Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  “Ugh, must we?” she shouts back. “Roll the windows up, already. I’d rather be hot than deaf.”

  He cranks his closed—the van’s clearly too old for power windows—and I do the same in back.

  “So this is the story,” he starts. “Leigh and Dad and I went camping just after we rented The Blair Witch Project. Which I wasn’t supposed to show Leigh, who was ten or something, but I did, and I fast-forwarded through the part where it said they were in the Maryland woods. I told her it was the woods around Santa Cruz Lake.”

  “You idiot,” Leigh says, whipping her shades off. “They weren’t even the right trees.”

  “Who’s the idiot? Your spongy little child-brain believed me. So the next week we drove up, and Dad had a surprise for Leigh. Her own tent. Usually we all slept in the same room in our old Coleman, but Dad said Leigh-Bee was becoming a woman.” He reaches over to pinch Leigh’s cheeks.

  She grunts and swats him off. “He was probably afraid I’d wake up and see you playing with yourself.”

  “Shut up. Vanni, you should’ve seen her face when she realized she had to sleep alone with the Blair Witch waiting out there in the dark. And her sad little ‘Help!’ when I snuck out and pounded on the walls of her tent in the middle of the night. After that, she slept in the backseat of the station wagon with the doors locked.”

  “That’s so mean!” I say.

  But Leigh laughs with him. She has a nice laugh, light and high-pitched, like ice tinkling or something. “Dad wanted to drown you in the lake. He didn’t even tell you when I peed on your soap.”

  “Wait. You did that? Did he know?”

  “About the soap, yeah. He didn’t know about your toothbrush.”

  “You little sicko!” he cries.

  We drive north while the sun dips low in the sky and the air cools, then pull off the highway into the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. All of a sudden, we come into a town up in the darkening hills. Houses loom above us on the left. On the right where the cliff side slopes down, you could walk off the road and onto the roofs below.

  “What is this place?” I ask.

  “Not sure.” Lucas shrugs and steers carefully. “I guess we should look it up on a map, but we never have. Wait and see what’s ahead.”

  When we round the next bend he pulls off to the side and puts the car in park in front of a house. He whistles, even though he must’ve seen the place loads of times. Leigh cranes her neck out the window for a better look too. I unclick my seat belt, lean forward, and slip between them to stare through the windshield at a house absolutely smothered in cow skulls—nailed up to the walls and gutter and fence posts, like cracked white stones.

  Leigh settles back into her seat and turns to me. “Lucas thinks a psycho ex-cowboy hermit lives here. Like, he’s been sneaking out of the hills and murdering the stupid beasts that plagued him all his life to collect their bones.”

  “It is pretty creepy.”

  She shakes her head, and her voice is softer. “I bet he really cares about them. He thinks they’re beautiful and doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. Maybe he’s just a sad old guy who loves what he loves.”

  Up this close, she doesn’t look as much like her brother. Her sandy-brown hair is short, her hazel eyes just as big, but Leigh’s eyelashes are even longer—they leave fan-shaped shadows on her cheeks in the dim light—and her face is smaller. Slimmer. Baggy clothes or no, she’s pretty.

  Too bad she’s a total Karen Goodstein.

  We’re not back on the road for long before we pull down a slope and into a parking lot. The last of the sunset fades over the water in front of us, behind a lake cupped by rising hills of pine trees. There are no bonfires down on the beach, no other cars in the lot. It’s a quiet place. Kind of a murdery place for a first date, you might say, and I’m almost glad there’s three of us here.

  Lucas pops the trunk, steps out, and stretches. He grabs a few grocery bags while Leigh hauls out a pile of blankets, and leads the way down to the lake. Beyond the lot is the narrow beach, and stretching out into the water, a long metal gangway leads to the dock. We dump our stuff in the sand around us and I shrug into my sweatshirt.

  Farewell, sex appeal.

  Lucas spreads out the blankets and says, “Okay, girls. It’s just after nine now. The Weather Channel says we should see the shower around nine thirty. So eyes on the sky.”

