and steps aside, I put the car in drive and peel out of the driveway, a bright red brontosaurus craning its neck around the house as I leave them behind me.
DAY 2
Sidney
Riverton is only four hours from where I live, but it’s like another world up here. One with grocery stores that take checks but not credit cards, and close at five o’clock sharp. All of the houses have names, like Blue Thunder, Copper Cove, and Lake House A. Where random businesses crop up out of the woods, and instead of parking lots, everyone just parks on the side of the road for a quarter mile in either direction.
As I pull up to River Depot in my dad’s car the next day, cars are everywhere, even on a Monday. I see the swarm of red shirts down by the canoes as I cross the little bridge over the river. It feels like forever before I find a break in the cars and can wedge myself between two with out-of-state plates, and set out for the big brown building. River Depot is a small, brown log building from the street, but beyond its doors it opens into multiple rooms and levels built into the hill that slopes from the road to the river.
This is the third summer Kara has worked the desk at River Depot. Her grandma lives three houses down from Five Pines—a little cabin passed down through Kara’s family from back before the lake became a trendy tourist spot. We met my first summer here when I was twelve, and I accidentally stole her inner tube. And by stole, I mean it washed up on our beach one morning after a bad storm, and with no way of knowing where it came from, Kara found me two days later, lying on the hot-pink plastic tube where I had tethered it to the end of our dock.
She dumped me off of it while I lay there with my eyes closed, and when I surged out of the water, completely bewildered, she laughed at me like a wild little water pixie. Which turned out to be a pretty accurate description of Kara. She’s tiny—barely four foot nine—and even though she makes me feel like a giant at five foot eight, she’s one of my favorite people in the whole world.
We were inseparable that first summer—the only summer Asher’s family wasn’t with us. Kara brought her float to our dock, and we strapped it next to the yellow version my parents bought me at The Little Store down the road. She crashed dinners when her grandma let her, and the two of us were wild little summer pixies together, covering our toes in glittery polish on the deck and pretending to fish out of a little rowboat, even though neither of us ever caught anything and would have been too freaked out to pull a fish off of a hook even if we did. Some days, we’d be joined by Nadine and Charlie’s daughter, Lindsay, who was a year older than us, and would get dropped off to swim and drive around the WaveRunner docked at Five Pines. But by the next summer, Kara had turned fourteen and was working at River Depot in the afternoons, and when Lindsay made an occasional appearance she was more interested in my new neighbor, Asher.
By the time I make it to River Depot I’m sweaty and hot. I find it hard to believe any canoe trip can be worth this kind of dedication, but the massive lines outside the gazebo where they sign people up tells me I must be wrong. I push past the crowds and into the gift shop, which is dead and deserted compared to outside.
“Yesssss,” Kara squeals from behind the counter as I round a rack of postcards and shot glasses, all covered in the iconic images of a Michigan summer—lighthouses and waves and towering golden sand dunes. “Now it’s summer!”
She wraps tiny arms around me from across the counter, ignoring someone approaching with a box of graham crackers and a bottle of lighter fluid. “When did you get in?” she asks.
“Saturday night.” I glance at the man next to me, but Kara isn’t fazed.
She gives me a quick up and down, like she’s checking me out. “You’re still in one piece,” she says, looking amused with herself. “A whole day in, and no serious damage yet?”
“We’re too busy unpacking,” I say, wondering what Asher has planned for me this summer.