“What happened?”
She paws a dark strand of hair out of her face, curled from the sudden heat, with one damp wrist. Her voice is calm, but her fingertips are white where they clench the door frame. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Then why do you need the kit?”
Mom’s fingers flex, nails digging into the wood. “Your father just hurt his arm. He might need to get stitches, but I have to wrap it first. It’s not bad. Just get the kit, please, Savannah. Now.”
I hurry to grab the kit Mom keeps fully stocked from beneath the kitchen sink and bring it to her. Then I go and sit cross-legged on my bed with the door just slightly ajar, listening to the sounds of my parents: The creak of the warped bathroom door as it swings open. The low murmur of my mother’s voice. The uneven shuffle of Dad’s footsteps up the hallway and toward the front door. The jingle of the Malibu’s keys lifted from the heart-shaped basket on the coffee table. The quick, deliberate patter of Mom’s approaching footsteps as she heads back my way. She knocks delicately. “We won’t be gone long, mija. You’ll be all right here by yourself?”
“Uh-huh,” I say, my eyes on the ceiling.
“You’re sure?” she asks, but she’s gone from my doorway already.
Instead of reading or watching TV or playing the Baskervilles at top volume, I do something incredibly dumb. I sit perfectly still, staring at those words on the ceiling, and start to think.
It’s not like I’ve never considered death before Dad’s diagnosis. I’ve even thought about my death. One summer during middle school, before I was busy growing boobs and learning to wield a curling iron, Marilee and Diana and I went on this kick and read every Lurlene McDaniel book they had in the little one-room, no-bathroom, volunteer-run town library. Maybe we were too old for them, but not yet too old to feel too old. So instead, we loved them. There were beautiful teenagers in hospital gowns on the covers, bathed in pastels, glowing. Titles like Don’t Die, My Love. Sixteen and Dying. Too Young to Die. She Died Too Young. I mean, they weren’t subtle. We would all lie out on Diana’s trampoline with our books, reading for five minutes, discussing for ten.
Diana: “Would you marry a boy if he was dying?”
Marilee: “No. Well maybe, if he loved me and he looked like Liam Hemsworth.”
Me: “Would you tell a boy you loved that you were dying?”
Diana: “If I didn’t I’d feel really bad all the time.”
Marilee: “How do you think you’ll die?”
The how, I hadn’t much considered. I could almost make myself believe that, like the gorgeous red-haired brain tumor patient, or the young Amish boy hit by a vegetable truck, I would one day cease all activity. Close my eyes beautifully and then . . . nothing. Or something. Who knows?
But I never thought it’d be ugly. And HD is ugly. It’s mean and it takes everything, and nights like this, when these things happen, when I think of what could happen to me, what might be happening already, and I wouldn’t even know it . . .
I fumble my phone out of my pocket, dialing Leigh. Pick up, pick up, pick up, my heartbeat thumps. Pick up, pick up, pick up.
On the fourth ring, she does. “Okay, I’m really s—”
“Can you, um, can you come here?” I cut in. “Or I can go there? Can we do something?”
“I thought you were stuck at home.”
“No, I’m . . .” The phone shudders in my hand, and I grip it so hard that the plastic case bites into my fingertips, jam it against my ear until I hear the low roar of the ocean through the screen. “My dad, something happened, so I’m free.”
“Is he okay?” And then, “Are you okay?”
That hateful fucking question.
“Yeah, can you just . . . ?”
“Sure, okay,” she says. “I’m coming right now.”
I take a deep and jittering breath. It’s okay. Leigh is coming. Things are being seen to. It’s okay. I’m okay.
“What do you want to do?” she asks.
“I don’t know.” I grope for the right word. “Something kind of scary?”
When she answers, I hear the dare in her voice. “Want to go for a swim?”
SIXTEEN
The Lost Lagoon is long since closed by the time Leigh’s van screams into the big empty parking lot. She slams us into a spot in the very back beside the stucco wall surrounding the lot, crushing the brakes underfoot, and the whole car shudders. My body rocks forward, the seat belt burns against my skin, I clip my tongue with my teeth and taste the blood. “Chingado,” I hiss, but my exasperation melts away as I look over at her. Weak moonlight and the dim glow of the park through the windshield ignites just a sliver of Leigh’s skin here and there—a slice of jawline, a bare shoulder, an eye, river-bottom dark—but I love the puzzle the pieces make.
