Off Course Read Free Page B

and fifteen minutes to reach Sawyer and a straightaway. Surely, Cress thought, the drive would chill their ardor: Would her parents really want to drive it every weekend? (Yes. Yes, they would. They would happily drive it forty, fifty times a year, up and back.)
    Their check cleared instantly. When Reggie Thornton didn’t return her father’s calls for three weeks, her parents grew frantic, certain they’d been swindled. But Reggie Thornton was not a con man or a thief; he was a garden-variety drunk. He sobered up, resurfaced, and called back as if nothing had happened. Eventually, despite several such lapses, inspections took place, the title cleared, more money changed hands, and escrow closed.
    Thus, their fates were sealed: Sharon and Cress Hartley would not go to parties or school dances or spend Saturdays at the beach or at the movies with friends. All sleepovers and make-out sessions would take place without them. They would not have boyfriends or be the popular girls. They would be at the cabin .
    *   *   *
    Sam Hartley built the A-frame’s shell from a kit he found on sale in a catalogue, 40 percent off. Sylvia and Cress both lobbied for something more rustic and charming, a board-and-batten redwood cottage with shutters, say, or a modest log cabin stained dark; Sam insisted that the A-frame would give them more room and a panoramic view—for significantly less. Having been a union carpenter when younger, he managed the nailing, plumbing, electrical, and finish work by himself, to his own relaxed standards. For paneling, flooring, and fixtures, he haunted salvage yards and a warehouse by the Los Angeles railyards that sold unclaimed and damaged freight.
    Friday afternoons, when Cress and her sister got home from school, anxiety shivered their mother’s voice. “Get your coat, Sharon, your parka  … Cressida, where are those new snow boots I bought you?… Sam, I told you we needed ice for the cooler!”
    Sylvia exhorted her friends, colleagues, even her students to come up to the cabin. Her closest friends were under steady pressure. Cress heard her mother on the phone: You haven’t been up for a year, Barbara. That’s right. More than a year. Nope, nope. I’m sure. I have my calendar right here .
    All Cress wanted was to stay home with her friends—Tillie and Rochelle Boyer and the Ellis twins—and loll in each other’s bedroom or take the bus downtown in a gang. That was her real life, and it was forbidden to her. When she was fourteen, Cress called the A-frame Auschwitz to her mother’s face. And was slapped across the mouth.
    Tillie had once tried to intervene on Cress’s behalf. “Please, Mrs. Hartley, can’t Cress stay home a couple weekends and do stuff with us? These are her high-school years ! She should have fun!”
    For days afterward, Cress heard her mother on the phone: Cressida’s friend thinks I’m a terrible mother because I won’t let her run wild every weekend.
    Cressida’s friend informed me that Cress should be able to do whatever she wants.
    Apparently, our having a beautiful vacation home has ruined Cressida’s whole high-school experience. So I’ve been told.
    Once at the cabin, the sisters could come and go as they pleased, as long as they were home by dark. Sharon stuffed a backpack with books and food and disappeared until dinner. Cress stayed in bed, exhausted, her head throbbing, until her father started hammering or her mother put a Mahler symphony on the stereo. Taking a book, Cress wandered down to the eponymous meadows, alluring green expanses that were deceptively boggy; she hopped hummock to hummock; a misstep and she sank to her shins in muck. A narrow, deep trout stream meandered through the middle and led to a slumping, shuttered log cabin. The Bauer family, who had owned the whole private parcel before the Meadows was developed, had held on to this ancient