by Callie West
While I was scheming like a criminal, trying not to act nervous but throwing glances at the oven clock, Mom was humming and pinching her piecrust into a delicate scalloped edge. She was never as happy as when she was baking, which she rarely got to do. That and classical music were the two things that helped her relax.
“How about some classical music while we wait?” I suggested while she put the pie in the oven. I went to the kitchen counter and turned on the radio.
“Since when are you willing to switch from the rock-and-roll station?” She laughed. “No, thanks, it’ll make me too sleepy. Let’s clean up the mess we’ve made, then find something lively on TV instead.”
By that point, I was the one who was exhausted, mostly from being so nervous. When we finished cleaning up, I dragged my feet to the living room and flipped through the TV channels, looking for something that would put Mom to sleep. An old movie maybe, one she’d seen at least a dozen times. I’d have settled for a rerun of a sitcom—anything, really, as long as it wouldn’t keep Mom on the edge of her seat.
“Listen, the late movie sounds terrific,” Mom said, pressing a finger to a column in TV Guide. “ ‘Based on a true story: Mother launches a nationwide search for her daughter, who disappeared under suspicious circumstances.’ ”
For a minute, I thought she was teasing, that somehow she’d found out about my plans to “disappear” with Chris. But when I turned to the channel she told me to, I saw it was a real show, Bring My Daughter Back.
We settled down on the sofa, while in the kitchen the oven timer tick-ticked away. “Let’s turn the lights off, so it’s like a real movie,” I said, reaching for the lamp.
“Okay,” she said with a yawn.
Despite the action-packed plot of the movie, thirty minutes into it and two minutes before the pie was done, Mom had curled up on the couch and fallen fast asleep. Moving carefully so as not to wake her, I stood and turned off the TV. In the semidarkness, I pulled a blanket from the linen closet and tucked her in from neck to feet. Then I tiptoed into the kitchen and quietly turned off the oven timer.
When I took the steaming, bubbling pie out of the oven, my mouth watered from the spicy-sweet smell that filled the kitchen. And even though I’d been looking forward to meeting Chris, I felt a twinge of regret that tonight wouldn’t be as simple as Mom and I sharing a piece of hot, homemade apple pie. I had this funny feeling that nothing after that night ever would.
chapter seven
Outside it was breezy and warm, shorts-and-T-shirt weather, the kind of night that feels more like the end of summer than the middle of fall. But as Mom says, that’s Arizona for you, with its two seasons: hot and even hotter. Sometimes I wished I lived in a more changeable climate, a place that had the brilliant-colored leaves and snowscapes we’d been taught to draw in second grade. But that night I was happy being just where I was. I felt content sitting in the square of grass outside our apartment, breathing in the scent of eucalyptus and cooling earth, watching the wind fan the branches of the spindly palm trees above me. Waiting for Chris.
He showed up at exactly eleven, turning the corner of our street pedaling a bike. Around the handlebars, he’d strapped a blanket and a wicker picnic basket. “My mom packed this for us. Cokes and brownies,” he said, jumping lightly off his seat. He unleashed the basket from the bike and handed it to me. “You know, to help us stay awake.”
I felt envious for a boy’s life then, in which you could walk out the front door at eleven with your mother’s goodie basket and blessing, instead of stuffing your bed with clothes to look like a sleeping body (as I had) and tiptoeing out. I was afraid Chris would think I was a baby if he knew I hadn’t gotten permission, so I didn’t tell him.
“How come you didn’t drive?” I asked instead. In fact, I was curious why a guy whose family had money didn’t have his own car.
“You promise you won’t think I’m a dork?” he asked.
I couldn’t imagine what he was going to say. “I promise.”
“I just think that the less we pollute the environment, the better.” Then he added quickly, “I’m not a fanatic or anything. I love driving my brother’s car, and if I get into Stanford next year, I’ll get a car. But if I don’t need a car, why buy one?” He shrugged.
“I think that’s great,” I said sincerely.
He seemed embarrassed, and he looked up at our apartment. “You have a nice place.”
