Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  I peered dubiously over the dashboard.

  “No tengas miedo, corazón,” he said. “I was here with my dad, you know? Just once. Hadn’t met your mom. Hadn’t even thought you up yet.”

  We climbed out. It was cold—I think November, or even later—so Dad took an old rawhide coat out of the trunk, where he kept his emergency kit in case the truck ever gave up and stranded him somewhere. He tucked it in around me and lifted me up onto his shoulders, marched us steadily down the path, which was sometimes paved and sometimes not. The trail wound through the trees alongside the thin, shimmering black path of a river. “Rito de los Frijoles,” Dad said, tapping my knee so I would look. “Bean Creek.”

  We passed the first ruins, mostly a wide circle of stones, and then in a grassy clearing, the remains of what Dad said was a pueblo, though it looked like a flattened gray honeycomb. Soon we were out of the trees and red cliffs rose up around us, the canyon widening. On either side of the ravine, the rock was punctured by holes as tall as Dad—low to the ground, some with wooden ladders propped up to them. I thought the holes were like the pores in coral our science teacher had brought into class to show us.

  Dad whistled.

  “What is it?” I asked in a low voice.

  “Homes. Or they were.”

  We later learned about those in school too. Cliff dwellings. Once they were full of people who carved out lives in the calcified rivers of old volcanic eruptions. Then they were gone, abandoning the pueblo, and nobody was 100 percent sure why. Probably dead crops and drought and plain old enemies. Scientists or whoever have spent their lives digging for the exact reason, but what does that get them? It’s not like they can bring the people back.

  The trail continued, but I think I fell asleep right on Dad’s shoulders, because then we were back at the truck, him shifting me into the warm cab. It felt like seconds before we were in La Trampa; the drive up had seemed to take forever, but the trip home, no time at all.

  Overhearing Dad’s outburst, Mom pokes her head out of the kitchen. “¿Todo bien ahi?”

  “We’re fine,” I answer for Dad, who either didn’t hear her or isn’t listening as he stares at the ledger on the floor. I get up and scoop it off the floor to hand to him, then head for the bathroom while he reads over the numbers for the fifth time. I don’t have to go, but I want him to think I was getting up anyway, and not to spare myself the sight of Dad climbing to his feet.

  Safely inside, I sit on the closed toilet lid and tug my phone from my back pocket to text.

  Me: What are you doing tonight?

  Less than a minute later, an answer.

  Leigh: I hate everything but you. What do you think I’m doing?

  I guess that works out, then.

  For all its ruffles and ghosts of Aqua Net cans past, this time the hideous bedroom no longer seems that hideous. Maybe because it’s becoming ours. We sit cross-legged on the bed, and Leigh hands me the joint she’s been nursing so she can root around in her backpack. I take a weak pull. Of course Leigh found a dealer right away after Lucas caught her sampling from Naveen, though she hasn’t yet bothered to find friends.

  “Did you hear about the truck?” she asks while she digs.

  My mind flashes stupidly to Jake’s catastrophe of a Ford. “Probably not.”

  She tumbles a bag of ripple chips and a little Spanish-English dictionary out onto the mattress in her search, which I try not to be flattered by. “This eighteen-wheeler overturned and went into the Rio a couple days ago.”

  “That sucks,” I say inadequately, and take a proper lungful, coughing as I hand back her joint. I’m not a very impressive marihuano.

  “The driver was fine. He said he saw a horse in his headlights and swerved, but the guy who owned the horse ranch nearby said it was probably a tumbleweed. Whatever, that’s not the story. So the truck flipped and went through the guardrails and half into the river, and guess what it was carrying?”

  “I’d prefer not to.”

  “Okay, well you wouldn’t guess anyway. It was headed to the UFO Museum in Roswell. So the truck doors opened in the slide, and all these alien shot glasses and T-shirts and books got caught up in the rocks and the shopping carts and stuff. But there were also these glow-in-the-dark squeaky aliens and tub toys, and their boxes were smashed, and they all floated away down the river. Thousands of them.” She tosses a spray can of Febreze from the backpack and finally tugs out a bottle of our old friend, Largo Bay, sparkling dangerously. “Then this morning, some doctor was rafting in the Rio, like, sixty miles south of the crash, and this little tub alien floated by. The news says they might go all the way to the Gulf and out to sea.”

