Dedication
To Natasha, my first resplendent light
Epigraph
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions.
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake
1. Insanity’s Horse
2. Sweet Potato
3. The Perils of College Interviews
4. Paleo Flood at Red River
5. The Irish Inquisition
6. Mottos
7. Olivia the Dancing Pig
8. Empty Wells and Vernal Pools
9. Red Vineyard
10. Lupe
11. Moody
12. Peacocks
13. Uncle Kenny from Kilkenny
14. The Meaning of Typos
15. She Will Be Loved
Part Two: Johnny Rainbow
16. Modern Travel
17. Carmen in Carnikava
18. Cherry Strudel
19. Zhenya
20. Thorn Forests
21. The Guider of Guiri, the Singer of Songs
22. All Things Are Numbers
23. Lost Children
24. Missing Time
25. Roses for a Farm
26. Dread
27. Emil
28. Warsaw
29. The Dragon and the Honey
30. Instead of Auschwitz
31. The Clock in Trieste
32. A Town Called Heartbreak
33. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
34. My Rags of Heart
35. Jimmy Eat World Pain
Part Three: The Blue Suitcase
36. Freshman Summer
37. Sophomore Summer
38. Junior Summer
39. Senior Summer
About the Author
Praise for Paullina Simons
Books by Paullina Simons
Copyright
Part One
Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake
We’re not serious when we are seventeen.
One fine evening, full of pints and lemonade,
In rowdy cafes with their dazzling chandeliers,
We stroll under the linden trees in the park.
Now you’re in love, till August anyway.
You’ll make her laugh, you’ll write her poetry
At night you wander back to the cafes
For more pints and lemonade …
We are not serious when we are seventeen,
And when we have green linden trees in the park.
Arthur Rimbaud, “Romance”
1
Insanity’s Horse
CHLOE SAT ALONE ON THE BUS RIDE HOME ACROSS THE TRAIN tracks, dreaming of the beaches of Barcelona and perhaps of being ogled by a lusting stranger. She was trying to drown out Blake, Mason and Hannah verbally tripping over one another as if in a game of drunken Twister as they loudly argued the pros and cons of writing a story for money. Threads of songs played their crowded lyric notes in the static inside her head. Under the boardwalk like no other lover he took my hand and said I love you forever—all suddenly overpowered by Queen’s matchless yawp Barcelonaaaaaaaaa …!
She placed her palm against the glass. The bus was almost at their road. Maybe then this psychodrama would end. Outside the dusty windows, made muddy by the flood of recent rain, past the railroad, near a clearing of poplars, Chloe spied a fading billboard of a giant rainbow, which two white-suited workmen on ladders were papering over with an ad for the renovated Mount Washington Resort in the White Mountains.
She had just enough time to glimpse the phrase on the soon to be obscured poster before the bus lunged past it. “Johnny Get Your Gun.” This left her to contemplate, alas not in perfect silence, the philosophical meaning behind a rainbow being papered over.
Just before the bus stopped, she remembered where the sign was from. It was an ad for the Lone Star Pawn and Gun Shop in Fryeburg. Remembering it didn’t answer Chloe’s larger question, but it answered the immediate one.
“What idiot thought a rainbow was a good symbol for a gun store?” Hannah’s mother had said. Soured on men and life, she had pawned her engagement ring there. Got seventy bucks for it. Took Chloe and Hannah for lobster in North Conway with the money.
They all got food poisoning afterward. So much for rainbows.
Is that what they called karma?
Or was it simply what happened next?
On the dot of 3:40 in the afternoon, the small blue bus pulled up—extra carefully and slowly—to the pine trees at the beginning of Wake Drive, a dirt road past another dirt road marked with a rock painted with a black whale. Four kids jumped off into the dust.
Because it was the merry month of May, and almost warm, they wore the clothes of the young out in the boonies—denim and plaid. Though to be fair, that’s all they ever wore, blizzard or heatwave.
