Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  My palms are slippery on the plaster. Forget flirting. I suck in my stomach and try not to dry-heave onto the basking rock.

  A serene voice like you’d hear in commercials for antidepressants blasts out of the speakers, twice as loud as the fake Little Mermaid sound track. “WELCOME, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, TO THE WATERS WHERE THE UNKNOWABLE DWELLS.”

  That’s our first cue. All ten of us scoot and slide into the pool, swimming for the shade directly below the bridge. Fuck pretty hands and pointed toes—I dolphin-kick my ass off for the only spot in the water where the park visitors can’t see us, and so I’m the first to reach the nylon ropes that dangle from the underside of the bridge. While the rest of the girls make their way over, I cling to the middle rope, catching my breath.

  “THIS IS A WORLD OF MAGIC AND WONDER,” the blissed-out narrator declares.

  Whatever she’s on, I wish she’d share with me. Before today I was hardly nervous; maybe I didn’t have the time to freak, or maybe I just didn’t care that much. That’s over now. What if I forget my twenty-second solo? What if I forget the whole routine? Fall out of place and mow down the Camilas? Panic and wallow and drown in front of two dozen children in cartoon-themed swimsuits while Mr. Orthodontia prays for my shell bra to snap off and float away?

  “THESE BEWITCHING CREATURES LIVE IN A WORLD UNLIKE ANY WE’VE SEEN, HALF-HUMAN, HALF-FISH.”

  From under the bridge, we can hear footsteps shuffle back and forth as tourists try to catch sight of us. I twist the rope so tightly, my hands cramp.

  “THEIRS IS A WORLD FORGOTTEN BY MAN.”

  Bobbing beside me, Iris shoves sopping red hair out of her face and twists into position.

  “IT IS A WORLD WHERE MERMAIDS SWIM FREE.”

  That’s our next cue.

  All at once (or almost at once) we surge forward and resurface on the opposite side of the bridge. While the tourists rush to the railing to watch us, we maneuver into a circle, flip onto our backs and link hands. We float in place, our hair drifting to the center of us, tails flicking. The water carries my weight, just like it always does. I make my body relax, bone by bone and muscle by muscle, and it listens, and then I’m not so scared anymore.

  For a debut show, it goes mostly as planned. We let go of one another, somersault, and twirl. When I look to the left and right, Kristian and Iris are on the same moves as me with our arms in roughly the same places. Then each of us runs through the short, simple solos we’ve learned. Mine is three back tucks in a row, which I first learned messing around with the Aquatics Club in Santa Fe. Laid out on my back on the surface, I pedal my arms to grab a scoop of water, push my hands overhead, and tuck my knees to my chest to roll under. I finish with this easy move Naomi calls “the oyster,” where I lie with my hands stretched above me, then bring my legs and arms up straight to touch my fin above my hips, pointing skyward. I sink underwater, butt first, then swim back to the group without plowing into anybody. Mission accomplished.

  After that, we split into pairs. Some do identical spins, some handstand in the shallowest part of the pool. Camila A and April swim back toward the bridge, where they toss up gift shop seashells the parents catch for their kids. Iris and I race each other in a half lap that skirts the edges of the pool, a duet bestowed on us by Eric. At the end of the routine, we make our way back to the basking rock, spend a minute or two blowing kisses and waving. The staffer ushers out the guests, we get a break, and the whole thing resets for the next group.

  There are no disasters, no near-drownings. Nobody’s iPhone falls in the water, and, miraculously, no teenage pendejos shout at us to take our tops off. And the way the little kids look at us—not like we’re bartenders and stylists and dropouts and a part-time waitress with a high school diploma and no plan. Like we’re magic. Like they wish they could grow up to be us, though what I wish for them is to be little and stupid and safe forever.

  When we break at noon, I’m almost sad to scrape myself out of my tail.

  The sadness passes the second I walk out of the Cove and into the park proper to find Leigh Clemente waiting at the gates. She wears her uniform boy’s tank top and boxy khaki shorts that hang on her body—god forbid she should wear a bathing suit to a water park. But while women like Mrs. Reyes (and there are lots of women like Mrs. Reyes around here) would crow about how pretty Leigh could be if she grew her hair out and dressed like a “girl,” Leigh is better than pretty. With her strong, narrow shoulders, and her sharpened collarbone, and her face, her straight nose and pink-but-slightly-chapped lips and big hazel eyes . . .