  I take the bottle and purse my lips around the neck, grimacing through a familiar sip of lighter fluid and lime. “That’s one way to leave. Maybe you can float out of New Mexico.”

  “Maybe I can.” She shuts her eyes and leans back against the wall, crinkling an ancient Menudo poster. I study her lips as she inhales, and when she blinks, she catches me staring. She lifts the corner of her mouth just slightly. “What?”

  “What?”

  “What’re you thinking?”

  I pull my ponytail over my shoulder and start braiding down to the tip, suddenly desperate for someplace to look besides at Leigh. “I was just thinking . . . what do you think it means?”

  “It?” Her dark eyebrows scrunch. “Be more specific.”

  With our knees overlapping, we’re close enough that I imagine I can feel the heat coming off her, even in the still-hot bedroom. “You know. Me, you. What we did. What I kind of want to do now. What do you think that all means?”

  “Shit, I’m not a gay pride informational pamphlet, Vanni.”

  I wince and take a sip. “I’m so sorry to bother you with my confusing new sexuality.”

  “It’s not that complicated,” she says, but nicer. “It doesn’t have to be. Are you into guys? Not like ‘You’re visually pleasing and I’d look at you in a museum,’ but like, ‘I want to shove my tongue down your throat until I taste your uvula’?”

  I think of Max Binali’s football biceps and his arm wrapped around my shoulder in the arroyo freshman year; of Will Fischer sweetly playing “Going Off to College” on a used ukulele at Fender Bender when I was a junior and he was a senior; of Jake’s dimpled smile and strong hands hooked around my apron straps. “Yeah? I think so, yeah.”

  “Are you into girls?” Her eyes catch mine, hazel and bronzed around the center. She wears long shorts and her standard boys’ tank top, bright white against the tan, smooth skin of her collarbone, her slim shoulders, and the hollow beneath her throat. She takes the bottle back and her fingers dance over mine.

  “Yeah.” My voice comes out husky.

  “Okay then,” she says casually, but her whole body loosens into the headboard. “Maybe you’re bi.”

  “Maybe I’m bi,” I repeat, tasting the words. “You think I am?”

  “Who cares what I think? You just have to figure it out yourself.”

  “When did you?” I ask, setting the stub of the joint on the nightstand and reaching for her instead of the bottle.

  She slides her fingers through mine and squeezes. “Figure it out? Probably when I was six or seven and obsessed with Power Rangers Wild Force. Every episode, I just wanted to jump through the screen and hug the yellow ranger. She was bossy and blond and hot. Then in third grade, there was this girl, Nina Brewster. She lived down the street from me in Santa Fe. Also blond and she smelled like grape Bubblicious. I convinced her to play Power Rangers. She was the Yellow Ranger and I was the Lunar Wolf, and I would always rescue her by, like, giving her piggyback rides out of danger. Thoroughly misogynistic.” Leigh smirks. “But yeah, I was pretty sure.”

  I toss my ponytail over my shoulder and try not to bristle at the fact that Leigh liked blondes first. She was eight, after all, and what eight-year-old has solid judgment?

  “And you just, like,
came out? And it was fine?”

  “Oh yeah, they built me a float out of sunflowers and made me grand marshal of the parade, and I never had any problems again,” she says, and snorts.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I’m being salty.” Leigh takes a deep sip—she’s on her way to a better buzz than me, but I’m not trying very hard—and winces as she swallows. “It was mostly fine. It was okay. Just some kids . . . there was this one goblin-faced fucksicle, Jeremy.” She says the name as if spitting out a mouthful of sour milk. “For, like, a month in eighth grade, he’d follow me around school, sneak up behind me, and shove me into random girls in the hallways and shout ‘Kiss her!’”

  “Ugh. Did you tell Lucas?”

  “Um, no. I didn’t feel like testifying at the murder trial. He acts like he’s the most mature, like his shit never stank, but when Lucas was twelve, he tried to fight a high school senior who drove over my bike on purpose. I left it in the apartment complex driveway, but whatever—that kid was such a testicle. It was pretty sweet. Lucas was the approximate height of a mailbox and didn’t weigh much more, but he was mad enough that if he hadn’t gotten that concussion in the middle of the fight, he totally could’ve had the dude. But that’s another story.

