Before Frankie says anything to embarrass me, I tell them we were just busy doing family stuff and wanted to meet them out tonight, but since we got stuck in San Francisco later than we’d planned we might not be able to risk sneaking out.
They laugh as we recount our day, mock witness-style for Frankie’s camera, starting with the presto-change-o act in the locker room and ending with our bus schedule oversight and frantic phone call to the Shack. Thankfully, Sam’s friend could cover his shift.
“You should still come out tonight,” Jake says. “Even if the rain doesn’t stop. We’ll just hang out on the deck at the Shack — no one will be around.”
“We probably will,” Frankie says. As Sam’s leg brushes against mine in the backseat, I agree. She could promise them we’ll help kill someone and hide the body — as long as Sam keeps me warm, I’ll go along with anything.
After almost two hours on the road, we reach the Welcome to Zanzibar sign. Jake pulls up in front of the community pool so we can change back into our boating ensembles.
Unfortunately, the fickle old universe wants to teach us another Important Lesson About Secrets and Lies, and the community pool — along with its locker room — is closed. Locked. Lights out, thank you, please come back tomorrow.
“You could tell them that you hit a big wave and soaked all your clothes, so you had to change into your friends’ clothes,” Jake says.
“Even better,” Sam says. “Tell them someone went overboard, and you had to jump in to save them.”
“Or that the boat tipped, and you had to use your backpacks as flotation devices until the coast guard showed up.”
“Or —” “Or,” Frankie holds up her hand to shut them up before they start talking about bombs or drug enforcement agents or any other James Bond boy fantasies, “we’ll just tell them we came back early because of the rain, changed at Jackie’s house to hang out for a barbecue, and left our clothes there accidentally.”
We rehearse the story again before Jake and Sam drop us off a few houses from ours. Otherwise, Red and Jayne might spot us getting out of a car full of strange boys and want to invite them in for tea and lemon cookies. We’d have to pretend that they were Jackie and Samantha’s older, super responsible, super gay brothers who dislike girls and coincidentally have almost the same exact names as their sisters. Those crazy parents!
The guys pull over and get out of the car to say goodbye. We make tentative plans to meet up at midnight at the Shack, assuming we can get away without incident. This time, after Sam kisses me and we unhook, the warmth of his body lingers against me, blocking out the cold like a blanket on a snowy Saturday morning back East.
I will see him tonight, no matter what.
The car pulls away and we watch the brake lights brighten at the stop sign before turning the corner. Frankie and I walk the last fifty feet or so to the house, rehearsing our story one last time for consistency. There’s no way Red and Jayne are already in bed — they’d never fall asleep until Frankie and I got home safe. But if tonight’s a good television night, there’s a chance we can sneak in unnoticed, make our way upstairs, and hide out in the bathroom taking showers and changing into our pajamas without Red and Jayne asking too many questions. I blow a wish up to the God of Broadcasting and open the door to the kitchen.
I should have known better than to invoke the universe when it’s so clearly in the mood to dole out lessons. Tonight turns out to be a horrible television night in the Bay area, for Red and Jayne are waiting for us in the kitchen, drinking tea, playing cards, and eager to hear about our wild pirate-girl adventures at sea.
“Wow, did you fall in?” Red asks. Bathed in the fluorescent light of the kitchen, we look like two sea creatures dragged to shore by a fishnet. The only things missing are renegade starfish, old seaweed, and a few well-placed barnacles.
“We walked back from Jackie’s,” Frankie says. “We wanted to be in the rain.”
“Did you guys still go out on the water today? Even with the weather?” Jayne asks.
Frankie shrugs in her voodoo cool way. “Partly. We didn’t stay out as long as we wanted. But her dad invited us back to the house for an indoor barbecue, so it was still fun.”
“Where are your clothes from this morning?” Jayne asks, eyeing us suspiciously.
Why do mothers always notice things? Uncle Red’s just sitting there with his tea, holding his cards, patiently waiting for Aunt Jayne to get her head back in the game. But Jayne’s on to us. Any minute now, she’ll cluck her tongue, let out a long sigh, and pick up the phone to call my mother and remind her what a horrible daughter she raised.
