Everyone knew.
She picked up an open Coke can wedged against the seat. “When’s this from?”
“Yesterday?”
She tipped her pills into her palm, then into her mouth. The soda was warm and flat, delicious.
Abe asked, “What would happen if I took one of those?”
“You wouldn’t get high, if that’s what you mean. You’d shake and have cottonmouth. Want one?”
“Yeah, right, really fun.”
She propped her feet against the dash and fiddled with the radio, tentatively happy. Actually, maybe lithium would get a normal person like Abe off, but the idea bothered her.
They pulled up to the low pool house, its white paint grimy, its wide front window shuttered. “We met here,” she said, realizing.
“Bleah.” He made a face. “I was such a little brat.”
“You were kind of a brat.”
She got out of the car. When she leaned down to say good-bye, Abe said, “I love you.”
She wouldn’t have imagined he’d be able to say it like that, looking at her, not touching his toes or stretching his shoulder muscles.
“I love you too.” As she said it, it became true. She slammed the car door, ran up the steps to the pool house.
That morning she swam the hundred-meter butterfly in 1:11.87. It was the closest she’d come all summer—though it wasn’t very close—to the record she’d set last year.
She’d been dreading Abe’s departure, but as she climbed out of the pool, then stood doubled over with her hands on her knees, panting, exultant, she felt a stab of yearning. She wanted the summer over.
She’d pushed herself hard and she was dizzy, blood pounding in her temples, her feet shriveled, white, weirdly distant. Everyone knew, and this fall was going to be much harder than she’d let herself understand, but she wanted it to come, she wanted Abe gone and the summer over so she could know she’d managed to not fuck it up, know that it was safe.
Six
The alarm went off at ten of five, and Luke reached over Khamisa to turn it off. Then he reset it for six-thirty, when she needed to get up. Over the summer, he’d been able to go back to bed after getting home from Khamisa’s, but since school had started up again two months ago, he’d had to wait for weekends to catch up on sleep.
Groggily, she said, “I had the strangest dream. You were, like, a car, but also you—”
“I have to get up,” he whispered. He found his cold sweatpants on the floor by the bed and pulled them on. Leaning back, he kissed her quickly but she put her arms around his neck, pulling him into a longer kiss. He reached behind his neck, unhooking her hands. “I have to go.”
“You were a car, and there was this tower with water in it, and those little rectangle windows. And you were floating in the water. …”
He shoved his feet into running shoes. Going back through his window via the dogwood meant getting up at four or risk bumping into his dad. Instead he wore sweats to Khamisa’s. That way, coming back into the house, he could claim to have been out jogging.
“Kiss me again.”
“I really have to go.” He leaned over and kissed her breast quickly, where it was flattened against the mattress.
Downstairs, he pulled the front door closed. Late October. No snow yet, but the cold air pierced through his sweatshirt, through his T-shirt, to his skin. He began to run, muscles stiff. When he lifted his hand to tug at the sweatshirt’s neck, his fingers smelled musky, like sex. Quite suddenly, he was very happy. The gray half-light made the houses indistinct, like buildings under water. That he was the only person awake made the world seem full of promise. He jumped up to hit a low-hanging branch.
His family’s house was rectangular and brick, shouldered between two white clapboard houses with green shutters. It was the only house on the block with a light on. His father stood at the front kitchen window, looking blankly out into the yard. Luke circled around to the back door, and his father turned as he came in.
“How was your run?”
Luke shrugged. He got water at the sink—it was very cold and tasted of iron.
“Chilly morning,” said his dad.
“I guess.”
“Leaving at five-twenty?”
“We always leave at five-twenty.”
Upstairs, he pulled on his swim trunks, then his sweatpants again. The room was freezing—the window had been open all night, and he went to close it now. Luke glanced at the clock; if he was late, Angie would leave for practice without him. From outside, he heard her car cough, then shake alive.
He jogged downstairs and out to the driveway. The open sides of his letter jacket knocked softly against his chest.
