Would You Read online

  Also by Marthe Jocelyn

  How it Happened in Peach Hill

  For Paula

  and

  For all my Water Street kids

  A Question

  Would you rather know what's going to happen? Or not know?

  Getting Ready

  “When did you become so sunny?” I ask. “You're in this perpetual good mood. Have you seen my other green flip-flop?”

  Claire laughs. “I feel like … I feel like there's promise.” She kicks my flip-flop out from under a heap of clothes on the floor. “It's summer. But that isn't even the best of it. I'm going to college in what, seven weeks?”

  “Don't remind me. Abandoning me to face eleventh grade without your protection. Stranding me with Mom and Dad.”

  “Aw, Nat, don't worry.” She comes over and slides her arm across my back. “You'll come for weekends sometimes. It'll be great.”

  “Great for you.” When I think about Claire leaving, I want to throw up. We've been sharing a room since I was born. How can our life be reduced to occasional weekends?

  “I have this roar in my head,” she says. “Of… of anticipation. That it's all just starting. Stuff I don't even know about.”

  “Could you be any more corny?”

  She ignores me, putting on mascara. They should use her eyelashes to advertise mascara.

  “Where are you going tonight?” I ask.

  “Movies. With Joe-boy and Kate and Mark.”

  “Did you fix things with Kate?”

  “As long as I ignore her massive flirtation with Joe, and her relentless need to be more attractive than I am, she's the best and we're tight. Where are you going tonight?”

  “Nowhere,” I say. “There's nothing to do here. Summer just started and it's already boring. And so effing hot. I'll just meet everybody, I guess.”

  “Mwa,” she says, kissing air as she grabs her bag.

  “Mwa back.”

  Ding-Dong

  They're already there when I get to the Ding-Dong, except Zack, who doesn't finish at the DQ till nine. Audrey looks pissed off, but she's still on duty. It bites to wait on your friends.

  “French fries,” I tell her. “Gravy on the side.”

  Leila is scrunched in the corner of the booth with her feet up on the seat, no matter how many times Audrey tells her, Get your stinking feet off the seat, I'll get fired if my friends mess up in here.

  I slide in next to Carson. He's building a log cabin out of toothpicks. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” they say.

  Leila is filing her thumbnail with her teeth. Audrey sets down the fries, gravy poured over.

  “Does the phrase on the side mean anything to you?”

  “He wasn't listening. Just eat them, okay? Really.”

  “I hate using a fork for French fries,” I remind her. “I like dipping.”

  “Get over it,” says Audrey.

  “They're good tonight.” Carson pinches a fry. “They don't taste like cigarette butts.”

  “Would you rather have French fries swimming in gravy or no gravy again for the rest of your life?” says Leila, picking up her fork.

  “Lame,” says Carson.

  “You do better.” Leila flicks a crumb at his toothpick masterpiece.

  “Mmmm, the point is to have options that are not options. The point is to repulse.”

  “Not necessarily,” I say. “Moral challenge is good.”

  “Gravy counts as moral challenge?”

  Some Good Ones from Before

  Would you rather eat a rat with the fur still on or eat sewage straight from the pipe?

  Would you rather have your father sing at the supermarket or your mother fart in the principal's office?

  Would you rather be a murderer who gets away with it and has to live with the guilt or someone who is kidnapped by a wacko and doesn't have the courage to kill the kidnapper?

  Would you rather lose all your hair or all your teeth?

  Would you rather have a piece of rice permanently attached to your lip or a fly always buzzing around your head?

  Would you rather be so fat you need a wheelchair to get around or so skinny your bones snap if someone bumps into you?

  Would you rather die or have everyone else die?

  Zack Gets Here

  “I've got one,” says Zack, showing up to save the day.

  “Let's hear it,” says Leila.

  “Hello, Guh-nat,” he says to me special, touching my shoulder, setting off sparks. Gnat. Nat. Get it?

