Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  I nod, but Juno’s an asthmatic smoker, and her wheezing vocals aren’t the most sensual sound track. When she calls for me a second time, I shrug Jake off. “I’ll be quick,” I promise.

  Sorrowfully, he watches me go.

  Blinking in the bright daylight outside the stockroom, I’m shocked to see Leigh leaning against the vacant host podium.

  “Hi?” I say, approaching cautiously.

  She straightens and shoves her hands into the pockets of saggy black basketball shorts, cinched tight over her waist. “I’m not creeping or anything. Lucas sent me over.”

  “He . . . huh?”

  “He got the date wrong for that job they’re hiring for. At the water park? It’s today at three—he’s been texting you all morning.”

  Fuck, my phone’s been in the back office. “Well that sucks, ’cause I can’t get there this afternoon. My mom’s got the car, and I’m working.”

  She raises one dark, arrow-straight eyebrow and glances toward the old men shuffling conquian cards at table four, sipping the same coffees they ordered an hour ago. Regulars in the midafternoon, they’re our only customers at the moment. Every so often they’ll lift their mugs for a refill, but that’s as much action as we’ll see till the dinner rush—really more of a crawl on Mondays—unless Mr. Paiz drops his spoon again.

  “Look, I don’t know why you want to work at the Pitiful Kingdom, but I’m driving down to see Lucas anyway. We can pick your stuff up on the way. And you don’t look that busy.”

  I almost wish we were busy, or that Juno would forbid me to take off if I asked. The idea of riding all the way out to Albuquerque with Leigh, of finding things to say the whole time, is nerve-racking. “That’s pretty unnecessary,” I say. “Like, thanks for the offer, but you don’t have to be nice to me just because your brother wants us to be friends.”

  “Maybe I am nice.”

  It’s my turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “Maybe I’m trying.” She plucks a wrapped peppermint from the dish on Jake’s podium and twists the plastic tight between her tan fingers. She’s nervous too, I realize.

  I could so easily brush her off. Tell her I won’t have a break for hours yet. That we’re expecting that imaginary rush any time now. That sacks of rice won’t inventory themselves. That I mostly asked for this job to get inside her brother’s swim trunks. That I couldn’t really take on another job, even though the money would be great, and I wouldn’t mind a distraction of a different kind.

  And then there’s Jake.

  I try to picture him in back, to remind myself what’s waiting for me: He checks the time on his phone, reapplies the ChapStick he doesn’t know I know he keeps in the pocket of his apron, texts some girl he met at Sonic. Now, he’s arranging his most attractive pout for my inevitable return.

  “Okay,” I say.

  One thing’s certain as I shove my apron behind the counter: Jake will be pissed, and I’m not sure if this is a pro or a con. Ditching him feels the way you’d feel walking away from that Allsup’s chili dog. You know it’s right, but that’s cold comfort as your empty stomach slowly consumes itself.

  Leigh isn’t as good a driver as her brother. She seems to think the pedals won’t work unless crushed to the floor mat with every traffic light or stop sign, so the ride starts uncomfortably, in more ways than one. Because despite Lucas’s scheming, one semipainful night under the stars does not the best of friends make.

  But it was legitimately nice of her to fetch me for tryouts.

  Besides, Leigh doesn’t know my life, doesn’t know which awful and sincere questions to ask. None of this How are you, Vanni? How’s your dad, Vanni? What are your plans, Vanni? Why won’t you talk about the future, Vanni? Are you gonna take the test, Vanni? I don’t even think she’d care about the answers. Leigh doesn’t look at me like Diana does, as though I’m sinking and she’s the only one who can save me. Or like Marilee, as though I’m sinking and might at any moment drag her underwater with me.

  So I take a breath, and search the car for a conversation starter, anything at all, landing on “I like your sunglasses.”

  “These?” she asks, patting the top of her head where big blue-green aviators perch in the tufts of her hair. “They’re Lucas’s. I think I stole them.”

  “Cool.”

  “I guess.”

  Since that’s a dead end, I continue the search. In the mirror of my flipped-down visor, I spot a stack of books in the backseat. I recognize the one that tops the pile: The Poem and You. “Are you reading that?” I ask.