Abe hadn’t taken the Galaxie to Harvard and was letting Angie use it. Luke opened the front door so he could reach back and undo the back door lock.
From the driver’s seat, Angie asked, “What are you doing?”
He crawled into the backseat. “I’m wiped out.”
“You’re lying down?”
“I just want to sleep till we’re there.”
“No way,” Angie said flatly. She turned off the ignition. Her eyes in the mirror were pale blue. “You can sleep in front but I’m not chauffeuring your ass.”
“Jesus, Ange.” He flopped over on his side, his face against the hard plastic seat. Muffled, he said, “Why do you care if I’m back here or up there? Just pretend you’re alone.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you in back.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
She turned the key, but just to switch on the radio. She found a rap station, then lit a cigarette.
“You know, I’m being nice enough not to tell Coach Nawrocki about you smoking. He’d kill you.”
She turned the radio up.
This summer she’d been pretty normal. Once or twice she’d even spoken to Luke without having first been spoken to. One night after Abe dropped her off she’d said, “His clothes are a little too perfect, don’t you think? They should be more worn out.” Luke noted in his head: more worn out.
Another night he’d been lying on the bed, listening to the Meat Puppets. Occasionally he glanced over to see if Kristin was under the tree outside. He tried to check without moving his head, so she wouldn’t know he was aware of being watched. Angie appeared at his bedroom door with a small plastic film canister. “Do you want this?” she asked, and tossed it to him.
He sat up to catch it. The canister was so light it felt empty; it must hold pot. “You don’t want it?”
“I’mfuckedupenoughwithoutdrugs.” He could tell she’d practiced saying it before coming to his room. She took a breath. “Anyways, it’s old. It might not even be any good.”
He popped off the lid, picked up a bud: pale green, shaped like a tiny horseshoe crab. He wasn’t used to Angie lingering. Rolling the bud between his thumb and forefinger, he asked, “Do you still think you’re sick?”
Her blond hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail. She wore a dark pink cotton tank and cut-off jeans, the sunburnt tip of her nose peeling a little. She’d squinted at him and he’d thought she might yell, but her voice had come out uncertain. “I don’t feel sick.”
The backseat smelled of old Coke spills, and stuck in the crack were dozens of crumbs like sharp, tiny stars. An ad for diamonds came on the radio. He couldn’t think of anything stupider than paying thousands of dollars for a piece of rock, then wearing that rock on your finger. The radio announcer made some extravagant claims for the station. He tried to sleep. When he found that he couldn’t, he concentrated on the appearance of sleeping, holding his body still, breathing as slowly as he could.
Angie was smoking with the window up, so that smoke filled the car. After maybe two minutes, Luke said, “Shit piss fuck.” His sister would sit there all morning. When he pushed himself over the front seat, tumbling awkwardly, she calmly turned on the engine and rolled the window down partway, letting out the smoke. Without speaking they
drove to the Y.
The air indoors was thick and warm, mugginess pierced by the sharp smell of chlorine. Luke stepped out of his sweatpants, balling them and tossing them up into the scored metal bleachers, high enough not to get splashed.
Fluorescent lights flickered high above the pool room. The tall, dark windows mirrored people as they pulled off their clothes. Steam rose off the pool in dense wisps. A sophomore boy sat on the pool’s concrete apron, legs straight out in front of him, back bent so that his forehead touched his knees, hands wrapped around the arches of his feet. Farther over, a girl stood with her hands on her hips. Another girl stood behind her, slowly pushing the front girl’s elbows together until she cried out sharply. The back girl let go; they both laughed.
His sister was taking off her sweat clothes, folding them carelessly. Her pale hair was silvered by chlorine. As kids they’d been friends, but in about junior high Angie had lost interest in Luke. Mostly they just didn’t have much to say to each other; Angie was Supergirl, all honors classes and Student Government, and he didn’t care about that stuff. For a long time, swim team had been the one place they really connected. Last fall, when his IM relay won against Whitman High, Angie had screamed and screamed through the whole race, then given him a hug so exultant she’d lifted him off the ground. Of course, that had been when she was doing crazy things: running through a party naked (other people had streaked too, but all guys), stealing shoes from Goldman’s, standing to make a funny, rambling speech at an all-school assembly.