  “Would you rather,” he says, pushing Leila's feet off the seat, “use that fork to eat a live baby or drink a pail of Mr. Harrison's acid-green pee after he's scarfed a bushel of asparagus?”

  Now we're screaming. Leila's hand is over her mouth and Carson sweeps the toothpicks off the table, he's laughing so hard. Audrey races over. “Shut up, shut up, you guys!”

  Mr. Harrison is the chemistry teacher, worst dandruff ever recorded in Western Hemisphere. City snowfall calculations get skewed when he shakes his head.

  “Baby,” we say.

  “Hands down,” I add. “We'll eat the baby. Pass the salt!”

  “That does it,” says a voice in the next booth. This woman stands up with her mouth puckered in disgust, not knowing there's a gob of ketchup on her chin. “Your behavior is appalling.”

  Zack stands up and bows an apology, all the cuter because he's such a nerd. He's still wearing the white paper hat he has to put on to serve ice cream. I don't mean cute cute, just cute. He's skinny and freckly and he's my best friend. Except that Audrey is my best friend, but Zack's her brother. Other than when it's awkward, it's excellent to have them both in the same house.

  His hair is below his collar, so they make him wear a hairnet too, but he tears that off the instant he leaves work. He likes the paper hat, though; thinks it makes a fine accessory with the patched black jeans and the skull on his T-shirt.

  “Ahh,” says Zack, sitting back down. “I'm done. Employment for this particular Tuesday night in history is now successfully completed. I've dug holes and I've built cones and now it's time to rest.”

  “How many tonight?” asks Carson.

  “One hundred and twenty-three soft vanilla, eighty-nine chocolate, sixty-eight with sprinkles and a mere twenty-four with coco-crunchies.”

  “Thanks for the update,” I say.

  “If you guys are staying till I'm finished”—Audrey clicks her pen at us—“you have to order something else.”

  We look over to see her boss glaring from the grill, apron stiff with smears.

  “Bring it on,” says Zack.

  Audrey nods. We all know what he's going to have after a shift at the Dairy Queen.

  I get a text message from Claire: Remind me 2 tell u what Kate said.

  Audrey brings Zack his large V8 juice with pickles on the side and a plate of saltines. Then she goes to change out of her Ding-Dong Diner Deluxe Dork uniform. We've done a survey. Of all the dumb uniforms any of us has to wear for our summer jobs, Audrey's is the worst. I secretly love my LIFEGUARD tank, but Audrey, ohmygod. She won't go outside the restaurant even to get on her bike and go straight home.

  It's this pleated miniskirt with a red and white striped vest over a puffed-sleeve blousy thing made of the sleaziest polyester. Plus a little hat that has an oversized crown embroidered with the face of a clock. Audrey tells the owner that ding-dong means a doorbell, not a clock. She tells him, Lose the hats or rename the diner Tick-Tock. The owner's name is Bill. We call him Belly. He hates us and he doesn't listen to Audrey.

  Her uniform is especially funny because she cares more about her clothes than any of us. She's all about thrift stores and sewing stuff together to make things no one else would ever think of.

  Z
ack gets his salty fix and Audrey comes out of the bathroom. You wouldn't know it was the same girl who just went in. Milkmaid braids have been turned into a rat's nest, yellow puffed sleeves traded for shredded black silk, cheerleader skirt replaced by a piece of tapestry or something, stitched at some clever angle to sit on her hips and still hang right.

  “Found a new pool today,” says Zack, adding lemon and horseradish to his V8. “Everyone on bikes?”

  We all nod. Sometimes we walk, but basically, how could we live without bikes? None of us can drive yet. Leila's got her beginner's, but she's not allowed to have a car full of teenaged passengers. Eventually she'll have her own car because her parents give her everything. That's her summer job, getting stuff from her parents. Sometimes that's why we like her.

  “We should go,” says Zack. “It's out past that minimall where the Seven-Eleven is. There's a crescent development out there where we're putting in a rockery.”

  “A rockery, Zack?” says Carson. “What the hell is a rockery? What the hell is a crescent development? Why do you know these things?”

