tail end of August in 1994, and all of us were eighteen and free, although Jake could’ve easily passed for almost thirty. To look at Nancy, it was hard to believe she was dating Jake Renshaw, who with his flattop cut and his tattoos looked like trouble (and sometimes was). But then it was hard to picture a kid like me with Geri. Geri and Jake were twins and six feet tall to the inch—which meant they both had two inches on me, something that always bothered me when I had to rise on my toes to give Geri a kiss. They were strong, lean, limber, and blond, and they grew up jumping dirt bikes and doing after-school detentions. Jake had a criminal record. The only reason Geri didn’t have one as well, Jake insisted, was that she’d never been caught.
Nancy, on the other hand, wore glasses with lenses as big as tea saucers and went everywhere with a book clutched to her flat chest. Her father was a veterinarian, her mother a librarian. As for me, Paul Whitestone, I longed to have a tattoo and a criminal record of my own, but instead I had an acceptance letter from Dartmouth and a notebook full of one-act plays.
Jake, Geri, and I had made the run to Cape Maggie in Jake Renshaw’s 1982 Corvette, a car as sleek as a cruise missile and almost as fast. It was a two-seater, and no one would let us ride in it today the way we did then: Geri in my lap, Jake behind the wheel, and a six-pack of beer behind the stick shift—which we polished off while we were en route. We had come down from Lewiston to meet Nancy, who’d worked on the pier all summer long, selling fried dough. When she finished her shift, the four of us were going to drive nine miles to my parents’ summer cottage on Maggie Pond. My parents were home in Lewiston, and we’d have the place to ourselves. It seemed like a good spot to make our final stand against adulthood.
Maybe I felt guilty about offending the ticket lady at Big Bertha, but Nancy was there to clear my conscience. She touched her glasses and said, “Mrs. Gish over there pickets Planned Parenthood every Sunday, with faked-up pictures of dead babies. Which is pretty funny, since her husband owns half the booths on the pier, including Funhouse Funnel Cakes, where I work, and he’s tried to cop a feel on just about every girl who ever worked for him.”
“Does he, now?” Jake asked. He was grinning, but there was a slow, sly chill in his voice that I knew from experience was a warning that we were wading into dangerous territory.
“Never mind, Jake,” Nancy said, and she kissed his cheek. “He only paws high-school girls. I’m too old for him now.”
“You ought to point him out sometime,” Jake said, and he looked this way and that along the pier, as if scouting for the guy right then and there.
Nancy put her hand on his chin and forcibly turned his head to look at her. “You mean I ought to ruin our night by letting you get arrested and kicked out of the service?” He laughed at her, but suddenly she was cross with him. “You dick around, Jake, and you could do five years. The only reason you aren’t there already is the marines took you—I guess because our nation’s military-industrial complex can always use more cannon fodder. It’s not your job to get even with every creep who ever wandered down the harbor walk.”
“It’s not your job to make sure I get out of Maine,” Jake said, his tone almost mild. “And if I wind up in the state prison, at least I’d get to see you on the weekends.”
“I wouldn’t visit you,” she said.
“Yes you would,” he told her, kissing her cheek, and she blushed and looked upset, and we all knew she would. It was embarrassing how tightly she was wrapped around Jake’s finger, how badly she wanted to make him happy. I understood exactly how she felt, because I was stuck on Geri just the same way.
Six months before, we had all gone bowling at Lewiston Lanes, something to do to kill a Thursday night. A drunk in the next lane made an obscene moan of appreciation when Geri bent over to get a ball, noisily admiring her rear in her tight jeans. Nancy told him not to be