Ramona Blue

by Julie Murphy

  “Ramona’s been swimming at the Y a few times a week,” says Hattie, practically sacrificing me on the conversational altar. “She’s getting real good.”

  I fidget in my seat. “It’s something to do.” But I’m scared it might be more than that. I can feel my body getting stronger with each workout, and though I still can’t beat Freddie, he beats me by a little less every time.

  “Well, girl, if you’re just looking for something to do, I can think of a million better ways to spend your time.” She smacks at my arms. “You don’t want to get too muscular either. Ladies weren’t built for that type of look.”

  “I wouldn’t call Ramona a lady.” Hattie snickers.

  I shrug off both of their comments and opt to keep the peace. “I go with my friend Freddie. He used to come round here every summer when we were little with his grandma, Agnes. They live in Eulogy now. A few blocks north of the train tracks.”

  Mom slaps her knee. “I remember those two. I swear you and Freddie were the cutest little pair I’d ever seen.”

  I purposely shovel too many pieces of orange chicken into my mouth, leaving myself unable to respond.

  My mom puts her carton of shrimp lo mein down on the table. “So are you two . . . ya know, seeing each other?”

  I swallow a bite. “Mom,” I say, my voice low.

  “What?” she asks. “He was a fine young boy. And I’m not one of those people who thinks people shouldn’t mix. Like, racially speaking.”

  I shake my head. I can’t find one bit of sympathy in my heart for her. “Do you even know how racist you sound? And it’s not like I’m kissing girls just because the right boy hasn’t come along to turn me straight.”

  “That’s politically correct nonsense. Anyway, you can’t blame me,” Mom says as she lights a cigarette. “I want to see you get married. I need grandbabies.”

  Of course she does, because taking care of her own babies was such a breeze. “Well, I’m pretty sure Hattie’s got you covered there,” I say under my breath.

  The air goes still for a moment before Hattie throws the rest of the beef and broccoli in my lap. “I can’t believe you!”

  Okay. I deserved that.

  “What’s she trying to say, Hattie Leroux?” demands Mom. “You tell me right this instant.”

  Hattie reaches over and takes the cigarette from between Mom’s fingers and tosses it in the pool. “I’m fucking knocked up, okay?”

  Mom claps her hands over her mouth. “Well, this is a little earlier than I expected! My baby’s gonna be a mama!”

  And once this baby comes into the world, Hattie will always be a mom first and not my sister. I stand up, shaking the food out of my lap. Wilson is quick to collect the scraps.

  Mom scoots in closer to Hattie. “Baby. I’ve been there. I understand what you’re going though. Is Tyler the daddy? I was wondering what he was sticking around for.”

  And this, I think, is why Hattie really didn’t want to tell Mom. Not because Mom would be angry, but because it would make her just another girl who was too stupid and too young. Just like Mom.

  “You are keeping it, right?” Mom asks.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Hattie nods, not looking away from Mom’s hand on her wrist.

  The way she answers makes me feel guilty for the decision I know I would’ve made.

  We spend the rest of the evening lying on plastic lawn chairs while Mom relives each of our births and tells us all about how temperamental we were as babies. I have the baby pictures to prove that she was there when we were in diapers, but I can’t imagine her doing anything but leaving. Whenever I try to imagine Mom when we were kids, all that’s there in my head is a shutting door.

  After Tyler comes to pick us up, Hattie gives me dagger eyes the whole way home in the rearview mirror.

  She tells him about the big reveal, and he shrugs. “She would have found out eventually, right? Doesn’t really matter who told her or how.”

  Tyler glances up to me in the rearview mirror, and I realize that if he’s taking my side, I might be even more in the wrong than I’d imagined.

  “I wish you would’ve been there,” Hattie tells him.

  “Wouldn’t want to interfere with lady time.”

  When I can’t sleep that night, I settle in on the couch to watch TV, but all that’s on is paid programming.

  The woman on the screen is trying to explain how horrible it is to cut a tomato with a regular knife. She tries all these different knives and sighs dramatically, but only makes a bloody disaster on her cutting board.

