Mom grew up in Round Rock, Texas, this suburb outside of Austin. Right after she and her friend Kat graduated high school, they road-tripped to Santa Fe to celebrate their freedom. One day, they drove down the trail and stopped in La Trampa for lunch, wandering into Silvia’s. Just passing through on the way to someplace better, like every tourist. Mom wore a black babydoll dress sprinkled with daisies and her silver Doc Martens, and Dad was nervous while he took her order for barbacoa de pollo, because she was so pretty. But once he’d calmed down, they spent the lunch hour flirting. When he brought the bill, they exchanged phone numbers, the pencil slipping from his sweat-slick fingers. Two years of late-night calls later, Dad had taken over all of the cooking in the restaurant—his father died suddenly of pancreatic cancer in the winter—and Mom came back to La Trampa for good. She married him, helped him run the business when his mother returned to Tijuana to take care of her older sister. We visited her and the cousins right after I was born, and then maybe once a year, but she died before I could really know her. Her name was Silvia, of course.
Dad told me this story as we ate empanadas and watched a flock of mallards skim the surface of the lake. He said one of his greatest sorrows was that I couldn’t remember my abuela’s cooking. “Her soul was in her cooking. ‘Estómago lleno, corazón contento,’ she’d say.”
I follow Leigh down the wooden ramp to the observation dock, where the same mounted telescope Dad and I peered through is aimed toward the glittering black lake beyond the grass. Along the railing, the same framed signs identify plants and birds. Little bluestem and yucca plants, raptors and red-tailed hawks. Leigh presses her face to the telescope, but of course, if there’s anything to see you can’t see it in the dark.
“I almost forgot,” Leigh says. She jogs to the minivan, roots around in the trunk, and when she comes back, thunks a big bottle of Largo Bay Silver down on the railing in front of us. “I hid it in the spare tire.” She screws open the cap, drinks, full-body-shivers, and passes it off to me. It is possibly the worst cheapo rum I’ve ever tasted, a mix of lime and mouthwash, with the burn of hydrogen peroxide on a scraped knee.
“Smooth,” I say with a cough.
“Subtle hints of nail polish remover,” she says, clearing her throat. “What do you want? I had nine bucks. It was this or Popov.”
We sit cross-legged on the deck in silence for a while, arm to arm and hip to hip, grimacing our way through sips of goddamn Largo Bay. Slices of Crane Lake sparkle through the gaps in the railing. Between us and the water, a sea of grass whispers.
“I guess this isn’t so bad,” Leigh admits spontaneously.
“New Mexico is wearing you down,” I giggle. The awful rum is good for something, at least; my throat feels permanently warmed and everything seems funnier already.
“I mean, in this exact spot, it’s not the worst place to be, ever.” Strangling and then loosening the frayed strings of her Adidas hoodie, she sighs a little more emphatically than a sober person would. “Everything else is the worst.”
“This is where you come from,” I remind her.
“So? That doesn’t mean I belong here.”
Hoping I’m not about to poke the bear, I ask, “What was it like, where you lived?”
Leigh smiles, staring at the water. “Awesome. Our apartment was close-ish to Fenway. Like not right up in the bars and the crowds, but close enough to hear the concerts, so a couple times a year, you could lean out our window and listen to Billy Joel or the Police or someone. And we were half a block down from this awesome Thai restaurant that mostly smelled amazing, like garlic or chili or lemongrass. Except sometimes in the spring, before the AC was on and all the doors and windows were propped open, on days when they cooked a certain special, you could smell, like, fermented fish through the whole neighborhood. Lucas hated it, but I kind of didn’t mind, because then it smelled like summer was coming.”
At the same exact moment, we take a deep breath, and then we laugh. Here, almost-summer smells like dust, and faint smoke from some distant wildfire, but I knew that it would.
“Just wait a few weeks and it’ll be monsoon season, so it’ll be like . . . what’s that word for that smell when the rain hits dry soil? I think it’s ‘petrichor,’ Mr. Garza said. Remember that smell?”
“No.” She tightens her hoodie cords.
