They agreed to meet the next day. That night Seth started to have second thoughts. What if she were a major biff, a total Betty who couldn’t learn anything? And what if she kept coming back to the park day after day anyway? What then?
He hoped it would rain, and the whole thing would fall apart. But it didn’t. She showed up right on time wearing the same sort of cutoffs and T-shirt that she had had on the day before. Then she took off her helmet.
Oh. He had forgotten how pretty she was. Maybe this would be okay.
She handed the waiver to the kid at the counter and then took some dollar bills out of her pocket. Behind her head Seth waved a hand, and the attendant told her to go on in.
“How come I didn’t have to pay?”
“Because you’re with me. I don’t pay.”
“You don’t? Why not?”
“They know me. I started here when I was four.”
“Okay.” She clearly didn’t see how that added up. So she reached for the pads. “How do I put these on?”
She was a quick learner. She had strong legs and a good sense of balance, and since his mom was also nagging him to praise other people more, he told her.
She shrugged. “I’ve taken a lot of ballet.”
“Really? Ballet?” She didn’t seem like the type.
“My mom thought it would turn me into a lady.”
“So how’s that working?”
“Incredibly well. Can’t you tell?”
He laughed and then showed her how to make a turn sharper. An hour later the park manager—an older man, a regular city employee—arrived, and he called them over to ask why “Mrs. Thurmont” had signed Caitlin’s waiver. He seemed to know who Mrs. Thurmont was.
“She’s my grandmother, but my parents signed a bunch of forms so that she can take me to the hospital or whatever.”
The man smiled. “Let’s not have any hospital trips from here, okay?”
A while later he came out again. “Seth, she’s getting tired.”
“No, I’m not,” Caitlin protested.
Seth hadn’t noticed, but now that Mr. Kendrick mentioned it, yes, he could see that her ankles were wobbling and they hadn’t before. “Then we need to stop. Doing stuff when you are tired is the way to get injured.”
How many times had he heard people say that to him? His coaches, his mom, they were constantly on him to stop practicing.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really I am.”
“No you aren’t.” How wack for him to be acting like the grown-up. “We’re stopping.”
They met up every day for the rest of the week. He learned that her last name was McGraw and that her family lived in Norfolk, Virginia, but they had moved all the time because her dad was in the navy. He was a lawyer, a judge. Seth hadn’t known that the navy had judges. Caitlin had an older sister who also took ballet. She was a million times better than Caitlin, but no—and suddenly Caitlin had gotten a little awkward, sending out all kinds of “I don’t want to talk about this” signals—she didn’t think her sister would try skateboarding.
She continued to improve, but it clearly bugged her that Seth was so much better than she was. She was pushing herself, and Seth didn’t need Mr. Kendrick to tell him that she was trying too much too fast. She was going to hurt herself. “You’re not ready for this kind of thing, not without a foam pit.”
“Are you saying that because I’m a girl?” She looked pissed off.
“No,” he lied. “I’m saying that I first got on a skateboard when I was four. And now snowboarding is, like, what I do. I am sponsored. That’s why I don’t go to school and shit.” So how can you think you could be as good as me? He didn’t say that last part.
She glared at him for a moment. Then she stepped up on her board and started again.
A second later he shouted at her. She was going too slow.
But she wasn’t. She was so light that she didn’t need tons of speed, and when she took off in the air, she didn’t get much height, less than she had been getting, but she did something with her arm, letting it trail around her body, her eyes following her hand. Her fingers were gently curved, and halfway through she flipped her palm over. Her landing was soft, only the lightest sound.
When you analyzed it, it was nothing of a move, but he hadn’t thought about it. He hadn’t thought about anything. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. That’s what it was like with the really epic guys, the top boarders. Whatever they were doing, even just their warm-ups, you had to watch them. You just did.
He wanted to be like that.
Long bike rides were a part of his summer training routine, and pretty soon she started to come. As long as she didn’t do the sprints—he would do one sprint forward and then another back to her—she could keep up even through this hilly country.
The hills’ winding roads would be dark with the shade from the birch and ash trees until around a bend everything would suddenly be open and light, and they could see, below them, town and the two ribbony rivers that met there. Further on was a Christmas tree farm with its regular lines of carefully trimmed Fraser firs marching up the lower slope of a mountain where Seth had first snowboarded. They would ride until they reached the lake. They would bring towels and wear their swimsuits under their clothes. In shadows of trees he tried to kiss her once, and she shoved him away.
Her grandmother, whom she called MeeMaw, lived in a big modern house on Pill Hill, which was where all the doctors lived. Caitlin’s grandfather had been a doctor before he died. On wet days Seth would ride his bike through the rain, and they would sit at her grandmother’s dining table, Seth supposedly catching up with schoolwork and Caitlin addressing envelopes for a benefit that her grandmother was running. She used special pens and had this major sick handwriting. Calligraphy, it was called. No one had taught her. She had learned it from a book.
He hated learning things from books.
One evening when he was at home, he heard his mother and one of his sisters in the kitchen talking.
“Mom, Seth is spending a lot of time with Mrs. Thurmont’s granddaughter.”
“I know,” his mother answered. “It’s usually the pregnant one who has to leave home, not the sister.”
Pregnant? Was Caitlin pregnant? That couldn’t be right. Of course, she was a girl. She used the girls’ bathroom, and she wore a girl’s swim suit, but still...pregnant? A baby? That would have meant that she had—
He couldn’t think about it.
“Apparently”—his mother was still speaking—“her parents felt like Caitlin wasn’t being supportive enough of her sister.”
Oh, of course. Caitlin wasn’t pregnant. Her sister was.
His aunt had been pregnant last summer. She already had three kids, and she was enormous. Her feet spilled over her shoes. She struggled to get in and out of a chair. Seth tried to imagine that happening to one of his sisters. He couldn’t.
As soon as he saw Caitlin next, he asked her. It didn’t occur to him not to. “So your sister is going to have a baby?”
“How did you know that?”
“My mom and sister were talking about it.”
“How did they hear?”
Seth shrugged. “My mom seems to know everything. It’s a pain.” He started to put on his knee pads. They didn’t have to talk about it.
“That’s