  Zack knows everything. He reads ingredients on boxes. He scans dictionaries for fun. He memorizes encyclopedias. Excuse me, encyclopediae. His phony word.

  His eagerness to earn money and improve himself serves us well. He works evenings at the DQ, so we get half-price Blizzards, and he gets up at dawn to dig holes and handle the wheelbarrow for Crombie Landscape, so he knows where the pools are, essential inside information for our favorite summer pastime.

  Pool-Hopping

  It's summer, so we're all wearing swimsuits under our clothes. Except Leila, whose tits are too big not to wear a bra at all times. But she wears a bikini top over her bra.

  Like all other sports, pool-hopping is an art. If you mess up, you can really mess up. So pay attention.

  We cycle for way longer than we feel like but Zack swears it'll be worth it. Of course he gets us lost and we circle around these dumb streets like Meadowlark Crescent and Bobolink Lane, as if it's an aviary instead of a suburb. The houses will be nice in about a hundred years when the trees loom over the roofs, but now they're just new.

  “Got it,” says Zack. “That's the one.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, see the dirt at the sides of the drive? That's me. That's what I did today.”

  The drive is made of these giant cobblestones, as if some ancient Roman lives here.

  “Go past, go past,” hisses Audrey. She bikes ahead a couple of houses.

  We park our bikes in a phalanx—keeping with the ancient-worlds motif—and do not lock. Never lock when pool-hopping. Amazingly, we haven't lost a bike yet, in a town where bicycle theft is the number-one crime.

  I put my flip-flops right under the kickstand and slide out of my tee. I leave it with my shorts in the basket.

  “Ready?” Audrey always acts like she's the captain, and mostly we let her.

  “Ready,” we all say.

  “Is the gate locked, Zack? Do you think?”

  “I doubt it,” says Zack. “But there are bags of peat moss stacked against the fence if we need to climb over.”

  “Okay,” says Audrey. “Go!”

  We go, racing like fools, bare feet not summer-ready yet, ouching on tarmac sprinkled with construction grit.

  “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

  “Sssh!”

  We're squeaking and giggling, panting up to the gate.

  The latch is on the inside, but it's easy to open. It nearly always is. I've only had to fence-hop twice. We stream through in a swarm, buzzing with mischief.

  Carson prides himself on being first, but Audrey's pretty competitive. I wait till there's space, not wanting to jump in on top of other bodies.

  Splash! Splash! Splash! Spl-splash! Like stones hurled from the same fist.

  In, dunk, stroke, side.

  A light goes on upstairs in the house.

  “Light,” shouts Audrey, but we all saw it.

  I boost myself out, dripping, and the others are already running. Leila's limping, must have banged a knee or something. We're making enough racket to wake a drunk. I'm last through the gate. A light comes on downstairs and we peel toward the bikes, laughing instead of breathing.

  The front door opens. “Hey!”

  I jam on my flip-flops, grab my tee, throw a leg over, push off and kick away the kickstand in one motion. I am unstoppable. My butt is soaking wet and slippery on the seat.

  “Hey! You there! Hey! Damn kids!”

  We zoom away from the house, back into the maze of Birdland, with the hollow shouts behind us and the glee of trespass making us bark like a pack of dogs in the curving, sleeping streets.

  Later

  Downtown, only Beanie's Coffee Bar is open, and the Donut Barn. We see Claire outside the cinema saying goodbye to Kate.

  “Claire,” I call. “Claire.”

  “Hey.” She comes riding over.

  “Where's Joe?” I ask. “What did you see?”

  “Joe left,” she says. “We saw the one the boys wanted. Really dumb. But it had a good chase scene and a happy ending.”

  “Oh,” says Zack. “You mean girls like the ones that slow down and end in tears?”

  Claire laughs. “Where you going?”

  “Swimming,” we say. “Wanna come?”

  “Swimming? You mean …?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where?”

  “You want to come with us?” I say. She never has. Usually, my friends are too young, not cool enough.

