Stalker Girl (14 page)

So he didn’t see how this guy kept moving closer, how he got so close she could smell his beery breath.

She reached into her pocket for her phone and typed out what she hoped was an understandable text to Val.

Beer Breath stared at Brian as he leaned in and said, “I mean, he can’t weigh more than one thirty.”

Now she could smell hamburger and onions, too. He wanted to know if she’d ever been to a rugby game. He said rugby players were tougher than football players.

“No pads. No helmets.”

“Really,” Carly said. “Is that what happened?”

“Huh? What happened? What?”

“Is that how you—” It was probably a good thing that her phone rang before she could ask if he got the brain damage playing rugby. “Just a sec—this might be my dad. He’s picking me up.”

Beer Breath was gone before she got to the
i
in “hi.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just needed an excuse to get away from an overly friendly frat boy.”

“Where’s Brian?”

“Playing.”

“And you’re . . . ?”

“Waiting. Watching.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What? ”

“Waiting? Watching? You’ve been doing that for how long?”

Carly looked at her watch: 11:14. Brian said they’ll be done with their second set by midnight. “Just a couple hours. But there was a break between sets.”

“
Just
a couple hours? Wow. That didn’t take long.”

“What didn’t take long?”

“For you to turn into a groupie.”

“Val. I am
not
a groupie. That’s not how it is. That’s not how Brian is.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m serious, Val. You don’t know him.” Carly thought about Estelle and Harvey, how Brian had helped them despite Avery and Liam’s protests. She wished Val had been there to see that. Or how affectionate he was with his mother. And with Carly.

“Okay. Okay, I won’t judge. Yet. But, I mean, what do you expect when you tell me you’re all alone at a frat party and then you send a text like that? Do you know what they call freshman girls? Freshmeat.”

“That’s an urban legend.”

“It’s not. Here, ask Luis.”

“No. Val—”

As she handed Luis the phone, Carly thought she heard her say something about setting someone straight.

“Hey, Carly Girly. You hanging with the frat boys now?”

“Hey, Luis. No. I’m just—I just came to hear the guys play.”

“Well, be careful. Everything you heard is true. Those boys are looking for one thing. I’m surprised your boy—what’s his name?”

“Brian.”

“I’m surprised Brian let you go.”

“
Let
me?”

“Yeah. Let you. Don’t go all
feminista
on me here.”

“I won’t go all
feminista
if you don’t go all
machis- mista
.”

“But I didn’t mean
let
you like give you permission. I just meant—”

When a pair of arms suddenly circled her waist, she gasped. But then she recognized the heart-shaped freckle above the elbow and let herself sink back into the safety of Brian.

“Carly? Hey, Carly! You still there?”

“Hey, Luis. Thanks. Yeah. It’s okay. Brian’s here. Tell Val I’ll call her tomorrow.”

Carly turned toward Brian, ran her fingers through his dripping-wet hair, and planted her lips on his. The kiss was half for Brian, half for the benefit of her rugby-playing sexual harasser, in case he was watching.

“Whoa,” Brian said. “Guess you’re glad to see me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“See what I mean about these frat gigs? There are too many guys like that around here.” So he had seen.

Carly shrugged. “Guys like what?”

Up on the stage, Avery and Liam were unplugging and packing and talking up the girls gathered around, phones out, fingers poised, hoping to get numbers. Another girl walked over and handed them each a red plastic cup of beer.

“You okay?”

“Yup.”

He kissed her on the neck. “I’ll be right back.”

She held the place on her neck where he kissed her and watched as he climbed the steps to the stage and started packing. Brian worked quickly while Avery and Liam took their time, entertaining their admirers as they slowly packed their equipment. When the beer-delivery girl approached Brian, red cup in hand, Carly started to feel a little less okay. The girl leaned over, offering him the cup, a smile, and a close-up of her cleavage.

He looked. He nodded. He smiled.

Carly stopped breathing.