Before the hospital, Angie had been so much better than anyone else on the team that it wasn’t the kind of thing you got jealous about. Lots of people swam butterfly well, but you admired them because you could see how hard it was. With Angie, the stroke seemed so natural that you didn’t even appreciate it until she raced and you saw how thrashingly other people swam, how inefficient their movement was. If she’d been at Regionals last year and not in the hospital, their team would have come in second, possibly first; without her, they came in fourth. Weirdly, though, her being gone had been a kind of relief. The scale for achievement shrank; it was possible to just be good.
Coach Nawrocki, who was also Luke’s algebra teacher, blew his whistle. He’d written the workout on a whiteboard, which he wheeled to the side of the pool: a four-hundred-meter warm-up, a ladder of timed intervals, two four-hundred-meter IMs, some stroke practice, a warm-down. Sometimes, between intervals, Luke saw Angie in the pool. She wasn’t the way she used to be. Partly she’d lost conditioning, but also she didn’t seem to care very much. She got by because her form was so good.
When they finished, the windows were hard with the white light of New England winter. He showered in the tiled bathroom, only realizing now how exhausted he was. Because the bathroom had no windows, it could have been midnight. Afterward, he studied himself covertly as he combed his hair. Since Kristin had begun coming to the yard last year, he’d looked in mirrors more, but he didn’t look any different. He still had a big forehead and eyebrows that met in the center and hair that looked shaggy no matter what, unless he crew-cut it. Sometimes at home, he locked himself in the bathroom and took off his clothes, standing on the toilet lid to see himself full-length in the mirror above the sink. This is the body I’ll be in until I die, he’d say to himself, and sometimes for a moment he’d feel awe, but then it would be gone.
The air in the parking lot, during the hour they’d been at practice, had gone from darkness to thin gray dawn, sharply cold, scented with gas fumes. Trucks ground by on the highway in clouds of white exhaust. His sister was standing in front of the Y, frowning, near a knot of girls. She was bigger than them, and wearing a shapeless, shabby overcoat of his dad’s. She barely spoke to her teammates these days, even though Martha Packer was lingering near her, obviously hoping to be noticed. Martha, with her triple-pierced ears and black lipstick, was one of the girls who had recently become infatuated with his sister. Since her breakdown, Angie had had satellites, girls who wrote poetry about the poignant beauty of dead roses and doodled razor blades in the margins of their class notes.
She saw him and said, “Finally.” She stomped out toward the Galaxie.
Martha called hopefully, “See you at school?”
Angie kicked a chunk of snow, which burst into powder. She wore flip-flops, her toes pink and hard-looking in the cold.
At school, stowing his stuff in his locker, he found a letter Kristin had pushed through the slats. He didn’t have to look down the hall to know she was watching him unfold the paper. Written in ballpoint pen, it began:
So, it’s 11 on Tuesday night and my mother is downstairs drinking wine with her “boyfriend.” This one has been around for exactly two weeks, and I give the relationship another two weeks, max. That’s an optimistic forecast, though, since the last “boyfriend” I was introduced to I never saw again. I could see him anytime I want, of course, if I just walked into the Onion after about four in the afternoon. And now you could too, though I doubt you will.
If you did go in, the “boyfriend” (now “ex-boyfriend”)’s name is Mike, but rather than going into the Onion and shouting, “Mike! Mike!” you could just look for a guy who looks a little like a basset hound—big oniony (ha!) rings under the eyes, no cheekbones—and who (according to my mother) drinks Bloody Marys into the evening and plays Johnny Cash on the jukebox. She confessed these details during the why-doesn’t-he-call-do-you-think-he’s-going-to-call? (um, no, Ma) week after she slept with him, before she gave up and went out and found the current boyfriend. Are you even allowed to drink a brunch drink at night and while listening to Live at San Quentin?
