Windfall

by Jennifer E. Smith

  The rest of the crowd is getting quieter now as their attention shifts, and the voices of the two men are audible. Charlie shakes an arm off his shoulder.

  “Just pay up, man,” the other guy says, and my heart sinks as a gym teacher steps in, trying to appease them both. It’s almost completely silent now, more than a hundred people watching the spectacle unfold as if they were in a theater.

  “I’m not leaving,” Charlie says to the teacher. “I’m here to see my kid.”

  I glance at Teddy again; his ears are turning pink as he watches. From across the bleachers, I’m relieved to see Uncle Jake pop up. He’s been sitting beside Aunt Sofia and Katherine—who is watching all this with a horrified look—but now he dashes past the rows of rapt students and over to Charlie, who is still shouting.

  “I’m a parent too!” he yells at the teacher, gesturing toward Teddy. “Of a student. Of that student.”

  The silence is beginning to turn into whispers and murmurs and muffled snickers. Uncle Jake finally reaches Charlie, and when he does he bends his head to speak to him in a low voice. To my great relief, whatever he says does the trick. Charlie sweeps his eyes across the crowd with a look of slow comprehension before landing on his son, who turns away. Finally he sighs and allows himself to be led out into the hallway.

  “Good luck, kid!” he shouts vaguely in Teddy’s direction, and the minute the door slams shut behind him the bleachers fill with noise. The other man follows him out a second later, but by then nobody is paying attention.

  “Good luck, kid!” people begin to yell, cupping their hands around their mouths and shouting the words. “Do it for your pop!”

  I turn back to Teddy, who is staring at the too-blue water of the pool, his back to the crowd. With a burst of static, Mr. Dill speaks into his megaphone: “Pardon the interruption, folks. But it looks like we’re ready for the next race now.”

  “Hey,” I say to Teddy, so softly that I’m not even sure he hears me over all the many voices. “Are you okay?”

  He inclines his head, just slightly, and I can see that his mouth is set in a thin line. Without answering, he bends to push the boat into the water, holding it steady while I climb into the front. I fold my knees underneath me and grab one of the paddles, which are made from cardboard tubes. Then he gets in behind me, the boat tipping wildly from one side to the other before righting itself. I’m alarmed by how low we’ve settled into the water; my calculations had us riding a lot higher. But test runs were against the rules, so this is our maiden voyage, and it’s all a bit of a guessing game at this point.

  I grip my paddle hard, waiting for Mr. Dill’s whistle to split the air. To our left, Mitchell and Alexis are staring straight ahead, their faces rigid with focus, and behind them the bleachers are a blur of people and noise.

  “On your marks,” says Mr. Dill, who is sitting in the lifeguard chair at the halfway point, a clipboard balanced on his lap. “Get set….”

  Then the whistle sounds and we’re off.

  Teddy lunges forward so quickly that he knocks his head against my shoulder, and I immediately drop my paddle. He reaches for it before it can float away, shoving it back into my hand, then begins to row frantically. But he’s much faster than me, and instead of moving forward we start to spin in circles.

  He groans, then pulls his paddle out of the water to bring it to the other side and help me, but he manages to bonk me on the head in the process and I drop mine again. By the time he fishes it out, we’re already a few lengths behind, the other boat splashing ahead of us, our two classmates somehow as synchronized in their movements as members of a crew team.

  “Faster!” Teddy yells through gritted teeth, and I lean forward, paddling as hard as I can. I’m so focused on catching up that it takes me a minute to notice there’s water in the bottom of our boat, at least an inch of it, soaking my knees and my bare feet. I turn to give Teddy a panicked look, but he just shakes his head at me and says it again: “Faster!”

  The crowd is clapping hard now, half of them laughing and half of them booing as they watch us flounder in the middle of the pool.

  The water in the boat gets higher, and I can feel the bottom start to bend.

  “Teddy,” I say, whipping around, but his eyes are hard and he doesn’t even seem to see me: he’s looking past me to the finish line.

  The noise is now deafening, the voices ringing off the tiled floor and the concrete walls. The other boat has made it to the finish line, and we’re still rowing fast but we don’t seem to be getting anywhere, sinking deeper into the turquoise water.

