Chapter 1: The Beginning of June

Before the End of August

How much could I say about that perfect summer? Did I expect it to live like this in my memory forever? Did it begin the day of graduation, or the day a month earlier, when all the passing grads were clinched, schools accepted, scholarships in place, and the sun was so warm that even the math teacher let us take our books and graph paper outside to the grass, all the teachers feeling the same thing, just as restless to leave the overhead lighting as we were? 

If it had started on that day, it would have made the most sense. It was the last wave before college rolled in, and it rolled all of us along like the tiny crustaceans that float below the wave, even as a surfer cuts through it above. If we were living in our tiny fragile shells, the surfer above us would have been the hot distant war that didn’t make sense to us or the hurricane that crashed on a shore far away, the headlines on the news that changed what we were going to be when we grew up. But we wouldn’t know that until years later. That summer, we were happy to clunk into each other on the unsettled sand, to see where the swirling took us and where we would end up. 

That day, the possible true start of summer, was the day that Cocoa and Eduardo broke up. The day was mostly over, and who breaks up during the school day anyway, but they had homeroom together and were allowed to take their homework outside, just like the rest of us. If it had been raining or windy or cold, maybe they wouldn’t have been allowed outside, we wouldn’t have spread out on the field, the homeroom classes bumping into the math class, circled by the gym class walking the track, and then Eduardo never would have seen Cocoa blush when Peter sauntered past, never would have had his suspicions confirmed about his unreturned texts and calls, never would have believed it. In fact, that is what he said: “I can’t believe you would fall for a dork like that.” 

I know he said this because we were lying in the grass, not too far away, pretending to do math, but no math requires that much writing. Lydia and I were listening together, passing our pages back and forth, desperate not to miss a word. 

Cocoa was insulted. “What on earth do you think you’re talking about?” 

“I saw you watching Peter. I saw you checking out his stupid blue gym shorts, and you got all embarrassed.”

Lydia and I scribbled furiously. I can’t believe Eduardo just said a full sentence without dropping an f-bomb. We laughed together. He’s so mad he forgot all the bad words. 

Cocoa wasn’t having it. “You think I was checking him out in his gym shorts? You mean the same nasty shorts that all the rest of us have with the stupid white drawstring and the school logo on the leg?”

“Yeah, the same ones that we were wearing when we met during volleyball! What is it, you have a thing for guys in gym shorts?”

Now we weren’t the only ones listening. Across the field, Mrs. Tempe and Ms. Platt, who had been chatting together, heard him yelling. Ms. Platt, extra salty about being interrupted during teacher time, began a march over. 

As soon as Ms. Platt took a step, that marked the countdown to the end of Cocoa and Eduardo’s relationship. Started in tenth grade volleyball, surviving two years of high school exams, four semesters of finals, and—though they didn’t realize it down in their crustacean shells at the bottom of the sea—a hurricane, an election, and the start of a new war, it would be over as soon as Ms. Platt reached their section of the field. 

“I’m done with you,” Cocoa retorted.

Eduardo jumped up. “Yeah, go chase Mr. Blondie-Blond in his little gym shorts.”

Ms. Platt made it just in time to tell Eduardo to walk away, and by the final bell of the day, the whole school knew that Eduardo and Cocoa had broken up because Cocoa only liked guys in gym shorts. 

✷

If that wasn’t the start of summer, I suppose the formal definition would have been when commencement concluded, and we all left the school grounds in flapping navy robes, with gold cords draped around our necks, depending on our level of approval from the school. But could that really be the start of summer, since most of us spend a few hours with family in town, eating BBQ outside of our parents’ houses or at long restaurant tables covered in sticky red-and-white squares, hoping and praying for our relatives to hand us envelopes with more than just a card inside?

If the summer started on the day of graduation, it would have started that night, when we celebrated the envelopes that came with more than a card by splurging a bit of it on ice cream and fries. 

Cocoa and Peter were together now, determined to have one whirlwind summer romance before they were beckoned to their schools on opposite sides of the country. Peter, who sometimes hung out with us, brought her to Sparky’s for fries and shakes, and we dutifully pretended that we weren’t the ones who had witnessed her last break-up. My initial self-importance in this role slowly deflated over our time there, as I realized that she didn’t know who I was.

