Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  We are not back together. I didn’t dump Jake to date Leigh; that I did because it’s one thing to sleep with him, which I don’t feel bad about, but another to lie to him, which I’ve been feeling consistently crappy about. So now there’s no me-and-Jake, but there’s still no me-and-Leigh. She asked me to come today, and of course I said yes. But everything between us that used to feel so easy now seems so tough. We haven’t talked on the phone yet, haven’t texted about anything serious. Even my stupid jokey texts land weirdly. This morning I sent her a GIF of Taylor Swift in a party hat, astraddle a banana, hurtling through the galaxy, and she sent back a laugh-face emoji. Which is not like her. It’s as if we’re standing on opposite shores and shouting, but half of our words are whipped away by the wind, and what makes it across is barely recognizable as our voices.

  Why does it have to be so hard all of a sudden? Why can’t everything just vanish again, leaving only us, on an ugly ruffled bed in a hideous room?

  I hear high-pitched yipping and the scrabbling of nails against the wood in the seconds before Naveen answers the door to four Berry Creek. She joins me out on the porch, her raspberry hair flashing in the sunlight, and the dogs circling our shoes. She smiles and leans in for a sweet if awkward hug right on the porch—all arms, the big bell sleeves on her purple top enveloping me, one of her feathered earrings sticking to my lip gloss as she presses us cheek to cheek. I sort of pet her back where I can reach it. She lets me go and we step inside, where the air is warm and sugary with the smell of a cake baking. There’s other evidence of her efforts to make this a totally normal birthday celebration—a bouquet of silvery balloons drifts along the ceiling by the fireplace, yellow streamers dangle from the archway between the living room and the kitchen.

  “Savannah, honey, we’re so glad you came,” Naveen says. Her voice is balloon-like itself, sweet and floating.

  I feel guilty for the gratitude I don’t deserve. But whatever we do or don’t “deserve,” it doesn’t stop the bad stuff from smashing down on us. So I take this good thing. “I’m really glad Leigh’s okay,” I tell her.

  She squeezes my hands between her soft, pale ones. “She’s in her room. I can grab her for you?”

  “That’s okay.” I shake my head. “I’ll find her.”

  I follow Naveen into the kitchen, where she returns to the stove. As I pass the sliding door to the dusty backyard I see Lucas and his dad huddled together around the grill, probably over blackening squash or bell peppers. We’ll eat meatless burgers with eggless soy milk mayonnaise, wave sparklers, watch America-themed movies, I hear past-Leigh say, and get that same pang in my chest you get looking at photos of your old stupid, sweet, little-kid self.

  In the hallway outside Leigh’s bedroom, I hover. I sweep a hand down the ridges of my French braid, raise a knuckle to knock, stop, shift my weight, tug my shirt down over my hips.

  “Oh get the fuck in here,” her muffled voice drifts through the door.

  I crack it open and lean in to find Leigh lying on her bed in a blue Henley and black nylon gym pants. Her head hangs backward off the edge of the mattress, tanned face pinker with blood, short brownish-blondish hair dangling, legs crossed and propped up against the wall. She holds a comic book straight up above her with the pages pointed down. Just seeing her, I let out a breath. Things might still be terrible and weird, but I miss her. I miss her the way I miss the water. I can pretend I don’t, that being a performing fucking mermaid was a joke and now I’m better off. But I know the second I’m back in a pool, it’ll be a held breath released.

  “This page,” she says, “it’s supposed to be the same picture when you look at it upside down.”

  “Oh.” I lean against the door frame, pretending that makes sense. “How’d you know I wasn’t Naveen?”

  “It sounded like you on the floorboards. Naveen flutters. You kind of sink down.”

  I pop my hip to the side for old time’s sake. “I know that’s a fat joke.”

  Tossing the book down on her yellow bedspread, she snakes around until she lies on her stomach, feet drumming back and forth against her ass . . . which is looking pretty tight, though it’s certainly not mine to look at. “I guess I should say some stuff now,” she says, examining her knuckles instead of looking up at me.

  “You don’t need to.”

