“You know,” Mick said, “I know someone in Pittsburgh who could help you out. All you’d need is a ride there, and she’d only charge you, like, fifty bucks. I had a girlfriend who went to her once. She just feeds you this cocktail of herbs and cleaning fluid, and then in, like, three days the thing’s gone.”
I sat back on my haunches, submerging my shorts in the water. Mick looked at me, his face relaxed and normal. His hair had grown out a tiny bit, enough so that I could tell which direction it would flop across his forehead. In his bathing suit, minus the bandanna, his blue eyes looked uncharacteristically calm—as if the afternoon’s heist had satisfied his hunger for excitement. He seemed very close to normal. As if he had no idea that what he was offering could end up killing me.
What would my mother think if she could hear this conversation? How ridiculous would it be if a girl like me—educated, with parents she should be able to turn to—ended up doing what Mick suggested? Except that really, if my physical well-being were the most important thing to me, I would have told my mother immediately. I remembered what she said that night in our living room. I don’t know why such a smart girl does such stupid things. And I knew she meant in terms of my health, my future—which never seemed quite real to me, quite important. The future was so far away, it might as well be happening to a different person. And my health was a matter of course. What mattered to me was just myself, this me inside—away from her—and she always had to stomp that down. A part of me wanted to protect that self and keep it from her, even if it meant drinking some underground abortionist’s toxic brew, or going ahead with a pregnancy that no part of me wanted.
“Maybe,” I said. “Thanks, Mick.”
“Sure.” He reached out to pat my head. He looked pleased that I would consider accepting his help. We stood up and walked together to the campfire. Anybody watching would have assumed we were the best of friends.
Just before and then during dinner, before the beers were opened, Cody and I began a strange kind of dance, keeping mostly to our own groups. Cody milled about with his friends, talking and laughing, at one point even putting his arm around one of the girls. But then at regular intervals he would look back at me, not necessarily smiling or even acknowledging the glance, but paying enough attention that I knew before long he would sit next to me, hand me a lake-chilled beer, and the physical side of our romance would begin.
“My girlfriend,” Brendan lamented, as we spooned peanut butter out of a jar. One of the other group’s leaders was busy preparing some sort of elaborate hash—not heated in the can, but pan-fried and seasoned—but for us Jane had put out an assortment of condiments, including the last of our wild blueberry preserves, which—when we opened it—turned out to be completely fermented. So as a prelude to our beer party, we passed around makeshift blueberry wine. After I took my first, nose-squinching sip, Brendan handed me the peanut butter and said, “I’m losing my girlfriend to an outsider hottie.”
“You think he’s a hottie?” I asked, wanting my own opinion seconded.
“I definitely do,” he said. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’ve got a couple condoms in my pack, if you need them.”
“You do?” I said. Brendan shrugged, nonchalant.
“Sure,” he said. “You never know.”
I absorbed this for a second. Then I had a thought. What if Cody and I had sex tonight, and then in two weeks I got in touch and told him I was pregnant? The timing would be exactly right, and it would give me just enough time to get my abortion in under the wire. Getting the money would suddenly be his responsibility. He wouldn’t even have to come get me; Natalia and I could take care of that. I could always turn to one of my other friends if Natalia didn’t want to help.
I shook my head sharply, remembering my hand hovering over that cash register. First an almost thief, and now an almost con artist. What was happening to me?
The sun began to dip, the evening slowly turning to mauve. I thought of what Lori had said, about everything on the lake looking the same, a statement that was equal parts true and preposterous. The sunset, for example—every night its color came up with a subtle surprise, the last bit of sunlight reflected off the lake from a different angle. I thought of those twenty-dollar bills, abandoned in the till. Maybe tonight I would blow Cody off and sneak away in a canoe. Help myself to the twenties and rescue myself from all this uncertainty and indecision. However rotten that scheme, it sat better with me than lying to innocent Cody.