In what universe could a five-minute speech by Mrs. Mencken about the annual Acadia Award for Short Fiction at the end of English period right before lunch—when there wasn’t a soul in class who was paying attention to anything but the rumble in their empty stomachs—result in Blake and Mason deciding they were suddenly writers and not trash collectors?
“Character is everything,” Chloe said doggedly into the dirt. “Character is story.”
The mile of unpaved road at the end of which they lived was all downhill between dense pines. It meandered through the thick forest, getting narrower, crossing the train tracks, hugging the small lake, ending in pine needles and disarray, not a road anymore, just dust, and that’s where they lived. Where the road ended.
Chloe and Mason and Hannah and Blake. Two couples, two brothers, two best friends. A short girl, a tall girl, and two brawny dudes. Well, Blake was brawny. The scrappy Mason was all about sports the last few years, ever since their dad had his back broken. Mason was a soccer midfielder and a varsity shortstop. Blake got the lumbering body of a man who lived in a rural town and could do anything: lift anything, build anything, drive anything. Blake’s wavy, bushy hair hadn’t been cut in months, his beard was weeks overgrown. The brown Timberlands were grimy. The belt was six years old. The extra large plaid shirt was his dad’s. The Levi’s were hand-me-downs. His light brown eyes darted around, dancing, laughing, full of good humor.
Next to him, his smaller brother looked like a child of prissy aristocracy. Mason’s hair was shaggy straight, but it was meant to be shaggy. It was designer shag. Unlike Blake, who rolled out of bed, hair slept on, and ran to school, Mason woke early and worked hard to make his hair just so. The girls loved his hair, and tortured Chloe about it. Oh Chloe, they chirped, you’re so lucky, you can run your hands through it any time you want. Mason shaved every day, and did not wear plaid. He wore black and gray T-shirts. He was monochrome and his jeans were washed yesterday. On his feet were sneakers. He didn’t cut wood, he played ball. He didn’t look like Blake’s brother, with his compact lean build, intense blue eyes, and his serious, gentle face. Plus, unlike Blake, he was a boy of few words. When he quietly held Chloe’s hand, it was always with kindness. He didn’t pull on her, yank her, demand action from her. He was a gentleman. Not that Blake didn’t try to be a gentleman with Hannah. Just that he was a lot like the German Shepherd he once owned. Panting, unapologetically getting mud on everyone’s floors, dripping ice cream and tomato sauce all over, loping wild through the day. You c
ouldn’t help but feel exasperated affection at his constant antics.
And next to Blake walked Hannah.
Though Chloe herself found Hannah to be slightly androgynous with her tall, boyish body—straight hips, straight waist, small high breasts, short hair always slicked back away from her face—other people, boys especially, did not agree. Her face was opalescent and scrubbed clean, with symmetrical, correct, in-balance features and a gaze as straight as her narrow hips. Her eyes, brown and unblinking, were serious and appraising, making Hannah look as though she were engaged—as though she were listening. Chloe knew it was a ruse: the steady stare allowed Hannah to be lost inside her head. She wore makeup she could ill afford, but strived to look as though she just splashed water on her face and, voila, perfection. With fluid grace Hannah strolled like a ballerina.
At the long mirror in her room she had practiced her arabesques and soubresauts, hoping one day she would stop growing and her parents could afford ballet classes. She finally got her lessons in the divorce settlement, but by then she was five-ten and too tall to be lifted into the air by anyone but Blake, who was definitely not a ballet dancer.
With a detached elegance, Hannah walked and talked as if she didn’t belong in tiny Fryeburg, Maine. She fancied herself barely even belonging in this country. She wore ballet flats, for God’s sake! Even when she schlepped a mile through the mud and pine needles. No butch Timberlands for her. Hannah walked with her shoulder blades flung back, as though wearing heels and a Chanel blazer. She carried herself as if she was too good for the place that by an unlucky accident of birth she had found herself living in, and couldn’t wait until the moment she was sipping wine on the Left Bank and painting the Seine with other artistic, beautiful people. Her big round eyes were permanently moist. She evaluated you before she cried, and then you loved her. That was Hannah. Always crying to be loved.