  Leigh cuts her eyes to the rearview mirror, just in time to launch us over a school-zone speed bump. “What, the poetry one?”

  “We read it in junior and senior English. Mr. Garza, he was our teacher both years, though he might’ve been drunk the whole time?”

  “Go on,” Leigh says.

  “It wasn’t for sure, but he’d have us read our textbooks while he was ‘grading papers.’ Except he’d never turn the page on a single report, and he was popping aspirin hard-core. He was also our football coach, but there were, like, thirteen guys on our team, basically every guy in school who could throw a ball in a straight line and take a hit without dying. And they weren’t all big or strong, so someone was always hurt, and the rest had to play the entire game, every game. They were about as good as you might think, which could’ve been one of the many reasons why he was always sipping the juice.”

  “Scandalous!” Leigh gasps.

  “It was. But that’s probably why I never learned any poetry, which would’ve come in super handy bussing tables for a living.”

  “Same for me. I mean, it’s all assigned reading from the Santa Fe Prep summer list, but I haven’t looked at it.” She waves her hand toward the books. “I’m pretty sure they’ll change my life.”

  “You’ll be a senior?”

  “Yeah, but I’ll be eighteen in September.”

  “It sucks you couldn’t finish school in—” I cut myself off, afraid to poke the bear, as Mom sometimes says.

  “It really does,” she agrees, her voice quiet, her body stiff. Then she shakes her head, like a dog shakes off droplets of water. “But whatever. Who cares about varsity soccer and actual trees and buildings over two stories, when I can have all of this?” She sweeps one hand across the windshield, palm face out toward the rolling dust and squat brown buildings in front of us, stretching on. “Good thing I’m not the type to sulk.”

  “What type are you, then?” I ask, because I thought she was exactly the sulking type.

  Leigh looks over, draws her eyes up and down my skin in a way that feels familiar, and also not.

  My June-hot face flushes brighter.

  “I . . . am the type to chauffeur Savannah Espinoza to her casting, obviously.”

  “Aha! If you know they call it a casting, you know what the job is,” I accuse.

  “I do.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  “I cannot.”

  “Great, now I’m scared.”

  “Good scared, or bad scared?”

  “There’s a good scared?” I ask dryly.

  “Yeah. It’s like . . .” Stopping for barely a blink of the turn signal, she pulls us out onto the trail. “When you’re waiting for a train, and you see the lights coming down the track, and just for a millisecond your brain wants you to jump out in front of it. And you’re scared your body might actually do it, and your heart’s going, like, faster than the train.”

  “How is that good?”

  Leigh doesn’t have Jake’s dimples, or Lucas’s easy grin, but with a rare, real smile, her eyes warm up, become mottled slivers of light. “Feels good to me.”

  It turns out the tryouts aren’t actually at the Lost Lagoon, but at the indoor pool at the West Mesa Aquatic Center. A familiar place. I did a few competitions here with my swim club; once, I came in second in my age group in the 100 meter. The pool’s Olympic-size, with stadium seat
ing for hundreds, three diving boards, and red, white, and blue pennants strung up across the lanes, all of which are full except for the one blocked off for us. Three dozen girls gather, about two dozen more than I expected to apply as waterslide attendees or inner-tube minders.

  But then a middle-aged man with a stereotypical clipboard summons us to the bleachers by bellowing, “Mermaids, round up!”

  What. The. Fuck?

  I drift over at the back of the pack and drop my gym bag on the bench beside me.

  “I’m Eric, in charge of auditions for our performing park personnel,” the man with the clipboard says, “and I’ll be casting five mermaids per shift, ten in total.”

  Now that I look around, I notice . . . similarities between me and the girls waiting to be “cast.” We’re all eighteen at least and late twenties at the oldest. We’re all average in height, and though I’m one of the curviest, we’ve all got decently muscled shoulders and legs. We’re pretty—the girl down the row absentmindedly chewing her long brown hair looks like that YouTube star, the one who matches her makeup to fancy cupcakes she bakes and ices, but never eats. The girl next to her looks like the fifteenth Kardashian sister.

