Poison Ink Read online

  Until recently. Things had been tense at home over the past few months. Sammi had a feeling her father could have avoided working today if he had really wanted to, but instead, he’d wanted to avoid his wife. It made Sammi sad, so she tried not to dwell on it. She’d always been much closer to her mother than to her father, which seemed sort of inevitable, since her father wasn’t around much. Her dad could be charming and funny when he wanted to be, but much of the time, it seemed like his mind was somewhere else. Her mother had told her a thousand times that it had nothing to do with her, but Sammi couldn’t help thinking she’d disappointed her father somehow. Otherwise, why didn’t he make more of an effort to be home with them, to act the way Sammi thought a dad was supposed to act?

  Lately he’d been more distant than ever. But at least one good thing had come from that: at a time when a lot of kids she knew were doing their best to avoid their parents entirely, Sammi and her mother had become closer than ever.

  Today was the perfect example. A picnic at the lake, lazing around together, a splash in the water—it had all sounded great when her mom had brought it up. Sammi knew it was just what her mother needed, especially with the escalating tension at home. So they chatted like girlfriends and drank lemonade and ate mozzarella and tomato sandwiches on focaccia bread from the cooler.

  After lunch, Linda sat in her beach chair reading a novel by Michael Connelly. Sammi had brought her guitar along. She would never have lugged the acoustic to the beach, but the lakeshore—a hundred yards of sand and dirt—didn’t have as much blowing grit and wind as the beach. They sat just at the edge of the shadows thrown by the row of tall trees so they could retreat into the shade if they wanted to. The lake was crowded, but not nearly as busy as the beaches would be today. Radios played, but only distantly, and none so loud that they distracted Sammi.

  On the edge of her chair, she sat with her acoustic across her thighs and strummed one of her favorite old Jack Johnson songs, “Banana Pancakes.” When her fingers were limber and her memory had caught up to the rhythm of the song, she sang along quietly.

  “Can’t you see that it’s just raining? Ain’t no need to go outside.”

  The irony made her smile.

  No rain today. The sky stretched into the distance, forever blue, and the sun beat down on them. Thankfully, the humidity that had lingered through much of the summer was gone, and there was a breeze off the lake. Sammi loved the waterfall noise of the leaves rustling on the trees.

  Worried about the sun, she dragged her chair into the shade, putting distance between herself and her mother. Wrapped up in her book, Mom didn’t even seem to notice. Most everyone at the lake had slathered himself with sun-block and was enjoying the fry time. Sammi preferred the shade, preferred to be out of the spotlight. Her guitar brought her plenty of attention, but she did not seek it. If people wandered over, drawn by a shared love of music, they were welcome. But guys who just wanted to flirt with the cute blond girl in cutoffs and a bikini top could ogle her from a distance.

  “Play something else,” a voice said.

  Sammi looked up. A guy stood just at the edge of the shade, dark hair and sleek, muscled body dripping from the water. He pushed a hand through his hair, shedding water, and smiled.

  Cute. Very cute.

  “What do you want to hear?”

  He shrugged. “Whatever you feel like playing.”

  Good answer, Sammi thought.

  Her fingers danced along the frets as she picked out the opening notes of Amanda Marshall’s “Love Is My Witness.” Keeping her voice low, not wanting to put on a show for the whole lake, she started to sing.

  His smile brightened. Sammi felt warm, even in the shade. Even with the breeze.

  Curious, a few other guys and two girls, apparently all friends, wandered over to listen. They kept back from the shade, remaining in the sun, arms thrown over one another. One of the guys twisted around, tripping his buddy, and tossed him on the ground. They laughed and started to wrestle.

  Sammi couldn’t help rolling her eyes. She stopped singing, but her fingers kept playing the song.

  “What’s your name?” Cute Boy asked.

  She switched tunes, playing a bluesy little run. “My mother always told me not to talk to strangers.”

  “I’m Adam.”

  With a look of shock, she put her fingers over the strings to halt the music. “You’re kidding. My name’s Eve.”