  “I’m still mad at you,” says Hattie from behind me. “But I am sweating my ass off back there in that room. Scoot over.”

  I do as she says. “I’m so sorry,” I tell her.

  She pulls my head into her lap. “That chlorine is turning your hair green.”

  “I thought it looked different.”

  “We’ll dye it this weekend.” She scratches my scalp with her acrylic nail and splays out each section of my hair so that it looks like I’ve been electrocuted. “It’s okay. If it had been up to me, I would have told her on my way to the hospital.”

  “She didn’t seem upset or disappointed at all really.”

  “I knew she wouldn’t be,” says Hattie.

  “Hey.” I turn my head to face her. “How did you know you wanted to . . .”

  “Keep it?”

  “Yeah.” I nod. “I mean, you’re going to be responsible for a whole other human being.”

  She laughs. “I don’t know. I guess I thought that maybe this baby could be the start of something new. For so long, our family has been built around Mom and Dad and their past and a storm we can barely remember. But I just figured that maybe this baby could be about our future and what we want our family to look like. I mean, it sucks that we don’t have family dinners or birthday parties. And I kind of want that for me and this baby and Tyler. Don’t you want something like that for yourself too?”

  I smile with my lips pressed together.

  Tyler is about as permanent as an afternoon thunderstorm. Hattie will see that soon enough. And maybe it’s going to take Hattie a while to figure out that this baby is about more than playing house, but if there’s one thing I don’t doubt, it’s my sister’s ability to love. Love isn’t all you need, but it’s a start, I guess.

  SIXTEEN

  It is stupid hot outside. It’s like Mississippi didn’t get the memo that it’s mid-October, and we’ve been left to melt.

  On Saturday night, two weeks after my and Hattie’s dinner with Mom, Freddie comes to hang out for the last bit of my shift, and once Tommy leaves, he even helps me bus a few tables.

  “Where’s Adam tonight?” I ask.

  “His little sister’s birthday party,” he says. “He tried to sneak out, but when his mom caught him, she made him wear the prince costume his cousin was supposed to wear and dance with all his sister’s friends.”

  I try not to laugh. “Well, that sounds fair.”

  “Yeah. Try telling Adam that.”

  After the last customer finally leaves, Saul slams the door and locks it all in one motion. “We’re going swimming, y’all. And not in that dirty-ass ocean.”

  “No one has a pool,” I remind him.

  He shrugs. “Plenty of people have pools.”

  I shake my head at him skeptically.

  “I know people, okay?”

  “Straight boy,” he says, pointing to Freddie, “you’re invited, too.”

  After running through our Saturday closing duties, which are a little more extensive than other nights since it’s the end of the week, we all meet in the parking lot. Agnes dropped Freddie off, so we’re all left to squeeze into Saul’s Jeep.

  “I need to run home for my swimsuit,” I say.

  “Me too,” says Ruth.

  Saul clicks his tongue at me. “Y’all can swim in the suit the good Lord gave you.”

  Ruth shrugs. “Whatever. I’m wearing a sports bra anyway.”
r />   I feel myself shrinking a little. I’m not modest really at all, but somehow there’s a difference between swimming in your underwear and swimming in a swimsuit that looks like underwear.

  I turn to Freddie. “Agnes won’t mind that you’re out this late?”

  “I turn into a pumpkin at midnight,” he says. “I told her I’m crashing at Adam’s anyway.”

  “I make a mean pumpkin pie,” says Hattie as she locks the door behind us.

  We all pile into Saul’s Jeep, and he drives us down dark, twisting residential roads.

  The thick evening heat has my mind wandering back to this summer and the first time Grace and I kissed. It was a Movie on the Green night downtown, where they show a movie on a projector outside city hall. Grace’s family was going, and I told her I’d meet her there after work.

  When I showed up, she was waiting for me at the fountain that sits in the center of Eulogy’s only roundabout. Across the street, families were spread out on picnic blankets, watching The Goonies.