  I threw my hair into a hasty ponytail on the car ride, but the rest of the girls have hair that ripples down their backs. I tear my elastic out to match, even as I listen dubiously.

  “The job’s important but simple,” Eric continues. “We don’t do underwater stunts like your big fancy parks, so you won’t have to mess with scuba lessons or breathing tubes. You don’t have to dance or drink underwater. You’ll swim around Mermaid Cove, pose on the rocks, wave to the tourists, do a little routine a few times per shift. If selected, you’ll begin official training on the twenty-third, and we’ll worry about your tails then. Today, we just need to see that you’re comfortable in the water and can swim pretty.”

  I itch to pick up my bag, call Leigh, and on the ride back to Silvia’s, text-scream at Lucas for setting me up for this shit. Because I’m trained, damn it. I don’t swim pretty. I’m strong. I could get into tryouts at a Division II college, especially if I spent a few months working on my times, and then at the end of summer . . .

  Except that I’m doing nothing and going nowhere at the end of summer. So what am I, too good for a mermaid tail? Too good for a C-list water park outside Albuquerque? Too good for a paycheck?

  No, I am not. So I shut up and I suck it up. I change into my suit and when it’s my turn to try out, I slip into the water. After a few warm-up laps, I pretend that Eric-in-charge-of-auditions-for-performing-park-personnel is a coach at CSU East Bay, or Florida Tech, or Pace. I propel myself off the bottom of the pool and dolphin-kick my damn heart out, knees together, toes pointed, body rolling, my hips more than my legs powering me along. Not my strongest style, but when Eric asks me to use soft hands and a big smile, I do it, even though I much prefer to swim in the zone where I feel like I’ll never stop, like I’ll never need to.

  In the end I emerge dripping and dissatisfied, but at least I swam pretty.

  There are only four cars in the lot when we return to Silvia’s, and half of them belong to Juno and Jake. I’m guessing I wasn’t missed too badly, even if my lunch break has run three hours long.

  Leigh throws the car into park, and I jerk roughly against my seat belt. “I release you back into the wild,” she says.

  I pause before climbing out. Trapped in the heat of the minivan, with all the windows rolled up so we could hear each other on the drive home, Leigh smells generically clean, like Irish Spring soap. I’ve never much considered the scent of it, but I like it. It almost makes the heat bearable. “Thanks for the ride, I guess.”

  “You’re welcome, I guess,” she says, and then “Hold up,” as I reach for the door handle. She takes my hand, flips it over palm-up. Fishing a pen out of the glove compartment, she presses down and scribbles across my hand. Her warm fingers trap mine.

  I breathe. “What is it?”

  “It’s my number. You punch it into a phone and then you can text me. In case you need another ride or whatever.”

  “Six-one-seven?” I squint at the scribbled area code.

  “It’s a Boston number,” she says mournfully.

  I climb out into the baking sun and start to wave, but for some reason feel like a goober, so instead I reach for the hem of my skirt, swivel around and moon her with my bathing suit bottom. It’s no less stupid, but Leigh fake-swoons against the door, and drives off grinning.

  The skip in my step lasts until I duck inside the diner, where Jake glowers at me from behind the counter. “What the hell, we were looking for you!”

  I stop in my tracks, deflated. “Is Juno mad?” I didn’t really think she’d care. It’s not like I’m a flaky employee.

  “No,” he whispers. “Try the guy you blue-balled in the stockroom! You didn’t even tell me you were leaving.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I start for the back office, but Jake catches my wrist.

  “You know there’s a way you can make it up to me. . . .”

  “Not now,” I snap, slipping free.

  Maybe it’s my imagination, but he looks genuinely hurt, instead of sexy-pouty hurt.

  I grab a pot and top off table four’s coffees, agree with Mr. Paiz that I am, indeed, so grown-up, and then I check in with Juno in the office. After punching Leigh’s number into my phone and stashing my purse once again, I head back to the stockroom to finish taking inventory. I ignore Jake when he slides through the door, until he plucks at the apron strings tied behind my back, working at the knot. I spin around, swatting his arm away. “I said, not now.”

