Jamaica Plain, August 2010.
The party was her mother's idea, which was the first problem.
"Marisol's mother invited you personally," Margaret said. She was standing at the kitchen counter, signing a card with a ballpoint pen that kept skipping. "Personally, Tina. She stopped me outside the laundromat."
"Marisol and I haven't really talked since sixth grade."
"Then you'll have plenty to catch up on." Margaret licked the envelope, made a face at the taste, and held it out. "Sixteen is a big birthday. Be nice. Eat something that isn't chips. Home by eleven."
"Ten-thirty sounds more reasonable."
"Eleven," her mother said, "so you have something to complain about."
The card was from the CVS on Centre Street and had a cartoon cupcake on the front wearing sunglasses. Tina carried it the three and a half blocks to Marisol's house the way some people carried a summons.
It was the last stretch of August, the week when Boston gave up on pretending to be pleasant. The air was so thick it felt chewable. Porch lights were coming on along the street of triple-deckers, each house stacked like three apartments someone had balanced on top of one another and dared to stay up. Somewhere a screen door banged twice. Beyond the rooftops, an Orange Line train rumbled into Green Street and rumbled out again, the sound rising and falling like weather.
Tina had a library copy of *Jane Eyre* in her bag, just in case.
***
Marisol's backyard was a long rectangle of tired grass behind a yellow triple-decker, fenced in on three sides. Someone had strung colored lights from the back porch to a crooked maple, and they swung a little whenever a train passed. There were folding chairs in uneven rows, a card table sagging under paper plates and bowls of chips, and a cooler full of melting ice and off-brand soda. Marisol's uncle stood at a grill by the fence, turning hot dogs with the seriousness of a surgeon. A speaker on the porch steps was playing the same summer songs every radio station in America had been playing since June.
Tina gave the card to Marisol, who hugged her with real enthusiasm, said "Oh my God, you came," and was immediately pulled away by three girls in matching friendship bracelets.
So Tina did what she always did at parties. She found the edge.
She took a paper plate she didn't intend to fill and stood near the porch steps where the light was weakest. From there she could see everything. A cluster of boys was pretending not to look at a cluster of girls. Marisol's little cousins were chasing each other between the chairs. Two of the older kids were dancing ironically, then less ironically. Marisol's mother leaned out the kitchen window to shout something in Spanish at the uncle, who shouted back without turning around.
Tina watched faces. It was a habit she did not examine closely. She would never have said she was looking for anyone. She would have said she was bored, and this was true. But each time the back gate opened, some part of her lifted its head, the way a dog does at the sound of keys.
Nobody who came through the gate was anybody.
She was considering *Jane Eyre* when she noticed the boy by the fence.
He wasn't dancing. He wasn't eating or talking to anyone. He was crouched on his heels in the shadow behind the grill, where the colored lights didn't reach, holding something small and black out at arm's length toward the bushes. His head was tilted, and his face had the expression of someone trying to hear a conversation through a wall.
Tina watched him for a full minute. He didn't move.
Curiosity was another habit she did not examine closely. She set down her empty plate and walked over.
"Are you okay?"
He held up one finger without looking at her. Wait.
She waited, mostly out of disbelief. From the bushes came the dry, electric racket of cicadas, rising to a pitch and holding it. Behind them, the kitchen window clattered with dishes, and Marisol's mother laughed at something, loud and sudden.
The boy pressed a button and stood up. He was taller than she expected, with dark hair that looked as if it had been arranged by a strong wind and then abandoned. When he smiled, only one side of his mouth went all the way up.
"Sorry," he said. "They were about to do the big part."
"The bugs."
"Cicadas."
"You were recording the bugs."
"And the kitchen." He nodded toward the window. "Mostly the kitchen. The bugs were just in the way at first, and then I liked them." He turned the thing in his hand so she could see it: a slim black digital recorder, not much bigger than a cell phone, with a tiny screen and a red light that had just gone dark. "I'm Noah."
"Tina."
"Tina," he repeated, as if he were filing it somewhere. "Do you go to school with Marisol?"
"I used to. Elementary. Now I'm at Latin."
"So you're smart."
"I'm good at tests. It's different."
That made him laugh, a quick, surprised sound. "I live on Wyman. My mom knows Marisol's mom from church, which is the only reason I'm here, but I'm not complaining. The hot dogs are excellent."
Tina frowned. "Wyman Street? I'm on Boylston."
"That's three streets."
"I know how far it is."
"How have we never met?"
They worked it out in the space of a few minutes, standing by the fence while the uncle pretended not to listen. They used the same corner store. They had stood at the same bus stop on Centre Street, presumably for years, at slightly different times. He was going into his junior year at English High. He had a sister, Grace, who was older and bossy and had just started college. Tina had no sisters and a mother who was, she said, bossy enough for several.
