Chapter 17

Nick woke up to the sound of a shower running. This swim meet had ended and the work week began. He was so groggy. He remembered Lacey in his bed so that must be her in the shower. He’d lost his virginity to that woman. She was so sexy, so beautiful, funny and kind. She was even smart, in a way. Not book smart like him, for all the good it did him, but street smart. She knew how to milk her stingy old customers for good tips, how to cheat the lounge vending machines with slug coins, how to pick the Summer Lake locks with paper clips and she knew how to get cigarettes and booze even though she was just 17.

He felt so lucky to be with her. Sure, everyone outside the group made fun of him for dating a “slut”, but Lacey had been faithful to him and that’s what counted. She slept around before because she liked sex, which most guys seemed to think was a huge negative in a girl, but Nick thought it was great. Who wanted to have sex with a girl who didn’t like it? That just seemed mean. Much better to get with a girl who enjoyed the hell out of it like Lacey.

Last night they’d drank the last of the bottle of bourbon she’d gotten from town the weekend before. Nick hadn’t been so keen to drink hard liquor, since that was something he’d never done before this summer, but Lacey wasn’t like the stereotypical teenage drinker, binging until she puked or passed out or both. Based on his prior years at Summer Lake, Nick thought that was all that teenage drinking could be, and he didn’t have any interest in that. Lacey just laughed at that notion of his and showed him the pleasure of drinking the good stuff in moderation. Very sophisticated, very adult. Nick could get into that. Bourbon was an acquired taste, but he was all into acquired tastes.

They’d kept their drinking from the group because Nick didn’t want Esmie to start. He loved his sister but she sometimes lacked discipline and moderation, and she was just 14. He wasn’t sure about Eric either, the guy was so naive and was also like Esmie a bit of a pleasure-addict. He loved his junk food, the more sugar the better, and couldn’t get enough of Esmie of course, no shortage of sugar there. Nick didn’t think either of them needed booze, at least not more than a can of beer here and there, and they were so fixated on each other that they weren’t seeking out alcohol to entertain themselves like most teenagers on staff.

He stumbled out of bed naked. The shower was still going and he figured he’d join Lacey. The overpowered fluorescents were on so he looked down at his feet to avoid the glare on his sleepy eyes.

Just as he got to the shower he heard a bass voice bellowing “When you call my name, it’s like a little prayer. Down on my knees, I wanna take you there”

“Gah!” Nick shouted in alarm at the definitely-not-his-girlfriend voice booming from the shower cubicle a foot in front of him.

Eric slid the green shower curtain open. “Oh hey Nick,” the gigantic redhead said, standing there nearly filling the little shower stall, shamelessly naked with the water flowing over him. “What, did you think I was Lacey?”

“No, I gotta piss,” Nick said with embarrassment, not about to admit his mistake. “Why are you here on a weekday morning?”

“Dude it’s 3 o’clock, I’m off work,” Eric said. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Nick said, shaking his head to try to wake up. He went to the toilet and peed with his back to Eric. Over the course of the summer they’d gotten rather immodest, but Nick figured that was fairly natural for two dudes sharing a tiny room and tinier bathroom.

“I dunno,” he corrected himself as Eric turned off the water. “I wish I hadn’t slept so late. Even though I get bullied as much as ever and get bossed around by Laura fucking Ballard every night for work, I don’t want this summer to end. We only have two weeks left.”

“Brother I know just what you mean,” Eric said. “Hey hand me a towel, by the way.”

Nick shrugged and got his roommate a towel from the main room. There was no good space to store towels in the tiny bathroom, except on the back of the toilet which seemed disgusting. Nick put his on the tiny sink when he showered. “Oh, this is why there’s always water on the floor,” Nick chuckled, “Why don’t you just take a towel with you?”

“Guess I forget. Anyway yeah I wish summer could last forever. We’re gonna miss you guys.”

