Red Water: A Novel

by Kristen Mae

  He walks away without another word, and for a few moments I’m so wracked with shame that I can’t breathe. I’ve just lost something I could have had with Garrett, if only I’d chosen a different path. I shouldn’t have gotten totally trashed last night. I shouldn’t have been hanging out here right now with Rome. I’ve done nothing wrong, not really, I can logically see this is true, and yet my chest is tight with the feeling that I’ve ruined…something.

  “That’s the guy you’ve been seeing?” Rome turns to me, his eyes narrowed in bewilderment.

  My heart is roaring in my temples, and the headache is back, flashing at me like a strobe, but I lie down on the blanket and close my eyes, try to pretend I’m calm. “We’re just hanging out.”

  Rome doesn’t respond, so I open my eyes and look up at him. “What?”

  “So you’re not serious about him?” A thin line of worry has appeared in the middle of his forehead.

  Can he see my chest flushing? My face? My ears? I shrug. “Like I said, just hanging out. How do you know him?”

  “We…work together sometimes.”

  I have to laugh. “You sell insurance?”

  One of Rome’s eyebrows goes up. “Nah, Mal, I don’t sell…insurance.” His tone is mocking—he’s making fun of me.

  “What, so you both sell weed? Big deal. I don’t care what Garrett does in his spare time.” I close my eyes again, try to pretend it doesn’t bother me that I didn’t know this about him.

  Rome makes a little huffing sound. “Well, he cares what you do in your spare time. He didn’t like seeing you with me. Not one little bit.”

  Rome is right. There was an unmistakable stiffness to Garrett’s responses. I cross my arms over my chest. “Well, he can’t tell me who to see.” But I’m thinking that from now on I’ll be more careful about where I meet with Rome to study.

  “The way you’re acting today—it have anything to do with him?”

  “No.”

  “Malory…”

  Stop it, Rome. “Yesterday was the anniversary of my mom’s suicide.” It’s cruel to toss this information at Rome like a hot potato, but I want to shock him into leaving me alone about Garrett.

  “Fuck, Malory.” My eyes are still closed, but the way his voice sounds, I imagine he’s put his head in his hands.

  I sigh.

  “We could’ve…” He stammers a little, as if he’s fishing for the right thing to say. “I dunno, done something different. We didn’t have to study.”

  “It’s good to keep moving forward. Stay busy.”

  I feel him lie down next to me, hear him inhale deep and let it go.

  Garrett and I are definitely not getting together tonight. My chest hollows out as this truth settles in my mind, and the emptiness—it’s too much. I don’t want to think, don’t want to feel. “Let’s go get high,” I tell Rome.

  “Fuck yes.”

  * * *

  Rome’s dorm room is neater than I expected—or at least, his side is. His roommate’s side is covered in clothes and papers, an iPod, headphones, a few textbooks. But the slob himself isn’t here. Rome sits at his desk and rolls a blunt, his brown boy-fingers strangely adept at the task, as if smoking pot is an art form. The leaves he uses to stuff the cigar paper are sea green and covered in crystals that look like morning dew. The scent is clean and herbal, overwhelming in the tiny room.

  Rome lifts his eyes at me while he licks the blunt to seal it, and something in the twitch of his mouth tells me he senses my discomfort. I’m standing in the center of the room with my arms crossed because the only places to sit are Rome’s roommate’s desk chair, covered in clothes, or Rome’s bed, which…I’m just not sure I should sit there. It feels too intimate.

  “I finally got you up here, see,” he says with a wink.

  I can’t help but grin. “You’re an asshole.”

  “Gotta take this outside.” He stands and slips the blunt into his pocket, very careful. “Someone on our floor got caught a few nights ago and they’ve been patrolling.”

  “Outside? In the open?”

  “I know a place.”

  I follow him downstairs, and he leads me around the back of the dorm to an alleyway between our building and the one behind it. There’s enough space to shrink from view but escape out the other side if anyone comes by.

  Rome leans against the brick wall and lights the blunt, puffing on it and squinting against the smoke, then passes it to me. I puff on it gently, trying not to be too brave about it, afraid I’ll end up coughing like I’ve seen others do. I’ve only smoked once before and I wonder if I should have warned him in case I make an ass of myself.