  She’s perfect.

  “When’s the next show?” she asks with a grin. “I heard the mermaids are hotties.”

  I tuck my chin into my shoulder and shrug, enchantingly yet elusively.

  Leigh stuffs a handful of my fries in her face, and I don’t blame her. The fries are the best thing on my plate—better than the overly salted fish sandwich that makes up the rest of my Flying Fish and Chips. But I do get a 60 percent park employee discount, so we bought our sandwich platters for cheap and brought them to the outdoor table for two we managed to snag despite the crazy holiday crowd. I lean close across the table so I can listen to her complain above the noise of the mob.

  “My brother’s abandoning me to go to Albuquerque and ‘buy soft pretzels’ with Scoop Girl,” Leigh says through a full mouth. “So I’m stuck at home with Dad and Naveen on Independence Day, irony of ironies.”

  “That sucks,” I half shout.

  “It does, but if you’re not doing anything tonight, you could hang out at my place. Dad will even give you a hippy beer if you promise to sleep over.”

  I process this. “Sleep over, like at your house?”

  “We’ll eat meatless burgers with eggless soy milk mayonnaise, wave sparklers, watch America-themed movies.”

  I snake a fry from my dwindling pile while I still can. “You really want me to go?” Because of my busy new schedule, we’ve only seen each other briefly since the drive-in. Once, Leigh popped into Silvia’s and ordered a horchata just so we had an excuse to sit for five minutes and talk about nothing, and a few times, I slipped away from the Cove on my break and ran to the pool, where she was hanging by Lucas’s lifeguard chair. Leigh’s grand plan to go east hasn’t come up again; we haven’t had the chance, since we haven’t been alone. So a sleepover feels like a big step, a scary step. Whether it’s good scary or bad scary, I can’t decide.

  “Why do you always ask that?” Leigh shakes her head. “You think I’m being nice? Of course I want you.”

  If I’m blushing, maybe I can blame it on sunstroke. There’s a shade umbrella over our little patio table, but like the rest of them it’s tattered and holey, as if it’s weathered a terrible storm or, more on-theme, washed up on shore after a wreck. Coverage is spotty at best. “I’m off at four.”

  “Perfect, so come around six. But don’t get too hot. Remember, Lucas won’t be there.”

  “Leigh, I do not want on your brother.”

  “No?” She pauses, and my heartbeat kind of does too. “I guess I’ll see you for meatless burgers.”

  “And America-themed movies.”

  She steals the last handful of my fries and heads off, while I sit and try to sort out just what it is that I want. I’m out of practice. I’ve been drowning everything in my imaginary pond for a few years now, holding the big wishes under instead of inspecting them. But that’s the thing about Leigh; she’s the kind of person who stirs everything up, if you let her.

  ELEVEN

  I empty my dresser drawers and small closet, miniskirts upon camisoles upon cutoffs piled on my bed. Too dull, too tight, too eleventh grade, too the romper I wore before skinny-dipping in Jaime Aguilar’s backyard pool after he accidentally finger painted my boobs orange with Cheetos dust.

  None of that is right for tonight.

  With the clock ticking away toward six and my mother waiting in the kitchen to drive me to the Cle
mentes’, I reach into the back of my closet for the garment bag containing a dress I’ve only worn inside the Macy’s changing room at the Coronado Mall. Back in May, Mom wanted to buy me something for my graduation ceremony. I knew we didn’t have the money, but she insisted it was a red-letter day and that I deserved it. That I was beautiful. That I was her only daughter. She kept cheerleading until I realized turning her down would pain her more than a bill in the mail the next month.

  So I let her choose a dress from the rack, white with a print of faded blue carnations, a full skirt, and a teardrop-shape cutout in back. Longer than I would’ve liked, and tooth-achingly sweet. I hadn’t been a floral kind of girl since middle school. Pre–curling iron, pre-boobs, pre–Max Binali. Pre-HD. Plus the thick straps made my shoulders look like eighties-style shoulder pads of skin and muscle. I clenched my fists until my fingertips ground the little bones below my palms, held on until my fingers throbbed and then a few heartbeats longer, then pushed through the curtain.