Nick assumed he meant he and Abby by “we”. He washed his hands and went back into the bedroom. Sleeping in so late had his head in a fog. It was Tuesday, now not even two weeks until Labor Day, the official end of summer and the day they’d be shipping out. He had been bugging Esmie about calling the bus company and buying her ticket in advance, but she said she’d just get it from the driver at the stop in town, the way you could for the long-haul bus. The drivers didn’t like that and it slowed everything down, but apparently Nick was the weirdo for expecting his sister to be efficient and plan ahead.

He even thought about buying her ticket, but she needed to learn some responsibility, and it was his money anyway. He’d saved just under $5,000 in his Summer Lake account. He’d spent more than he intended to this summer, given his unexpectedly vibrant social life, but he’d worked a lot too, and even gotten tipped generously by some of the acts he’d sound engineered, so he was going to hit his savings goal. Laura Ballard teased him for saving so much money and said nobody else on staff even came close, but her family’s bank offered a money market account for employees which paid great interest, it was a sweet deal. Nick didn’t understand why none of the other teenagers saw the value of saving money like that – well okay, he knew exactly why teenagers would rather spend their money on summer fun than save it for the future, but he thought they were being shortsighted.

Everyone in the group teased him for his financial habits, even Abby who was usually the responsible one. She and Eric were saving money themselves, but nothing like Nick. Lacey though blew her money as fast as she earned it. She called a 1-900 number to request her favorite music videos on the Video Jukebox channel that came over the air on television, she even called phone psychics to get her horoscope or to get messages from her best friend back in Florida who died in a tragic dirt bike accident (Nick’s girlfriend had quite the life story). She bought clothes and jewelry in town on impulse, and even ordered stuff off the Home Shopping Network, including presents for Nick which made him feel guilty since all he ever got her were tapes of her favorite music videos and flowers he arranged after Eric got them surplus from landscaping.

“So watcha gonna do without Lacey, back in Alabama?” Eric said, strutting out naked and looking for clothes to wear.

“Uh you know,” Nick said, “Just find another beautiful, cool, horny girl who’s into short, nerdy Mexicans.”

“So back to masturbation?” Eric said. For all his simplicity, his roommate was a pretty funny guy.

“You know it,” Nick said and sighed.

“I think you’ll do okay,” Eric said, “You’ve gotten a lot well, cooler isn’t the word, but you’re much less obnoxious than in May.”

“Gee thanks,” Nick said, but he was actually glad his roommate had noticed. He cringed when he thought back to his behavior at the start of the summer, whining about everything and expecting Abby to go out with him because he was in love with her and thought she was his soulmate.

Eric laughed and threw on some clothes. Nick dressed afterward as Eric collapsed on his bed.

“Work tonight?” Eric asked.

“Well I have a meeting with Laura Ballard to plan for this weekend,” he said. “Don’t have a heart attack but there’s a big polka band coming. Actually I gotta go soon for that. Are you hanging out with my sister?”

“She works till nine,” Eric said glumly.

“Well, hang out with the lesbians, or my girlfriend,” Nick said, feeling no jealousy. He knew Eric was about as likely to cheat on Esmie as he was to give a lecture on advanced calculus, and Lacey was honorable too.

“I guess,” Eric said with no enthusiasm.

“Hey, we’re still a group. And your sister and her girlfriend are getting bullied bad right now. You can’t just pine for my sister all day. You guys are gonna be going your separate ways in two weeks anyway when summer’s over.”

“Shut up, jerk!” Eric said, then looked surprised at his own words. It was the first mean thing he’d said to Nick all summer. “Sorry dude. I’ve just never had a girlfriend before. We might try to stay together ... long distance. Write letters.”

Nick smirked. “Have you ever written a letter in your life?”

“Well, I can start. I’m not dumb.”

“Okay okay, sorry,” Nick said, “Anyway dude, the point stands. Go make sure your sister’s doing okay. I shouldn’t even have to remind you of that. I know you could snap my head off for saying this, but we’ve gotten to be pretty good friends.”

