“We didn’t have a Realtor. My mom bought the house from the owner. The guy who fixed the windows told her. When he realized my mom was the colorful type he wouldn’t stop talking about it. Flirting with her.” She rolled her eyes. “A house with real history, he said. Built in the 1920s. One of a kind.”
The colorful type. I was tempted to ask if her colorful mother knew the stir her quadruped bumper-fish had caused. “I noticed the Ariel on the dock. Did you put it there because...”
“Yes. Screw them if they think The Shipwreck is an insult, it’s cool the way it is. Look, you can still see the marks from the bunk beds.” She shoved boxes around to show me the dark rectangles in the wood floor. “There were five bunks, so I guess ten kids could sleep down here. And one babysitter had to deal with them all summer, I bet.”
“My mother grew up in our house. She says the boys who stayed here in the forties and fifties ran wild all summer. But she never told me about the bunk beds.” I bent to touch one of the marks. “Cool.”
There were no bunk beds now. The only furniture in the room was a saggy, opened-out futon against the long wall. It was unmade, the imprint from a body still visible in the swirl of sheets.
“My mom’s sleeping down here for now,” she said. “She’s using one of the rooms upstairs for her studio because the light’s better and the daybed she ordered hasn’t come yet. Come see my room.”
I followed her up the dark staircase. “So she’s an artist?”
“Ultrabizarre stuff, but people pay a ton for it because bizarre is in.” She thumped her hand on a closed door as we passed, but didn’t offer to show me any of the ultrabizarre art.
“When’s your furniture coming?” I followed her down the narrow hall.
“Our last four places were furnished so my mom’s off buying stuff.”
Last four places? As I considered this, Casey disappeared into a wall of gold. At least that’s what I thought it was until I got closer and figured out it was yellow candy wrappers stuck together in chains, dangling from her doorjamb to form a crinkly, sunlit curtain.
“I made that for our hallway in San Francisco,” she said from the other side of the swaying lengths of plastic. “I was going through a butterscotch phase.”
“I like it,” I said. Did I? I had no idea. I was just trying to step through the ropes of cellophane without breaking them. “How many wrappers did it take?”
“A hundred and eighty-eight. My mom put my real door on sawhorses in her studio, for a table.”
I could only imagine what my mother would say if I tried to replace my bedroom door with candy wrappers. When I was little, she didn’t let me take hard candy from the free bowl at the bank, saying it was a scam they had going with the dentist.
But the fact that Casey’s mom apparently didn’t worry about cavities wasn’t the weirdest part. The weirdest part was that this girl had voluntarily taken her bedroom door off its hinges, not minding that now her mother could peek in whenever. She could catch her undressed, or interrupt her when she was writing in her journal, or yell at her from downstairs right when she’d reached the best part of her book.
My bedroom not only had a door—the wooden variety—but a lock. I used it twice a day, when I transferred my good-luck charm between my pocket and my pillow.
I stashed other objects in my room, too. I had a Maybelline Raspberry Burst lip gloss tucked into the bottom of my Kleenex box. A Cosmopolitan I’d filched from the dentist hidden inside the zippered cushion of my desk chair, with 50 Tips That’ll Drive Him Wild in Bed. I had come to know well the thrill of concealing objects in my room, the secret electric charge they emitted from their hiding places. My bedroom was strung in currents only I knew about.
I didn’t tell her any of this. I’d known her only twenty minutes.
“Didn’t you get sick of all that butterscotch by the end?”
She laughed. “Totally. I threw out the last fifty.”
We sat facing each other on her unmade single bed, inside a fortress of brown moving boxes, finishing the cake. She was still wearing her wet bathing suit and towel. I would never wear a thin bathing suit like that, even in the water, and definitely not out of it. But Casey, named after the male DJ, was flat as a boy. And something told me she wouldn’t have cared about covering up even if she wasn’t.
As we ate, and she talked about San Francisco—the freezing fog, the garlic smell that would drift up the apartment air shaft from the restaurant below—I monitored a damp spot spreading out on her yellow bedspread. It expanded around her hips, like a shadow. My mother would have gone ballistic; she pressed our sheets once a week and had a dedicated rack in the laundry room for used beach towels.
By my last bite of cake I had to admit that I liked this sturdy, confident girl. And I felt bad for her. She said she’d had no idea she was moving until her mom announced it on the last day of middle school.
“We’d only been in San Francisco for a year, and I was all registered at Union High for September, then all of a sudden my mom heard about this house, and here we are. Goodbye, Union. Hello, Coeur-de-Lune High.”
“People never say that. They say CDL High.”
“Got it.”
“Which is kind of dumb since it’s exactly the same number of syllables.”
She laughed, and I realized in that second just how much I wanted her to like me. I couldn’t resist going on. “Like I said, it’s not such a great school.”
“Go, Astronauts,” she said, laughing, shaking her fists as if she was holding miniature pom-poms.
“Astros.”
“Right. Keep the insider tips coming.”
“I’m definitely not an insider, I... So why’d your mom want to move?”
“She’s impulsive like that. You’ll get it when you meet her. We lived in a bunch of places before San Francisco. Reno, Oakland, Berkeley. Then suddenly she was all about nature. Fresh air, peace and quiet so she could work and I could... I don’t know. Suck in all the fresh air.”
“Weren’t you sad? Leaving your friends in San Francisco?”
“Yeah, but...my mom’s my best friend.”
I licked crumbs from my fingers. “That must be nice. My mother is...”
Strict? That wasn’t the right word. Cold was closer to the truth, but not quite fair. My mother took my temperature when I was sick, and remembered that I liked German chocolate cake, and once said I played the piano like an angel. She asked me for my Christmas list the day after Thanksgiving. Rigid? Overly efficient? Judgmental? None of them added up to a good answer.
“She’s what?”
“She’s older than most mothers.”
“Grandma old?”
“Sixty-two. I’m adopted. And my dad’s almost sixty-four. But my mother seems older than him because she’s kind of religious.”
“Like that nutjob fanatic mom in Carrie? I have that, have you read it? It’s awesome.”
“No, but I saw an ad for the movie on TV. She’s not like that. She’s just... I don’t know. Old-fashioned.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah.”
Bummer. I liked that tidy summary of my relationship with my mother. It took something that made me feel freakish and confused and brought it into the light, transforming it into a typical teenagey complaint.
I didn’t tell Casey she