Snap (5 page)

I had a new message—which I thought was a good thing until I saw Kyle Ziegenfuss's pale, puffy face on the profile shot, his eyes half closed, like he'd just been smoking pot. Which he probably had.

Kyle and I weren't friends, but he didn't quite get that. At Amerige High, I was a “student guide” in this tutoring program called Peerage. Motto: “Bridging the Academic Gap while Building Friendships.” Yeah, whatever. Like
The Buzz,
it would help
me get into college (again: not that that was my motivation). Basically, the program matched up a smart kid with a dumb kid so the smart kid could make the dumb kid smarter and the dumb kid could make the smart kid more sensitive or something. And I know “dumb kid” sounds really harsh, but it's the term Kyle always used, and, well—you've got to admire his forthrightness. Kyle was classified as learning disabled, which was different than being stupid. But he was seriously slow—in the way he talked, moved, and thought. Maybe he was just unmotivated. More likely, all that pot smoking (he'd started when he was
twelve)
had messed up his brain.

He was a nice enough guy, though, and I didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I always answered his messages.

At least spending the summer in Sandyland meant I didn't have to worry about running into Kyle. I hit
send
and sighed.

“Bad news?” Delilah asked, gluing a straw to her board.

“Nah, just—there's this guy, and…” I tried to come up with the right words.

“Boyfriend?”

“Kyle?” I shuddered. “God, no. He just thinks we're closer than we really are, and I don't want to hurt his feelings, but…” I shook my head. “Whatever. I don't have to deal with him till September.”

“September?”

“When I go back to school.”

She said, “But in September you'll be—” And then she stopped.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She looked at the counter, and I started to feel all creeped out, like maybe Delilah could see my future. But that was ridiculous. She wasn't even the family psychic—not that I believed in any of that stuff.

As I left the shop, I heard the printer whir to life.

“See? That was easy,” the sandy-haired woman told her husband. And then, to Delilah: “How much would it cost to have my fortune told?”

O
VER THE NEXT FEW DAYS:

It rained.

I learned more than I ever wanted to know about sharks.

And my mother got a job.

Let's start with the rain. After a long night of pounding water, wall-shaking thunder, and flashbulb-bright lightning, a stagnant, damp dreariness turned the sky a murky, one-tone gray and unleashed the full power of Home Suite Home's mildewed dog aroma. It was the kind of rain that ruled out long walks or picture taking. It was the kind of rain that dulled hope and cut vacations short.

Not that we were on vacation.

In the motel parking lot, dads in Windbreakers ran back and forth loading minivans and SUVs while shivering children stood damp-faced in open doorways, cartoons blasting from behind.

Homesickness struck me like a terrible flu. My muscles ached and my stomach cramped. I wanted my bed, my computer, my photo-covered walls. I wanted my kitchen and den and living room.

I wanted my life.

We couldn't see a movie or go shopping or do any of the other stuff I typically did on a rainy day—because, in case I hadn't heard my parents the first fifty times, “money is tight” and “we all need to make sacrifices.” (Argh!) Not that it mattered: the closest movie theater was miles away, and the surf shop was the only store worth visiting. There wasn't even a bookstore in town, and I'd already finished the two books I'd brought.

So I filled the time listening to my iPod, taking still-life photos of bruised fruit in a purple plastic bowl, and watching “Shark Week” on the Discovery Channel. Part of the programming was dedicated to explaining how rare shark attacks are. A larger part was spent on shark attack reenactments, with the occasional
Jaws
clip thrown in. It was enough to turn me from an Ocean Person to a Lake Person.

My father, slumped on the edge of his bed in a T-shirt and shorts (at least he'd changed out of his bathrobe), watched every minute. He was supposed to be working—that's why we were here, after all—but it was raining too hard for construction.

In case sharks weren't scary enough, late in the day the programming gave way to haunted house investigations. Ghosts scratched children's cheeks. They hovered over beds. They rattled pipes, shattered dishes, blew cold air.

“Get out of the house!”
I muttered at the television. If these people were so terrified, why didn't they just pack up their bags and go?

Why couldn't we?

During the commercials, I played with my camera. Most of my Sandyland shots were the usual beach stuff: breaking waves, the yellow swim float, some long-legged sandpipers. Again and again,
I returned to the old woman in the pink bathrobe. She was still there. It still made no sense.

Maybe she's a ghost.

Leonardo was just saying that. Ghosts aren't real. Everyone knows that, even the people on TV. If ghosts were real, those people would get out of their houses.

 

Grocery shopping with my mother was the highlight of my first rainy day; that's how low I had sunk. Outside Food World there were gumball machines, a coin-powered pony, and a blue charity drop-off bin with
CLOTHING AND SHOES ONLY
stenciled on the side. After wearing my black shorts and pink-and-black-striped T-shirt for four days straight, I longed to pitch them into the bin. Unfortunately, that would leave me naked.

