Reese
My first night on the porch is cold. The dark, crisp air slips in through the screens, surrounding me. I try to wait it out,
telling myself I’ll get used to it, but it doesn’t work. I sit there for a long time, thinking about nothing but how cold
and dark it is (my only source of light lying broken on the floor—pieces of glass that I have to avoid because I haven’t bothered
to sweep them up), until eventually I dig sweats from my bag and pull them on, wrapping myself in blankets, refusing to go
inside where it’s warm because the last thing I need is for Emily to be right about this. I’d just as soon die of hypothermia
than go inside.
The darkness is inescapable. It closes in on me like some tactile thing. There are no streetlights and no house lights. No
one bothered to leave a light on inside. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t weird me out, not knowing who or what lies just
beyond the screens, and for a while, I sit on the edge of the bed, staring out into the darkness and waiting for a face to
press against the mesh, thinking of Pennywise, of Jigsaw, of Samara Morgan from The Ring in that white dress, her long, dark hair covering her face as she crawls out of the TV. The screens are weak. Other than
keeping bugs out, they don’t serve any real purpose. If someone wanted to break in in the middle of the night, they could.
I think about the creep at the lodge today, the one who stood there, smoking his cigarette, his eyes feasting on me and then on Mae.
I wonder if he’s staying at this resort.
I wonder if he watched us leave the lodge, if he followed us back to our cottage, if he knows where we’re staying and if he’s out there in the woods right now, watching me.
Sometime after midnight, it starts to drizzle. The rain is a fine mist that comes in through the screens, threatening to get
anything within two feet of them wet. On the side of the bed closest to the screens, it just misses. I hold my hand out, letting
it dangle over the edge of the bed, feeling rain.
I lie in bed, cocooned in the quilt, looking at Instagram and Snapchat, trying to distract myself, to not let myself be scared.
Cell service is less glitchy at night than before. For whatever reason, it just works better. There was a bonfire tonight,
back home, at Marshall’s house, because it sits on like six acres of land in the middle of nowhere and his parents go to bed
at nine o’clock so that—according to Marshall—they never hear what happens at the far edge of their own property late at night.
There are pictures of the party online, including one of Skylar dancing around the fire—Liam Morris grinding behind her—drinking
from her bottle of Poland Spring, which everyone knows is not water, but vodka.
I text Skylar my picture of the taxidermy fish. It’s two in the morning. I don’t expect her to be awake or sober. Still, she
sees my text but leaves me on read, and I wonder if there was a sleepover after the bonfire, if she’s with Gracie again and
if she’s having more fun with her than she has when she’s with me.
In the morning, there’s just one word from Skylar in response to my picture of the fish. Cool. Which means it’s not. Which means it’s lame as fuck. I’m actually embarrassed I sent it.
Did u and Liam Morris hook up? I start to text, but I don’t send it because what’s even more lame than sending pictures of taxidermy fish at two in the morning is spying on your friends on Instagram, especially when they’re mad at you.
I told her I was sorry about what happened before, before we left.
I said it would never happen again, and she said, Whatever, forget about it, it’s fine.
I don’t think it’s fine. In fact, I keep replaying it again and again in my mind, wishing it was a bad dream, that it never
happened.
Emily wants us up and out of the cottage by nine, so we can stake a claim to chairs at the pool. I get dressed in the one
bathroom everyone shares, getting naked before stepping into the bathing suit I bought for this trip, the bikini bottoms high
enough to hide my new tattoo that Emily and Nolan know nothing about, because if they did, they’d kill me. It’s a butterfly
on the side of my hip, because butterflies represent freedom and transformation, which seemed fitting and hopeful. The tattoo
is sexy too, except for when I have to hide it, like now. I stand before the mirror, making sure the high waist of the bikini
bottoms covers it.
When I come out of the bathroom, Mae is standing there, wearing my pink sweatshirt, which she’s obsessed with because it’s pink and because it’s super soft and fleecy, which means that when I was getting dressed, she went onto the porch and went through my things.
“Take it off,” I say, more pissed about her snooping than about her wearing my stuff.
The sweatshirt is too big on her anyway, though she poses with it slouchy and off the shoulder with her hands on her hips, doing the duck face like those stupid tween influencers she’s infatuated with on Instagram and YouTube, which Emily knows nothing about because Emily somehow still believes Mae idolizes Disney princesses.