Brian took the cup from the girl’s hand and said something that made her giggle.

She said something that made him laugh.

It went like that, back and forth a few times and then—

He waved, turned away, and started winding cables again.

The girl stood there looking at his hunched back for a few seconds, and when he didn’t look up, she turned and rejoined the gaggle surrounding Avery and Liam.

Carly resumed breathing.

STONY HOLLOW
was good for Jess. During mealtimes, whenever Carly would peek out through the conveyor-belt window, she’d see her little sister in the middle of a group of girls, laughing or singing or engaged in one of those endless clapping games that seven-year-olds do obsessively. Sometimes Jess would sneak back into the kitchen to exchange hugs with Carly and play around with Brian, Liam, and Avery, who doted on her. If Kevin wasn’t around, they’d let her stand on a stool and rinse things with the overhead power washer—which, because she didn’t have to do it for hours a day, she found fun. One night Liam and Avery enlisted her help in building a giant pyramid of plastic cups then knocking it to the floor.

She liked horseback riding and, unfortunately for Carly because she had to watch what she said about Cameron Foster, sailing. But of course drama was her favorite activity. She played the Undersecretary of Understanding in
The Phantom Tollbooth
and stole the show—in Carly’s opinion—during the Parents’ Weekend production.

Nick came up for that weekend, which was tense. He and Isabelle were stiff and awkward with each other, while pretending to be great friends. Carly just felt weird. She introduced him to Brian, and the three of them sat together for Jess’s play on Saturday night, but what conversation they had never moved beyond small talk.

All summer she’d been thinking about how well Nick and Brian would get along, how much she was sure Nick would love Brian’s music. She’d imagined taking Nick back to Ernestine’s so he could hear the guys rehearse and see the cool old house. But when they were both there, sitting on either side of her, there didn’t seem to be any point to trying to connect them when Carly’s own connection to Nick was so uncertain.

Nick made an effort. He invited her and Brian to join him and Jess for dinner the next day. The kitchen crew always got Sunday afternoons and evenings off. Usually the camp bought pizza from a place in town, and the campers ate dinner in the sheltered annex down by the lake, but since it was Parents’ Weekend, some families were going into town for dinner.

“Invite Brian, too,” Nick said. “He can tell us where to go, and I can hear more about the band.”

But Carly said no. Brian had told her he had a surprise planned for that afternoon, and she’d been invited for dinner at Ernestine’s afterward. She knew that all she had to do was ask and Sheryl would insist that Nick and Jess come along. But Carly was surprised to find that she didn’t want to ask. She didn’t want to share Sheryl and Brian and the Quinn clan with her falling-apart family. She wanted them all to herself.

 

All Brian would tell her about their mystery outing was that they’d be driving part of the way in the van and walking the rest. He’d told her to wear long pants and long sleeves and good walking shoes. And he’d refused to tell her anything else.

They drove along a winding country road, past rundown houses with yards full of junk next to newly pimped-up farmhouses with swimming pools and tennis courts and shiny new Range Rovers. One of these places had a brand-new stable, red with white trim, in front of which they saw two little girls—who couldn’t have been older than eight or nine—decked out in jodhpurs and boots and holding riding crops.

Now and then they’d catch a glimpse of the Hudson, which looked dark green against the clear blue late-summer sky.

Eventually Brian turned onto a dirt road. It was full of bumps. Rocks and pebbles crashed and clicked against the underside of the van.

Carly kept asking where they were going. Not so much because she wanted to know but because she loved the sneaky smile that would appear on his face when he said “Not telling.”

Finally they pulled off and parked on the shoulder. There were no other cars, but there were a lot of footprints and tire tracks. Brian pulled a small backpack from the behind the driver’s seat, put it on, and took Carly by the hand to the edge of the seemingly endless, pathless woods.

“How will we find our way back? There’s no path.”

“Sure there is, if you know how to look.” He reached out and pulled the branch of a small tree. A small piece of light-blue plastic ribbon hung from its end. They took a few steps past the tree to another that had a piece of that same ribbon dangling down.

