I didn’t tell her how hard it is in a small town, where you’re shoved into a role in fifth grade and you can’t escape it no matter what you do, how it squeezes the fight out of you, because everybody knows everybody and you aren’t allowed to change.
And I didn’t tell her that one of the things hidden in my bedroom was a homemade calendar taped to the inside back wall of my closet, where I crossed off the number of CDL High days I had to survive until graduation. 581.
Go Astros.
Instead I said, even though I wasn’t that interested in horror novels, “Can I borrow Carrie sometime?”
“Sure.” Casey jumped off the crumb-strewn bed and went through boxes, tossing books on the floor.
She had more books than I did, and I had a ton. I even had a first edition of Little Women. Casey had Little Women, too, I noticed, and I picked it up off the floor, about to ask if she liked it and if she’d ever read Little Men or Rose in Bloom, which could be preachy but had some entertaining parts.
Only when I looked closer I realized it wasn’t Little Women. It was The Little Woman.
And judging by the cover, it was definitely not an homage to Louisa May Alcott. It had a lady sashaying down her hallway in a skimpy white nightgown, with a gun stuffed down her cleavage. Behind her, at the other end of the hall, you could just make out a shadowy male figure.
The perfect wife is about to get the perfect revenge, it said.
“We had this fantastic used bookstore down the street from our last place,” Casey said, her head down in the moving box. “It’s one thing I’ll miss. That and foghorns. And pork buns.
“Found it,” she said, lobbing a paperback of Carrie at me. “Keep it as long as you want. And take this, too. You might be into it, being adopted and all. I went through a phase where I totally imagined I was adopted because of that book. It seemed so romantic.”
“It’s not, believe me.”
The cover of Carrie, with a pop-eyed teenage girl covered in streams of blood, creeped me out. I’d probably just skim it. The other one looked pretty good, though. Lace, it said in pink, on a black lacy background. The book every mother kept from her daughter at the bottom. Which sounded promising.
This daughter would definitely keep it from her mother. Maybe I could stuff it down one of my winter boots. It was too big to conceal inside my Kleenex box.
“You’re lucky your mother lets you read whatever you want,” I said.
“My mom’s annoying, too. She can never stick to one hobby. She gets totally into something, then just when I get interested she’s onto something else. It sucks.”
It didn’t sound sucky at all. It sounded kind of great. My mother hadn’t developed a new hobby in decades. She was content with her baking and her needlepoint and her charitable bustling-around. Even my father was pretty stuck in his ways. He had his crosswords, and his never-ending house repairs, and his twice-a-week volunteer job at the Historical Society which consisted—as far as I could tell—of playing backgammon with Ollie Pedersen above the hardware store surrounded by old photos.
“Last month it was pressure valves,” Casey said.
“Like, plumbing?”
“No. This philosophy on stress relief. She got this book by some lady named Alberta R. Topenchiek and it’s all she talked about for weeks. Pressure Valves and Self-Monitoring of Wants versus Needs and Minor Stress Triggers versus Major Triggers.”
I laughed.
“I almost threw the book down our garbage chute, I got so sick of talking about it. Anyway, Alberta R. Topenchiek says everyone has to have a pressure valve. The thing they do when nothing else makes them feel good. My mom’s is her art, and mine’s swimming. What’s yours?”
“Kayaking,” I said. I’d never thought of it that way before, but of course it was.
“Will you teach me? I’ve never done it.”
I hesitated a second but I didn’t have a chance against her smile. Her smile, her ridiculous candy-wrapper curtain, her directness.
And her total confidence that the only thing separating us was a few hundred feet of lake water.
“Sure.”
I stayed at Casey’s for three hours that first day, helping her organize her books and clothes, listening to the Top 40 radio countdown CD for 1982. I’d never seen someone sing along so completely unselfconsciously to Toto’s “Africa” before. Usually people sort of mumbled it in the back of their throats, looking around as if they were worried they’d get caught.
When she wasn’t singing I tried to stick to safe topics. The principal is married to the history teacher. Hot lunch in our district is $3.60, or you can do the salad and fruit bar for $1.80.
But Casey kept steering the conversation back to exactly where I didn’t want it—me.
“So what are your friends like?” she said, folding a green sweater.
“I used to hang out with this girl Dee, but she moved to Tahoe last year.”
This was a lie. Dee and I had been friends in third grade, and she’d moved away in fifth, right when I could have used her. Fifth grade was when Pauline Knowland decided I had entertainment value.
“Are you allowed to go on dates yet?”
“It hasn’t come up,” I admitted.
“Right. It’s early.”
“What about you? Have you had a boyfriend yet?”
Casey got a funny half smile, looking at a spot over my right shoulder. She spoke slowly, as if she was in a witness box, enunciating for the court reporter. “No, ma’am. I have not had a boyfriend yet.”
With the cake polished off, she set a big pink-and-white Brach’s Pick-a-Mix bag on the bed. Root beer barrels, lemon drops, toffee, and starlight mints. No butterscotch.
“Sustenance, because we’re working so hard,” she said.
By the time I kayaked home, promising to return at ten the next morning, Casey’s closet was organized, her CDs were lined up alphabetically along one wall, and my back molars were little skating rinks of hard candy.
I ran my tongue across my teeth as I paddled, trying not to smile.
I spent five hours with Casey the next day, and seven the next, and as the long summer days ran on it became easier to count the hours we were not together.
She proved to be a quick study on the kayak but I still sat in back, where I could take over if things got dicey. She liked to go fast. We’d be floating along, lazy and destinationless, and she’d shout, “Let’s do warp speed!” and we’d fly, enjoying a windblown rush for a minute until we inevitably knocked paddles and collapsed into laughter.
I showed her my favorite spots on the lake. The flat, sunny rock at Meriwether Point, where I’d always picnicked alone, and shady little Jade Cove, where tiny fish tickled your ankles and there was a downed pine tree that made a good, bouncy diving board.
One day I took her to Clark Beach on the North shore. We ate cheese-and-sourdough sandwiches and drowsed in the sun, and it would have been another perfect day if I wasn’t slightly on edge, worrying that Pauline Knowland and her pack of blow-dried minions would show up. I hadn’t taken Casey anywhere so public before. But Pauline didn’t come. She spent most of