Eric mulled it over, and Nick wondered if he’d gone too far. But the big redhead had been so obsessed with Esmie, he did need some sense talked into him.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Eric said eventually. “Esmie isn’t the only woman in my life.”

Nick took that as a victory, more or less. “Anyway I’ve gotta go to my meeting. How do I look?”

He had on his usual flannel button-down and jeans by then.

“Like shit,” Eric said teasingly.

“Up yours,” Nick said with a chuckle and left for the front office area. Most people on staff just came here to pick up their paychecks, which they usually cashed for a 3% fee at the gift shop. Summer Lake was a real company town, Nick had come to believe, if you weren’t careful you could work here all summer and not take any money home.

Nick was just barely in time for the meeting with the event committee. Consisting of Laura Ballard who oversaw the events, the event coordinator who booked them, and several other year-round employees from the front office plus Nick, and sometimes Mitch Ballard sat in, but he wasn’t there today. The event committee was tediously bureaucratic and in Nick’s opinion fairly pointless, but part of his job was to attend. They went over the exact plans for the weekend’s events, including all of the setup. It was at least a chance for Nick to formally request the help he’d need from the maintenance department to set up the stage and seating and ask for any equipment they’d need to rent.

He had to admit that he liked these meetings. Not so much the meetings themselves, where people talked to hear their own voice and often went over such pointless things as whether they needed ten vases with flowers decorating the stage or just eight, but he liked the fact that he was a 16-year-old Mexican holding his own with white-collar adults in an office meeting. He took notes, he followed the rules of order, he always had good answers when called on to present his plans and requests for the upcoming events. Everyone else at the meeting was a white person and most had a college degree, but after over two months of competent participation, they treated Nick like he was one of them and not a brown-skinned summer staffer.

He loved his parents very much, but he never wanted to work in a chicken plant like his father. He’d sooner die than work there for a single 12-hour shift. It made him feel lousy to be such a wuss, but he just did not have it in him to live like that. He wasn’t a scumbag though, instead of whining about how awful manual work was, he’d made himself qualified for professional work. He could participate in a business meeting, he could make himself indispensable as a sound engineer even without any formal training. He’d found a way, he was succeeding.

That particular meeting went fine. The second-to-last weekend had a polka concert, a big family reunion, a wedding, and the resort had hired the wedding band to play a free concert for guests as well out on the terrace Sunday afternoon. They also touched on the big Labor Day weekend end-of-summer events. Those events would be some of the biggest of the summer, and they were already planned for the most part, but the committee wanted to go over them yet again as the big day neared.

The meeting adjourned and Laura called him into her office. Things had been awkward lately with Laura given what he’d heard from Nicole about his boss’s outright abusive behavior toward her cousin. Nick had always figured Laura was nasty, she certainly teased him more than was professional, and not in the nice way the group joked on each other, but in a very condescending way, like she took it as self-evident that she was better than the likes of a 16-year-old Mexican sound engineer. But Nick knew the game, he just ignored her and acted professionally. He was walking away from Summer Lake with $5,000 and a solid professional reference for his resume.

“Nick,” she said as he walked into her office, “Sit down.”

He sat. “I hear my cousin has joined your little group. Quite the odd addition, isn’t she?”

“Not really,” Nick said, “She’s actually a great fit. She’s a lot like us.”

Laura winced, no doubt despising the idea that a Ballard would be a natural fit with the Summer Lake outcasts.

“At any rate,” she continued, but without any fake warmth now, “There’s been a problem with your I-9.”

“I provided the birth certificate and social security card,” Nick said, “That’s all I have to do.” He didn’t like where this was going, but he tried to stay calm.

“Yes, well, did you know there are two other people working with your name and social security number?”

Well, he knew there was at least one. Being a Mexican national with no legitimate documents, Nick had hit upon the idea of finding the social security number of another Nick Sanchez his age (an easy enough trick if you were good on the phone – it’s amazing what people will do for you if you call and act confident). He got that Nick’s documents and worked under his identity. It satisfied employers, the IRS, and even the real Nick Sanchez had nothing to complain about since Nick wasn’t running up debts in his name.