  “I want to, though.”

  Realizing I’m still in the hallway, I step into her room, easing her door shut behind me. I perch straight-backed on the edge of the papasan across from her. “Me too. I should say some stuff.” Then we sit in the loudest kind of silence. A warm breeze slithers the curtains; Naveen bangs a pan around in the kitchen; dog-day cicadas rattle drily out in the scrub. I watch dust motes drift through a sunbeam that slants by the bedpost and think, oh god, we’re going to sit here not talking until the veggie kabobs are ready.

  “You want to go for a walk?” she asks at last.

  “Definitely.”

  Leigh fishes her Vans out from under her bed and leads me toward the front door. “We’re going outside,” she tells Naveen when we pass her in the kitchen.

  Naveen pauses in the middle of sponging off the floury countertop. “Lunch will be ready pretty soon.”

  “We’ll turn back when we reach the border,” Leigh says, and I cringe. But then, in a peace offering that’s basically a gold-plated olive branch, she adds, “I can take the dogs out if you want.”

  “That would be very helpful.” Naveen smiles and goes back to sponging.

  I wait while Leigh gets their vinyl leashes out of the hall closet, a pink one speckled with purple hearts and another, purple with pink hearts. The ankle-height dogs dance around her while she hooks the leashes to their collars, and then she sweeps them gently enough toward the door with her foot.

  “Nice she’s making you a cake,” I say as we burst out onto the front porch.

  “Yeah,” Leigh agrees, swatting at the tinkling copper wind chime hanging from the eaves with her free hand. “My nonna sent me another gift card.”

  “Sephora?”

  She pulls a tragic face. “Banana Republic.”

  So we walk. The cicadas click and the breeze rattles mesquite bushes in the front yards. The dogs’ paws whisk back and forth over the dirt, pebbles skittering away from them.

  “What’re their names?” I think to ask for the first time.

  “Coconut and French Vanilla.” Leigh’s lips twist, burying a smile. “Don’t ask me which is which, though.”

  A few houses down, Leigh stops, because her road isn’t actually that long. We’re at the dead end of Berry Creek. Right in front of us, the dirt that’s been packed and sculpted into a road tapers off into pale desert prickled with spiny plants, studded with rocks in the distance. She loops the dogs’ leashes over a rough fence post outside the last house on the street, checking them twice, then sits down along the fence, sort of the way we found her Sunday night. This time I sit beside her, though a solid foot away.

  “M’sorry,” she mumbles. “I was a megabitch.”

  “I was a bitch,” I argue.

  “I got you fired. I really didn’t mean to, but it’s my fault. And then I went and got so pissed at you just for pointing out the pretty obvious fact that I fuck things up.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that, though. And I’m sorry I said you were—” The word catches in my throat. “Crazy. That was so shitty of me.”

  Silently, she tugs down the sleeves of her Henley, tucks her fingers inside. “You’re not wrong,” Leigh says at last. “I have that therapist now, you know, my dad’s making me go? This guy.”

  I watch the dogs snap at a tuft of purple wildflowers, then at each other, then at the light breeze. “Is he, like, helpful?”

  “Eh. He says when ‘teens’ abuse ‘substances,’ and ‘act out,’ it’s often to escape ‘emotional struggles,’” she says, air-quoting liberally.

  I smile at this because I assume I’m supposed to, but
Leigh doesn’t. “What struggles are you escaping, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. He asked me why I wanted to go back to Boston, and what I thought I was going home to, and whether I was actually happier there. Then we talked about Lucas, about how he’s moving out to go to college. He says it’s technically a kind of loss, so I’m technically grieving, or whatever.”

  “Maybe you are.”

  “Maybe.” Leigh leans forward to swirl one finger in the warm dust, scribbling a meaningless language of shapes and squiggles. “My brother’s just always been there, and now he won’t be, and I miss him before he’s even gone. He didn’t know everything about me, but he knew more than anyone. And he still liked me, which is weird. Like, not just loved me, but liked me. Sometimes I don’t think anyone else does.”

  “I do,” I tell her.

