Chapter 1: Teenagers

Lanie had been through more sticky summers than she wanted to count. But no matter how many went by, there really just wasn’t any way to understand the uniquely suffocating combination of late-afternoon sun and oppressive humidity that came with them — other than to feel it. It took only a few crunches of the gravel beneath her feet to feel like her clothes were already fused to her skin.

She’d dressed lightly — a tanktop underneath a thin, checkered button-up and cargo capris that gave her enough pockets for an extra lens and a notebook. That was her excuse for why she didn’t wear shorts, like her daughter or the hundreds of other teenage girls flocking around, eager to show off skin that hadn’t seen nearly so many summers.

The yelps and squeals behind her let her know that her daughter and son were still trailing — the seemingly constant arguing and taunting they’d carried on since about the time they’d learned to walk still going strong. By this point, Lanie had given up trying to play peacemaker. At least until things inevitably went so far even she couldn’t ignore it anymore.

“Can you please quit it until we get inside and no one can tell who’s responsible for you?” she said, turning to her kids.

Wyatt, a couple of inches shorter than his twin sister, looked like he was getting the worst of it, as usual. Both he and his sister had the same dark hair Lanie had — well, Lanie’s hair was mostly still dark — and the same discerning brown eyes. Wyatt didn’t pay much attention to what his hair did. Or to most things that didn’t particularly interest him, really. He was a scrawny kid, always wrapped up in his own little world.

With Rian, it was more like everybody else was wrapped up in her world. Lanie had hoped she would’ve grown out of that by the time she graduated high school but ... Lanie didn’t need to look further than the smirk on her daughter’s face for evidence that she hadn’t. Unlike her brother, Rian had always taken great care with her hair, her clothes — everything about how she appeared to other people. Maybe that was just the way all teenage girls were, although Lanie couldn’t remember going through a phase quite like that herself.

Rian’s current phase was some kind of punkish grunge, or whatever the kids were calling it these days. She’d chopped off her long hair into a pixie cut and dyed the ends a deep red. Lanie didn’t dare tell her it actually looked pretty good, complementing the pale complexion and slight features they all had. Mom’s stamp of approval would’ve meant an immediate trip to the hairdresser to roll the dice on something else. Lanie had drawn the line at tattoos, though. Hair grew back. Once they got out of her house, she’d be perfectly fine with them making more difficult-to-reverse mistakes. But that meant not until the end of summer.

For now, Rian looked annoyed she’d had to go through the trouble of torturing her brother in the first place. Like it was a tedious job she was generous enough to do for the greater good.

That’s about the only responsibility she takes seriously.

But they kept their hands to themselves — or at least, were quieter about it — until they all were up the gravel incline to the fairgrounds entrance.

The music, the colors, the rides — they all tugged at unpleasant memories in Lanie’s mind, trying to pull her into flashbacks. She’d never liked the county fair. There wasn’t much else to do around here, though, then or now, so going to the fair was just ... something everybody did.

She hadn’t had a choice when she was a kid. And now, it was something she had to do for work. If she didn’t take copious amounts of photos of their kids and put them online, how would any of the other mothers her age be able to prove they were even there??

They don’t talk about this shit in journalism school.

Still, as she looked back at the smirk on Rian’s face and the far-off, focused concentration on Wyatt’s, Lanie couldn’t help but feel a little pang of wistfulness that this would probably be the last time she’d drag them here while she did her rounds taking photos for the newspaper.

“Okay, everybody’s back at the car at 9, got it?” she said, making eye contact with each of her children.

Wyatt nodded absent-mindedly and Rian rolled her eyes, which was as much as Lanie could hope for out of her 18-year-old daughter, she knew. She gave them a mock sign of the cross to absolve herself of whatever it was they were going to do once they were out of her eyeline, and turned toward the fair.

All the oh-so-familiar sights, sounds, and smells assaulted her at once: the kids of all ages grinning and running, the colorful booths and rides, the scent of fried food faintly mixed with cigarettes, and the glaring sun behind it all.