The blueberry wine came my way again. I took another sip and it spread, sweet and spoiled, inside my chest. My head began to buzz, and from across the fire I could see Cody, eating his more elaborate meal. He caught my eye, and instead of looking away he grinned. My stomach dropped a little.
The problem was, I couldn’t figure out a solution that didn’t bring at least a little shame. If stealing money and tricking Cody was out of the question, no other option—abortion, adoption, giving up my own life for all eternity—seemed any less terrible.
People began floating down to the lake and fishing out beers. Although most of them had Swiss army knives, and we had two can openers with church keys on the handles, the guys all tried to open the bottles without tools. Nobody except Mick could actually do it. He would rest the bottle against a boulder and then tap the cap off with the flat of his palm.
When Brendan stood up and headed down to the lake for a beer, Cody took only a minute to take his seat beside me. No show-off, he opened two bottles of beer with the can opener Jane had left next to the fire pit, and handed one to me. Then he gave me a plate of corned beef hash.
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Your dinner looked pretty lame,” he said.
“But look,” I said, picking up the nearly empty preserve jar. “At least we have fine wine.”
Cody leaned over and took a sniff, then exhaled—half coughing, half laughing. “No thanks,” he said. “I think I’ll stick to this Canadian vintage.”
“Good choice,” I said. “I’m sure last month was a very good year.”
I looked back down toward the lake. Brendan was talking to a tall, muscular guy from Cody’s group. I wondered if they knew each other from base camp.
“So,” Cody said, trying to sound casual, “you and the movie star have become pretty tight, huh.”
“Didn’t we already have this conversation?” I said, flattered that he was still jealous.
Cody smiled, his lips still damp from his last sip of beer. “Just checking,” he said.
I jutted my chin toward the lake, and Brendan. “We’re good friends,” I said. “But the truth is, he would be more interested in that guy there than in me.”
I felt an instant stab of guilt, sacrificing Brendan’s secret in the name of getting closer to Cody, who just nodded and said, “He might actually have some luck with Roger.”
“Don’t tell anybody,” I said.
“I won’t.” He let his knee move a little bit, pressing against mine. We could hear laughter and splashing: the drunken skinny-dipping had begun.
“You feel like going for a swim?” he said.
“Sure.” We stood up, carrying our beers, and I followed him down toward the water. Darkness closed in around us, along with the first hints of chill. I thought about running back to the tent to grab my jacket—it would be freezing when we got out of the lake—but I didn’t want to run into anyone.
Just at the mouth of the water, where everyone else had gathered, Cody grabbed two more beers and then took a turn into the woods. I could see Natalia, her head bobbing out on the water, watching us disappear behind the trees. As Cody and I walked down the sandy path, stepping over roots and rocks, he reached his hand back to me. I grabbed it and kept following. His white T-shirt shone through the darkness. BREWSTER FLATS, it read, in big, bold letters.
“I love the way guys dress,” I said. The blueberry wine and surprisingly cold beer had gone to my head. “All the T-shirts. You can’t tell much about a girl from h
er clothes, about her history anyway. But with guys, it’s like a record of everywhere they’ve been and everything they like.”
“That’s cool,” said Cody. “I never thought of it that way.” We emerged from the trail onto a beautiful beach. Our groups should have camped here. The great expanse of sand, two fire pits, and the opening of trees made way for a steady stream of moonlight.
“Wow,” I said. “Did you know this place was here?”
“I did a little scouting earlier,” Cody said. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and let it drop to the sand. Then he took off his shorts. It felt too personal, too intrusive, to look at him, so I busied myself taking off my own clothes. By the time I’d undressed, Cody was already treading water, waiting for me.
I felt very conscious of the moonlight as I walked, naked, down to the water. Cody had left the extra beers with his clothes. I took the last swig of mine and carried the extra bottles down to the water with me, to chill while we swam. I wondered if what Natalia said was true, that my breasts had gotten bigger. My hair felt wild on my shoulders. My muscles felt taut and strong. It felt unbearably sexy, sauntering naked through this wilderness, the hiss of cicadas and the coo of the loons pulsing all around us.
