Page 34 of My Favorite Lost Cause
I’m not sure why she sounds so troubled.
Elijah stays late,so Maren invites him for dinner.
I spend more than enough time with Elijah during the day. I sort of like having our dinners on the back porch alone, justme and Maren, and she’s only got two nights left here, but I can’t exactly rescind the invitation.
Maren makes roast chicken and potatoes and grills Elijah for stories about the summer I spent here. She seems certain it was more exciting than we’ve let on.
“So there were no girls here? Not that entire summer?”
“Well, we did have your sister and her friend out here that one night,” I remind Elijah. “That was pretty exciting.”
Elijah laughs as he takes the potatoes from Maren. “Charlie’s full of shit. It was my little sister and her friend, and they were, like, thirteen at the time.”
Maren’s eyes widen. “Weren’t you, like, eighteen?”
“Nobody hooked up,” I promise her. “We told them there was a ghost?—”
“I think we actuallybelievedthere was a ghost,” Elijah counters. “So we waited until it was late, and then we climbed on the roof and lowered this sheer fabric from overhead. My sisterliterallypissed herself.”
“And then her friend punched you,” I add with a laugh. “Whatever happened to that kid? Some pretentious name. Kestley or Eastwick or something.”
“Easton,” Elijah says, his smile fading. “She moved away. She comes back at the holidays sometimes, but that’s about it.”
I’ve struck a nerve. It almost feels like I should apologize for bringing her up. There’s a moment of strained silence and Maren’s gaze flickers between us.
“I want to do a sleep out, Charlie,” Maren says, gamely changing the subject.
“I promise, you don’t. You realize how humid it is, right?”
“It won’t be that bad now that the sun’s down,” she replies.
“And you love the mosquitoes, too, so there’s that.”
“I’ll run our little machine. It’ll be fine. Why do you keep shitting on my plan?”
Because your plan hasn’t been thought through and that mosquito device doesn’t work for shit.
I lean back in my chair. “You’re going to be sweating your ass off and getting eaten alive while sleeping on a rickety deck.”
“Correction,” she replies. “We’regoing to be sweating our asses off and getting eaten alive while sleeping on a rickety deck.”
“Now I know you haven’t thought this through,” I reply, “because there is no way in hell you can offer me anything worth enduring that.”
And she just smiles at me in that way that says she’s already won.
Which she has.
Hot girls are a menace. Especially this one.
“Have fun with that campout,” Elijah says to me as he leaves.
Just after nine,we drag her mattress out onto the deck.
“Should we tell ghost stories?” she asks, smiling at me in the moonlight.
I’m being suffocated to death by the humidity, but I grin anyway. “Someone did die out here, by the way.”
“You mean…in this section of South Carolina?”
