“Doesn’t Scarlett always get her fun in?”
Mom throws her head back, laughing. When she does that, openmouthed, hand on her stomach, she is identical to Scarlett. Even the way her neck cranes back just so.
“Help me with the milk,” she says and hands it to me. “Then we’ll go.”
Turns out Mom has to take Nancy to pick up her heart pills.
“Might as well make yourself useful,” Nancy says as they are walking out the door. Mom’s cheeks redden and I can’t tell if it’s from anger or embarrassment. When she’s mad she purses her lips, and she isn’t doing that now. “Maybe we can find a Providence Journal while we’re there, help you find a new job. Lord knows you didn’t bring one with you.”
After the door closes, I decide that
1. I hate Nancy and
2. I should busy myself by getting started on my scholarship application and essay. August 7th will come quick.
I trudge up the stairs, past Scarlett’s closed door on the second-floor landing. Heaven forbid I set foot in there. I plop down at Comet Headquarters. On a calendar above the desk my birthday is circled in blue—it’s also the registration date for the Waterman Scholarship. The online form has been saved and filled out. I need to reread it at least two times and spell-check before sending in the registration.
Tucker said, “A computer checks the registration. No one cares if you spell-check it.”
I’ll send it out on my birthday. That way I can spell-check one extra time just to prove a point.
I get to work and scroll through and stop where I always do: the dreaded essay question.
Please explain in 1,000 words why your experiment successfully represents who you are as a scientist and how the execution of your experiment reinforces your educational goals.
I rest my chin in my hand and tap my pen on the desk.
You watch the world.
The sunlight streams in from the skylight onto my hand and warms the skin.
I wish I had gone to the beach. I don’t have anyone to call to go with me. I just haven’t made a lot of friends here. Scarlett has. I’ve been with Dad in the labs, or the people my age that I have met over the years only stay a couple weeks at a time. Not many people come back summer after summer.
I put the pen down. Scarlett is a little like Becky. Popular, well liked, confident, and funny. Everyone is always laughing when they are around Scarlett. She knows who she is and she’s got boyfriends all the time. They don’t dump her for Becky Winthrop. She always knows exactly what to say to other people her age. I don’t. I always trip over my words and overthink everything.
Until I can figure out why Becky and Scarlett get all the guys, it’s going to eat away at me. There are people who can just talk to other people—they can socialize and it’s not hard for them, it’s no big deal.
I get up and pace.
I can study that specific behavior. There has to be a set of parameters, something concrete that both Scarlett and Becky have in common. Since I can’t study Becky, who I might throttle to death if I saw in person, I can watch my sister. Scarlett does and says specific things that make people want to be around her all the time. Just like Becky.
There has to be a direct correlation between Scarlett’s specific behavior and style to the number of people who revere her and want to be her friend. If I figure this out, maybe I’ll get Tucker to see who I am—that I’m not “watching the world.”
I put my pen down. I can wait to write the essay. If I do this before Scarlett goes to orientation in a week or so, it’ll help me figure out what Becky Winthrop does that I don’t.
I’m going to the beach. I open the bureau and slip on my red one-piece. It’s what I wore for swim lessons and it’s comfy. I’m going to get my fun in too—in a different way. I snatch my journal and slide it into my backpack. The walk to Nauset Beach is .75 miles.
“I’m not logical,” I say aloud, and when I get outside, I hike a beach chair into the crook of my arm. “And I don’t watch the world!”
FIVE
WITHIN TEN MINUTES, I’M ALMOST AT THE entrance to the beach. The beach chair keeps slipping out from under my arm and I adjust its position. Nauset Beach already has a line of cars ten deep from the tollbooth.
A group of boys in a Jeep Wrangler drive by and stop at the end of the line of cars waiting to pay and park. Sitting in the backseat is a blond guy who has his arms out resting on both of the empty seats beside him. His back is very defined. Maybe he’s a swimmer? He turns his head to me, but he’s wearing Aviator sunglasses so I can’t verify if he’s looking at me. It’s possible he’s interested in the various foliage growing on the roadside. That kind of guy would check out Scarlett, not me. I walk a bit but keep pace with the slow creep of the Jeep. He keeps glancing over and smiles.