I’m not sure I believe her. “Well, it’s great. Then it’s chile-roasting season, and that’s obviously fucking amazing, and ooh, then it’ll smell like piñon in the fall, when everyone starts to burn wood. You’ll love it,” I promise. “You just have to wait a little while.”
She pulls the cords, relaxes, pulls. “Could you keep a secret?”
“I could,” I understate.
Leigh leans in, the burn of alcohol on her breath. “I’m not gonna wait. I’m going back.”
“Like, you’ll go back east for college?” I feel like a little girl saying it; of course that’s Leigh’s plan.
But she shakes her head in an exaggerated sort of way. “I’m talking September third. That’s my birthday.” She tugs the strings until they’re tight around her neck. “There was some custody stuff going on before we left, but it was nothing, this total red-tape situation, and when I’m eighteen, I can do whatever I want. And I want to go back to Boston.”
“You want to live with your mom again?”
She nods. “I’m saving up for a plane ticket—you know there’s a Coinstar kiosk in Albuquerque that trades cash for, like, eighty percent of what’s on your gift card? I found it when I drove you down. My nonna in Boston’s always sending me these loaded-up gift cards to Sephora and Macy’s and Victoria’s Secret and crap. Like I’ll wake up one day and hear the siren song of pencil skirts and lipstick.”
I study Leigh’s profile in the moonlight, her short brown hair ruffling softly in the breeze, her paintbrush eyelashes, the clean shape of her nose, and slightly chapped lips. The way she swims inside her hoodie, her strong legs and rough knees. Leigh knows exactly who she is, so why would her nonna want her to change?
I don’t even really know Leigh, but already the thought of her leaving makes me sad in advance. The same feeling I get when I’m eating the last slice of the tres leches cake Mom orders from the bakery for my birthdays, and though it isn’t gone yet, I know it will be soon, and there won’t be anything like it for a long time after.
“Your dad won’t be crushed?” I ask, taking the bottle.
“He was fine before we came. And he has Naveen,” she says, as if the name tastes sour in her mouth.
“Your stepmom?”
“No, she’s just his girlfriend. You know when they met, she was running a matchmaking service for dogs? Our neighbor in Española wanted to stud her Weimaraner. That was before Mom and Dad got divorced. She stopped after she and Dad got together. Now she makes candles, sells them at farmers’ markets and wherever.” Leigh grabs the bottle from me. “Yeah, they’ll be fine.”
“What about your brother?” I take the bottle back.
“What about him?” she says a little too loudly. “He’s moving into the dorms when the semester starts, anyway. He won’t care. He probably won’t even notice.” Then she knocks my elbow with hers while I’m sipping from the neck, splattering my chin. “Maybe you should come, right? Go east of Texas? Maybe September is your someday.”
It’s a dumb idea she can’t possibly mean, but the fire in my throat spreads, sinks into my chest, my heart, pumps to the farthermost parts of me. I picture Leigh pulling the van up my driveway on a sunny day. She leans out the window and laughs, Dare you. We stuff the trunk with our suitcases, though the only luggage I own is Mom’s big duffel bag, older than me and Frankenstein-stitched back together in so many places, it’d probably have saved her time to knit a new one. We point ourselves toward the East Coast, because for some reason we’re driving instead of flying, and I crank down the window as we hit the highway. Dust and wind roar through the cab. I stick one
arm into the outside air, white sunlight rippling between my fingers like we’re in some cheesy fucking road-trip flick.
“Would I even like Boston?”
“You’d love it,” she says, and though she couldn’t possibly know, I want to believe her. Because Leigh hasn’t known me all eighteen years of my life (unlike the whole of La Trampa), it’s like I can be anybody when I’m with her. I could even be that girl in the van, heading off to start the rest of her life, feeling the good kind of fear.
Then I blink, and the open road is replaced by the slats in front of me, initials and hearts and profanity slashed into the wood. C likes J’s dick; Mike Abbey Forever. It all blurs together in the dark . . . or maybe it’s my new best friend, Largo Bay. I pull from our bottle, trying not to cringe. “We should go back. Movie’s probably almost over.”
She looks at me, pupils wide in the dark, lips parted, then stands and dusts off the back of her shorts. “Yeah, it probably is.”
