Free Other People We Married by Emma Straub Page B

a joke in May, no matter where you were. The seniors were already into their colleges or technical schools or had jobs at the mall, and the juniors could see the light at the end of the tunnel. For everyone else, it was just the looming summer, and the sunlight, and the tanning lotion. During the year, it was easy to pretend that she had dreamed up the Forest and her parents and that, really, she had a normal house and a sister or two and a neutered dog, but once the summer was under way, it wasn’t so bad. Abraham was funny when she had no one to compare him to.
    Lincoln High School sat in the middle of the town proper, which was a fifteen-minute bus ride down Route 17 from the Enchanted Forest. People had started getting their learner’s permits, and riders were dropping like flies, but Greta didn’t mind. She couldn’t imagine what kind of car Abraham would help her buy. The school bus, at least, was neutral.
    He’d beat her to school somehow, despite the bus’s head start. When Greta pulled open the heavy door to the main corridor, people were already giggling in a way that was impossible to misunderstand.
    “Ahoy, matey,”a boy from her geometry class called out. There was a portrait of Herman Melville in the mall’s Barnes and Noble, and the beard was similar. She nodded and kept walking, holding her book bag tight against her chest.
    Abraham’s voice reached her first. It was “O Captain! My Captain!” and it was coming from the direction of the cafeteria. Greta knew most of the big hits by heart, not on purpose, just because the house wasn’t that big and Abraham liked to practice. Greta took a minute to picture Abraham in his Walt Whitman outfit, standing in front of the hot food trays. There were three bays for food—gross, grosser, and grossest. She usually ate from the first one, the salad bar. Greta imagined Abraham sticking his chubby finger into the plastic bucket of Italian dressing, and picking up a handful of cherry tomatoes without using the tongs. He loved cafeteria food. She knew that Abraham would stick around to eat, either before or after he spoke to her class, still wearing the Whitman outfit, and undoubtedly still in character. Greta could picture all the nerdy, bookish kids loving him, and crowding around his table. They would all look make-believe and pale next to him, imaginary. They would slop up their applesauce and macaroni and cheese and not believe their luck. Abraham could do that to people, make them feel important, like they had something interesting to say. She took a breath and rounded the corner, her sneakers squeaking on the glossy red tiles. She looked through the glass-paned door at her father.
    Abraham, or rather Walt, wasn’t just standing in front of the lunch trays. One of his hands held aloft a slotted metal spoon, and the other was clamped over his heart. His eyeswere closed. It was only the middle stanza. Greta closed her eyes, too, and waited for it to be over. The room was quiet aside from her father’s voice and the clinking of cheap, school-issue flatware. There was going to be applause, and laughter. The ratio seemed unimportant.
    Judy was in charge of the restaurant, which had a lunch counter and five tables, too small for the busloads of Japanese tourists. In season, there was always a line out the door. Everyone paid cash and bused their own tables—it was part of the appeal. Greta’s favorite part of the entire Forest was her mother’s apple pie. Some writer had mentioned it in a guidebook once—
You’ve Got to Eat This!
—and now people drove out of their way just to order a piece. In July and August, Judy baked fifteen pies a day. She’d been almost forty when Greta was born; Abraham was a decade older. It was some kind of miracle, Judy liked to say. “My tubes were all going the wrong way,” she told Greta. “You were the only one who knew where to go.”
    The restaurant was painted green both inside and out, with fake vines winding their