  “You ain’t gonna get high like that, girl,” he says. The way he’s scrutinizing me, that mocking little half-smile—I’m sure he can tell I’m a newbie.

  I roll my eyes. “Leave me alone.” But I try again, pulling deeper with my inhale, and then I feel the smoke bloom in my lungs. I double over, hacking and croaking, and by the time I stand up, tears are running down my face and the world is a whole different place than it was a few minutes ago, bending and pulsing and billowing like a flag. I feel like, if I take a step, the ground will rise up to meet me.

  “Fuck,” I say.

  Rome laughs and it echoes through my head, a rubber mallet ricocheting off a steel drum. “The coughing makes it hit you a lot harder.” His voice is distorted, like it rolled out of the same steel drum as his laugh.

  “Fuck,” I say again. I grab onto the brick wall.

  “You don’t smoke much, do you?”

  I laugh, because wow Rome’s voice is hilarious—can he honestly not hear how musical it is? And I want to tell him that, how his voice is music in my ears, but it doesn’t make sense, so the words stay stuck inside my head. “Goddammit I am so high,” I say instead.

  He’s looking at me with his lips pursed like he wants to laugh at me.

  “Go ahead,” I say. “Make fun of me. You know you want to.”

  He snickers. “You feel a little better, at least?”

  I nod, and I can practically see myself, head bobbing slowly back and forth, eyes half shut, smiling like an iguana.

  “We’d better get you upstairs. I didn’t realize you didn’t smoke. You just smoked some major high-grade shit, girl.”

  “Awesome,” I hear my voice say even though I don’t remember my brain telling my mouth it was okay to speak.

  The sun has gone down and there is only a faint purple glow where it was a few minutes before. Rome takes another quick drag off the blunt and extinguishes it on the brick behind him. “Come on.” I’m being dragged along and it feels like the earth is moving underneath me instead of my feet moving over the earth. I have no idea how my legs are walking. I think Rome’s arm is linked in mine.

  “Stand up straight when we go through the lobby. I don’t need to have my room searched.”

  Somehow my body forces itself erect, and again I don’t know where the command originated. My conscious thoughts are disconnected from the part of my brain that does things automatically. Or maybe they’ve switched places, and now I’ll have to think very hard about breathing and blinking, but conversation will happen involuntarily. I giggle at the idea—god, I’m clever—and suddenly we’re standing in front of the elevator waiting for it to ding.

  My lungs fill with air, expanding my diaphragm, and then, without the slightest bit of effort, they deflate—I’m empty again. Repeat. It’s incredible that these two symmetrical mounds of muscle with all their thousands of root-like bronchioles are able to vacuum air from the atmosphere surrounding our faces, separate out the oxygen, expel the bullshit carbon dioxide, and then send the oxygen into our bloodstreams so we don’t suffocate. Breathing is a miracle! Good job, evolution, you fucking sorcerer, you.

  Rome stares at me while the elevator rises, still with that half-smile, but his eyes are droopy as hell, so I know he’s high too. I smile at him, and now we’re just a pair of buds leaning against opposite elevator wa
lls and smiling at each other like idiots, reading each other’s high-ass minds. I know he’s thinking that I look stoned and I know that he knows I’m looking at him and thinking the same thing. This is all just so goddamn reciprocal.

  The elevator doors open, but we don’t get out right away.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” he says.

  I’m too high to feel that usual drop in my stomach when I think of my beautiful mother. I push off the elevator wall and step out into the hallway. “Life’s a bitch,” I say. But then I correct myself: “No…death is a bitch. Death is a real fucking party-pooper.”

  “A-fucking-men,” says Rome, and we’re standing in front of my dorm door and I’m fumbling with the key because it keeps wriggling in my hands—I can’t get a grip on it. The door opens on its own and there’s Daphne, staring at me somberly and she is NOT HIGH, not high at all, and damn, can she tell how fucked up I am? Her eyes are accusing as hell. I breeze into the room, raising my eyebrows at her like Go ahead and say something.

