The Fourth Summer. Kathleen Gilles Seidel

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СКАЧАТЬ about it. He hadn’t thought about anything. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. That’s what it was like with the really epic guys, the top boarders. Whatever they were doing, even just their warm-ups, you had to watch them. You just did.

      He wanted to be like that.

      Long bike rides were a part of his summer training routine, and pretty soon she started to come. As long as she didn’t do the sprints—he would do one sprint forward and then another back to her—she could keep up even through this hilly country.

      The hills’ winding roads would be dark with the shade from the birch and ash trees until around a bend everything would suddenly be open and light, and they could see, below them, town and the two ribbony rivers that met there. Further on was a Christmas tree farm with its regular lines of carefully trimmed Fraser firs marching up the lower slope of a mountain where Seth had first snowboarded. They would ride until they reached the lake. They would bring towels and wear their swimsuits under their clothes. In shadows of trees he tried to kiss her once, and she shoved him away.

      Her grandmother, whom she called MeeMaw, lived in a big modern house on Pill Hill, which was where all the doctors lived. Caitlin’s grandfather had been a doctor before he died. On wet days Seth would ride his bike through the rain, and they would sit at her grandmother’s dining table, Seth supposedly catching up with schoolwork and Caitlin addressing envelopes for a benefit that her grandmother was running. She used special pens and had this major sick handwriting. Calligraphy, it was called. No one had taught her. She had learned it from a book.

      He hated learning things from books.

      One evening when he was at home, he heard his mother and one of his sisters in the kitchen talking.

      “Mom, Seth is spending a lot of time with Mrs. Thurmont’s granddaughter.”

      “I know,” his mother answered. “It’s usually the pregnant one who has to leave home, not the sister.”

      Pregnant? Was Caitlin pregnant? That couldn’t be right. Of course, she was a girl. She used the girls’ bathroom, and she wore a girl’s swim suit, but still...pregnant? A baby? That would have meant that she had—

      He couldn’t think about it.

      “Apparently”—his mother was still speaking—“her parents felt like Caitlin wasn’t being supportive enough of her sister.”

      Oh, of course. Caitlin wasn’t pregnant. Her sister was.

      His aunt had been pregnant last summer. She already had three kids, and she was enormous. Her feet spilled over her shoes. She struggled to get in and out of a chair. Seth tried to imagine that happening to one of his sisters. He couldn’t.

      As soon as he saw Caitlin next, he asked her. It didn’t occur to him not to. “So your sister is going to have a baby?”

      “How did you know that?”

      “My mom and sister were talking about it.”

      “How did they hear?”

      Seth shrugged. “My mom seems to know everything. It’s a pain.” He started to put on his knee pads. They didn’t have to talk about it.

      “That’s why I’m here, because of Trina being pregnant. My parents are all about how we have to show the world that we love her and we stand behind her. And they say that I am ‘insufficiently supportive,’ that I’m being a spoiled brat.”

      Seth wasn’t sure what to say. “How old is she?”

      “Fifteen, two years older than me, and I get that it totally sucks for her. I get that. But I didn’t do anything wrong and yet everybody at school talks about me like I’m some kind of slut. I got invited to a rainbow party, and I don’t even wear lipstick, much less do that.”

      Seth was not about to admit that he didn’t know what a rainbow party was. That was the one bad thing about not going to school with the other kids. Sometimes you felt like a major stupid-ass dork. “Your folks...weren’t they mad at your sister?”

      “Who knows? My mom would go into their bedroom, she’d close the door and all, but I could hear her crying. And she kept asking my dad what they had done wrong. But they say that family problems stop at the front door. To the rest of the world we have to pretend that everything is okay, which is crazy because it’s not.”

      “Is she going to keep the baby?”

      “Yeah. My dad really thought that she ought to give it up, and this social worker came and talked to all of us. But Trina and my mom...so it’s going to live with us. They’re trying to figure out stuff like health insurance because the military will go on covering Trina, but not the baby. That’s all anyone talks about, Trina and the baby. So that’s why,” she finished, “I’m not going to let a guy do stuff to me.”

      “It’s okay. I get it.”

      “Good. Then we don’t have to talk about it again.”

      Seth went home and looked up rainbow parties...and then since the whole family used the same computer and his sisters knew how to check browser histories even if his parents didn’t, he instantly did some searches on rainbow photos and rainbow physics as if he were suddenly interested in meteorological phenomena, which actually were pretty cool when you learned about them.

      But the rainbow parties thing...why would a girl be willing to do that at all, much less on a bunch of guys and in public?

      One afternoon at the skate park he looked up and saw that his dad was watching him work with Caitlin. Usually in this part of town you could hear the factory whistle signaling the shift change; Seth must have missed it.

      For someone who couldn’t afford to come to any competitions, his dad was stoked about Seth’s career. Early on he had taken Seth’s cheapie boards and tinkered with them in his garage workshop, putting better edges on them and the like. Now he was making them from scratch, layering and laminating the wood.

      He also made the skateboards Seth used in the summer, and a week after coming to the park his dad gave him a skateboard he had made for Caitlin. “She’s small for her age. This is a better board for her.”

      And it was.

      She had to leave in the middle of August. She was taking the bus to Charlotte, and her parents were driving to meet her there. He rode his bike to the bus station to say goodbye. She was going to keep her skateboard on the bus with her, and her grandmother suggested that Seth carry it out of the terminal for her. Mrs. Thurmont turned away as if there were something on the station’s bulletin board that she just had to read. She was chill for an old lady—although it wasn’t like he was going to kiss Caitlin goodbye or something. He walked out to the bus anyway, handed her the board, and punched her lightly on her arm.

      “Next summer?” he said. Her eyes really were something. He had gotten used to them so he didn’t notice them all the time, but now, standing here...

      “You’d better believe it,” she said.

      CHAPTER TWO

      And now eleven years later, Caitlin still had those eyes.

      His family’s house at the lake was timber and stone with lots of windows and a big СКАЧАТЬ