We Were Promised Spotlights

by Lindsay Sproul

  It felt like the air was gone.

  I lost my stomach right away, and then again about halfway down.

  The water hurt when my bare feet hit, and the cold sucked the breath out of me.

  We all surfaced. We did not die.

  Susan looked at me with intense anger, but then I wrapped my arms around her, holding her close, and whispered, “We did it” into her cheek.

  Heather glanced at the two of us and frowned slightly, then ducked underwater again. When she resurfaced, her dress was floating downriver. She turned to face our classmates, braless, and everyone cheered—Scottie loudest, probably because he was the one who got to touch Heather’s boobs. They weren’t exactly together, but they definitely had a lot of sex. Both Heather and Susan slept with boys in our grade all the time—Heather was even the one Brad lost his virginity to—and it was hard to keep pretending I didn’t feel left out.

  “Don’t be mad,” I whispered to Susan. I wrapped my arm around her back, hoping it felt strong.

  Moving toward the shore, holding each other, it felt like my dress weighed eight hundred pounds. I could barely make out the faces of my classmates standing above us, but I heard their soft overlapping voices, full of a kind of subdued cheerfulness, and they began to sound not like people but like the audience of a play. We were onstage, which made Susan’s anger dissipate.

  The dead uncle was right. I felt different. I felt like I’d gotten away with something, like I’d cheated death.

  I hoped that on Monday, Corvis McClellan would notice.

  * * *

  —

  Susan lived in a two-hundred-year-old colonial on Juniper Hill Road, white with black shutters. It was so old that it faced away from the street, reminding us that the street used to go a different way when there were horses and buggies. The staircase had ropes instead of railings, which you held on to when you walked up the steps, and I liked to imagine that the ropes were so old that seamen’s wives held them hundreds of years ago when they went to sit in the widow’s watch and wait for their husbands to return from sea. I also liked to imagine that those seamen’s wives were ghosts now, pacing in circles above our heads, judging our hairstyles and our sex lives.

  The Blackfords had a beautiful yard, which was Mrs. Blackford’s pride and joy. There were tulips in little clusters, and old wooden lobster traps scattered like chess pieces, with flowers sprouting inside them.

  We stepped on the tulips on our way into the house, laughing in our soaking-wet dresses. Heather had gone home with Scottie, and since Brad didn’t jump, it was easy to keep up the momentum with Susan, and now it was just the two of us.

  Once we got to Susan’s bedroom, I felt the rush of the jump leaking out of me. I opened the top drawer of Susan’s bureau, searching for pajamas. She kept all kinds of things in there, including notes I’d passed her in American History, origami fortune-tellers Heather had made—each fortune focused on either sex or alcohol—and balled-up silk hair ribbons that she’d worn in ballet recitals. Next to the stack of nightgowns was a small collection of items Brad had touched—a pencil he’d given Susan in middle school, a shoelace from his lacrosse cleats, a tube of ChapStick that Susan had loaned him once. It touched his lips, I remembered her saying. I grabbed a nightgown from the top of the stack and pushed the drawer closed.

  I changed quickly in the corner and sat down on her bed.

  I wondered where Corvis was. Having sex with Kristen in the dunes? Cuddling with Kristen while they watched a silent French film?

  Kristen was fat, but she had attitude. Her earrings were safety pins. She was obsessed with whatever political issue was cool that week in the band-and-art-kid crowd. Sometimes it was feminism, sometimes the environment. I’d overheard Kristen in the hallway, saying she was going to join the Earth Liberation Front, but she’d quickly abandoned that in favor of gay rights when her friends changed passions.

  They hated us. We hated them. It worked out pretty well.

  Sliding out of her wet dress, Susan watched herself in the mirror on the back of the door.

  She stood in the perfect first position, a habit from ballet.

  She was a good ballerina, with extremely high arches and hyperextended legs. Once, she played Clara in the Boston Ballet production of The Nutcracker. She mostly just flitted around the stage in a nightgown that made her look like an exquisite, helpless ghost.

  I’d taken ballet as a child, too, but after a while, Sandra could no longer afford the lessons like Susan’s parents could, which was a good thing, honestly, because I was thrust into all of the main roles even though I sucked. As we grew, though, Susan’s body betrayed her—her chest and hips meant that she could never join a company.

  Susan pinched her stomach and sighed, turned, and pinched the other side, measuring the skin between her fingers.

  She groaned. “My body has no drama.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, looking from her head to her feet, which were bruised and scabbed from both toe shoes and heels.

  “I don’t know,” she said, turning and examining herself from the other side again, then looking sharply at my reflection. “Your body is like a secret or something. A secret that Brad wants to find out.”

  I pulled my knees to my chest, covering myself.

  I thought of the night in Brad’s Datsun. Then I thought of the herpes.

  Susan switched to the fifth position and looked at my reflection in her mirror again. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t Brad’s official girlfriend, because everyone already acted like I was, and eventually I would have to be. He’d asked me to be his homecoming date by leaving flower petals around my locker, which the whole school saw.

  “I don’t think Brad has any secrets,” I said.

