Authors: Stephanie Greene
“I’ll
never
be like Natalie.”
“Nobody’s saying you will. Come on, baby, I’m taking you up,” Sheba said, lifting Lucy out of her chair. Lucy’s head promptly flopped against Sheba’s shoulder, her thumb went into her mouth. “Put your dishes on top of Natalie’s,” Sheba said. “I’ll take care of them when I come down. You can come back for dessert when I’m done putting your sister to bed.”
“Do I have to finish the rest of my chicken?” Jack called.
“It’ll fly away if you don’t.” Sheba’s voice floated back and was gone.
“You don’t have to if Natalie doesn’t,” Cecile declared. “Come on.” She put her foot on the pedal of the garbage can to hold it open for Jack and then scraped the rest of her dinner in, too. Even though I love Sheba’s stew, she thought. Even though I’m still hungry. She let the lid mournfully down. Jack sat back at the table to continue his battle.
The setting sun flooded the living room. Clusters of chintz-covered couches and deep armchairs were arranged in inviting circles. The jigsaw puzzle the children worked on with Granddad on rainy days lay half-finished on a card table in one corner. Cecile’s feet sank into the soft carpet as she crossed the room and collapsed onto a couch.
Picking up a magazine from the coffee table, she flipped aimlessly through it, then threw it back down. She stretched out along the couch to discover the pillow for her head was flat. Peevishly, she sat up and plumped it up and lay back down, but it did no good. Natalie’s excitement had invaded her body like a germ.
The Interlopers were already ruining everything.
Natalie hadn’t even seen William and she had a crush on him. No, not a crush. She had set her sights on him. That’s what their father called it. He made it sound like hunting.
Tomorrow Natalie would laugh at stupid things William said that weren’t funny and toss her head to make her hair fly back over her shoulders; William wouldn’t be able to take his eyes off her. Cecile had seen it happen with the boys Harry brought home from prep school. Had sat in the living room, watching Natalie pretend to read, then suddenly jump up with a startled cry when the boys entered the room, as if she hadn’t heard them crashing around in the front hall and been lying there, waiting for them.
A door closed quietly upstairs. Cecile pictured Lucy in her bed in their dusky room. Cecile had been happy to do that, too, when she was little. She’d lie between cool sheets and fall effortlessly into sleep to the sounds of life on the terrace. They made her feel safe.
Oh, don’t be a baby, Cecile thought. Really, it was
too annoying; the tip of a feather pricking the back of her leg through the fabric of the cushion was unbearable. She got fussily up and went into the dim front hall. Standing in front of the mirror over the sideboard, she stared.
What did people see when they looked at her, with her sharp chin, her untamable hair, her eyes too wide apart? And her nose. Cecile despaired over her nose. Natalie said it was a boy’s nose—straight and plain like their father’s. Natalie’s nose, on the other hand, was a ski-jump nose, Natalie said; she ran her finger along it lovingly to show its graceful curve. All the prettiest models had ski-jump noses, Natalie said. Cecile, glued to Natalie’s side, believed every word.
Her mouth was all right, though, wasn’t it? Couldn’t anyone smile a dazzling smile if they practiced? Cecile smiled at herself and then frowned; smiled again to show her teeth this time and shook her head, laughing silently as if a boy had said something funny. The boy on the boat, maybe.
But no, he wouldn’t fall for a phony smile.
Something about the way he’d stood there told Cecile he’d think she was an idiot if she were to smile at him that way. She could never respect a boy who would actually fall for it.
Did all boys fall for a girl’s fake smile as long as she was pretty? And what if the girl wasn’t pretty? What then? Surely it was only the dim light of the foyer that made her look so pale and insignificant.
Defiantly Cecile gathered her hair on top of her head and turned her face from side to side, checking to see which was her better profile. Natalie said girls needed to determine which one was theirs, and then make sure they sat on the right side when they were on a date so that it was the one the boy would look at.
Both her profiles were ordinary. She let her hair fall.
At the sound of footsteps on the stairs, Cecile looked up. “I’m going to the dock,” she said as Sheba came slowly down.
“No dessert tonight?”
“No.” Cecile sagged against the banister. What if she went to the dock and the boy was there, with the
Rammer
and the tiny lights lining the bow sparkling in the night and the people on board laughing and talking? What would she do or say? “Well, maybe,” she said listlessly.
