The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

“Where are you guys going?” she asked one morning. She walked to Joe and sniffed his hair. “You smell fishy,” she said.

      Renee and Caroline spent their days primarily indoors in front of the fan, where it was cool. They braided each other’s hair and made papier-mâché bowls and beads and masks by wrapping gluey strips of newspaper around the various items they wished to replicate. When they were tired of making things, they watched The Brady Bunch or The A-Team on rerun or sometimes a program that showed a man painting oil landscapes, his voice so calm that it stupefied them. They learned from this man nothing about painting, only that it was possible to spend your entire day in a sort of daze, half awake, half asleep, and at the end of it to feel jumpy and restless but entirely worn out from heat and boredom.

      Renee sniffed Joe’s hair again. “Take us,” she said.

      Joe and I led our sisters down the road, down the steep hill, along the bank of the brook through the woods until we reached the pond. The day was very hot, and the mere sight of the dark water cooled me off. The rushing sound operated as a hush on us all. Maples and slender birches arched over the pond. The current was weak and nearly invisible. Over the dam the water spilled like a silver cloth pulled through a wringer.

      Renee let out a whistle. “Awesome,” she said.

      Immediately I resented the presence of my sisters. This was our place, mine and Joe’s, and their intrusion altered the feel of it. Caroline wore a bikini and spread her towel in a sprinkling of sun. Renee began to patrol the bank in search of frogs. Yesterday I’d seen a large one, a bullfrog with a call like a rock dropping down a well, but I didn’t tell Renee. I let her search.

      “Fi, let’s practice swimming,” said Joe. I scowled at him, but he lifted his eyebrows, and his face said, This is still our place. We can share with the others, it doesn’t change what we have found.

      And so I relented. I let Joe place me into the water, stomach down. His hands buoyed me up, and I kicked my legs, circled my arms. I didn’t swim that day or the next, but it happened soon, that perfect moment when my body stopped being mere weight and became like the water itself: fluid, joyful, effortless. It was Joe who made this happen, Joe who clapped the loudest as I swam from bank to bank.

      Over the course of that summer, Caroline and I developed a game. Inside the gray house, we rarely played together, but outside at the pond the rules shifted, expectations changed. She and I would scour the brook for water-rough pieces of broken glass or other strange treasures. The rocky bottom was full of odd detritus, perhaps castoffs from the old furniture mill or wayward bits from the town dump. Once we found a large silver spoon, then a crusty broken bicycle chain, then a small green bottle. We would arrange these treasures carefully and make up elaborate stories about their provenance and the lengths to which their previous owners would go to reclaim them. Before the Pause, Noni raised us on fairy tales and fantastic stories. Princesses and queens, mothers and trolls, a dashing prince, salvation, and a perfect everlasting love. The pond offered the perfect backdrop for magical possibility.

      For weeks Caroline and I discussed the owner of the spoon, a wily queen from a distant, frozen place who became angry at her daughter and threw the spoon at the poor girl. The daughter ducked, and the spoon sailed over her defenseless head, across nations, oceans, time, and landed here in our brook.

      “And then the daughter disappeared,” Caroline said solemnly. “The queen believes the girl’s spirit is hidden inside the spoon. She searches, but she can’t find it. The queen vows to search forever. Until her dying day.”

      We gazed into the tarnished silver of the great spoon’s bowl and saw the barest dull reflection of our own faces staring back.

      * * *

      IT WAS THE second summer of the Pause when our game ended. This was when we first met Nathan Duffy. One morning we tramped down the hill and heard splashing, giggles, whoops. We emerged from the woods to see a gaggle of kids, each brown from the sun and shaggy-haired, different heights and genders but all variations on the same essential theme. Nathan was one of six siblings, looked after during the summers by their babysitter, Angela, who long ago had come to the pond when she was a kid. Now Angela spread out a flowered king sheet and sat smack in the middle with a crossword as the Duffy siblings swam, played, ate, and fought around her. Nathan was middle of the pack—two older brothers, three younger sisters—and the quietest. I hadn’t even noticed him until later that day when he appeared beside our blanket.

      Nathan crouched on his haunches in the grass and asked Caroline about her book.

      “Is that Nancy Drew?” he said. “Do you read the Hardy Boys, too? I like The Tower Treasure best.” It was overcast that day, a dull, heavy sky. Thunder was coming, rain too.

      Caroline lifted her eyes from the book and studied Nathan. They were both long-legged and skinny, both dirty blond, both bronzed and squint-eyed in the sun. Nathan wore gold glasses that matched his hair. His gaze was careful and serious.

      During the Pause, Caroline was the one who missed our parents the most. She cried easily, silently, at the kitchen table while we ate breakfast or later in the living room when we played Monopoly, even if she was winning. Her bad dreams raged for nights, then subsided, then took hold again without any apparent pattern or cause. She’d awake screaming and crying, and none of us could comfort her, not even Renee.

      Now she coolly returned Nathan’s gaze and shrugged her shoulders. “Hardy Boys are okay,” she replied. “But Nancy is braver.”

      Nathan tilted his head, considering. With his long, careful fingers, he picked at the edge of our quilt and at a collection of small, warm pebbles I had gathered and placed on a leaf.

      “Wanna swim?” he said suddenly. He moved quick as a darting minnow, jumping away from us, running along the bank, from one side of the pond to the other, in and out of the water, atop the dam (although it was slippery and Angela yelled at him to come off), up a tree and down. At last he returned to Caroline. He shook his wet head at her, and she angrily slammed her book shut and stalked off to sit on the sand. But she looked back at him. I saw the glance, her interest in this pale, quick boy clear on her face.

      It wasn’t long before we learned all about Nathan. He had a mother named Jeanette, a father named Cyrus, and five siblings who became known to us as a single unit: DouglasTerryMaddyEmilyJen. We called them the Goats, because their last name was Duffy, which reminded us of the Billy Goats Gruff from the fairy tale, and also because there was something goatlike about them, with their long, curious faces and all that shaggy hair. Each of them appeared strong-willed, utterly confident, fighting loudly with the others over questions of Eggo preparation and volcanic eruptions and Michael Jackson song lyrics.

      The day after we first met Nathan Duffy, we met Ace McAllister. Ace came crashing down the path to the pond wearing head-to-toe camouflage and holding a BB gun.

      “Bang, bang, bang!” he yelled, startling us from our games and books.

      “That’s Ace,” Nathan declared without emotion as Ace pretended to shoot him again and again.

      Ace was short and thick in the torso, with heavy limbs and broad features. He had an abundance of dark, shiny hair that fell into his eyes. He and Nathan were not friends, but they were neighbors and only one year apart in age, and so their mothers had thrust them together since their earliest days of playground visits and birthday parties.

      “Angela, gotcha!” Ace yelled, and directed his attention toward the babysitter. Angela flapped a hand at him but did not lift her eyes from her magazine. Once she’d been his babysitter, too, and brought him on summer afternoons to the pond, but she’d quit to work for the Duffys. Now Ace’s parents left him alone with a ten-dollar bill, a house key, and instructions to keep out of trouble.

      Within days it became clear that Ace was the wildest of us all. He cannonballed off the dam into the pond and whooped so loudly that even Nathan’s big brother Terry told him to quiet down. Nathan was in sixth grade, Ace in fifth at a private day school in Greenwich called Pierpont Academy. We all went to public school, and the idea of Pierpont—with its uniforms and lacrosse