  “That’s why he wants yours,” Susan said. “Why didn’t you leave with him?”

  She peeled off her wet strapless bra, revealing full breasts, and turned to me.

  “I’m not ready yet,” I said. This was usually my excuse for dodging Brad. I was a virgin. I held on to it because I was afraid, but also because virginity was a powerful thing. It was a way to avoid Brad, to be closer to Susan—a get-out-of-jail-free card—but it was also something you only get one of, and therefore it was valuable.

  “It doesn’t hurt as much as people say,” Susan said. She held it over me sometimes that she’d slept with boys.

  “There are different kinds of hurting,” I said.

  Susan stood in front of her dollhouse, picking up the tiny porcelain father and examining him between her fingers. This wasn’t just any dollhouse—it had working crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, and a phonograph that played scratchy-sounding old-timey music. Her grandfather had built it for her mother, who gave it to Susan for her tenth birthday.

  “You might as well get it over with, and Brad would be nice,” Susan said wistfully, placing the father doll in the upstairs bedroom of the dollhouse. I waited for her to continue, but instead she said, “I’m so tired.”

  She walked over to her bed, which had little carved pineapples on each corner of the frame, and Laura Ashley sheets that I was sweating on, and lay down next to me. She wore only a clean, dry pair of white cotton underpants. Her damp arm touched mine. She leaned into me, and we were quiet for a while. My foot twitched embarrassingly.

  Looking down over her shoulder, I saw a mark from where her father had hit her with his belt. It stretched across the middle of her back, a smear of fading pink. I imagined that my fingertips were magical, that they could wipe it away like a paper towel in a Mr. Clean commercial. I wanted to touch it, to place my feelings on top of it, but we had a silent agreement that I would ignore marks like these, so I didn’t say anything.

  Susan was basically sleeping, but she said, “What is it like, being you?”

  “It sucks,” I said. I moved my arm so that it touched more of hers, but not too much
. I was wearing an entire nightgown.

  This was the kind of question she only asked me if she’d been drinking. The question could have stemmed from my crown, which she had propped on her naked stomach, or it could have been about Brad. I saw her watching us dance together before I puked in the secret bathroom, and then again when he approached me at Fourth Cliff.

  I wondered how Susan managed to get the crown back from whoever rescued it before we jumped. It was pretty busted-up.

  She rolled over to face me, fitting her head between my collarbone and my neck. I stiffened.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Everyone was always asking me that, except for Sandra. I knew they either wanted me to just say yes, to pretend I was always fine—or maybe they wanted to feel powerful by helping me.

  Susan’s parents hated each other, but she had two of them. I only had one. Sandra was never home, and other than Stephanie Tanner, my goldfish, she was all I had.

  “I’m fine,” I said. Susan’s boob was touching me now, with only the thin cotton of my nightgown between us.

  “Am I okay?” Susan asked.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “I’m cold,” Susan said, wrapping an arm around me.

  It was an invitation to touch her. I pulled the blanket up around us, and my whole body tingled. This was a feeling that I both loved and hated.

  Susan was the kind of girl who clung to other girls’ arms in the cold, who borrowed people’s coats and burrowed her nose into the neckline, who looked at me with this irresistible helplessness and said, “Keep me warm?”

  The weight of her head on my chest made me feel strong, protective, like I mattered, and the smell of her—of baby powder, clean laundry, salt like the ocean—was intoxicating.

  Keep me warm?

  Hold my hand?

  Is it going to be okay?

  Yes, I always answered. Yes, yes, yes.

  Even though I knew I couldn’t answer that question, even though I didn’t know if any of us would be okay, or even if we were right now.

  Yes.

  When I said it to Susan, it felt true. It felt like I knew the answers.

  What I loved most about her was that in those moments, when I said yes, she believed me.

  “I guess maybe I’m not fine,” I said after a while, trying it out. “I can’t really tell.”

  But Susan was already snoring into my collarbone, and I didn’t want to move. I wanted to keep her there forever. It made me sad that she would eventually roll over or wake up.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I whispered to someone. Maybe to my father.

  While other people prayed, I wrote letters to him, though it had been a while since I’d written one. Because he was missing, he held all the possibility of the tooth fairy, of Daniel Boone, of Paul Bunyan, of God.

  I was pretty sure my father was Johnny Moon, the movie star who once spent a summer in Hopuonk, filming a movie right around the time I would have been conceived. He was famous for being beautiful—not for choosing good movies—though lately he’d been trying to take on more serious roles. I looked like him, especially in the nose. Other people thought this, too, though they rarely discussed it with me.

  Of course he went to The Mooring while he was here, and every man who went to The Mooring fell in love with Sandra. Loving Sandra was just a liability of being around her.

  The Full House

  When I got home late the next morning, I saw that Brad had let himself into my house. He sat at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. He looked up when the broken screen door slammed against the frame.

  “Hey,” he said, and held up the front page of the Hopuonk Mariner, which showed a photo of Principal Deftose crowning me while I wore the same dress I still had on, but back when it was clean.

