The little one was the return of my best friend, Casey Melvin, from 4-H camp, where she’d spent most of the summer letting boys go up her shirt and writing me long, dramatic letters in pink magic marker sealed with a lipstick kiss. She came back plumper, cuter, and wearing a green T-shirt that belonged to her new long-distance boyfriend, a seventeen-year-old from Hershey, Pennsylvania, named Rick. She had a lot to tell me.
“God, Haven, you would just die if you met him. He is so much better looking than any of the guys around here.” We were in her room drinking Cokes and going through what seemed like eighteen packs of pictures, double prints, all of smiling people posing in front of log cabins, bodies of water, and the occasional flag. They had to salute the flag three times a day, apparently. That seemed to be the only 4-H activity involved, at least for Casey. In the mere month and a half that she’d been gone, she had become what my mother would politely call “fast.”
There were at least twenty pictures of Rick in the small stack I’d already gone through, half of which featured Casey hanging off of some part of him. He was good looking, but not stunning. Casey was lying on her stomach beside me, naming all the people.
“Oh, that’s Lucy in the red shirt. She was so crazy, I swear. She was sneaking around with one of the counselors-this college guy? And she got sent home the third week. It was too bad because she was loads of fun. She’d do anything if you double dog dared her.”
“Double dog dared?” I said.
“Yeah.” She sat up, plunking another stack of pictures into my hands. “And Rick called me last night, can you believe it? Long distance. He said he misses me so much he wanted to go back to camp for the first time in his life. But I’m going up there for Thanksgiving; we already asked his parents and everything. But that’s four months. I think I’ll die if I don’t see him for four months.”
I watched my best friend, boy crazed, as she rolled on the bed clutching the stack of Rick pictures to her chest. Sometimes love can be an ugly thing.
“So what did I miss here?”
I shrugged, taking another sip of my Coke. “Nothing. Dad got married. But that’s about it.”
“How was the wedding? Was it awful?”
“No,” I said, but I was glad that she asked. Only your very best friend knows when to ask that kind of question. “It was weird. And Ashley’s practically psychotic with her wedding so close. And my mother is going to Europe in the fall with Lydia.”
“Lydia? For how long?”
“Months, I think. A long time.”
“God.” She pushed her hair out of her face. Casey was a redhead, actually an orange-head, with that brassy kind of pumpkin, colored hair. She’d had masses of freck, les when we were little, which thankfully faded as she got older; but her hair stayed basically unmanageable, a mop of wild orange curls. “Hey, who are you gonna stay with while she’s gone?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t talked about that yet.”
“Cool, the whole house to yourself! Man, that will be awesome. We can have a party or something.”
“Yeah. Whatever.” I tossed the pictures back to her, all the strange faces tumbling together. I didn’t know these people. It was like a whole world in a different language.
She got up and put the pictures on her desk, then tugged on her cutoffs, which dangled fringe down the back of her leg. Suddenly she spun around and said, “God! I can’t believe I forgot to tell you!”
“Tell me what?”
“About Gwendolyn Rogers.” She jumped back onto the bed, shaking it so madly that the headboard banged against the wall. Casey was always taking flight or crashing into things. My father called her the whirling dervish.
“What about her?” I had that image again of Gwendolyn walking her dog, the leash reaching far up to her hand.
“She’s back. She came home,” she said ominously (I could always tell when something big was coming), “because she had a nervous breakdown.” She sat back, nodding her head.
“You’re kidding.”
“Her mother is friends with Mrs. Oliver, who is in my mother’s walking group and was sworn to secrecy but can’t keep anything quiet so she told everyone but made them all swear not to pass it further.”
“So your mom tells you.”
“She didn’t tell me. She told Mrs. Caster next door and I overheard because I was out on the roof smoking a cigarette. They never think to look up.”
“You smoke now?”
She laughed. “I have since the beginning of the summer. I want to quit, but it’s just so hard. You want one?”
“No,” I said, still trying to catch up with all this new information. “Why’d she have a nervous breakdown?”
“Because”—she went over to her dresser, reaching far under the sweaters she never wore to retrieve a box with a rumpled pack of cigarettes and some matches in it—“she was badly hurt by a man. And the modeling industry. It’s a hard life for a small-town girl, Haven.”
