Teeth (24 page)

Claudia’s positively beaming.

“She’s going to be swarmed,” Noah says, his voice muffled. “Do you want her swarmed by
men
?”

Claudia laughs, all grown-up in the back of her throat.
Ha ha ha.

“Maybe someone will fall in love with her,” Bella says, and bites her lip and looks at me.

Noah looks at me, telling me it’s my turn to object. “Too young to be someone’s lust object,” I say, then turn to Bella and mouth
Eleven
, to clarify. Bella had her makeup done before we got here, and now she’s studying herself in the mirror, pinching her cheekbones and pressing the skin between her eyebrows.

“You’re all too young to be talking about this love and lust shit,” Noah says.

Melinda is calm, blowing extra eye shadow off her fingers. “The point is not to be loved. The point is to love.” She puts on some kind of accent. “‘
For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.
’”

Noah picks up his head. “What’s that?”

“Camus, darling.” Melinda takes a book from the foot of her bunk and tosses it down to Noah. “Only the most summer-oriented philosopher in the book.”

“What book?” says Bella.

Melinda examines her eyeliner pencil. “The book of life, my dear.”

“Man,” Claudia says. “That’s one big book.”

“Small font, too.” Noah sits up and cracks open the paperback. “He’s French?”

“
Oui
, but that’s supposed to be the best translation.” Melinda gathers her curly hair back in one hand and leans forward, examining Claudia’s eyebrows. “You guys would like him.”

Noah reads,
“‘Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus’s motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening’s slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky through the years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon.’”

We’re quiet.

“Well.” Claudia flinches at the mascara wand. “That was happy.”

“Shut up,” Noah says. “I’d almost believe he grew up here.”

I look at him, and I know by the way he’s smiling that I’m making the same face I always make when we agree. The one that looks really shocked.

“I think it’s beautiful,” Bella says, quietly.

“‘No love without a little innocence,’”
Melinda recites, putting on that silly accent again.

Noah says, “Hmm,” and sticks the paperback in his pocket. “All right. You kids ready to go?”

The Jolly Roger isn’t much of an amusement park, and it’s farther away than we’ll usually stand to travel when we’re down here, but every few years we all get it in our heads that we need to go. We grab Shannon and Gideon from the living room, stuff ourselves into the van, and we’re off to see the creaky fun house and the carousel and the clumsy juggler.

All the windows are down and the wind sounds like someone yelling at us, but we’re laughing so hard we barely hear it. The girls rake their fingers through their hair to keep the tangles out, but it’s hopeless and they know it and it’s okay. The lights on every restaurant, mini-golf-course, icecream stand, and motel rush by just like the people, who are all dressed ten times better than they ever are during the year and trying ten times less hard. I feel like we’re stuck in a movie reel, roaring through as hard as we can and spinning the world into streaks.

“‘Gods of summer they were at twenty,’”
Melinda says.

It takes Noah a few minutes to find this quote in his book.
“‘Gods of summer they were at twenty by their enthusiasm for life, and they still are, deprived of all hope. I have seen two of them die. They were full of horror, but silent.’”

Melinda takes her eyes off the road to examine us all in the rearview mirror. Claudia, for a minute, stops punching Gideon and looks at us, her artificially enlarged eyes artificially sparkling. She’s beautiful—just normal, unscary beautiful—without all the makeup, but she never carries herself like she is.

“Which two?” Claudia asks.

Noah’s glued back to the book. “It could be an exaggeration.”

“I need to get a copy of this book,” I say.

Noah nods. “You so do, Chase. And so do I . . . . ”

“What’s mine is yours,” Melinda says softly. “As long as I eventually get it back.”

We park and wait by the ticket booths, calculating how much money we have and how many rides we need to go on. I’m trying to track everyone with my eyes; I feel older than the twins but younger than Claudia, who’s standing with Melinda, tossing her matted hair, while Bella and Shannon shriek and climb on each other’s backs. Gideon falls down. “Everyone needs tickets,” I say. “Someone has to watch—”

“I’ve got it.” Noah gives me one of those rare, reassuring
smiles. “Melinda and I will take Gideon, okay? And you stay with Claude and the twins.”

I yank Gideon off the ground and sign
Noah stay.

Noah run
Gideon says, and I try not to concentrate on that.

Stay me?
Noah signs.

I realize that we never try to do anything to Gideon without asking his permission. Even though he’s six, and I don’t think considering a six-year-old’s opinion usually comes with the territory. Some parts of being deaf are pretty sweet, I guess.

Gid spins around for a little while, then falls down again and signs
OK.

“C’mere, you.” Noah hauls Gideon onto his back and smiles at Melinda. “We’ve got him.”

This finally hits me. “Yeah, and what are you going to do with Gideon while you’re with Melinda?”

“Cover his eyes.”

“Oh, ha ha,” I call to their backs.

Claudia and Shannon want to ride the log flume, so we walk across the park, crunching the gravel beneath our sandals. Every few steps Bella will look at me and smile. Whenever a girl from school is nice to me like this, I’m always tripping over myself figuring out how far I’m going to try to
get with her and freezing up before I can do anything. But here, I have this feeling that I can’t screw this up, and there’s no point in planning anything, because what’s going to happen is going to happen. It’s as predictable as the carousel.

She doesn’t want to get splashed, so we stand under the pavilion while Shannon and Claude get in line. Bella’s wearing a pink skirt, and the breeze sometimes hitches it above her knees. Her legs are starting to tan, or maybe it’s that brown lotion girls use to pretend. Either way, I like it even more than I would have expected.

“Really nice night, isn’t it?” she says.