"I've definitely seen you," Noah said. "At the store. You buy the sour candy that nobody buys."
"Somebody has to keep them in business."
"That's very civic of you."
She looked at the recorder. "So what do you do with it? The bugs and the kitchen."
He shrugged, but the shrug wasn't careless. "Keep them. Listen to them later. Sometimes I put things together, like a little piece. Like a radio thing, without the radio." He glanced toward the porch, where the speaker was thumping. "Everybody takes pictures of a party. Nobody records what it sounds like. And in ten years Marisol's mom won't be leaning out of that window, and nobody's going to remember that she laughed like that, and then it's just gone." He hesitated, as if he had said too much. "Every place has a story. It disappears unless somebody keeps it."
Tina had expected him to be strange. She had not expected him to be serious.
"That's kind of sad," she said.
"It's kind of the opposite."
"How is it the opposite?"
"Because I'm keeping it."
She didn't have an answer for that, so she asked him what else he had recorded. He told her: the Orange Line doors at Forest Hills, his grandmother explaining how to make arroz con gandules while refusing to give exact measurements, a thunderstorm through a cracked window, the man who sold flowers outside the T station and sang to himself. He talked fast when he talked about it, then caught himself and slowed down and asked her what she did all summer.
"Read," she said. "Babysat. Read more."
"What are you reading now?"
"*Jane Eyre*. It's in my bag, in case this party was a disaster."
"Is it?"
"The party or the book?"
"Either."
She considered. "The jury's out on both."
He grinned, then asked her what the book was about, and she told him, and what surprised her was not that he asked but that he listened. He didn't look past her toward the cluster of girls. He didn't wait for a pause so he could talk again. When she said she wanted to live somewhere else someday, somewhere you could see a horizon without a train line cutting through it, he didn't laugh. He asked where.
"I don't know yet," she said. "Somewhere that isn't three streets from where I was born."
"I'd miss it," he said. "But I'd want to see you leave it. Just to hear what you'd say about it." He held up the recorder. "Can I?"
"Can you what?"
"Record you. Just a little bit. You can say no."
Nobody had ever asked her that. Nobody had ever thought anything she said might be worth keeping. She felt her face warm, and was grateful for the dark behind the grill.
"What would I even say?"
"Whatever. I'll ask you a question."
"Fine," she said. "But if it's weird, you delete it."
"Deal."
He pressed the button. The red light came on, small and steady, and he held the recorder between them, not quite in her face. His voice changed slightly, became more careful, the way people sound reading aloud in class.
"August twenty-first, 2010. Marisol's birthday. Tina Walsh." He looked at her. "What does this summer sound like to you?"
She opened her mouth to say *cicadas*, because that was the obvious answer and he would like it. Instead, something else came out.
"Our ceiling fan," she said. "It clicks. Every time it goes around. My mom's been saying she'll fix it since I was in fourth grade, and she never does, so it just goes click, click, click all summer, and you stop hearing it, and then you can't sleep without it." She paused. The red light watched her. "And my mom humming in the kitchen. She doesn't know she does it. It's never an actual song. I think she makes them up."
Noah didn't say anything. He didn't stop recording either. Behind them the cicadas swelled, and the train rumbled somewhere north, and Marisol's mother called the uncle's name again.
"That's it," Tina said. "That's my summer. Fans and humming. Very exciting."
He pressed stop. "That's a really good answer."
"It's a boring answer."
"Those are the good ones." He thumbed through a menu on the tiny screen. "Want to hear?"
"No."
He played it anyway, holding the speaker close to her ear. A small, tinny girl said *Our ceiling fan. It clicks.*
"Oh my God." Tina covered her face. "Is that what I sound like? I sound like I'm twelve."
"You sound like you."
"That's worse." She was laughing now, helplessly, the way she only ever laughed at home. "Delete it. You said you'd delete it if it was weird."
"It's not weird." He tilted the screen so she could see. The file sat in a short list, a string of numbers and then, beside it, letters he had typed with his thumb while she was covering her face: *TINA 8-21-10*. "See? It's labeled. It's official now. I can't delete official things."
"That's not a rule."
"It's my rule."
She should have been annoyed. She was mostly something else.
***
The cake came out at nine, sixteen candles leaning in the heat. Everyone sang badly. Marisol cried a little and pretended she didn't. Tina and Noah ended up sharing one folding chair's worth of space at the end of a row, him sitting, her perched on the arm because the other chairs had been claimed by aunts.
"You know what the best love story is?" she said, apropos of nothing, because Marisol's boyfriend had just kissed her on the cheek and everyone had made noises about it.
"I feel like you're about to tell me."
"Romeo and Juliet." She said it lightly, half a joke. Only half.
Noah winced. "Really?"
"What's wrong with Romeo and Juliet?"