Chloe in stark contrast was not moist of eye or long of limb. She didn’t care much about not being tall when she wasn’t with Hannah. But next to her reed-like friend, she felt like an armadillo.
One of Chloe’s best physical features was her brown hair, straw-straight, shining, streaked with sunlight. There was nothing she did to make it great. It just was. Every day washed, brushed, clean, unfussy, thin-spun silk falling from her head. She wore no makeup, to differentiate herself from the senior girls who were all about the heavy eyeliner, the flimsy tanks, the one size too small jeans and three-inch (or higher!) mules in which they clodded through the Fryeburg Academy halls, always in danger of falling over or tripping, and perhaps that was the point. Sexy but helpless. Both things were anathema to Chloe, so she kept her body to herself and walked in sensible shoes. Where was she going that required getting dressed up? Bowling? Italian ices? Swimming in the lake? Gardening? Exactly. And she heard the way the boys talked about the girls who dressed the way, say, that hateful Mackenzie O’Shea dressed. A lifetime of meds wouldn’t be able to erase the trauma for Chloe if she thought boys talked about her that way.
Her face, unblemished and fair, suffered slightly from this pretend plainness, but there was no hiding the upper curve of her cheekbones or her wide-set eyes that tilted slightly upward, always in a smile. She had inherited the Irish lips from her father, but the eyes and cheeks from her mother, and because of that, her face, just like her body, wasn’t quite in proportion. The ratio of eyes to lips was not in balance, just as the ratio of body to breasts was not in balance. There was not enough body for the milk-fed breasts she had been cursed with. There may have been a genetic component to the comical chaos inside her—to her math abilities colliding with her existential confusion—but there was simply no cosmic excuse for her palmfuls of breasts.
Chloe blamed her mother.
It was only right.
She blamed her mother for everything.
Look at Hannah. Everything on that girl was assembled as if hand-picked. Tall, lithe, lean, eyes mouth hair nose all the right size, not too big, not too small, while Chloe spent her life hiding under minimizer bras and one-size-too-big shirts. She was afraid no one would take her seriously if they thought of her as a body instead of a person. Who’d ever listen to her explanations about the movements of the stars or migrations of mitochondria or beheadings in a revolution if they thought she was just a pair of boobs with legs. Too heavy-breasted to be a ballerina and too short to be a bombshell.
That Mason didn’t agree—or said he didn’t—only spoke to his poor judgment.
The bus had been dropping them off on the same rural road for thirteen years. Kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, fancy high school.
Soon there would be no more blue buses, no more lurching afternoon rides. In a month they would all be graduating.
And then?
Well, and then, there was this:
“Don’t be hating on my story already, Chloe,” said Blake. “It just began. Give it a chance. It’s a good story. You’ll see.”
“Yeah, Chloe,” echoed Mason. Being ten months younger than Blake, he looked up to his older brother, though he did not necessarily disagree with Chloe, as evidenced by his cheerful wink. She took his welcome hand as they strolled past old Mr. Leary out on the lawn, surrounded by every bit of garbage scrap he owned, trying to make it look less garbagey so he could sell it.
“Blake, dear boy,” Mr. Leary called out, “you said you’d come by after school and help me with my block saw. I still can’t get the dang thing to turn on.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Leary.”
“Block saw?” muttered Mason. “What does that codger need with a block saw? It’s soft dirt all around him.”
“He wants to build a bomb shelter,” Blake said out of the corner of his mouth, smiling at the old man as they ambled by. “That’s why he’s collecting the cinder blocks.”
“What’s a block saw?” asked Chloe.
“Who cares,” said Hannah. “A bomb shelter? Guy’s a freak.”