“That’s a girl.” Sheba swept the stray rose petals that had fallen on the table into one hand. She wiped its gleaming surface. “You come sit with me in the kitchen,” she said. “You’ve had enough for one day. It’s time for you to be settling down for the night.”
“But I’m not even tired,” Cecile protested feebly as she followed Sheba’s wide back through the swinging doors. The warm air rushed out to greet her.
T
hey had to come down sooner or later. Cecile climbed on a piling and held her arms out for balance. It was tricky, keeping one eye on the stairs while trying to stand as still as a statue. It wasn’t the same, either, playing statues by herself. The whole point was to see who could stay frozen in their pose the longest without falling into the water.
“Yeah, right,” Natalie had said earlier this morning when Cecile asked if she wanted to play. Natalie tilted her chin and held up her right arm as if she were holding a torch, the pose they used to imitate the Statue of Liberty. “Hi, William,” she said in a mocking voice. “You can call me Liberty.”
“We’re not going to let them change everything,” Cecile said.
“Maybe you’re not.”
Who did Natalie think she was fooling, pretending to sunbathe? The sky was overcast; the sun’s weak rays held no warmth. Cecile shivered, wishing that Harry was here. Harry would play with her. He never passed up the chance to show off the pose of
The Thinker
he’d perfected over the years. Watching him stand calmly on a piling, with one leg crooked and the other leg resting on his knee, his forehead on his fist, pretending to be deep in thought, always made the rest of them laugh so hard they lost their balance long before Harry did. He won every time.
How cold the inky water looked! Cecile rubbed her thin arms. She needed to be hot before she could jump; she dreaded the shock of it even on a hot day. The rest of them always leaped ahead wildly, shouting, “Slowpoke!” and “Chicken!” to goad her on. The icy drops they splashed on her feet alone were enough to make her climb down.
People couldn’t help being cautious; they were born that way. Of course, it would be worth it when she finally jumped and made it back to the surface.
But first would come the slight feeling of panic when the water closed over her head. She’d squeeze her eyes shut against the riotous, noisy bubbles and kick as hard as she could to rise up…up, only feeling safe again when the sun was on her face and she could breathe.
But there was no sun this morning to reward her, no jeering siblings. Cecile was about to climb down when she heard voices. Whipping her head around, she saw the Cahoon children filing down the stairs behind their mother and quickly put her foot down to steady herself. How embarrassing it would be to fall in front of them!
“Leo, come back here,” Mrs. Cahoon called when Leo started toward the float with a fishing pole in one hand. He must have spotted Jack. Cecile could tell the pole and hook were plastic. Wait until Jack saw it.
Mrs. Cahoon put her large straw bag down in front of the cabanas and took out a tube of lotion. She could have been in the city, the way she was dressed. Her flowered dress was belted at the waist; a sweater hung over her shoulders. She wore a hat,
too, and, oh my gosh…(Cecile wobbled and almost fell again at the sight of them) high heels! No one wore high heels to walk down to the dock. They’d make walking on the drive impossible. Had Mrs. Cahoon expected the Island to have sidewalks?
How funny! If only this were last summer and she and Natalie had been hiding in the lilac tree when Mrs. Cahoon wobbled by. It would have been all they could do not to laugh out loud. Mrs. Cahoon didn’t look like a person who would appreciate wobbling. Maybe that was why she looked so severe and hadn’t called hello to Cecile when she saw her. Because she did see me, Cecile thought, but she ignored me. And I ignored her.
Mrs. Cahoon squirted a thin stream of lotion into the palm of her hand and motioned for Jenny to turn around. What a baby, letting her mother do that. Cecile watched as Mrs. Cahoon slid her hand under the straps of Jenny’s suit and ran it over Jenny’s back and shoulders briskly and efficiently. When she tapped Jenny on the shoulder, Jenny turned back around and lifted her face so her
mother could spread more lotion over her cheeks, nose, and forehead.
Mrs. Cahoon motioned to William next. Cecile couldn’t stand it for another minute. They weren’t just babies; they hadn’t even been born yet.
“Geronimo!” she cried, exhilarated, and jumped.
Shocking, how dark and cold it was. Cecile burst back up to the surface, gasping. Then the thrill of it: of not being a pale, pudgy child who was afraid of the sun, and the triumph of having jumped, took over. She treaded water and tilted her head back until it reached her hairline, then quickly lifted her head up again, plastering her hair away from her face so it rested sleek and heavy on her neck.