  Then I’m lying flat on my back on my bed. How did I get here? But who cares, I’m here, that’s all that matters. Is it wrong to eat two boxes of macaroni and cheese in one day? Pretty sure I’ve got another box in the cabinet.

  Rome’s steel drum voice: “I’ve got plans, but maybe you could keep an eye on her? I didn’t uh…know she wasn’t used to it.”

  Daphne’s not responding, but that’s okay. I’m not going anywhere. Garrett’s not inviting me to his place to be his cum dumpster tonight. But god, if he touched me right now my skin would probably sizzle right off.

  I hear the door latch closed, and then Daphne is hovering over me, her tangle of blond hair a disorderly halo backlit by the ceiling light overhead.

  “I’m so fucking high,” I tell her, because she really needs to understand just how high I am. But then I see her eyes are puffy and she still has those dark circles and I’m trying to push through my fogginess to feel whatever it is I’m supposed to feel for her. Why can’t I feel? “What happened to you?” I finally say, the words floating out of me without my doing, with the same detachment as when I stood up straight in the lobby, the same as when I managed to walk across the undulating earth.

  “I did something last night,” she says. Her hands are shaking and the cords in her neck are growing taut with the strain of some secret she doesn’t want to tell.

  “Gabby?” I think I remember seeing them kissing at the party.

  “It was just for fun, just for fun…” She’s still hovering over me, shaking, but she’s turned her head, looking out the window like she can’t bear to face me.

  “If it was just for fun, why are you so upset?” The words tumble out of my mouth, and I’m not sure if they are the right words or not. Am I missing something, or am I just too fucking high?

  “It wasn’t just for fun,” she whispers, her eyes still on the scene outside the window, and for a second I think her hushed words are the wind rushing in from outside.

  Then I’m scooting toward the wall and patting the bed next to me, and she’s climbing in, lying on her back beside me and still shaking from head to toe—her teeth are actually chattering, I can hear them. “You mean,” I say, “for you, it wasn’t just for fun.”

  “No,” she breathes. “Oh, no, no, no.” Her voice still sounds like wind, the sad, sighing kind that comes before a devastating storm.

  “Gabby was just…oh, for attention? From guys?”

  She gives a sad little moan that is so laden with humiliation, I turn on my side and put an arm around her. Her shoulders are hard and knobby. I picture myself shoving Gabby down a flight of stairs.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m in the wrong life,” she says, and she turns to face me with her arms crossed over her chest, tucking her chin and hugging herself as she snuggles into me. “Or…” she whispers, “that there is just something wrong…with me.”

  Daphne and her devastating storm. I stroke her hair away from her face the way my mom used to do for me, even after she became a shell of herself. And after she died, Liza and I took our mother’s place, just like Daphne and me now: curled up on each other like a pair of embryos seeking comfort.

  “You’re perfect exactly how you are,” I tell her, and then she lets loose a hiccupping sob, opening the floodgates to a river of tears.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I wake up alone in my bed. Daphne is asleep on hers with her back to me. I grab my phone, terrified that Garrett tried to call while I was high and I missed it, but there are no calls, only a message from Liza with a selfie of her and a friend from the school musical. They’re all made up, grinning like fools and sticking their tongues out. Happy. Good.

  It’s nine in the morning and I still feel a little high. Either whatever I smoked with Rome was the highest grade pot ever or I am a major fucking lightweight. Probably a little of both.

  My heart is heavy—actually, everything’s heavy right now, even the air. I feel terrible for Daphne, I’m still reeling from the anniversary of my mother’s death, and I can’t get Garrett out of my mind—his face before he walked away. I’ve been rejected because I’ve done something wrong, I know. And I want to undo whatever that wrong is, because his hands on me, his coolly delivered demands, that thing he does where he tears me apart and puts me back together…I don’t want it to stop. But he might already be finished with me—he has no reason to be attached to me, the way I do to him. To him, I’m just another girl.

  I need to get my mind back on track. I need to practice, but my muscles are a weird combination of limp and jittery, and it feels like my organs are floating around in a lot of empty space. Running will help. I’ll work these jitters off, get my body back in order, and then I will practice and set my mind straight. I know exactly where to go.