I shoot forward, tripping over a rock. The chair flies out of my hand, my arms pinwheel, but I steady myself. The chair clatters to the ground. These dumb flip-flops. The guys made it to the tollbooth and the driver talks to the guard. The blond in the back is still laughing. He calls, “Are you okay?”
“It’s just the rock sediment!” I say and reposition the chair.
“It’s the what?” he calls back.
The car revs past the tollbooth and speeds into the lot.
Rock sediment? What the hell is wrong with me? This is why I am dumped for people like Becky—because I bring up the stinkin’ rock sediment.
When I get to the lot they’re nowhere to be seen. Good. I’ve humiliated myself enough in front of cute guys for one day.
Okay, so, if I’m observing Scarlett then I need to compile a short list of concrete observable behaviors and go from there. The world is an equation. I just have to fill in the right factors to find the answers. I can’t be a ballerina, but Scarlett’s social interactions are at least worth a look.
I need to be far enough away from the second lifeguard chair but close enough so no one can recognize me. There are four possible boardwalks. I walk up the first one and when I get to the end, I try to stay near groups of people. The second lifeguard chair is one hundred yards away. There are about five hundred people in my immediate view, so I should be camouflaged. I have to get closer to see Scarlett. I walk along the edge of the beach and the dunes that run all the way to the parking lot. I can hurry back to the first boardwalk if necessary.
I don’t see her. She’s not at the—
Holy crap.
Scarlett stands up about twenty feet from me and pulls a blue strapless dress over a zebra-print string bikini top. I drop the chair and turn my back to my sister, pretending to riffle through my beach bag.
A few couples and their beach umbrellas separate us. I hunch my shoulders up as though somehow that will hide my face.
“I love that suit even more on you than when we saw it in the catalog,” a girl says. I recognize her but don’t know her name. Scarlett made friends with a lot of local girls, but I have only met them out on Main Street when we’ve bumped into them on our way to dinner. She even hangs out with them when she visits Nancy throughout the year. Except for the summer, I’ve never been to visit.
“It’s so cute, right?” Scarlett says and adjusts the triangle cups. “Definitely an eye catcher.”
They pass by me and once they turn onto the boardwalk I hurry behind.
The sand sinks beneath me as I haul ass the way I came. I slip in my flip-flops, burning the underside of my feet on the sand. The silver bar of the chair is slicked with my underarm sweat and the thong of the flip-flop is killing the skin between my toes. This sucks.
Boardwalk. Thank the beach gods.
Once I get to the end, I walk slowly because the sound of a person running on the planks will travel. Scarlett and her friends are already past the third boardwalk entrance and near the beach headquarters, which sit just before Liam’s, the best clam shack in existence.
I leave the chair by the showers and follow their path car by car.
Scarlett and her friend
s hold their bags, pass by Liam’s, and keep walking. I scoot to a car nearby, but stay hunched over and out of sight.
“Well, well. If it isn’t my true love, Scarlett Levin.”
I peer around the side of the car. The driver of the Jeep gets out and walks toward Scarlett and her friends. The Jeep Wrangler idles near the entrance to the outer beach. The blond guy who laughed at me secures a cooler with a bungee cord. They seem to be packing to go somewhere.
The driver says something I can’t hear. Scarlett laughs and it chimes out over the parking lot. I don’t laugh like that; I snort.
“You coming to the outer beach?” he asks Scarlett.
“I wish,” Scarlett says. “My aunt is having some kind of welcome-back dinner.”
She lets her hands linger on his chest. The blond guy keeps working on the cooler. “Tate, you want to let the air out of the tires?” he asks the other guy riding in the Jeep. His hair is so blond, it’s almost white.
Oh, they’re going four wheeling. You can’t go out on the beach unless your tires are at a lower pressure. It makes it easier to drive on the sand.
