Her lips curl up slightly at the corners, like burning paper. “No one has everything they need.”
I reach to touch Evan on the shoulder. “We should get back to the house.”
But he ignores me; he’s looking at Mrs. Palmer. She’s still smiling. “You know,” she says, “you look like a nice, strong boy. I could use your help. I’ve got an old car—a classic, as they say—and it usually runs like a dream, but lately I’ve been having trouble starting it. Would you take a look at it for me?”
I wait for Evan to say that he doesn’t know anything about cars. I’ve certainly never heard him mention them as a special interest. Instead he says, “Sure, I could do that.”
Mrs. Palmer tilts her head back, and the sun glints off her hair. “Wonderful,” she says. “I can’t offer you much of a reward, but I’ve got a cold drink for you if you like.” The bottle in her hand sparks rainbows.
“Great.” Evan spares me only a single glance. “Tell the ’rents where I went, okay, Violet?”
I nod, but he doesn’t even seem to notice; he’s already heading toward the pink house with Mrs. Palmer. Evan never looks back at me, but she does; pausing at the gate, she glances back over her shoulder, her eyes skating over me in a thoughtful way that—despite the heat—sends a cold shiver racing up my spine.
Sunset comes and paints the sky over the ocean in broad stripes of coral and black. Damaris and the rest of the staff are setting the table on the porch. I sit at the edge of the pool, my feet in the water. I’ve been waiting for Evan to come up the steps for hours now, but he hasn’t appeared. Mom and Phillip are still sitting in their deck chairs, though Phillip has put down his book and they appear to be arguing in hushed, intense tones. I block them out, the way I always do when they fight, trying to concentrate on the sound of the sea instead. Everyone always says it sounds like the inside of a seashell, but I think it sounds like the beat of a heart, with its regular, pounding rhythm and the soft rush of water like the rush of blood through veins.
Holding a folded set of napkins in one hand, Damaris leans over the porch and says, “Will there be four of you for dinner or only three?”
“Four.”
“I don’t see your stepbrother here,” Damaris says.
“He’s down on the beach,” I tell her. “But he’ll come back.”
Damaris says something under her breath. It sounds like, “They don’t come back.” Before I can ask her what she means, she turns back to setting the table.
Dinner is eaten in silence. No goat this time, just stuffed peppers and a lemony sort of fish. Halfway through the meal Evan joins us, sliding silently into his seat as if hoping not to be noticed.
Phillip freezes with his fork halfway to his mouth. “And where have you been?”
Evan stares at his plate. He isn’t wearing his bathing suit anymore, I notice, but a fresh pair of shorts and a worn T-shirt. He looks very…clean. “I was helping the lady next door fix her car. She said if I could get it started, she’d let us take her boat out and use it if we wanted.”
“That was very nice of you,” says Mom. She turns to Phillip. “Wasn’t it nice of him, darling?”
Phillip grunts a reply around his mouthful of fish. “I don’t know why she thought you’d know anything about getting cars to work. You’re just a kid.”
Evan flushes but says nothing, concentrating instead on forking up food from his plate.
My mother turns back to Phillip. “So I was thinking, tomorrow maybe, we could take a trip to Black River.”
“That town we drove through on our way here?” Phillip tears a chunk of bread in half. “It looked like a dump, Carol.”
“Apparently there’s a market there every weekend, with people bringing items from all around. And you can take boat trips up the river, see crocodiles in the water….” My mother’s voice trails off under Phillip’s cold stare. “I thought it might be something for us to do as a family. Something fun.”
“Fun?” Phillip echoes. “I didn’t come all the way here, Carol, to shop for cheap handicrafts and stare at a floating log some idiot tour guide claims is a crocodile.”
“But Phillip—” My mom reaches out for his hand and accidentally knocks over the glass bowl of fruit salad beside his plate. Phillip jumps up, swearing, even though none of it has gotten on him.
Mom looks dismayed. “I’m so sorry—”
Phillip doesn’t answer her. He’s staring coldly at the remains of the fruit salad on the tiles at his feet. “Look at this mess.”
“Phillip.” On the verge of tears my mom gets down on her knees, scrabbling with her fingers at the slippery bits of fruit and broken glass. I wonder where the staff is, but they seem to be hanging back, sensing the delicacy of the situation.