I dove in headfirst and swam underwater—like a fish—in Cody’s direction. When I came up for air I realized I had gone in the wrong direction. He had to swim to catch up with me. We were both sputtering and laughing by the time his hands found my naked hips.
I could tell as his fingers straddled my waist that everything there was slim—if not slimmer than it had been before. We faced each other in the moonlight, chilling ourselves in the same lake water we’d used for a refrigerator. I let some of it lap into my mouth, trying to clear my suddenly fuzzy head. And then we fell on each other. His hands moved from my waist to my bare butt, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. We kissed and kissed, drinking each other like we’d been lost in the desert these past three weeks, Cody kicking his legs to keep us afloat. The physics of the water kept our activity to just that—kissing, kissing, beneath the insistent and all-encompassing moon.
By the time we paddled ashore, we were practically paralyzed by the cold water and the delicious, tingling frustration that might be satisfied at any moment. There was no question of continuing our makeout session on the sand—it was much too cold. Instead we shivered into our clothes, nowhere near what we needed to stay warm, retrieved our beer from the water, and headed back to camp.
The party still raged, now mostly centered around the fire. I could hear Silas’s and Brendan’s guitars, and drunken choruses of “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Peering through the smoke, I saw that Roger sat next to Brendan, leaning into him slightly as he played. Meredith was on the other side of Brendan, singing away in a sweet contralto, and I realized that even she was drunk. I took a quick inventory of the crowd and felt relieved that Mick was nowhere nearby.
Cody and I separated to go to our tents and bundle into warm clothes. “Get your sleeping bag,” he whispered, squeezing my hand and planting a kiss somewhere between my lips and nose. I squeezed back. Five minutes later I met him by the lake, bundled into my fleece jacket and wool cap, and of course carrying my sleeping bag—ever obedient. We grabbed a few more beers from the lake and headed back down our path.
The perfect beach waited for us under the perfect moon. Cody zipped our sleeping bags together, and for a while we sat on top of them, talking and drinking. The noise from the party mixed seamlessly with the buzz from the forest. We swatted mosquitoes and linked elbows, talking about swimming, school, and hometowns. Close as I felt to him, I didn’t say a word about any of the things that had been most pressing on my mind. Not Natalia and Mick. Of course not my pregnancy. After a while we crawled into the sleeping bags. Cody’s hand, still chilly, found its way under my shirt. His tongue traveled into my mouth. His hand warmed up, squeezing one breast, then the other. My head fogged and buzzed deliciously, with the beer and the blueberries and the night. The woods and the boy.
It all felt so good, so good. Nothing like Tommy, or even Greg. I could see that full moon over his shoulder. I couldn’t care less about the bugs. His hips pressed into mine. That I could reveal everything to him—my body, my desire—and not let on what I carried inside me made it all the more unreal. Cody pushed up my coat and let his tongue wind around my nipple. I closed my hands into his hair and moaned.
Cody moaned too. He slid one hand into my jeans, and then unzipped them. I realized he wasn’t wearing any pants. When had he taken off his pants? I realized that through all of this night, I hadn’t made a single move to stop him from doing anything. Shouldn’t I have at least pretended to protest? I remembered Mick’s words, which must, no matter how much he liked me, be echoing in Cody’s mind: She’s a goer.
Maybe it was true. My jeans were around my ankles. My breath panted so close to Cody’s ear, so loud and exposing, I thought I would die from wanting him inside me. I could sense him gearing up to make that plunge—his face so close to my own—and suddenly I couldn’t breathe at all. My short, encouraging breaths had somehow morphed into long and shuddering ones.
“Get off me,” I heaved. “Please. I can’t breathe.”
I started struggling against him, as if he and the sleeping bag combined to make a straitjacket. Cody pulled back immediately. I clawed at the zipper. He calmly reached over and unzipped from the other side, then threw the top bag off of me. I jumped up, pulled my jeans back on, and ran toward the lake, hyperventilating.
