He looked up at me over his hand of cards and nar-
rowed his eyes.
“Seriously, Lucas,” he said. “You need to get your
butt out of here and go have that picnic.”
Obviously, I had told him a little bit about Libby over
the course of the day. Libby past and Libby future.
“Maybe some other day,” I said.
“My mom is here. I’ll be right here. When you get
back, everything will be just the way it is now.”
It sounded like a promise. But I was not about to leave
a thing like that to guesswork or chance.
“Promise?”
“Yeah. Promise.”
I looked at the clock radio beside his bed.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s too late for today.”
“How is it too late?”
“Well, it’s supposed to be a picnic lunch. Lunch. By the time I put the whole thing together and got over there,
it would be time for dinner.”
“So? Who says it can’t be a picnic dinner?”
“It’s sandwiches.”
“You can eat sandwiches for dinner.”
I looked over at his phone. He had a phone in his
room, the lucky dog. The fact that I looked at it meant
I was considering it.
He noticed.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Call.”
I just sat a minute. The tips of my fingers were tin-
gling, but I had no idea why.
Then I got up and walked to the phone.
I knew her number by heart. But I had never called
it before. Which means I had memorized it, but not the
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cool way—by using it. The pathetic way. By staring at it
until the numbers were permanently etched into my brain.
“She might have plans,” I said. “Kind of short notice.”
“One way to find out,” Connor said.
“Maybe her parents want her home for dinner.”
“One way to find out.”
I picked up the phone and dialed.
Mrs. Weller picked up.
“Hello?”
“Oh,” I said. “Hi. Mrs. Weller?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Lucas Painter. Is Libby in, please?”
“She is, Lucas. And you have very polite phone manners.
Just hold the line a minute, and I’ll go tell her you’re calling.”
I shifted from foot to foot. Caught Connor’s eye.
Nodded.
Then Libby was on the line.
“Lucas?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me.”
“About time you called.”
“It’s only been a couple of days.”
“Oh. Well, it seemed longer.”
It made my face hot when she said that. Or maybe
it was the way she said it. I turned my face slightly away from Connor, hoping he wouldn’t see it redden.
“I was just wondering…” Then I stalled, and realized I
had no idea how to phrase my request. I hadn’t rehearsed
this part at all. Which, considering how obsessed I’d been
with every other aspect of the thing, seemed strange. “Do
you have to be home for dinner?”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah.”
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“Well, I don’t know. What did you have in mind?”
“I thought maybe I could come get you and take you
someplace.”
“I’ll ask my mom,” she said.
I tapped my foot and waited, and then she was back
on the line, her words all in a rush.
“She says it’s okay and I accept, what time do you
want to pick me up?”
* * *
I showed up at her house promptly at five, the carefully
prepared picnic basket dangling from my hand.
Libby answered the door.
She looked at me. Then down at the basket.
“I hope this is okay,” I said. “I hope it’s something you’ll like. My first thought was to take you out someplace to
dinner. But I thought a picnic would be more romantic.”
She said nothing for a moment. Just looked into my
eyes. But I could tell by her face that I’d done well. I had struck the right note with her. And just in that moment
my life was so perfect I could hardly stand it.
“Mom!” she called over her shoulder. Into the house.
“Lucas and I are going. See you later.”
And then we were walking down the street together
hand in hand. And life was just the way you see it in the
movies or on TV.
My life. Was all that.
* * *
“If anybody asks you,” I said, “we had this picnic in the
park.”
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We were up in the woods, on the highest hill I knew
how to find, looking down through the trees at the town
spread out below. I hadn’t chosen a spot looking over the
river. Libby might have thought it was a nice view, but I
didn’t. Not since reading that newspaper story.
“Probably smart,” she said. “Parents are weird about
the woods, and I don’t know why.”
“I don’t know why, either. I like it up here.”
I lifted the checkered tablecloth off the basket. Unfolded
it and spread it carefully on the forest floor.
“Have a seat,” I said.
She settled on one edge of it.
“This is nice,” she said, looking down over the town.
“I like this.”
“I hope it doesn’t seem weird to have sandwiches for
dinner.”
“I don’t see why a person shouldn’t,” she said. “Besides,
I didn’t exactly think you had a roast turkey or a baked
lasagna in there.”
