Usually, he had to shut his eyes in order to conjure up a fantasy this good. But now here it was, in three-dimensional living color, walking straight toward him. The chorus in his head switched to “Pretty Woman” as she approached with a runway-model rhythm, as if she heard the music, too.
Some latent lesson in manners kicked in, and Julian rose to his feet as the introductions were made. Daisy was from New York and like Julian, she had just finished her junior year in high school. She offered him a smile that lit up the world, her amazing blue eyes sparkling. “Mind if I share your table?” Though it was a question, she didn’t wait for an answer but sat beside him as though bestowing a royal favor.
He wasn’t about to argue.
Daisy’s family resemblance to her father and brother, Max, was unmistakable. She, too, was a von Trapp—blond and Germanic, with features so appealing they should probably model a Barbie doll after her. However, Julian observed, the girl-next-door cuteness masked something else, something he couldn’t quite identify, like the shadow of a troubled spirit.
During dinner, he learned that she went to some snooty-sounding New York prep school, one she insisted everybody should have heard of. Her mother was a lawyer who practiced international law, and her father was a landscape architect who had taken the summer off to renovate Camp Kioga.
All right,
that
was annoying, thought Julian. Bragging on your parents. Who did that? Not him, that was for damn sure, and the nosy blonde had better not ask him about his family.
Fortunately, she dropped the subject when Dare brought out dessert—thick slices of peach pie with vanilla ice cream. The pie was so good, Julian almost wept. He looked around the table and everyone else clearly felt the same way. They had the closed eyes and ecstatic expressions of people in the throes of a religious experience.
“The pie’s from Sky River Bakery,” Dare said.
“No, it’s from heaven,” Greg amended.
The only flaw in the perfect dinner was that Julian and Daisy had to do the dishes. Even that wasn’t so bad. The big, industrial kitchen had walk-in coolers, tall steel racks and a commercial dishwashing system. They made short work of everything, laughing and teasing as they scraped, soaped, rinsed and dried everything. By the time they finished, it was dark outside. Freddy took Max and the little mutt called Barkis to the rec hall for a game of Ping-Pong. Connor and the others sat around drinking coffee and looking over plans and schedules. It was all so frigging wholesome, Julian wanted to puke.
“Can we go make a fire on the beach?” Daisy asked.
“You and Julian?” her father asked.
“Duh. Yeah, Dad. Me and Julian.”
So here was something interesting, Julian observed. Some sort of power struggle between Daisy and Greg Bellamy. Julian decided to speak up. “I promise I’ll be on my best behavior. Sir.”
Girls’ dads were suckers for “sir.” One little syllable, and they acted like their daughter was dating Dudley Do-Right.
“He will,” Connor said. No further words passed between them, but Julian caught a repeat of the warning:
Don’t fuck up.
“I guess it’s all right,” Greg said. “I might come out to check on you later.”
“Sure, Dad,” Daisy said with forced brightness. “That’d be great.”
Olivia handed her a box of kitchen matches. “Just keep it in the fire pit, okay?”
Making a fire was actually harder than it looked on
Survivor.
They used up the whole box of matches before their pile of twigs finally caught, creating more smoke than fire. Trying to avoid the thick billows of smoke, Julian found himself wedged comfortably next to Daisy.
Score.
“So what’s your story?” she asked.
Julian thought about inventing some high-class-sounding boarding school just to impress her. He was too damn tired to make up a story and stick to it, though.
“My mother’s an out-of-work performer—sings, dances, acts,” he said, and decided not to explain about his father. When people heard what happened, they got all sympathetic and mushy, which Julian hated.
“I got in trouble with the law in May,” he confessed.
The truth worked like an aphrodisiac. He thought he could maybe even feel Daisy’s boob pressing on his arm as she leaned toward him and whispered, “So what was the incident? Did you steal a car? Deal drugs?”
Of course. That was what people thought when they looked at Julian Gastineaux. A big black kid with dreadlocks and an attitude. What else could he be but a small-time criminal?
“I raped a girl,” he said. “Maybe I raped three.”
Daisy tried not to be obvious about scooting away from him, but he noticed when the warm tension between them slackened.
“You’re lying.” She looped her arms around her drawn-up knees.