  “Yeah, well, you don’t really know me.”

  I want her to be wrong, but she isn’t, not completely. Because part of what I’ve loved best about Leigh was that she didn’t really know me, and so with her I could be strong, and special, and brave. I loved the girl I could’ve been in the next-door dimension where one tiny butterfly of a thing is different.

  But this is the world we have, and this is the girl I really am. So I just say, “I want to.”

  Leigh seems to think about this as she draws a big circle in the dust. “You know what you said, that night after the Lagoon? When we were fighting?”

  I wince. “What in particular?”

  “That you didn’t want to be trapped in your body.”

  “Yeah. I remember.”

  She smashes the circle clear with the palm of one hand. “I feel that way sometimes too.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like . . . I’ve known I was into the ladies since practically forever. Then I’m eight, right, and the girls at the back of the bus are saying Shelby Leroy’s mom told them that the lady on Sex and the City is a lesbian, because she’s into girls. I thought, hey, that’s me all the way down. I’m a girl who likes girls—I’m a lesbian—good to know. But that doesn’t even feel completely right. I don’t know if it felt completely right back then.”

  I must sound dubious as I say, “You think you like boys, too?”

  “No.” She snorts. “I’m definitely not bi.” She draws my name in the dirt, my whole name, with little polka dots around it.

  “So you like girls, but . . .”

  “But sometimes I don’t, um, feel like a girl. I mean a lot of the time, I don’t.” Leaning back against a post, she dusts off her fingers against her gym pants, leaving light handprints on the black fabric.

  Rather than stare at them, I lean down and rake my own fingers through my name, watching all the tiny rock particles glitter in the sun overhead. “Do you feel like a girl right now?”

  She gives the smallest toss of her head. “I think I always knew something was wrong with me. And then I got older, and it started to piss me the fuck off.”

  I try to picture tween-Leigh, the way she was in school pictures: her long, silky hair, shiny lips, frilled shirt. Angry all the while. I guess I’m not surprised she started fighting back, and just fighting, period.

  “Have you told Lucas?”

  “I sort of did, in Boston. I tried, but I didn’t know what I was saying. It’s like . . . I’ve been reading this English to Spanish dictionary,” she switches tracks out of the blue.

  “. . . Oh?”

  “Yeah, I got it after the Fourth. There’s this part in the beginning about Spanish words that don’t exist in English. Like, there’s no translation.”

  On this subject, at least, I know my lines. “Yeah.” I fold my arms across my knees, sitting the way Leigh sits. “Vergüenza ajena, that means when you’re really embarrassed for somebody even if they’re not embarrassed for themselves. Or te quiero is sort of in between ‘I like you’ and ‘I love you.’”

  “Right. It’s all this vocabulary, and I never knew it, and I could’ve talked around these words forever without really describing them. Then I start to learn this new language, and I find exactly the word I’ve been looking for. I mean I’ve known this word for a long time, I just didn’t . . . I never really knew I was looking for it. Does that sound amazingly stupid? I’m messing this up.”

  “No.” And though I’ve already guessed, I ask, “What’s the word?”

  Her eyes are like river ice when it’s first melting, just after the water shows through the cracks.

  “Sorry, you don’t have to say.”

  But then she bends down, dips a finger into the dirt, and spells it out. Genderqueer. I know that word. I came across it in my bisexual-and-generally-queer-related Googling, which I was zero percent kidding about.

  Okay, so Leigh is genderqueer. I nod, and reach over to wind my dusty fingers through hers.

  “You probably think I’m crazy.”

  “Stop. You’re not crazy, that was the worst thing to say. This is, yeah, it’s a lot, but it’s not crazy. You know that, right? There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  Her throat clicks as she swallows. “I want to be okay. I just don’t think I am.”

  “I don’t think I’m okay either.” I give her a half smile that hurts; shakily, she returns it. “What can I do? Should I be doing or saying something different? Like, should I call you anything—”

  “No.” Leigh grinds the heel of her free hand into her eye, sounding tired beyond tired. “I don’t know. I have to figure it out. That, or keep fucking everything up all the time.”