“Mom, don’t,” I say, but she ignores me. She has cut herself on the glass, the blood dripping down on the mess of squashed fruit and juice splashed across the ground. I look over at Evan, wondering if he’ll say anything. He’s always liked my mother, or at least I thought he did. But he stares silently at his plate and avoids my eyes.
That night I lie awake in my four-poster bed, staring at the ceiling. The mosquito netting, white as the veil of a bride, drifts in the faint breeze from the air conditioner. I can hear Phillip’s voice on the other side of the wall rising and falling like a wave as it grows angrier and angrier. My mother’s voice runs a faint point-counterpoint to his shouting: as his voice rises, hers gets more and more quiet. I watch a shining green beetle make its way across the stucco wall, its feelers reaching out delicately for something it can touch.
We don’t go to Black River in the morning, of course. Phillip takes his book out to the pool and sits glowering in the shade. My mom stays inside, sunglasses over her eyes and a big hat casting dark shadows over her face, but despite the glasses I can still see that her eyes are swollen from crying.
Evan doesn’t get up until noon, and when he does, he comes out of his room yawning, in board shorts and flip-flops. His hair looks lighter than before, as if the sun has already bleached out some of its color. I’m lying in the hammock on the deck, a magazine open on my lap; when I see him, I set it down and go over to him, lowering my voice as I get closer. “How did you sleep last night?” I ask, hoping he can read my eyes, wondering if he heard the same thing I did.
“Fine.” He’s not reading my eyes; his own sky blue ones are darting around nervously. Maybe he’s wondering if they’re watching us, if they’re talking about how we stand too close to each other, talk too softly. But no. They don’t notice anything. They never have.
I had met Phillip a bunch of times before my mother finally brought me over to his house, but that was the first time I’d ever realized how serious they were. Phillip was still trying to impress us both back then. He still thought there was some point in getting on my good side. He would come to our house dressed up in a suit, with a bunch of flowers for my mom and something for me—always something dumb and inappropriate, like a shiny barrette or a CD of bubblegum pop music. It was like he thought all teenage girls were the same and liked the same things, but he was trying, my mother said and besides he didn’t know anything about girls—he only had a son. And even though I knew that, even though I knew Phillip had a son my age, I never gave him the slightest thought until that night, when my mom hurried me up the lighted walk to Phillip’s front door and rang the bell, smiling nervously at me the whole time.
And Evan opened the door. He smiled when he saw me. “Hi,” he said. “You must be Violet.”
I stood there on the front steps without saying a word. I felt stunned, as if I’d fallen off a high tree branch and hit the ground hard, knocking all the wind out of me. There was just no way that this boy, who I watched every day at school, whose every mannerism I’d memorized—the way he flicked his hair out of his eyes or fiddled with his watch when he was bored—was the offspring of Phillip. Boring, tight-lipped, sallow-faced Phillip couldn’t possibly have a son who looked like that.
I didn’t even care that Evan didn’t recognize me. Didn’t care that he didn’t seem to know we even went to the same school.
“Are you going down to the beach?” he asks now. “I’ll come with you.”
I shrug. There’s really no way to stop him. “Okay.”
There are baskets of beach towels on the deck, brightly striped as candy canes. Evan drapes one around his shoulders as we head down the sandy path to the beach. It’s deserted again today, empty sand stretching away into the distance. It looks like an ad for some honeymoon destination, someplace where you can kiss on the beach with no one watching.
We spread our towels out and lie down, me on my stomach, Evan staring up at the sun. He has a book spread out over his stomach: The Postman Always Rings Twice, I think it is, though I can’t read all of the spine. I was surprised when I found out Evan loves to read. I wouldn’t have thought any boy who looked like he did had interests outside maybe sports and girls, just like I never would have thought he’d have any time at all for a skinny, unpopular girl who wore unmatching socks and boys’ T-shirts because she didn’t know what she was supposed to be wearing anyway.
But I found out I was wrong. Evan had time for me. The sort of time that meant we spent hours together in Phillip’s library, talking or playing Halo on the big-screen TV. The sort of time that meant he actually waved to me in the hallway sometimes, even when other people could see him. The kind of time that meant that on Tuesday nights, when we had dinner at Phillip’s, he’d wait for me outside school in his car, the parking brake on and the engine running, the passenger door propped slightly open. For me.
I’d slide into the seat, smile over at him. “Thanks for waiting.”
He’d reach across me to pull the door shut. “No problem.” The flush across the back of his neck as he bent to turn the key in the ignition let me know he noticed how close to him I was sitting.