made two of us.
There’s so much I want to tell you, but every time I try to say it on the phone, I lose my nerve … I’m afraid someone will hear. If Mom and Dad knew Brooks was seventeen, they’d never let me out of the house. So I’ll have to save it all up and tell you when we come out to Oregon for your birthday. Or maybe you could run away from home instead. The badgers wouldn’t bother you.
I need you, Dinah. I don’t know what I’m doing all alone here.
Every file on that card was a letter to me. They progressed from her giggly nerves over an older guy she thought was out of her league to moon-eyed infatuation with Brooks that was little more than a free-form ramble dedicated to his eyes, and hair, and too-white teeth, followed by anticipation of dates and days at Freeman’s Point.
Afraid of acting her age and having Brooks shun her for it, Little Miss Can’t-Do-Her-Health-Homework-Without-Blushingsuddenly decided that under the pier and out of her shirt was the best way to watch
The Princess Bride
. If I hadn’t known where she was going to end up a few weeks after she wrote that entry, I probably would have cheered for her loosening up. But Claire was already in over her head.
Her spontaneous strip-down was the last, steep step before topless under the pier became naked under the pier. And I bet that stupid, innocent, too-trusting kid believed Brooks when he said it wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t help himself—she was too pretty, and the movie was too romantic. She told me so in the letter she never sent.
It started:
I’m not a virgin anymore.… Please don’t hate me
.
Everything that came after was a system purge of confusion, embarrassment, and betrayal. She probably didn’t even notice when she wrote it out, but she kept repeating things like “I told him to stop” and “I asked him to slow down” and “I said no, but I guess he didn’t hear me.” She hadn’t wanted to raise her voice because she was afraid someone else at the Point might hear, and in her mind things would get worse if someone caught them.
Tabs had heard about the “the new guy” in glorious crush-worthy detail, but not about this. I’d spoken to Claire a dozen times and had never heard anything in her voice to hint at how far she’d withdrawn into herself. Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul shared a house with her, knew every facial tic and nervous habit, and they didn’t have a clue.
Abigail-not-Abby didn’t know what she was asking for when she wished for a body that looked older than fifteen. She was so much like my cousin in every way but the physical. When everything was over, I wanted to make her read Claire’s wordsuntil they sank in and she realized how lucky she was that no one hassled her.
By the next letter, Claire was doing what she always did: she brushed over anything unpleasant with a fresh coat of sunny yellow paint and pretended she’d overreacted. She actually thought the fact that Brooks hadn’t called her and didn’t come to her birthday party meant he was embarrassed, too. She would have called him and told him not to worry, but he claimed he’d dropped his phone in the lake.
And she believed him. The boy drove a Beemer, and she believed he didn’t have access to a cell phone.
Claire acted like the real world worked the same way as a musical, where even the bad stuff wasn’t so terrible. She restructured things in her head so that what happened at Freeman’s Point worked into her big-picture plan. She was going to surprise Brooks, likely the first day of school, when she started Lowry, like the first scenes in
Grease
, and she expected just as happy an ending, spontaneous choreographed dance numbers and flying cars included.
But reality didn’t play along with her fantasy. Brooks kept not showing up and not calling. Her vision for how they’d spend the last few weeks of the summer never came true. It took a while, but she finally got the message that her beginning had been his
There’s so much I want to tell you, but every time I try to say it on the phone, I lose my nerve … I’m afraid someone will hear. If Mom and Dad knew Brooks was seventeen, they’d never let me out of the house. So I’ll have to save it all up and tell you when we come out to Oregon for your birthday. Or maybe you could run away from home instead. The badgers wouldn’t bother you.
I need you, Dinah. I don’t know what I’m doing all alone here.
Every file on that card was a letter to me. They progressed from her giggly nerves over an older guy she thought was out of her league to moon-eyed infatuation with Brooks that was little more than a free-form ramble dedicated to his eyes, and hair, and too-white teeth, followed by anticipation of dates and days at Freeman’s Point.
Afraid of acting her age and having Brooks shun her for it, Little Miss Can’t-Do-Her-Health-Homework-Without-Blushingsuddenly decided that under the pier and out of her shirt was the best way to watch
The Princess Bride
. If I hadn’t known where she was going to end up a few weeks after she wrote that entry, I probably would have cheered for her loosening up. But Claire was already in over her head.
Her spontaneous strip-down was the last, steep step before topless under the pier became naked under the pier. And I bet that stupid, innocent, too-trusting kid believed Brooks when he said it wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t help himself—she was too pretty, and the movie was too romantic. She told me so in the letter she never sent.
It started:
I’m not a virgin anymore.… Please don’t hate me
.
Everything that came after was a system purge of confusion, embarrassment, and betrayal. She probably didn’t even notice when she wrote it out, but she kept repeating things like “I told him to stop” and “I asked him to slow down” and “I said no, but I guess he didn’t hear me.” She hadn’t wanted to raise her voice because she was afraid someone else at the Point might hear, and in her mind things would get worse if someone caught them.
Tabs had heard about the “the new guy” in glorious crush-worthy detail, but not about this. I’d spoken to Claire a dozen times and had never heard anything in her voice to hint at how far she’d withdrawn into herself. Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul shared a house with her, knew every facial tic and nervous habit, and they didn’t have a clue.
Abigail-not-Abby didn’t know what she was asking for when she wished for a body that looked older than fifteen. She was so much like my cousin in every way but the physical. When everything was over, I wanted to make her read Claire’s wordsuntil they sank in and she realized how lucky she was that no one hassled her.
By the next letter, Claire was doing what she always did: she brushed over anything unpleasant with a fresh coat of sunny yellow paint and pretended she’d overreacted. She actually thought the fact that Brooks hadn’t called her and didn’t come to her birthday party meant he was embarrassed, too. She would have called him and told him not to worry, but he claimed he’d dropped his phone in the lake.
And she believed him. The boy drove a Beemer, and she believed he didn’t have access to a cell phone.
Claire acted like the real world worked the same way as a musical, where even the bad stuff wasn’t so terrible. She restructured things in her head so that what happened at Freeman’s Point worked into her big-picture plan. She was going to surprise Brooks, likely the first day of school, when she started Lowry, like the first scenes in
Grease
, and she expected just as happy an ending, spontaneous choreographed dance numbers and flying cars included.
But reality didn’t play along with her fantasy. Brooks kept not showing up and not calling. Her vision for how they’d spend the last few weeks of the summer never came true. It took a while, but she finally got the message that her beginning had been his
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