Apparently so.
Anyway, it’s eleven, and I can’t come see you because even though my mother probably wouldn’t notice or care, once I left when a boyfriend was here and the whole time I was away I was imagining coming home and finding her strangled in bed, á la Looking For Mr. Goodbar. (Did you see that movie?) Not that it ruined your night or anything, but anyway.
Sometimes I get this awful chill and know how maybe this all seems out of proportion, considering we aren’t even exactly friends or anything. But then I think about how that night when we talked, it was like I’d finally met the one person who got it. Before that, I’d decided you were just a jock with your jock friends, and now that I know differently, I find I can’t go back to seeing you the way other people do.
I wish you’d just let me know you don’t hate me.
Khamisa came up behind him. “Another note?” She took it from his hand, skimming it, and muttered, “God, she is so weird.”
“She’s right down the hall,” he said.
“So?”
“So it’s going to embarrass her if she sees you reading that.”
Khamisa turned away from him, holding the note up in the air, and waved it. “Fuck her,” she said.
“You want me to fuck her?”
“Very funny.” She kissed him, hard.
He wished she wouldn’t. A jock. Was he really a jock? As spooky as Kristin was, he didn’t quite want her to stop coming to the yard. This summer, there had been two weeks she hadn’t shown up, and he’d felt almost lonely. As if he existed less. He opened his eyes but couldn’t see, past Khamisa, whether she was still there.
Seven
Waking up, there was a moment Angie didn’t feel bad. Then it descended again onto her chest, like a cat that had merely stood to change position and was now settling more securely. It was three in the morning. She had to go back to sleep, or she would be a wreck at school.
She lay awake for an hour, watching the green numbers of her digital clock. Nights had been getting steadily worse. Finally, she decided she could at least get something done if she was up anyway. It was a comfort to have an excuse to get out of bed, but then as soon as she sat at her desk she felt exhausted again. She forced herself to pick up the first of the blank college applications, heavy tan paper with a blue seal. What one experience would you say has most shaped who you ar
e as a person?
What happened last fall had made a mess of her transcript. She’d failed a class and gotten pity-Ds in two more, though, bizarrely, she’d held on to an A in Spanish. And she’d aced her SATs, a 1560; that had been late October, when she’d been a little manic but hadn’t yet gone off the rails. She was applying to Yale and Brown and Wesleyan and Middlebury and Cornell, as she’d originally planned. Her parents thought she should, and she didn’t have it in her to figure out a new list of schools. Her mom kept saying, “One bad semester won’t matter if you just tell them what happened.” Her mother’s theory was that colleges were full of students having breakdowns. According to this theory, Angie would be attractive because she’d gotten her breakdown out of the way.
She picked up a pen and stared at what she’d written on a sheet of loose-leaf, a few lines about losing a swim race that would have qualified her for the Junior National team, the day she’d realized she wasn’t Olympic material, not even close, as much as she could dominate regional meets. She imagined sentences, the words lined up like railroad ties into the distance. The essay would be easy to pad and fill out. She’d describe the meet, her hopes, her dashed hopes, and what she realized now, or at least recognized she should realize now—that losing sometimes was necessary and good. She put her head down on the desk, on top of the pile of applications. It wouldn’t be so hard to do this essay, and then she could change it to fit the other schools’ questions, which all basically asked what made her different. She didn’t have to do it yet: a thin strand of relief.
At practice she had to force herself through every lap. Her arms and legs felt like they had weights tied to them. She wanted to stop, sink, but that would just mean flurry and attention and someone diving down to pull her up. The energy of the scene—the image of people lifting her from the pool, thumping on her back—exhausted her. Luke would be standing off to the side, disgusted. She managed a leaden flip turn, pushed herself forward.
Halfway House Page 8