  A few minutes later I’m jogging past Garrett’s house, careful not to turn my gaze to the windows in case he’s looking out. I don’t want him to think I’m running by on purpose, even though this is the only way to the river. With the endurance I’ve gained from training, I can make it there in around forty minutes and be back before lunch. Plenty of time left to practice.

  It’s invigorating, the sound of my feet hitting the earth as I fly over the branches and raised roots that block my way. My focus is on the path ahead—I let my breathing flow as it will, natural, no more trying to control the air as it comes and goes. My lungs burn, but it is a steady, sustainable burn, the kind that gives power rather than takes it away.

  I understand there is nothing I can do about my grief, that it is as real and alive as I am, and making space for it is the only way to coexist with it. No more fighting. I must carry it with me. I want to carry it with me. As for cello, I’ll practice this afternoon and drill the notes into my fingers and brain. Maybe I’ll go downtown, earn some money, send it to Liza. Study, get ahead in my coursework. Make myself forget Garrett.

  My lungs are stinging now, and my quadriceps are melting like butter. Almost…any minute now…and there it is. The river. My wasted legs come stuttering to a stop and holy shit, it’s him—it’s Garrett, right at the edge of where the earth drops away, and he’s got his eyes on me and his mouth is shaped in a self-satisfied little smile that says I knew you’d come here.

  Is that why I came? Did I sense he would be waiting for me here, in this place?

  We face each other as opposites: I, a jagged lightning bolt, sizzling with directionless energy and looking for a place to ground; and he, a tree, deep-rooted and wise, emanating a voluminous, shady quiet.

  I catch my breath, and when I’ve almost recovered I stand up straight, trying to think of the right thing to say to slingshot myself out of his gravitational pull. But then I’m looking at his expressionless face and all my resolve is melting away and I’m slipping, slipping, slipping back into orbit again.

  I’m pulling my clothes off.

  He stays where he is.

  I set my sweaty clothes and shoes on the bank and climb naked into the water where t
here are no manatees today. My eyes are on Garrett while he watches me with his arms crossed over his chest. He walked here—he’s wearing athletic clothes, but he is clean and dry and orderly, not sweat-stained and filthy and chaotic like me.

  I submerge myself beneath the cool water and rinse the grime from my body, then reemerge, slicking my hair back as I come out. I love this feeling of offering myself to him, love the agony of the possibility that he might reject me and leave me standing here ankle-deep in the water, alone and naked and quivering with tragic hope. But he won’t. He’s coming down the bank as I come up, and his feet are bare now; he must have taken his shoes off while I was underwater.

  Everything’s in slow motion. His feet make wet, slurping sounds as he steps into the water with me, and then his hands are on my hips, light but firm. He circles behind me, brushing his fingers along my abdomen, my side, my back, as he disappears from my field of view. But I remain where I am, facing the riverbank, again with the unfounded certainty that I am meant not to move. My lungs are still heaving from running, and my heart is thrumming hard in my ears, each beat a cloud of sound in my head that amplifies the sensation of Garrett’s fingertips teasing at the sensitive skin of my lower back.

  Garrett wades backward into the water, coaxing me with feather touches on my hipbones until we’re in up to our knees. I’m still with my back to him, facing the bank, my arms stiff at my sides, the cool forest breeze on my wet skin making hard little pebbles of my nipples. His fingertips skate along my skin, tracing the curves of my hips, my waist, under my arms, the center of my back. I close my eyes.

  Then his palms flatten against my back, solid and sure and possessive. I suck in a breath so fast that it makes a wheezing sound, and then he shoves me, hard, and my head whips back as I fly forward and catch myself with my hands on the muddy embankment.

  Fuck. Is this bad? My heart launches into a sprint, and I hear a zipper, a crinkling—a condom—and he’s got his hands on my hips again, fingers digging hard into my skin, and he’s plunging violently into me—what is happening?—while I hold myself up on the riverbank. I bite my lip to hold back a scream. I wanted him, I did, but this makes no sense, this isn’t what I wanted, and it’s crazy the way he’s pounding into me, shoving me so hard that I lose my grip and now I’m on my elbows in the muck, and this…this is not for me, or maybe it is, but not in the sense that it’s a gift—is this a punishment? Or is he claiming me?