Frankie stays cool under pressure and repeats the whole story, just like we practiced it. Boat ride prematurely interrupted by the weather. Back to the house for dinner. Changed out of boat clothes that got wet when the rain came in. Jackie’s parents offered to drive us back (because they’re reallyreallyreally great, concerned, responsible people), but we refused, insisting that we wanted to walk in the rain since it’s still so warm out. We had such a fun day with Jackie, Samantha, and their families that we totally forgot our clothes — but we’ll get them tomorrow morning. And by the way, if those are indeed lemon cookies on that plate in front of Dad, can we have some?
Jayne reaches across the table to pass the cookies and expresses sympathy that our boat trip was preempted by a storm. “Sounds like you still had a fun day, though.”
We assure them that we did, grab a few more cookies for the road, and make haste for the bedroom, where we close the door and explode in laughter.
“Parents,” Frankie says, mouth full of lemon dust. “They believe just about anything.”
“Maybe yours do.” I pull off my wet clothes and get into shorts and a sweatshirt, chasing away the last of the soggy chill from the rain. “You know Helen and Carl would never leave us alone in the first place. And a boat ride with strange girls? They’d demand their phone number so they could call in advance and secure the facts of our story with a responsible adult, get an accurate count of the available life jackets and flotation devices on board, then call the coast guard to make sure someone would be watching us.”
“Don’t remind me,” Frankie shrugs. “So, how long till we break out?”
“Maybe two hours,” I say. “We need to go downstairs and appear extremely tired until your parents go to bed. You know, being out on a boat most of the day can be very draining.”
“Anna, you’re turning into a rather naughty girl.”
“Oh, that’s not regular Anna,” I assure her. “It’s Crazy Anna from the dressing room mirror. Totally your fault.”
Frankie laughs. I think we both like Crazy Anna a little more than regular Anna. It’s like magic — while I was trying on the bathing suit last month, it rubbed against my butt and unleashed the A.B.S.E. Bikini Genie, granting all my wishes.
“That reminds me,” Frankie says, changing out of her clothes. “I think we should alter the contest rules. Our vacation is almost half over and we haven’t gotten very far.”
“We didn’t plan on Sam and Jake.” I sit on the end of her bed as she touches up her makeup for our big date on the couch downstairs.
“No. I mean, I could still find my own ten, but I don’t want to get ahead of you. You really like Sam, don’t you? I can tell these things.” She dabs at her smudged eyeliner with a Q-tip.
“Maybe.” I shrug. “But so what? You really like Jake.”
“He’s okay, I guess. I think we’re gonna — you know. Tonight.” She tosses her mascara on the dresser and flips her head over to shake out her hair as though making this decision is no more taxing or important than choosing between the powdered sugar and the glazed from the morning donut box.
“Frankie, are you serious?”
“Maybe.” She half grins, the devil that sits on shoulders in all the old cartoons. The one that’s way more cute than scary and therefore causes infinitely more destruction and chaos.
I stare at her with
my mouth open, but additional details aren’t forthcoming. Instead, she does a final face-check in the dresser mirror, blots her lips with a tissue, and leads us downstairs for Act Two, in which doting daughter and friend give an Oscar-worthy performance as the two sleepiest girls on the planet, putting all fears of illicit behavior to rest.
But two hours later, as we tiptoe off the deck and into the backyard with the camera, beach blankets, and the trusty turned-off flashlight, we uncover a previously unresolved and potentially dangerous hole in the plot.
“Can’t sleep, girls?” Aunt Jayne calls from the dark and lonely shadows of the sea, wrapping a crocheted shawl around her shoulders against the breeze.
twenty
Frankie crashes into me at the sound of her mother’s voice and I yelp, though from the shock of Frankie stepping on me or Aunt Jayne wandering up the shore to meet us, I can’t decide.
“Going somewhere?” Jayne asks, surveying our gear.