“Shall we?” She wags her eyebrows and pops out of the car, pausing to grab her backpack from the trunk.
“What about cameras?” I ask. “Our contract said we’d be filmed for security.”
She shakes her head. “Only at the front entrance and in the buildings, the stores and stuff.”
“Which you know because . . . ?”
“Lucas. In June these kids hopped the fence after close and got caught messing around on the slides. They wanted to go down without the water running. The security guard checks those regularly—”
“So they do have security.”
She waves one hand. “They have Mike. I casually interrogated Lucas. So stealth, right? It’s almost insulting that he wasn’t suspicious. He said the staff does a sweep when the park closes at eight, and the janitorial crew cleans up for a few hours, but unless there’s a work crew fixing the piping or a ride or something, it’s just Mike after that. When he actually caught the kids, he just yelled at them for trying to break their necks before he kicked them out. No actual cops called. Anyway, we’re not going on the slides, and we’re not going in through the front.” Leigh starts to hike toward the park, then stops to slip her fingers through mine and squeeze, so hard it almost hurts. “Hey, you want to turn around?”
As if I’d say yes.
When we’re halfway across the lot, we juke to the side, angling for a part of the brand-new chain-link fence away from the main entrance and illuminated turnstiles. It’s twice as tall as I am, but not exactly impenetrable. No barbed wire curling meanly along the top, no sun-bleached skulls of past trespassers on pikes. Maybe security’s so lax because the Lost Lagoon is out in the desert. It’s fifteen miles off the highway, surrounded by scrubby, barren plains and sandy ridges and hills freckled with mesquite shrubs. Kids have to be the ambitious kind of assholes to graffiti penises onto these waterslides. But tonight of all nights, I wouldn’t care if there were cameras or sharp spirals of wires or severed heads. I don’t want to worry about the consequences. I don’t want to worry about anything more distant than the pavement directly underfoot, still freshly laid and velvety black.
Besides, it’s the frailty of our plan that makes it perfect.
We follow the fence, aiming for a spot between the public entrance and the utility entrance, which I know to be just behind the park security office. That’s where misplaced children wait for their parents, or staffers scold double-parked cars over the speaker system. If Mike is chilling anywhere between rounds, it’s probably in the office. When we can’t see the parking lot anymore, Leigh picks a place. Hitching up her backpack, she wedges one toe of her ratty brown Vans into the chain links, curls her fingers around the new metal. I hesitate for a moment, but then I jam my tennis shoe in and I’m pulling myself up, racing to the top. She’s hard and lean and I’ve got twenty extra pounds to haul, but my arms are strong, stronger than hers. It’s a quick, thrilling climb. Leigh’s barely swung over the top and started down the other side when she drops to the ground, staggering. “Ven acá, guapa,” she says, stretching her arms out as if she’ll catch me. I let go and hit the dirt half on top of her, the shock of impact s
inging up through my ankles.
And then we’re both inside.
Naturally, the park looks different at night, so it takes a second for me to place us. We’re in a corridor of dust behind one of the waterslides. It looms over us against a blue-black sky. The way it ripples downward, I can tell it’s the one called the Tide; it shoots out park guests into a deep, circular green pool with plastic starfish and clay barnacles plastered to the walls. Leigh stares up at it; her neck craned backward, the arc of her throat silhouetted. I dart in to kiss it. She wraps her fingers around my chin and pulls my lips to her. My lip gloss squelches against her warm, dry skin.
Laughing, I shake my head loose.
I steer Leigh around the Tide, and though it’s not pitch-black, it’s pretty dim. There are barnacle-encrusted iron lamps along the concrete path between attractions, but only every third bulb is aglow. And all the signage on the rides and on the abandoned popcorn booths and ice cream carts scattered throughout the Lagoon is dark. I wouldn’t call it creepy—though the crumbled statues look more convincing in the dark—but it does look unnatural. There’s no evidence of people, no trampled snow-cone wrappers or cigarette butts or busted flip-flops. The janitorial crew took care of all that. But I swear, I can still detect the sweat and sunscreen smell of them.
