculum. Pretty soon she had started escorting Ben and Nate too. Nate’s mother was a schoolteacher; she couldn’t take off during the school year. Ben’s mother had five other children; she couldn’t leave either. So the arrangement helped a lot with the expenses and certainly made everything more fun.
Although there was snow on Oregon’s Mt. Hood year-round, his parents drew the line at the summer programs. Seth’s two older sisters needed their mother too. So starting in April, Seth was back in North Carolina, attending regular school, trying to keep up his skills by skateboarding, while his mother turned her attention to the girls.
Each year it was harder to connect with other guys at school. Seth wasn’t interested in ball sports, and this was a ball-sports kind of town. Of course he was better than the chumples, the slow, fat kids in glasses, but Seth wasn’t used to being in the middle of the pack. He liked being the best, and although his mom kept preaching about this to him, he just didn’t have as much fun when he was ordinary. What was so wrong with that?
The county had built a little skateboarding park back when skateboarding was a hotter fad. In the summer Seth was there all day every day, riding his bike over, often providing free unplanned entertainment for the little-kid birthday parties that were the main source of the park’s revenue.
One day he noticed a kid, maybe eleven or twelve, on the other side of the fence. The kid was perched on his bike, with one foot on the ground and his helmet still on. Seth showed off for a bit—so what if this was an eleven-year-old kid, it was still an audience—then glanced over his shoulder to be sure that the kid was watching. The kid still was there, but he had taken his helmet off.
And he wasn’t a he. He was a girl, slight in build but much closer to Seth’s age than Seth had first thought. Okay. That was a better audience. Seth showed off even more, finishing a trick close to the edge of the skate park.
“Hi, I’m Seth,” he said through the fence.
“Caitlin.”
She was pretty with these really dark eyes. Seth wasn’t sure what to say next. It was kind of awkward for a moment, but she spoke. “That’s pretty amazing what you do. I suppose you’ve been doing it for a long time.”
“Yeah, but some things aren’t that hard to pick up. Do you want to try? I am happy to show you how.”
“I don’t have any of the stuff.”
“That helmet will work. I’ll bring a board and pads for you if you want