Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  Well, it’s something.

  I point her to Jimeno Road, just off the trail on the way into town. Chris Zepeda’s property backs up against the arroyo, which must be strewn with Solo cups and smashed glass and shed clothing after the Fourth, some of it Marilee’s and Oriel’s. Rarely do kids get stupid enough to crawl up the slope toward the small homes spaced out along the streambed, and I only steered us here to buy time.

  I don’t even buy us much, at that, because everything’s clearly fine. There’s the big tin-roofed garage where he fixes half the busted cars in La Trampa, cheaper and quicker than the super-professional place in Rio Rancho. It’s untouched, as is Chris’s much smaller house off to the side, a one-story stucco home a lot like ours, but even tinier and older. The robin’s-egg blue paint on the door has been leisurely chipping away for as long as I can remember. His grandfather built it when he bought the land in the thirties, probably for six bucks and a pack of gum.

  I circle the place to check for broken windows or a jimmied back door, returning in thirty seconds flat.

  “Done?” Leigh asks the air just to the left of me.

  I can’t figure out what’s crawled up her ass since last night. “I want to check out the rest of the place. A couple more minutes, okay?” I jog back to the garage and let myself in with the spare key Chris left my parents to give to me. From the pegboard above the tool bench, I slip a second key ring off its hook.

  Trotting up the path, I grab Leigh by the wrist and pull her toward the shed a couple hundred yards behind the house, where my key fits the padlock. I pull open the doors and we squint inside. Sunbeams pin dust between us and the two ATVs Chris stores in here. Junky Suzukis older than me, speckled and pitted with more rust than paint. The smaller one he taught me to ride is up on blocks since it stalled on us four years ago—Chris always claimed he was fixing it slowly, slowly. Dad said it’ll run again on the same day the Earth runs backward. Meanwhile, metallic guts dangle from the underside. It’s sad to see it this way.

  Luckily, I can drive them both. And Leigh and I can fit on the bigger four-wheeler together.

  “Umm,” she says, standing back as I grab a pair of nerdy safety goggles and a helmet from a hook on the wall and pull them over my hair, then straddle the bigger ATV and yank the pull cord, just like Chris showed me.

  “There’s, like, two miles of land—this is the quickest way around.” I technically don’t lie. “I d—”

  “Do not dare me. You think you’re so cute.”

  I pose cutely, then pull the cord again and the machine coughs to life. Standing on the rear break, I push the lever to put it in drive, then roll out of the shed and scoot forward and wait for Leigh to climb on behind me, the metal warming under my skin. She slides on, her knees pressed against my thighs.

  I twist the right-hand grip to press the throttle, and off we ride.

  “You don’t think anyone will notice?” she yells in my ear.

  We’re far enough from the Marcons’, the next house over, that the guttural roar of the ATV shouldn’t draw attention. Still, I shout over my shoulder, “Do you want to turn around?”

  She shakes her head—I can feel her chin graze my back—and I twist the throttle so we surge forward. Her grip tightens and she squeals in a very non-Leigh way; it feels like a victory.

  As we ride across Chris’s land, we bounce over small hills like wrinkles in a sand-colored blanket. I haven’t driven an ATV since the smaller one broke down—I’m so extremely not allowed to do this on my own—and in the rush I almost forget about Leigh until she leans in and shouts, “Go that way! Go left!” She squeezes my legs with her knees like a jockey trying to steer a horse. I turn us east and we churn up over a steep embankment that breaks out onto the flat land split by the arroyo. Leigh laughs in my ear, and I smile through the grit the wind kicks up.

  By the time we’ve rolled the ATV back into the shed, my hair looks like something whipped out of a cotton-candy machine. Dusting ourselves off and smoothing ourselves down, we walk back up to the house. Leigh pauses to press her nose to the cloudy glass pane of the front door, palms cupped around her eyes to see through. “Can we go in?”

  There’s no reason to—Chris isn’t a potted plants kind of homeowner, and there sure aren’t any pets to feed. But the heat settles on us like wool, stifling and scratchy, and I could use a glass of whatever’s in the fridge to rinse the dust out of my teeth. Besides, I still can’t shake the feeling that something’s off with her. I let us inside and show Leigh through the claustrophobic hallway, past the tiny, tiled living room, and into the tinier kitchen. I’ve been here a lot, roasted marshmallows around the chiminea on the concrete porch, but I’ve never seen the bedrooms in the back. It feels wrong—which it is, because I don’t have permission.