Inside the store, it was freezing. Overhead, fluorescent lights buzzed as if they, too, were shivering. My mom pushed the squeaky cart while I used my honors math skills—imperfect though they were—to comparison shop. We hardly spoke. When she muttered, “I suppose I should start clipping coupons,” it took all my strength not to say, “Yeah, that'll fix everything.”

In the health and beauty aisle, she spent some time looking at hair color boxes before picking one called
ASH BLONDE.
And then she shocked me by asking, “Do you want to do yours, too?”

This was a peace offering. I'd been asking for blond streaks since junior high. I reached for a highlighting kit and then stopped. Blond streaks seemed too cheery for my current mood.

Instead, I took a box of black dye off the shelf, narrowing my eyes at my mother, daring her to stop me. But she didn't say anything.

On our way to the check stand, we passed the “Flower Shoppe,”
which was basically a counter with plastic buckets full of carnations and daisies, along with shiny balloons that said
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
and
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR RETIREMENT.

My mother paid for the groceries in cash. For a moment, I worried that she wouldn't have enough money—how mortifying would that be?—but she did. When the checkout woman gave her the change, my mother cleared her throat and asked, “Are you hiring?”

That floored me. When my mother had said she was getting a job, I thought she meant something glamorous, like an interior designer or a party planner. And I guess I thought she meant something easy to leave. A real job, with regular hours, tied us to this town more than I liked. She was going to make me stay here for the entire summer. I could just feel it.

“Applications are at customer service,” the checkout woman told her.

My mother nodded but did not stop on the way out. “I want to color my hair first,” she told me.

“No rush,” I said.

 

“Ash Blonde” was misnamed. It should have been called “Margarine.”

“Maybe you can find a salon around here to fix it,” I said when my mother came out of the bathroom, a stained white towel over her shoulders.

I was just trying to be helpful, but the wrinkle between her eyebrows deepened. “You want me to do yours?” she asked.

I touched a strand of my brown hair. On the way home from Food World, I'd decided that black hair was a bad idea. But I didn't want to back out and hand my mother even the tiniest victory.

She ripped open the cardboard box and put on plastic gloves. There were two bottles; she poured the smaller one into the larger and shook it. Immediately, the room stank: a harsh chemical smell that made my nose sting.

I closed my eyes and pictured Jenny, my hairdresser back home. She was twenty-five, with streaky hair cut in daring angles. Now, far from the salon, my mother drew stripes along my scalp with a plastic bottle. When she'd worked her way from ear to ear, she stroked the goo along the length of my brown hair and then snapped a plastic shower cap over the whole smelly mess.

While I waited, I washed my black shorts and striped T-shirt in the bathroom sink with the bug-spray-scented shampoo. When I was done, I wrung them out as best as I could and hung them on the towel bar to dry. I could wear my Dennis's Building Supply T-shirt until morning.

Later, as I stood in the shower, the water ran gray at my feet. I got scalded just once as someone, somewhere, flushed a toilet. But that wasn't the worst of it. My hair looked bad wet. Dry, it looked hideous, like a Halloween wig—and not a nice one from a party store, either, but a cheap one that you'd pick up at the drugstore for six bucks.

“I told you black was a bad idea,” my mother said when she saw it.

“No, you didn't.”

“You know what I thought.”

 

My clothes were still damp the next (rainy) morning. I tried on all of the outgrown clothes my parents had brought on the off chance that I had shrunk.

I hadn't. Most of the clothes were from junior high (I should really clean out my closet more often). The shirts ended above my belly button, and the shorts wouldn't snap.

If only my mother wasn't so stinking skinny, I could have worn some of her clothes. Instead, I was left with my dad's fugly orange T-shirt (which he'd told me I could keep—gee, thanks—because it was too small for him anyway) and my new board shorts.
It's not like I'm going to run into anyone I know.
An image of that skater boy, Duncan, flashed through my mind.

Not my type.

When my mother went back to Food World to submit her application, I tagged along with the shopping bag full of my old clothes. The bag fell with a hollow thump inside the blue charity bin: a piece of my life gone forever.

“You can wait out here, if you want,” my mother said, standing by the automatic door as I adjusted my board shorts, which really were kind of big. Beyond us, raindrops trickled from the eaves.

I shrugged. “I'll go in.” It's not like I had anything better to do.

Her nostrils flared, and that's when I saw myself as she did: the wiggy black hair, the baggy T-shirt. I was fifteen years old and my mother was ashamed to be seen with me. Talk about ironic.