Lanie lifted her camera and snapped a few photos, the flare of the sun washing out much of the picture. She couldn’t really see on the small preview screen, but she knew how it looked anyway: the people, the tilt-a-whirl, the Ferris wheel all silhouetted in gold by the low, summer sun.

People didn’t care about those shots, though. They wanted faces. Preferably faces from their own family, but faces of people they knew would do fine.

That’s all anyone really wants. If I just stopped reporting news entirely and reprinted people’s Facebook feeds, subscriber numbers would go through the roof.

She snorted. That wasn’t true. These days, nobody would do more than look at the headline and cover photo, much less click the link or subscribe.

Pressing her eye to the viewfinder, she settled on a baby in a stroller giving her a smile, a group of teenagers laughing, a dad with his daughter on his shoulders.

Sometimes she felt like a creepy voyeur, snapping photos of kids and families having fun, unawares. But for reasons she couldn’t understand, everybody seemed to love seeing themselves in a big gallery posted online. Maybe just so someone could tag them on Facebook and say how cute their kids were.

Does life even happen if nobody posts it on Facebook?

That’s how the rest of her generation seemed to think, anyway.

She didn’t see herself as a particularly good photographer, though she’d picked up a few things in her time as a reporter. Chiefly, to just snap as many photos as possible in the hope there’d be some good ones tucked away in there. Consequently, she sometimes barely paid attention to what was going on inside the viewfinder, except that it was framed around something halfway worthwhile to see.

But when a middle-aged man with wispy brown hair waved at her, she lowered the camera in surprise.

Is that...

He grinned — a warm, inviting grin that clinched it. The face around the grin had grown a bit and added some lines, but even nearly 30 years later, Devin Atchison’s smile hadn’t aged a day.

They hadn’t really been friends in high school — he was a couple of years younger — but they’d been friend-ly. And the older she got, Lanie had begun to find that it didn’t matter so much how close she’d been to someone she’d known when she was a kid.

When you’re within shouting distance of a half-century, anybody who was around when you thought that was too old to fathom suddenly seems like the walking embodiment of “the good old days.”

“Lanie! Wow! Long time no see!”

They met up next to the facepainting booth, where Devin went in for a hug that caught her off guard. She did her best to adjust, clutching her camera tightly as she reciprocated with one arm.

“Yeah, it’s been forever!” she agreed while they separated from the awkward hug. He didn’t let on if he thought there’d been anything awkward about it, though. “What are you doing back in town?”

Devin was still grinning that grin. The last time she’d seen it was ... probably when she was still in high school. Had to be, although she couldn’t remember an exact occasion. Honestly, she hadn’t really thought about him much since; she just had a vague awareness of his existence through social media, like most people their age.

“Oh, I’m here to kind of get my parents’ affairs in order,” he said, still smiling but letting his tone adjust appropriately to the somber topic. “My mom passed away a couple of weeks ago, so ... we’re going through that whole process.”

“Oh no, I’m sorry to hear that, Devin,” she said, frowning sympathetically. “Is your dad still...?”

He shook his head. “No, he passed a few years ago.”

She patted him on the arm. “I know what that’s like.” She gave it a few beats before switching subjects. “So ... did you bring the whole family?”

Laughing a little, he sighed. “Boy, you ask the tough questions, huh.”

Lanie shrugged. “That’s my job!”

They chuckled again before he went on. “Well, I’m actually just here with my kids. They’re around here... somewhere.” He shrugged, which Lanie also understood. “I’ve got them for the week, though.”

Oh shit. I did not know he was divorced. That’s what he meant by “tough question.”

“Oof, I really stepped in it, huh,” she said, hoping to make light of it. “Sorry.”

He laughed, his hand giving her the same kind of pat on her shoulder she’d given to his arm.

“No, no it’s ... relatively recent. The divorce, anyway. Not so much the ... situation.”

They were quiet for a few moments, and Lanie wasn’t quite sure how to follow that up, although she didn’t especially want to say goodbye quite yet. Seeing someone she actually wanted to talk to while she was taking photos at the fair was a rare occurrence.

“How about you?” he said more brightly. “You’ve got a couple kids, right? They here with you, or you just here on business?” He pointed to the camera.