  Mom was sitting on one of the little velveteen couches in the dressing room, and she beamed when she saw me. “It’s perfect, sweetheart. It’s exactly you.”

  I shifted in the shoes she’d picked out, espadrille wedges with wispy blue straps, and felt as if I were wobbling along a tightrope while my mother clapped below. But she was still smiling resolutely, so I nodded back.

  “Right. It’s me.”

  She bought the shoes, and the dress, and when we got home, I tucked the white plastic garment bag into the back of my closet. But I could still sense it. It plagued me like the imaginary beating in that story, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Graduation day came, and when I took it out of the bag, I couldn’t bring myself to put the thing on. I told Mom it was too tight in the waist. I promised I’d bring it to Mrs. Aguilar, Jaime’s mother, who worked in the Laundromat and did tailoring on the side, so she could let it out and I could wear it on another red-letter day.

  It wasn’t a total lie. Maybe in the next-door dimension where one tiny butterfly of a thing is different the dress would fit me, but in this life it didn’t.

  When I unzip the bag, though, it isn’t as sugary as I remember. The carnations are still a faded blue, like flowers somehow bleached of their color by sun and wind, and the white looks nice beside my summer tan. The skirt is full over my rounded hips, the waist tight. Even the cutout between the shoulder blades seems more grown-up when I picture Leigh standing behind me, her breath on my back. . . .

  But why am I picturing my kind-of-friend breathing on me? Why am I not even bothered by it? And why am I not even bothered by that?

  I shower and blast myself with my clunky old blow-dryer until I have to stick my face in front of my window AC so I don’t sweat my makeup off. I brush on a new bronze liquid liner that’s supposed to make brown eyes pop, then step into the dress, slithering the silk down over my hips. I slip on the shoes Mom bought me and pace experimentally across the old red rug. Then I clomp down the hall into the kitchen.

  My parents are going through Silvia’s menu for next week—Dad gets full approval over the menu, even if it sometimes takes him longer to decrypt it. They raise their heads at my thunderous entrance, and he smiles. “Look at you, mi corazón!”

  “Leigh says her parents get fancy for this stuff, and whatever.”

  Mom is watching me with one hand over her mouth, her eyes crinkled, but for once she doesn’t say anything.

  “Ready?” I ask.

  We drive the ten miles to Los Cerrillos in the same uncharacteristic silence (for Mom, anyway). The town outside my window is like a lot of places in New Mexico. Old, dusty, and brown, but even smaller than La Trampa. Like, it’s literally a ghost town. Just a few hundred people live there since the turquoise mines closed, and there isn’t a lot left but ruins and trees. There’s the Casa Grande Trading Post, which sells rocks and bottles and things, and there’s a petting zoo next to the mining museum with llamas and goats and even a few emus. And there’s a historic park where, every spring from elementary school to twelfth grade, we went hiking for a cheap field trip (Marilee first swapped spit with Donald Palmer beside the petroglyphs).

  We pull down Berry Creek, more of a wide dirt path than a road. It’s on the far north side of Los Cerrillos, a mile from the far south side. The houses are smallish and brown, like the town, and the yards are dirt and clay. Four Berry Creek has a bright green glider on the little adobe porch. Beaded wind chimes hang from the eaves.

  “Is this the place?” Mom slows the Malibu.

  “I think so.”

  “Beautiful. So are you, mija.”

  “I look like I always do.”

  Mom reaches over and tugs the end of a carefully shaped and sprayed curl. “I think you look grown-up.”

  I blush and grab the backpack I’ve brought with my overnight stuff. “Tell Dad happy Fourth?” I ask, half out of the car already. “I forgot.”

  “Of course. Enjoy your sleepover with your friend.”

  I shut the door behind me and watch from the lawn as she backs up to turn around. When I squint, she fades into a blur of brown hair and pale skin (paler than mine and Dad’s) and I get this pang in my chest, sad but sweet. I wave at her until she drives off, then when I’m alone under the evening sun, I trudge up the slight hill of the lawn. My hair sticks to my neck in the fading heat of the day, and I pat down the curl Mom displaced.

