The Creeping

Taylor Martinson and I have been flirting for months, and I’ve been playing it distant and disinterested. Zoey says playing hard to get is the only way to sink your talons in a boy. And she would know. Zoey’s gone out with as many guys as me, Cole, and Michaela combined. But I am interested. Interested in his lazily crooked smile; his stormy blue eyes; his velvety laugh that leaves my stomach flip-flopping; the way he pours himself into chairs, reclining, stretching long, tan limbs out to take up every inch of space, head cocked back, half laughing like nothing is ever for real.

The only iffy thing about him is the couple of lacrosse boys—the “scum brigade”—he hangs out with. They’re basically like dogs: Any girl’s leg will do. And while that alone wouldn’t eek me out, how dishonest they are about it does. They prey on underclass girls with promises of prom and happily ever after. Once the girls give it up, the boys give them the ax. I don’t hold that against Taylor, though. He probably bonded with those boys over tetherball and roly-polies on the playground in kindergarten. If you consider that, he’s loyal to stay friends with them.

It’s doubtful that Taylor and his “bros” could find us here. This is Zoey’s and my special hideaway. We’re at least a mile away from the nearest cabin, way off the beaten path, and across town from the beaches of Blackdog Lake, where our classmates go for bonfires and swimming. We spend every summer in this spot, dallying away the afternoons, sunbathing topless to get rid of tan lines, and sneaking hard lemonades.

When we were younger, Zoey’s brother Caleb used to bait fishing lines for us in this exact spot. It’s where I had my first kiss in the summer after the fourth grade with Sam Worth. His palms were sweating so profusely he kept wiping them on his jeans. His eyes were scrunched closed, and his lips hovered an inch from mine until I grabbed his shirt collar and pulled until our mouths met. It’s where I had my second kiss, which I lied and said was my first, with Scott Townsend three years later. It’s where Zoey went to third base for the first time and was covered in poison oak blisters for two weeks. It’s a special spot, sheltered from prying eyes and anyone’s expectations but our own.

Cole plops down on her beach towel next to mine and dips her head back, basking in the sun. Thousands of miles from the ocean and she manages to have beach-wavy hair, as if her enthusiasm is generating static electricity. “I mean, oh my gosh. How do you not remember anything?” The cadence of her voice makes her California accent exaggerated. I think she does it on purpose, but it’s cute rather than annoying.

“No idea. For the first few years they sent me to shrinks, therapists, psychotherapists. Eventually, the cops talked my mom into bringing me to a hypnotist who was a total wacko and made me lie on a purple velvet couch as she burned incense and pretended to delve into my mind.” For some reason I lower my voice as I continue. “But no dice. I never remembered a thing. Just like it happened to someone else.” And in some ways it did. I was six years old then, and now I’m just past my seventeenth birthday. I don’t remember anything from that entire day or anything specific from any day before. It’s like someone reached inside my head and scrambled my memory from that afternoon, leaving me with only my name and my parents’ faces.

My earliest memory is of Zoey, stealing a chocolate marshmallow egg out of my Easter basket, the year after it happened. That’s more fitting than you know, since Zoey is a total savage. But she’s my savage, and I love her more than I love anyone and anything.

“But doesn’t it frighten you to be out here?” Cole gestures encompassingly at the wilderness around us.

I want to answer: not usually. “Not at all,” I say instead. “The trees didn’t spring to life and eat Jeanie. Whoever took her didn’t have anything to do with the woods. If I wanted to avoid the forest in Savage, I’d have to be a hermit.”

Zoey swings on the rope and screams, “Boring conversation!” as she plunges into the water.