“Mmm-hmm.”

She revolves, looking at the lights from the Ferris wheel bouncing off the water for the paddleboats. “I love it here.”

“I love everywhere here.” I rub the back of my neck. “I seriously wish we could live here, even in the off-season. Like, even when it’s cold, this has got to be good.”

“We come down in the fall and winter sometimes. I almost like it better. No people around, everything so gray . . . It feels really old. Like you’re looking at this town a hundred years ago.”

“When our forefathers ran around barefoot.”

She smiles at me. “Exactly.”

There’s no one else under the pavilion, and with the
amusement park bouncing off Bella’s eyes and the dusty pink of her skirt, I can almost pretend we are a hundred years old and we know everything. When, really, the only thing I know is that I’m going to kiss her, but I’m not going to try anything more. And she’s smiling because she knows it too.

It’s not really that we’re old so much as we’ve existed forever. We’re in a black-and-white photo. The only color comes from the Ferris wheel lights and her skirt.

We’re eternalized in the film. Forever kids. We are our forefathers today.

I kiss her, and her mouth tastes like wax and peppermint.

It’s not my first kiss, but it
feels
like it. Like I’m watching a movie of my first.

She pulls back, laughing. “Chase, you bit my lip.”

Or a blooper reel. “I did? Sorry.”

She giggles and turns, and I smell the powder on her cheek. I want to kiss her. I want to bake cookies with her. I want to watch her put on her makeup like I got to watch Claudia.

“Look.” She points to the top of the flume. “They’re going down.”

“Shannon looks
terrified
.”

“He’s just hoping Claudia will hold his hand.”

We watch Claudia and Shannon take the plunge, and I wrap my fingers around Bella’s palm.

“Chase.”

I look up from Camus. “Shh shh shh.” I jerk my head to Noah, crashed on top of his covers, shoes still on. “He’s asleep. And still, for once.” Noah’s always waking me up by thrashing around when he’s sleeping. It’s the worst.

Claudia tilts from one foot to the other, doing the same little dance that Gideon does. I close the paperback and say, “You’re supposed to be asleep, beautiful.”

“Mom and Dad are fighting.”

“Come on. Don’t let that worry you.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

I scoot over on my bed and she sits down, her nightgown pooling around her knees. She’s washed all the makeup off and she got sunburned today, so she looks like my little sister again. It’s something about winters and nighttimes that makes me remember how young Claudia is. It’s when she’s quiet. Her voice is old; she’s always confused for our mother on the phone.

“Is this Camus stuff really any good?” she asks.

“He definitely knew his summers.” I flip to one of my dog-eared pages.
“‘Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed
underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.’”

She stares at me. “You can’t sleep with your eyes open.”

“You are so literal, Claude. Come on. Remember . . . you’ve got to remember. When Gid was still a baby, and Dad used to take me, you, and Noah and set us up on deck chairs on the balcony at night? Wrap us all up in sleeping bags and tell us stories? And we’d hear the waves come in and it would always be too bright to sleep—”

“Because of the stars?”

“Well, because Mom had all the lights on inside, walking Gideon up and down the hall so he’d shut up, but . . . yeah. The stars, too.”

Claudia sticks her head out my window. “I mean, I don’t know if they’re
dripping
exactly.”

“The sky’s dripping.”

She doesn’t speak for a minute, then says, “Oh.”

I tuck her under my arm and hold her for a while. She says, “I don’t really remember.”

“Well. You were young.”

“Don’t remember before Gideon.” She smiles. “Was I alive then?”

“I assure you that you were.”

“Your birthday’s in two days.”

“Oh, really? I didn’t know.”

She sticks out her tongue.

“Go back to bed,” I say. “Gideon will feel you walking around and get all upset.” Gid can tell the vibrations of our footsteps apart, and if he wakes up and realizes Claudia isn’t in bed where she’s supposed to be he is going to freak out. He hates when he wakes up and people aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Before he goes to bed every night, he takes an inventory of where we are, and if we drift, we have to be so quiet.

She kisses my cheek. “Night, Chase.”

“Night.”

“‘No love without a little innocence,’”
Noah says, completely still.

“I thought you were asleep. You’re so creepy.”

He shrugs. “So how was your lovely innocent night?”

“I kissed her.”

“What a man.” But he says it warmly. “How was it?”

My first thought is to relate it to soft-serve ice cream, but I can already hear Noah laughing at that. “It was nice.”

“God. God, really, it was nice?” He sounds so earnest that I think for a minute that he’s making fun of me. He props himself up on an elbow. “God, I fucking miss when kisses were nice. I’m so jealous of people young enough to still have nice kisses.”

“Wait, kissing isn’t nice anymore?”

“No. It’s foreplay. Trust me, you get old enough, and everything is foreplay. Kissing is foreplay. Talking is foreplay. Holding hands is foreplay. I swear to God, Chase, I think at this point, sex would be foreplay.”

This would probably be a good time to ask if he and Melinda have really slept together, but I can’t make myself say the words. So I just say, “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Sex is a to-do list where nothing gets crossed out.”

I find the passage Melinda quoted in my Camus book.
“‘No love without a little innocence. Where was the innocence? Empires were tumbling down; nations and men were tearing at one another’s throats; our hands were soiled. Originally innocent without knowing it, we were now guilty without meaning to be: the mystery was increasing our knowledge. This is why, O mockery, we were concerned with morality. Weak and disabled, I was dreaming of virtue!’”

Noah looks at me and coughs, his eyebrows up in his bangs.

“What?” I say.

With a straight face, he recites,
“‘I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.’”