Freckles on pink skin, a tangle of red hair, an upside-down Jantzen Swimwear size six label: these are the strongest visual memories of that summer before high school.
I had a journal my dad gave me when I was seven, a puffy pink thing with A Girl’s First Diary on the cover in gold script. I hid it inside a hollowed-out copy of Silas Marner on my bottom bookshelf, and concealed the key in a mint tin in my third-best church purse.
I wasn’t a dedicated diary writer. My entries were sloppy and I sometimes went weeks without turning the key in the little gold lock. But on June 13, seven days after I met Casey, I wrote:
A summer friend. Ariel. She’s...disarming.
TGTBT
Disarming. (One of my PSAT words.) TGTBT. Too good to be true.
The acronym—such an obvious attempt to sound like other fourteen-year-olds—wasn’t the most pathetic part. It’s that I was afraid she’d vanish if I wrote her real name.
It’s not that I didn’t think she liked me. I knew she did. I made her laugh, not polite laughs but snorty diaphragm laughs. I didn’t talk much about my life at school, but my family was safe material. I told her how my dad and I once secretly replaced the gritty homemade apricot fruit leather in my mother’s charity care packages with Snickers bars. How he always saluted me if we met in the upstairs hallway, because of my vaguely military cargo shorts.
“You’d like my dad,” I said.
We were swimming in Jade Cove, floating on our backs, Casey in her purple one-piece, me in my loose black T-shirt and underwear, once again pretending I’d forgotten to bring a suit. I’d carefully rolled up my shorts in a towel and set the bundle on a rock, far from the water.
Disarming. She had disarmed me. I rarely separated myself from the charm I kept in my pocket, but for her I did. I wasn’t ready to tell her about it, though.
“Would he like me?” Casey said, eyes closed, arching her back to stay afloat so her stomach made a little purple island. The skin on her nose was bright pink, and the freckles there merged closer every day.
“Definitely.”
“Hey. Why do you always wear them?”
“Hmm?”
“Your cargos. I’ve never seen you in anything else. Not that I mind.”
“I just like them. The pockets are good for collecting things. Hey, I have oatmeal cookies in my backpack. Are you hungry?” I splashed over to the beach.
* * *
Two weeks into summer we still hadn’t met each other’s parents. We rendezvoused at Casey’s dock every morning and stayed on the water all day.
I said my mother got on my nerves and Casey accepted this. She kept me out of her house, too, telling me her mom wanted to fix the place up before inviting me over.
“She’s dying to meet you, though,” she said. “She just wants to get the house done first. She was mad you saw it before it was finished.”
“Does this mother of yours really exist?” I teased. I could tease her by then.
“She’s in some kind of retro homemaking phase. Yesterday she drove all the way to Twaine Harte for an antique firewood holder. I just hope she puts up my bedroom curtains before she gets bored with antiquing and moves on to rock climbing or whatever.”
Casey scattered crumbs like this about her mother all the time. I stored them up, greedy for more. I was as fascinated by her fond, indulgent tone of voice as I was by the composite picture they created of this person I hadn’t met yet.
On June 26 I wrote in my diary:
Ariel’s mother—Alexandra Shepherd
Only 36.
+ Once a card dealer in Reno.
+ Makes lots of $ off her art. Scandalous art?
+ Let her boyfriends sleep over til Casey asked her not to.
= Exact opposite of Ingrid Christie
* * *
One afternoon in late June, as I was showing Casey how to make a hard stop-turn in the kayak, I got an official nickname, too.
“Slow down, Pocahontas, I didn’t quite get that,” she said.
Pocahontas. The four syllables were a sweet drumbeat in my head for the rest of the day. Casey had sort of called me Pocahontas the first day we met. But this was different. I’d never been given a nickname by a friend.
When I left her dock a few hours later, she sat on the edge to see me off, legs dangling over the silvery-gray wood. I was late for dinner and was already paddling hard when she called out, feet now churning the water, “I almost forgot, come early tomorrow. My mom wants you for breakfast.”
I showed off my stop-turn. “Really?”
“The house is done so she wants to meet you. Nine, okay?”
I hadn’t planned to say it out loud. I was giddy from the day, the breakfast invite, and my diary name for Casey just slipped out at the last second. “Okay. Goodbye, Ariel.”
But when I felt myself saying it I got shy, and her nickname came out so soft it got lost crossing the water.
“What?”
I gathered my courage and repeated it, louder this time. “I said, goodbye, Ariel.”
She stilled her legs and tilted her head, considering. Then she grinned, kicking out a high, rainbowed arc. “I love that.”
As I started to paddle away again, Casey pulled the Disney figurine off the nail by her legs and waved it.
“Twins,” she yelled. Then she set it on her shoulder and made a goofball face.
I smiled all the way home.
But in my diary that night, I wrote:
65 days til school. Wish there were zeros at the end. Infinite zeros. 00000000000000000000
Before I slipped the diary back inside Silas Marner, I filled in the string of zeros, making each oval into a sad face.
It’s not that I thought she’d instantly transform on September 2. Change into someone cruel, from a fourteen-year-old who could still make dumb jokes about Disney princesses into a sneering wannabe grown-up like some of the high school girls I’d observed. I knew she was better than that.
It’s just that she didn’t know what a machine school could be. I’d already been processed through the machine, because our town was so small sixth through twelfth were in the same building complex, the high school separated only by a covered walkway. My reputation as Sister Christian had already traveled down that walkway, I was sure of it.
And the machine had decided that I didn’t deserve a friend.
I had this fantasy that Casey would say she wasn’t going to CDL High after all, that her mother would have an overnight religious conversion and send her to the Catholic girls’ school four towns over. It would solve everything, and it wasn’t completely ridiculous. I knew all about her mom’s impulsive nature. If I scattered some pamphlets about St. Bridget’s and maybe some enticing religious icons on her futon, I could probably make Catholicism her next obsession.
But even if I could pull it off, judging by what Casey had told me, her mother would end her fling with the Lord long before first-day