  Behind one door, we find a perfectly normal bedroom where Chris’s denim-and-engine-grease smell lingers. Leigh opens the farthest door back into a hot sunlit room and—santa mierda.

  I knew Sophia Zepeda practically ran away just out of high school, and seldom returned from California to visit. I knew Chris was a creature of habit in a town of unvarying habits. But I couldn’t have guessed about this room.

  Except for a stack of boxes in the corner, labels like Spare Tools and Hoses markered across the cardboard, I don’t think much has changed in Chris’s sister’s bedroom since she moved away. My first clue: posters of bands I do and don’t recognize, still stuck to the walls with duct tape. Depeche Mode, Bon Jovi, Tears for Fears. A round braided rug, pink and white, covers half the tiled floor, and on the bed, a ruffled white bedspread printed all over with pastel milk shakes, hearts, sunglasses, and music notes. On a little white desk beside the window sits a row of dusty pink jewelry boxes and tubes of makeup and perfume bottles. Dumbstruck, Leigh uncaps a bottle of something called Red Door, sniffs it, and drops it in the pile, glancing around the room. “It’s like a can of super-hold hairspray fucked an ice cream truck in here.”

  I poke my elbow into her ribs, and regret it when she backs off. “Wait . . .” Without really meaning to, I reach for her, wrap my hand around hers, warm and rough.

  “Vanni.” She tugs away gently without looking at me. “You don’t have to. It’s fine.”

  “It’s fine?” I ask, bruised.

  “You don’t have to convince yourself you’re into this.” She says this lightly, acting like none of this makes a difference to her.

  Well, maybe it doesn’t.

  I try not to look crushed. “Sorry. . . .”

  “Jesus, don’t be sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong,” she says, lifting the lid off a jewelry box, then letting it fall. “Look, it’s no big deal. You’re not the first straight girl to get, like, caught up in the moment. You don’t have to—”

  “What?” I flinch.

  She picks up an ancient bottle of blue nail polish, hopelessly dried. “You don’t have to talk yourself into wanting this because of me. Or because you feel guilty. Or bored. Or scared.”

  That’s a lot to deal with, and I’m not sure where to start. For some reason I land on, “Why would you think I’m bored?”

  “That guy who works at your parents’ restaurant.”

  My breath catches. My lungs are full of Elmer’s glue instead of air. “When did you talk to Jake?”

  At last she looks up at me, her eyes narrowed, like: suspicion confirmed. “I don’t know. A couple weeks ago? I came in to pick you up after your shift, and you were still waiting on one of your tables. That guy—Jake—he said he was kind of your boyfriend. He said, ‘Savannah’s crazy, right? My girl’s cool, but don’t let her run you around. She does dumb stuff when she gets bored.’” Leigh drops her voice for this last part, drags out her vowels, fakes the northern New Mexico accent and adds a slight whine to her voice. No doubt, she sounds like Jake Mosqueda, but the words . . . why would he say that? I don’t want to be his girlfriend; I don’t believe he even really wants it.

  “He isn�
��t my boyfriend. Jake was never my boyfriend.”

  “That’s not really the point,” she says quietly.

  I squint out the window into the dull blue sky, unbroken by clouds. If I were a crier, I’d feel like crying. This is all going wrong. I don’t want to be explaining myself. I don’t want to tell her the things I’ve done, the reasons I’ve done them, what it feels like and what it doesn’t feel like. I’ve never felt bad about the things I did with boys. Slipping out from beneath a sweating Jake Mosqueda has always been a bittersweet business, but I mean, I never felt bad about myself. My mother, unlike Marilee’s, never told me that my body was a precious banana, and if I allowed myself to be unpeeled, my sweet white fruit might be forever spotted. Unlike Diana’s parents, she never said my virginity was my contract with a holy ghost. Mom told me sex could be fun and feel good, but it’s more fun and it feels better when a girl knows what she wants and knows how to take care of her body and herself, et cetera, cue the piano music they play during Very Important Moments in coming-of-age TV shows. Okay, well, I know what I want out of sex. It’s my body, and I’m in control of it for the time being.