  Leigh fishes out a can of Pringles, rolls over onto her stomach on her blanket, and fixes her eyes down the tube. I share a quilt with Lucas, sitting close enough so when we lie back, our elbows are inches apart.

  “When were you guys up here last?” I ask, staring up toward the Milky Way, every star visible in the unpolluted darkness.

  “Together? Probably when Leigh turned ten—she had her party up here. Was it Barbie themed, Leigh-Bee?”

  “It was World Cup themed, butt-munch.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He grins up at the sky. “You had your little Abby Wambach jersey, and that soccer ball cake, and you didn’t get to eat it because you had to go sit in the van for trying to drown your friend.”

  “She shouldn’t have worn a Marta jersey,” Leigh mumbles around a mouthful of chips.

  “We lived in Española then,” Lucas explains, “but Dad moved to Naveen’s house in Los Cerillos after the divorce, and Leigh and Mom and me moved to Boston, where our grandparents live.”

  “So you live in Los Cerrillos now?” I ask. “That’s ten miles from me!”

  “Hallelujah,” Leigh deadpans. She throws a chip toward the lake, and because Pringles aren’t aerodynamic, it falls short, but not by much. Good arm.

  “This might come as a surprise since Leigh’s being really subtle about it, but she doesn’t like it here.” Lucas reaches over to punch lightly at her bicep, and she swats him off dramatically.

  “You didn’t want to come home?” I ask, tracking the red pinprick of a plane across the sky.

  “Boston’s home,” she answers, frost in her voice.

  “Oh.” Though no part of us is touching, I feel Lucas stiffen beside me, and for his sake I scramble to break the tension. Okay, it’s also for the sake of my long game, wherein he and I go for a private starlit hike, leaving Leigh behind to sulk. “A girl in my class was from New England. Karen. She was . . . awesome. She loved it there.”

  “You ever been?” he asks.

  “No closer than Round Rock, Texas, to visit my grandparents.” I shrug. “Maybe I’ll get there sometime.”

  Leigh snorts loudly, still staring into her Pringles tube. Lucas bunches the blanket in his fist, and everything’s awkward again, more so than the first few quiet miles in the car.

  Although Mistake! Mistake! blinks through my brain in rhythm with the winking lights of that far-off plane, I can’t help myself. “What?” I ask her, knowing I’ll regret it.

  She looks up at last. “Just you.”

  I roll to my side and stare at her across Lucas’s stone-still chest. “What about me, exactly?”

  Leigh stares back. “Maybe you’ll get there? Like, maybe you’ll someday get farther than Tex-ass? Have you never partaken in the miracle of flight? Have you never experienced motorized vehicles or blended fabrics or this thing they call electricity? Aren’t you eighteen? What are you even—”

  “Oh my god,” Lucas sighs. “Vanni, I’m so—”

  “Don’t.” Leigh sits up and snaps. “Don’t act like I’m your sad little dog who pooped on her front lawn. Don’t apologize for me. This tragedy is on you, since I never asked my brother to make me friends.”

  “As if I could work such fucking miracles!” He stands and snatches the Pringles out of her hand. Ignoring her cries of protest, he stalks off and vengefully empties the tube into a trash can up near the parking lot. Though he pauses as if he might come back our way, Lucas shakes his head and walks off down the beach toward the trees beyond the sand, his hands folded behind his head; the living, bre
athing, dictionary definition of surrender.

  In the ringing silence that follows, Leigh turns to me. It seems like she wants to say something more, but I’m already up and shuffling away across the beach. Because I did not switch shifts with Jake for this, I did not cram myself into a car with strangers just to have a staring match with Leigh Clemente. I had another goal in mind, and for a moment I have every intention of trailing after Lucas. Maybe this night can be salvaged. Boys are pretty good at compartmentalizing when persuaded. I’ll catch up to him, grab for his shoulder with gentle fingers, and it’ll go something like:

  Me: Hey.

  Him: Hey. Look . . . I’m really sorry about my sister. She’s such a mega-bitch. That stuff she said . . .

  Me: It’s fine.

  Him: She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You’re awesome, Vanni.

  Me: Really, it’s totally fine. I didn’t come here for your sister, anyways.

  Him: No?

