Five

Summer was always an awk­ward sea­son for Josephine Brooks. By eight in the morn­ing, it was often too hot to go run­ning, so she had to wake up at sun­rise to jog before the tem­per­a­ture got too high. But that meant that the only item on her to-do list—work out—was crossed off before the rest of the world even got out of bed.

And it’s true, too, that Josephine’s house wasn’t the most enter­tain­ing place to waste away long sum­mer days, either. Her and her mother had a tele­vi­sion, but it was a small and ancient black & white set, pur­chased before Josephine’s birth, for occa­sional PBS view­ings. For the last few months the screen had been blocked by a stack of text­books that Josephine’s mother was eval­u­at­ing for the upcom­ing school year. The rab­bit ears had gone miss­ing a few years before—Josephine sus­pected that her sis­ter had taken them with her to L.A.—so now the only sta­tions they could get were a stat­icky NBC and four sep­a­rate “Jesus chan­nels” which, of course, came in crystal-clear. So TV wasn’t really an option.

Neither was the Internet. Josephine had a com­puter for school­work, but she wasn’t allowed to have it in her room; her mother, after a rare night of insom­nia and tele­vi­sion, had decided that the inter­net was pop­u­lated almost exclu­sively by sex­ual preda­tors who pos­sessed end­less tricks for ensnar­ing under­age girls. Therefore, Josephine had to move her com­puter into the “office,” where the mon­i­tor faced the door­way. For about two weeks, Josephine’s mother would silently sneak up and spy on her daugh­ter as she looked at run­ning web­sites, looked up diabetic-friendly recipes, and shopped unsuc­cess­fully for a new bicycle.

Eventually, Josephine’s mom was sat­is­fied that her daugh­ter wasn’t trawl­ing the web for sex­ual part­ners, or run­ning a voyeuris­tic web­cam, or inno­cently falling into the ingen­u­ous trap of a pedophile, and she stopped spy­ing on her. In her mother’s defense, she had never seri­ously thought that Josephine was up to some­thing like that, but that episode of Dateline had been very con­vinc­ing.

The Internet never really inter­ested Josephine that much to begin with, how­ever, and after an hour online she would would come away feel­ing bored and itchy. One of the few things Josephine remem­bered about her father was that he would lul­laby her with a song from his own child­hood, one that went “All the lonely peo­ple, where do they all come from?” Well, Josephine didn’t know where they came from, but she knew where they went: they all had blogs.

(Also, the office was actu­ally her sis­ter Catherine’s old room, kept pretty much as it had been years before, and Josephine didn’t like being in there.)

Both of her par­ents were academics—her father had been a teacher at Beaumonde before he died of lym­phatic can­cer when Josephine was in sec­ond grade—so their house had a lot of books, and Josephine did read a lot. In fact, she was prob­a­bly one of the most well-read mem­bers of the Gang, but nobody knew because she never made a big deal about it. (Also, she sus­pected that oth­ers got more out of books than she did.)

For the last few years she’d been work­ing through her father’s library. Every now and then she would find some light under­lin­ing or a small dot in the mar­gin. Occasionally, she’d even come across a lit­tle note in his hand­writ­ing: a few weeks before she’d found a sec­tion in Benvenuto Cellini’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy brack­eted off, with “Ridiculous!” pen­ciled in softly in her father’s hand. It had made her happy for days afterwards.

Unfortunately, Josephine couldn’t spend four­teen hours a day read­ing, despite her best efforts. What else was there, though? She wrote in her jour­nal, but as sum­mer stretched on and the days became longer, her diary got caught in a sort of feed­back loop where the only thing she had to write about was hav­ing writ­ten in the diary the day before. It was depressing.

The after­noon that The Gang's meet­ing was being orga­nized, Josephine was in fact just fin­ish­ing up her jour­nal entry for the day. She wrote about her jog, and how long she had writ­ten in her diary yes­ter­day, and (just to have some­thing to write, really) an essen­tially point­less story about find­ing a dead cater­pil­lar on the back porch as she did her before-bed stretches.

She usu­ally wrote in her room, but today she had felt cooped up and rest­less, so she’d moved to the kitchen table. Her mother, Dr. Ellen Hayes, the head­mistress of Beaumonde Academy, was sit­ting across from her, work­ing on a grant pro­posal for the school. The house was com­pletely silent, as her mother pre­ferred to write with­out music. This was some­thing she picked up from Josephine’s father, who often decried the mod­ern world’s “mania for con­stant distraction.”

Josephine reread what she’d just writ­ten with a sort of flinch­ing dis­gust at what she saw as a use­less entry told with the most unin­ter­est­ing and straight­for­ward prose pos­si­ble. She closed the plain fake-leather journal—it was actu­ally a sketch­book, and she had twelve iden­ti­cal vol­umes stowed away under her bed—and frowned at the blank cover. She was expe­ri­enc­ing a vague emo­tion, some­thing she couldn’t quite put her fin­ger on. She was…anxious? No, that’s not quite right. She was list­less? No. She flipped through her men­tal the­saurus, try­ing to come up with the right word for what she was feel­ing. Finally, she real­ized what it was.