“Drive me home first?” Scarlett says. “You won’t make me walk, will you?”
How can Scarlett just ask them for something like that? These guys were about to go out on the beach and she gets them to stop their plans, drive her home, and then come back. Does she have some kind of special power? Some branch of science that hasn’t been discovered: a boy manipulation molecule?
“I’ll see you tonight. Main Street,” she adds.
The girls jump in the car and Scarlett sits in the front on the lap of the guy with the white blond hair. Her friends cozy up next to the guy who talked to me. The Jeep screeches out of the parking lot. The girls scream and fall into fits of laughter.
As they speed away, my guy, the one in the back, tips his chin to the sky as if he were more interested in the warmth on his face than the girls sitting by his side.
I can respect that.
After dinner, Scarlett walks to town to join her friends. I follow a little later, but she doesn’t know that. It’s better than sitting in this house, fielding calls from Ettie about band camp.
I walk past the town pier, turn onto Main Street, and there it is: the Seahorse shell and gem store, the best store in the world. Every August, when we pull out of Nancy’s driveway to head home, I calculate how many hours I have to work during the school year so I can buy whatever catches my eye the following summer.
Scarlett is down in the Silver Lining, a jewelry store she loves. Mom, Dad, and Nancy are at home, and I have a good hour or two before it’s optimal viewing conditions for the comet. Plenty of time to observe Scarlett in her natural habitat. The street smells the same as it always does: like the thick marinara from the pizza place, the sugary sweet cotton candy from the ice-cream store, and of course the ocean, because it’s never too far away.
I take one step off the main drag and into the Seahorse. Inside, everything sparkles: rare rocks and gems, fossils as big as my Stargazer. There are bins of shells, and twisting mobiles made of rocks and starfish. I don’t know where to go first. My eyes fall on a blue agate stone tied to a leather strap, under glass in a display case. It’s a slice of a geode, a hollow rock that’s been crystalized due to volcanic heat and water. Anyway, it’s really sparkling there under the store lights.
“Those look so good with the shape of your face,” a voice says.
Toward the back of the store are three girls, each trying on different kinds of sunglasses. One of them has long black hair that falls to her mid-back. She poses for her other girlfriends and they take pictures next to the turnstiles of sunglasses.
“Let’s find the boys,” says one of the girls, who has a short pixie-cut hairstyle. They put the sunglasses back and, hand-in-hand, the girls form a chain and file out toward the store exit. The one with the long black hair stops next to me and points at the geode necklace.
“Oh my gosh, are you getting that? It’s so pretty.”
“Definitely,” I say, trying to channel my inner Scarlett. “When I get the cash.”
“Right?” she says. The other girls peek at the glass case. “I want everything in here.”
They remain in their chain and continue out onto the street. I turn, watching them go. I have never done that, made a chain of hands with my girlfriends. I never wanted to, but it looks fun.
I am about to take one step to see where they are going, maybe even see if I can hang out with them, when Scarlett’s voice echoes from outside. Right. I almost forgot the reason for being on Main Street in the first place. Through the open French doors of the shop, I see Scarlett toss her hair over her shoulder. I hide behind a wooden turnstile holding dried sand dollars and conch shells. I peek around.
As Scarlett walks, her blonde hair swishes behind her in wavy lines. She goes into Pleasantries, a clothing store I know she can’t afford. I step out of the Seahorse and follow slowly, close enough to hear but not so close that she’ll see me. I stop next to a busy restaurant and pretend to look for someone coming down the road. From where I am standing, I can see Scarlett walking inside the store. A familiar Jeep Wrangler idles at the nearest intersection and I recognize the driver. He runs into the store after Scarlett and playfully carries her outside.
The girls follow behind and Scarlett laughs, holding on to the guy’s sculpted arms as he grasps her waist. I would give anything to be there too. I know from their dark tans in June that these boys are either locals or lifeguards. I don’t see the blond guy from the beach earlier today, and surprisingly I’m disappointed about that.