She thinks Mae hasn’t discovered social media yet, though she has, because she’s ten and doesn’t live under a rock.
She also knows Santa doesn’t exist, but Emily doesn’t know that either.
Mae doesn’t have her own phone (in our house, you have to be in middle school to get one) but she steals mine or even Emily’s sometimes and does whatever she wants on it and Emily and Nolan are completely clueless.
“No,” Mae pouts, crossing her arms. “I don’t want to.”
“Take it off now.”
“But I’m cold,” she whines.
“Find your own sweatshirt. That one’s mine.”
“No. Please.”
“I’m counting to three. If you don’t take it off yourself, then I’m ripping it off your head. One . . . two . . .”
By the time I get to three, Mae screams, and Emily comes running, out of breath when she arrives, stepping between Mae and
me like she thinks I might hurt her. “What is it? What’s wrong? Is everything okay, Mae?” When I tell her, she looks disappointed
with me, like this is somehow my fault, and asks, “Can’t you just let her wear it, Reese? She already has it on.”
“No. Give it to me,” I say, dragging it off Mae’s head and telling her to leave my shit alone.
When we get there, the pool is small. It’s cold, like sixty-eight degrees outside, though Emily swears it’s going to get warmer
as the day goes on. I watch as some guy skims twigs and leaves from the pool, but it comes back again, falling from the sky
like confetti. The only redeeming quality is that there aren’t as many trees here, which means the sun gets through somewhat.
If I drag my plastic chair with its broken brown straps into the patches of sunlight, moving it throughout the day with the
sun, I might stand a chance of going home with a tan. Then, when people ask, I can say I went somewhere cool like Cancun or
Cozumel and not Wisconsin.
The day is never-ending. It moves by at a snail’s pace.
Mae and our cousin Cass are cojoined. Whatever Cass does, Mae does.
Synchronized swimming, tea parties at the bottom of the pool, pretending to be mermaids.
They want me to play with them, but I say no.
I don’t know where Wyatt is. All I know is that he’s not here, which doesn’t seem fair, because he can do whatever he wants, while I can’t even go to the bathroom without being interrogated.
“Where are you going?” Emily asks, as I stand up from my chair, adjusting my bathing suit. She glances up from her book, shielding
her eyes from the sun.
“To pee. Or is that not okay?” She says that it is. I ask for the key to the cottage.
“There is a bathroom in the pool house,” she says, but I went in there once and I don’t ever want to have to do it again.
The words pool house are deceptive. It’s a dingy little building like a shed with a grungy concrete floor that pools with water from people going
in barefoot and sopping wet.
“Can I not just go back to the cottage to pee?”
“What’s wrong with the pool house?”
“Have you seen it? It’s disgusting. And there are bugs in there.”
“Fine,” she reluctantly says. “But come right back when you’re done.”
In the chair between us, Uncle Elliott drinks beer from a can in a koozie. He has a cooler of beer beside his chair, which
he and Nolan share, stacking their empties on the concrete deck, seeing who can stack theirs higher before it falls, as if
it’s Jenga, as if this isn’t the most redneck vacation ever.
Earlier I looked over to find Uncle Elliott staring at me, and I didn’t know if he looked when I looked or if he was already
looking, but he smiled and there was something a little cocky but also guilty-looking about it, like he got caught red-handed,
leering at his teenage niece in her bikini. It’s gross, though every family has that one slightly pervy uncle and Elliott
is mine, which isn’t the worst thing in the world, because he’s also hot.
He says now, “Hey. Can you bring me back something to eat?”
But Emily tells him, “We’re going to have lunch soon,” as if she planned the whole day’s agenda and no one’s allowed to deviate from it.
“What do you want?” I ask, ignoring her.
He smiles, crinkles forming around his brown eyes. Aunt Courtney sits on the edge of the pool, her legs dangling in the icy
water, though she doesn’t go in because Aunt Courtney can’t swim. Imagine being like forty years old and not being able to
swim.
Instead, she tosses some pool toy for Mae and Cass to race to, as if they’re dogs playing fetch. She glances back over her
shoulder, catches Elliott’s eye and smiles. Aunt Courtney and Uncle Elliott are an it couple. They’re both cool and hot, so that I find it impossible to believe that she and Nolan share the same genes. She teaches
preschool, he’s an attorney, which feels so dead-on for them, like they couldn’t have picked more fitting careers if they
tried. They live in a big house. They’re relationship goals, like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds or Emily Blunt and John Krasinski.