Something told me these were not her own words. “What man?”
“A photographer. He took all those pictures of her that we saw in Cosmo; you know, the ones in that tight red sweater that showed her nipples.” She shook out a cigarette and put it in her mouth, then took it out. “She was going to marry him, but then she found him in bed with a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“God,” I said.
“And another man,” she added with a flourish, popping the cigarette back into her mouth. “Could you die?”
“That’s horrible,” I said. I felt guilty knowing this about a stranger, some poor girl who knew no shameful secrets of mine. With Mrs. Melvin’s mouth, it had to be all over the neighborhood by now.
“She flew in last Friday, and Mrs. Oliver said she took right to her bed in her old room and slept for forty hours straight. Poor Mrs. Rogers thought she was dying of some horrible disease ’cause Gwendolyn wouldn’t say what was wrong or why she came home or anything.” She reached over and opened the window, then lit a match and touched it to the end of the cigarette. “She woke up at four A.M. and made pancakes, and when Mrs. Rogers went downstairs to see what was going on, that was when Gwendolyn told her. Standing there at the stove flipping pancakes at four A.M. and telling this horrible story. She ate ten pancakes and burst into tears and Mrs. Rogers said she is just at a loss as to what action to take. And since then, Mrs. Oliver says, Gwendolyn hasn’t said a word.”
“Ten pancakes?” I said. This, to me, seemed like the most unbelievable part of the story.
“Haven, honestly.” Casey hated when anyone tried to take away from whatever story she was telling. “And that was when Gwendolyn took to walking.”
“Walking?”
She puffed on her cigarette, then blew the smoke out the window, where it circled across the roof and into the sky. “She walks all night long, Haven, through the neighborhood. She can’t sleep, or won’t, and Mrs. Oliver says she’s like a ghost passing on the sidewalk, long legged and freaky looking. All night long.”
Suddenly I had chills, the kind you get during the climax of a good ghost story, when you realize the scratching on the roof is the disembodied hand or that the ribbon holds her head on. I could see Gwendolyn loping along on her thin legs, casting a giant shadow across the green lawns of our subdivision. Gwendolyn Rogers, supermodel, wandering lost on the streets of her childhood and mine.
“Creepy, huh?” Casey said, taking another long drag off her cigarette and fanning the smoke outside. “Mom says she bets modeling made Gwendolyn crazy. It’s a horrible industry, you know.”
“So you said.” I thought of the Lakeview Models in their pumps and matching T-shirts, posing in front of giant fake leaves. And Gwendolyn, the town’s pride and joy, walking mad in the streets.
“It’ll be all over the papers, and People magazine, soon,” she went on, waving her hand in front of her face to fan off the smoke. “You know, it’s big news when someone like Gwendolyn goes nuts.”
“It’s so sad,” I said again. If even supermodel and beautiful hometown girl Gwendolyn Rogers could crash and burn, what would become of me ... or anyone? She’d been profiled in one of Casey’s Teen World magazines just a few months before, sharing her Biggest Secrets: her favorite food (pizza), band (R.E.M.), and beauty secret (cucumbers on her eyes to reduce puffiness after long days of shooting). And we knew these things about her, just as we did about Cindy and Elle and Claudia, girls who didn’t even need last names. Girls that could have been our friends by the details we memorized about them, or the girl next door. As Gwendolyn, supermodel and Lakeview girl, tall like me, had once been.
“Casey?” There was a sudden knock on the door and Mrs. Melvin’s thick New York accent, which always made her sound irritated even when she wasn’t, boomed through the wall. “It’s time for dinner and it’s your turn to set the table. Haven can stay if she wants to.”
“Just a minute,” Casey yelled, tossing the cigarette out the window, where it rolled down to the gutter and caught a wad of pine needles on fire. Casey, busy running around the room spraying White Shoulders on everything, didn’t notice.
“Casey,” I whispered, pointing out the window at the small blaze. “Look.”
“Not now,” she snapped in a low voice, still waving her arms. “God, Haven, help me.”
“Wait,” I whispered, getting up and going to the window. “Don’t open the door yet.”
“Can you smell it?” she said, whirling around. “Can you?”
“No, but—”
Mrs. Melvin knocked again, harder. “Casey, open the door.”