  Still, Teddy continues to paddle, unwilling to give up, and so I do the same in spite of the soggy cardboard, in spite of the rising water, in spite of the jeering crowd.

  We’re three-quarters of the way to the finish line when the whole thing collapses. There’s no surprise to it by that point, no dunk tank moment; I’m already half-soaked, and the edges of the boat are starting to bow. It’s like a blanket being folded in half, all four corners drawn inward, and just before it happens, before the bottom gives out entirely, the whole thing caving in at once, I manage to close my eyes and hold my breath. And just like that we’re plunged into the deep end of the pool.

  It’s still something of a shock: the water is cold and the fall is sudden. For a few seconds I remain underwater, suspended in the muffled quiet. But when I open my stinging eyes to search for Teddy I don’t see anything, so I kick hard and let myself drift back up to the surface just in time to catch him hoisting himself out of the pool.

  “Teddy!” I shout, but it’s lost to the sound of our classmates, who are stomping their feet, hooting and laughing and pointing.

  Better luck next time, kid!

  Can’t win ’em all, Moneybags!

  Where’s your yacht when you need it?

  Beside me our crumpled boat is still bobbing in the chlorinated water like something dead, the bottom already beginning to break apart, so I grab the edge and start swimming toward the shallow end, dragging it behind me.

  I look up just in time to see Teddy disappearing through the door to the locker room without a backward glance, and suddenly I’m angry. I’m angry that we lost, angry that we failed. Angry that Teddy changed the design after contributing nothing for so long. Angry that he left me with the battered boat and the sneering crowd.

  Angry that he left me at all.

  By the time I make it to the end of the pool the next heat is lined up and ready to go, and I stand there, waist-deep in the shallow water, dripping and shivering and tugging at my clinging T-shirt as I look around for someone to help me pull the sodden cardboard mess out of the pool. But nobody seems to care. Mr. Dill is marking something down on his clipboard—probably our failing grade—and the audience has shifted its attention to the next race, no doubt hoping for an even more spectacular fail.

  I start to heave the damp remains of the boat over the concrete lip of the pool, but it’s unwieldy and surprisingly heavy, and I’m relieved when someone reaches down from above and pulls the whole thing out at once, hauling it onto the blue tiles, where it slumps to the floor like some sort of beached animal.

  When I look up, I’m surprised to see that it’s Sawyer who has come to my rescue. Only seniors are excused to watch the races, which means he must have cut class. “What are you doing here?” I ask as he reaches out a hand. But I wade over to the ladder and climb out on my own, eyeing him as I wring out my dripping shorts.

  “I wanted to cheer you on,” he says, handing me a towel from a stack sitting on one of the starting blocks. I wrap it around my shoulders gratefully.

  Behind us the whistle sounds and the next race begins, a flurry of splashing and shouting. Sawyer puts a hand on my shoulder, steering me toward the locker room, and I follow him, relieved to have someone pointing me in the right direction.

  “You’re shaking,” he says, and I realize that he’s right. But at the door to the locker room I’m suddenly weary of all the high-pitched voic
es of my classmates from inside, many of them laughing, probably still about Teddy and me.

  Instead I turn around and walk out into the hallway, my bare feet leaving wet footprints on the floor as Sawyer trails behind me. When we reach a small empty corridor between the nurse’s office and the gymnasium, I slide down the wall and onto the ground, tipping my head back against the cool concrete. My clothes are still soaked, and the towel is draped around my shoulders like a cape, and my hair is dripping onto the floor. But I’m grateful for the sudden quiet.

  Sawyer sits beside me, leaving a little space between us, and I’m not sure why but I feel oddly guilty as I wait for him to say something.

  “So did we win?” I joke, but his face doesn’t change.

  “You like him, don’t you?”

  My first instinct is to say Who? to buy myself some time, or maybe just to avoid the conversation altogether. But I can’t do that to him. Not after all the nice things he’s done for me. He was the one who took care of the boat. The one who gave me a towel. The one who offered me a hand.

