I told her it did.
“Don’t take any crap from any boy—not even my own sons, okay?”
“Okay,” I whispered.
“And you,” she said, looking to Sam. “The best girls are worth waiting for. Trust and friendship come first, then the other stuff. You’re only sixteen, just about to start eleventh grade. And life, hopefully, is long.” She smiled sadly. “Okay, that’s enough mom talk,” she said, putting both hands on the table and pushing herself out of the chair.
“Oh! One more thing: If Percy wants to sleep over again, you, my dear son, will be on the couch.”
* * *
MY PARENTS RETURNED and so did the hot, dry days, turning the air thin and dusty. A small brush fire started on the rocky point across from the cottage. We saw smoke billowing from the scrub and then watched boaters pull up to help put it out. Sam, Charlie, and I took the Banana Boat over and anchored it just out from shore. I waited while the boys joined the water-bucket chain. The flames were only ankle height, but when Sam and Charlie climbed back into the boat after it had been put out, they were so chuffed with themselves you’d have thought they had rescued a baby from a burning building.
Sam and I swam and worked and talked about pretty much everything—how tired he was of small-town life and small-town thinking, how I was considering trying out for the swim team, the finer points of the Saw movies—but we never talked about the night we kissed. I wasn’t sure how to bring it up. I was waiting for the perfect moment.
Mason phoned the cottage landline now and then, but we only talked for a few minutes until the conversation fizzled out. After one of our calls, Dad looked at me over the top of his glasses and said, “Every time you talk to that kid, you look like you’re trying to go to the bathroom after eating too much cheese.” Gross. But he had a point. I just didn’t want to break things off with Mason on the phone. I was waiting until I got back to the city.
The weather changed the third week of August. A thick cover of dark clouds settled over the province, their overstuffed bellies drenching everything from Algonquin Park to Ottawa. Cottagers packed up early and left for the city. A light mist moved in over the lake, making everything look black and white. Even the green hills on the far shore looked gray, as though they had been shrouded in gauze. Dad wasn’t much of an outdoorsman and was happy to have us all inside, keeping the fire fed to ward off the damp. Mom and I snuggled up on the couch. I worked on my story while she made her way through a half-dozen books she was considering adding to her gender-relations course syllabus. Sam sat at the table working on a one-thousand-piece puzzle of fishing lures with Dad, who talked animatedly to him about Hippocrates and ancient Greek medicine. I tuned it out, but Sam was captivated. Just like working at the restaurant gave me a taste of freedom in the form of a paycheck, I got the sense that talking with my dad gave Sam a window into a larger world of possibilities. I think I gave him that, too, in a way. He loved it when I talked about the city and the different places I’d visited—the museums, the huge movie theaters and concert halls.
After six straight days of heavy rain, I woke up to the sun beaming in through the triangles of glass in my bedroom, the reflection off the lake dappling the walls and ceiling. Sam took me on a hike through the bush, following a streambed that had been dry all season but was now bubbling over the rocks and branches in its way. The weather had turned cool after the rain, and I wore blue jeans and my old U of T sweatshirt; Sam had thrown on a plaid flannel button-up, rolling the sleeves past his forearms. It was damp underfoot and mushrooms had sprouted up all over the forest floor, some with jolly yellow-and-white domed caps and others with flat pancake tops.
“Here we are,” Sam announced after we’d walked through dense bush for about fifteen minutes. I peered around his shoulder and saw that the gentle slope we’d been climbing had flattened, making a small pool of water. A fallen tree, covered in emerald moss and pale lichen, lay across its middle.
“I like to come here in the spring when the snow has just melted,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how loudly the water in this stream rushes.” He climbed onto the tree and scooted down, patting the spot beside him. I shimmied over till we were both sitting with our legs dangling above the pond.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “I’m kind of waiting for a gnome or fairy to appear from over there.” I pointed to a thick, rotting tree stump with brown mushrooms growing at its base. Sam chuckled.