“I think what she means,” said Lindsey, “is that she’s not a timeless beauty.”
“She’s more of a stiletto, hair-extension beauty,” I added, getting Nina’s grateful look, which was far rarer than the others she’d been giving.
“You girls can call it whatever you want to,” said Decker. “She’s hot.”
“Okay, fine, agree to disagree,” said Lindsey hurriedly, eager to move along before Nina started misbehaving. “But does that mean when you see a less-than-Clark-Gable-esque actor, like Steve Buscemi or what’s-his-face Sideways—”
“Paul Giamatti.”
“Sure. Does that mean they’re super-nice?”
“Maybe nice is the wrong word. They have, I don’t know, character. You can see it, their character, when they act. Like they’re calling upon some greater truth behind the universe rather than, I don’t know, what they’re gonna have for dinner. They’re wise instead of wickedly funny or cuttingly sarcastic.”
We took a drink break to think about the last movie we had seen either of them act in.
“So what’s your second theory?” I said, after replaying The Big Lebowski highlights in my head.
“I don’t believe in moderation,” he said, putting down his empty bourbon glass and picking up the beer he had ordered with it.
“Explain,” said Lindsey.
“Everyone likes to tell you to apply moderation in everything. At least all the people I know. But I think the opposite. I don’t eat foods that are bad for me in small quantities. I like to eat seven thousand calories a day and then run ten miles. And I don’t drink in moderation. Obviously. I go on a five-day bender and then sleep for five days. I mean, not really, but there’s not a lot of productivity happening in the five days after my five-day bender. And when I read a book, even if it’s like Anna Karenina or something, I want to get to the end as soon as I can. Like, it’s hard for me to do anything else until I know what the fuck happens to Anna Karenina.”
He saw Nina open her mouth to speak.
“And don’t tell me she throws herself under a train, because I know that. I read that book in two days.”
“I haven’t read that shit,” said Nina. “I was actually going to tell you that’s a theory I can get on board with. Moderation is for pansies.”
He nodded, glad they were back on the same team.
“My theory is that it all evens out in the end—all the extremes, I mean—but watching the sunrise after fourteen beers is a lot more fun than going home after three beers to feed yourself a responsible dinner in front of the TV.”
“Wow,” said Lindsey. “You’re really afraid to be bored, aren’t you? Boring is like your Kryptonite, huh?”
“My mom says only boring people get bored,” I said, realizing as I did how childish it sounded.
“Yeah, well, moms say all kinds of things,” he said, and I loved him all over again for sounding as juvenile and square as I had.
“Wait!” Nina said.
“What?” Decker asked.
“What about you?”
“What about me? I just told you really the only two things you need to know.”
“No. I mean, you’re attractive and so far you’re not the biggest dick I’ve ever met. I mean, you don’t even know us and you keep putting our beers on your tab.”
“I’m not that attractive,” he said.
We all gave him Yeah, right looks at once.
“There are a lot of expensive grooming products I’ve been able to afford for the last few years that are real game changers.”
“Sorry, dude. Nice try, but she’s right,” Lindsey said. “Your theory’s shot.”
“Fine,” he said, shrugging. “Maybe I’m not that nice a guy.”
• • •
After our field trip to the day school we had a long stretch without any pranks, so Max must have hit some sort of nerve. It was an unprecedented dry spell, by the end of which we were all willing to take bubble baths again, unworried about what our bubbles had been replaced with, and our necks stopped kinking up from looking over our shoulders so often, which only made it worse when the gesture became automatic again. Max, ever transparent, grew lighter, less pensive with every prankless day, and this had its own buoying effect on Nina. She recognized his happiness and, realizing that she was responsible, took a sort of pride in it. His brain no longer occupied with listing all the potential dangers of the prank war, Max was free to focus all of his attention on Nina and her ideas. Eager to compensate for undermining her greatest idea ever—the prank war itself—he declared everything else she came up with “excellent” or “gorgeous.” It was like they were engaged in a weeks-long back-and-forth of standing in front of an open door, insisting the other go through first—determined both to put the other’s happiness before their own and to make it known to the other that this was what they were doing. They were just so nice to each other.
Sometimes Nina even let Max pick what we did. Which meant we did things like play trivia baseball, in which you made your way around the bases to score, as in the traditional game, but you advanced by answering history, literature, and science questions. The harder the question you successfully answered, the more bases you sailed through in a single turn. It was the only game he routinely beat all of us at. We made detailed blueprints for a fort we never built, because Max estimated the materials to build it “properly” would have been four digits at least, though he assured us the geometry he had used in the plans was flawless, and urged us to keep them until we had the money. We even bought a piggy bank to start saving, though the only thing we stored in it was the folded-up sheet the prints were on. Sometimes, when Lila had too much homework, something that had never happened until that year, Max would even be waiting for us alone at the three crosses when we got there.