“Thanks,” I said, but I could tell that he was trying to be nice. The Palms apartments aren’t exactly luxurious. They’re a series of slightly run-down two-story buildings with balconies, forty years old, as old as just about anything in Phoenix ever got before some new developer came in and tore it down. Chris’s family, on the other hand, lived in a neighborhood full of new houses, huge Tudor and French château mansions. I knew that because the swimming bus had dropped him off there after a few late meets.
I led him around to the tiny side yard. We stashed his bike in the oleanders, dragged an old ladder from its resting place in the crabgrass, and leaned it up against the side of the house. “Be careful of the roof tiles,” I whispered as I began carefully climbing. “There were a few loose the last time I was up.”
“You’ve been up here before?” Chris asked, following my slow steps up the ladder, the blanket around his shoulder and the picnic basket tucked under his arm. “And here I thought I was being so original.”
“Well, I’ve never been up here with anyone before,” I said. “It’s a good place to think. You can see a lot of the neighborhood—though not the whole city, the way you can from Squaw Peak.”
We climbed onto the gently sloping rooftop, spread out the blanket, and settled down to watch the sky. I couldn’t help feeling grateful that my mom was asleep on the first floor, rather than right below us. Chris lay back against the roof. I sat up straight beside him, my arms wrapped around my knees.
Chris looked adorable in his baggy shorts and baseball T-shirt. I felt strangely calm sitting next to him. My heart wasn’t hammering, like it was the day we watched the sunset together, and my palms were dry. I’d never done anything like this in my life, but somehow it felt perfectly right.
“Fifty-three minutes to show time,” I said, squinting at my glow-in-the-dark wristwatch. Tayerle had told us that at 12:08 A.M., the moon would slowly move into the Earth’s shadow. Since this was a total lunar eclipse, the full moon would be entirely in shadow. I knew from our astronomy book that the eclipse could last over three hours.
“Let’s synchronize our watches,” Chris said.
“Eleven-fifteen,” I said, and Chris answered, “Check.”
We were quiet for a few minutes looking up at the sky. “This sort of reminds me of camping,” Chris said finally. “The darkness, the quiet, the whole sky spread out above you …”
“The backache you have in the morning from sleeping on the ground …”
Chris laughed, and readjusted his body on the hard, jutting tiles. “All we need to make it perfect is some poison ivy and a few mosquitoes. I remember once, when I was a Boy Scout—”
“You were a Boy Scout?” I interrupted.
Chris propped himself up on one elbow. “Went all the way to Eagle,” he said.
“No way!”
“Why don’t you believe me?”
“I just can’t see you in one of those little uniforms,” I said. “I mean, don’t you lose merit points or something if you have holes in your pants?”
Chris sat up and tried to look indignant but then let a grin escape. “I’ll tell you, wearing that uniform was lame. But my parents were always too busy being lawyers to take my brother and me camping. If it hadn’t been for Boy Scouts, I might never have gotten out of Phoenix or learned the names of the stars.”
“I didn’t know both your parents were lawyers,” I said.
“Yeah,” Chris said, but he didn’t sound too impressed. “And they’re waiting for one of their children to follow in their footsteps. My brother Dave
wants to join the Peace Corps, so I guess they’re thinking I’m their man.” He hesitated. “But I know I’m not.”
“Mmm,” I said, thinking of how I sometimes felt I was living my mother’s derailed dreams. “What do you want to do?”
Chris opened the wicker basket and pulled out two Cokes. “Well, I had this incredibly cool job last summer. I worked for Habitat for Humanity building houses for low-income families,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m signed up to do it again this summer, but considering I don’t get paid anything, I guess it’s not a practical choice for a career.” He shrugged and handed me a Coke. “If we stay up here talking long enough, maybe you’ll help me figure it out.”
“I’ll try,” I said, reaching into the basket. “But first I’ll need a little help from these brownies.”