I’ve become quite adept at lying on this vacation but still haven’t mastered the skill of instantaneous fabrication under extreme pressure. That’s more Frankie’s specialty. Unfortunately, the queen of far-fetched fairy tales is cocooned in a state of shock behind me, unmoving and silent.
“We were just, um, we were going to — we wanted to —” I hope my stammering snaps Frankie back to reality, since Jayne is too close for me to give Frankie the swift mule-kick-in-the-shin she deserves.
It works. Frankie drops her blanket and heads down the stairs with purpose to meet her mother.
“Anna and I wanted to come out to the water to get some night shots,” she says. “You know, for the trip documentary.”
Aunt Jayne eyes her closely. “In full makeup?”
“Mom, we don’t want to look all hideous on camera.”
“I thought you two were exhausted?”
“We were,” Frankie says, twisting her bracelet around her wrist. “But now we’re rejudevated.”
“Rejuvenated,” I say, translating for Jayne. “Right. And you need blankets because…”
“Because we might want to lie down and look at the stars.” Frankie has an answer for everything.
Aunt Jayne looks from her daughter to me, to the blankets at my feet, and back to Frankie before letting out a long sigh and shaking her head. “Frankie, I —”
“Mom, why are you out here alone, anyway?”
If you can’t afford an attorney, Frankie “Teflon” Perino will be appointed to you by a court of law.
Aunt Jayne opens her mouth, but Frankie counters again before any sound comes out. “Do you want to be in our movie?”
Jayne laughs as Frankie heads back to the stairs to pull her camera out of its bag, adding credibility to our threadbare tapestry of lies.
“All right, all right.” Aunt Jayne throws up her hands and ushers us back across the lawn. “But let’s do it on the deck. It’s freezing out here tonight.”
Tonight? As opposed to other nights you’ve been hiding out in the shadows as your doting daughter and I slipped away into the darkness? My heart is thumping its way up my esophagus and into my throat. I swallow it back down and shoot Frankie a sideways look that translates to, “Did your mom see us sneak out the other night, and if so, why hasn’t she said anything?”
Frankie responds with a lift of her eyebrow. “Doubt it,” the broken little wings tell me.
On the deck, we interview Jayne, asking her how she’d redecorate the beach house, the lawn, and the entire shoreline if given the opportunity. This amuses her, and as she plays along with our silly questions, I relax, convincing myself that she doesn’t know about our previous boy-filled escapades and, by some inexplicable break in tonight’s chain of horrific events, accepts our documentary cover-up story.
“That’s a wrap,” Frankie says. “We have to do some editing before we can show it to you, though. We want it to be a surprise when we get back from the trip.”
By editing she means transferring all the parts with Sam, Jake, and our secret life in the shadow realm to a separate DVD and slicing in the loop of random shots she and I took of us splashing, swimming, reading, and generally behaving ourselves on the beach, sans boys. We filmed it all in about twenty minutes the first day, but that’s the beauty of swimsuits. No one expects a change of clothes to indicate the passage of time.
After Aunt Jayne goes to bed (at least, after she tells us she’s going to bed), I turn to Frankie. “Okay, I know you’re good. I’ve seen you snow teachers and security guards and my parents and all manner of responsible adults, but your mom isn’t that stupid. There’s no way she believes us.”
Frankie shrugs. “Whatever.”
“Forgive me, o great one. I should not have doubted you.” I bow in admiration.
Frankie is unaffected, her eyes far away and glassy. “Frank, what’s wrong?” I ask. “Do you think we’re busted and she’s just waiting to tell your dad?”
Nothing. “Frankie?” I’m getting concerned. The last thing I want is for the trip to be cut short because of our stupidity.
“It doesn’t matter, Anna,” she finally says. “She sees what she wants to see.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know you think she’s so cool and everything, but sometimes I wish she’d just — I don’t know, get mad. Yell. Call me out on my lies. Be disappointed. She doesn’t even care.”
I picture Aunt Jayne on the deck that first night, red-eyed and severe, pressing me for the truth about her only daughter. Her only living child.
