Wildwood. Drusilla Campbell

      Summer

      That week no new polio cases were reported in Rinconada so most kids swam at the town pool. For practically the first time all summer, Bluegang Creek belonged to the birds and the squirrels and the crawdad—and a twelve-year-old girl sunbathing on a flat rock with her old Brownie shirt tied at her midriff like Debra Paget, painting her toenails with Tangee Strawberry Sundae polish, waiting for her two best friends.

      Hannah Whittaker twisted the top off the polish and took a deep breath. Strawberry Sundae smelled forbidden, grown-up and cheap—like ankle bracelets and pierced ears and the music she listened to on that Oakland radio station. The show was called Sepia Serenade and she didn’t know what sepia meant until she looked it up. Brown. Hannah Whittaker, the Episcopal minister’s daughter, closed her bedroom door and listened to Negro music down low so her parents wouldn’t hear.

      She steadied her right foot, lifted the brush from the polish, let it drip, then brought it gingerly over to her big toenail and painted a perfect stripe of pink. Toes were easier than fingernails. Of course it didn’t matter if she did a good job or not since she had to pick it all off before she went home. If her mother saw her painted toes, she’d catch it.

      Hannah had always understood that she and her mother were not alike. This made her feel bad because if a girl wasn’t like her mother, who was she like? She wanted her mother to love and admire her but there seemed no way this could happen unless she made herself into someone she was not, a carbon copy of her mother.

      Hannah had explained this to her friends, Liz and Jeanne, and they knew exactly what she meant. Sometimes she felt like they lived right inside her head and if they were captured by Communists and tortured and their tongues cut out they would still be able to communicate. That was what it meant to be best friends.

      Hannah’s mom thought they all spent too much time together. She didn’t approve of the way Liz was being brought up, half neglected. She said intellectuals had “no business” having children. She wouldn’t even say what she thought of Jeanne’s parents. Just rolled her eyes. Hannah’s mother divided her world into two columns, those people who met her standards and those who did not. Women and girls were always either ladies or not. Ladies did not paint their toenails except with clear polish and where was the fun in that?

      Fortunately, Hannah’s mother was easy to fool.

      Hannah had headed down to Bluegang right after breakfast when Liz called and said she had the new copy of Secrets, snitched from Green’s Drugstore. It wasn’t like they wanted to steal; they had to. In a town like Rinconada they couldn’t even pay a quarter for a confession magazine without word getting back to someone’s mother.

      Hannah hummed a few bars of a song she liked, “Bebop Wino.” She loved the beat and the smoky sound of the music on Sepia Serenade, but most of all the words which, even when they didn’t say anything, implied so much. “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” “Money Honey.” “Sixty-Minute Man.”

      Dirty songs, songs about sex, the dark side of the moon.

      If nail polish was cheap, confession magazines were unadulterated trash. Hannah wasn’t sure what her mother meant when she said unadulterated; it was one of her favorite words and bad for sure. I Married My Brother. Forced to Love—Forced to Pay. My Secret Shame. The stories were never as good as the titles, which sent little ripples of expectant heat through Hannah’s stomach.

      Liz always kept the magazines because her mother never investigated her bedroom the way Hannah’s did. Hannah stole nail polish and lipstick from Woolworth’s and hid them in her bookcase behind boring old Nancy Drew, and she had to remember to carry them to school with her on Tuesdays because that was the day her mother dragged out the Hoover and all its attachments, the furniture polish, the vinegar and ammonia and the basket of rags and cleaned house like she expected a visit from an angel. Jeanne mixed cocktails when they slept over at her house. Last weekend they’d tried out Manhattans, which tasted the way Tangee nail polish smelled.

      Hannah heard the crunch and rustle of deep oak leaves, the snap of a branch and looked up, expecting her friends. Instead she saw Billy Phillips on the hillside above her, standing on a saddle of roots from the big oak that had been undercut by high water some winters before.

      “Hubba-hubba,” he said.

      Billy