Henry Crosby. The name reverberated in my head as I put the penguin on the kitchen counter and opened and shut one of the cabinet doors. He was someone I had consciously tried not to think about too much over the years. He’d become reduced, shortened to a slumber-party anecdote when the inevitable question—Who was your first boyfriend?—would arise. I had the Henry story down perfectly now, so that I barely had to even think about it:
Oh, that was Henry. We’d been friends, up at my summer house. And the summer we were twelve, we started going out. He gave me my first kiss at the summer carnival…. This was when everyone would sigh, and if someone asked me what happened, I would just smile and shrug and say something along the lines of “Well, we were twelve, so it became pretty clear there weren’t exactly long-term prospects there.” And everyone would laugh and I would nod and smile, but really I would be turning over what I’d just said. Because it wasn’t that any of those facts had been technically incorrect. But none of them—especially about why it hadn’t worked out—had been the truth. And I would push thoughts of that summer out of my head and rejoin the conversation, relegating what had happened—with Henry, and Lucy, and what I’d done—back to the anecdote that I pretended was all it was.
Warren came into the kitchen a moment later and beelined for a large cardboard box sitting on the counter. “Sorry,” he said after a moment, opening the top. “I was just kidding around.”
I shrugged, as though I couldn’t have cared less. “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s ancient history.” Which was true. But as soon as we’d crossed the line that separated Lake Phoenix from the rest of the world, Henry had been circling around in my thoughts, even as I’d tried to turn up the volume on my iPod to drown them out. I’d even found myself watching for his house. And I had seen, to my surprise, the house that had been a soft white was now painted a bright blue, and the sign out front that had always read CAMP CROSBY now read MARYANNE’S HAPPY HOURS, decorated with a silhouette of a martini glass—all proof that new owners had taken over. That Henry wasn’t there any longer. I had kept my eyes on the house even as it faded from view, realizing that I might really never see him again, which the presence of Maryanne, whoever she was, seemed to cement. This realization caused a strange mix of feelings—nostalgia coupled with disappointment. But mostly I had felt the cool, heart-pounding sensation of relief that comes when you know you’ve gotten away with something.
Warren began unpacking his box, lining up row after row of plastic ketchup squeeze bottles on the counter in perfectly straight lines, as though there might be some sort of epic condiment battle looming on the horizon.
I stared at them. “Is Pennsylvania having some sort of ketchup shortage that I’m not aware of?”
Warren shook his head without looking up from his unpacking. “I’m just taking precautions,” he said. “You remember what happened last time.”
In fact, I did. My brother wasn’t at all picky about food, unlike Gelsey, who seemed to live on pasta and pizza and refused to eat anything moderately spicy—but his one exception was ketchup. Warren put it on almost everything, would eat only Heinz, and preferred it chilled, not room temperature. He claimed he could tell the difference between the brands, something that he’d proved once at a mall food court when we were younger and extremely bored. So he had been traumatized five years ago, when we first arrived in Lake Phoenix and the store had had a run on Heinz and was down to the generic brand. Warren had refused to even try it and had used my father’s corporate card to have a case of Heinz shipped overnight to him, something my father—not to mention the company accountant—had not been too happy to find out about.
Now, fortified against such tragedy, Warren placed two bottles in the nearly-empty fridge and started transferring the rest into the cupboard. “Do you want me to tell you how ketchup was invented?” he asked, with an expression that I, unfortunately, knew all too well. Warren was very into facts, and had been since he was little and some probably well-meaning, but now much-despised, relative gave him Discovered by Accident!—a book on famous inventions that had been discovered by accident. After that, you couldn’t have a conversation with Warren without him dropping some fact or another into it. This quest for useless knowledge (thanks to his equally fun obscure-vocabulary-word kick, I knew this was also called “arcana”) had only grown with time. Finally, we’d complained so much that Warren no longer told us the facts, but now just told us he could tell us the facts, which wasn’t, in my opinion, all that much better.
“Maybe later,” I said, even though I was admittedly slightly curious as to the accidental origin of ketchup, and hoping it wasn’t something terribly disgusting or disturbing—like Coca-Cola, which, it turned out, had been the result of a failed attempt to make aspirin. I looked around for an escape and saw the lake through the kitchen window. And, suddenly, I knew that it was the only place I wanted to be.
I pushed through to our screened-in porch, then out the side door, heading for our dock. As I stepped outside, I turned my face up to the sun. Five wooden steps led down to a small grassy hill, and below that, the dock. Even though it was directly behind our house, we had always shared it with the houses on either side of us. The dock wasn’t particularly long or impressive, but had always seemed to me to be the perfect length for getting a running start to cannonball into the lake, and the water was deep enough that you didn’t have to worry about hitting the bottom.
There were some kayaks and a canoe stacked on the grass by the side of the dock, but I barely noticed them as I got closer. You weren’t allowed to have any motorized watercraft on the lake, so there was no roar of engines disturbing the late afternoon quiet, just a lone kayaker paddling past in the distance. Lake Phoenix was big, with three small islands scattered across it, and surrounded on all sides by pine trees. Despite the size of the rest of the lake, our dock occupied one side of a narrow passage, the other side close enough that you could see the docks across the water and the people on them.
I looked across the lake to the dock opposite ours, which had always been the Marino family’s. Lucy Marino had been my best friend in Lake Phoenix for twelve summers, and there had been a time when I’d known her house as well as my own. We’d slept over at each other’s houses almost every night, alternating, our families so used to it that my mother started stocking Lucy’s favorite cereal. I usually tried not to think about Lucy, but it hadn’t escaped my notice, especially recently, that she had been my last tell-everything-to friend. Nobody at school seemed to know how to react to the news about my father, and overnight, it was like I didn’t know how to talk to anyone about it. And since I’d been thoroughly cast out of my old group of friends, I found myself, as the school year ended and preparations for our summer up here began, pretty much alone, without anyone to talk to. But at one time, I had told everything to Lucy, until we, like everything else, had fallen apart that last summer.