  I know exactly what she means.

  “But, um”—she squints over at me—“if I looked like a boy when we met, like if I was a boy then, would you still have wanted me?”

  To make her laugh, I almost joke about my failed seduction of her doppelgänger brother, but stop myself. Leigh deserves much better than that, and needs me to be better. So I tell her what I’ve decided. “We’re not just our bodies, right? You’d still be you.”

  After squeezing my fingers between her own, she peels away. “Um, can you take something?” Without waiting for an answer, she reaches into her pocket, pulling out a piece of paper folded in on itself so many times, it’s a tiny white block.

  “What’s this?” I ask as she presses it into my palm.

  “Homework. Kind of. The guy, the therapist, he wanted me to do this thing, transactional writing or . . . whatever, it doesn’t matter. I’m supposed to write letters to the people I care about, and I don’t have to send them until I’m ready, or ever. But I wrote this thing for you. For us, kind of. So I’m giving it to you, but can you not read it until I tell you I’m ready?”

  I nod, and I must be making heart-eyes at her, because I am a person Leigh cares about.

  “Oh, stop.” She taps my cheek and turns my face away. “For all you know, I farted in an envelope and folded it up.”

  “Are you trying to seduce me, Leigh Clemente?”

  “Like it’s hard.”

  We sit with our backs against the fence posts, and I close my eyes as the sun toasts the top of my head pleasantly. For the first time in a while, I don’t feel like meat cooking on a spit.

  Leigh clears her throat, and says in the loud cartoon voice of a game show host, “So! Savannah Espinoza! Thanks to your bitchy ex, you’re no longer a performing mermaid. What are you going to do next?”

  Again I resist the joke (have awesome sex with Leigh in a semi-public place) and picture that stupid cold pond where everything I ever tried to sink is bobbing along the surface. There are so many things I want. I want Dad to drive and talk and cook again; I want to buy a plane ticket to Boston, or California, or Tokyo, with Leigh in the aisle seat beside me; I want, at the same time, for us to hide away together in the hideous room forever, never worrying about what we were or what we are or what we’ll become.

  But what’s really stirring at the bottom of the water, what’s been stirring for a week, or months, or years, is
this:

  “I think I am going to find out if I have HD,” I say, the words only wobbling a little.

  “Shit,” she breathes.

  “Right?”

  “I’ve been reading this other thing—”

  “Jesus, really?” I laugh. “A month ago you owned five books, and you’d read none of them.”

  “Well, now I’m grounded for eternity, so I need something to do. Anyway, it’s not a book, it’s online. About Huntington’s.” She looks up through her eyelashes, as if confessing. “Are you mad?”

  I can only shake my head.

  “I read a bunch of stuff online, actually. Some of it was about getting tested. You were talking about it, so I just wanted to know more. This one article, it said something like, ‘Most people would rather live with the question of Huntington’s than the answer.’”

  “Yeah. I get that.” I squint up into the turquoise sky. “A lot of people do just fine and have great lives without knowing. And me, I think I could totally survive without knowing. I can be too scared to go anywhere, and work one thousand awful jobs just to keep busy, and eat defrosted leftovers forever. Or I could go somewhere and do something and get some damn tamales. Probably most people could do all of that without taking the test, but I’ve tried, and I don’t think I can. I think this is what I need to get un-stuck.” As I say it aloud for the first time, I know it’s true; terrifying, but true. “Do you think that’s a good reason?” I ask.

  Though I didn’t notice it happening, we’re all of a sudden right next to each other—either I’ve been inching closer, or Leigh has, or both—so it’s nothing for her to reach up and take my hand in hers again. “It’s your reason, right? It’s what you need. Good enough for me.”

  Happening #4: Sitting at my laptop that night, I pull up the bookmarked guidelines for predictive testing in a new tab. Just before it loads I catch a flash of an article on my homepage, the KOB 4 local news blog, and click back over for a moment. It’s a picture of a rubber alien, bright Crayola green, big-headed, binocular-eyed, and a two-sentence blip of a headline: