Call Me Steve and Jared end up doing the cooking. The rest of us change out of our formal wear.
Everyone but Nathan switches to soft drinks. None of us has eaten for about eight hours and the steaks smell so ridiculously good, we hover in the main room like incredibly serious hyenas. “I will start gnawing on your shoulder if this takes much longer, Jared,” Henna says. “I’m not kidding.”
“Ask and ye shall receive,” says Steve, dishing up a bunch of plates. I should probably stop calling him Call Me.
The dinner is, in its own way, better than anything we’d have got in a restaurant. Mr Shurin is so awesome he remembered everything: steak sauce, napkins, salt and pepper. Even salad and salad dressing.
“I wish he was our dad,” I say.
“You get who you get,” Mel says.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know.”
There’s a TV in the cabin, though it’s so old it’s not even flat. Hooked up to it is – are you ready for this? – a VCR. An actual VCR that you put cassettes into. I’m pretty sure you can’t even buy those any more. There are a few cassettes at the cabin, too, all of which I remember from when I started coming out here to the cabin with Jared as a kid.
“We’ve got Pretty Woman,” Nathan reads, drinking another beer. “Or Tremors.”
“Tremors,” five of us say at once.
So for a while, it’s just steaks and Tremors. The sound of people eating and the sound of people being eaten.
Who’d have thought that would actually sound sort of happy?
“Are you kidding me?” Call Me … um, just plain old Steve says, when Jared comes out of one of the bedrooms in his swimsuit.
“It’s almost summer,” Jared says, smiling.
“It’s May,” says Steve. “At night. And that lake is fed by a glacier.”
“It’s June tomorrow, and I’ve been swimming in that lake my entire life, Doc,” Jared says. “Who’s with me?”
“I’m not allowed yet,” Henna says, patting her tattoo.
“You’re also wearing a cast,” I say.
Henna looks at her arm, almost in surprise. “I’ve gotten so used to it, I forget it’s there.” Her eyes widen. “I’m going to have to walk down the graduation aisle with it.”
“I’m up for a swim,” Mel says, standing.
“Are you sure?” Steve says. “You don’t really have the body fat.” There’s an awkward pause at this.
Steve back-pedals. “I’m just speaking medically–”
“That’s okay,” Mel says. “It’s sweet. You can apologize by getting in the lake.”
“I didn’t bring a swimsuit.”
“Oh, we don’t wear suits in the lake,” Jared says, mischievously. “This is just for show.”
“It’s dark,” Mel says. “You’ll be fine.”
“Seriously?” Steve says.
“I’ll come, too,” I say.
“And me,” says Nathan, but he wobbles a little bit and has to sit back down.
“I don’t think so,” Jared says, in a way that Nathan doesn’t disagree with.
We head out to the water ’s edge, even the non-swimmers. There are a few other cabins along the shore, but ours is the only one with a light on. It’s a bit early in the season, and even that word,
“season”, isn’t quite right. These are cabins for people who probably can’t make it out on a Friday night to begin with because they’re working late to pay for the cabin they can’t quite afford. Mr Shurin inherited his from his father, but even then, it hasn’t had a new paint job in my lifetime.