A trip to Sparky’s meant that timing was crucial, a social lesson that has stuck with me to this day. I’m relieved at weddings with seating charts, the all-important task of where to sit removed from my hands. Lydia and Jenna and I made it a point to arrive together, made it a point to sit at the booth near the windows, where extra tables could be added easily and we could box ourselves off from everyone else if we wanted. Peter and Cocoa came to the extra tables. Ralphie and Box leaned in from the next booth over. We all had our own milkshakes and hoped that Devi would come. She usually had more money than the rest of us, and she refused to eat a milkshake without fries. She was also an avid talker so her fries would mysteriously disappear every time she turned to greet someone new, and she never seemed to mind that she only got to eat a few of them herself. 

Sure enough, the crowd piled in, plus a few hangers-on from other years, and Devi bought fries, and I reached over to grab one after another as she leaned over to tease Box about his crush on her older sister. If the summer started the day we graduated, it probably started then. As Devi teased Box and wished he liked her, as Cocoa fumbled to find as much romance with Peter as she had had with Eduardo, not realizing that Sparky’s was only good for fun, as Lydia and Jenna watched out the window, realizing that last year’s seniors were in the parking lot, smoking by the dumpsters, as I stole more fries than I ought to and realized Ralphie was watching me, as I put my finger up to my lips to seal the secret, and suddenly everything meant more than I was prepared for it to mean. As Ralphie grinned and put his finger to his lips, then leaned past Devi to steal a fry of his own, our eyes locking for a moment before Devi spun around and slapped his hand. 

“What do you think you’re doing? So that’s where all my fries go!” 

“It’s just one fry!” Ralphie protested, and as he did, I stole another, and Devi missed the whole thing, and I ate my fry with a satisfied smile and I realized that Ralphie was watching me again, and he probably couldn’t tell if the smile was for the fry or for him, and I wasn’t sure anymore either. 

✷

If we had been paying attention that summer, we might have realized that the housing market wouldn’t stay good for long, that the next year it would all come crumbling down, that the houses being built behind the golf course wouldn’t be worth what people were paying for them right now. But those were all lessons I learned later that I now superimpose over that perfect summer, the way you might place a painting behind glass to help it last longer, and the frame makes it more complete, but the brushstrokes of the artist are a little lost to time. 

What we knew that summer was that soon we would leave for college, that we hoped to make a little money before we did, and that we had a little time and a lot of songs telling us to make the most of it before that happened. In three months, most of that would still be true, but I think we were all surprised how finished the summer felt after what happened at the construction site, after we fled through the darkness as fast as we could, and we wondered if we were the ones who had done something wrong.

✷

The subdivisions had names, but we never used them. Instead, there were the big houses, by the red park, up near Clearwood Elementary, and over by the library. If we need to be more specific, we would triangulate the place between houses of classmates. Between Steve and the dead end street. Across from Nicole but not quite to John’s. 

Our square was fairly well-mapped, but we had started branching out, sometimes in the cars of people lucky enough to have them, sometimes still on bikes, an art we would lose in a few years, flying through the hot night as lightning bugs slowly crossed in front of you, keeping your mouth shut near the creek because you wouldn’t want to swallow a mosquito the way Lydia’s brother did that one time. 

Jenna had a car, so we alternated between bikes and driving, depending on what shift she was working that day. Lydia and I were the first to explore the new houses together, quickly named the New New Houses or the Construction, but we had to be careful with both of those because our parents definitely wouldn’t have been okay with what we did. 

I should pause to say that what we did was nothing. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t make out with random people, didn’t spray paint the walls, didn’t even carve our names into the posts or try to scrawl our initials in wet concrete. We tried to carve our names into the trunk of a tree once, but it was too much work, so we just screamed them out quickly into the night sky and pedaled away as fast as we could. But doing nothing, if it’s happening in an empty house in the middle of a construction site, is still not okay by parents’ standards, so we were careful not to let them know where we were on those nights. Of course, by the end of the summer they found out, because we had to tell them what we had seen, just like we had told the police when we reported it. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. It was still just the beginning of summer. Jenna was on a late shift, so Lydia and I were on our bikes, headed past the library, and we crossed the underpass to get to the golf course. The path next to the golf course was one of our favorites, perfect for nighttime rides with few other people around. We could ride around the whole thing—up to the far side, down past the bakery—and not worry about running into anyone else. We were halfway up the west side when Lydia slowed down ahead of me. She stopped near two overgrown lilac bushes, mostly bare of flowers this late in spring, except for a few stubborn buds that held on. 