  “Why?” he asks, his full bottom lip thrust forward, and it’s not attractive. Not even obnoxiously attractive. “You have your girlfriend, so you don’t need me anymore?”

  “What does that mean?”

  He folds his muscled arms. “Come on. That chick! She’s . . . you know. You know?” He lowers his voice to a hiss I have to lean in to hear. “You know?”

  I can feel the blush coming from my scalp down. “So what?”

  “So nothing.” He leans back like he’s proven something. “Just, you go on a date with her, but every time I ask you out, like really out, you blow me off—”

  “It wasn’t a date,” I interrupt. “I had a thing. In Albuquerque. And we just talked, like you and I are simultaneously talking and not-dating.”

  He holds his hands up and laughs. “¡Cálmate! I didn’t know you were one of those angry lesbians.”

  Fuming, I ball up a fist and drive it at Jake. I don’t know where I meant it to land—probably on his stupid square jaw—but I’ve never punched anything, and so I pound into his stupid huge bicep instead. He twitches slightly backward, while I feel a great dull pain shoot up through my wrist.

  “Jeez, loca.” He blinks down at me. “I was just being funny.”

  “Next time be funnier, pendejo.” I clutch the inventory ledger and turn my back until he leaves, shaking out the hand where Leigh wrote her phone number. Underneath the pain, it still tingles from the impression of her pen, and her fingers steady around mine.

  SEVEN

  “¿Cómo te fue hoy, mija?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Anything interesting happen at the restaurant?”

  “Not really.”

  “Easy days can be the best days.”

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  Such is the typical script to our family dinners. Mom asks benign questions, I feed her scraps, she cheerfully makes a feast of them. Even as she saws through the too-tough pot roast on Dad’s plate so he can spear the bits with a fork held slightly sideways, her smile never wavers. If anything, Mom is more cheerful in the years since Dad’s diagnosis, more endlessly grateful for all of the challenges life presents, and the opportunity to face them as a family and whatever. As Dad’s grown quieter, her undying positivity has only intensified.

  And to be honest, a little has alw
ays gone a long way.

  It’s like the ghost peppers Dad once got as a birthday present, picked from Mrs. Mosqueda’s sister-in-law’s garden. I sat at the kitchen table and watched him diminish them to almost nothing. To use ghost peppers, you put on gloves, you chop them into tiny pieces, cook them a little at a time for a long time, strain out the actual peppers, put the fiery orange oil into a jar and store it in the dark for a few months. Then you add one drop to your big pot of pozole rojo, and you’ve got a really good spice going.

  But you put a piece of ghost pepper right in your mouth, and you melt through your tongue, through your body, through the tile floor beneath you, through the earth to its very core, burning a hole through which prehistoric beasts emerge and retake the world.

  What I’m saying is, my mother was always chatty, always the first to ask about your day or if you want one more enchilada on your plate. But Mom 2.0 talks and talks, even when it feels like she’s putting on a show for some TV audience that isn’t really watching.

  To give her a rest, I turn to Dad, who’s stabbing shakily at Mom’s shoe-leather roast.

  “Mrs. Reyes told me to tell you hi.”

  Technically, Mrs. Reyes told me to tell Dad she was keeping a prayer for him when she caught me filling up Mom’s Malibu at the Allsup’s. Then she flipped down her sunglasses and hustled into the convenience store, ankle-length sundress rippling around her sandals. I guess she means well, in spite of my swift exit from her daughter’s life. Or maybe she’s grateful; maybe she thinks I’m a bad influence, with my Christmas-and-Easter-only parents, and my halter tops, and a growing reputation I’ve managed to keep from Mom and Dad pretty easily, because that’s the way gossip works in La Trampa. You know people are talking about you; you hear it like the rustle of bushes, feel it in the prickling hairs at the back of your neck. But nobody’s there when you turn around.

  Anyway, I think Mrs. Reyes’s prayers are about as useful as a fake mermaid’s fin, but Dad brightens. “Seen Diana lately?”

  I nod. “Yeah, we’ve hung out.”

  “That’s good,” Mom speaks up while Dad digests the information. “We’re glad you’re making time for your friends, before you all go your own ways.”