She ditches the rum in a trash can at the end of the observation deck. Between us we’ve killed a third of the bottle. And yeah, Leigh more than pulled her weight, but I’ve been drinking here and there since I was fifteen—there’s just not a lot to do in La Trampa—so I know neither of us should drive. Mom would strangle me. But I’m strangely detached from the thought. It drifts into focus, I acknowledge it, then watch it float away. Instead, I scramble to buckle my seat belt as Leigh backs the car around to the road, and I feel a little thrill as she toes the gas pedal. Every time I glance sideways at her, she’s blinking determinedly, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. Once, she catches me and stares back with wide hazel eyes.
Until we hear the beep beep-beeeeep of a horn, and turn to see the headlights swimming toward us in the dark. With a gasp that knifes through the car, Leigh jerks the wheel so that we’re safely right of the yellow line.
“That’ll wake you up,” she jokes unsteadily.
I clamp my shaking fingers between my knees and laugh, though I don’t even know what I’m laughing at.
As Leigh glides the van up alongside Lucas and Scoop Girl in the emptying field of the drive-in, my stomach clenches. He’s turned from Leigh’s big brother into Mrs. Short, the high school principal, when she caught me with Oriel Trejo. With a precise cocktail of grief-stricken silence and earnest, help-me-help-myself apologies, I persuaded her not to tell my parents. My family had enough to deal with at home, she admitted.
I’m not sure Leigh will be so lucky. She hops out to hand Lucas the keys, and through the windshield, I watch him trap her chin with his fingers to smell her breath.
“For fuck’s sake!” he swears.
Wrapped in the picnic blanket, Scoop Girl pokes one hand out and lays it on his shoulder. “Don’t, babe. She’s a kid.”
Leigh rears back and gapes at Scoop Girl. “Oh my god, you better marry rich. What’s even the deal with this girl, Mucus?”
“Get. In. The. Car,” he grits out between clenched teeth.
We slink into the backseat, and Lucas drives for a silent hour to drop Scoop Girl off at her friend’s house in Santa Fe. Then we head south for home. Leigh and I have been very still, me with my hands tucked into my lap, Leigh slumped down with her knees shoved against the driver’s seat and her palms braced on either side of her. Finally, as we enter La Trampa, she speaks up, her voice more a challenge than a plea. “Are you gonna tell Dad?”
Lucas cuts his eyes toward us in the rearview mirror. “I should.”
I guess that means something to Leigh, because a slow half smile curls her lips. “You’re my favorite brother,” she says, this time softly.
“Shut up,” he snaps, but I see his frown waver in the rearview mirror before he refastens it. “And get your shit together already. This was selfish and dumb, and it can’t keep happening. ’Cause I can’t help you when I’m not gonna be around all the time. You get me?”
She salutes him, then lets her hand fall and, without looking over at me, slips it into mine for such a brief moment, I’ve barely felt her touch before it’s gone.
NINE
If Santa Cruz Lake was cold, Mermaid Cove at the Lost Lagoon is icy as a Viking’s balls. Nine girls and I stand shoulder-deep in the glassy green water, pale lipped and shivering in our practical swimsuits.
“Sorry about the temp,” Eric-in-charge-of-auditions-for-performing-park-personnel apologizes from his safe, dry perch on the deck, sculpted and painted to look like mossy rocks. “We’re working on it. The heater’s been acting up, but we’ll have it running by showtime.”
There’s an HVAC guy I could recommend, if my teeth weren’t chattering out of my skull.
Once we’re moving and our sludgy blood is pumping, it’s a little better. We swim some warm-up laps (literally) around the Cove, a rough oval about a third the size of Bicentennial. The bottom is black tiled to appear natural and pond-like, the water darker still because it’s sheltered by giant plastic boulders—beyond those, the front gate set in a cinder-block wall painted to look like river stones. That gate will stay locked until the Fourth, when a staffer will lead park guests inside, up a narrow path, and out through a break between the boulders. They’ll cross the weather-beaten-looking footbridge that arches over the center of the pool, and from there, watch our maiden performance. I haven’t let myself dread it just yet.
For now, we train. We dolphin-kick while practicing soft fingers and pretty smiles. We’re told how to bask gracefully on a clump of fake boulders in the deeper end, which are heated by the sun, at least. We learn to act like mermaids, coyly beckoning to visitors, then giggling behind our damp shoulders.