  “Yay, Claire,” says Zack. “Come.”

  I get this clutching in my chest. I'm pretty sure Claire and Zack had sort of a thing. Not a real whole thing, but maybe a time or two a while ago when they hooked up. I used to ask myself, Would you rather not see him ever again or see him every day with your sister? Zack is a year older than me and a year younger than her. They were on the same team from our school for the Smart Teen Challenge, and I know he really liked her. Then she got with Joe-boy and maybe Zack felt like the loser.

  But now he's saying, “Come with us, Claire,” and she's giving him that warm, sweet smile.

  “Why not?” she says. “I might as well try it once in my life, right?”

  And we all say, “Right!”, like we've converted another sucker to our cult.

  A minute later she clubs the brake. “I'm not wearing a swimsuit.”

  “That's okay,” we all say.

  “Undies work,” says Audrey. “We're only going to Amanda Layton's, clothing optional.”

  “The perfect starter operation,” says Zack.

  Amanda Layton is a folksinger who has a pool and a hot tub. She's nearly always away on tour, playing music festivals and hippie conventions. We can't figure out who buys her CDs, but somebody must because she's got this vast house. The pool is no challenge, really, except for one nosy neighbor who clearly wants to come in herself.

  Claire does fine. We linger in the water, floating, stargazing, no worries until the neighbor's patio door slides open and we hightail it out of there. We're all cheering Claire, high on fun for a few minutes. Then she brakes.

  “I left my wallet,” she says. “I took it out of my pocket. It's on the bench by the hot tub.”

  “I'll go back with you,” says Zack.

  “No, I'll just go,” says Claire. “I'll catch up with you later.”

  The Cops

  So we're zipping down King Street in a pack and we see the cruiser behind us.

  “Dang,” says Audrey, Western drawl. “Looks like the sheriff done nosed us out.”

  We slow down but keep going, not really thinking there's trouble. We're not doing anything wrong. At the moment. But then the siren goes blip, blip, telling us to stop. We stop.

  Two officers climb out. One is Burt McCafferty, who coaches Claire's soccer team, and the other one I don't know.

  “Hello, kids,” says Burt.

  “Hello.” We're all bright and peppy the way cops want kids to be, not mumbl
y and shifty-eyed and high on illegal substances.

  “This here is Officer Foster,” says Burt. “Just moved to town from Oakdale.”

  “Hello, Officer Foster,” we singsong, like he's visiting our second-grade class to tell us about traffic rules.

  “Where you coming from?” says Burt. “Why are you all wet?”

  “We were swimming,” says Leila. “At my house.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your parents home?”

  We look at Leila, since none of us knows. Even though if we'd just been there we would know. If they were out, we'd still be there, eating all the ice cream sandwiches in the freezer. If they'd been home, we would have noticed. We would have said, Hey, Mrs. Greyson, how are you? The garden looks nice this year.

  “They might be home by now,” says Leila, trying to cover both angles.

  “We had a call,” says Burt. “Didn't we, Foster?”

  “Yep,” says the other guy, growly-like. “Citizens complaining about a break-in.”

  Citizens? What TV show do these guys think they're starring in? We straddle our bikes, not looking at each other.

  “ Break-in?” I say, because it's too quiet.

  “Over in the new development,” says Burt. “Break and entry in the backyard pool.”

  “Oh,” says Leila. “That's a break and entry? I thought you had to break something, like a window. Or a vase.”

  Audrey snorts. “A vase, Leila?”

  “This is not a laughing matter, young lady,” says Officer Foster.

  “We don't want to think it's anything to do with you folks,” says Burt. “You're good kids, I know you kids. But you're all wet.”

  “We were swimming,” says Leila. “At my house.”

  “And where is your house?” asks Officer Foster.

  “Burt's been there,” says Leila, showing off. “For dinner. It's on Caledonia Street.”

  “So where are you headed now?” he says.

  “Donut Barn,” says Carson.

  “The Beanie,” says Audrey.