Bad Creek, page 3
“Hey!” someone called out.
Glory disappeared, just like that. The only proof of her was a puddle in the dirt where she had been standing and that horrible sewer stench lingering in his nostrils. But both of those could be explained by the spray of the waterfall. He must have imagined her.
Right?
Though he usually avoided his cousin like the plague, Gum felt comforted to see someone he knew was alive. Up close, the golden boy wasn’t as put-together as usual. His polo was untucked, and he had ditched the expensive hair gel. Strands of blond hair hung in front of his pale eyebrows.
“What are you doing?” Hudson asked.
“I . . .” What was he supposed to say? I thought I saw a ghost? Hudson wouldn’t believe it. Gum himself hardly believed it. “Nothing.”
His brain was fuzzy, and his body felt too heavy, but he refused to show weakness in front of his dickhead cousin. Spite gave him enough energy to stand back up.
None of that had been real. He’d had a panic attack. An extra-terrible panic attack. Not sleeping enough can cause hallucinations, and the energy drink he’d chugged an hour ago had probably made it worse. He’d been thinking of her, before falling asleep. That was what probably did it. He’d barely thought of Glory for the past year, but now that he was in Bad Creek again, it was like his brain felt guilty for not mourning this whole time. Did that make him a bad friend? Probably. Did that make Glory Garren a ghost?
Of course not.
Gum didn’t subscribe to his family’s version of the afterlife. He couldn’t fathom a loving God sending people into a never-ending pit of torment because they worshipped differently or went to first base before marriage or—gasp, even worse—were gay. Hell was a definite no, and heaven was still iffy. Even if people’s souls (or essences, or whatever) didn’t completely disappear, they went elsewhere. They didn’t linger on earth.
Once you were dead, that was it. You didn’t stick around. Death was like gravity, and there were no exceptions. Not if you asked real nicely; not if you demanded it. Not even if you went kicking and screaming into that good night. Not even if your name was Glory Garren.
She could get away with whatever she wanted in life, but death was inescapable. It was awful and tragic, of course. He would have preferred that it never happened. But that didn’t mean Gum had to feel personally guilty about it. He started toward the parking lot, searching for some reason he could give for having missed the rest of Mass.
“Whatever’s wrong with you, keep it to yourself,” Hudson said behind him.
“Shut up.”
Gum could see his dad’s truck now, where Clarice was putting away the wheelchair. Grandpa stood next to them, watching with his hands clasped behind his back.
“I’m serious,” Hudson called after him. “Don’t bother. They don’t give a shit about you anyway.”
If the priest wasn’t literally right there, Gum would have punched Hudson in his perfect teeth.
Chapter 3 Aidan
The Dirty Diana was in even worse shape than last summer, but the elderly speedboat refused to die. The color of vomit, with an unreliable motor and a limp pirate flag hanging off the back: this was Paul’s favorite child.
Aidan helped his dad tie the boat to the rickety dock. The gray planks had cracks that worsened as the years went by, like wrinkles on skin. Just one look at them, and Aidan felt a splinter sink into his heel. Which wasn’t possible. The splinter was removed a year ago. But Bad Creek didn’t care if he had on thick socks and heavy boots. The memories would needle into him anyway, and they wouldn’t let go. They’d tear his flesh until they hit bone.
The dock should have been replaced before Aidan was born, but the regulars at the Landings would keel over if anything changed. So they pretended to trust the weathered dock with knots that looked like bruises.
Too bad Aidan wasn’t very good at pretending.
“Just rip off the Band-Aid,” Paul said, stepping off the boat. His rare attempts at parenting usually included unhelpful clichés, like, You never know if you don’t try, or Fake it till you make it, or Don’t eat the yellow snow.
Paul had a sunburn so deep, it made Aidan—who never burned—wince in pity. At first glance, it was hard to tell that he was Aidan’s father. Aidan was lanky and shades of gold, while Paul was stocky and pink. Yet everyone in Bad Creek swore Aidan was the spitting image of his dad when Paul was a teenager.
