She sat up from her position and said, “Fine,” as casually as she could muster.
Hazel followed Eve, who had her phone clutched between her fingers, down toward the lake’s edge. Hazel took note of the workshop as they passed it and pressed her ear in that direction to see if she could get even a hint of what Silas was up to in there, but she didn’t hear anything.
As they traipsed down the path and toward the water, Hazel made out the silhouette of a figure lying on the dock. It was almost certainly a man’s body, legs splayed out and hands resting behind the head. With just a few more steps closer toward it, the outline of the sweeping curls of hair, the broad hairy chest and shoulders, and the shape of the aviator sunglasses revealed themselves. By now, Eve had caught on, too.
“Oh my god, is that Silas, literally doing nothing when he told us he was working all day?”
It couldn’t be anyone other than Silas. As they got closer, they could identify a cooler filled with icy beers and an upright fishing rod lodged into the dock keeping him company as he lay there. It was almost comical how bad a liar he was. He could have gone anywhere that wasn’t that dock.
“He really wanted an excuse to get away from us, huh?” Eve threw her hands up, apparently stricken but not showing any signs of distress. “Ugh, he’s so moody sometimes! He did this last year, too, but whatever.”
Hazel, on the other hand, felt as if she had been punched in the gut. She thought of her mother. The great void in Hazel’s life Jane had created by inviting Cam and the twins into their home. The gaping hole that Hazel felt Silas and Eve to be filling. All of a sudden, she was empty again. Stuck in a sad limbo of home and alone.
The feeling was compact and familiar. She felt it right in her heart.
“Whatever.” Eve shrugged and pushed Hazel into a beam of sunlight caressing the trunk of a tree. “Stand there and look out onto the lake. I’ll snap a few and we can decide which one to post.”
Hazel debated whether this was what she’d come all the way to the lake for. And in the absence of answers, she stood next to the tree and looked out toward the lake like Eve told her. She couldn’t help but stare at Silas’s body sprawled on that dock as she did it, though.
“Why do you think he lied to us?” Hazel blurted out. She couldn’t keep it inside. She was so scared it would all come crumbling down.
“Who knows! Parents are weird. Sometimes they love you, sometimes they really, really act like dicks.”
“Tell me about it,” Hazel responded, feeling increasingly comforted.
“So, sometimes I’m a dick right back,” Eve said smugly and then whipped her long hair around to her other shoulder.
“What do you mean?” Hazel responded, the anxiety creeping back up in her now.
“I mean, that’s pretty much why I’m here anyway.”
There was a pause that was long enough to indicate that it may be the end of the conversation, but then Eve continued.
“My parents only told me that my dad wasn’t really my dad like two years ago. I was so pissed. They lied to me my entire life and expected me to just sit around and take it? No! I had to punish them. So I found Silas online. To punish them. It was seriously so easy. They freaked out when I told them I had arranged with Silas to come here. I think they thought I was going to like Silas and Grandor better than I like my life at home. What a joke. Silas is a total mess and this place is a shithole.”
Hazel’s heart was pounding and her breathing became audible. Eve continued on without a trace of pain behind her words.
“But the more I say I want to come back, the more and more upset my parents get, so it seems like a good idea to keep doing it. At least until I graduate high school. And, oh my god, when you responded to my Wassup? message, I was like ‘This is perfect!’ Seriously, you should have seen my mom’s face. It’s not like they’re going to give me a sibling, so they’re totally panicked that this is the final straw and I’ll never come back home. Ha!”
Hazel could barely breathe. She felt an intense pressure behind her eyes and down in her throat. She placed her hand on a tree next to her to make sure she wouldn’t fall over if her knees gave out. The cracks were starting to form and her whole life, her whole new life, could sink through. She hoped it wouldn’t. She hoped so badly it wouldn’t. Eve swung her hair back to the other side and flashed another smile. She may have detected something in Hazel’s face because she dropped her smile.
“No offense or anything.”
There was a big, thick pause.
“Oka-yyyyy, well,” Eve said with wide eyes. “Guess we should get back to the house.”
Hazel thought she heard Eve mutter “awkward,” as she skipped away as quickly as she could back up the hill. Hazel sat right down in the grass and alternated between looking down at Silas on the dock and up at Eve walking away.
* * *
Later that evening, Hazel and Eve slipped right into what had become their routine of sitting in their own beds on opposite sides of the room. Eve, as usual, alternated between jamming her fingers into the screen, giggling or scowling at whatever was on the screen, taking pictures of herself and scrolling through pictures of and messages from others. Hazel, as usual, sat either observing Eve on her phone or trying to pretend like she was equally enraptured by her own. Occasionally, Eve blurted out a comment, not necessarily directed at Hazel, but she felt entitled to respond.
“Christie Channer has the best hair but I heard she gets a $400 highlight job every month even though she won’t admit it.”
“Tommy Dens is fucking hot but I heard he got a blow job from Rainey Popper, which makes him a lot less hot.”
“Don’t you think it’s funny when people have two first names? Elizabeth Aaron has that and also yellow teeth. Once, John Spencer left an electric toothbrush in her locker for her birthday and when she opened it she cried.”
“Pam Jackson went from barely an A-cup to a D in like a month. Tyler Hanner used to think she stuffed but I checked her out in the locker room before gym class and she definitely doesn’t.”
Hazel wondered if it would be better to be scrutinized by Eve, or ignored, but always netted out on scrutinized. Hazel had certainly been held under Eve’s microscope and latched on to her editorial review of her body. Hazel always felt Eve appreciated her physiognomy in a way that was not as disconnected or brutal as she scrutinized others. Eve understood Hazel’s body in a way she didn’t have to contemplate. They had been created from the same genes, after all.
Suddenly, Eve interrupted her own trance and stared right at Hazel. Her green eyes were swirling and sparkling.
“You’re not going to believe this. Connor Samuelson wants to FaceTime! He said he’s going to call me in an hour.”