Freefall Summer

by Tracy Barrett

Denny: Sounds good. Meet there or should I pick you up?

  Me: Better if you pick me up. I’m not home right now, but I’ll be there by five

  I would tell my dad this wasn’t a date so he wouldn’t think I was cheating on Theo. I’d remind him that Denny was new in town and I was just being friendly. I’d also tell him that Denny was eighteen, and he was in college, and that he and his father had rebuilt his car. That would be sure to impress my dad; he liked boys who did things like work on cars.

  I finished texting Denny my address just as Julia came back. I hastily dropped my phone in my purse. I must have looked furtive, though, because once again, she pounced.

  “How’s Denny?” she asked.

  “What makes you think I was texting Denny?”

  My innocent act didn’t work, and she teased me mercilessly all the way to the pool. We were spending the rest of the afternoon there to celebrate her last day of freedom. To my surprise and Julia’s indignation, her mom had told her that far from being allowed to quit her part-time job at the miniature-golf place, Julie had to work full-time. I thought her mom was probably sick of having her hanging around the Estrogen Palace all the time.

  It was strange being at the pool without Theo. When he was lifeguarding I could feel his presence in the tall chair, even though he couldn’t talk to me. After work he’d dive into the pool to cool off, and I loved watching him hoist his long, lean body out of the water, knowing that other girls were watching him and knowing that I was his girlfriend, not one of them.

  Julia and I swam a few laps and then stayed in the shallow end, draped over floats. Since it was a weekday, there were mostly little kids and moms in the water, with lots of shrieking and calls of “Marco!” “Polo!” I left Julia with her float and swam more laps.

  “I’m getting out,” I told Julia when I passed her and went to stretch out on a chaise. She followed, toweling herself off. She wore a yellow bikini that fit her curves to perfection and showed off her brown skin, and the boys and few men there followed her with their eyes as she plopped herself down next to me.

  “You’re attracting attention,” I told her as she lay back.

  “Too bad Justin isn’t here,” she said. “A little jealousy is good for a guy.”

  “You think?” I always thought that making a guy jealous was childish, but what did I know? Whatever Julia and Justin were doing, it had worked for a long time. Theo and I had only been together for—I counted—almost five months. Maybe I could learn from her.

  “Absolutely,” she went on. “It might be really good for your relationship with Theo if you dropped some hints about Denny.”

  “There’s nothing to drop hints about.”

  She sighed theatrically. “I don’t believe you, but even if you’re telling the truth, there’s no harm in making Theo think there is something going on.”

  “I don’t see why, and besides, it’s childish to play games.”

  “Oh, but playing games is fun! Why do you think they call it playing? Everyone does it anyway, and besides, it works. Men don’t know what they’ve got until they think they’re going to lose it.”

  I propped myself up on one elbow and looked at her. “And you like that? When they get territorial?”

  She shaded her eyes with one hand and looked back at me. “You bet. Don’t you?”

  I lay back and considered this. “I guess I don’t like to think of myself as territory to be defended.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “It’s nice to feel like you belong together and that he doesn’t like the thought of you being interested in someone else. Don’t you think?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t feel like arguing. “I’m getting a snack. You want something?”

  We had some chips and soda and went back in the water a few times, and then we walked back to my house and Julia drove home.

  I couldn’t wait to take off my clammy suit and get in the shower. But I had to wait, as it turned out. My dad was shaving in the bathroom, so I stripped off my suit in my room and put on my bathrobe. The smell of chlorine filled the tiny space. When we first moved to this house right before I started kindergarten, it had been plenty big, even with three of us. Now the two of us barely fit.

  I checked texts and email. Denny said he’d see me soon.

  I hoped he hadn’t left yet. I went and pounded on the bathroom door. “Dad! I need to get ready to go out!”

  “Hold your horses,” he called through the door.

  “If you don’t hurry up, I’ll still be here when you and Elise are cooking,” I threatened.

  “Heaven forbid,” he said in mock terror, and in a minute he was out and I could finally wash off the pool water.

  I was still drying my hair when the doorbell rang. I hadn’t had a chance to tell my dad that Denny was picking me up, and it was strange that when I’d said I was going out, he hadn’t asked me where I was going, who I was going with, and when I was going to be back. He must really like Elise.

  I turned off the hair dryer and heard my dad’s footsteps heading toward the door. I groaned. I hoped he wouldn’t say anything stupid. It wasn’t like Denny and I were going on a date. For all I knew, Denny had a girlfriend back home, or he was already seeing someone from his lab. We had never talked about that kind of thing.