The three crosses were in memoriam of the Hendricks family. At the time of the accident that made them infamous, Judy Hendricks had three kids under the age of six, so you can hardly blame her for what happened. Plus the accident happened in August, and everyone knows what Florida Augusts can do to a person’s mind. One presumably bright morning she took her three children to the playground next to the crosses. Her oldest, naughtiest child, Caleb, refused to get off the monkey bars and, to show him how little she cared about whether or not he listened to her demands to put his shoes back on and get in the car, she gathered up her other two children and packed them in the car and even reversed out of the parking lot before Caleb jumped down and started wailing for her to wait. Angry, by now, that her bluff hadn’t worked earlier, she threw the car back into park before climbing out of it, or thought she did, but really it was in neutral. And because the playground sat at the bottom of a hill, the car rolled back down into the parking lot and into a metal lightpost that had been installed only weeks earlier after too many complaints about the illicit behavior that was being conducted in the park at night, the remnants of which cluttered the playground by day. The lamp fell on top of the car, crushing the two youngest Hendrickses. The third cross was for Judy, who shot herself with her father’s rifle a month later.
Judy Hendricks became the patron saint of overworked mothers, of which there was no shortage in our neighborhood. Every child who lived within a twenty-block radius of the crosses could feel their mother’s gaze travel subconsciously in the direction of the crosses on their worst days. An acknowledgment of the fact that it could always get worse or a search for empathy from the one mother who would surely understand, we were never sure. We were too young when the accident happened to actually remember it, so to us it was just an easy meeting spot, but Max found it unbearably sad and insisted we find a new place to congregate. Unenthusiastic about the prospect, the stop sign across the street with no tragedy attached to it was the farthest he could get us, just far enough that Max couldn’t read the kids’ names while he waited for us (he was always the first to arrive).
Most of us forgot, though, so we met at the crosses as always, and he would call to us from across the street, waving excitedly as if it were a coincidence that we all found ourselves in the same place.
One day when I was running late after an errand my mother insisted I do immediately, I went to the crosses as always, but the other girls had already migrated over to Max and his stop sign. Marie was with them, which was infrequent but not rare. She was a creature who seemed genuinely happy to be alone, but on the few days she did want some company we were generally it. This wasn’t because she was an outcast of any sort. All the mothers in our neighborhood seemed always to be leaning forward, ready to mother her in her own mother’s careless absence, and would have had more than just a mouthful of words should any of their own children be unkind to her. But she seemed, sometimes, too old even for us, so I can understand how there was very little appeal for her in children her own age.
As I started to cross the street I saw that Marie was standing over Max, braiding his short hair in a series of tiny braids in a stern, almost soldierly way, determined not to be defeated by the impossibility of her task. Max kept leaning back and looking up at her to stick out his tongue, his eyes widened in mock craziness and real delight. He adored her in a way that would have made it clear, even if we didn’t know him, that he had a little sister of his own.
“Are you ready?” Nina asked as soon as my second foot was out of the street and over on their side.
Lindsey raised her eyebrows, clearly amused but not able to say why, because she kept trying to swallow her smile. And I knew there must have been a disagreement about whatever it was Nina wanted me to be ready for.
“Max wants to show us something,” said Lila.
“Okay, what?” I asked.
“It’s a surprise,” said Lindsey, the glee in her voice even more of a giveaway than her illicit smile had been.
“Follow me,” said Max, pulling up his bike and hopping on with more grace than I had ever seen from him, enough to convince me whatever he had for us might be good. Before he met us, Max hadn’t been on a bike in years, never having been an outdoor kid, and you could still sometimes tell when he rode.
We went farther than we had ever ridden before, off the bike paths we knew better than the layouts of our own houses, closer to Max’s house and his part of the state than we had ever been. We went single file, never talking, communicating only in the silliness with which we rode—sometimes without hands, sometimes without feet, the rogue appendages always held high to make sure their bad behavior was noted. Layers of clothing were peeled and wrapped around heads like sweatbands, and around waists and shoulders, making us a colorful brigade. We pedaled furiously, joyfully, calling to one another in whoops and arm waves and smiles thrown over our shoulders, and I loved not knowing where I was going more than I ever thought I would.
Just when I forgot there was any purpose to the outing other than the ride itself, Max turned off the path into what looked like shrubbery, into a clearing. There was a thick canopy above it, making it almost fully enclosed, giving us shelter from the sun and cooling the air by at least a few degrees. At the center of the clearing was what looked like a little pond, and just after it was a swamp big enough to make it a safe bet that there were at least a dozen things in it that could kill you.
“What is it?” Lindsey asked, nodding at the pond as she dismounted her bike for a closer look.
“It’s a pool,” said Max triumphantly.
“That thing is a pool?” I asked. “Why is it black? It’s creeping me out. You can’t see the bottom, or tell how deep it is.”
“It’s chlorinated. And clean. The owner just had it painted dark and had these rocks put all around it, so that it looked natural, so that it would blend right into its surroundings.”
“I don’t get it,” said Lila.
“So you can enjoy the beauty of nature without worrying about snakes and gators.”
“But it’s not nature,” I said, sticking my hand in. “It’s chlorinated, like you said. And temperature-controlled, I’m pretty sure.”
