“Quit being a perv,” I tell him.
“I’m not being a perv,” he objects. “I’m just trying to figure you out.”
“What’s to figure out?”
He snorts. “Only everything.” His smile fades a little. “You’re a conundrum, Bess,” he says, his voice getting softer. “I just don’t know what to think.”
“About what?”
“Hey!” he suddenly says. “Do you remember that night we all rode our bikes in the dark down to the haunted house?”
Do I remember it? Of course I remember it. “You guys scared the pants off me that night.” But I can’t help but smile at the memory.
“Jake, Eli, and I had been planning that shit for days.”
“Planning what?” I ask.
“The howling wind?” he reminds me. “That was on a tape. And the knocking on the door? That was Little Robbie Gentry. We paid him two dollars to stand there and knock, then slowly open the door so that it creaked really loudly.”
“You did not!”
He chuckles. “We totally did.”
“You paid Little Robbie to do that?” Little Robbie Gentry was called Little Robbie because his dad was called Big Robbie and it just seemed appropriate. He’d never complained, but then he was a few years younger than us and always more than willing to join in our shenanigans—even though his dad Big Robbie was a state trooper.
“Yep!” Aaron slaps his thigh. “I thought Lynda was going to jump out of her skin. She glued herself to me and never got more than an inch away from me. That was the first time I ever–” He drops his voice down to a whisper. “—touched her boob!”
I can’t keep the smile off my face. “She told me about it. She said it was just a graze.”
“It was everything, I tell you. Everything!” He grins. “I already was in awe of breasts, but ever since that night I’ve been entranced by them!”
“Well, according to her, it wasn’t that big of a deal,” I say, teasing him.
He pauses and his eyes narrow at me. “Didn’t Eli kiss you for the first time that same night?”
I let out a long breath. “Yes, he did.”
“Tell me about that.” He watches me closely.
“I’d rather not,” I reply flippantly, and I pick up a magazine to riffle through it.
He points to his port. “Hell-o!” he sings out. “Che-mo! I get to pick the topics. So you better start talking, girl, or I’m going to tell the doctor you’re not holding up your end of the bargain.”
“Fine!” I snap. I throw my magazine down with much more force than is necessary. “What is it you want to hear? That the haunted house was perfectly terrifying? Because it was.”
“Keep going,” he says, as his eyelids grow heavier. He doesn’t fall asleep, though. He just settles deeper into his chair.
19
Bess
We biked most of the way to the old shack in the woods, but it was so deep in the forest that we couldn’t bike the whole way. So we all walked the rest of the way in the dark, the trees above us blocking out all the stars, the gentle blowing of the wind our only company as we traversed through the forest. This was, by far, the most daring thing I’d ever done.
The house was an old fishing cabin that Jake’s great-great-grandfather had built many years ago. Now it was a crumbling mess with a sagging roof and warped floorboards. Kids had broken into it years ago and painted graffiti on the walls, knocked holes in the wood paneling, and made a general mess of the place. Now only Jake and his family knew about it, and I was sure Mr. Jacobson didn’t want anyone going there. If he knew we were going there to summon the ghosts of Jacobsons past, he’d have all of us scrubbing the bathhouses with our toothbrushes as punishment.
But after dinner, Jake had walked up to us as we sat around the campfire, leaned over and whispered to Katie, who had whispered to Lynda, who had whispered to Aaron, who had whispered to me that we should all go up to the old haunted cabin in the woods.
“What’s that?” I whispered to Eli after I imparted the invitation to him.