Paul held his store-bought cookies under his arm, waiting for his son to get off the boat already.
Aidan wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’m sure your friends miss you,” Paul coaxed.
Aidan pretended he couldn’t hear his dad’s voice over the roar of motors and someone’s radio blasting country music. A Jet Ski zipped by, pulling children on an inner tube.
Yeah, maybe they would miss him, but not as much as they missed Glory. Aidan didn’t have the power to leave a void like her. No one could. Even if the Disasters claimed to miss him, it would be missing the idea of him. The Aidan who lived in their heads stopped being real a long time ago. And now that Glory was gone, there was no point in keeping up the act.
“We had a deal,” Paul reminded him.
The deal was enticing at first: stay in Bad Creek for four days, and he could fly back to his mom’s house in California early. He had three days left.
The thing is, he wouldn’t have agreed to it if he knew his dad would force him to participate.
Aidan groaned and stepped off the boat.
The cookout had always been his least favorite part of vacation. The old ladies felt entitled to grandmotherly chitchat and would comment on how much he had grown from last year. Little kids would run around wild, knocking into him while he tried to drip ketchup on his hamburger. He would only be safe when the Disasters formed their own camp away from the rest of the party. They would sit on the Garrens’ old quilt and talk about more interesting things than the adults did. Well, Aidan would listen to them talk. They hardly ever asked for his input, so he’d stopped giving it.
The Richardsons rolled up in their golf cart. The basset hound in the backseat stared at Aidan unblinking, and so did its owners. Paul backed away. Aidan wasn’t so lucky: Mr. Richardson clasped his old, wrinkled hands on him. Now he couldn’t escape. Let the conversational chokehold begin.
The elderly couple asked him about grades (straight As) and the weather in California (exactly what you think it is). They criticized his all-black outfit, and Mrs. Richardson asked if he was still in his “goth phase” and Mr. Richardson said there were support groups for that. As always, they asked if he was “going steady” with anyone.
Bad Creek took another bite out of Aidan’s brain.
This place had always been powered by déjà vu. It was a time loop. Same people. Same traditions. Same old music. Same old boats. Every summer, the line between now and then turned murky. There was a dam in Aidan’s head capable of separating the past and present, but since Glory’s drowning, the dam had flooded.
Are you going steady with anyone? Mrs. Richardson’s voice echoed in his ear. Aidan was taken back to the last time she had asked the same question. Suddenly it was sunnier. He had that splinter in his heel. He had tried to pull it out that morning, but he couldn’t, and he hadn’t wanted to ruin anyone’s day by asking for someone to yank it out for him. So he put his weight on the other leg.
“Uh . . .” Aidan didn’t know how to answer the Richardsons back then. The wrong person could hear, and it would turn into a problem. He truthfully didn’t know if he had a girlfriend. The word hadn’t been said out loud yet.
Then he’d been rescued. Glory had grabbed his hand and whisked him away without a word. She never engaged in small talk. Perhaps she was excused from it because the more conservative regulars considered her moms an abomination. Aidan hated that he and his friends were always considered an extension of their parents. He had his mother’s height and curls and complexion. He looked nothing like his dad, yet Bad Creek doctrine required him to be seen as a mini-Paul. Aidan couldn’t imagine his mom making small talk with these people every summer. He was too young to know what really went down in the divorce, but he had to guess that Paul’s obsession with this place had something to do with it. She had the right idea to stay in California. Aidan never got that option.
“Let’s go to the beach,” Glory had said.
“What about Iris and Gum?”
He looked to the edge of the open lawn, where the two youngest of the Disasters were already on their quilt, eating burgers and drinking lemonade. They were always an easier duo. Even if their parents didn’t shove them together, Iris and Gum probably would have ended up as friends organically. But Aidan knew Glory would have never looked at him twice if it wasn’t for their parents. The rest of them arrived in diapers, but Aidan’s first summer wasn’t until he was eight. The Disasters let him in the special club only because it was his birthright.
“They’re not invited,” Glory said.
