of Libby’s words, sure as the string on a balloon. They drifted, like that released balloon, until they were too far to see. I regretted not stopping and seeing Travis. He gave me something I wanted, that much was clear. What I wasn’t entirely sure about was what that something was. I didn’t think having something you wanted could make you feel so bad.
That afternoon Chip Jr. came back from his best friend Oscar’s house. He went there most summer days when Mom was at work since Oscar’s mom was at home. If I used the word baby-sat he’d kill me. Chip Jr. met up with me in the kitchen. I was peeling an orange into the sink, staring out the window. I guess I was thinking with both guilt and pleasure about that too-pretty face of Travis’s, his fine, silky blond hair. I was thinking about this dark pact we had seemed to make, this ugly andthrilling partnership of going too far. Lately I could think of nothing else. The hidden life I’d been leading took up a place in me, and I wondered what I had done before it was there, what I had thought about, how I filled that time. That no one knew about all of this gave me a delicious feeling of my own separateness. Like a CIA agent, I was creeping around doing huge things and no one even noticed. I wished I’d gone to see him.
“What are you looking at?” Chip Jr. asked.
“All of the holes Poe’s dug in the backyard. It looks like the surface of the moon.”
“We should stick a flag out there,” he said.
I ate my orange. My fingers were covered with those mysterious white scales you get in the process, and I wiggled them at him.
“Mummy fingers,” I said.
“I like apples better. No squirting.” Talking about apples apparently inspired him to have one. He opened the refrigerator, tumbled the apples around in the bin until he found the one he wanted. He took a loud, crunching bite.
“You’re supposed to wash it.”
“I love pesticides. Yum, yum,” he said.
He chomped on his apple, appeared to think awhile. We sat in silence, eating, until he finally spoke again. “What’s the heaviest thing in the world?” Chip Jr. asked me, his cheeks puffed with apple.
“A blue whale.” I slid in a slice of orange. I thought it was a science question.
“Nope. The heaviest thing.”
“A skyscraper.”
“Nope.”
“A mountain.”
“Uh uh.”
“A mountain range.”
“Nope.”
I was getting tired of this game. “I give up.”
He looked at me a real long time. He saw me, that I could tell. He saw me, and he wanted me to see me too. “A secret,” he said. “A secret is the heaviest thing in the world.”
That Chip Jr. was too smart for his own good.
“I like you with your hair wet. It looks brave,” Travis Becker said.
“Brave?” We’d just gone for a swim in Marcy Lake. It had been my idea. We were sitting on the dock, at the same place we’d come when my father had been in town, that one right day.
“Sleek.” He pulled my neck toward him and kissed me. “Mmm, baby,” he said. I had my hand around his shoulder. It was wet and cool, though the sun was quickly trying to change that. His mouth was cold from the lake.
He moved his fingers over, tried to feel around my bikini top. I grabbed his hand and yanked it away. Then I put my shoulder into him and gave a shove, sending him crashing off the dock and into the water. He created quite a splash; a couple of boys about Chip Jr.’s age on the otherend of the dock started to laugh. A minute later Travis’s head bobbed up.
“Ha,” I said to him. “That’s what you get.”
“You bad little girl,” he shouted. He swam to the dock’s edge and pulled himself up. Water dripped off him; his swimsuit, fifties surfer shorts with pineapples and palm trees, clung to him as if they’d had a sudden fright and were too scared to let go.
“Served you right,” I said.
He grabbed me in revenge and I shrieked and then went flying. I held my nose just in time so I didn’t get water in it, and a moment later saw an