  Taylor Garland, Hopuonk’s sweetheart, the caption said.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  It infuriated me that Brad felt comfortable enough to just walk into my house. It also infuriated me that he looked well rested, like he’d showered and brushed his teeth.

  “I came to check on you,” said Brad. “You and Susan disappeared after you jumped last night, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t break your ankles.”

  “I’m fine, Brad,” I said, grabbing the newspaper from him and smacking it facedown on the kitchen table. “How long have you been here?”

  “You left without saying goodbye,” he said. “Where did you go?”

  I glared at him, at his shiny chestnut-brown hair and matching eyes, at his single dimple. His smell of Old Spice and safety made me feel like I was in a scene from a 1950s sitcom.

  In contrast to him, I smelled like cheap hair spray and salt water, and the inside of my mouth tasted like a mouse had crawled inside it and died. Still, I knew I wouldn’t shower for a long time, because I didn’t want to wash off the remnants of Susan’s baby powder–ocean scent.

  “Susan’s,” I said.

  “You were my date,” he said, looking at his legs and sliding his hands up and down his thighs. “You could have at least let me drive you home.”

  I let his comment hang in the air and looked away, watching dust motes swirl around in the dirty-yellow light of my kitchen. It was freezing, because my house wasn’t a real house. What I mean is, it wasn’t winterized. It was a beach house, meant for vacation.

  I shivered.

  “Susan was too drunk to drive home,” I said—not exactly a lie, but she’d driven anyway. I shrugged, still not looking at him. Out the window, the birds sounded like people pretending to be birds.

  “Whatever,” he said.

  “Did you expect me to just leave Susan at Fourth Cliff?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know. Why didn’t you let Jake drive her home? He was her date.”

  “He was even drunker,” I said.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  He poured me a cup of coffee in a chipped mug that had a picture of dinosaurs smoking on it. Under the dinosaurs were the words The Real Reason Dinosaurs Are Extinct. Sandra smoked, so the mug was a mystery.

  “Just because you were my date doesn’t mean I owe you anything,” I said. “I told you I’m not ready.”

  That usually shut him up, because he was a good person. He didn’t want to push me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  I sat at the kitchen table and let the dress bunch into an itchy ball of damp tulle around my legs. Full House was on the small television we kept on the counter. Joey did something with Mr. Woodchuck, which activated the laugh track. I thought I recognized some of the laughs from yesterday.

  “I’m going to move to LA and be a professional laugher,” I said, taking a sip of coffee.

  “Is that a thing?” he asked.

  I turned to the television, dismissing him. There was something comforting about Full House. When I was little, I imagined D.J. touching my hair while I fell asleep on her bed. Now, Stephanie was my favorite, because she was the underdog, and D.J. was too boy crazy in her teenage years.

  “The Tanners are lucky that they live in California,” I said, not necessarily to Brad. Their house was just like all the others on the street—unlike mine, which was smaller than everyone else’s. Behind the city, they had mountains to look at.

  I imagined myself in California with Johnny Moon, where no one knew me, and wondered what it would be like to start over.

  “The Tanners aren’t real,” Brad said. He still had this hangdog look on his face, like a bald eagle who’d been caught eating roadkill.

  “Are you real?” I asked him. There had to be something he was hiding. He couldn’t possibly be this even-tempered and satisfied all the time.

  He looked confused, like he was attempting to solve a complicated mathematical equation.

  �
��What do you hate?” I asked him.

  “Hate? I don’t know. Biology?”

  I wasn’t satisfied.

  “Who do you hate?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “No one,” he said. “O. J. Simpson, I guess.”

  I sighed.

  On the kitchen counter, there was a packet from Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, where I was supposed to apply for a seventeen-month program in dental hygiene. Sandra thought it was a great idea, and so did Mr. Doyle, the guidance counselor at my high school.

  I hated going to the dentist, and I couldn’t imagine going to one every day for work. It smelled like rubber gloves, artificial mint, and fear.

  Sandra had made it clear that I needed to move out after graduating. I was starting to get nervous, because, first of all, I wasn’t completely sure that I would graduate. My grades were shit. In eighth grade, they separated the smart kids from the regular kids, and out of our group, only Corvis was put in the accelerated classes.

  “Is your favorite food oatmeal?” I asked Brad. “Or, like, pot roast?”

  I was really cold now. Choosing to put the dress back on had been a mistake, but I didn’t know what else to do with it.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He looked like he wanted to carry me somewhere.

  “I just want to go back to bed,” I said.

  I would lie in my bed and close my eyes, imagining that Susan was there with me.

  Brad stood to leave, shrugging on his Carhartt jacket. With his hand on the doorknob, he said, “Taylor, you would make an excellent professional laugher.”

  And then he left, closing the door gently behind him. Brad always did things gently.

  I looked back at the television. Whenever one of Johnny Moon’s movies came on, I would ask Sandra if she’d met him when he filmed the movie in Hopuonk, and every once in a while, she told me the story of how he’d come into The Mooring. When I asked if they had had a big romantic affair, she did not deny it.