Free Midwives by Chris Bohjalian

maintenance crews as they tuned up the chairlifts and grooming machines. He was about to turn fifteen (just as I would soon turn thirteen), and he could have hung out at the garage with his brothers and father, he could have spent July and August smoking an endless chain of cigarettes with his brothers’ and his father’s friends, but he didn’t: He hitchhiked up to the mountain every morning and found a ride home from an adult member of the crew every evening. And while mowing lawns and oiling chairlifts isn’t neuroscience, the fact that he was doing it some miles from home suggested to me ambition.
    Of course, it also kept him away from the village most of the time. And while Tom and I had kissed only once, and that one time had been three and a half months ago, I was sure we could have a future together if one of us could find a way to bring our bodies into a reasonable proximity. I was convinced that Tom hadn’t tried to kiss me again for two simple—and, in my mind, reassuring—reasons. First, he was two years my senior, and therefore feared with the gallantry of a man who was kind and wise that I was too young to kiss on a regular basis. In addition, the fact that he was two years older than I was meant our paths simply didn’t cross with any frequency—certainly from September through June, when we both attended the union high school but had a full grade between us as a buffer zone, and now in the summer as well, since he had an adult man’s commute to the ski resort.
    If Rollie wasn’t as convinced as I that Tom Corts was my destiny, she at least agreed he would be a good boy to date. He was intelligent, independent, and cute. And since it would be no more likely for Tom’s and my paths to cross in the fall, when he would be in the tenth grade and I in the eighth, Rollie believed we had to attempt to move the relationship forward in the summer. In her now barely thirteen-year-old mind, this meant simply being visible before Tom so he could again take some sort of initiative.
    “The creemee stand,” she suggested thoughtfully that afternoon. “You have to hang out at the creemee stand once you figure out when he goes there.”
    “I’m not going to hang out at the creemee stand. I’ll get fat.”
    “You don’t have to eat anything. You just have to be there.”
    “No way. I think I’d get sick inhaling all the grease from the French fries.”
    “You don’t inhale grease.”
    “And I’d wind up with pimples.”
    “You probably will anyway as soon as you get your period.”
    “You didn’t!”
    “I wash my face seven or eight times a day. Every two hours.”
    “Then I will, too. What do you think I am, a slob?”
    “I think you’re making excuses not to run into Tom because you’re shy.”
    “I don’t see you going after anyone special.”
    “There aren’t any boys I’m interested in right now.”
    I shook my head, as Foogie aimed the sprinkler at a vacant hornet’s nest near the awning of the house. “I am not going to hang out at the creemee stand, it’s that simple.”
    “Do you have a better idea?”
    “The general store, maybe. He has to buy his cigarettes before he goes to the mountain.”
    “Or when he gets home.”
    “Right.”
    “You can’t just hang out at the general store, you know.”
    “But I can be there when he is.”
    And so it went for most of the day. We were still outside, sitting on the front steps and awaiting the Bedfords’ return, as the afternoon slowly gave way to evening. Through the living-room window we could hear Foogie watching reruns of old situation comedies on television, while crashing a plastic flying saucer over and over again into the plush pillows on the couch.
    The stories that the attorneys and newspaper reporters would choose to tell—although in my mind, certainly not my mother’s story—began that afternoon. The Bedfords arrived just before six, well after most barbecues in Vermont had begun to smoke but hours before the night