  “Anyway, I didn’t tell my brother. Then one day Jeremy tried his shtick outside the nurse’s office, right next to the lost-and-found bucket full of textbooks and shoes and stuff, and . . . I hit him in the face.”

  “With a shoe?”

  “With the bucket. And it was fucking heavy. Maybe I had one of those mom-lifts-car type bursts of strength.”

  “Badass,” I declare.

  Leigh smiles down at the neck of the bottle. “So. You really never got a boner for a girl before?” She elegantly changes the subject.

  “Uh. I don’t know,” I say, searching. I’ve always looked at pretty girls twice, but who doesn’t do that?

  There was this summer coach for the Santa Fe Aquatic Club when I was eleven. She had all this strawberry-red hair piled under her swim cap, the reddest I’d seen outside a TV show, and this long, cut body that sliced through the pool, peeled the water back like it was air. I think she was in college, and so I knew we’d never be friends, hold hands, have sleepovers, and breathe in each other’s shampoo in the dark, but I wanted it so bad; this shockingly hot feeling in my lukewarm little-kid heart.

  And there was that party in the arroyo before sophomore year, where this girl visiting from a few towns over, from Jaconita or something, asked me for a cigarette. Rather than shout to be heard over the racket of boys, she leaned in so close, the tips of her careless brown bob brushed my cheek and I could see the slight veins in her purple lipstick. I stammered back that I didn’t have one on me, never mind that I didn’t smoke. She smiled and sort of hip-checked me, the rivet of her hip bone bouncing against mine, before walking away. I felt like I would’ve traded a kidney for a cigarette to offer her, till Max pulled me by the arm to watch him play the slap game with his friends.

  I figured all girls had moments like that. Maybe they do, but don’t talk about it.

  Leigh takes another sip, then caps the bottle and drops it on the bed, reaches forward and hooks a finger beneath the strap of my halter top, grinning as she tugs. “Teach me how to say ‘Come here, hottie’ in Spanish.”

  Whenever a boy’s commanded me: Say something sexy in Spanish, it’s annoying as hell. But this is Leigh, and that makes a difference.

  I lean back. Propping myself on my elbows, I cross my legs in front of me at the ankles and tilt my chin up to look at her, a mermaid lounging on a rock. “Ven acá, guapa. Quitate la ropa.”

  Even though she can’t understand, she crawls forward into my lap and kisses me, tasting like lighter fluid and lime. We fall flat on the bed, her narrow hips against mine, fingers skimming the hem of my shirt, and I kiss her back and forgive her for Nina Brewster.

  On the drive back to Leigh’s a couple hours later, we speed with the windows rolled down and hot wind sandpapering our faces. It whisks away the fresh-linen smell of Febreze we sprayed copiously in the hideous room and on ourselves. I swallow and taste the desert in my teeth.

  “Now what are you thinking?” Leigh shouts over the squall raging inside the van.

  I’m thinking the same thing I’ve been thinking for days. I’m thinking that I want Leigh to stay. About a month and a half from now, on her eighteenth birthday, she’ll go back home and my tiny world will be exactly like it was, unless I convince her to stick around. Of all the things I want, this is something I can have, something I can choose, and I’m not prepared for it to drift away.

  I’m thinking that I just want one thing to be good and right, because one good, right thing can be enough.

  FOURTEEN

  Being with Leigh is like . . . I don’t know, like halftime at the homecoming game freshman year. When Coach Garza announced the court over the loudspeakers with perhaps the slightest tug of beer in his voice. He called the king and queen of the freshman class first, and Marilee nearly shoved me over the side of the bleachers in her fervor. I tromped down the metal steps to the football field, under the glow of the outdated floodlights they were always holding fund-raisers to replace. It was a particularly freezing November, and I shivered while someone on the student council handed me a little white bouquet of yucca flowers and draped a sash over my peacoat, knocking my beanie askew. Playing triumphantly behind us was the El Trampero High six-man band—there weren’t enough kids for a football team and a full ensemble—and suddenly that scrabbly field was exactly where I belonged. No, it was where the better version of me belonged. A girl with a higher algebra grade and a faster time in the fifty-meter backstroke, with blond highlights and straighter teeth and better-fitting clothes, from some glamorous seaside town, with a sure and bright future. And lucky me, I got to stand in her spot for one night.

