"Come sit down and help us put this album together," my mother said, rifling through an old striped hatbox.
"Laurel, can't you see she's all dressed up? She's got better things to do than look at dusty old pictures." Susannah winked at me. "Belly, you look fresh as a daisy. I love you in white with your tan. It sets you off like a picture frame."
"Thanks, Susannah," I said.
I wasn't all that dressed up, but I wasn't in shorts like the night of the bonfire. I was wearing a white sundress and flip-flops, and I'd put my hair in braids while it was still wet. I knew I'd probably take them out in about half an hour because they were so tight, but I didn't care. They were cute.
"You do look lovely. Where are you headed?" my mother asked me.
"Just to a party," I said.
My mother frowned and said, "Are Conrad and Jeremiah going to this party too?"
"They're not my bodyguards," I said, rolling my eyes. "I didn't say they were," my mother said. Susannah waved me off and said, "Have fun, Belly!"
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"I will," I said, shutting the door before my mother could ask me any more questions.
I'd hoped that Conrad and Jeremiah had just been kidding around, that they weren't really gonna try to come. But when I ran down the stairs to meet Cam's car, Jeremiah called out, "Hey, Belly?"
He and Conrad were watching TV in the family room. I poked my head in the doorway. "What?" I snapped. "I'm kind of in a hurry."
Jeremiah turned his head toward me and winked lazily. "See you soon."
Conrad looked at me and said, "What's with the perfume? It's giving me a headache. And why are you wearing all that makeup?"
I wasn't wearing that much makeup. I had some blush and mascara and a little lip gloss, that was it. It was just that he wasn't used to me wearing any. And I'd sprayed my neck and wrists, that was all. Conrad sure hadn't minded Red Sox girl's perfume. He'd loved her perfume. Still, I took one last look at myself in the mirror in the hallway--and I rubbed a little of the blush off, also the perfume.
Then I slammed the door shut and ran down the driveway, where Cam was turning in. I'd been watching from my bedroom window so I'd know the exact moment he drove up, so he wouldn't have to come inside and meet my mother.
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I hopped into Cam's car. "Hi," I said.
"Hi. I would've rung the doorbell," he told me.
"Trust me, it's better this way," I said, suddenly feeling very shy. How is it possible to talk to someone on the phone for hours and hours, to even swim with this person, and then feel like you don't know them?
"So this guy Kinsey, he's kind of weird, but he's a good person," Cam told me as he backed out of the driveway. He was a good driver, careful.
Casually I asked, "Does he by any chance sell crystal meth?"
"Um, not that I know of," he told me, smiling. His right cheek had a dimple in it that I hadn't noticed the other night. It was nice.
I relaxed. Now that the crystal meth stuff was out of the way, there was only one more thing. I twisted the charm bracelet on my wrist over and over and said, "So, you know those guys I was with at the bonfire? Jeremiah and Conrad?"
"Your fake brothers?"
"Yeah. I think they might be stopping by the party too. They know, um, Kinsey," I said.
"Oh, really?" he said. "Cool. Maybe they'll see that I'm not some kind of creep."
"They don't think you're a creep," I told him. "Well, they kind of do, but they'd think any guy I talk to is a creep, so it's nothing personal."
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"They must really care about you a lot to be so protective," he said. Did they?
"Um, not really. Well, Jeremiah does, but Conrad is all about duty. Or he used to be anyway. He should've been one of those samurais." I glanced over at him. "I'm sorry. Is this boring?"
"No, keep talking," Cam said. "How do you know about samurais?"
Tucking my legs under my butt, I said, "Ms. Baskerville's global studies class in ninth grade. We did a whole unit on Japan and Bushido. I was, like, obsessed with the idea of seppuku."
"My dad's half-Japanese," he said. "My grandmother lives there, so we go out and visit her once a year."
"Wow" I'd never been to Japan, or anywhere in Asia for that matter. My mother's travels hadn't taken her there yet either, though I knew she wanted to go. "Do you speak Japanese?"
"A little," he said, rubbing the top of his head. "I get by okay."
I whistled--my whistle was something I was proud of. My brother, Steven, had taught me. "So you speak English, French, and Japanese? That's pretty amazing. You're like some kind of genius, huh," I teased.
"I speak Latin, too," he reminded me, grinning.
"Latin's not spoken. It's a dead language," I said, just to be contrary.
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"It's not dead. It's in every Western language." He sounded like my seventh-grade Latin teacher, Mr. Coney.
When we pulled up to this guy Kinsey's house, I kind of didn't want to get out of the car. I loved the feeling of talking and having somebody really listen to what I had to say. It was like a high or something. In this weird way, I felt powerful.
We parked in the cul-de-sac--there were a ton of cars. Some were halfway on the lawn. Cam walked quickly. His legs were so long that I had to hurry to keep up. "So how do you know this guy?" I asked him.
"He's my supplier." He laughed at the expression on my face. "You're really gullible, Flavia. His parents have a boat. I've seen him down at the marina. He's a nice
guy-"
We walked right in without knocking. The music was so loud I could hear it from the driveway. It was karaoke music--there was a girl singing "Like a Virgin" at the top of her lungs and rolling around on the ground, her mike getting twisted up in her jeans. There were ten or so people in the living room, drinking beer and passing around a songbook ."Sing 'Livin' on a Prayer' next," some guy urged the girl on the floor.
A couple of guys I didn't recognize were checking me out--I could feel their eyes on me, and I wondered if I
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really had worn too much makeup. It was a new thing to have guys looking at me, much less asking me on dates. It felt equal parts amazing and scary. I spotted the girl from the bonfire, the one who liked Cam. She looked at us, and then she looked away, sneaking glances every once in a while. I felt bad for her; I knew how that felt.
I also recognized our neighbor Jill, who spent weekends at Cousins--she waved at me, and it occurred to me that I'd never seen her outside of the neighborhood, our front yards. She was sitting next to the guy from the video store, the one who worked on Tuesdays and wore his name tag upside down. I'd never seen the lower half of his body before, he was always standing behind the counter. And then there was the waitress Katie from Jimmy's Crab Shack without her red-and-white striped uniform. These were people I'd been seeing every summer for my whole life. So this is where they'd been all this time. Out, at parties, while I'd been left out, locked away in the summer house like Rapunzel, watching old movies with my mother and Susannah.