  Leigh meets me at the front door. “Ooh la la.” She fans herself with her hand and slumps against the frame like a fainting lady.

  “Oh, enough,” I say, pleased, popping my hip casually.

  She’s dressed up too, so I didn’t totally lie to my parents—she wears a long, loose, gray cotton vest buttoned over her tank top, and dark jean cutoffs.

  I stand in the doorway under the porch lights, which are on even though the sky’s the same pale blue as my faded flowers. “You combed your hair.”

  She ruffles her fingers through it. “I had to for company. You came just in time. Dad is busting out the veggie burgers.”

  She takes me by the wrist and pulls me inside, through a little tiled entryway with shoes arranged in neat rows. It’s hot inside, but not horribly, and the house is as clean and bright as it is dusty on the outside. There are candles everywhere, in jars and on pillars, in all colors, so the place smells like a fruit stand turned up to eleven. In the corner over the adobe fireplace, a dozen school portraits of Leigh and Lucas hang above the candle-lined mantel. My jaw drops at one picture in particular, the earliest in the series of Leigh’s. She’s maybe eleven or twelve against a marbled background. Her hair is long and sandy brown around her shoulders, her T-shirt lacy, her lips so glossed I can practically see my reflection in them.

  “Oh my god!” I can’t stop myself. “You were so—”

  “Sickening,” she says with utter disgust. “Never speak of it. Naveen won’t take it down.”

  In the kitchen, a tall, thin woman with hair dyed a cool raspberry-red bends over the counter, poking metal skewers through vegetable slices and laying them carefully on a tray. Two tiny, blond, flat-faced dogs prance around her ankles, nails clicking against the tile as they circle for scraps like small fluffy land sharks. Naveen looks up as Leigh tries to hustle me by. “Is this the famous Vanni?” she asks, wiping her hands on her shirt—a kind of purple, tasseled poncho. Her fingers shine with a collection of rings made from bottle caps, and her nails are painted tangerine.

  Leigh keeps her eyes straight ahead. “No, it’s one of my many other friends I have.”

  The woman’s mouth tightens. “Well, whoever you are, welcome!”

  “Thanks, Mrs. . . .” I stop short. I have no clue what to call her.

  “Naveen, of course, dear.”

  “We’re going to my room until dinner,” Leigh says, already tugging me out of the kitchen and down the hall. My last glimpse of Naveen as we round the corner is the little forgiving smile she throws me before blowing kisses to her dogs.

&n
bsp; Once we’re in Leigh’s bedroom and she’s shut the door behind us, she seems to relax. Her jaw unclenches, her muscles uncoil. She plops loosely on the bed while I look around. I expected her room to be her sanctuary or something, a Batcave crammed with laundry and doodles and embarrassing stuffed animals. Half of my things came from my dad, but there’s still my pictures and my posters of the Baskervilles album art and, okay, the hot-as-fuck lead singer with his slight but permanent smoky eye.

  But in Leigh’s room, there’s nothing like that.

  It isn’t totally barren. In fact, it’s strangely bright. There’s a yellow accent wall behind the bed (your standard IKEA). It matches the yellow comforter, yellow wire trash can, and yellow papasan chair. Only I’ve never seen Leigh wear yellow. As far as I know, she has no passionate feelings for yellow at all.

  If I had to guess, I’d say her dad and Naveen prepared this room for her before she moved in, and Leigh’s done nothing in the weeks since to make it home. There are no incriminating band posters or sports posters or school banners on the walls, no souvenir paperweights or framed family pictures on the desk. No soccer trophies on the squat, empty bookshelf in the corner. The only books in the room are the summer reading books I saw in her car, now on her desk beside a stack of foreign language dictionaries.

  I pick up The Poem and You, run my thumb along the edge, and let it fall open to a page:

  “Little Cosmic Dust Poem” by John Haines

  Out of the debris of dying stars,

  this rain of particles

  that waters the waste with brightness . . .

  The sea-wave of atoms hurrying home,

  collapse of the giant,