I sighed out a bit of tension and began unpacking the
food. Carefully laying out two sturdy china plates, cloth
napkins. I arranged the fruit and the wrapped sandwiches
on a third plate in the middle of the cloth. The cookies
were in a plastic storage container, and I set those beside
the serving plate.
Then I saw the pink rose, which had apparently fallen
to the bottom as I walked. I’d forgotten it. And it was
supposed to come first. But anyway, better late than
never, I figured.
“Here,” I said, pulling it up by the stem. “This is for you.”
She took it from me, her eyes soft.
“You’re a very thoughtful boy,” she said. “You know
that?”
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It made me blush, so I turned my face down. I pulled
the two small bottles of apple juice out of the basket and
put one by her plate, one by mine. I never answered. I
was too embarrassed by her praise.
“I can’t believe some girl hasn’t already snapped
you up.”
Flustered, I became a tour guide for sandwiches.
“This is sliced ham,” I said, pointing. “And this is
deviled ham.”
“Ooh. I like deviled ham. And I haven’t had it for ages.”
I put that one on her plate. I wasn’t sure if I should
take it out of the plastic first. Maybe that would have
been more polite. But maybe she didn’t want my hands
all over her food. By the time I remembered I had made
the sandwich with my hands, I had already gone ahead
with giving it to her wrapped.
“There’s also turkey and tuna,” I said. “If you’re hun-
gry enough for two.”
She ignored the statement and stared into my face as
she unwrapped her sandwich.
“Have you had a girlfriend before?”
“Not really,” I said.
The honest answer would have been not at all. Not
in any way. But I thought what I said sounded better.
“I wonder why.”
Now we were traveling down a less comfortable road.
Were we really going to analyze whether there was some-
thing wrong with me? Why I repelled girls like the wrong
end of a magnet?
“You do know I’m only fourteen,” I said. “Right?”
“I know.”
“Does that bother you? That I’m a little younger than
you?”
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“No. Who cares? It’s only a year. And you’re very
mature. And you seem to know a lot about how to have
a girlfriend for a guy who never had one.”
I did not wade into the minefield of replies.
We began to eat our sandwiches. I took the sliced ham,
since I figured she was less likely to choose it after eating deviled ham. We ate in silence for a time, staring down
over the town. The sun was on a long slant through the
trees, off to the west. And I felt unbalanced.
Turned out I had no idea what unbalanced even felt
like. Not yet. I was right on the cusp of finding out.
“I think I might know why,” she said.
“Why what?”
“Why you haven’t had a girlfriend.”
Her words iced my belly in a heartbeat. Was she really
going to tell me what I was doing wrong? After every-
thing had gone so well up until this moment?
“If you want to know, that is,” she added.
I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.
She looked over at my face and seemed to pick up on
my discomfort.
“Oh, it’s not you,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say
anything bad about you.”
I breathed a little. Not much, but more than I had
been breathing.
“Okay. I guess I want to know, then.”
“It’s just that you have to really think about who you
want to hang around with. People will judge you by that.”
I had a bite of sandwich in my mouth, and I chewed it
before answering. I didn’t know who she meant. Maybe
Mrs. Dinsmore? But how would she even know that? My
intention was to ask, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to.
She went on to tell me.
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“I really think you can do better than Connor Barnes
for a friend.”
I swallowed hard. The bite of sandwich seemed to
hang up on its way to my stomach, and I felt a wave of
something like heartburn.
“What’s wrong with Connor?”
“He’s just kind of weird,” she said. “And kind of a sad
sack. He always has this big black cloud over his head,
following him everywhere he goes. I mean, not really,
but … you know what I mean. I think you’d have a lot
more friends if he weren’t with you all the time.”
My mind had begun to run circles inside my head.
I was trying to get a feel for whether this was a “game
over” sort of thing, or if I could still think of her as a
potential girlfriend.
“He’s been my best friend since we were three.”
“Maybe that’s too long. Maybe it’s time to make new
choices.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” I said.
“Okay. I didn’t mean to upset you. Just trying to help.”
We finished every last bite of that meal without find-
ing one other thing to talk about.
* * *
I learned something about kissing that day. I learned it
can wipe the slate clean of just about everything that
came before it.
We were lying side by side on the big tablecloth. The
dishes and any leftover trash had been carefully packed
into the basket, which I’d placed off to the side. Out of
our way.