It was not a windy night. Cold air settled gently around my bare legs. I realized that my shirt and jacket were still bunched up above my breasts, and I pulled them down with a desperate yank. I stared out across the water, wondering if my frantic, honking breaths could be heard back at the party.
I could hear Cody behind me, approaching cautiously. He stood next to me and placed a hand on each shoulder. “Here,” he said. “Sit down.”
I lowered myself to the ground. Cody moved his hand to the back of my head and slowly pressed it down between my knees. Then he rubbed the place between my shoulder blades in light, comforting circles. “Just take it in calm,” he said. “Out with the bad, in with the good. One breath at a time. Let it slow down. You’re all right.”
Gradually my breathing went back to normal. One or two cycles of oxygen was all it took for mortification to set in. “Oh my God,” I said in a squeaky, despondent voice.
“It’s okay,” said Cody, and I started to cry.
“I can’t,” I sobbed. “I’m so sorry. I really, really want to, but I just can’t.”
“You don’t have to,” Cody whispered. “You don’t have to.”
He put his arm around me and held me close. We stared together out across the water. After a while I stopped crying, but we didn’t say anything more. We just sat there, until there was nothing left to do but zip ourselves back into the sleeping bags and cling together until the moon melted into morning sunlight, and the cool night air transfigured into dew.
chapter thirteen
cliff diving
After Silas and Jane had rowed a canoe full of empties to leave on Backwater Jack’s doorstep. After we had eaten the last can of baked beans for breakfast, and pulled down our tents, and made our bleary, hungover way to our canoes. After Cody and I had said a sheepish and awkward good-bye, letting our fingers part from each other slowly, and I had watched him row away with a pretty blond girl in the front of his canoe. After all that, we set out on our own way, back toward base camp, exactly five more days to spend on the water.
It was the hottest day yet, and I felt terrible. Physically wrecked, a hangover like I’d never experienced. My body trembled from someplace beneath my skin, a tremor that rocked my nerve endings. I tried to row from my shoulders, but my hand kept slipping off the butt of my oar. Poor Brendan, in only slightly better shape, had to propel the canoe almost entirely on his own. In the morning I had seen him and Roger come out of the same tent, with pale faces and m
essed-up hair. Clearly Brendan had used those condoms himself and was definitely the worse for wear.
But Brendan wasn’t pregnant. And for the first time in six weeks, I had to completely, entirely admit that I was. The smell of Meredith’s damn butterscotch ripped through my respiratory system like a chemical weapon. I couldn’t get that glass of lemonade out of my head. My stomach heaved with the remains of the beer and the disgusting blueberry wine. I felt like I’d developed an allergy to my own body. I felt like dying.
We stopped for lunch after only a couple of slow hours on the water, at a flat stretch of sand girded by rocky cliffs. I guessed we’d rowed barely three miles from last night’s party, but that may have just been my sudden and all-consuming pessimism warping my perception. Brendan and I dragged our canoe onto shore.
Mick and Natalia pulled up just behind us. Natalia jumped out of the canoe without looking at me and walked purposefully toward the fire. I could tell she was furious about my obvious hangover, and I braced myself for her lecture on fetal alcohol syndrome. As Mick came toward us, I also braced myself for his remarks about my behavior last night. But instead he walked over and thumped Brendan on the back.
“Dude,” he said. “Have an interesting night last night?”
Brendan and I froze. I reached out and grabbed his hand, as if the pose of us as couple could still protect him. Mick laughed. “Give it up, you two,” he said. “The cat’s out.” He smiled and rumpled Brendan’s perfect hair with what could almost be called fondness. Brendan and I looked at each other, then back at Mick.
“We thought it might bother you,” I said to Mick. I tossed the words out softly, like a hand grenade, not sure how strongly they would be lobbed back at me.
But Mick just shrugged. “I’m cool with it,” he said. “My brother’s a fag.”
Every Little Thing in the World Page 18