"Nothing. The words are great. The ending makes me crazy." He leaned back in the chair. "They don't wait. They don't talk to anybody. Like, there's a whole friar right there, and a nurse, and they just do everything in three days and then die. If one of them had just sent a text."
"They didn't have texts."
"They had a friar." He shook his head. "I don't know. I like stories where people get older. Where you get to see what happens after."
"After is boring," Tina said. "That's why nobody writes it."
It came out sharper than she meant. Something in her had flinched, a small, private hurt she could not have explained, as if he had stepped on a thing she kept on the floor of her room.
Noah looked at her. Not the quick look people gave when they wanted to move on, but a longer one, as if he had heard a note he hadn't expected.
"Okay," he said. "Maybe it's a good story. I just wanted them to get a sequel."
"Noted," she said, and the hurt eased, though it didn't entirely go.
"Everybody!" Marisol's aunt was standing on the porch steps with a silver digital camera. "Picture! All the teenagers, by the cake, come on, before it melts!"
There was a general groan and a general shuffling. Someone dragged the card table closer. The cake had been reduced to a frosted ruin. Folding chairs were pushed back, paper plates abandoned on the grass. Somehow, in the crush, Tina ended up at the end of the second row with Noah beside her.
"Put that thing down," the aunt told him.
"It's part of my look," Noah said, and kept the recorder in his hand.
"Say *dieciséis*!"
Everybody said it, badly. The colored lights swung above them as a train went by. Noah's hair was a disaster. His smile went all the way up on one side. Tina had no idea what her own face was doing. The flash went off, and for a second the whole yard was white.
"One more!" the aunt said, but by then everyone was already leaving.
***
At ten-forty, Tina said she had to go.
"Curfew?" Noah asked.
"Eleven. My mother picked it specifically so I'd have something to complain about."
"I like her already." He stood. "I'll walk you. It's on the way."
"Wyman isn't on the way to Boylston."
"It is if you go the long way."
The street outside was darker than the yard and much quieter. The heat hadn't broken; it had just settled, heavy and patient, over the parked cars and the chain-link fences and the triple-deckers with their blue television glow in the upper windows. A cat watched them from a porch. The music from the party grew thinner behind them until it was only a bass line, and then nothing.
After half a block, Tina became aware of a small red light at the level of Noah's hip.
"Are you recording our *feet*?"
"Your sandals make a really specific sound."
"Stop it."
"It's like a little slap and then a scuff—"
"Noah."
He clicked it off, laughing, and put the recorder in his pocket, and then for a while neither of them said anything. It wasn't uncomfortable. She could hear what he must have been hearing: the hum of a window air conditioner, a television laugh track drifting down from a third floor, their footsteps, uneven, his a little slower than hers until he matched them.
At the corner of Boylston, under a streetlight that buzzed, he took out his phone, a scratched silver flip phone with a sticker half peeled off the back.
"Can I have your number? Or are you on Facebook? Or AIM, if you're ancient."
"I'm not ancient." She took out her own phone, her mother's old one, with a crack across the outside screen. They traded, and she typed her number into his with her thumb, pressing each key two or three times to get the right letters for her name. When she handed it back, he had saved himself in hers as *Noah (the bug guy)*.
"Very professional," she said.
"I have a brand."
Her building was the fourth one in, its porch light already on, because Margaret always turned it on at ten and pretended it was a coincidence. They stopped at the bottom of the steps. For a moment, Noah looked as if he might say something important. Then he just said, "Good luck with *Jane Eyre*."
"Good luck with the cicadas."
"They're very difficult to work with," he said, and lifted one hand, and walked away up the street. The long way, she noticed. Not toward Wyman at all.
***
Upstairs, the apartment was dark except for the light over the stove. Her mother called "That you?" from the bedroom, and Tina said "It's ten fifty-two," and her mother said "Show-off," and that was the end of it.
Tina lay on top of her sheets with the window open. The heat pressed in. Somewhere down the block, a car door slammed, and an Orange Line train sighed into the station and out again.
Above her, the ceiling fan turned. Click. Click. Click.
She thought about the boy who had asked to keep her voice. About the way he had looked at her when she was sharp with him, not hurt, just listening harder. About the label on the tiny screen: her name, the date, as though the evening were something that could be filed and found again.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. One text, from *Noah (the bug guy)*.
*your fan is very loud btw. i could hear it in the recording.*
She laughed out loud, alone in the dark, and didn't answer yet, because she wanted to think of something clever, and because some part of her wanted to hold the moment a little longer before she let it become a conversation.
It had happened the way she had always known it would. She had walked into a backyard full of strangers and there, by the fence, had been someone she recognized. Not his face. Something underneath it.
She was fifteen. She did not yet know that what she had actually done that night was eat half a hot dog, argue about Shakespeare and trade phone numbers with a boy who lived three streets away.
She only knew that she had found him.
The fan kept clicking. Eventually, she fell asleep to it.