There was barely anyone else at the beach.
Glory didn’t bring a swimsuit, so she was still wearing a white dress with puffy sleeves. No one else had worn anything that fancy to the cookout. The campground at the Landings was “charming for its trashiness,” according to Aidan’s mom, even if not everyone who rented at the Landings was broke. The uber-wealthy Claveys had dibs on Cabins 1 through 3, and rumor had it the Hacknees in Cabin 10 were millionaires too, though they hardly dressed like it. The five Hacknee kids were always running around barefoot, with their mouths stained blue from popsicles.
So why was Glory all dressed up? Was this a date?
She waded into the water until she was knee-deep. She tried to trap minnows in her hands with no luck. “I would hate to be a fish,” she said.
“Why?” Aidan sat on one of the towels. He didn’t know if she expected him to go into the water. He dreaded how cold it would be and how awkward he would look trying to wade in without shivering. If she asked, he’d do it, though.
“Fish are stuck,” Glory explained. “They die in the same place they’re born.”
“I mean, the lake turns into the creek—”
“Arteries, veins, capillaries . . . It’s all the same blood. They’re all just swimming in their future graves, on the bones of their siblings,” Glory continued.
Aidan flinched. “Yeah, but then isn’t the planet just kind of like a huge grave?”
Glory ceased her fish-catching duties to look at Aidan.
“Well, that’s morbid.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re right. I don’t even know what I’m saying.”
She got out of the water to sit beside him, so close her shoulder touched his. Glory watched the water without speaking. Usually she was only silent when she was drawing. But she didn’t bring her sketchbook with her that day, and all her grand monologues were full of doom. It was day two of vacation, and Glory already wasn’t acting like herself. He hadn’t noticed then.
Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to.
“What were you gonna say to the Richardsons?” she asked.
“What?”
“They asked if you were going steady with anyone. What were you about to say?”
Aidan wanted to sink into the sand until he reached the earth’s mantle. Glory was fishing for the correct answer, and he didn’t know it. “I . . .”
“You could’ve said yes,” Glory said. “If you wanted to.”
“Do you want to?”
“Want to what?” She would make him say it out loud. Of course she would.
“Go steady?”
Usually Aidan made direct eye contact with people. It wasn’t a conscious thing; he hadn’t noticed until Gum pointed it out a few years ago. He’d called it “creepy.” But with Glory, it was hard to meet her eyes because he knew if he did, she would take him over completely. He would be lost forever. This time, he let himself look right at her, and she looked at him. Yeah, he was done for.
When they kissed, it was like the splinter never existed.
But he could feel it now.
He was back at the cookout. The Richardsons were beaming at him, waiting for his answer. There was no way Glory in a white dress would swoop in and save him this summer.
Not after Aidan had ruined everything.
“I’m gonna . . . go find my dad,” he mumbled.
Paul hadn’t strayed very far. He was by the marina, arguing about Spielberg with a guy grilling hamburgers. Paul thought he was an expert on film because he had directed a grand total of one movie, It Runs Below. Yeah, some people might have called it a cult classic by now, but originally it was a box-office flop. A B movie with a bloated budget. He made most of his money from good investments and working as a script doctor for other people’s movies. He used to be a Comic Con darling, but it had been years since he’d made a public appearance.
“Can we go?” Aidan asked.
Paul ignored him. What was new? “E.T. is horrifically paced,” he argued, instead. “It’s almost impressive how it made aliens boring.”
“I don’t know,” said the other man, who Aidan was pretty sure stayed in Cabin 7. He flipped a hamburger. “I loved it as a kid.”
“Oh please.”
“Can we go?” Aidan asked again.
Paul sighed. “We just got here.”
“I don’t feel good.” It wasn’t a lie. His head ached so bad, he could have sworn chunks of his brain were missing. He’d rather be on the other side of the country, but for now he’d accept the other side of the lake.
Paul raised an eyebrow. He didn’t believe Aidan, but he also didn’t believe in conflict. “Five minutes,” he said.