Damn, but she was an annoying girl. She not only knew he was lying; she knew he was already regretting characterizing himself as a rapist. It had been a stupid thing to say. “I got caught bungee jumping off a highway bridge,” he admitted.
“Whoa. Why would you go bungee jumping off a bridge?” she asked in horror.
“Why wouldn’t you?” asked Julian.
“Oh, let me see. You could break every bone in your body. Wind up paralyzed. Brain dead. Or just plain dead.”
“People wind up dead every day.”
“Yeah, but jumping off bridges tends to hasten the process.” Daisy shuddered.
“It was awesome.” His gaze tracked a spark to the sky. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’ve always liked flying.” Anything that even remotely resembled flying was his dream, and always had been.
“Then you’ll like this.” Daisy reached into her pocket and took out an eyeglasses case. She opened it up to reveal a fat, misshapen joint.
Holding the glowing end of a twig to it, she lit up and inhaled. “This is my kind of flying.” She took a second expert hit and held it out to Julian.
“I’ll pass,” he said. “I need to watch myself. See, the judge in California gave my mother a choice—I had to leave town for the summer or do time in juvenile detention. By coming here, I get the incident wiped off my record.”
“Fair enough. You won’t get caught.” She offered the joint again.
So now he had to admit the truth again. Even though it made him seem like a Boy Scout. “I don’t partake.”
“Come on. It’s really good weed,” Daisy said. “No way we’ll get caught. We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
“I’m not worried about that,” he said. “Just don’t like getting high.”
“Whatever.” Daisy added a twig to the fire, watched it burn. “A girl’s got to find her fun where she can.”
“So are you having fun?” he asked.
She squinted at him through the smoke. “So far, this whole summer has just been…weird. It’s supposed to be a lot more fun. I mean, think about it. It’s our last summer as regular kids. Next year, we’ll graduate and have to spend our time working and getting ready for college.”
“College. That’s a good one.”
“You’re not planning to go to college?”
At first he was so stunned by her question that he just laughed.
“What?” she asked, seeming to forget the smoldering joint.
“No one’s ever asked me that before,” Julian admitted.
“You’re going to be a senior, aren’t you?” she pointed out.
“That’s right,” he said.
“And your teachers and advisers haven’t been hounding you since ninth grade?”
He laughed again. “That doesn’t happen at my school. People don’t go to college. At my school, they figure they’re doing a good job if a kid makes it through without dropping out, having a baby or being sent up.”
“Up where?”
“It’s just an expression. Sent up means doing time at juvenile hall.”
“What a nightmare,” Daisy said. “You should change schools.”
Julian was amazed. This girl did not live in the real world. She just didn’t get it. “Where I’m from, you go to the public school that’s close to you. And after that, you get some crappy job at a car wash and play the lottery and hope for the best.”
Daisy got the giggles then. “I do admire a boy with ambition.”
“Just being realistic.”
“I’m not saying that college is, like, some nirvana or something, but it sure as hell beats working at a car wash.”
“College costs money. Even if you get financial aid—which I’d never qualify for because of my mom’s sucky financial records—you still have to come up with all kinds of dough I don’t have.”
She shrugged. “Then get into the ROTC. God, even I know that.”
ROTC. He’d heard of it, vaguely. Some recruiter had come to his school to talk about it, but Julian had taken the opportunity to skip class and head for the dirt bike track. Reserve Officer Training…something.
“The military picks up all the cost of your schooling,” Daisy continued. “You could also apply for an appointment to a service academy, but that’s, like, really hard. You have to have, like, a fifteen-hundred-plus on your SAT.”
Despite the fact that he’d already taken the SAT, and had earned a score that had school officials convinced he’d cheated, Julian felt totally ignorant. Appointment? Service academy?
“Those schools are free,” she continued. “Actually, they even pay you to go there.”
“No way.”
“Way.”
“Name one.”
“West Point. Ha, I’m right. You could go to West Point.”
“About as easily as I could go to the moon.” He’d seen the place in a movie one time. West Point. Guys marching around like toy soldiers, screaming into one another’s faces. And it was a college? “So you’re saying they give you a four-year college degree for free?”
