Free Rowing in Eden by Elizabeth Evans

Franny decided as she wedged the poetry book back under her mattress.
    â€œI get the skinny mirror!” crowed a female guest, and another said, “Well, hey, I like the fat mirror. It keeps you on your toes,” and a third, “I’ll take a realistic assessment.”
    Franny did not recognize the voices, but the girls had clearly been at the house before as they knew the trio of mirrors that Brick had hammered into place in the upstairs hall; and then Franny did recognize the voice of a certain newly engaged girl:
    â€œ Anyway, I sort of forgot about the fact that I’d helped out old Bruce with his hard-on and, my mom’s, like, ‘Elaine, what on earth did you get on your jeans, dear?’”
    While the others erupted in laughter, Franny silently lowered herself into the dark recesses of her bunk. Let the engaged girl speak gaily and without constraint to her friends; Franny knew she was not meant to have overheard.
    â€œâ€˜Elaine,’” one of the girls repeated in a high, mocking voice, “‘what on earth did you get on your jeans, dear?’”
    More laughter.
    What the engaged girl had said—Franny made her breathing so quiet her chest ached—what the girl had said did not quite jibe with certain bits of information that Franny had received on the trail to and from the dining hall at Camp Winnebago. Those bits of information were now fixed in an odd amber of sunshine and shade that also contained the taste of unripened raspberries, the buzz ofmosquitoes, the changes undergone by a certain small heap of scat—raccoon? fox?—that during last summer’s four-week stay started out tawny and slick as a squirt from the craft hall’s tube of ocher, but grew darker and darker until a colorless, long-haired mold overtook the shape, and, eventually, broke down its edges altogether.
    Still: “Hard-on” must have to do with what the engaged girl’s mother found on her jeans. Which went along, Franny supposed, with a recent afternoon in which she had tickled Bob Prohaski on the glider in the side yard. Without warning, Bob Prohaski had grown quiet. “Look, here,” he whispered, and pulled at the waist of his pants to reveal a rim of moisture shimmering on his belly.
    â€œOh. Well, that’s all right,” Franny had said, and then she gave that big boy a sympathetic smile to ease what shame she assumed he felt at having wet his pants. But Bob Prohaski had put his arm around her and pulled her close and smiled at her as if he were not at all ashamed. And there was a reason, she realized now. Because the shimmer on his belly—she had not liked seeing his belly, the damp, dark curls flattened to the white skin—the shimmer there must have been made of the same stuff as the stuff on the engaged girl’s jeans. Which also had something to do with certain cartoons Franny had seen in the books crammed flat against the piano teacher’s bookshelves, behind Masterpieces of the Louvre and Van Gogh in Arles. It must have been the teacher’s dead husband who had hidden those books behind the art books; the teacher probably did not know the books were there. And who would ever tell her? No one. No one could. It would be too embarrassing. And better not to think at all of that embarrassing night in May when Franny crawled into her parents’ bed after a particularly bad version of the Snow White dream, only to reawake as something—neither elbow nor knee, something more like the rude nose of a dog—began to bump up against her from behind. “Wha’?” her father had mumbled when she sprang from the bed. Then he came wider awake and there was alarm in his voice as he called, “Who’s there?” By then, however, Franny had made her way out the bedroom door and could pretend she had not heard.
    Someone—the engaged girl or one of her friends—switched off the hall light before returning to