He realized Laura was up to something shady herself here, though. “I don’t know who’s working under my social,” he said coolly, “I don’t run background checks on myself. Neither should my employer, I-9s are supposed to be filled out and sent in to INS, not verified by the employer. All the employer has to do under the 1986 act is verify that the employee’s paperwork appears on its face to be genuine.”

Laura grinned. “Oh so you know the exact federal law, huh? Area of interest for you?”

Nick recognized this version of Laura. Smart and evil, just like Nicole described her cousin. “I’m interested in lots of things,” Nick said coolly, “Like labor law. Payment for services. The penalties for withholding payment.”

“We can’t be paying over $5,000 to someone when we aren’t even sure if they’re the real Nick Sanchez,” she said, “Your account is frozen.”

“That’s money I earned and you held for me as an account custodian,” he said, “It’s in writing. There’s no exemption to banking law because someone else is using my social, if that’s even what’s happening.”

“Are you sure you’re 16, Nick? You’re too smart for 16. Anyway, I’m sure you could hire a lawyer to argue that in court,” Laura said, glaring at him, “It might even work when it went to trial in a year or two.”

Nick glared right back at her. He’d heard she was overseeing the harassment of people in their group, but it was hard to believe that a Stanford graduate would be this evil and petty toward teenagers. Still, if they actually withheld the money and dragged out the legal proceedings, it’s not like he could fight it. Summer Lake was a big corporation in a county without many big corporations, he was a poor Mexican and if it really came to it, not a legal citizen, and not the Nick Sanchez with that social security number. She knew this and was using it to her advantage.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Just information, Nick,” Laura said with a smile, “For my cousin’s own good. That’s all. You don’t even have to do anything. You just have to tell us what’s going on that little group of yours, so we know Nicole is safe, and not going to do anything foolish. Then we might be able to clear up your paperwork, and even throw in a bonus for what good work you’ve done all summer. Otherwise ... I guess you can call a lawyer if that’s what you want to do.”

And that, Nick would think later, is how fast it happens. He had to have his money. He couldn’t fight them and she knew it. Nobody thinks they could ever sell their soul to the devil until the day they find themselves signing on the dotted line.

Eric lumbered down the girl’s hallway. It was late afternoon and boys were allowed over here now but as usual the girls glared at him as he made his way toward Abby’s room.

He hated these days when he got off work just as Esmie started her shift and he didn’t get to see her until late, but Nick was right, he did need to give some attention to his sister. At the start of the summer he’d been there to help Abby at every moment, but she’d been doing so well, and he’d been so distracted by Esmie, that he’d been letting her fly on her own in this home stretch of their time at Summer Lake. Still, he knew his sister was neurotic and brooding, and she was in this relationship which Nicole which could end very badly. He definitely needed to keep up with her.

He tapped on her door, afraid he’d interrupt something, but Abby opened the door and seemed to be alone.

“Oh, if it isn’t my wayward brother,” Abby said, wearing jeans and a pink spaghetti strap top, “Where’s Esmie?”

Eric gave a guilty grin. “She’s at work. Are you busy?”

“Nah, come on in, brother dearest,” Abby said. The room was indeed empty and Eric sat on Lacey’s bed as Abby closed the door.

“So where’s Nicole?”

“Working, too,” Abby said, “We had different shifts today. I guess that’s the only time you and I see each other, when our girlfriends have the same shift.”

“I still can’t get used to you having a girlfriend too,” Eric said, shaking his head. But he wasn’t offended by it anymore.

“Well, you’ll have to,” Abby said.

“Are you gonna tell grandpa?”

Abby laughed. “Uhhh that’ll be a no. And you aren’t either.”

“Of course not,” Eric said. “Have you called home lately, though?

Abby looked down. “Yeah, well, I did Sunday night. Mom’s apparently moved into the other guest bedroom and going to two Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every day. Grandpa’s on her case about finding a job. How do we have a better work ethic than our own mother?”