  We’d held hands the night before, but I couldn’t decide if it was supposed to mean anything. I’d been racking my brain all day, to the point where Hattie could barely tolerate how distracted Grace had me.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said as she popped up from the edge of the fountain.

  She wore a short white dress and mint-green sandals, and she smelled like a perfume of salt water, sunscreen, and bug spray.

  As we headed in the opposite direction of the movie, she looped her arm through mine. We walked by darkened shop windows and rows of trees strung with twinkly lights.

  She made the first move when she pulled me down a dark alley and kissed my bare shoulder. My eyes searched for hers in the dark. My hand slipped down her arm to intertwine with her fingers, and I kissed her on the lips. She kissed me back in the most ferocious way. For a moment, I was too shocked to even move, but soon our bodies were pressed up against the back door of one of the shops.

  “I think Adam’s family lives out this way,” Freddie says, pulling me back into the present.

  Saul parks in front of a huge white house with a tall wrought-iron fence lining the perimeter of the property.

  “What is this place?” asks Ruth.

  “A friend of a friend’s place,” says Saul. “They let me come here and swim whenever I want.”

  Hattie’s lips twist into a pout. “Well, then why is this the first time the rest of us have been here?”

  “A boy’s gotta keep a secret or two up his sleeve, okay?” Saul says.

  We follow him up the driveway, and he squeezes through a gap in the fence, and I follow behind him. “You’re sure we can be here?” I whisper to Saul.

  He winks at me once and presses a finger to his lips. I should stop him. I should stop all of us, but my shirt is drenched with sweat, and there’s obviously no one home. It’s not like we’re breaking into the actual house or anything.

  “Yeah,” says Hattie, pointing to her belly while she eyes the fence. “Not gonna happen.”

  Saul and I share a look, and I know what he’s about to suggest is completely moronic, but I don’t have any other ideas. “What can’t go through,” he says, “must go over.”

  Hattie shrugs and turns to Freddie and Ruthie. “Y’all gotta hoist me up.”

  Ruthie holds her hands out for Hattie’s foot but shakes her head. “This is the picture of maturity. Helping our pregnant friend jump a fence. Maybe I should put this on my med school applications.”

  “Hey,” says Hattie. “If I fall, at least you can be the first responder.”

  “Is that supposed to be comforting?” Ruth asks.

  Freddie grunts a little as he pushes Hattie over the other side, and thankfully Saul and I are both tall enough that she doesn’t have a long way to go without a safety net below her.

  Once she’s safely over, Ruthie squeezes through the fence.

  “You’re sure we’re allowed to be here?” asks Freddie with one foot still on the other side of the fence.

  “Positive,” calls Saul as he skips up the driveway and around the corner with Ruth and Hattie close behind. Normally Ruth wouldn’t be down for something like this, but if there’s anyone she trusts, it’s Saul. Even if deep down sometimes her intuition says she shouldn’t.

  Saul always knows someone who knows someone, so it’s no surprise that he knew about this pool. He’s resourceful, and I don’t know if he was always that way or if it developed out of necessity.

  Freddie hesitates, and I hold out my hand. “Come on,” I tell him, swallowing my guilt. “Trust me.”

  In the backyard, Saul rustles around in the bushes for a minute, looking for the pool lights.

  While it’s still dark, I shimmy out of my shorts and Boucher’s T-shirt and jump into the pool in my pineapple underwear and purple-and-pink-polka-dot bra.

  “Found ’em!” Saul calls, illuminating the backyard.

  The pool is beautiful and is so much more luxurious than what we normally swim in at the Y. Rocks cluster together to create a fountain that drips into the deep end of the pool.

  Saul tears his tank top and shorts off before kicking off his flip-flops and cannonballing into the deep end. He’s not at all shy about his tiny neon-green brief underwear.

  Ruthie and Hattie undress without ceremony. Ruthie wears black boy-shorts underwear and a pink sports bra while my sister struts her stuff all the way to the pool in a pink lacy thong and a turquoise push-up bra.

  “She’s still got it, y’all!” calls Saul.