“What if the park never actually closed, and everyone here was just abducted by aliens?” I ask Leigh. “And we’re the only ones left?”
“Don’t I wish,” she snorts.
In that moment, I wish it too.
Lights or no lights, people or no people, I know my way to Mermaid Cove. Keeping our eyes peeled for Mike, we stick to the dirt just off the paved path. We’re careful but not that careful—because honestly, what’s the worst that can happen to us?—as we snake past Neptune’s Pool, the little temple at its center looking particularly ruinous after hours. Toward the back of the park we creep, by the looping slide called the Shipwreck, the spiraling slide called Charybdis, passing nobody before we reach the arched, fake-ancient wooden gates set in the cinder-block wall around the Cove.
I’ve never been in through the gate, only the employee entrance hidden in back, inside a fake cave in the rock. There’s a very real metal padlock on the latch, but the painted wall isn’t much taller than us. After I massacre Leigh in Rock-Paper-Scissors, she sets her back against the wall, squats, and braces herself to boost me up. I put a foot on her thigh and a hand on her shoulder as she wraps her hands around my calf. Then I can reach the top of the wall. My palms scrape rough cement. She pushes, grunting in a way that’s unflattering for both of us, and I haul myself up like I’ve done so many times on the basking rock. Once I’m perched on the foot-wide shelf I lean down, to help Leigh drag herself up after me. Sweating and panting and scratched, we drop down the other side. There are no lights on in the Cove, only the very faint haze of the lamps on the other side of the boulders and the moon and the stars, but all we have to do is follow the path. It spits us out on the footbridge over the water. Our footsteps are hollow thuds as we cross it to the very center, where we lean our elbows on the wooden railing, peering down.
And I thought the black-painted pool was murky in the day.
“Um.” Leigh’s voice echoes around the boulders, unexpectedly thunderous. “You didn’t tell me you worked in the sunken city of R’lyeh.”
“Huh?”
“Home of Cthulhu? Underwater monster god? Possibly your boss?”
The pool looks bottomless and icy and alive, oil sequined with moonlight. Like the house bejeweled in cow skulls by the lake, I think it’s beautiful, in its way.
Leigh dumps her backpack on the wooden beams of the bridge—I hope she’s got big fluffy towels in her overstuffed bag, because it’s after eleven by now and the desert air has long since cooled. I’m still only in my T-shirt and Tinkerbell shorts. Shaking in the dry breeze, I scuff my legs against each other and try not to recall how cold it was in the water with the heater off that first day at work. Instead, I problem-solve a route to the pebbled pool deck that’s supposed to be inaccessible to tourists. If we backtrack to the foot of the bridge, climb the railing, and push off, it’s only about a three-foot drop to the deck—
Leigh’s shed tank top whaps me in my face. Then the sweatpants she’d worn rolled to the knees not a moment ago. Pawing her clothes off my head, I turn just in time to see her in her black sports bra and Y-fronts and bare feet, mounting the slim railing. She straightens and wobbles with her toes over the edge, brings her arms out, biceps tight, and bends forward just as I realize what she’s doing.
The dead center of the bridge where we stand is at least five feet up from the water, the top of the railing another three.
“Leigh,” I say frantically, “don’t, it’s not deep enough to—”
She snaps her arms up and dives off the railing headfirst, taking all the breath in my lungs with her, but on the eight-foot fall, does a sloppy kind of half layout just in time to fall into the pool on her back. With a thunderous and sharp smack, the water parts to envelope her, leaving only violent swirls of light on the black surface.
Until she rises a few feet out, swearing. “Motherfucker!” she gasps, palming her short hair back off her forehead. “It’s been, like, five years since I did that. Forgot it hurt like a bitch.”
My breath stutters and restarts. “¿Qué chingados, loca?” But she’s already laughing and then I’m laughing too. “¡Esta noche estás como una cabra!”
“It’s colder than a fucking Eskimo fart,” she chatters. “Get in!”
