“It looks painted shut,” Ethan observed.
“I have a knife,” Petey offered without missing a beat.
“You’ll need swimsuits,” Ethan told us, and Laurel instantly swiped a one-piece from the wreckage of her suitcase explosion.
“Where are we going?” No one answered me. “Why are we climbing out of the window?” I asked, trying again foranyexplanation.
“It’s fun,” Laurel finally responded from the closet. She was changing into her one-piece while Petey chiseled at the window frame, and Ethan was keeping watch for our parents at the bedroom door. This group was already a runaway train. “And this way, we won’t need to explain to Derek that we don’t want his performative Sitcom Dad lunch. It’s a win-win.”
“But…” My head pinged between the three of them, heart racing. “We’re going to get into trouble.”
Laurel emerged from the closet in a tie-dye swimsuit and denim shorts. She rolled her eyes at me. “Our dad left us to film a movie about penguins for two years without so much as a Skype call. I think we’ve banked enough paternal guilt to sneak out in broad daylight.”
My heart smarted at the casual mention of how easy the two of us were to abandon. I looked for Ethan’s reaction, but his eyes were on the hallway.
“Jesus, enough with the knife,” Laurel instructed Petey, her new partner in crime.
He laughed. “You’re sort of mean,” he replied, visibly pleased. Together, they jerked the window open with an ear-piercing CREAK.
We all froze.
One second passed. Two. Then Ethan mouthed,Go.
—
They’d never told us where we were going, but by that point, it was too late to ask. We rode through the backwoods of town on a dirt path that was only slightly wider than a bike wheel, me standing on Ethan’s bike pegs and Laurel sitting on Petey’s handlebars.
“You can hold my shoulders,” he’d told me, so I had. I could feel his shoulder bones under his cotton T-shirt, and this close he smelled like powdered sugar.
The trail was mostly flat until the very end. Ethan struggled up the hill before I finally hopped off. He didn’t have time to get too embarrassed because Petey and Laurel toppled over inslow motion about a second later, and then we walked the bikes up the hill like that was the plan all along.
“Welcome to the falls,” Petey said when we arrived at a lake surrounded by trees and a few houses we could just barely make out in the distance. A pile of bikes had been dropped at the base of a treacherous trail that led up the side of a waterfall with a sign reading:Lake Lewellen. No climbing, diving, or ice luging.A giddy squeal at the top of the hill followed by a splash signaled that the people of Lewellen were comfortable taking their chances with at least two out of the three.
Ethan and Petey nodded and fist bumped other kids all the way to the top as we followed behind. They told the kids our names too, but their voices could barely compete with the sound of water beating against the lake’s surface in a frothy collision of waves.
“Why did you bring that big dorky camera?” Laurel said into my ear while we hiked up the steep path.
I didn’t say anything but continued toying with the stiff strap so the camera would fall just so on my hip. As soon as I got it right, I wasn’t sure where my hands should go and the process started over again.
“Hey,” Laurel said, grabbing the hand that wasn’t swinging the way a normal person’s does because I’d made the fatal mistake of thinking about its swing. “They’re just boys, Charley, and we’re two fascinatingenigmas.” Laurel had learned the word “enigma” watchingTop Modelreruns and it’d become the only way she described herself. But this was the first time she was using the word to describeme. Even though I still wasn’t convinced she was using it properly. “They’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”
I nodded and kept walking, feeling a little steadier with my sister’s hand in mine.
Laurel could be like that sometimes. Though she mostly treated me like an embarrassing appendage, she could transform into a fiercely protective older sister at the first sign of a threat.
Petey wanted to jump first when we got to the top, which ignited Laurel’s competitive streak. It wasn’t that high up, but when I looked down at the lake, the bodies cooling off at the bottom looked like bugs to be crushed. There was no railing or lifeguard. No regulation high dive. It was a cliffside the Lewellenians had discovered through potentially deadly trial and error, the angry water foaming white beneath like a rabid dog.
“Wanna take pictures instead?” Ethan’s head pointed to the camera dangling at my hip. “We don’t have to jump today.”
“I’m not wearing a swimsuit.” He nodded as though he knew that wasn’t the real reason I wasn’t jumping but wasn’t going to push it.
So we took pictures. At first, I pretended to know how to use the camera, but I gave up the act as soon as he noticed I’d forgotten to turn the camera on.
“It’s cool you’re teaching yourself photography. I taught myself how to play guitar.”
“Mydad’steaching me photography. He’s a filmmaker, mostly documentaries. We used to travel with him on shoots all over, and now he’s teaching at the college.” I didn’t tell him the part about all the times hedidn’ttake us with him, because as an experienced “new kid,” I knew that maintaining mystery was key.
“That’s so cool. I’ve never left Minnesota. My parents ownthe Donut Barn.” He leaned his back against a tree and squinted up at the sun. “It doesn’t give us a lot of freedom to go anywhere new.”