Natalie and she used to call it their seal look. Whoever had the smoothest hair won. Now Cecile tilted her head back again and again with her back to the dock; she wondered if anyone was looking. She moved her arms and legs to make herself spin in circles. She closed her eyes. She was a mermaid.
“Isn’t it freezing?”
Jenny was sitting on the edge of the dock. A
white smear ran along one side of her nose, her stomach in her bathing suit rose round and comfortable as a pillow. She was even paler and softer than she’d looked in clothes. Her brown eyes were filled with admiration.
“Not really,” Cecile said. Then, “Well, sort of. It’s still early.” She swam quickly to the ladder and grasped a rung to pull herself up. The warm air folded around her skin as she rose.
“It’s freezing,” Jenny cried, putting up her hands to shield her soft self when Cecile stepped onto the dock, sprinkling water. “I can’t believe you jumped from the top of that thing.”
“What, the piling?” Cecile said carelessly. She adjusted the legs of her suit, shook her arms. “It’s nothing.” She felt Jenny’s eyes on her back as she climbed up on the piling again. William passed her on his way to the end of the dock, glanced at her, and looked away.
“Is your brother girl crazy?” Cecile asked.
“You’d better believe it.”
“Then he’s going to like my sister.”
“They’ll be flirting before you know it,” said Jenny.
Cecile glanced at her, alert.
“Don’t you know what flirting is?” said Jenny.
“Of course I do,” Cecile said, and jumped. The bubbles roared around her head as she sank down. Who did Jenny think she was, assuming Natalie would have anything to do with a boy who had such ears? When her feet touched bottom, she pushed back up.
“My sister doesn’t flirt with just anyone, you know,” she said as she neared the ladder.
“My brother does.” Jenny watched as Cecile climbed the ladder. “Which one are you?”
“Cecile.” Cecile pulled herself up, adjusting the legs of her bathing suit. “And you’re Jenny and your brothers are William and Leo.” She strolled toward the piling, climbed up, shook her hair.
“How do you know?”
“It’s our island.”
Cecile jumped again, higher this time, and spun in the air like a top. That ought to show her, she thought smugly as she sank down, down, down.
Interloper who thinks she knows everything.
But Jenny was waiting on the edge, patient as a dog. “Can you touch bottom?” she asked when Cecile resurfaced.
“If I want to.”
“Is it over your head now?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t like swimming over my head,” Jenny said.
“Jack swims over his head, and he’s only eight.” Cecile pulled herself up the ladder and sat down. The dock was warm on the backs of her legs.
“I’m a total chicken,” Jenny said. “I’m afraid of dogs, too. Even small ones. William calls me Chicken Little.”
Chicken Little! If Natalie were here, she’d look at Jenny’s stomach and make a face behind Jenny’s back. Somehow Cecile didn’t think Jenny would care. She felt oddly envious of the way Jenny sat there, so unself-conscious, so contented. Cecile never used to care either.
Suddenly she was glad Jenny hadn’t been insulted; she was happy. “I think flirting’s dopey,
don’t you?” she said, rolling over onto her stomach to let the dock warm her whole body.
“The girls at my school practice on one another,” Jenny said, doing the same. “We don’t have boys.”
“What do you mean, practice?”
“You know, they dance, and one of the girls pretends she’s the boy and leads. Or they practice kissing the backs of their hands and watch what it looks like in the mirror.” Jenny shrugged. “Stuff like that.”
“Kissing the backs of their hands?” Cecile said. “What does that do?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“Weird.”
They rested companionably, side by side, and, cupping their chins in their hands, stared at the action on the float. Leo was watching Jack cast, with his own fishing rod dangling uselessly at his side. Jack was patiently explaining something. He held out his rod for Leo to take, keeping a careful eye on Leo when he did, and made casting motions with his arms for Leo to imitate.
William stood at the far corner of the float staring
out at the wall of sea grass, as if he found it far more interesting than Natalie lying tan and sleek behind him.
“Leo’s not going to catch a fish with that hook,” Cecile said.
“He wouldn’t know what to do with it if he did,” said Jenny. “Does your brother catch things?”
“Tons of fish. We eat them for breakfast, sometimes.”
“
Eeuuw,
I hate fish,” Jenny said.
“What about lobster?”
“I’ve never had it.”
“You’ve never had lobster?” Cecile rolled over and sat up. This was wonderful! Jenny was afraid of deep water and had never eaten lobster. Why, she didn’t know anything!