  “So I’m not a virgin,” I manage, my voice wobblier than intended.

  “Dude, I’m not slut-shaming you.” She rumples the short hairs along the back of her neck, drags her hand forward until everything stands on end, like a cat grooming itself backward. “You think you’re the only one who’s played their V-card?”

  I smile tight-throated, and Leigh softens.

  “Come here.” She sits down on the ruffled bedspread in a slight puff of dust motes, a shifting halo around her.

  I do, so close our shoulders bump together. In the direct path of a sunbeam slanted through the window, Leigh’s eyes aren’t one color, the muddied yellowed-brown I thought they were; they’re rich brown on the outside, but with a bright, wispy ring that’s more like amber around the pupil. I don’t think I’ve looked at her this closely in the light before.

  “I like you, Vanni,” she says, and chews on the corner of her lip with her small white teeth.

  “I don’t want you to like me,” I try to explain.

  “Okay, so what do you want?”

  Maybe my life would be simpler if the kiss this morning was just another kiss. But this isn’t Jake. Or Will/Max/Oriel, or just any girl I’ve grown up around.

  This is . . . I mean, it’s Leigh.

  I can feel my heart beating all the way up to my collarbone and all the way down. “You could kiss me,” I answer. “If you want to.”

  “Hmm.” She laughs, knocks her forehead lightly against mine, then looks out the window. “You know what I wish? I wish I could’ve met you back home. I wish it was September and I was eighteen and in Boston already. Like, we’d see each other for the first time by the Frog Pond before the pool closed for fall, and you’d buy me a hot dog, and then I’d make out with you in the fountain until the lifeguard screamed at us to go the fuck away. That would’ve been so much easier, I think.”

  Her smile is slipping, so I lean in and kiss Leigh first, right at the smooth angle of her jaw. She closes her eyes and tilts her head down and I kiss her below the jaw, my lips tracing a path toward the back of her neck. I breathe in, and a little of her hair gets up my nose.

  She laughs again as I snort it out—“Okay, okay”—and turns into the kiss. Her lips are full, dry-but-not-too-dry. It’s even better than the first time. I shift my feet up beneath me and lean into her until she lets herself fall backward onto the hideous bedspread. At the last moment, her fingers clamp around my shoulders, strong and slim and warm, and she pulls me down with her.

  When Leigh sits up and wriggles out of her Pac-Man T-shirt, she doesn’t do it the way I’ve seen boys do; fisting it over their heads like Will Fischer, or shrugging roughly out of it. She does it like me, pinching from the hem and pulling upward. She sees me watching, ducks her head, and kicks off her shorts quickly. Then she throws back the bedspread to slip beneath, even though it’s hotter than balls in here.

  “Wait,” I say, catching her arm.

  I remember her body from the lake, of course. Thin but muscled shoulders, high, small breasts, a hard stomach and narrow hips, a runner’s thighs, and a knee that’s been skinned since I met her. All perfect. But I can see things in the hot, dusty light I never saw before, like a faint slash in the skin above her right hip bone, lighter and pinker than her tanned skin. She tucks her knees up to her chest when she sees me looking. “Appendix. Had it out when I was ten.”

  I slip off the bed, step out of my skirt and prop my foot on the mattress to show her the white C-shaped scar just above my left knee. “When I was nine, I stole one of those pink razors from my mom’s bathroom and tried to shave my legs for the first time. I had no clue what I was doing. I bled through, like, three of her good hand towels.”

  Leigh reaches out and glides a fingertip across it. “Badass,” she says, and nods.

  I shiver in the heat.

  I get the definite impression that Leigh doesn’t like her body, which is ridiculous, but she loosens up as we trade scars and run our hands over each of them. The nick on her calf where she went hiking with Lucas in Massachusetts, tripped on a log, and was “slightly, temporarily impaled” on a sliver of root sticking out of the ground; the small, shiny patch of skin on my right pointer finger from a too-hot pan; the thin white line along the small of her back where she slipped and scraped herself on the concrete rim of a pool. All her scars make her look even stronger.

