Free Local Girl Swept Away by Ellen Wittlinger Page A

hideout, especially Cabin 5, which backed up to a patch of pine trees and could be approached without anyone seeing us. The way the cottage was tucked back into the trees, it was invisible from the street, and in the winter that stretch of beach was always deserted. All it took was a screwdriver to pry the boards off a grimy window. The four of us spent hours in that cottage, pretending to be thieves or pilgrims or pirates, runaways hiding out.
    When we were little, we sometimes played “house” too, the way kids do. As I remembered it, Lorna never wanted to be the mother, whether because it was too boring a role or because her model for it was such a bad one, I didn’t know. But I liked playing the part of the perfect mama who kissed knees, settled arguments, and tucked her children into bed. I was often a single mother, because Finn never wanted to be the father, and neither he nor Lorna was willing to play the child very often. Lucas could sometimes be coerced into one of those roles, but the other two preferred more dramatic parts.
    Finn liked to pretend he was the captain of a ship that had wrecked on our shore, someone who’d had many adventures he’d happily recount to those of us more shore-bound. But Lorna usually wanted to be a mysterious person of some kind. Someone whose life we had to guess at. I think she didn’t always know herself who she was supposed to be, but she liked to hear our guesses: circus performer, famous actress, amnesia sufferer found wandering on the dunes. That last one was her favorite role, a woman with a cleanly erased past who might have been anything, but now had to start all over.
    As we got older the cabin became our clubhouse where we shared secrets we told no one else. Some were about petty arguments with family or classmates, some about stand-offs with teachers, but sometimes the topic was more important and we took our roles as confidants seriously. When Lucas’s dads were fighting a lot and he was afraid they might split up, we huddled around him on the creaky sofa and listened intently to the fears that never materialized. When Lorna’s mother was arrested for shoplifting a bunch of expensive cheeses from the Stop & Shop, we let Lorna pace and curse and throw things until she settled down. Every one of us offered her rooms in our houses should Carla go to jail. That didn’t happen, even though Lorna kind of wished it would (and so did we).
    Finn and Lorna may have used the cabin for other purposes too, the last few years. They’d been sleeping together since they were fifteen, and the cabin would have provided the privacy that neither of their houses did. But that was a subject they didn’t talk about with me or Lucas. Why wouldn’t they sleep together at Dugan’s? From September through May Cabin 5 was our own secluded refuge and no adult ever knew.
    I hadn’t walked past the cabin all summer. In season it was usually rented, and I hated seeing other people in our place. But I noticed that Mrs. Dugan, never a procrastinator, had already gotten someone to board up the windows, even though it wasn’t quite Labor Day. I walked the perimeter of the place, taking shots of the rusty hinges and weathered shingles. I wondered if it was still furnished with the same ancient, uncomfortable furniture—the couch springs broken, the mattress on the bed moldy, the pots and pans in the tiny kitchen pitted and burned? Even as kids we knew it was kind of a crummy place to spend a vacation, but it was a palace to us, our headquarters, our home.
    Daydreaming, I lost track of time. Before I knew it, it was almost seven and I had to run to the café. Most of the shops weren’t open yet. Tourists slept late and the locals, out early, didn’t need lighthouse key rings or sweaters for their dogs. By ten o’clock Commercial Street would be thronged with the usual assortment of characters: vacationing parents blocking the sidewalk with their double strollers, young men in short shorts,