I stand across the street, hidden by the crowds of people window-shopping and planning their dinners.
“Hello to you too, Curtis,” she says. He puts her down and kisses Scarlett right on the mouth. He even dips her. He’s tall, with shaggy hair that would have been dark had it not been lightened by the sun. The way the boys look at Scarlett and her friends you’d think they were hungry or something.
She pushes him back with a laugh. “Get off!” she says. “Don’t even. I am not slumming it this summer, Curtis.” Scarlett saunters away from the boys, but Curtis, the brown-haired guy, grabs her hand and pulls her back.
“I’m only joking, Miss Scarlett. Come to Lighthouse Beach; we’re starting a bonfire.”
Scarlett runs a hand through her hair so it fans out on her shoulders and back. She does that all the time and especially loves to do that when her hair has been up in a bun. It gets tons of looks from guys. I’ve seen it. Okay, so I guess I need to excessively play around with my hair.
Scarlett looks to her friends, who I can see even in the reflection of the window, are dying to go with Curtis and his friends. Hell, I am dying to go and I’m across the street. Her friends look at Scarlett, eyes wide, waiting for her to make the executive decision.
“Okay. Fine. But do not bring that crappy light beer again. I’m strictly drinking vodka this summer.” Scarlett side glances one of her friends. “I need to watch my calories,” she adds with a shrug. Okay, good. This is a clear, observable behavior I’ve seen Scarlett do. If I act like I don’t care, or show disinterest when I am actually interested, people will think I am even more interesting.
This is complicated.
Curtis agrees to grab some vodka and runs into the liquor store a few buildings down from where we stand.
This gives me time to find a different vantage point before she crosses the road to where Curtis’s Jeep is waiting.
The side street that runs down to Main is very steep. I turn the corner and run up so I am looking down on Main Street, just where Scarlett is standing. A couple of ladies head into the diner, the Bird’s Nest, which is next to Pleasantries.
I lean against the building and keep checking for Scarlett and her group of friends to cross the intersection to the Jeep.
I slip out a flip notebook from my pocket. I scribble down some Scarlett observations underneath those from the beach earlier tod
ay:
1. Scarlett’s confidence seems to be the biggest influence. Zebra bikini. Asks for boys to tote her around because she knows they will say yes.
2. Toss hair around.
3. If you act like you’re not interested in people they will actually be more interested in you.
Scarlett can just throw her shoulders back and not care what people think. I’m only confident when recounting things like the complex theories of black holes.
A red truck pulls up the side street from Main and stops just beyond me at the top of the hill. A sticker on the back of the rusted bumper says, “If the Doors of Perception Were Cleansed, Everything Would Appear to Man as It Is—Infinite.”—William Blake.
Who the hell is William Blake?
“I thought you were paying!” Scarlett’s voice carries up the hill.
Curtis must have come back with the vodka. They are going to pass before me any second. I tuck deeper behind the Bird’s Nest Dumpster and peek around to look down the street. I guess this vantage point isn’t so great after all. A door closes from the pickup behind me and a familiar frame gets out of the car. I think—I think it’s the blond guy from the beach? The one who laughed and smiled at me. He carries a shirt or a team jersey in his hand.
The guy ties the arms of the shirt around the tree so it seems to be hugging the bark. It’s not that dark out with the street lamps, but I have to squint. He presses his palm onto the tree trunk and after a moment bows his head and brings his other hand to cover his eyes. His back shudders.
It clicks—he’s crying. I immediately put away my notebook. It’s wrong to be watching this. This is a very private moment and I should not be here. I step out from behind the Dumpster to hurry down Main Street, away from this guy, and leave him to his privacy. The damn flip-flops crunch on something and echo loudly in the little alley. I try to make a run for it, but my foot shoots out from under me and I grasp onto the side of the Dumpster so I don’t fall. I cry out, the back of my heel scrapes on the asphalt.
The guy at the tree looks in my direction. Great.