  He blinked and for a second almost believed her. Then Sammi smiled and he knew she had been playing with him. Irritation and disappointment flashed in his eyes before he could hide them.

  “Sorry. Couldn’t resist,” she said. Her fingers moved on the guitar as if of their own accord, jumping through the rhythm of a song by the Shins. “I’m Sammi.”

  “You don’t look like a Sammi.”

  “My parents are the only people who’ve called me Samantha and survived.”

  “Teachers?”

  Sammi gave him a dark look. “Their graves litter the Merrimack Valley.”

  Adam grinned. Oh, she liked that grin.

  “Pull up some shade, Adam.”

  He sat beside her on the sand and they talked while she played, running through tunes from Maia Sharp, Bonnie Raitt, the Strokes, Jason Mraz, and Keane. She sang a little, talked a little, people came by and watched, asked her questions about the music, about her playing, wondered if she ever played for money. As soon as she had a license she planned to head down to Cambridge and start doing the street corner thing. T stations were a possibility, too, but she hated the idea of being down in the subway with the trains rumbling by. On the street, with the people, that’d be nice. Bookstores and cafés, too. But she was too young to play in bars.

  Adam turned out to be eighteen and had a car of his own, a junk heap that had gone from his father to his two older sisters before ending up with him. But it ran.

  “You feel like hanging out tonight? We could hit a movie. Or there’s this party these guys I know are having. End-of-summer bash.”

  A tremor went through Sammi. Guys flirted with her all the time, but not guys like Adam. Her opinion of teenage boys had not changed, but spending an hour or two talking to him had shaken it, that was for sure. He hadn’t used her music just as an introduction to talk to her. He spent as much time listening as he did talking, and it didn’t seem to bother him that his friends were having chicken fights in the water and playing Frisbee on the shore, enjoying themselves without him. Adam was content to just sit there with her.

  Sammi didn’t answer him at first. She played “Blackbird,” by the Beatles, and sang softly to the tune. Halfway through, she glanced at him. He hadn’t pushed the question, hadn’t asked again, but he also didn’t seem to be embarrassed that she had not replied yet. No awkwardness hung between them.

  “Not gonna happen tonight,” she said. She caught a glimpse of his disappointment, then forged ahead. “I’m sweaty and grimy. And my mother would be pissed—or at least hurt—if I blew her off to hang out with you. Tomorrow she’s taking me school shopping. Mother-daughter bonding stuff.”

  Adam held up a hand. “Okay. I get it.”

  She flipped her hair out of her face. “I’m rambling. I do that sometimes. Not often. Consider it a compliment. Point is, I’d love to hang out with you sometime. Just not this weekend.”

  Her cell phone was clipped to the pocket of her shorts. She took it off and tossed it to him. “Give me your number. I’ll text you.”

  Adam caught the phone and then looked at her, tilting his head like some kind of bird. “Will you?”

  “I just said I would.”

  That smile returned to his face and he nodded. “I hope you do.”

  He’d finished entering his phone number into her cell and handed it back to her. A couple of guys called to him, and when he turned, one of them whipped the Frisbee his way. Adam snatched it out of the air, then turned to glance at her.

  “I should get back. See you soon?”

&
nbsp; Sammi’s fingers danced along the neck of her guitar, and she began to strum, idly running through the chords of a song of her own that she’d been toying with for a while.

  “Definitely,” she said.

  Adam gave her one last look and then ran off. Sammi watched him play Frisbee with his friends for a while, playing without singing, without really focusing. A breeze rustled the leaves behind her, and then a strange feeling came over her, that instinctive certainty that someone was watching her. She glanced around and discovered that it was her mother. Mom had set her book aside and sat drinking a bottle of spring water she’d fetched from their cooler, watching Sammi.

  Her mother smiled, arching an eyebrow that indicated both curiosity about the boy Sammi’d been talking to and a kind of silent approval. Mother and daughter shared a grin.