Soon we’ll have to do this crap in public.
“What’s, like, our character motivation here?” asks an ombre-haired twentysomething, one of two Camilas in the group. Camila A, I call her, because her shell bra is no Camila C’s. “Are we Peter Pan mermaids or Harry Potter mermaids?”
“Can we be Starbucks mermaids?” a tall, tan girl named April mutters beside me, hugging her goose-bumped shoulders in the cold surf. “I need a hot latte or something.”
“That’s a very astute question,” Eric calls from the deck. “The part you’re playing is mysterious, yet shy. Enchanting, yet elusive. Desirable, yet unattainable. Uncatchable. You want to captivate the tourists, be mischievous, but not too mischievous. You do not want to drown the tourists.”
We practice looking mischievous (but not murderous) until we break for lunch at noon. My fellow mermaids haul themselves out of the water, grab their towels, and cluster in the sun. They laugh about the sad state of our chlorinated hair while Eric’s assistant passes out mediocre sandwiches from the Sunken Sub, free in honor of our first day of training. Throwing on a T-shirt, I take my BLT and sit on the fringe. It’s not like the girls aren’t nice. April seems funny, and Camila C offered me a granola bar while we changed in the locker room this morning. It’s just that it’s been a long time since I was at the center of so many girls. They haven’t said much to me, and even though I remember how simple this used to be, I’m having a tough time talking to them. I consider sneaking away to Neptune’s Pool to find Lucas, with whom I hitched a ride this morning. Instead, I dig my cell out of my pocket and text Leigh.
Me: Am learning to be enchanting yet elusive
Moments later, she sends a selfie snapped at (I assume) her kitchen table, with rumpled I-woke-up-like-this hair and a mouthful of spaghetti half spilling down her chin.
Leigh: Already there
I send back a heart-eyed smiley, but it’s pretty freaking insufficient.
After lunch, we gather back at the pool and watch a tough-looking woman with rough gray braids like nautical ropes haul garment bags over on a hand truck. Eric kneels and unzips one ceremoniously, then waits for us to admire the contents: lemon-yellow fabric, beads and sequins winking in the sun, narrowing and then bursting into a fin. “Naomi comes to us from costuming on a mermaid show that just shut down in Las Vegas.” He m
eans Sin City and not San Miguel County, I assume. “She’ll take your measurements today, and then your tails will be fitted properly to each of you. In the meantime, you’ll get the chance to try them on, take them for a test-swim. Just stay in the shallow end until they fit and you’ve put in the practice, okay? We’d rather nobody drown today.”
I open the bag with my name pinned to the plastic and watch my future spill out: a tail the glittering aquamarine of painted oceans in Disney movies.
Seems appropriate.
We wriggle into our costumes, which are like thick, scaly, waist-high stockings for one big leg instead of two. It feels a little like squeezing myself into a giant condom. Inside, the fabric is a plastic flipper like two scuba fins glued together, with slots for each foot. Naomi clips and slides and zips us into place. My tail’s a little too long for me—when she helps me up to finish dressing, I have to hoist the top above my waist to stand flat-footed on the fin. I wobble while Naomi circles me with measuring tape. Once all of my numbers are scribbled on her clipboard, she helps me sit again. I scoot to the water and slide in with some of the others. Camila A floats by on her back, while a muscled redhead with a very fancy set of eyebrows works her way around the perimeter, gripping the ledge. It seems as good a method as any, so I drag myself along a little behind her, legs and tail trailing.
I tow myself to the middle of the pool, where the bottom starts to slope toward the far end, eight feet at its deepest and off limits till we’re skilled enough for flips and tricks. Here it’s just deep enough to try a proper dolphin kick.
Awkwardly, I curl into position against the wall, then push off. I ripple forward, arms outstretched, chest down, hips down, thighs down, knees bent slightly. It’s not my strongest move—my knees always did drift a little too far apart on the butterfly stroke—but now they’re pinned together, and it’s harder than I thought. I let my feet sink to the pool floor, the water around my chin. I dip down a little to shimmy clumsily back to the ledge—
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