“Have you ever held a hermit crab?” Cecile asked. Then, “You
do
know what a hermit crab is.”
“Those little things with shells and lots of legs?” Jenny said, sitting up.
“That could be a lot of things,” Cecile said. “Don’t you go to the beach where you live?”
“We mostly swim in the pool at our club.”
“Pools,” Cecile said. She had nothing else to say about pools.
“My mother’s worried we’ll step on something at a beach,” Jenny said apologetically.
“Don’t tell me she doesn’t let you go barefoot.”
Jenny hunched her shoulders in the face of Cecile’s cold stare. “My father stepped on a rusty can at a beach when he was little and had to get a tetanus shot,” she said meekly.
This was getting better and better.
“Your mother’s not going to follow you around the whole time you’re here, is she,” Cecile said, “making sure you have lotion on and are wearing your sandals?”
The question felt momentous. The two girls sat, eyes locked, as it quivered in the air between them. Much depended on Jenny’s answer: the direction of their friendship, or (more delicious and dramatic) if a friendship would even be made.
“She hates the sun,” Jenny said. “We only came here so my father can be in a golf tournament. Mom will sit in the house all day and read. Anyway,” she
finished, and it was as good as a drop of blood exchanged between them, “I wouldn’t let her.”
There. It was sealed.
“All right, then.” Cecile got to her feet. “We’ll start with hermit crabs.”
Jenny stood up, too. “Do they bite?”
“Not hard. I suppose you’ve never touched a jellyfish, either?”
“Yuck,” said Jenny, shivering, excited.
They heard a laugh and looked toward the float. Natalie was sitting up now, her hands on the straps of her bathing suit as she looked up at William, who finally seemed to have noticed her.
“See? They’re already starting.” Jenny’s voice was breathy. “First they pretend they don’t notice each other. Then they start.”
This wouldn’t do. Jenny hadn’t sounded nearly as interested in hermit crabs.
“Who cares?” Cecile said, starting off. “Let’s go. How long are you going to be here?”
“Ten days,” Jenny cried, running to catch up with her.
“Only ten days? That’s hardly any time. I’m sure
Lucy has some hermit crabs in her bucket.”
“You promise they won’t hurt?”
“They’ll tickle, Chicken Little,” Cecile cried as she broke into a run. “Hurry up, slowpoke!”
The girls staggered back in the late afternoon, sunburned and victorious, to show the day’s bounty to Jack and Leo. The four of them crouched around the two buckets on the float, inspecting. Cecile kept her eyes on Leo as he held out his hand for Jack to put a huge hermit crab on it.
“We had to walk up and down the club beach about ten times for it,” Cecile warned. “Be careful.”
Leo’s face was a mixture of terror and excitement, as if he were dreading the moment when the crab drew blood but was prepared to face it like a man. He would have faced anything for Jack by this point in the day. Jack was the mighty fisherman. Jack was kind.
“Don’t jerk your hand away, even if it tickles,” Jack said in his serious way.
“But what if it hurts worse than a needle?” quavered Leo.
“You’d better do it on the beach,” Cecile told Jack. “You know he’s going to drop it.”
Cecile fixed the whole of her attention on the bucket. She’d spotted Natalie and William when they came around the corner of the beach from the direction of the club and quickly checked to see if they were holding hands. She let out a soft puff of air when she saw they weren’t.
“Here they come!” Jenny said excitedly when their footsteps sounded on the dock.
“So?” Cecile said. “Make sure you don’t hurt those minnows! Pay attention!”
But Jenny didn’t want to pay attention. “I wonder what they’ve been doing,” she said, and squeezed Cecile’s arm. She’d been squeezing Cecile’s arm all day, whenever she got excited. Cecile had enjoyed it earlier; it made her feel brave. Now she jerked her arm away and kept her head down as Natalie and William approached.
The weight of them standing there when they stopped at the top of the ramp bore down on the top of her head. Only when Jack led Leo up the
ramp did Cecile finally look up, and then it was all right, because it was the boys she was interested in, not them.
Natalie had rolled up the sleeves of one of Harry’s old shirts and tied the tails in a knot over her bikini. Her blue eyes stood out in her tanned face; her sunglasses held back her hair. The tops of William’s shoulders and the rims of his ears were red. His madras bathing suit hung to his knees. The outline of his sunglasses, visible in his shirt pocket, was faintly etched against the sunburn on his face.