Page 49 of The Gallagher Place
Nate was headed to Princeton in the fall, and he had declared that he wanted the summer to be perfect.Golden.So far, Marlowe thought he couldn’t complain. Since their parents came up only every other weekend, Enzo was the only adult supervision. Occasionally, Nate had friends up from the city, but most of the time, it was just the four of them: Nate and Henry and Marlowe and Nora. They were a posse of sorts, and Nate was the undisputed leader of the pack. Each morning over a breakfast of bacon and eggs that Enzo cooked up, Nate told them exactly what they were going to do that day.
Marlowe wandered into a small clearing, kicking dead leaves and ferns to the side as she scanned the ground.
Her eyes lit up when she saw several perfect rocks. “Nora, come over here—there’s so many.”
Nora scampered over, brushing aside the prickers that tugged at her shorts. “It’s another wall!” It was decrepit and scant, but Nora was right. The bottom layer of another wall ran perpendicular to the one they had just been pillaging; it would have been undetectable if Marlowe hadn’t been deliberately clearing the leaves.
Marlowe bent down to pick up a flat gray stone, but Nora tapped her shoulder. “Scouting trip—we have to see how far it goes. We’ll bring the boys up here to collect rocks later, once we know.”
Marlowe readily agreed. They tramped happily through the woods, veering into a section where they had never been before. That was what excited Marlowe about the land. She could spend a lifetime exploring it and still come across unseen tracts. The girls hopped from rock to rock, following the wall along the top of a gentle slope.
“Sean called me last night,” Nora said, jolting Marlowe out of her musings. “He wants to hang out this weekend.”
“But it’s Henry’s birthday this weekend.” Henry was turning fourteen. Enzo was going to make barbecued ribs to honor the occasion, and Marlowe and Nora had promised to make a cake.
“I know, I told him that, but he didn’t get it.”
Marlowe breathed a sigh of relief, even as she observed Nora’s furrowed brow. The summer had put a strain on Nora’s relationship with Sean. They’d been going out for roughly nine months, since homecoming last year. During the school term, Nora ate lunch with Sean and his friends in the cafeteria and went to all his baseball games. They went to the movies together on Friday nights. But Nora still spent the majority of her weekends and, so far, all of the summer tromping through the woods with Marlowe and her brothers, an arrangement that suited Marlowe.
Nora confessed to Marlowe that she got bored with Sean sometimes. He never wanted to talk about books or traveling or college. He only ever wanted to talk about baseball and high school stuff. It made Marlowe feel good to know that she was still the more interesting, beloved person in Nora’s life.
Nora jumped off the wall and turned to look at Marlowe over her shoulder. “I’ve actually been meaning to tell you something.”
“What?” Marlowe stopped her skipping and sat on the wall. She could tell it was something serious from Nora’s expression.
“The other night, after we went to the movies, Sean wanted to go all the way.”
Marlowe gasped. “And you waited untilnowto tell me?”
“Nate and Henry are always around,” Nora said. “Plus Enzo and your parents were up that weekend! I couldn’t risk any of them finding out and telling my parents!”
“Did you … do it?” Marlowe asked.
Nora looked into her eyes before placing her hands on her hips and saying, “No, of course not!”
“Good. You should never let a boy force you into anything you don’t want to do,” Marlowe said, speaking with an authority she didn’t have. She had still never been kissed. “So what happened after that?” Marlowe scratched at a mosquito bite on her thigh. It was turning red and swollen.
“Oh, nothing.” Nora waved her hand, hopped up, and started walking again. Marlowe chased after her. She’d noticed that Nora had become less willing to go into detail about her dates with Sean recently. She claimed it was because they did the same things all the time; their relationship had become mundane. But Marlowe had her doubts. She had overheard girls at school comparing notes about how far they had gone with boys. Hands over the bra, under the bra, pants unbuttoned. She didn’t know if Nora had done any of that stuff, but if she had, Marlowe hoped she would tell her, acting, as usual, as her most trusted guide in life. Though she had some friends at school in the city, none were as close to her as Nora was.
“I guess I should call things off with Sean, but we haven’t even hit a year yet.” Nora ran her hand over the trunk of a tree as she passed.
“Maybe it’s just a phase,” Marlowe said. “It will be nice to have a date for dances this fall and someone to hold hands with in the school hallway, won’t it?”
“I don’t know. Being with a guy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, trust me,” Nora said. “I mean, Sean never makes me laugh. Hedoesn’t think like you and I do, like Nate or even Henry. All Sean cares about is baseball. Our school’s team isn’t even the best one in Dutchess County.”
Marlowe lengthened her stride so they were side by side and threw her arm over Nora’s shoulders. “Well, if the cons outweigh the pros.” Without any practical experience herself, Marlowe could only parrot generic phrases when it came time to advise Nora. But it wasn’t Marlowe’s fault that no one asked her to dances. That the boys at school, especially the cute ones, made her tongue-tied with nervousness. Marlowe knew she wasn’t ugly, but she also knew she wasn’t considered fun. She was quiet and boring and wore her innocence stamped on her forehead. And no guy wanted an innocent girlfriend.
“There aren’t any pros at all to the relationship,” Nora burst out. “Even the stuff that’s supposed to be a pro was weird.”
“You’ll know what to do when the time comes,” Marlowe said.
Nora smiled, and they walked on, marveling at the length of the wall. The air seemed to crackle with sudden warning, and Nora halted and pointed into the pines. “What’s that?”
There was a brown shape, twice Marlowe’s height, several yards away, obscured by undergrowth and trees.
The hair on Marlowe’s neck stood up. As they drew closer, they realized the shape was a rusty car; it looked like an automobile from the 1940s. There was something ominous about this latest discovery. Marlowe wondered how long the car had been sitting out in these woods unnoticed.Decades?The car held something bad, she just knew it, felt it somewhere deep in her bones.
“How did it get all the way up here?” Marlowe whispered.