A shrill shriek of “I’M GONNA KILL YOU!!!” rang out from a commotion ahead of them, and Lanie didn’t need to look up to confirm whom the voice belonged to. Sure enough, up the path in the distance, there went Wyatt, in hot pursuit of his always-faster twin.

Devin turned to see what it was all about, but Lanie took his arm and gave him a slightly-more-than-polite tug in another direction. “Oh, you know kids, who can say what they get up to! Hey how about we take a walk over here?”

He shrugged and grinned, giving her his arm to loop hers through. That hadn’t been her intention but ... she didn’t mind it.

Maybe someone will see and start a rumor!

She had to keep from laughing at the thought.

Lanie found a polite reason to disentangle, though, by snapping some more photos. One of the very few good parts about the heat and humidity was that everyone’s faces were a little flushed, a little more colorful than usual. That always popped on camera. Shielding the digital display with her hand, she showed Devin a few of the pictures.

Her favorite of the set was a teen boyfriend and girlfriend — okay, she didn’t know for sure, but she liked to make up stories about the people she captured with her camera — holding hands while they meandered aimlessly. The light leaking over the roofs of the various booths along the aisle lit just enough of the girl so that her face seemed to be glowing compared to the rest of the shot. Her eyes rested on her boyfriend, who wore an uncertain, boyish smile.

“Wow,” Devin said, looking at the photos. “I had no idea you were such a good photographer.”

She snorted. She wasn’t, really. “Eh, I just take a zillion of ‘em and there’s bound to be one in there that doesn’t look too bad.”

He handed the camera back and looked up at the teenage couple with his own eyes before turning to Lanie.

“Little do they know they’re gonna be in their 40s someday,” he said in a low voice.

They both laughed.

“I was just thinking the same thing!” Lanie said. “I don’t know if you ever feel this way, but ... whew, I still wake up some mornings and get surprised when there’s some wrinkly old lady looking back at me in the mirror.”

He cocked his head. “Huh? Do you ever catch her? Maybe you should just bite the bullet and change your locks.”

She stared him down with a good-natured glare. “Very funny. But no, unfortunately I’ve narrowed it down, and the old woman with the gray streaks in her locks is, alas, me.”

As evidence, Lanie fingered a few of the worst-offending strands along her temples, unsuccessfully covered by the rest of her darker hair.

Devin smirked at her and fondled some of the light brown hair on top of his own head. “Hey, at least you’ve still got some!”

“Oh please, you’ve got plenty.” She peered closer, and it was probably a little thinner on top, but he really didn’t look like he was missing much. He wouldn’t have even qualified as bald-ing. To her, anyway.

His expression warned her she didn’t have to lie just to be nice, although that wasn’t what she was doing.

“Well, you make the gray look good,” he said.

Lanie smiled, despite herself. She didn’t get a lot of compliments, even rote ones that felt required by the conversation. Certainly not like when she’d been a teenager — even if she still felt like one inside.

And that teenage girl inside was telling her to wake the fuck up and look at the signs.

Umm, he’s fucking into you, you dumb old hag. Don’t waste it!

She’d been on dates since the divorce, sure, but none of them really went anywhere — not in a way that made her heart beat faster inside. But his brown eyes were looking at her now like ... like he was still seeing the same woman she expected to greet her in the mirror every morning.

Shit. Shitshitshit. I did not dress for this.

As covertly as she could, she tried to catch a whiff of herself ... but had trouble finding much of a reason to stick her nose into her armpit. Really, though, she knew she didn’t have to actually smell herself to know whatever was wafting out of there probably wasn’t too pleasant after sweating out a day of work and now the time in the baking-hot sun.

Looking down, her button-up was wrinkled, probably because she kept it in the car to wear for occasions when she thought she was too old to show much of her aging skin. And she already knew her hair was scraggly — it was only even down because she’d been too lazy and tired to do anything else with it.

I didn’t think there was gonna be anybody to impress!

She took a few more photos, though she had no idea what of. Her mind was elsewhere, trying to figure out if she’d be okay with herself if she didn’t at least try to be a little more... presentable.

I mean, whatever you’re doing so far is working, right? Of course ... I’m not doing anything, so...