“See? Like Hansel and Gretel, only no one’s gonna eat these.”

They followed the little blue ribbons for about fifteen minutes until they came to a small, hilly opening in the woods. What looked like part of a brick wall rose a few feet from the ground at the foot of the hill. Behind that wall—under a pile of branches and dead leaves that Brian pulled and pushed and brushed aside—were two large rectangles of plywood.

Brian slid them aside to reveal a large hole on the side of the hill. He pulled two flashlights out of his little backpack and handed one to Carly.

They had to crouch to get themselves all the way in, then duckwalk for about ten feet to where things opened up and they could stand.

Brian pointed his flashlight at the ground directly in front of where they stood. Steps.

The light revealed five; there were more after that.

“What is this place?”

“You’ll see,” he said, starting down the steps. They were barely wide enough for one person. “Coming?”

Carly followed in spite of the slight claustrophobia she felt surrounded by dark, moist earth.

The steps ended at ten, and the narrow tunnel opened up into a room. Not a hole, but a room, with four walls, all made of brick, and a ceiling of logs. On one side was an archway over what must have once been a door. Stacked logs filled the opening.

It was another one of those locals-only secret places, like Baldwin Rock. No one knew for sure what the room was for originally, Brian explained. It might have been for storage, or part of an underground tunnel used for transporting goods to and from the river during the winters. For at least thirty years, since Brian’s father was a kid, the townies had managed to keep it a secret among themselves and pretty much as they’d found it. The only alteration they’d done was to add a bit of ventilation using pipes. Somehow every year the pipes were cleared of whatever dirt or debris got in there over the winter.

He walked Carly over to the logs stacked under the archway. They were filled with carved initials and numbers.

“When someone brings you here for the first time, you add yourself. There’s me, and Avery and Liam.” He shined the light on three sets of initials: BFQ, AFQ, and LKQ ’05. “And here’s my dad and my uncle Michael.” He moved the light down two logs to find the SOQ and MOQ ’75 that belonged to Sean O’Brien Quinn and Michael O’Brien Quinn.

He pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his pack and handed it to Carly.

“Let’s find a spot for you.”

 

Later that night, after dinner with the whole family, she and Brian lay side by side on the not-so-neatly made futon on the floor of room nine, catching their breath, letting the warm summer breeze pass over them while they listened to the crickets and the bits and pieces of the Yankees game on Sheryl’s kitchen radio.

This time there was no “We better stop.”

And there was no call to Val to share the news. Not that night when she got back to the cabin or in the morning when she got up. Even if Val managed to say the right words this time, Carly knew her friend’s voice would betray judgment. Doubt.

And she didn’t want to hear it.

Maybe after a “couple nights” she’d tell. Like Val had with the news about her and Jake. But not yet. Or maybe she wouldn’t tell at all. Maybe that was how it should be, something that stayed between her and Brian.

BEFORE SHE
knew it, the summer Carly had expected to drag by slowly was coming to a close. The day after the campers and counselors went home was a Sunday, Carly’s last. The next day she was heading to Ohio for what promised to be an excruciatingly boring week at her father’s, and then it was back to New York, to a dubious-sounding sublet on the West Side that Isabelle had finally found.

If Brian weren’t moving back to Brooklyn, if the two of them hadn’t sat down at the computer and mapped out the fastest ways to get from her new apartment to theirs in Brooklyn, if she weren’t already on the guest list for their first New York City gig, she’d have been miserable.

But she wasn’t miserable. Nothing—except the physical distance between them—was going to change when they got back to the city.

 

On her last night upstate, she was invited for dinner with the whole family. She and Sheryl had one more talk in the garden before dinner.

Carly had never seen anything like the garden at Ernestine’s: a huge, triangular plot with something growing on every inch it. Flowers, berry bushes, zucchini and melon vines, tomatoes, cucumbers, even a few rows of corn.