Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian Page A

weeks she had managed to convince their grandmother that she was wearing sunblock when in reality she wasn’t: Though this might mean she’d have to battle all kinds of skin cancers in that never-never land of adulthood, right now her skin was bronzed to the point of exoticism, and she was going to show off every single inch that she could.
    By comparison, Willow felt like a jar of old craft paste: pale white because she had been wearing the requisite sunscreen, tired, and common. Even her bathing suit looked unattractive: The bottom had started to pill from all the hours she’d spent sitting on the cement around the pool. Until this week, it hadn’t even crossed her mind that a Speedo could pill. She’d wanted to buy a new suit before her parents brought her here for the month, but because of baby Patrick there hadn’t been time to go to the mall.
    “I think I should pierce my belly button,” Charlotte said abruptly, and though Willow was aware that the remark technically was directed at her, she knew her cousin had only broached the idea to get a reaction out of Gary. “I think I should get a silver ring. Don’t you?”
    “No.”
    “You don’t think I’d look good with one?”
    “I think your mom and dad would kill you.”
    “They wouldn’t know. It’s not like I walk around in a halter at home.”
    “Well, it’s not like you do at school, either. So why do it?”
    “It would be cool.”
    “You couldn’t wear that bathing suit,” Willow said, and for a moment it seemed that Charlotte was pondering this, but then the girl glanced out of the corners of her eyes at Gary—Gary with the peeling skin on his nose and the tawny young man’s hair on his chest, Gary with the sunglasses and the whistle and the small stud of his own sparkling right now in his left ear—and she realized that Charlotte was thrilled that she had alluded to how scanty her bathing suit was in front of the lifeguard.
    “That would be too bad, wouldn’t it?” Charlotte said. “Maybe I’ll wait till the end of the summer. When we go home. I’ll bet this town doesn’t even have a place that does body art.”
    “No,” Gary said from the top of the chair, the sound of his voice—and the reality that he was actually listening to their conversation—catching them both by surprise. “There isn’t a place in Franconia or Sugar Hill. But you could always try Yankee Art up in Littleton. The guy there also does tattoos.”
    “Yeah, Charlotte, why don’t you get a tattoo? A belly-button ring and a tattoo. That’ll make your mom and dad real happy.”
    “Of course,” Gary continued, “you’ll need to wait at least five or six years. I’m pretty sure it’s against the law to tattoo a seventh-grader.” He was smiling when he said it, and Willow wished she could see his eyes behind the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses.
    “Eighth,” Charlotte said, almost spitting the syllable up at him. “I’ll be in eighth grade in September.”
    The lifeguard just nodded, and Willow could tell he was struggling not to laugh. Then she saw him look up at something behind her, and when she turned she saw her mom and dad and Patrick—the baby in a Snugli on her father’s chest, his small pink hands the only visible flesh—wandering toward them across the grass between the main entrance and the clubhouse with its picture-window views of Mount Lafayette. They were early, she realized, because Grandmother had said they probably wouldn’t arrive until midafternoon. Then her mom was opening the gate in the chain-link fence that surrounded the pool, and—forgetting completely for the moment that her cousin Charlotte was annoyed by enthusiasm in any form—Willow was on her feet and running across the cement deck toward them because the truth was that she missed her parents, even if they hadn’t found the time to buy her a new bathing suit, and she was very glad they were here.
     
    WILLOW BOUNCED her baby brother on her lap in a