“Yes, she does, Frank. You can’t say that.”
“Whatever. I’m not her precious dead son. I’ll always be second.”
“I don’t think it’s like that, Frank.”
“You have no idea what it’s like.”
I look at my feet and don’t talk for what feels like a long time. Frankie sighs, breaking the silence. “Sorry — it’s not you. I don’t know what my deal is tonight. We’re not busted. That’s the main thing. Let’s go.”
Some invisible force — the Force of Sam — wants to pull me back to Smoothie Shack, but I resist. We can’t risk getting caught again, and it’s way too late.
“No, Frank. We’re, like, two hours late. They won’t even be there.”
“Fine. Tomorrow, then.”
“Tomorrow.”
I watch her face for another opening, another chance to convince her that her mom really does care, but her eyes are set against the chill coming in off the ocean.
End of discussion.
Tomorrow comes quickly, the sun falling through the window and warming my feet like a hot bath. Frankie’s awake and smiling at me from her bed across the room, the sourness of last night evaporating in the new light. We shower and dress as fast as Frankie’s glamour routine allows, inhale some cereal and juice for breakfast, and run outside before Red and Jayne invite us on another family tourist trip. After a quick stop at the community pool for our fake boat clothes, we head down the beach.
We don’t need to go all the way to the Shack — we find Sam and Jake in the alcove, laughing it up with a hideous, frightening, evil, super-cute girl. My heart sinks into my stomach, and in an instant I turn into a bad friend, secretly hoping that the cutie belongs to Jake and not to Sam. It’s all we can do not to turn back before they notice us.
“Hey! Over here!” Jake sees us and waves us out to the water. She must be with Sam. For a moment I don’t think my legs will work, but Frankie nudges me to set our stuff down and drop our beach cover-ups. I follow her out of numb obligation, angry that he’s already with someone else, and angry that I let myself care.
We get into the water, and Sam runs up to hug me. My first response is entirely physical, acting before my mind can process the situation and prepare a more appropriate — that is, bitchy — reaction. His bare legs and chest are warm against me in the water, and I know if I stay like this it won’t matter how many other girls he has.
I pull away just as Jake introduces the girl.
Now that I see her body — rather, lack of body — I think I’m almost old enough to be her mother. At least her older sister.
“This is Katie,” Jake says. “My kid sister — the one I told you about.”
“Whatever,” she says. “I’m not a kid.”
Katie. I totally forget about his sister. I’m so relieved and embarrassed that I almost laugh out loud. She’s only three years younger than me, but it feels like there’s a lifetime between us. When I look at her easy smile and happy eyes, I can’t remember the last time I felt that way — probably back when Frankie still had two whole eyebrows.
We spend the morning with the surfing trio until just before lunch, when a group of girls clad in pink beckons Katie to join them for ice cream. Before she ditches us, Katie hugs me and Frankie goodbye in the BFF way of kid sisters. She’s sweet, and I feel bad for wishing evil things on her when we first arrived.
Whether I like Sam is no longer a question — at least not one that I can lie about. It’s all I can do not to count down the remaining twelve days of the vacation, after which I won’t see him again.
But I can’t think about that right now.
Once Katie’s gone, Frankie and Jake become an undulating, kissing, indistinguishable mass of flesh and highlights sticking out of the water. If things progress any further, I’m going to have to upgrade the rating on this public spectacle from PG-13 to R.
Thankfully, Sam is nothing like Jake. Just his foot brushing against mine under our secret layer of ocean is enough to drive me crazy, and within five minutes I know I’ll meet him out here tonight, even if I have to leave a ransom note to fake my own kidnapping.
Several hours later, Frankie and I cautiously test our new escape route, hoping to avoid the ransom note plan. This time, we wait until Aunt Jayne is definitely in her room and definitely not making any sounds. Then we stuff the beds, tiptoe downstairs, exit through the front door, and cut back to the beach through a neighbor’s yard several houses down. It adds five extra minutes to our arduous journey, but it’s better than running into a renegade parent out for a midnight stroll in the sand.