Leni felt the start of an emotion so new she couldn’t categorize it. “I love Tolkien,” she said quietly. It felt oddly freeing to be honest with someone. Most of the kids at her last school had cared more about movies and music than books. “And Herbert.”
“Dune was amazing. ‘Fear is the mind-killer.’ It’s so true, man.”
“And Stranger in a Strange Land. That’s kinda how I feel here.”
“You should. Nothing is normal in the last frontier. There’s a town up north that has a dog for a mayor.”
“No way.”
“True. A malamute. They voted him in.” Matthew laid a hand to his chest. “You can’t make this crap up.”
“I saw a man sitting with a goose in his lap on the way here. He was talking to the bird, I think.”
“That’s Crazy Pete and Matilda. They’re married.”
Leni laughed out loud.
“You have a weird laugh.”
Leni felt her cheeks heat up in embarrassment. No one had ever told her that before. Was it true? What did she sound like? Oh, God.
“I—I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. My social skills blow. You’re the first girl my age I’ve talked to in a while. I mean. You’re pretty. That’s all. I’m blabbing, aren’t I? You’re probably going to run away, screaming, and ask to sit next to Axle the soon-to-be murderer and it will be an improvement. Okay. I’m shutting up now.”
Leni hadn’t heard anything after “pretty.”
She tried to tell herself it meant nothing. But when Matthew looked at her, she felt a flutter of possibility. She thought: We could be friends. And not ride-the-bus or eat-at-the-same-table friends.
Friends.
The kind who had real things in common. Like Sam and Frodo, Anne and Diana, Ponyboy and Johnny. She closed her eyes for a split second, imagining it. They could laugh and talk and—
“Leni?” he said. “Leni?”
Oh, my God. He’d said her name twice.
“Yeah. I get it. I space out all the time. My mom says it’s what happens when you live in your own head with a bunch of made-up people. Then again, she’s been reading Another Roadside Attraction since Christmas.”
“I do that,” Leni confessed. “Sometimes I just … spaz out.”
He shrugged, as if to imply that there was nothing wrong with her. “Hey, have you heard about the barbecue tonight?”
*
SO WHAT ABOUT THE PARTY? Can you come?
Leni kept replaying it over and over again as she waited for her dad to pick her up from school. She’d wanted to say yes and mean it. She wanted it more than she’d wanted anything in a while.
But her parents weren’t community barbecue people. Community anything, really. It wasn’t who the Allbrights were. The families in their old neighborhood used to have all kinds of gatherings: backyard barbecues where the dads wore V-necks and drank Scotch and flipped burgers, and the women smoked cigarettes and sipped martinis and carried trays of bacon-wrapped chicken livers while kids screamed and ran around. She knew this because once she’d peered over the neighbors’ fence and seen all of it—hula hoops and Slip ’N Slides and sprinklers.
“So, Red, how was school?” Dad asked when Leni climbed into the VW bus and slammed the door. He was the last parent to arrive.
“We learned about the U.S. buying Alaska from Russia. And about Mount Alyeska in the Chugach Mountain Range.”
He grunted acceptance of that and put the vehicle in gear.
Leni thought about how to say what she wanted to say. There’s a boy my age in class. He’s our neighbor.
No. Mentioning a boy was the wrong tack.
Our neighbors are hosting a barbecue and invited us.
But Dad hated that kind of thing, or he used to, in all the other places they’d lived.
They rattled down the dirt road, dust billowing up on either side, and turned into their driveway. At home, they discovered a crowd of people in the yard. Most of the Harlan clan was there, working. They moved in wordless harmony, coming together and drifting apart like dancers. Clyde had that cage thing and was milling logs into boards. Ted was finishing the cache, pounding boards to the side stanchions. Donna was stacking firewood.
“Our friends showed up at noon to help us prepare for winter,” Dad said. “No. They’re better than friends, Red. They’re comrades.”
Comrades?
Leni frowned. Were they communists now? She was pretty sure her dad hated the commies as much as he hated the Man and hippies.
“This is what the world should be, Red. People helping each other instead of killing their mothers for a little bread.”
Leni couldn’t help noticing that almost everyone had a gun holstered at his or her waist.
Dad opened the bus door. “We’re all going to Sterling this weekend, to fish for salmon at Farmer’s Hole on the Kenai River. Apparently these king salmon are a bitch to land.” He stepped out into the soggy ground.
Mad Earl waved a gloved hand at her dad, who immediately bounded off in the old man’s direction.
Leni walked past a new structure that was about nine feet high by four feet wide, with sides covered in thick black plastic (unspooled garbage bags, Leni was pretty sure). An open door revealed an interior full of sockeye salmon, sliced in half along the spines and hung tented on branches. Thelma was kneeling in the dirt, tending to a fire built in a contained metal box. Smoke puffed up in dark clouds, reached up to the salmon hanging on branches above the fire.
Mama looked up from the salmon she was gutting at a table in the yard. There was a smear of pink guts across her chin. “It’s a smokehouse,” Mama said, cocking her head toward Thelma. “Thelma is teaching me how to smoke fish. It’s quite an art, apparently—too much heat, you cook the fish. It’s supposed to smoke and dry at the same time. Yum. How was your first day of school?” A red kerchief kept the hair out of her eyes.
“Cool.”
“No social-suicide issues with the clothes or the lunch box? No girls making fun of you?”
Leni couldn’t help smiling. “No girls my age at all. But … there’s a boy…”
That got Mama’s interest. “A boy?”
Leni felt herself blushing. “A friend, Mama. He just happens to be a boy.”
“Uh. Huh.” Mama was trying not to smile as she lit her cigarette. “Is he cute?”
Leni ignored that. “He says there’s a community barbecue tonight, and I want to go.”
“Yeah. We’re going.”
“Really? That’s great!”
“Yeah,” Mama said, smiling. “I told you it would be different here.”
*
WHEN IT CAME TIME to dress for the barbecue, Leni kind of lost her mind. Honestly, she didn’t know what was wrong with her.
She didn’t have a lot of clothes to choose from, but that didn’t stop her from trying on several different combinations. In the end—mostly because she was exhausted by the desire to look pretty when pretty was impossible—she decided on a pair of plaid polyester bell-bottoms and a ribbed green turtleneck beneath a fringed, fake-suede vest. Try as she might, she couldn’t do anything with her hair. She finger-combed it back from her face and twined it into a fuzzy, fist-sized braid.
She found Mama in the kitchen, placing thick squares of cornbread into a Tupperware container. She had brushed her shoulder-length, shag-cut hair until it glimmered in the light. She had definitely dressed to impress in tight bell-bottom jeans and a fitted white sweater with a huge Indian turquoise squash-blossom necklace that she’d bought a few years ago.
Mama seemed distracted as she burped the lid of air from the container.
“You’re worried, aren’t you?”
“Why would you say that?” Mama gave her a quick, bright smile, but the look in her eyes couldn’t be so easily transformed. She was wearing makeup for the first time in days and it made her look vibrant and beautiful.
“Remember the fair?”
“That was different. The guy tried to cheat him.”