  I couldn’t get from the bathroom to my room without being seen from the den, so I figured I might as well get my hair and makeup done before coming out. Denny had only seen me in DZ mode, and for once I wanted to look decent in front of him. “Be right out!” I called to my dad, to Denny, to both of them, I guessed, and hurried. I didn’t want my dad to get chatty and say something about me being in high school, or even worse, about Denny driving to pick Travis up. Or worse still, about Theo. When I was done, I tightened the belt on my bathrobe and came out.

  They were sitting in the den, talking. Denny glanced up at me, and he didn’t have a terror-stricken look. My dad must not have been doing his usual interrogation about how long Denny had been driving or lecturing him about drinking and driving, and then giving Denny his cell number “in case of problems.” And he wasn’t glowering, so Denny must not have mentioned that I’d been the driver on Travis day. Phew.

  “Sorry,” I said. “My dad was hogging the bathroom.” I made a face at my dad and he made one back. Phew again. He was in a good mood. “I’ll just be another minute.”

  Denny stood up when I came back. “Ready?”

  I flashed him a smile. “Finally, right? Sorry,” I said again. “Bye, Dad. Have fun!”

  Denny reached the door first and held it for me, and I ran down the steps before my dad could call me back on some pretext and either grill me about Denny or lecture me about being careful.

  As I settled into the passenger seat, I realized that I should have noticed before that this car wasn’t some rich kid’s graduation present. There was no new-car smell and the upholstery was worn. “What were you and my dad talking about?” I asked.

  “Mostly about the lab. He was interested in what I did there and what I was going to study.”

  “Did you tell him psych?”

  “I said pre-med. It’s close enough and parents always like it.”

  “Turn right,” I directed, and for the rest of the drive I showed him my personal landmarks. We passed the church where my Girl Scout troop used to meet. I told him that Angie had told my dad I needed female role models who didn’t jump out of airplanes, so he put me in Brownies the next day. Then came the house where my first best friend, Alex, had lived until she moved to Michigan right before I met Julia; next was my old elementary school, where some boys were shooting hoops next to the swing set that Theo and I had played on right before he left for Idaho. I felt myself flush when I glimpsed the path leading to the passion pit and wished I had left the playground out of the tour. I kept my face turned away from it and pointed out a supposedly haunted house.

  We passed the big brick high school. Denny said it looked like something out of an old TV show. In
another minute we reached town, if you could call it that. “You can park anywhere,” I told him.

  Inside Manuelito’s I looked around for a table. No luck. In fact, there was a line inside the door. I groaned and turned to Denny. “Want to try someplace else?”

  “I was all set for Mexican.” He surveyed the crowd. “Is there another Mexican place in town?”

  “Nope. Not unless you count drive-throughs.”

  “How about this—let’s get something to go, and we’ll have a picnic?”

  “Good idea. I recommend the flautas.” I pulled a menu out of its holder at the hostess station.

  We ordered, and then I wasn’t surprised when Julia’s familiar voice called my name. She and Justin were sitting in the back. I waved, but I knew she wouldn’t let me get away with that, and sure enough she gestured at me to come over.

  “I need to go say hi to my friends,” I said, but instead of waiting for me, Denny came along.

  “Denny, these are Julia and Justin.” Julia’s eyes sprung wide at the name, and she looked meaningfully from me to him and back to me again. I ignored her, though my face turned hot. “Denny’s doing an AFF course at my dad’s drop zone.”

  “What’s AFF?” Justin asked, and while Denny was explaining, Julia beckoned me to lean over.

  “Cuuuute,” she said under cover of the conversations and music.

  “Jules, please don’t say anything about Theo, and don’t let Justin either. Denny doesn’t—”

  “Do you think I’m stupid? Of course I won’t.”

  “And don’t say anything to Theo either. Denny’s just a friend.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “And Julia…” I leaned in closer. “He thinks I’m in college, so don’t say anything about school, okay?”

  “But he’s just a friend, hmm?” She cocked her head and grinned.

  “Seriously, Julia—”

  “Clancy, they’re calling our order.” Denny was a lot closer than I had thought, and I fervently hoped he hadn’t overheard us.

  “We’ve got to go.” I forced a smile at Julia and Justin. “See you.”

  “Get it while it’s hot!” Julia said, and Justin winked at me. I wished the two of them would cut it out. I waved and followed Denny back to the takeout counter. He was taking his wallet out.

  “Hey, I invited you,” I protested. “I’m paying. Anyway, you paid for lunch last weekend. And you had to drive all the way here.”

  “No way,” Denny said. “You rescued me from ramen noodles for dinner.”