I peel off my shirt and shorts and scuff out of my sandals. Before I can think about the night air on my skin, I unzip Leigh’s already-full backpack and cram our clothes inside—maybe it’ll keep them warm for us, at least. I wobble onto the railing, the wood grain rough and cool below my fingers and feet, and execute an extremely elegant cannonball into what feels like the just-melted ice at the bottom of a beer cooler. The cold water swallows me, plugs my ears and sets every part of me on fire as I plunge. I sink to the slick tiles, kick off and come up a little way from Leigh. She wraps her fingers around my arm underwater to tug me closer. We’re in the deeper end by the big basking rock, so in a tangle of limbs we tread water, holding on to each other, her warm breath shuddering across my neck. All I’m thinking about is Leigh and all I’m hearing is the gentle lap of the pool and the animal roaring of my heart.
After minutes or hours like that, we paddle our way toward the rock. Leigh pulls herself out, scoots backward across the stone, and hugs herself, legs tucked to her stomach and arms crossed over her knees. Her teeth click together as she stares down at me. I stare back up at her, at the water beading down her neck, her shoulders, her knees, her slim, sharp ankles. If I licked them—though I won’t—she’d taste like chlorine and soap and salt.
“Don’t,” she says.
“Don’t what?”
“You always look at me like that.”
“So?” I ask, bruised. “Why can’t I look? Maybe you don’t like your body, but I do.”
She shakes her head and snorts, hugs her knees closer. I grab on to the rock, resting my chin on my arms. “How can you not see how fucking gorgeous you are?”
“Can’t it be more complicated than that? You’re gorgeous. You love your body?”
“Yes,” I say at once, though it is complicated. I love how I look, I love my hips, my legs, my muscles. I love what my body can do. I hate that it might betray me—or that my brain might betray my body, more like.
She watches my smile fade. “Oh god, let’s not talk about this.” She forces a laugh, and then in a shivering voice says, “I just want to see you do your thing.”
Leigh’s never watched me swim. Even if she’d been to a mermaid show, that wouldn’t be swimming. It wouldn’t be me. Without my legs pinned together, I’m free to go flat-out.
Pressing my feet against the submerged base of the basking rock to push off, I do.
There�
��s this thing that happens every time I push off the wall. It’s like nothing else. From above, I probably look like any decent swimmer stroking along. I don’t have the perfect body for it, and as I said, I’m definitely no Olympic hopeful. My fastest time in the 100-meter freestyle was barely less than a minute. But below, I feel like some weightless animal, something born down here. Like my body was made to slip through the cold, thick honey of the water, and this is the only way I’m really meant to move. Before I’m tired, before I’m breathless and aching, there’s just potential.
If I could just stay in this moment forever, my body would never let me down.
By the time I make it back to the basking rock, I don’t know how many laps I’ve swam. Not as many as I could, but I haven’t moved at full speed—at competition speed—for so long, and so I am breathless and beginning to ache.
I toss my arms up onto the rock, letting air rip through my lungs. Now it’s Leigh’s turn to haul me up, and I drop down beside her, dripping and gasping and shivering. She rolls over, folds herself on top of me, and grabs the sopping hair behind my ear between her fingers. “You fucking goddess,” she murmurs, her dark eyebrows furrowed. “What are you even doing here?”
“I’m with you,” I pant, sinking into the hard plaster beneath me. “Obvs.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Her fingers loosen.
“What?”
“You’re not here because of me. Just, take the test or don’t take the test, and if you didn’t have it or if you did, that’s okay, you could still come to Boston! You could go anywhere you wanted. You’re so fucking strong, you can do anything.”
There are so many things I could say. Casual things, flirty things, clever things. But even though my breath is settling, I can’t make myself say any of them. “Sometimes I have these dreams. Like, we take Dad to the doctor’s office, and they draw his blood and look at it through a microscope, and then they say ‘Ah, okay, we see the problem, eat this weird turnipy-looking thing, or burn this piece of paper, or put this dead chicken under your pillow when you go to sleep tonight, and you’ll be cured.’ And I’m so happy. Then I wake up, and I remember it’s not, it’s not just a thing I can put down and leave behind.” I swallow noisily, stupidly. “And I don’t feel strong, just scared all over again.”
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