  And then I’ll take his arm, pull him inside the tree line, and we can forget about all this and all about the meteor shower, the sky blocked out by the branches overhead.

  But I don’t go after Lucas.

  Instead I veer right, clank over the narrow gangway to the dock, and drop down onto the cooled metal at the end, my hands shaking against the railing.

  For sure, Leigh is a mega-bitch.

  She’s also right. Not about the blended fabrics or whatever. But even though she’s said five words to me, ever, she’s right about me. How I’m just here, I might always be here, scared and bored and waiting for the sky to fall—or not.

  Footsteps clomp down the dock, but alas, it isn’t Lucas who plops down next to me.

  “So this was fun,” Leigh says flatly. “When’s the second date?”

  The lake laps at the dock below the platform. The insects whine.

  “You want my brother, right?” she asks.

  “If I say yes, will you switch places?” I sneer my coldest sneer, colder even than hers.

  Unfortunately, she doesn’t take it personally, and doesn’t leave. “Just, he sort of has a girlfriend. At least, they’re sniffing and circling each other like dogs in a park. She’s going to UNM in September too. I guess they met at some orientation thing last month. And she told him about the Lagoon. She’s a scoop girl at the Glacier—that’s the ice cream parlor at the park. Gives him free ice cream. It’s hard to compete with a mating call like that.”

  I stare carefully into the moon-sprinkled water. A scoop girl and a college girl in one; that is tough to compete with.

  “I’m not trying to be mean,” she says, which I actually believe, because she must’ve had to leave her dignity in the sand to come out here and talk. “Are you devastated?”

  “Why would I be devastated?”

  “I figured you were into him. Everybody’s into Lucas.”

  I wonder: Am I devastated?

  It doesn’t feel like devastation. Disappointment, sure. Like I said, we don’t get a lot of fresh blood around here, and Lucas does have gorgeous eyes. Maybe I feel like an asshole for swaying and hip-popping, if he was never into me in the first place.

  “He does like you, though,” Leigh adds. “He couldn’t stop talking about you this afternoon. ‘Vanni’s pretty cool, right?’” she grunts in a low voice. “‘You should see if Vanni likes soccer, since Vanni’s such a good swimmer. You should be like Vanni. Vanni probably doesn’t fart in her brother’s sock drawer.’”

  I laugh, though I don’t mean to.

  “Right? Everyone thinks he’s cool, but the nerd has no chill.” The breeze kicks up and Leigh shivers, her tan skin noticeably goose bumped in the starlight. She only wears another long white tank top—the kind you buy in six-packs at Walgreens, which I suspect she has—and baggy black sweatpants cuffed to the knees. “I just wish he’d give me a fucking week to miss home before he starts matchmaking. But, um, I am sorry.”

  “Whatever. Don’t worry about it.” I put her out of her misery, because what good is it to me?

  “And all that stuff about you basically being like a modern tragedy—”

  “Yeah, we really don’t have to talk about it.”

  “That’s cool.” She taps her fingers against the railing in no particular rhythm, then glances at me and smiles slyly. “We could go in the water instead.”

  I look back toward the shore, where signs posted all over the beach demand: NO SWIMMING. “We’re not supposed to.”

  “So we can wade. I dare you.”

  “It’ll be freezing.”

  She glances at me, moonlight ponding in her narrowed eyes. “But I dared you.”

  “But I’m not twelve,” I shoot back. What’s her deal? Miserable one second and a human amphetamine the next?

  Still, when she stands, I follow her. Down the gangway, onto the sand, where she turns deliberately away from me before pulling off her sweatpants and tank top to reveal navy Y-fronts, loose on her muscled legs, and a plain black sports bra.

  “I thought we were just wading,” I object.

  She glances over her shoulder at me, arms wrapped around her waist, then strides into the water. “Oh shit oh shit, that’s cold!” she hisses.

  I strip off my sweatshirt and jeans, glad I picked the hot-pink panties with black polka dots; according to Will Fischer, they make my butt look like “a sexy watermelon.” Part of me wonders whether Lucas is watching; I search for him in the dark and find him up the beach, tossing rocks into the lake. I can’t tell if he’s looking this way, but I bend over to lay my capris out on the sand, slowly and deliberately. Serves him right. He could’ve mentioned the scoop girl. He could’ve told me this was a playdate with his little sister.

