“Ho!” George grabs the ball to stop the game. “Carrie, is it?”
“Yeah.”
The duffel bags are piled on the porch. Clothing bursts out of them. Tennis rackets, bags of taco chips. A typewriter is open and a piece of paper stuck into it.
Pfeff sits on the porch with his back against the house, a Coke in one hand, the blue kitchen phone in the other. Its curly cord stretches through the window. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I said, I’m sorry,” he’s repeating. “I know, but I’m calling you now… Yes, George’s girlfriend, Yardley. She invited us.” He looks up at George and Major. “When did Yardley invite us?”
“Me, a while ago,” says George. “You two hosebags on Tuesday night.”
“Tuesday night,” says Pfeff into the phone. “No, I don’t have her dad’s number. He’s like, in a different house than we are. We’re in a guesthouse… Massachusetts, I think.” He looks up again. “We’re in Massachusetts, correct?”
“Correct,” I tell him.
“Yuh-huh,” says Pfeff into the phone. “She said—Major, how long are we staying?”
Major shrugs. “Forever, maybe. This place is amazing.”
“Maybe forever,” says Pfeff.
“His mother,” George explains to me. He tosses the Ping-Pong ball in the air and catches it again.
“I know I’m a terrible son,” says Pfeff. “And I know you deserve a delightful son, so it stinks that you got me, but I also know you love me anyway… Of course I love you. So can we be friends?…Also, I’m a legal adult. That means I don’t have to come home. Okay.”
“I’m here to show you how to work the washing machine and whatever else,” I say.
“Yardley showed us all that,” says Major.
“We’re fully up to speed,” says George.
And maybe it’s the two shirtless boys, because I can’t stop looking at them. Or maybe it’s the way they’ve already disrupted everything about how Goose Cottage usually feels. Or maybe it’s just because it’s baking hot out—but I surprise myself. “Let’s go swimming, then,” I say. “You haven’t really been to Beechwood until you’ve been in the water.”
“Hell yeah,” says George. And Pfeff hangs up with his mother.
Beach towels are in a cupboard by the door. The boys find their swimsuits, Pfeff riffling through his duffel, tossing shirts and jeans across the porch in his search, then changing in the mudroom, yelling, “Don’t come in and look at my weenie.”
Major yells back that it’s not the kind of weenie anyone would be interested in, and Pfeff says “What on earth does that mean?”—still from the mudroom. “It’s a perfectly normal weenie. A good weenie, even. Oh god, now Carrie’s going to think terrible things about me. Major, you’ve never even seen it. Carrie, he’s never seen it. Seriously.”
George tells him to shut up and Major says he doth protest too much. The two of them change quickly upstairs in the bedrooms. George phones Yardley, who is over at Pevensie, and together we troop down the long wooden staircase to the Tiny Beach.
* * *
—
TWO O’CLOCK IS the perfect time to swim on Beechwood. The sun has heated the water all day. The cove is protected from the wind. The shore is rocky. The sand on the Big Beach is nicer, but there is a private feeling to the Tiny Beach that’s magical.
All three boys run whooping into the water, diving under the gentle waves as soon as they hit knee-deep. I stand for a moment and watch them. The muscles in their backs ripple. Their shoulders are sleek with water. They flip their hair out of their eyes and splash each other. George swims a serious-looking crawl toward the sharp rocks that edge the cove, then stops to tread water and look around. Major floats on his back, looking up. Pfeff shouts and swims out to join George.
“You coming?” Major asks me. “We won’t bite.”
I strip down to my swimsuit and go in. The codeine I took earlier blocks all thoughts of what happened to Rosemary in this very same water. Instead, I hear the echo of the waves, feel the warm drumbeat of the sun and the cucumber cool of the seawater against my skin.
I am awake. I am expanding.
The nerves in my fingertips cry to touch someone, the pulse in my veins jumps.
They are here on our island, these boys. Transforming it. Possibly desecrating it.
They may last a week.
They may stay forever.