Eric laughed. “She wasn’t that bad before she went crazy with the booze.”

“Yeah,” Abby said, “I’m glad we don’t do that. Nicole teases us for being the only teenagers at Summer Lake who don’t get wasted, but I mean, with Mom as our role model, drinking doesn’t seem like much fun.”

“Yeah,” Eric said, “I’d never thought of it like that really but I’m just not that drawn to the stuff.”

She came over and sat with her brother, putting her arm around him in sibling affection. “We’ll focus on family in the fall. Get good grades, excel at our sports. You have football if you hadn’t forgotten. Have you been doing weights?”

“Yeah, during staff hours,” Eric said, referring to the resort gym’s policy to keep employees from bothering the guests. “Not that the old people use the weights anyway.”

Abby giggled. “You wanna play basketball?”

“Yeah sure,” Eric said. This was the sort of thing they always did back home when wanted to have a conversation. Abby wrote a note “At basketball court -A.” and taped it to her dorm room door so their friends could find them.

The courts were off the parking lot and were not one of the more popular features of the resort, given the demographics of the guests. Abby and Eric walked through the lobby to get a basketball from the activities desk and noticed the place was crawling with old people even though it was a Tuesday.

“Geeze why are there so many?” Eric asked as they got out to the parking lot and started walking across it.

“Discount rates for the end of summer,” Abby said. “I’ll kinda be glad to be out of here, in a way. This place feels like a time warp to the 1960s, and not the good part. Everything’s just so ... old.”

They made their way out the front door of the lobby into the parking lot.

“So um, are you not freaked out about things ending with Nicole?”

He felt like a hypocrite asking, given his own plans to run off with Esmie, but he was still concerned about his sister even if he’d probably be going away for a while.

Abby shrugged. “I mean, I care about her a lot. And I don’t want her to go to Stanford and go back to being a fake heterosexual, and having to pretend she hates lesbians. I think that would eat her up inside, maybe make her an awful person permanently. But we’re going every which way in life, she’s gotta do what’s best for her. I’ve gotta finish high school, keep up my training, take care of you and grandpa ... these things are meant to be summer romances, you know? They’re really intense at the time and you care about the person and think they’re your whole world, it’s not realistic to make it last when you’re going off your separate ways at the of the summer. Exact same with lesbians as straights.”

Eric felt like she was talking about him and Esmie without actually saying it, the same as Nick did lately when talking about how much he was going to miss Lacey. He supposed they meant well but he wished they’d just leave him alone. It was different for him and Esmie.

“Well, that’s good I guess. Are you going to date guys after Nicole?”

Abby laughed. “Uhh being a lesbian means I’m never going to date guys, Eric.”

“Oh,” he said. He supposed he knew that, but it was just a lot to wrap his head around. They walked around the lake for a while, Abby wanted to wave at Nicole as she worked her shift at the beach, and then they walked down the grassy lakeside slope Eric mowed and he pointed out various landscaping projects of interest.

Being in no hurry, they took this very long way but were eventually at the regulation-sized basketball court. It had a concrete surface and two goals with metal backboards painted beige. The early evening sky was a light blue with thousands of tiny clouds dotting off into the horizon. The temperature was pleasantly mild for mid-August.

They started playing 24-by-4, their usual game. Basketball was not Eric’s specialty and Abby was better at it, even though it wasn’t her sport either. He could beat her if he truly wanted to, but that meant making an all-out effort and that seemed ridiculous to do with his sister.

They weren’t playing very seriously, just dribbling around and shooting. Abby was so tall for a girl she could actually shoot over him.

“What’s on your mind?” she said after hitting a jump shot, “You’re not even trying.”

Eric felt something familiar stir in him. He and Abby always competed growing up, at cards, at board games, and definitely at sports. Sure he was stronger, there was no competition there, but she was a little faster and a lot more agile. It was fun to compete with his sister. He checked the ball with her then turned his back and started dribbling hard at her, bumping into her good as she guarded him aggressively.