  When I straighten, Leigh is watching me from the shallows, still hugging herself. Under all those shapeless clothes are narrow hips and small breasts. Nothing like my curves. She’s slimmer and straighter, with different muscles than mine; her body’s strong, but in different ways.

  It’s a good body.

  “What?” she asks defensively, hugging herself tighter, hollowing her rib cage and bowing her shoulders as if to shrink herself. Now she’s shy?

  “Nothing,” I call back. Already shivering, I tiptoe into the water after her. I was right, of course; it’s freezing. I push forward up to my shaking knees and consider myself brave, until Leigh drops her knees and lets herself plunge under.

  She surfaces a little farther out, gasping. “Fu-u-u-uck!” she splutters, slicking her short hair back. “Come on!”

  “Are you crazy?” I laugh around chattering teeth.

  But I’m considering it.

  Luckily and unfortunately, Lucas barks, “LEIGH!” and jogs toward us, sand kicking up under his sneakers. “What the fuck? The undercurrent’s too strong, you idiot! What are you thinking?”

  I blush guiltily, because I definitely know better.

  “Okay, okay!” She shovels her arms and legs smoothly through the water until she’s standing beside me again, dripping, blue lipped. We retreat to the beach, where she pulls her tank top and sweatpants on at once without drying off. I know from plenty of post-pool experience that it’s terrible, like you’re a snake trying to slip back into too-tight skin. Pushing the hair off her forehead, she grins at me. “Your turn,” she says, sweeping an arm toward the water.

  “No thanks.” I laugh again. Maybe it’s because I’m cold, but I feel . . . awake. Like I can feel every part of my body at once, every little blood vessel and bone.

  I tilt my face up, toward a million stars you can’t see from the city, not even from La Trampa. As I stare, a bright streak crosses it, then another a moment later. “Look,” I say, and she does. After a while, there are so many, they look like one great white light behind a shredded sky.

  SIX

  On Monday I’m taking inventory in the stockroom of Silvia’s when a pair of brown arms corded with muscles encircles my waist from behind. “Guess who?” />
  I clutch my chest. “Culero!”

  “Good guess.” Jake laughs as I slap him with the ledger. “Oh, don’t be like that, princesita. It’s dull as shit out there. Just the old guys at table four, guzzling coffee all goddamn day.” He steps into me, and his breath smells of Lucky Strikes thinly veiled by wintergreen gum. I imagine the still-glowing stubs scattering the hot pavement behind the Dumpster; he could’ve at least offered me one. I’ve been trapped among the pinto beans and flour sacks all morning, with only the knocking of the old swamp cooler for company.

  With my thumb and forefinger, I play the world’s saddest song on the world’s smallest violin. “You can do the inventory if you’re so bored.”

  An animal grin twists his full lips. He hooks his fingers around the neck strap of my apron, dragging me closer. “Sure, boss. I’ll get right on that.” One strong hand slips below the apron, works its way between the hem of my peasant top and corduroy skirt.

  However much he claims he wants to be my boyfriend, fooling around with Jake is the same overall experience as a two-for-two-dollars chili dog from the countertop case at Allsup’s. Attractive to the starving, surprisingly delicious, but followed by half an hour of gut cramps and regret. And yet, like the perpetually hungry, this hard-won wisdom rarely stops me. I come back for it again and again.

  I cut my eyes toward the stockroom door. If nothing else, it’d be better than tallying sacks of beans. I push him backward, drop the ledger, and shed my apron onto the concrete floor.

  We’re not even all the way out of our shirts before a voice crackles across the two-way on the shelf beside us. “Savannah, you there?” asks Juno, the assistant manager. “There’s a girl up front looking for you. Says she’s your friend.”

  I pull away from Jake as panic spikes my pulse. What girl? What friend? Is it Diana? Marilee? Why would either of them come by? I haven’t seen them since graduation.

  “Pretend you didn’t hear.” Jake’s breath warms my throat.