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“Can I push the button?” she asked in the elevator.
“Yes, eleven. One one,” Carmen steered Katherine’s index finger in the right direction.
Her excitement over this made Carmen feel as though she’d just awarded Katherine a lifetime of good fortune. “Nicky always gets to push,” Katherine explained, pushing several extra times.
Carmen couldn’t keep her eyes from scanning the halls. Her heart was beating a lot harder and faster than normal. Of course she was thinking about him. Of course she wanted to see him. But on the other hand, she didn’t.
She rested Katherine on the reception counter in pediatrics. “Katherine Rollins to see Dr. Barnes,” she said to the woman behind the desk.
The woman wrote Katherine’s name down and located her file. “Do you want to play in the playroom for a few minutes, sweetie?” she asked Katherine.
“Can she come?” Katherine touched her pointing finger right to Carmen’s cheekbone.
“Of course,” the woman said, and gestured them in the right direction.
Carmen couldn’t help looking over her shoulder as she walked. A part of her really wanted to see him. A big part.
Well, another time, she thought, entering the confines of the playroom. It was bright and sunny, involving a few other children and lots of toys and miniature furniture. Carmen would have to content herself with standing or sitting on the floor, because there was no way she was fitting into an Elmo chair. And if by some miracle she did fit in, she wouldn’t be getting out. She pictured herself walking out of the hospital with a red plastic Elmo chair attached to her butt.
“Hey, you.” She put Katherine down in front of a bead maze and straightened her helmet. “What do you want to play?”
Katherine danced around, utterly pleased. She brought over a Noah’s ark, a xylophone, two puppets, and a book. Carmen knew that Katherine was always miffed at how Tibby’s friends came over and spent time with Tibby. Now she had Carmen all to herself.
Carmen heard a girl’s giggle from behind the big dollhouse set up in the corner. She also saw a few parts of a man popping out—the girl’s father, no doubt. Carmen figured she and Katherine could take over the dollhouse once those two vacated. Twin boys were throwing Nerf basketballs at each other. Carmen observed that somebody had taken a few bites out of one of the balls.
“How about this?” Katherine was shaking the animals out of the ark.
They played. There were a lot of singletons in this version of Noah’s story, probably due to loss and theft, but Katherine didn’t seem to care. Carmen was the hippo, the elephant, the lion, and the penguin. It was good, because Carmen had always had a knack for animal sounds and voices. With the penguins, she really got into a character. In this case, her penguin was a mafioso, kind of like Marlon Brando in The Godfather, only in a penguiny way. Katherine was laughing so hard she stopped making any noise. The people behind the dollhouse were laughing too. The twin boys were circling them eagerly.
Suddenly Carmen realized that the leg extending from one side of the dollhouse had a brown shoe on the end of it. A brown Puma, specifically. She cut off the penguin’s soliloquy. Moments later, a face appeared over a miniature gable.
She put both hands over her eyes in complete humiliation. “Hi, Win.” Could she have been any louder?
He came entirely out from behind the dollhouse. He was fighting the impulse to smile. No, probably the impulse to laugh. At her.
“Hi, Carmen,” he said. He crawled over to where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. He pushed the inner part of her elbow and made the arm she was leaning on collapse. “Can I tell you I’ve never heard a more entertaining penguin in my life? I didn’t even know penguins could talk.”
“Ha ha,” Carmen said, straightening her arm again. She tried to pull herself up and recapture some tiny amount of dignity.
She cleared her throat. “Win, this is Katherine. Katherine and I are friends. Katherine, this is Win.”
Katherine stood up somewhat importantly. “Hi,” she said.
Win pointed to her helmet. “I like your stickers.”
She nodded. “I crushed my skull.”
Carmen looked aghast. “You didn’t crush your skull, sweetie. You fractured it.”
Katherine waved this off as an uninteresting detail.
“And it’s getting better really fast,” Carmen added, possibly for her own sake.
Carmen could tell that Win was fighting to look serious. “Hey, Maddie.”
A lovely girl with brown skin poked her head over the dollhouse. “This is Katherine,” he said.
Katherine headed straight for the dollhouse. “Hey. Can I see that thing?”
“If you don’t mess up the living room,” Maddie allowed. Maddie looked to be about four, enough older than Katherine to be totally seductive.
Win was sitting close to Carmen on the floor. She could feel the heat from his body. She could smell him. He smelled a little salty, like cashews, and a little sweet, like mango shampoo. She felt woozy.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” she said, feeling shy after all her bellowing and swaggering with the plastic animals.
“This is what I do.”
“I mean, I know you work here—” she started.
“No, this is specifically what I do. Nine to two I work in pediatrics, mostly here in the playroom. I play with kids when their parents need to talk to the doctors.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Really.”
“Yeah. And if you need work, I’d hire you in a split second. You got the place rocking with that penguin.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “Stop.”
“Only it doesn’t pay very well,” he said.
“How much?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not so good.”
“It pays better than my job after two. Then I go up to geriatrics to amuse and entertain the old folks. They’re always goading me to buy them stuff out of the vending machine. I’m going into debt with that job.”
A nurse appeared at the door of the playroom. “Katherine Rollins?”
Carmen got up. “Hey, Katherine. It’s our turn.”
Win got up as well. “Your…sister?” he asked.
“No. I’m an only child,” Carmen said. She had no idea why she said that. It was true, yes, but true in such a narrow and ungenerous way it felt more like a lie.
“She’s…?”
“My friend Tibby’s little sister. She fell out a window a few weeks ago. She’s going to be fine, but she has to get checked out a lot to see how she’s healing. Tibby was supposed to bring her, but her job added on a shift today, and she’s trying to save money for—” Carmen looked up. “Why am I telling you all this?”
He shrugged, smiling. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, Katherine,” she called. Katherine was having trouble parting with Maddie and the dollhouse.
“You can tell me more, though,” he added. “I’ll listen to anything you want to tell me.”
She heard in his voice, in its particular hopeful tone, that he meant it. She knew he meant it in a real way and not just a charming or flirtatious way. He was sincerely curious about her; he was utterly observant. She could tell that he did want to know her. And on one level this made her as happy as anything she could possibly imagine.
And on another level it made her sad. Because the girl he wanted to know wasn’t her. He wasn’t seeing her for how she was. He was seeing her as a kind and selfless person who cared about the people around her. He was coming to all the wrong kinds of conclusions.
And worse than that, she was letting him.
Show me a girl with her feet planted firmly on the ground and I’ll show you a girl who can’t put her pants on.
—Annik Marchand
“Vreeland! For God’s sake, quit sunbathing and help me get some of these things in the water!”
Bridget opened one eye and sat up on the dock. She started laughing. Eric was t
rying to pull four kayaks into the lake at once, and he wasn’t looking so graceful.
“Dude,” she bellowed in a perfect imitation of her cabin-mate Katie’s low, sloppy drawl. “You’re late. I can’t keep covering for you like this.” Bridget lay back down, resting on her elbows, letting the Traveling Pants soak up some sunshine. She’d already set up all the rafts, oars, life preservers, water shoes, and both double kayaks. She was always early, he was always late. He was always pretending to be put out by the small amount of work she left for him to do.
“I see it’s the usual horde of campers,” he said.
It was another joke between them. Three weeks into camp and almost no one came for their activities. Rafting just wasn’t as sexy as extreme mountain biking, it would appear. Well, there was a small group of boys who appeared now and then, but according to Eric, they weren’t there for the boats.
If it hadn’t been a no-flirt zone, Bridget would have batted her eyes and said, “Well, why are they here, do you think?” But she didn’t.