  That’s how it feels to be with Leigh.

  Like there’s a better, smarter, more interesting Savannah Espinoza in the world, one with a zero percent chance of doom in her future, and as long as nobody ever realizes she isn’t me, I get to take her place.

  Maybe that’s why, even as the weeks go by, I don’t say anything about us to anybody. It’s sure not because my sterling and virginal reputation couldn’t take the hit.

  And it’s not because my parents wouldn’t get it. They’re not marching in the parades or anything, but I think Dad would bob his head, as if to be like, “Do you, mi corazón.” And Mom would probably throw a party to prove how happy my happiness made her in these difficult times, order a rainbow sheet cake from Albertsons iced with We Leigh Clemente. At least, I think she would.

  But I want to keep Leigh as mine. And I want to keep being the Vanni that belongs to Leigh.

  Leave it to Jake Mosqueda to stick his nose where it doesn’t belong.

  When Leigh gives me a lift to my Monday afternoon shift at Silvia’s on the last day of July, I find Jake just inside, face practically pressed to the fogged-up glass.

  “¿Que pedo?” I ask, hand on my hip. The sweat of summer beads at my hairline, but I’m too busy looking tough to wipe it away, even though I feel about as tough as a melting Popsicle.

  “Nada.” He retreats behind his little host podium, pretending to stack and restack his pile of menus.

  “No, say it.”

  Jake looks up, hair tumbling across his eyes. “Just,” he whisper-hisses, “you guys are . . . what, like . . . is she your girlfriend now? Are you guys, like, dating?”

  I lift my chin. “None of your business.”

  He pouts thoughtfully, teething his full bottom lip. “So you didn’t like it, what we did? Together, all those times?”

  There’s no meanness in the question. He’s a little kid, waiting for his teacher to grade a test he’s sure he failed. “That’s not, you know . . . it doesn’t work like that, Jake.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “I don’t know, the, yo
u know, the spectrum of . . . human . . . whatever.” I wave my hands helplessly. “I can’t talk to you about it. Just Google some shit, okay? I gotta go check in.”

  Flushed worse than I was in the blistering parking lot, I make a break for the back office, where Mom makes Mom-faces and suggests I get a cold drink before I start my shift. I grab a glass of water from the kitchen and bring it into the stockroom. Sitting cross-legged with my back pressed against the door, I let the condensation drip into my lap.

  That went marvelously.

  To calm myself after a delightful confab with my ex-hookup over my newly embraced sexuality, I pull out my phone and text Leigh.

  Me: Still go for the garage tonight?

  Leigh: You were serious?!

  She answers immediately, as usual. Leigh’s on summer break, has no job, and no interest in making local friends, so she’s pretty available.

  Me: Yes?

  Leigh: Wow, you’re really jumping into the deep end.

  Me: I totally Googled “bi things to do in Albuquerque.”

  This last is not a joke; that’s precisely what I did yesterday, while Leigh and I were making plans. It turns out this club in Albuquerque, the Garage, hosts queer karaoke on Monday nights at ten. It’s eighteen and over, but Leigh (or should I call her twenty-two-year-old Shandi Qutubuddin from Sugarbrook, Massachusetts?) has a convincing-in-dim-lighting fake ID, which she swears worked 100 percent of the time at this place back home called Midway Café in Jamaica Plain, wherever that is.

  According to my research, the Garage is neither classy enough nor dive-y enough to attract non-Burquenos, and though I might be out of touch with my classmates, I don’t think queer karaoke is their scene anyway. I don’t even think it’s my scene.

  What it is is a mission.

  Leigh and I haven’t used the G-word yet. We don’t call each other “baby” or “honey” or “muñeca” or “querida.” We’re just us. We’re together whenever I don’t need to be somewhere else. Mostly we meet at Chris’s, and it’s great, it’s hot, it’s standing-on-a-football-field-while-Coach-Garza-slurred-out-the-homecoming-court magnificent.