That was the thing.
Every time Carol would mention something he had that I knew for a fact he didn’t have, he’d say it was up at his “cabin in Maine,” which he said was on this beautiful lake and surrounded by huge mountains. I knew he was just making it all up—but even if it had been real I doubt the cabin would be much to live in, because it’d be crammed floor to ceiling with all the stuff he said was up there that other kids had and he didn’t.
Anyways, I don’t know if Carol acted weird and did all this stuff when he met Suzie that day. I doubt he did, because like I said, he was really good at asking all these questions to find out whether whoever he was talking to was going to actually live in the neighborhood or not, and seeing as how there was a moving truck and everything, he was undoubtedly aware that she was here to stay. But he asked her a zillion questions anyway, so by the time I showed up in the afternoon he had worked up what you could call a complete dossier on Suzie, who he said was sort of skinny like a string bean, with a round face and short black hair cut in bangs and freckles on her face.
“Her mom’s divorced,” Carol told me about Suzie. We were standing in the street in front of his house and looking at her house on the corner, which still had plenty of unpacked boxes on the porch. He spoke from the side of his mouth and made it all sound very secretive, which he was very good at. So good, in fact, that his mom had managed to get him into a bunch of TV commercials—spots, he called them—shunting him off to New York or Hollywood every once in a while, to be in some commercial for cereal or toothpaste. That must be what made him feel so comfortable with lying—and from what I could see was what supported their whole household, because I never saw Carol’s mom ever go to work.
His mom was divorced, too, so he winked at me, like he knew something deep about what that meant. “She’s okay, but her mom’s gross. She weighs, like, six hundred pounds. Kind of makes you wonder, you know?”
“Wonder what?” I said.
He squinted and grinned at me. “Wonder if her daughter will become a whale,” he said.
Carol liked figuring everything out about people because he had this very nosy, brassy mom who sort of primed him to get all the facts about the people he met. I’m not saying she was nosy just to judge people like everybody else around here, but more to see what she could get from them, because you always had the feeling she was one of those people who sort of lived by their wits. She was what you’d call a hip mom, and dressed hipper and more casually than the other neighborhood moms—really, I guess, in a more sexy way. Carol called her by her first name, and she did stuff like smoke pot with him once in a while—at least he said she did, but he could have been lying. But even if that was a lie, her whole attitude and the sort of confidential way she talked to us made her different from any other mom I knew.
Carol looked like his mom, too, like they were peas in a pod, with sandy hair in bangs and freckles and eyes they always squinted at you when they talked, even on cloudy days or when they were inside the house—I guess some people just have a knack for doing that, especially people who don’t, you know, tell you everything they’re thinking. I swear, they were, like, addicted to squinting. They even squinted at each other when they talked among themselves.
Suzie wasn’t there anymore; she’d gone back in next door to eat lunch. Carol and I went and sat inside the big screened-in porch in front of his house—the veranda, he called it—waiting for her to come back. Actually, his place was two houses: a duplex, one side of which various people moved into and out of all the time, which was a very rare thing in my neighborhood. It was sort of a house for transient types; at least that’s what my dad called it when I told him Carol lived there.
We sat in big wicker chairs with these dusty flower-embroidered cushions, and Carol went on to tell me that Suzie’s mom worked in some job for a contractor downtown, so Suzie was alone most of the time, and that she liked to ride her bike up and down the street a lot, and that she was all set to go to this private girls’ school out in some county about fifty miles away, for which she was going to have to be picked up by a yellow bus every morning, even though that detail wasn’t particularly relevant right then, because it was just the start