  Sammi’s cell phone rang. For half a second, she wondered if Adam had pulled her number when he looked at the phone, if he might be calling her already, just to be charming. But as she looked up, she could see him up to his waist in the lake, whipping the Frisbee to one of the girls they had come with.

  The cell’s screen showed Deveaux, S. as the caller.

  “T.Q.,” Sammi said as she answered. “What’s up? Everything all right?”

  “Yeah. All good. Well, today, anyway. But it’s supposed to be a crappy day tomorrow, and it’s going to pour tomorrow night and all day Monday. Looks like we’re coming home early. I’m willing to bet Caryn and Letty do, too. So I was thinking tomorrow night we should have a sleepover. You guys can all crash at my house.”

  Sammi laughed. “Pajama party?”

  “I don’t think we’ll be doing each other’s nails, but yeah. We definitely should. Nothing like staying up all night gossiping to make sure we look our best on the first day of school.”

  “We can sleep on Monday,” Sammi said. “It sounds perfect. I just saw you guys last night, but I miss you already. What about Katsuko, though? What’s the weather supposed to be down at the Cape? I mean, her father’s probably too stubborn to come home even if it’s a monsoon.”

  T.Q. laughed. “Actually, I think they were supposed to come home tomorrow anyway. It was just for one night. I’ll leave a message on their machine.”

  “Did you talk to Letty and Caryn yet?”

  “I’m about to call them.”

  Sammi knew it was foolish, but it made her feel good to know that T.Q. had called her first. Sometimes she felt like the most ordinary one among her group of friends, as if there was nothing special about her. The one time she’d mentioned it, T.Q. had told her she had sidekick syndrome and needed to snap out of it. That had been followed by a litany of compliments. The girl was quiet, but she wrote in her journal and for the paper all day and night, so when she wanted to, she could always find the right words.

  “So, you’re in?” T.Q. asked. “And you’ll bring your guitar?”

  “Can’t wait. See you tomorrow.”

  2

  S ammi woke several times during the night to the rattling of her windows. Her curtains billowed in ghostly fashion, and she dragged her bedspread up to snuggle deeply underneath it. She dreamed of being lost in a city where everyone was a stranger to her, with nowhere to go, and with the sun about to set and ominous shadows seeming to reach out for her from every doorway and alley.

  In the morning she rose and shut her windows, pausing to peer out at the heavy clouds. The overcast sky hung like a shroud above the house, and the day had an odd, dreamlike quality about it, as though it were neither night nor day.

  She pulled on sweatpants and went downstairs, still rubbing sleep from her eyes. Her father sat at the kitchen table reading the Sunday Globe.

  “Morning, sweetie,” he said without looking up.

  “Morning.” Sammi studied her dad. He worked in computer software, the perfect executive, and he still looked entirely too neat and tidy for a day off. He had always been that way. Sundays had always been their day—the one day he paid attention to her—but even then he seemed as if he would rather have been at the office. Sammi wished she didn’t love him so much. It would’ve been so much easier if she didn’t care.

  “Your mother’s at the gym. I was just waiting for you to get up before I made the pancakes,” he said. “You ready for breakfast?”

  Pancakes were a huge part of their Sunday-morning tradition. Her father couldn’t cook anything else to save his life, but he made excellent pancakes. As long as he wasn’t out of town on business, Sunday morning always brought the ritual—pancakes, coffee, and the newspaper. For the past few weeks, her mother had made it a point not to be home during Sunday breakfast. Her father behaved like nothing was wrong, and Sammi wondered if he was pretending he didn’t notice she’d been avoiding him or was totally clueless. Neither would have surprised her.

  She wanted to yell at him, to shake him and make him see that their family was unraveling around him. Make him care. But she couldn’t do that. Their Sunday mornings meant the world to her, and if they were all she’d ever really get from her father, she wanted to hold on to them tightly. She wasn’t about to do anything to ruin the morning.

  “Sure. I’m just gonna jump in the shower first, though.”

  Her father looked up from his paper. “What’s the rush?”

  “Mom’s taking me school shopping, remember?”