“What did you stop for?” I asked.

Lydia pointed to the lilac bushes. “I wanted to smell the lilacs before they went away for the season. But look,” Lydia motioned to the ground between the two bushes. “I think there’s a path.” 

When you are in high school in the suburbs in a place somehow both close to the city and to the farmland, you begin to recognize the paths that are formed from human habit. We were familiar with many of these paths: the well-worn shortcut from the apartments to the grocery store, the unofficial back entrance to our high school grounds, the muddied cut between the baseball diamonds that the city eventually paved. This was a much younger path than any of those: no wheel-marks from bikes before us, no dirt churned up from a thousand children stomping through. This was a baby path, so light that if Lydia hadn’t stopped at that spot, we might not have noticed it. It reminded me of the paths I had found with my family on our summer vacation. As we hiked near the lake and up into the forest, everything looked like it could be a path, but almost nothing was. 

Lydia dropped her bike onto the asphalt path of the golf course. “I just want to check.” She pushed the two lilac bushes apart, and they spread, a curtain of green in the dark, the last of the light purple buds shaking off as she moved them. “Look.” She pointed.

Beyond the two bushes, the faint path near our feet became a much clearer march between the trees, winding between the underbrush and last year’s grass, dipping into the dark. “Let’s see where it goes.” Lydia grabbed her bike off the ground and pushed through the bushes into the darkness.

The lilac bushes had reached just above our heads, but we were soon engulfed in the woods, with branches high above us catching the moonlight before it could reach our steps. 

We walked for a minute in silence, both calculating if we should turn back, when we suddenly emerged from the trees onto a gravel road surrounded by houses that we had never seen before. 

There were no street lights, but the full moon was now generous, illuminating a circle of half-built houses in a stark white light. We walked between the skeletons of houses partly built: some pits dug with foundations barely poured, some forests of studs and boards beginning to spring up, a few that even looked like homes in the dark, just the bones of what would eventually become a home, or perhaps the skeleton of a home that had decayed away. We wondered if anyone else knew about this place.

As we walked through the circle of houses, we realized that we had snuck into a cul-de-sac, one corner of a neighborhood that didn’t exist yet. The cul-de-sac led to a wider gravel road, and our eyes followed the gravel, a shining path in the moonlight, cutting between the dark grass. There was a whole neighborhood here, being built or now abandoned, we couldn’t tell. We saw house after partly-built house in every direction we looked. 

“It feels haunted,” I said. 

“It’s like it’s pre-haunted. No one is here yet but they paid extra for the haunting to go in first, like bricks or a pool,” said Lydia. 

“I wonder how much extra that costs.” 

“It only costs more if you’re picky about which ghosts you want.” 

Brushing into ghosts, we felt a chill in the air and wondered if we had gone too far. We had only reached the first intersection, but we both hesitated to go further. If we kept going, I wondered if we would find our way out again, or if we would be stuck here, two girls walking their bikes in the night, talking ghosts into existence in houses that were not yet alive. 

“We should come back, show Jenna,” Lydia suggested. 

“Yeah, we should wait for her,” I agreed. And we turned around slowly, but walked a lot faster out of the neighborhood than we had walked when we entered. We found the path through the trees, pushed through the lilac bushes, and hopped on our bikes on the golf course trail. We didn’t talk again until we were back on the other side of the underpass by the library, where the streetlights spilled warm yellow pools over the black pavement, and we didn’t need the moonlight to guide us.

✷

Jenna could come, but no one else. “What is it?” she pried, as she pulled out her bike from the garage. She didn’t ride as much anymore, now that she had her car. 

Lydia took command. “Well, we don’t know exactly what it is. We’ve been waiting to find out until you were with us.” She nodded importantly. 