“Mom?” she said.

Her mother held up a fin­ger and con­tin­ued writ­ing, finally com­ing to the end of her sen­tence. “Yes?”

“I’m…I’m bored.”

Dr. Hayes capped her pen and tilted her head. “I thought it was nice, the two of us sit­ting here…”

“No, it is nice, I just mean in gen­eral. I’m bored. Summer days are too long. What am I sup­posed to do all day? How does a per­son fill up a day?’

“Oh, honey, just wait a few years…the world has a way of answer­ing that ques­tion for you.” This caused her mother to gig­gle a lit­tle, which briefly angered Josephine. Seeing this, her mother tried a dif­fer­ent approach. “Why don’t you walk down to David’s house, see what he’s doing?” David Sebastian, another Gangmember, had lived three doors away from Josephine since grade school.

“No, he’s been weird ever since Mr. Budd got arrested. Well, we all have, but him especially.”

Her mother tapped the table with her pen. “Well, let’s see. I’d let you bor­row the car to go…wherever, but I need to run over to St. Odo’s at 5:30. Do you want to come with me? Maybe a few of your old teach­ers will be there.”

“Not really. I won­der what Grandpa’s doing?”

“I’m sure he’s at the jew­elry store. You know, a cou­ple weeks ago he sug­gested get­ting you a sum­mer job down there, but I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

“I guess I’m not. I don’t know. I’m just bored.”

Her mother sighed and looked at her, with what Josephine thought was a not-entirely-sympathetic look. “Maybe tonight, after my meet­ing, we can go see a movie. There’s a doc­u­men­tary about Uganda play­ing downtown…”

“Maybe.” Josephine folded her arms on the table and put her head down, her chin on the diary.

“Oh, I talked to your sis­ter. She said she has some big news, but she didn’t want to ruin the sur­prise because it might fall through.”

“Maybe she’s knocked up,” Josephine mumbled.

“Josephine!”

“Or maybe she’s get­ting married.”

“That would be nice,” her mom said. “I just hope it doesn’t involve her quit­ting her job again.”

Josephine smirked a lit­tle. “I don’t know, I thought her designer t-shirt com­pany was a good idea.”

“I can never tell when you’re jok­ing, Josephine, but if you are: be nice. Your sister’s just ambi­tious. She’ll find her place in this world eventually.”

“I just hope she finds my bike…”

“You really need to let the bike thing go, okay? She was mov­ing to a big city, I thought you were about to out­grow bike rid­ing. Do you want a new bike for your birthday?”

“No, I’m too old for bikes.”

Her mom stood up and put her papers back in a manila folder. “Well, you’re cer­tainly in a mood today…”

Josephine sighed. Her mother was right, she was being a brat. “No, I’m sorry. I’m just…you know.”

“You’re bored.”

“Right.”

“Well, honey, I’m sure some­thing will turn up. Look, I’ll be right back.” Dr. Hayes opened the kitchen door and stepped out­side. She had quit smok­ing when Josephine was a lit­tle kid, but lately she had been dat­ing this guy (his name was Roger!) and she’d started back up again. Every morn­ing, when Josephine crept out of the dark­ened house, she would always grab her mother’s impro­vised ash­tray and empty it out in the garage, not­ing with dis­may that over the last few weeks the num­ber of cig­a­rettes had grown from three to four and now to five.

Josephine stayed at the table, her head rest­ing on her fore­arms, when she heard the odd­est sound. It was a loud chirp­ing, like an annoyed robot bird, and it was com­ing from the back of the house. Josephine straight­ened up. Was it the smoke detector?

Josephine crept down the hall­way, fol­low­ing the bird call. It seemed the sound was com­ing from her room. She won­dered what she had in her room that would make a noise like that. They’d moved her com­puter out, so that wasn’t it. When she got back to her bed­room, the noise had stopped.

She looked around, con­fused and lit­tle bit freaked out. Finally, she saw that her cell phone was blink­ing on its charger and the screen said 1 missed call – Andre. Now, I’m sure it was obvi­ous to you that it was a phone ring­ing, but nobody ever called Josephine and it really never occurred to her that some­body would.

Josephine had never liked the idea of phones, frankly. There were machines that—if the right but­tons were pushed—made a bell ring in her house? It was weird. She sat on the edge of her unmade bed and gen­tly, as though it were very hot, picked up the phone and stared at it. Why in the world was Andre call­ing her? What did he want?

She was still star­ing at the phone a few sec­onds later when a loud beep announced that she had a new voice­mail. Josephine yelped, almost drop­ping the phone, and quickly put it back on the charger. She scur­ried out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her just in case.

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