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She moved her face over close to mine, and I kissed
her. And suddenly everything felt okay again. I knew
there had been something bad back there, behind us.
Something had happened and I hadn’t forgotten it. Not
by any means. But it felt like such ancient history now.
Like it couldn’t possibly still matter.
I’ve had the same feeling many times since, over the
years, in relationships. Some little tip of an iceberg peeks up above the surface. Then it goes down again, and you
think, Oh good. It’s gone. I guess it was nothing.
Only now I’m not a kid anymore. So now I know.
We kissed for a long time. I have no idea how long.
Might have been ten minutes that felt like a second. Might
have been a few seconds that stretched out forever.
She rolled over onto her back and sighed. Not a bad
sigh. More of a contented one. She laced her hands together
behind her head and looked up at the late afternoon sky
through the trees. So I did the same.
“This is nice out here,” she said.
“Yeah. I like it out here in the woods.”
“You seem to know these woods pretty well.”
“I run out here.”
“Oh. Right. I heard you were a runner. I heard you
scored a place on the track team for the fall semester.”
Suddenly, in my head, I was on the team for the first
time ever. Really on the team. Not resisting. Not plan-
ning to weasel out of it.
“You run through these woods all by yourself?” she
asked. Before I could think how to answer.
run with me.”
“I didn’t know you had dogs.”
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“They’re not mine.”
“You run with two dogs that aren’t yours?”
“I do.”
“Whose are they?”
“You know that lady who lives out here in the woods?”
The silence that followed my question felt weird. It
felt much too silent.
“You mean…,” she began. But then she didn’t seem
to want to ask me who I meant.
“Zoe Dinsmore,” I said.
Looking back, I’m not sure why I felt safe enough to
say it. I guess all that kissing had softened up my brain. I had misplaced all my best walls and boundaries.
She sat bolt upright.
“You know her?”
“A little. Do you?”
“No. But I know who she is. And I’m shocked that
you know her, Lucas. I’m … shocked.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s…”
But then she seemed unwilling to finish her thought
again.
“What? She’s what?”
“She’s a killer.”
I sat bolt upright, too.
“She’s not a killer,” I said.
“She killed two kids. That makes her a killer.”
“She didn’t kill them.”
&
nbsp; “So why are they dead?”
“An accident killed them.”
“And she caused the accident.”
“But it was an accident.”
“But she caused it.”
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I could feel that we were going around in a loop, like
that traffic circle in Blaine, but I couldn’t find a place to turn off.
“Sometimes things happen,” I said. “It’s not like she
did it on purpose.”
“She showed up to work on hardly any sleep. And
drove innocent kids around. Why didn’t she call in sick
to work? Why didn’t she pull over when she knew she
was sleepy?”
“Maybe she didn’t know. My mother fell asleep at
the wheel once. With me in the car. I think I was about
seven. We were coming back from the north county, and
her head nodded, and then she drifted over the center-
line and scraped a car going the other way. Just sort of
scraped the trim off the guy’s door. She kept saying the
same thing over and over—that she hadn’t had any idea
she was so tired. She hadn’t known she was about to go
to sleep. She couldn’t feel it. Every night I lie in bed and try to go to sleep. And then the next thing I know, I’m
opening my eyes and it’s morning. I never feel myself fall
asleep. Ever. Do you?”
We sat there for what felt like a long time. Staring
down at the town, which I thought looked less welcoming
than it had a minute ago. She never told me if she could
feel herself fall asleep.
“Why are you defending her?” she asked after a time.
Her voice was like glass. Whatever door she had opened
into her life for me was closed and locked now. And you
didn’t have to be an expert on girls to know it.
“I just think things happen sometimes and it’s not
really anybody’s fault.”
“I don’t,” she said. Still like glass. “I think we have to take responsibility for what we do.”
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“So if my mom had hit that guy’s car head-on, and
somebody in the car had died, you’d think my mom was
a killer?”
“Of course not,” she said.
Now she really had my mind spinning in circles.
Uncomfortably so. It was dizzying.
“What’s the difference?”
“Your mom is a good person.”
“You know my mom?”
“Not really. But I know she is.”
That was the moment when my door closed.
I locked it.
I could have continued to argue. I could have pointed
out that she had decided my mother was an angel and Zoe