of a response, but I forced myself to raise my hand and wave back.
The next day when I went to my reading spot, it was hot and muggy, the kind of day when you wake up sweaty and take a cold shower, and start sweating again as soon as you get out of the shower. I pulled on my green bikini. I’d had it for two years but my body hadn’t developed much. It fit up top, although it was a little tight down below, where I now had hips. I pulled on a pair of shorts—ones I’d asked my mother to buy me earlier that summer. They were madras plaid and she said they made me look like a Kennedy, but she bought them for me anyway. I took my book and a bottle of sunscreen to the chair that faced Chet’s apartment. I hated the sun, and I hated heat. I had red hair and freckly skin so all the sun did was make my freckles darker. I slathered myself with the sunscreen, trying to remember if the high number on the bottle was a good thing or a bad thing. I kept an eye on the apartment and pretty soon I saw Chet peering through the window. I could make out the orange tip of his cigarette winking on and off. Fifteen minutes passed, and I was listening to my tape of Les Mis and reading Sleeping Murder when Chet emerged with a mug of coffee, descended the studio steps, and casually wandered toward where I was lounging.
“Hi there, Lily,” he said, standing about five feet away, the already high sun lighting up the hair along his bare arms and shoulders so that he almost shimmered. He smelled like he hadn’t showered in days.
I said hi back.
“What are you reading?”
I started to hold up the book cover toward him dismissively, then remembered that I needed to be a little bit nice so that he wouldn’t suspect anything when I came to his apartment later. “Agatha Christie,” I said. “It’s a Miss Marple.”
“Cool,” he said, and slurped at his coffee mug. Like everything else he owned, the mug was covered in paint. “Things okay with you?” he asked.
I knew that what he wanted to ask was if things were okay with us, with what had happened the night he came into the room. He wanted to know if I remembered him being in there. “Yeah,” I said.
He rocked his head back and forth. “It’s fucking hot out here, man.”
I shrugged and returned my eyes to the book. I’d done enough and I really didn’t want to talk to Chet anymore. I pretended to read but I could feel him still studying me. Sweat had pooled where the two triangles of my bikini top met, and a single drop was inching its way down my rib cage. I willed myself to not wipe the sweat away with Chet watching, even though the unbearable progress of the drop felt as though Chet’s eyes were slicing me with a razor. He took another loud sip from his mug and wandered off.
My father came back. There was a lot of yelling and some tears. The Russian left, and for some time, my parents were constantly in each other’s company, drinking like they used to on the unfinished back patio, listening to jazz albums. I was glad that my father was back for a few reasons, one of them being that with my parents’ attention turned toward one another, I could focus on getting rid of Chet. I had set up everything perfectly in the meadow, the pile of rocks growing every day, and the rope in place down the old well. It had just become a matter of picking the perfect day, a day when no one would see me cross the front yard to where Chet was living, or see the two of us walk together into the woods. That day came on a quiet Thursday three days after the return of my father. I spent the afternoon in my room rereading Crooked House and listening to the muffled sounds of my parents drinking. They’d started early, sharing a bottle of wine at lunch, then moving to the patio outside, drinking gin and listening to music. When the last record ended, a new one hadn’t begun, and I heard their bedroom door thunk shut, then laughter. I looked out my own bedroom window; it had just become dusk, the shadows from