Chris’s mom had stacked the brownies four across and three deep, and wrapped them first in plastic, then in aluminum foil. Chris tore the package open, making no effort to be neat about it. I thanked him for the brownie he offered, then took a big bite.
“This is delicious,” I said. “Tell your mom she’s a terrific baker.”
“Oh, my mom didn’t bake these,” he said. “She’s too busy to bake. She bought them at Sutton’s.”
I was silent, thinking of my mom baking an apple pie after working two jobs. “Well, they’re still really good,” I said.
“Mmm,” Chris said, his mouth full of brownie. “So what do you think about when you’re sitting up here?” he asked.
“Oh, a bunch of things,” I answered, trying to talk without chewing. “What college will be like, all the books I haven’t read … lots of things. Sometimes I even count up all the trash cans in the neighborhood and try to imagine where all of it goes.”
I didn’t tell him that I also thought about what love means and whether marriage can last, and why my father had abandoned us so long ago. You couldn’t tell a guy something that personal on your first date.
“Garbage! Now there’s something that’ll blow your mind,” Chris said. “At our house we recycle everything, but it doesn’t make a dent in what’s thrown away. I really worry about what’s happening to our environment and how we can solve the problems we’re creating with all our waste.”
“I do too,” I said. “But somehow, up here, all problems seem solvable. Maybe it’s because I’m looking down on them.”
“Yeah,” Chris said. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Blythe and I were always finishing each other’s sentences or punctuating them with “Exactly!” but I had never expected that to happen with a guy.
We sat talking, eating, and watching the moon until finally we noticed that one side of it was changing shape. Twenty minutes later it was totally in eclipse.
Even though I had read all about eclipses, I was still surprised that the moon hadn’t disappeared in blackness. Instead, it was a dull coppery color. It was eerie but also comforting, like the gentle glow of a child’s night-light. “Amazing!” I said. “I expected it to look much darker.”
“It is amazing,” Chris said. “Some of the sunlight that shines on Earth is scattered by our atmosphere, and enough of that light reaches the moon.” He laughed. “I don’t think Tayerle would be too pleased with my nontechnical explanation.”
“Who cares?” I said softly. “It’s magical.”
“Well, enjoy the magic,” Chris said. “The moon will only be in total eclipse for seven minutes.”
I stood up then like a surfer, half crouched, legs bent at the knees.
“Where are you going?” Chris asked.
“I just want to check something.” I waddled like that to the roof’s peak, and after securing my footing, made my way cautiously down the slight slope on the other side. The back end of our apartment overlooked the courtyard all the Palms tenants shared: a half circle of Bermuda grass and a medium-sized lima-bean-shaped pool.
“Chris, come over here,” I whispered. When I called him, he stood quickly, waving his arms in the air for balance. “Careful,” I warned him, hunkering down again into the surfer position. “You have to walk like this.”
Chris joined me at the roof’s edge, and I pointed to the pool. There, reflected in the surface of the still water, was the coppery orb of the moon.
“Wow,” we both said.
It was one of those perfect moments that you tuck away to look at later, like rose petals pressed between the pages of a book. I remember the joy in Chris’s expression and the warm breeze that carried the scent of pool chlorine. The moon looked so real floating there in the water that it seemed you could dive in and retrieve it with your bare hands.
Then Chris put his arm around me and pulled me close to him. “Amy,” he whispered, “I’ve liked you for such a long time, ever since you first joined the—” But before he could finish his sentence, I linked my fingers around his neck and stopped him with a kiss.
His lips were firm, like in my daydream, and chocolate-brownie sweet. I could feel them humming against mine, as if they held some secret. Before, I’d always worried about the technicalities of kissing, like how to avoid bumping noses. Now I found that everything, even noses, fit together, without my even trying. Chris opened his mouth slightly, tasting my lips with tiny, gentle bites.
Around us, the night was alive with the late-night sound that my neighborhood makes, the pulse and hum of a hundred pool pumps. This solemn sound and the kiss made me restless, the way quiet hymns played in church sometimes make me want to shout. Or maybe I should blame the full moon for what happened next.