  He was the one who was there for me today.

  And it’s not fair to him to pretend.

  “Yes,” I say in a small voice, flicking my eyes back to the puddle I’ve left on the floor so I can feel rather than see the way he steels himself, can sense the hurt so close to the surface, the way it radiates off him with a kind of heat.

  “I waited the other night,” he says, pulling his knees up. “To make sure you got in okay. I saw him there on the stoop, and the way you guys were talking.”

  “Nothing happened,” I say, which is the truth. Nothing happened then, and nothing ever will. Teddy has assured me of that much. Our kiss that morning in his apartment feels like it happened to two other people entirely.

  Sawyer gives me a sorrowful look. “It didn’t have to.”

  “We’re just friends,” I say, trying not to sound so disappointed by this. A drop of water slides down my nose and Sawyer lifts a hand to wipe it away, then changes his mind and lowers it again. But his eyes remain fixed on mine, and I can tell he wants to kiss me. Honestly there’s a part of me that wants to kiss him too. But I know that wouldn’t be fair, because I just don’t feel the same way he does. I wish I did. I want more than anything to feel for him what I do for Teddy, because everything would be so much simpler that way, so much better.

  But I don’t. And I can’t help that.

  So I pull back, just slightly, and his face clouds over. “Does he even like you back?”

  It takes me a second to say the word, and when I do there’s something hollow about it. “No.”

  “Because I do,” he says, his voice gruff. “I like you, Alice. A lot. I think you’re amazing, and if he can’t see that, then—”

  “Sawyer,” I say, because I can’t bear to let him finish. “I’m so sorry.”

  He gives me a hard look. “I know you like me too.”

  “I do,” I say, my stomach twisting as his eyes fill with hope. “But it’s just…it’s different with Teddy. I wish it wasn’t. I wish it was you instead. But I just can’t seem to shake this thing with him.”

  “You two have a history,” he says, like it’s the worst thing in the world, though history is what he loves.

  “We do,” I say. “But it’s not about that.”

  Sawyer sits very still for a minute, then rises to his feet, looking down at me with an unreadable expression.

  “You know he doesn’t deserve you, right?” he says a little angrily. “That’s why this sucks so much. It’s hard to watch you waiting around for something that’ll never happen because he’s too self-centered to notice what’s right there in front of him.”

  I open my mouth, then close it again, unsure what to say to that. But it doesn’t matter anyway. Sawyer turns and walks back down the hallway, the sound of his footsteps fading until they’ve disappeared altogether.

  Even after he’s gone I stay there like that, my heart sunk low, my eyes still burning from the chlorine, thinking about how the worst part of it all is that he’s probably right.

  Later that evening Leo and I are standing outside Teddy’s apartment.

  “You know this is pretty much the last place I want to be right now, right?” I say, and Leo gives me an exasperated look.

  “We have to make sure he’s okay.”

  I frown at him. “We were in the same boat, you know. Literally.”

  “I’m not talking about the boat,” he says as he lifts a hand to knock, and when Teddy opens the door he looks about as pleased as I am to find us there.

  “What’re you guys doing here?”

  “We knew it was taco night,” Leo says, waving to Katherine, who is slicing a tomato in the kitchen. She’s wearing her scrubs, and I know she’ll have to leave for work soon, which is just as well, since I’m still annoyed at Teddy for leaving me with the boat today and I don’t want to have it out with him while his mom is here.

  “Perfect. I’m just making seconds before I go, since this one never stops eating,” Katherine says, nodding at Teddy. “So there’s plenty for everyone.”

  Leo beams at her, and Teddy grudgingly steps aside to let us in, though he still refuses to meet my eye. We head over to the kitchen, grabbing extra plates and napkins, making ourselves busy so that we don’t have to talk about anything else.

  I notice a pile of newspaper clippings on the counter, tucked beneath the napkin holder. The one on top shows Teddy’s smiling face under a headline that reads DREAMS REALLY DO COME TRUE. A speck of salsa has landed on his chin.

  “I’m glad to see you dried out okay,” Katherine says to me, glancing up from the cutting board. “That was a tough race.”