Jenna was flattered, but she didn’t say anything. She had had to miss more hangouts ever since she got her car, because having a car in her family meant she also had to have a job. She would finish up at the store and drive home, and Lydia and I were always down to hang out late, but she missed a lot by the time she got off at ten. 

She didn’t have to work that night, so she left her gray car in the driveway, and the three of us took off on our bikes in the sunset, not planning how long we would be gone or when we would be back, not worried about drinking water or finding a bathroom or being hungry or wanting to rest. Sometimes now, when I am stuck in a rut, I will propel myself out of my apartment this same way, telling myself not to think about it, just the way I never did then, the way we pedaled down the street in the evenings with no plans and no provisions, trusting that we would find what we needed when we needed it. 

Lydia and I had promised to take Jenna, but we made it a surprise, a mystery, because the world was too small to have many mysteries these days, and the drama to follow had dried up to a trickle with everyone out of school and busy packing for college. Plus, we were both sure that Jenna would love it, but we weren’t sure that she would love it at night. It seemed easiest to get there while it was light and let Jenna decide for herself. 

We followed the golf course path, and Lydia and I wondered how obvious the entrance would be during the daylight hours. It was oddly harder to spot, the bushes and shrubs looking evenly spaced and uninteresting in the daytime, and we wouldn’t have seen the path if we hadn’t been looking for it, hiding behind the lilac bushes. 

We hopped off our bikes when we were close and walked into the neighborhood again, coming up through the last trees, between two skeleton houses that we hadn’t seen in the night, and out onto the gravel road of the uninhabited cul-de-sac. Lydia turned to Jenna triumphantly. 

“Whoa, what is it?” Jenna asked. 

“We weren’t sure. That’s why we wanted to show you instead of tell you.”

“They look kind of like the houses in my neighborhood, but I’ve never seen them before. How did I not know these were here?”

Jenna dropped her bike to the gravel and walked up the yard to the house nearest to us.

I offered the only things I knew. “I figure that we’re between the golf course and the big road. I bet there’s a street they use for construction equipment but they haven’t built anything else yet. It’s just so weird that no one is here now. Are they still building them? Or did they just stop one day?” 

Jenna leaned into the front door of the house frame, then turned and hustled back toward us. “I almost shouted ‘hello,’” she said, “but then what if someone said ‘hello’ back!” 

Lydia and I nodded. She had felt the same unsettled feeling that we had, a cross between the excitement of potential—anything could happen—and the threat of possibility—anything could happen.

We walked our bikes through the neighborhood before we lost the evening light. Days were at their longest then, so we mapped out all that we could find. Our cul-de-sac led to the main street stretching in both directions, where Lydia and I had stopped the night before. One way seemed to lead back to the big road, but we didn’t follow it all the way through because the houses stopped and the trees seemed darker than the road we were standing on. The other way was dotted with cul-de-sacs, like leaves on the stem of a plant. Our cul-de-sac was the lowest on the branch, closest to the big road and sidling up to the golf course. 

By the time we had mapped out the whole neighborhood, the light had sunk behind the houses, and the way back to our cul-de-sac was dark. But we still opted for the familiar route instead of the uncertain trees toward the big road. As we marched back, conquerors of another kingdom, we speculated on what was happening here, as if it wasn’t just more families like ours looking to get into more good school districts like ours had. 

“Maybe the pathway toward the big road doesn’t lead there at all. Maybe all the construction vehicles come from another dimension, and they are colonizing us and we don’t even know it!”

“Maybe it is like in Mission Impossible where they are building a perfect American town so that they can train spies to act like us!”

“Maybe they lost all their money and they’ll never finish it, and the houses will remain haunted here forever, but not haunted by humans because no one lived here. Haunted by construction workers because they never got their money back!”

The last one was probably the closest, though I still think back sometimes and hope for an alternate dimension. I comfort myself when the world feels too big, thinking about a little pocket of suburbia between a big road and a golf course, taken over by aliens who are practicing being just like us, as they infiltrate in the most innocuous of places. 

If, on the other hand, the development is haunted, it is probably not haunted by construction workers. It is probably haunted by us, just like we are haunted by what we saw later that summer.

✷