“Blake, not now?” The craggy man persisted. “I have some snacks for you and your friends. Donuts.”
“Thank you, sir, but not now.”
Because now Blake was busy. He had to clear the brush from the dusty path of his own winding life.
All the trouble began when Blake turned eighteen last July and was allowed to enter the Woodsmen Day competition at the Fryeburg Fair. He entered five contests. Tree felling, crosscut sawing, axe throwing, log rolling, and block chop. He lost the crosscut and the log roll and the block chop, and you’d think he’d remember that and be humbled—that he lost three out of five—but no. He beat the best time that year on tree felling by six seconds, coming in at twenty-three seconds flat, and he set a Fair record on the axe throw with six bullseyes in a row.
You’d think his head was the bullseye: it swelled to four feet in diameter. He strutted down the dirt roads and through Academy halls like an Olympic gold medalist. Chloe would remind him that the Fryeburg Academy—which all the local kids attended for “free” through a tax deal between the school and the state of Maine—was one of the most prestigious preparatory high schools in the United States. “No one here gives a toss about your axe toss, I promise you,” Chloe would say to him, but you’d think he were deaf.
It was right after that Blake and Mason entered the business competition for Mr. Smith’s tech class—and they won! Mason was used to winning, with his dozen sports trophies lining the dresser, but Blake became impossible. He acted as if he could do anything. Like, for example, write.
It wasn’t that they didn’t deserve to win. The project was: “Create a successful business.” Who knew that Blake and Mason would take the thing they had been doing part-time and turn it into a winner. With their dad’s ancient truck, they had been going to houses around the lakes in Brownfield and Fryeburg and asking if, for a small fee, the residents would let them cart their trash away. Now, most people in this part of Maine aimed their shotguns to point the brothers in the direction of the exit to their property, but there were some—wid
ows, the feeble-minded—who agreed to pay them a few nickels to cart away their old refrigerators, non-working snow blowers, rusty rakes, newspapers, chainsaws. The boys were strong and worked hard, and after school and on Saturdays, they would drive around and try not to get killed while they made a few dollars. After placing an ad in the Penny Saver, they discovered there was already a national junk company called 1-800-GOT-JUNK. This only fired up their cutthroat spirit. They flattered Hannah into designing their logo: THE HAUL BROTHERS HAULING SERVICES. “WE HAUL SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO.”
It looked pretty good. They got a decal made, slapped it on their father’s truck, painted the truck a hideous lime green—Blake said because it was the color farthest removed from the color of the crap they were hauling—used their rudimentary buttering-up skills to get Chloe to create a profit and loss statement, and figured out that if they worked full-time, hired two more guys, and bought another truck with a lift, they would make six figures at the end of three years. Six figures! They had an advertising plan: Yellow Pages, the North Conway Observer, local ads on TV, three radio spots—and then their dad’s Chevy died.
It was over twenty years old. Burt Haul had bought the V8 diesel powerhouse in 1982, before he knew he’d be having sons who a generation later would need it to start a fake business. Burt loved that truck so much that even after the accident that nearly ended his life, he refused to let it go and spent his own scarce money rebuilding it. “I drove your mother home from our wedding in that truck,” Burt told his sons. “The only reason I’m alive today is because of that truck. I ain’t parting with that thing.”
But now the truck engine was like Mr. Leary’s gas-powered block saw. Defunct.
No one had money for a new truck, even a used one. Burt and his boys were being shamefully carted around in Janice Haul’s Subaru. Were they even men?
Hannah and Chloe tried to console their disappointed boyfriends by reminding them that their business wasn’t really a business, it was just a business on paper, which is no kind of business at all. But Blake and Mason had fallen too far into the trap of a dream. Chloe knew something about that. The Haul boys had been so sold on their own pseudo-company that they decided to drop out of school in the middle of senior year and work until they got the money together to buy a truck, figuring that in their line of work a high school diploma was about as useful as watering grass during a downpour.