  He nodded, frowning. “Right. Of course. I wondered what that pain I was feeling was all about. Now I realize it was my wallet bracing itself for attack.”

  Sammi smiled thinly. She almost summoned up a sharp comeback, but didn’t bother. Her father remembered his own rituals, and she appreciated that. But he knew school started on Tuesday and knew that Sammi and her mother went together on this day every year—their own ritual—yet he couldn’t be bothered to remember. She forgave him; he had a lot on his mind. But she didn’t feel like making a joke out of it.

  “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” she said. “Banana pancakes today?”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  She went back upstairs, peeled off her clothes, and turned on the shower. As always, music filled her mind. She sang a few lines from a Josh Ritter song, and then the notes changed in her head and she started to hum something new, a tune of her own. Thoughts drifted to what the day would bring, where she and her mother would shop, where they might go for lunch, and then to the sleepover at T.Q.’s that night.

  It wasn’t until she shut the water off and reached for her towel that she thought of Cute Adam. A smile blossomed on her face. When she had dried off, she went into her room, shut the door, and grabbed her cell phone, which had been charging overnight. She had a bunch of texts from the girls solidifying their plans for later and talking about how their shortened trips had been. All except Katsuko, of course, whose parents wouldn’t allow her to have a cell phone.

  Wrapped in a towel, she sat on the edge of her bed and sent Adam a text.

  Told u I would text. Your turn.

  Sammi had just zipped her jeans, her hair still wet, when her ring tone began to play. She snatched the phone up off the bed and saw his name on the screen.

  “Hello?”

  “Texting takes too long. I’m an immediate gratification kind of guy,” Adam said.

  “Yeah? You may be calling the wrong girl, then.”

  “What? Wait, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know. It’s called teasing. A lost art, I guess. You’ll have to brush up on it.”

  “Will I?”

  The question hung there. Her implication echoed in the silence.

  “My father’s making pancakes and my stomach’s growling,” she said. “Did you just call to tell me you don’t like to text?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Sammi remained silent.

  “See that, with the teasing?” Adam said. “I’m a fast learner.”

  “Not bad for a beginner.”

  “Just wondering if you’d maybe want to go out and get some dinner Friday night.”

&
nbsp; “That could work. You’d have to pick me up here. I think my parents would want to get a look at you, just in case they have to give your description to the police.”

  Adam laughed. “Nice to know where I stand.”

  “Talk later?”

  “Tonight?” he asked.

  “I’m sleeping over a friend’s house.”

  “You could call me.”

  “I might. Or you could learn to text.”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  Sammi ended the call and flicked the phone shut, then brushed out her hair before it got completely crazy. Her father called up to her from downstairs that the pancakes were ready. Sammi went down to the kitchen but found she didn’t have much appetite. She forced herself to eat a couple of pancakes just so her dad didn’t feel unappreciated. They made father-daughter small talk over the newspaper, and once, he noted what a good mood she was in this morning. Pleased that he’d noticed even that much, Sammi mumbled something about clothes shopping but didn’t mention Adam.

  She had been fleetingly involved with a handful of boys, all of whom had been her friends first. Guys from school. Most of them were people she still knew. Immature, goofy boys who had hurt and disappointed her. Chances were that Cute Adam was no different. But she felt differently. Maybe it just came down to Sammi being older now, or to Adam being someone entirely new to her, a guy who had just come up to her at the lake because he liked her music.

  Whatever the reason, she felt like she was entering into strange, unknown territory. More than likely, nothing would come of it. She knew the way guys were wired.

  But for the moment, at least, Sammi liked it.

  The floor of T.Q.’s bedroom was as padded as a cell in an insane asylum, thanks to all the sleeping bags. Caryn and Letty lay on their bellies on the bed, and the others sprawled on the floor. They had speculated about some of the classmates they hadn’t seen over the summer and talked with dread about their new teachers and classes. T.Q.’s mother had gotten an assortment of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and all the pints lay empty in a stack in the hand-painted trash can in the corner.