The store called the next day (still raining: day three of my captivity) to offer my mother a job as Floral Shoppe Assistant. They'd been impressed with her experience arranging centerpieces for charity league luncheons and PTA fund-raisers. Also, they were surprised that she knew what a hydrangea was.

“Did you tell them it was just for the summer?” I asked.

She didn't answer. But then, she was busy making dinner, so maybe she just didn't hear me.

O
N
F
RIDAY
I
WOKE TO SUNNY SKIES.
Well, I woke to clear skies. The sun was hardly even up. In the past week, I'd been going to bed earlier and earlier because there was nothing to do at night. The problem was now I couldn't sleep past six or seven.

Early morning at Home Suite Home meant rattling pipes, screaming children, blaring televisions, and yapping dogs. You'd think I'd get used to the sounds, but they kept changing. There were new trucks in need of mufflers, new children with higher pitched screams, new dogs howling at the moon. Small dogs were noisier than big ones and young children whinier than old.

There was another new sound today: my parents getting ready for work, my mother showering, my father drinking his coffee in front of the television. My dad was going to be doing “hands-on labor” on an expensive new house. He did his best to sound enthusiastic.

“A block from the beach, two stories high—you'll be able to see the ocean from the master bedroom. Three thousand square
feet, and I know that doesn't sound that big, but it almost fills the entire lot. But before construction, we gotta bury phone and power lines; we gotta dig trenches by hand to protect the existing trees.”

From the way he talked, you'd think he was building the house for us.

 

I hung around for about an hour after my parents left. It was nice to be alone, but after being stuck inside for so many days, I was dying to get out of that place. In the bathroom I pulled my black shorts and black-and-pink tee off the towel rack. They were still damp and kind of stretched out. Even worse, they smelled like mildew. But it was that or the orange T-shirt/board shorts combo, and I'd come to hate Dennis of Dennis's Building Supply almost as much as I hated Sandyland—though not as much as I hated my parents for ruining my summer in the first place.

When I glanced at the mirror, I jumped at the stranger looking back. I'd completely forgotten about my black hair. A good night's sleep—well, a bad night's sleep (have I mentioned how much I despised the couch?)—had done nothing to improve my new look.

On the plus side, with hair so breathtakingly hideous, maybe no one would notice that my clothes smelled.

 

As I walked to the main street, the sun popped above the horizon and spread a golden light over everything. Just as I thought,
It's pretty here,
a foul-tempered cloud took over and turned the world back to gray. So much for taking pictures.

Downtown Sandyland was quiet. Most shops—and all
“shoppes”—were closed. An open door led to an Internet café. Entering, I took in the intoxicating aroma of coffee and the raindrop rhythm of tapping keys. For an Internet café, it was a little short on computers, but there were plenty of tables and chairs, all mismatched and painted bright colors. A glass bakery case displayed muffins, scones, and pastries.

I bought a vanilla latte and a half hour of Internet time. It put a pretty good-sized dent into my life savings, but you only live once—if you're lucky, that is. The past week felt like a second life, and so far it wasn't working out so well.

First, I went to Google and typed in “ghosts in photos.” After that, I tried “spirits in photos” and “unexplained figures in photos.”

There were tons of hits. I pored over the photos of shadowy figures looming in the distance, translucent bodies hovering at the edge. None of the ghostly figures were half as clear as the lady in the pink bathrobe. They looked more like fog or smoke. Most of the photos were really old, taken with black-and-white film. Any idiot could see that the “ghosts” weren't real—just some obvious double exposures or tricks of the light.

I tried a new search: “ghosts in digital pictures.” I found a few ghost hunter sites debating the merits of digital photography—but, again, the pictures showed misty white figures that looked nothing like my shots.

This was ridiculous. The lady in my photo didn't look like the pictures online for a simple reason: ghosts aren't real.

As I logged on to my MySpace account, I felt almost normal. There was my profile name (Mad Girl) and my profile picture, which showed Lexie and me with our identical haircuts, hers
blond, mine its old natural brown. We were laughing at something absolutely hysterical. (What was it? It bothered me that I couldn't remember.)

There was my profile song, my list of favorite television shows, books, and movies. In the Top Friends box, familiar faces smiled back at me.

Naturally I'd posted a lot of photos on my page. I stared at them like a stalker. Some were of my friends goofing around. A couple showed me smiling, with no idea what lay ahead. There were scenes of Amerige: arty photos of flower gardens and windows, stop signs and benches.

There were no ghosts anywhere.

On the bottom right, a bunch of people from school had left me comments. My first reaction was relief: nothing from Kyle Ziegenfuss!

And then I started reading.

I'd have to post a bulletin or something to tell everyone that I was spending the whole summer at the beach. They didn't have to know why. At least I'd have a good tan when I went back to school in September.