“Fine.” Aidan would wait in the boat; it was the only way to avoid people. He started heading that direction, but someone blocked his path.
Iris.
She was heading toward him, still wearing Joanna’s hand-me-down Bad Creek merch and her brown hair in a low-effort ponytail. Like the rest of the Landings, she was frozen in time. If this place was Neverland, she was Peter Pan. She had big grin on her face, but Aidan doubted it would last. He had broken the Disasters’ biggest rule: stay friends forever. According to Iris, “Friends don’t date each other.” So last summer she was pissed at Aidan, and Aidan was pissed at her. Glory was somehow above it, claiming everything was fine, and Gum tended to agree with whichever sister was the loudest, so they could go back to playing their games or raiding the marina’s snack bar.
Aidan didn’t owe the Disasters anything. Their friendship was built on duty, based on what their parents wanted. It wasn’t real. He wanted to believe he and Glory had something real, but that didn’t matter anymore either. What he needed was a hard reset. To leave this place and never come back. Then the memories would go away. He could start his life over.
Still, if he didn’t talk to Iris now, she would make these three agonizing days even harder. She’d show up at his dad’s house on Wahbee Drive, riding the same decrepit bike. She always loved old things, especially the broken ones. She was a Landings girl, after all.
“Hey,” Iris said, before giving him an awkward one-armed hug.
“Your hair’s longer,” he told her, which was a stupid thing to say. He should have gone with, I missed you, but that would have been a lie. There was so much of Glory in her face. Same big round eyes and full cheeks.
Iris flashed another quick, unsure smile. “I think you grew like eight inches.”
“Speaking of eight inches,” Gum began. He strolled behind her, still in the same white baseball cap, same cocky attitude. He had chips and barbecue dip sliding off his plate.
At least he could fill the inevitable awkward silence.
Iris got right to it. “You didn’t come to First Night Bonfire.” The smile had vanished; her dark eyes were accusing as if he’d cheated in Monopoly—which, according to Disasters’ rules, was to be punished with burning at the stake.
“Daniel!” A few yards away, a man with a silver mustache motioned with a cigar. Like Aidan’s dad, Bill Clavey had his own mansion on the north side, but his children and grandchildren still rented at the Landings, sweating it out with the poor folk to build character or something. Bill showed up in the Landings a few times a summer to keep an eye on his little colony on the broke side of the lake. The rest of the Claveys were standing in a row next to him, all blue-eyed and frighteningly clean. No creases or wrinkles or stray hairs. They were ready to be cast in an advertisement for Making Bad Creek Great Again.
Gum rolled his eyes. “Be right back,” he said, before dragging his feet as he followed his grandfather, which stranded Aidan alone with Iris. He prayed for the Richardsons to zoom up with their golf cart again. He forced himself to stand straight, ignoring the phantom splinter pain.
“What do you think he did this time?” Iris asked. Gum was always in trouble—or, more often, afraid of getting in trouble. He talked a big game about breaking the rules but couldn’t commit to anything. “Remember when he crawled out his window to go on a night ride with us and landed in poison ivy?”
“I thought you were the first one to get it.”
“No, I’m pretty sure Gum was patient zero.” She sighed. “We should do that again.”
Right. Their little poison ivy cult, when they slept in a tent behind Cabin 4. No outsiders allowed. You had to show the welts on your arm to access it, as if anyone besides the Disasters would even want in. Aidan still had scars from scratching his skin raw. Unlike Iris, he didn’t consider them happy little memories.
The ghost of the splinter was stabbing his heel again.
“So you’re gonna be a big bad senior?” Iris continued. “More drinking and drugs and sex, huh?” That was a Rex line. He didn’t say goodbye like a regular person. He gave unsolicited advice instead, like, Have fun, kids. No drinking, no drugs, no sex.
“I had a sip of tequila once,” Aidan snorted, “and it tasted like ass.”
“Wait, when? At Savi’s?”
She was asking about that night. The night his life turned moldy and rotten. And she’d done it so casually, like they were still talking about camping.