  But then there are softer things too.

  The way her whole body shudders as I trace my fingers down the ridge of her spine. The way she cups my hips with her palms. And when she pulls me beneath the covers at last, and I reach down and touch her, then stall, the way she smiles with actual sweetness, and something more, and whispers, “Wait, here, give me your hand and I’ll show you.”

  It’s not that sex is so different with Leigh. Okay, obviously it’s different. To have the same bits and parts and still fit together so well? Leigh knows what she’s doing, and I’m a quick study despite what my horrific senior year grades would suggest. But that’s not what makes it revolutionary. Will was pretty good. Jake isn’t as selfish as you’d think, and he’s had a lot of practice, bizzaro hometown hero that he is.

  It’s not because I’ve never done it in a bed, either, though that’s certainly a switch from backseats and stockrooms and boys’ parents’ couches.

  Mostly, it’s the afterward part that’s so strange and new. Usually once my bones unmelt, I feel trapped. I squirm away and reassure the boys that it was great and then I’m gone, even though I’ve got no place in particular to go. But Leigh and I, we lie in the heat like a softly unraveled braid; our legs still twisted, her fingers threaded in my damp hair, my arm across her back and hers across my chest, her face tucked into the pocket between my chin and collarbone, sweaty and breathing warm breaths. Anyone else’s limbs would feel like lead weights right about now.

  But—and I know it sounds extraordinarily fucking corny—that’s not how it is with her.

  Leigh is like water.

  THIRTEEN

  I’m sitting on the living room couch with Dad a week later while he flips slowly through this week’s menu and the order list for Silvia’s, fingers scrabbling at the pages. It’s a good day—his fancy rollator walker still stands against the wall beside his bed, unused, so it’s just these cushioned neoprene knee supports he wears. Meanwhile I’m sloppily folding a load of laundry, but most of me is still floating. I’m thinking about Leigh, feeling the ghost of her hands and the memory of her taste, cinnamon lip balm and Jarritos Limón soda. Both of our favorites, and one of the few things in New Mexico she’s admitted to missing when she left. A better taste by far than Jake’s winterfresh cigarette breath, though it never bothered me before.

  I’m so zoned out, I jump when Dad fumbles and drops the ledger. “¡Puta madre!” Dad spits.

  I cringe aw
ay, a reflex. It’s not his fault when he gets angry, and I know it’s worse for a lot of people with HD. That’s the disease; when the part of your brain that’s supposed to organize information starts to go, you can’t control how upset you get. But the reasons are real and purely his. He’s angry that he can’t cook, can’t drive, can’t take Mom dancing even though he never really liked dancing anyway. He’s angry when he can’t find the word he needs, even though he was never some great wordsmith. He’s angry because he doesn’t feel strong anymore.

  And when I was a kid, he was strong. This one time—I don’t remember how old I was, maybe in third or fourth grade—he pretty much carried me all through Frijoles Canyon. We were doing this unit on local history in school, and for weekend homework we were supposed to visit a historical site so we could talk about it in front of the class on Monday. Except there was some crisis with the fridge at Silvia’s breaking down, and both he and Mom had to be in the restaurant. I sat in the office most of the day, choked up with disappointment, stupid kid tears blurring the cartoons my parents put on the little TV for me. It wasn’t even a big deal; they could’ve written a note to excuse me from my wildly unimportant class project. But instead, when Dad finally came to get me in the very late afternoon, he put me in his old brown Chevy we had to sell off when he stopped driving and said, “Feel like a trip?”

  We motored up to Bandelier, this big national park about an hour and a half northwest of La Trampa, just south of Las Alamos. Later, it became a regular in the rotation of school field trips, but this was my first visit. Dad parked the truck outside the visitors’ center, already shuttered. Signs said the park was open dawn to dusk, but we were the only car in the lot, and “dusk” was bleeding into full blue night.

  “Are we supposed to be here this late?” I asked.

  Dad scratched his beard, which was thick and full back then. “Sure. It’s a national monument.” Like that solved everything. He zipped up his jacket and nodded toward the trail, which I could see ran off into not-so-dusk. “Up for a walk?”