Huh? That was strange. Maybe my parents were having work done on our house while we were gone. But that didn't make any sense. Why would they spend the money there if we were
here
because they don't have any? Besides, my dad had been sitting around for months. If something needed painting or fixing, he would have done it himself.

My palms began to sweat. What was going on? My parents wouldn't sell the house without telling me. Would they?

No—there's no way my mother would leave that house. She'd made my father paint the living room four times just to get the perfect shade of yellow. She'd hired a cabinetmaker to build custom shelving in The Library and a seamstress to sew curtains for all of the windows.

There must be some mistake.

In addition to the comments, there were new messages. I was almost afraid to read them, but I had eight minutes of Internet time left, and I couldn't let them go to waste.

Two messages were from Melissa Raffman, editor of
The Buzz.
The first was from a couple days ago.

Melissa's second message had just been posted.

My home phone was disconnected? Panic spread through my chest for just a moment before I figured it out. My parents hadn't paid the bill. The phone company had cut off our service. This was seriously embarrassing. Suddenly, my virtual world sucked
almost as much as my real world. At least the virtual me still had good hair.

My last new message was from Lexie. I read it fast because time was ticking away and I didn't want to surrender any future latte funds.

I dashed off a quick note to Lexie, trying to ignore the fear that pricked the back of my neck.

As if on cue, when my Internet time ran out, the sun popped above the clouds, and I rushed to the beach. The sun was like a magic spotlight, its beams gold with just the slightest hint of pink. Everything it touched turned beautiful. Even the trash cans were striking, as long as you thought of them as simple shapes: three green cylinders standing in a row, perfectly spaced, a wooden fence running in parallel lines behind them.

Snap.

“You cutting in on my territory?” Delilah stood to one side,
a plastic grocery bag in each hand, smiling. She was wearing a yellow cotton dress with short, puffy sleeves and a row of buttons down the front.

“Hey,” I said. My face flushed at the thought of my black hair—which, even now, wasn't as weird as Delilah's, but still. Seeing her plastic bags, I remembered what she'd said about scavenging materials for her art. “You find anything good?”

She peered inside. “Styrofoam, mostly: coffee cups and some of those take-out containers. I'll wash them with bleach when I get home so they don't smell. I'm speaking from experience.”

“Are you going to add them to the piece you were working on the other day?”

She shook her striped head. “Nah, the lollipop field is almost done. This is raw material for my next piece, which I plan to call
Landfill.
Last week, I found a busted boogie board on the beach; that'll be my canvas. I'll use the Styrofoam to build a series of hills, which I'll cover with different things: aluminum foil, hamburger wrappers, whatever I can find.” She paused. “I haven't figured it out beyond that. But it'll make some kind of an environmental statement.”

She pointed at my head. “I like your hair.”

That was a bit like having a blind person compliment my photography, but whatever. “Thanks.”

“Your camera working okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I still can't figure out how that old woman turned up in a shot, though. Anyway, I haven't been able to take many pictures because of the rain.”

She motioned down the beach. “You might want to come back tomorrow. Saturdays, the town rents kayaks—over there, by that
little gray house. They're all different colors, and I always thought they looked cool lined up on the sand. I mean, not as cool as the trash cans, but—you know.”

I checked her face to see if she was making fun of me, but she meant it about the trash cans. The girl liked her trash. I looked down the beach and tried to imagine the kayaks. It would be fun to play around with the shapes, the colors.

“Thanks for the tip,” I said. “I'll check it out.”

“And also tomorrow…” She looked down shyly. “There's this excellent thrift store downtown. I get most of my clothes there.” That explained a lot.

“It's only open on Saturdays,” she said. “I was planning on going tomorrow—it opens at nine—so if you want to meet me there….”

Used clothes? Yuck. I went to the Salvation Army a couple of years ago when I needed a costume for the school play, and everything just smelled…weird. Like dust mixed with perfume mixed with death. I didn't want to offend Delilah, but that whole “vintage” thing was way overrated.

“Saturday…hmm,” I said, as if trying to recall the details of my busy schedule. The breeze blew my hair in front of my face. It felt like a cobweb. I reached up to tuck the hair behind my ear and that's when I caught the smell, almost beachlike but not quite. It was the mildew from my still-damp clothes. Humiliation washed over me.

“My parents forgot to put my suitcase in the car,” I said. “That's why I'm always wearing the same thing. But I've got lots of other stuff at home.”

“Of course!” she said. “I didn't mean…what I meant was…
you know. There's not a lot going on around here, so it's just something to do.”

The breeze blew again, releasing an even stronger mildew aroma. I wanted to rip my clothes off and throw them in the ocean. Next week my dad would go to Amerige and bring back my suitcase. Next week sounded far away.