“I'm the CEO of an online advertising company,” I tell her with a slight shrug. She glances at me with wide eyes, surprised, and I'm secretly (well, not so secretly) pleased by her reaction. I have to work with people all day long, every day, who know what I do and the weight it carries, but for some reason, I'm happy that Summer's impressed.
But she isn't. Not...exactly.
“Wow. Good for you,” she tells me, taking a sip of beer. She tosses her braid over her shoulders and gives a little shrug, a noncommittal sort of shrug. “It's not what I thought you'd end up doing, but that's pretty exciting. CEO. Wow. It must have taken a lot of work to get there.”
Again, my hackles rise. How could she possibly think she knows me? “Really?” I ask her, my voice sharp. “What did you think I'd be doing?”
Summer glances at me with a disarming smile, her teeth bright in the encroaching darkness. “I thought you were going to be a writer,” she tells me, with another shrug. She glances away from me, lifting the beer to her lips. Her neck curves gently in the darkness, and my eyes, unbidden, are drawn to it.
My mouth is dry as I clear my throat. “How did you know I wrote?” I ask her then.
She glances at me sidelong in the twilight, setting the can down on the floor of the porch beside her feet. “It's all your sister talked about,” says Summer, her mouth lifted into a sweet curve of a smile.
Her words feel like a punch to the gut. As if someone used all of their strength and curled their fist into my belly. I hiss out a breath, and then I lift the can with a shaking hand to my mouth, swallowing the cold beer as quickly as I can. I drink down the entire contents of the can as Summer breaks another can off of the six pack, opening it and handing it to me without another word.
Finally, one beer in me, another started, I manage to croak, “What did my sister say about it?”
Summer takes a meditative sip of her beer and uncrosses her legs, stretching overhead. “Tiffany was really in awe of you, you know,” she tells me with a sidelong glance. “She was obsessed with the story you wrote for her, told me all about it. We made our Barbies play out a few scenes from it, even.”
I'm mesmerized, as much as talking about all of this makes my heart ache profusely. I straighten a little. I have to ask, so I do: “Which story?” I murmur.
Summer laughs a little, shaking her head. “The one about the unicorn,” she tells me.
I laugh then, too, because I have to. God, it's been such a long time since I thought about that story...
I wrote Tiffany the ridiculously titled “The Unicorn Princess” (it was a product of the eighties as much as I was) for her tenth birthday and gave it to her about six months before she drowned. I'd written the “book” on a word processor and printed it out, sewing the punched holes in the pages together with string. I presented it to my sister rolled up and tied with ribbon in a shoe box I'd covered in glue and glitter.
Tiffany had opened the shoe box with glowing, happy eyes and then spent an hour or so carefully reading the printed words until she was done. Then she demanded more of the story, because—like most of the stories that I'd written for Tiffany—I'd ended this one on a cliffhanger, when the unicorn princess had just realized that one of her unicorn friends was also in line for the unicorn throne. Why unicorn politics was so exciting to a ten-year-old girl, I'll never know. It was probably because, again, it was the eighties, and love of unicorns was one of the most important things that came out of that decade, besides the music and the big hair.
“Wow,” I tell Summer then, clearing my throat, which is suddenly too tight with emotion. I hide my discomfort by taking another very long sip of my beer, tilting my head back so that my gaze moves upward, to the surrounding trees and the first star of the night that's peeking out from between the branches far above. “I haven't thought about that story in a very long time,” I finally say, tilting my gaze back to earth. Back to Summer.
It's getting very dark, and I can just make out Summer's outline, the curve of her thighs and hips, the swell of her breasts under her tank top, the lovely flow of her shoulders and neck. The first few fireflies of the season are beginning to wink on and off in the campground behind her, giving her form a strange, soft sort of glow. Summer lifts her own can of beer to her mouth, tilting her head back, and I follow the curve of her neck again with my eyes, that graceful curve that leads down to her collarbone and to her toned arms—and then I stiffen in my chair.
She's wearing a ring on her left hand.
“So,” I say, breathing out, anxious to change the topic, stop talking about the story, about my sister. Anxious to take the conversation to safe, mundane ground. “You and your husband run this place? It must be so nice to own a campground.” I'm resorting to the sort of chitchat that I use in board meetings with people I have nothing to say to, with whom I share nothing in common.