They’ve been married exactly eleven years, which I know because I was their flower girl when I was six, the summer before
kindergarten. There are pictures of it, of me in my little white dress scattering red rose petals down the aisle of some big,
fancy church, which feels perfect and fairy tale–like in my memories, except that Uncle Elliott was married before. He had
a wife when he met Aunt Courtney, which is another one of those things I shouldn’t know, but that I do.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you surprise me,” Uncle Elliott says, and I glance down to find him still looking up at me from his
pool chair, shirtless, smiling though his sunglasses now cover his eyes. His abs are ripped. I try not to look at them as
I walk away.
Some guy in another chair who I don’t know says to me as I pass, “Hey. Can you bring me something to eat too?” his voice low and throaty.
He’s grinning when I look, like he’s pleased with himself, like he thinks he’s funny.
Except he’s not looking at my face, he’s looking somewhere lower than that.
My throat tightens. I can’t think of anything to say and so I stay quiet, smiling awkwardly and praying he doesn’t follow me when I leave.
I push my way out of the squeaky pool gate. There are trees between the cottage and me, dozens if not hundreds of them blocking
out the sun, darkening the world around me. I take the path through the woods, the temperature dropping so that I’m instantly
cold, goose bumps cropping up on my arms, making me wish for a towel, which I left on the pool chair so that I’m just in my
bikini and slides.
I haven’t gone far when my brother Wyatt’s voice comes to me, disembodied from somewhere in the woods. I inch closer, crouching
down when I see him. I pull back on a tree branch to get a better view, peering through the leaves.
On the other side of the trees, Wyatt stands less than twenty feet away, talking to some guy I’ve never seen before, their voices dulled down as they speak.
The guy, who looks like he’s forty, shoots nervous glances into the woods, over his shoulder and then back again at Wyatt, making sure they’re alone.
That no one can see them. Wyatt looks like my brother, but he doesn’t sound like him, he sounds like someone else, like someone older than he is and less of a bot.
He slips the guy something. The guy gives him something back.
The guy shoots another glance over his shoulder before taking off, and then Wyatt stands there, counting his cash.
I shake my head in disbelief. He’s an entrepreneur.
Always figuring out ways to make money, though never in the normal sense, like getting an actual job.
Instead, blackmail and now this: being someone’s plug.
Wyatt doesn’t use drugs. His body is a temple and all that.
But just because he doesn’t use them doesn’t mean he can’t sell them.
Weed is easy enough to get back home. It’s legal.
You just need someone old enough to walk into a dispensary and get it for you.
Wyatt also has a prescription for Adderall because, supposedly, he has ADHD, because he probably faked his way through some test for a doctor to say that.
Last I checked, he doesn’t take the pills.
He stockpiles them and sells them for fifteen or twenty bucks each.
Kids get especially desperate around final exams.
I wonder how he even does it, what the initial setup looks like and how he goes about finding random people to sell drugs
to.
I think I underestimate him sometimes.
Wyatt slips the cash in a pocket. I turn around to go back. But as I do, I realize there’s more than one path through the
woods. I pick one, figuring either will take me out of the woods and to the cottages. I walk faster now, looking back over
my shoulder, for Wyatt. I don’t want him to find me here, because I don’t know what he’d do to me if he did. I’m cold. The
mosquitoes are thicker in the trees. There are clouds of them that I have to walk through, that buzz close to my ear. I shoo
them away, feeling the sharp bite of one on my thigh and I slap at it, coming up with a dead, bloody mosquito on my hand.
I lean down to wipe my hand on the dirt because I have nothing else to wipe it on, and it’s then, when I’m bent down low,
that I hear footsteps approaching quickly, moving in on me faster than I can react.
I turn, jerking upright, my eyes searching the woods for Wyatt’s ugly face. I hear people laughing in the distance, the sound
of them carrying from the pool.
I wonder if I screamed, would anyone hear?
My heart beats fast. I see his shadow on the ground first.
“It’s okay,” he drones, becoming visible in the trees. “I didn’t mean to scare you. You don’t have to be scared. I’m not going
to hurt you.”