I broke away from Chris and blurted out—I can’t explain why—“I dare you to jump in the pool!”
Chris peeled his T-shirt off before I could say I was joking. He tossed it down into the courtyard and stood there peering over the roof’s edge, silently calculating the distance from there to the pool.
“Wait—are you sure you can make it?” I whispered.
“If I don’t,” he said theatrically, “at least the last thing I see will be you.” With that, he swung his arms out and leapt from the roof. Midair, he hugged his legs to his chest and cannonballed safely into the pool.
When he hit, the moon’s reflection exploded into pieces, then rippled back together. Water crashed on the deck, and the lounge chairs that surrounded it. I waited with my breath held, until finally Chris’s head popped up to the surface. “Come on in!” he stage-whispered, dog-paddling in place. “The water feels great!”
I imagined my mother’s voice warning me not to take chances even as I tossed my sneakers over and stood there, shivering, in my bare feet. Then I heard Blythe say that I was too cautious, that I’d never get anywhere if I lived my life stuck at a yellow light. I closed my eyes for a second and took a deep breath. “Now or never,” I said out loud.
I opened my eyes and dove into the darkness, aiming for the reflection of the moon. But instead of pulling a noisy cannonball, as Chris had, I sliced straight into the water and hardly made a splash.
“The water doesn’t feel great!” I complained. “It’s cold.” It was hard to keep quiet with my teeth chattering so hard.
Chris kept treading water and swimming in circles like a dog. “It helps if you keep moving,” he said.
Relieved that I had made it into the pool, I swam to the edge quickly and hoisted myself out onto the deck. “Let’s get out of here before the manager sees us,” I whispered. Or my mom hears us, I added silently. “Follow me—there are plenty of other pools we can hop.”
If you’ve never heard of pool hopping, you should come to Phoenix, where it’s practically a varsity sport. If you grew up here, you’ve done it: climbed over backyard fences, tiptoed across evergreen Bermuda-grass lawns, and tried out other people’s pools. I, for one, could tell you the size and shape and water temperature of every pool on our block. But I hadn’t hopped a pool since eighth grade, hadn’t even thought of it until the moon made me crazy, until some wild, reckless urge got into me that night.
“Come
on,” I whispered to Chris as we made our way, dripping and shivering, into our front yard. Chris hopped on one foot behind me, grabbing his other, soggy-sneakered foot with both hands. I noticed then that he’d jumped into the Palms pool without taking his shoes off. “Hold on a minute,” he said, pouring water out of a heel and onto the lawn.
“Let’s do Joey Favata’s,” I said, pointing to a ranch-style house at the far end of our street.
“Should be good,” Chris said, slinging his sneakers over his shoulder and holding on to them by their laces. “His dad’s a real hothead.” Chris knew as well as I did that only part of the point of hopping pools was getting wet. Most of the fun came from almost getting caught.
We started off down the street toward the Favatas’, moving slowly and cautiously at first, then sprinting boldly from lamppost to lamppost. Like burglars, we avoided the greenish light of the streetlamps, trying to keep to the safety of the darkness in between. There were lights on in a few houses—probably people who’d watched the eclipse—but at that hour of the morning, most of the neighborhood was already asleep.
At the Favatas’, the windows were dark, but four floodlights shone across the yard in green and blue and red. We darted through the circus colors and slipped around back to the six-foot stucco wall.
“Here’s a foothold,” I whispered, pulling back a tangle of crabgrass to reveal a palm tree stump. Chris put his bare foot there and reached for the top of the wall. “Any dogs?” he turned to ask me before he lifted himself up.
Yapping dogs were a challenge to pool hoppers—right up there with creaky gates and the crunching sound of walking across a desert lawn. “No dogs,” I reassured him. “And it’s grass on the other side, so you won’t cut your feet when you land.”
“Good to know,” Chris said. He boosted himself up to the top of the wall and sat there a moment, surveying the yard. “It’s a great pool,” he said admiringly. “They’ve got a water slide and a Jacuzzi and a plastic shark raft.”