“Okay, okay, one second.” She put the perfume on the dresser and went to the door, passing the window without noticing the flame burning in the gutter. She unlocked the door. “God, come on in then.”
As Mrs. Melvin came in I was leaning against the windowsill, attempting to appear casual with my Coke in my hand and trying not to cough as a thick cloud of White Shoulders settled over me. She took one step, stopping in the frame to take two short sniffs of the air. She was a small woman, like Casey, with the same shock of red hair, only hers was styled in a bob, ends curling down neatly over her shoulders. She wore stirrup pants and a long white shirt, with huge gold hoops dangling from her ears. Her eyeliner, as always, drew my attention next: onyx black, thick on upper and lower lids, curving out past her eye to a neat flourish that made her look like a cat. It must have taken half a jar of cold cream to remove and was a bit much, especially in our neighborhood, but it was her trademark. That and her incredible sense of smell.
She sniffed again, with her eyes closed, then opened them and said curtly, “You’ve been smoking.”
Casey turned bright red. “I have not.”
I glanced out the window. The fire was still burning, looking like it might spread to a wad of leaves nearby. I had to do something, so as Mrs. Melvin crossed the room, eyes closed again and still sniffing, I panicked and flung the rest of my Coke out the window, most of it hitting the glass with a splat but thankfully enough getting to the edge of the roof where it somehow, miraculously, doused the fire. I thought we were home free until I turned around to see Mrs. Melvin, hands on her hips, looking at me. Just past her was Casey, who threw her hands up in the air and shook her head, surrendering.
“Yes you have,” she said, walking past me to the open window and glancing out at the smoldering gutter. “Look at that. You’re setting fires and still lying to my face.”
“Mom,” Casey said quickly, “I didn’t ...”
Mrs. Melvin walked to the door. “Jake, get up here.” Parenting in the Melvin household was a tag-team affair. Any conflict had to be dealt with in tandem, attacked from both sides. I heard Mr. Melvin pounding up the steps before he appeared in the doorway in jeans and loafers. My father called Mr. Melvin the consummate frat boy. He was forty-three but looked eighteen and was about as whipped as any man could be. One look, one call from Mrs. Melvin and he snapped to attention.
“What’s going on?” He had a newspaper in his hand. “Hello, Haven. How’s it going?”
“Good,” I said.
“We have a situation here,” Mrs. Melvin said, directing his attention out the window to the gutter, which was still smoking a bit and thus providing the proper dramatic effect. “Your daughter has taken up smoking.”
“Smoking?” He looked at Casey, then out the window. “Is something on fire out there?”
“It’s that 4-H camp, Jake, where she picked up every other bad habit this summer.” Mrs. Melvin walked to the dresser and opened the box on top, taking out the pack of cigarettes. “Look at this. There are probably birth control pills in here too.”
“Mom, please,” Casey said, “I haven’t had sex yet.”
“Haven,” Mr. Melvin said quietly, “maybe you should get on home to dinner.”
“Okay,” I said. This was the way I always seemed to leave the Melvins’ house, under some sort of duress. Things were always exciting over at the Melvins’. During the divorce I’d spent most of my time there, sitting on Casey’s bed reading Teen magazine and listening to arguments and situations that blissfully had nothing to do with my world whatsoever.
On my way out the door I saw Casey’s brother, Ronald, on the porch petting the Melvins’ cat, a hugely overweight tabby named Velvet. Ronald was only five, not even born when I’d met Casey the day they moved from New Jersey all those years ago.
“Hey, baby Ronald,” I said.
“Shut up.” He hated his family nickname now. At five, he was beginning to resent anything with the word “baby” attached to it.
“See you later,” I said.
“Haven?” he called after me. “How’d you grow so much?”
I stopped at the end of the front walk to face his shock of Melvin red hair and his toughskin cutoffs, the cat shedding a cloud of hair all around him. “I don’t know, Ronald.”
He thought for a minute, still petting. He had the freckles, a faceful plus the ones Casey had lost once she hit fourteen. “Vegetables,” he said slowly, pronouncing it carefully, then added, “probably.”
“Yeah.” I hit the sidewalk in full stride for the one hundred and fourteen squares of cement, cracks and all, that led to my own front walk. “Probably.”