“But it looks like nature, and while you’re swimming in it you can look out on the swamp, at the real thing. My dad’s friend had it built. He said he found the bright blue pools next to these gorgeous swamps with all these fascinating creatures in them gaudy. He just hated that there was all this incredible wildlife next to these uniform, cookie-cutter pools. He said he always wondered what the animals thought of them.”
“Ah, but what if that becomes a problem?” Lindsey asked.
“What?”
“What if the animals like it too much? What if they mistake this pool for their swamp home? How do you know there aren’t snakes and gators in there now? It’s too dark to see the bottom.”
“Seriously?” Max asked, looking at Lindsey like she had just suggested man’s first walk on the moon had been staged by the government, his least favorite conspiracy theory. “Do you know what the effects of chlorine would be on the internal environment of a snake?”
“Yes, Max,” Lindsey said. “Actually, no, but I was kidding. I know there are no snakes in there.” She said it without any malice. She found his guilelessness as endearing as the rest of us did. She had been teasing him only because that’s how you said I love you in her family. She rustled Marie’s hair and winked when Marie looked up at her, an acknowledgment of how silly boys could be.
“Why isn’t this thing by the guy’s house?” Marie asked. “It’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“He has another one there. This is just his favorite swamp, so he bought all the land around it.”
“Rich people,” said Nina.
Max looked over at her, an automatic gesture.
“No offense. I don’t mean you, obviously.”
I felt a little bad for him. Not for Nina’s comment about a class of people he certainly belonged to, but because he didn’t yet know that all of these questions and challenges were standard after a discovery or opinion stated by any one of us. The rest of us had to turn it inside out before we could agree and adopt it into the list of things we all valued and believed true, never stopping to consider that we could have more than one worldview among us. Our questions could be ruthless, especially Nina’s, but once a piece of wisdom or a belief was in, it was in forever. This did nothing to fluster Max, though. He was a boy born for debate club. I had never heard him waver in anything.
“I think it’s really great, Max,” said Lila, smiling over at him. “Really. I’ve never seen anything like it. Hey, Marie, should we ask Dad for one for Christmas?”
Marie shook her head solemnly. “I already have my list.”
It was unsurprising that she had prepared for Christmas like she did everything else.
“Okay, I get it,” said Nina, not acknowledging Lila’s comment, or even that the rest of us were there. She was looking directly at him. “I mean, I get what he’s going for. But didn’t he kind of ruin nature by building this thing? Like, if you wanna enjoy the swamp, look at the swamp. Don’t make something that looks like it but without any of the magic beneath the surface. I mean, it just feels like a lot of work for something that, in the end, is just a swimming pool. Like, maybe swimming pools and swamps just don’t belong next to each other at all.”
“No way,” he said, looking over to return her gaze. He started to turn back to look at the swamp but stopped short, as if he had just noticed something about Nina’s face that required a second look. Or as if it were just then occurring to him how pretty she really was.
“My mom made me go out to Palm Springs with her for her sister’s wedding. I thought it was absurd to spend half a day on a plane to travel from one unlivably hot environment to another, no matter who lived there. You know, like when you’re on a plane for that long you should end up somewhere totally different. But she insisted, and when we got there it was different. It was
a totally different kind of heat. A dry heat, where nothing green was ever meant to live. But it looked like Disney World—the greenest grass you’ve ever seen, grass that never would have grown there naturally and must have taken all kinds of intricate manufactured systems to keep it alive. And it was the first time I realized it.”
“What?” Nina asked.
“How crazy it is, the places that man has made livable. Like the places not hospitable to life that we’ve managed to put houses and societies in. Like this pool—do you know how difficult it would be to dig a hole this close to a swamp, the kind of ground the pool was built in? And yet here it is.”
Lindsey looked over at me. Fascinating, she mouthed. I opened my eyes wide in alarm, like, Dude, don’t get me in trouble. Not wanting to be the one to ruin the unveiling of Max’s eighth wonder of the world. It really was just a pool, but his reverence was inspiring. Even then, without having the words for it, I knew it was better to care about anything that much than not, and it was never something we had done. At least not something we talked about. When I think of Max now, that is always what I start with—his quickness to marvel at the world. And I think that, for all Lila and Max’s shared car rides and teachers in common—as lavish as both their weekly allowances might have been—it was Nina who most loved and understood this capacity in him. Her watching him when he went on and on about the beauty of red canoes or the significance of which caterpillars have fuzz and which don’t is the one context I can think of when she ever fully, willingly ceded control.
We stood there, waiting for him to go on or sum his little speech up, but Max was never one for gestures—for openings or closings or segues. He said exactly what was on his mind as it came to him without any fanfare or finesse. He never took much time in the presentation of his observations and declarations. Having said everything he had to say about man’s ability to thrive in inhospitable environments, he laid his towel out a few feet from the pool, pulled a thick purple book from out of his bag, and sat down. The rest of us silently followed, arranging ourselves around the pool, pulling out the towels and the creased magazines and tattered copies of R. L. Stine novels we never went anywhere without, never knowing when the day might call for a swim. Not ready to let everyone settle into their private worlds yet, Nina looked over at Max’s book, which he was already engrossed in.
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