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Silas went on to set the scene: It was almost time for the troop to leave the lake, and Silas decided it would be funny—“hilarious,” to be precise—to leave his own tracks in the mud by the lakeshore and then hop into one of the rowboats waiting there for guests and row out onto the lake. See if his uncle Les could followthosetracks.
“But he didn’t even notice I was gone!” he declared, to more laughter. “And there I was, floating farther and farther out onto the lake, totally losing the battle against the wind, the oars slapping the water every which way, like a complete idiot.” He paused then, for dramatic effect, Meg supposed, then flung an arm around Danny’s shoulders. “Only my man Dan here saw me, and he tried to call out to my uncle—”
“But he was too far in front of me—”
“And we all know Danny,” Silas added, “and he just had to be a hero, didn’t he?” More laughter, though with Danny, orathim? Meg wasn’t sure. And Danny didn’t even seem to care. Silas just leaned in to his captive audience. “There I was, adrift and alone. Night falling.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Danny’s face flushed again.
Silas waved this away. “And then, suddenly, there’s another rowboat, and this kid, who seems to know how to actually use oars, is coming to my rescue.”
“It wasn’t quite like that.”
“I waved my arms at him—dropping my own oars into the water, since I hadn’t rigged the oarlocks”—more laughter—“and then there he was, figuring out how to hop from his boat to my boat,withhis oars, no less, so we could combine our spindly ten-year-old strength”—here Silas flexed what were no longer spindly biceps—“and get ourselves back to shore.”
The gathered crowd cheered—actuallycheered—and Silas ended with a flourish. “The only casualty that day? One rowboat, retrieved later, two oars, never to be seen again, and my backside, after Uncle Les heard the tale.”
Everyone laughed so hard now, the closest teacher popped her head out of her classroom and made a shooing motion, urging them to move along to where they needed to be.
“And we’ve been friends ever since,” Danny added shyly as the crowd reluctantly dispersed, “hanging out the next few summers Silas came back after that.”
Before Meg and Danny had become a thing. She braced for more laughter. But it didn’t come. Quite the opposite, actually. The cheer squad looked at Danny like they’d never really seen him before. Which had always been just as well, in Meg’s opinion.
“My uncle decided he was a good influence on me, I think.” Silas winked in the cheerleaders’ direction. “I just wish I hadn’t been gone so long,” he added. “Marble Lake Lodge with Dan was way more fun than traipsing all over the country.”
Silas hadn’t been kidding. He really did like hanging out with Danny Boy Scout Cairns. And right from the get-go, Meg was dragged along for the ride. He invited them to have lunch with him at thetop-social-tier cafeteria table that first day, already playing host at their own school, and even as Meg declined—she had nothing to prove to these people—Danny was already accepting. And so she sat, waiting for Silas to realize his mistake. To bolt for the cool crowd, following Jessica Howard, maybe, who had—impossibly—been shunted over to the next table. Surely, he had a thing for blonds? But no, he remained planted between Meg and Danny, polishing off his sandwich.
Not that it mattered. Not that Meg needed to win some sort of popularity contest. Meg had Danny, who would graduate high school, get his fire-science AA degree, and then join the Feather River Fire Station 11 crew. It had been his goal to serve the public since filling out the required “When I Grow Up, I Want to Be ____” project in preschool, and Meg liked that Danny knew himself. It was a nice change of pace from her mother, who changed career dreams as often as hairstyles, which was often, seeing as “hairstylist” had been one of said careers. Meg liked that, unlike this new whirlwind in their lives, Danny had an actual, applicableplan, one she could slip right into the wake of. Because Meg didn’t really have a label of her own. She wasn’t Boy Scout. She wasn’t MissPopular. She wasn’t prom-court material, wasn’t a jock, wasn’t on the cheerleading squad. Basically, she hovered just off-center of the mainstream, unnamed and uncategorized. Unseen, too. And honestly, that was just fine.
“You never told me about Silas,” she said to Danny late that afternoon as they tossed their backpacks onto the Cairnses’ worn couch.
“I guess after he stopped spending summers at the lodge, I kind of forgot.”
Nothing about Silas Matheson seemed forgettable to Meg, but she let this pass.
“What do you think of him?” Danny asked. “And be real.”
Megbe real? What had Danny been all day? Because he certainly hadn’t seemed himself. “He’s ... a lot,” she answered, after weighing thequestion with care, but Danny just smiled, like suddenly he’d decided “a lot” might be a lot of fun.
Within days, it was as if Silas had started school in Feather River at five years old, just like all the rest of them. He hit the ground running, joining every club, taking interest in every corner of the social stratosphere, and bringing his new duo right along with him. Methodical, steady Danny seemed charged somehow by Silas’s energy. A switch Meg hadn’t known existed in him had been flipped, and keeping up with the two of them became her breathless new normal, whether in the corridors or in the classroom or, as was the case one sunny October afternoon, on a biology field trip along the banks of the Feather River.
Following the river upstream, water-testing kit in hand, Silas had been—by far—the most enthusiastic among their classmates, a habit that didn’t seem to dock him popularity points. Meg had to trot to keep up with him and Danny in her clunky school-issued rubber boots, never mind that blisters were no doubt forming. Silas did that to people: he spurred them to action, set them to clamoring, even when all that awaited them was silty sand and ice-cold water. Wading through the pebbly river, fingers freezing as she sucked up samples with her plastic tester, Meg listened as Danny seemed to hang on Silas’s every word, acting like it was an honor somehow, to hold all the test tubes. So what if Silas was team leader for their project? He couldn’t collect his own samples? Though he did, actually, scooping up and filtering the murky stream water right along with everyone else, all the while waxing poetic about the forest around his aunt and uncle’s place, about the lakes he loved to swim in, even about the crawdads they uncovered with their boots.
“You really like this stuff, don’t you?” Danny asked, and Silas grinned in answer, lifting mud-caked hands up to his face to brush away a buzzing dragonfly.
“I like discovering things,” he answered, which sounded ridiculous. Or should have, at least.Wouldhave, without a doubt, coming out of anyone else’s mouth.
Apparently, one of the things Silas had determined to discover was Meg. He constantly peppered her with questions, making her feel like she was in some sort of bizarre interview as Danny’s girlfriend. He managed to coax opinions out of her she hadn’t even known she’d harbored on everything from books to nature to movies, absorbing it all before rebounding it in a manner that left her vaguely dizzy. His passion at the river hadn’t been an anomaly; Silas was agnostic in the purest sense of the word. He took nothing at surface value; in class, his hand remained nearly permanently raised; in his term papers, he wrote argumentatively, uncovering and overturning ideas, dismissing the mess he made out of hand.
He was such a contrast to everything Meg appreciated about Danny: his reliability, the way she could predict his moods, his easy companionship—a comfort to her since they’d been deposited together in the same after-school childcare program, both raised by single parents. So why did this contrast seem to work? The two boys balanced each other like the two sides of the same coin, Meg precariously poised on the edge between them.
The term “third wheel” never seemed to occur to Danny or Silas, leaving Meg to concludeshewas the odd person out. As the weeks went on, she gave up trying to figure out why and simply allowed herself to be carried along in Silas and Danny’s current, a loose, random bit of debris that bounced and bobbed along.
It wasn’t until 4:00 p.m. each school day that she was set adrift, when Danny headed to the Feather River station to rack up volunteer hours as a junior firefighter and Silas commuted up the highway to Marble Lake Lodge. She’d go home, where a note from her mom would inform her whether or not she’d be home for dinner. She’d make herself some food before starting homework and wonder when, exactly, having her free time had stopped feeling so welcome.
7
MEG