“You actually collect a paycheck while you’re there. This kid from my school, his dad’s, like, a colonel in the air force or something. He’s trying for an appointment to the Air Force Academy.”
Air force, thought Julian.
Flying.
The idea grabbed hold of him, vivid as a daydream.
“It sounds really extreme.” Daisy evidently tired of trying to get high. She put the cold joint in a Ziploc bag. “I think in addition to all the military stuff, you have to study to be an engineer or a scientist or something. Who wants to do that?”
Julian thought about his father, missing him with a pang as sudden and sharp as a stab wound. Science had consumed Louis Gastineaux. It was his passion. Julian understood it because he felt passion, too. Not for science but for flight and danger and speed. “So what’s the catch?” he asked.
“You don’t pay tuition, but you definitely owe them something. You give them, like, five years of your life, minimum.” She studied Julian with knowing, sympathetic eyes. “It must be weird to go to a high school where no one helps you get into college,” she said.
“I never really thought about it.” Julian didn’t know which was worse—that no one cared, or that the possibility of college was so remote that he hadn’t even considered it himself.
“Well, just because no one’s helping you doesn’t mean you can’t help yourself.”
“Sure,” he said, and tossed another dry branch on the fire. “Thanks for the public-service announcement.”
“You’ve got a chip on your shoulder,” she said.
“And you’ve got your head in the clouds.”
Daisy laughed aloud, and her voice was as light as the sparks and smoke from the fire. He sat still, watching appreciatively.
All right, he thought, maybe this summer wasn’t going to suck so bad after all.
Seventeen
F
or Olivia, each morning began with a magical hour. The birds sang the forest to life and the sun touched the world with gold. A mist gathered on the lake, the layered swath steered by the gentle morning breeze and slowly burned off by the rising sun. She went jogging every day, just as she did back in the city. Only back home, she did so on a treadmill. At Kioga, she ran an uninterrupted five-mile course through the woods, along a trail that had been newly bush-hogged by her uncle’s landscaping crew.
To keep from getting bored on the treadmill, she used to tuck an iPod into the inner pocket of her shorts. Out here, she didn’t need Radiohead or Cake in her ears during the morning jog. The trill of awakening birds, the occasional bugle of an elk and the rustle of the morning breeze were entertaining enough.
As she emerged from the woods to the dining hall, she spotted Connor Davis pulling his truck around to a storage shed, and nearly tripped over her own feet.
“You’re up early,” she remarked, trying not to pant too hard. She smiled pleasantly, but inwardly she was cringing. He had a habit of catching her at her worst—up a flagpole, clad in painter’s coveralls and now in her jogging bra, no shirt, neon-orange shorts. To complete the look, she was drenched in sweat, out of breath, her hair caught carelessly in a ponytail. Just once, she’d love for him to see her looking smart, in her favorite Marc Jacobs sheath and new Manolo flats.
He didn’t seem to be focusing on the sweat and unwashed hair, though. He was checking out her legs and her boobs and bare midriff. And yes, she saw the moment he noticed it—her pierced belly button. “So this is what I’ve been missing every morning?” he asked.
“Pretty much.”
“I ought to start setting my alarm earlier.”
She wasn’t sure if he was pulling her leg or flirting with her. Regardless, she wished it wasn’t so stupidly entertaining. Trying to seem nonchalant, she opened her water bottle, took a swig, then dabbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “How’s your brother doing?”
“He’s all right.”
Guyspeak drove Olivia nuts, and Connor was one of the worst offenders. “All right” could mean anything from “He still has a pulse” to “He just won the lottery.”
Maybe Connor’s very guyness was the reason she found him both infuriating and sexy. His truck was a perfect example. She suspected that the papers and invoices littering the cab were the closest thing he had to a filing system, yet his collection of CDs was perfectly organized so that he could access his favorite Rush album without even taking his eyes off the road.
When she looked into the bed of the truck, she was startled to see not the expected tools and equipment, but a load of birdhouses in every conceivable size and shape. Each one looked unique and handcrafted, with far more detail than the average bird needed. One had a little waterwheel on the side, another had a striped awning. A few had Victorian-style scrollwork, and several were perfect twig-and-timber replicas of Adirondack lodges.