  If she weren’t pregnant, I might wonder what Freddie thought of her. Hattie’s always been the hot and sexy one, and she would be the first one to say so.

  Freddie turns his back to all of us as he pulls off his shorts and T-shirt to reveal a pair of blue boxer briefs. He’s got nothing to be shy about, but I like that he is anyway.

  The water is colder than I expected, but my body is quickly adjusting. Hattie floats on her back into the deep end, where she sits behind the waterfall with Saul while Ruthie does handstands in the shallow end.

  I lean up against the side of the pool with Freddie, and everything from our chins down is under water, but I still catch him peeking down at my bra and underwear. I write it off as plain old curiosity.

  There’s something about the air around us that is absolutely electric. Maybe it’s because I know we’re not supposed to be here.

  “Up for an impromptu race?” I ask.

  Freddie shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think my ego can handle the possibility of losing in my underwear.”

  I blow a few bubbles in the water. “Hey, it’s a lot more coverage than what you swim in during the week.”

  “Yeah,” he admits, “but at least then everything is . . . secure.”

  I nod vigorously. “I think I’ve heard enough.”

  He grins wickedly. “I’d be up for a cannonball off the waterfall, though.”

  I nod. “Let’s do it.”

  We run along the side of the pool and up the back side of the rocky waterfall, which I don’t think is meant for climbing. As we stand there a few feet from the edge, Freddie takes my hand. “You ready?”

  I squeeze his fingers, and we run, flying into the air before crashing into the deep end.

  I let myself sink down to the bottom and open my eyes, even though it burns. Freddy’s blurry figure swims toward me, and his hand brushes my waist as he reaches for my arm, pulling me to the surface with him.

  As we emerge, my hair fans out around us like blue lava. “That was fun.”

  “You’ve got a mean cannonball.” He grins, displaying the gap in his front teeth. “If only your dive off the blocks was as good.”

  I splash him in the face with his mouth wide open and swim away as Ruthie, Saul, and Hattie climb up the rocks.

  Freddie chases me to the shallow end and walks through the waterfall to where I’m sitting on a little underwater bench. “Truce?”

  I grin from the sha
dows. “For now.”

  He sits down beside me. “Do you ever miss Grace?”

  “I do. But it’s not as constant as it used to be. Now I just remember her every once in a while. And it’s weird things that remind me of her. Like, certain canned soups and doughnuts with sprinkles and vampire movies. But it feels manageable all of a sudden. It wasn’t always like that.”

  Freddie leans his head back on the rocks. “I just feel stupid all the time. Like, when I remember Viv, I miss her. But I feel sort of embarrassed, too, like I should have known better. Everyone saw this coming except me. Even Viv. I wouldn’t listen, though.”

  “I don’t know. I think that’s part of it. Sometimes you’ve got to live through it yourself.” Because the mood has grown so somber so quickly, I splash him.

  “I thought we called truce!” he shouts.

  “It was temporary, sucker!”

  He’s quick to splash me back, and it’s not long before our water war has spread and we’re out from behind the waterfall, using Ruthie, Hattie, and Saul as human shields.

  The lights inside the house suddenly flip on and a voice is shouting, growing louder and louder until we can finally make out that it’s a man and he’s angry. “Who’s out there?”

  We all freeze, looking to Saul for our cue.

  “Uh,” he says. “Run.”

  I practically jump out of the pool, forgetting any embarrassment I might have about running around in my underwear, and grab all the clothes and flip-flops I see, constantly checking behind me for Hattie and Freddie.

  I hear the back door slide open. “I’ve called the police,” the deep southern voice says. “And this is private property! I could shoot y’all just for steppin’ a toe past that gate.”

  “Fuck,” I whisper the moment we get to the gate. I shove Freddie through.

  “What’s this guy even talking about?” Freddie’s voice is frantic. “I thought we had permission to be here.”

  My face gives me away.

  “Are you serious?” Freddie shouts. “You let me trespass without even telling me?”

  “I’m sorry,” I squeak.

  Saul is already down at the Jeep, pulling it up the driveway for the rest of us.