I smiled at our identical reactions. “Frank got to the customer first. Had already tied him up to tow him in.”
“Oh, well, that was nice of him.”
“Too nice?” I asked.
My dad tousled my hair. “Ah, don’t be so cynical, kid. One can never be too nice.”
I disagreed. Frank could be too nice, and there had to be a reason.
By Monday night, my skin felt hot from too much sun. I hadn’t applied enough sunblock for the amount of time I’d spent outside over the weekend. This afternoon, it had taken me an entire hour to teach one tourist family how to use a paddleboat. They kept turning it in circles.
I flipped on my ceiling fan and lay back on my bed, letting the air cool my skin. I reached over to my nightstand and retrieved my phone, then clicked on the icon that was like a portal straight into everyone’s lives. I scrolled down the page of pictures to see how everyone else had spent their weekend. Most of the people I followed were acquaintances from school and yet I felt like I knew way more about them than I should. Maybe that’s what kept me from posting more than I did: I liked to keep my life to myself.
I paused at a picture of Hunter. He was at some sort of a ranch with horses in the background. He wore a baseball cap but was surrounded by people in cowboy hats. Beneath the pic, he had written: I guess I’m going to ride a horse for the first time. The things friends can talk me into.
I clicked on the COMMENT button and typed: Careful, or you might have to trade out your hat soon.
My finger hovered over the ENTER button. I hadn’t commented on one of his posts in weeks. I deleted the comment and quickly called Alana.
“Hey,” she said. “Your child labor is done for the day?”
“They pay me.”
“Yeah, yeah. All I know is that it sucks that you are busy on basically every major holiday from May through September.”
“Love you, too.”
She grumbled something under her breath.
“Guess who I saw on Saturday?” I said. The marina had kept me too busy to hang out or talk with her at all until now.
“Who?”
“Frank Young.” I filled her in on what had happened with the WaveRunner and how Frank had asked for a truce.
“What does he want?” Alana asked when I had finished my story.
“Right? That’s exactly what I wondered.” I was glad Alana agreed with me that his intentions couldn’t possibly be pure.
“Good thing I’m his partner in podcasting. I can keep an eye on him.”
“Yes, please do. And report any suspicious activity.”
She laughed. “I will infiltrate enemy lines to figure this out for you.”
I opened the top drawer of my desk, pulled out a half full bottle of aloe, and began applying it to my shoulders. “How was your weekend?” I asked.
“Very productive. I completely randomly ran into Diego at the Oak Court grocery store.”
“Completely randomly you just happened to be in a grocery store thirty minutes away from where you live at the same time Diego was there?”
“Okay, so I may have gotten some intel.”
“From who?”
“Remember that guy I talked to who was hanging out with Diego at lunch? Bennett?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes I text him and ask him what he’s doing. Then he tells me, and occasionally he’s with Diego so then voilà, I find out where Diego is.”
I shook my head with a laugh. “You seriously should consider being a detective when you grow up.”
“No. Then I wouldn’t get to be a chef … or a newscaster. Or maybe I could have my own cooking show, and it would be like the best of both worlds.”
“That does sound like the perfect career path for you.” I put the cap back on the bottle of aloe. “So? You ran into Diego at the grocery store and what happened?”
“We talked for like fifteen minutes. It was great.”
“Only fifteen minutes?”
“I had convinced my mom we needed groceries and she was checking out, so I had to leave.”
“Oh.” I popped the aloe bottle back in my desk and sat down on my bed again. “And?”
“And what?” she asked.
“Were you able to listen to his voice and confirm he was the guy who called in to the podcast?”
“I was able to listen to his voice. But I’m still not sure he was the mystery caller.”
I pursed my lips. She may not have been sure, but I was fairly certain. I’d have to talk to him myself.
I sat cross-legged on my bed, my Math textbook on one side of me, my History book on the other. In my ears, the Movie Mashup podcast was playing. My attempt at multitasking wasn’t going well.
Jerry, the podcast host, was saying, “The problem: They made the monster talk. They turned him from a horrific monster à la Alien to the relatable, sympathetic monster of E.T. who just needed to be sent back to his motherland. It wasn’t scary. I found myself rooting for the misunderstood monster. And when they blow his head off in the end, I was angry. Listeners? Agree or disagree?”
Jerry hosted the show by himself. He occasionally took a caller. He played sound bites of movies, did reviews, and rarely had anything good to say about them. I wondered why he watched them at all, when he hadn’t liked a single one so far. Half the time he made me question whether I had really liked a movie I had seen, but he was funny, so I could forgive him.
My mom appeared in my doorway.
“Hey,” she said with a smile. “Listening to a new podcast?”
I tugged my earbuds out and nodded. “I know it doesn’t technically count as homework,” I said. But Wednesday was nearly here again, and I didn’t feel like anything would be different than the week before without some extra preparing.
“It’s okay,” Mom said. “You seem to be having a good time in that class.”
It had been more stressful than fun, but that wouldn’t prove the point that I wanted to eventually make to my parents: that I could love something else and still choose the lake.
“Yeah, it’s … different,” I said.
Mom smiled. “I listened to your second podcast yesterday. It was good.”
“I still have some work to do.”
“I just hope you’re not getting graded on the amount of words you say per episode.” Mom winked at me, as if it was a joke, but it felt like her passive-aggressive way of telling me I needed to talk more. I didn’t need her to tell me; I already knew.
“Well, I better get back to this.” I held up an earbud.
“Good luck.”
As I walked through the parking lot the next morning, I saw a guy holding a poster next to a car filled with balloons. Had someone driven that thing with all those balloons in it? That didn’t seem safe. The poster read: It took a lot of hot air to ask you to the Fall Festival. Please don’t deflate me with a no. A girl read the poster with both hands over her mouth. Then she squealed and threw her arms around the boy’s neck.
“Isn’t that sweet?” Alana said, coming up beside me with her bookbag on one shoulder.
“Nothing says sweet like using ‘hot air’ in a sentence.”
“How did Hunter ask you last year? I forgot.”
“He walked up to me while I was getting my Math book out of my locker and said, ‘So … Fall Festival?’ ”
Alana snorted. “And you said yes to that?”