  Teddy doesn’t say anything and neither do I.

  “If it was a race to the bottom of the pool, you guys would’ve killed it,” Leo says, but nobody laughs.

  When she finishes refilling bowls of tomatoes and lettuce and cheese, Katherine wipes her hands on her scrubs and looks at each of us in turn. “You two are taking this way too hard,” she says. “It was a cardboard boat. What did you expect?”

  “Maybe some help getting it out of the pool,” I say under my breath, and Teddy narrows his eyes at me.

  “I came back for it. But what’s-his-face seemed to be doing just fine on his own.”

  I glare at him. “That’s because you left me all alone in the water.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s not like you were drowning.”

  “Would you have noticed if I was?”

  “I was pissed off, okay?” he says. “I just had to get out of there. We completely tanked in front of the whole school.”

  “I know,” I say, practically spitting the words. “I was there too. Remember?”

  Leo pops a tortilla chip into his mouth, looking half-amused by all of this. But Katherine claps her hands hard, and the noise of it startles us into silence.

  “Okay,” she says firmly. “I think it’s time to change the subject.”

  “Yeah,” Leo says with a grin. “That ship has definitely sailed.”

  I give him a withering look.

  “Leo,” Katherine says, spinning in his direction. “How was Michigan?”

  All at once the smile slips from his face, replaced by the same blank expression he’s adopted whenever anyone has asked him about this since he got back.

  “Fine,” he says.

  Katherine tilts her head, waiting for more, and when it doesn’t come she pushes on. “It must’ve been nice to see Max.”

  “Yup,” he says, suddenly intent on fishing a fallen chip out of the bowl of salsa.

  “Okay, I have to get going,” she says, apparently giving up on us. She walks over and stands on her tiptoes beside Teddy, who bends so she can give him a kiss on the temple. “Last night shift.”

  He smiles. “I’ve been telling you about this whole sleeping-when-it’s-dark-out thing for years,” he tells her. “I highly recommend it.”

  “Thanks,” she says, laughing, t
hen turns to me. “And thank you.”

  The words are so full of gratitude that I blush. “Of course. I’m so happy for you.”

  “It’s a big night,” she says as she picks up her bag. Then she fixes a stern gaze on Teddy. “Don’t stay up too late. And no wild parties. And don’t you dare buy anything bigger than a breadbox.” She rolls her eyes at Leo and me. “Did you guys see the ice cream maker? And the jukebox? I’m going to have nowhere to sleep if he doesn’t stop.”

  “Mom,” Teddy groans.

  “And listen,” she says, her voice more serious now. “Whatever went on with your father at the race today—”

  “I already told you,” he says quickly. “It wasn’t that. He promised.”

  Katherine sighs. “Teddy, your dad—he’s not a bad guy. But he’s also not the most—look, I get that you want to believe the best in him. I do. But I honestly don’t know if his promises are worth all that much.”

  “This time is different,” Teddy insists.

  “Maybe,” she says. “But I’m not sure he’s the best influence for you anyway. He’s a lot of fun to have around when there’s money falling from the sky, but…”

  “Mom,” Teddy says. “It’s fine.”

  Katherine nods, but she still doesn’t look convinced. “Well, if he does come by, just…I don’t know. Be careful, okay?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just use good judgment. I know you love him. But don’t forget he can be really charming. A little too charming. And that makes it easy to lose sight of what he really wants, okay? So call if you need me.”

  Teddy nods.

  “I love you,” she says fondly, and he leans down to give her a hug.

  “Love you too.”

  When she’s gone he turns to us, clearly eager to move on. “Let’s eat before it gets cold,” he says, so we follow him over to the table, passing bowls of toppings in silence until the landline in the kitchen starts to ring. After a few seconds, the answering machine—which is ancient and hopelessly out-of-date—clicks on. If I didn’t know the reason, I’d be surprised Teddy hadn’t upgraded it yet. But there’s an old message on there from his dad, calling from Vegas a couple nights before everything fell apart to wish him luck in a basketball game. Once, when he thought I was asleep, I heard him play it from the next room and it just about killed me.