  “I thought you said Chinese takeout.”

  “I was trying to impress you. I thought takeout didn’t sound as pathetic as ramen.”

  “Let’s at least split it.” We paid, and I felt Julia’s eyes on me as we left, but I didn’t turn around.

  I must have exhaled louder than I meant to when we got outside, because Denny looked at me curiously. “Problem?”

  “I don’t care if she’s my best friend,” I said. “Sometimes I could kill her.”

  He unlocked the driver’s side door. “Best friends do that to you. Sometimes I could kill Frederick too.” He pulled up the lock on the passenger door. After I sat down, he handed me the food bags. They were so hot I had to hold them off my lap as I directed him to a picnic area in the park next to the playground, the one farthest away from the passion pit.

  “How’s Frederick doing, anyway?” I asked.

  “Not so good. They’ve pumped him full of steroids because of the graft-versus-host thing and it makes him jumpy. Plus, he’s covered in hives and they’re really itchy. His mom couldn’t even talk to me about it, she was so upset. His brother texted me.”

  I didn’t know what to say. On an impulse I reached over and put my hand on top of his, where it rested on his thigh. His leg twitched a little, and then he turned his hand palm up and held mine until he had to shift gears.

  I chose a spot that was in the open so that Denny wouldn’t think I was taking him to a private area on purpose. We sat down on a bench near the pond, but as soon as the ducks saw us, they bustled out of the water and ran at us, their tails waggling and their beaks open. They made an awful noise, and I knew they wouldn’t let us eat in peace. We grabbed our paper bags and ran back to the car just ahead of them. “So where to now?” Denny asked as the disappointed ducks waddled back down to the water, complaining loudly.

  “There are more tables around that way.” He drove where I pointed. A family was at the next picnic area, grilling something while three kids ran around playing, so we kept going until we finally found a vacant one tucked under a big tree. It was more secluded than I’d been aiming for, but it would have to do.

  One of the Manuelito’s bags had gotten wet and was starting to split, so we unloaded it carefully. Denny had flautas and a taco, and I had flautas and chile relleno. There were chips and salsa, a lot of napkins, and two Cokes. Mine was marked for no ice, which was convenient because the ice in Denny’s had long since melted. “See?” I said. “Another advantage of Coke sans ice. They’re both lukewarm now, but yours is lukewarm and watered down.”

  “I bow to your superior Coke knowledge. From now on, no ice for me either.” He held up his cup, and I touched mine to it.

  We didn’t talk a lot while we ate. “Like it?” I wiped my mouth.

  “Umph. Tons better than ramen. You were right about the flautas. But there was too much.” He untangled his legs from the picnic-table bench and started to sit on the grass.

  “Don’t!” I warned him. “Chiggers!”

  He paused. “What’s that?”

  “You don’t have them in Colorado?”

  “Never heard of them. What are they?”

  “Microscopic little bugs that itch worse than a mosquito bite. And they always seem to bite you in places you can’t scratch in public.”

  He looked around. “But if I don’t lie down, I’ll burst!”

  I patted the picnic table. “They can’t jump.” He looked dubious, like he thought I was kidding about the chiggers, but he lay down on his back on the table. I joined him, keeping a careful distance between us. We lay in silence for a few minutes.

  “So why skydiving?” I asked him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why didn’t you and Frederick plan to go bungee jumping or hang gliding or scuba diving or something? I mean, there are lots of ways to get a thrill.”

  “I guess we figured bungee jumping was something you did once just to say you did it. Every bungee jump you do after that would be the same as the first one. And scuba diving—you can kind of ease into it by snorkeling or something, you know? But from your very first jump, skydiving is all or nothing. You can keep doing it, and then when you’re good, it becomes like a sport.”

  “Not like a sport,” I corrected him. “It is a sport. It takes lots of skill.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to convince me of that! I can’t believe how much Louisa and Randy can do in freefall. I’d like to be able to do even half of that someday.”

  “So you’ll keep coming to Knoxton?”

  “At least this summer,” he said. “I don’t know how much time I’ll have once school starts.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “I need you out there to keep me from going crazy.”

  “Packing rigs all summer isn’t your idea of fun?”

  “It’s not bad,” I said. “There are worse jobs, even if they don’t involve monkey poop.”

  He groaned. “Don’t remind me! But at least there are interesting people at the DZ. Cynthia’s cool, and I like Louisa. And I can tell how much you like Randy.”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “I love Randy. I just wish I loved him half as much as he loves himself. But it gets old spending all summer with my dad.”

  He turned to face me and propped himself up on one elbow. “You could make a jump to pass the time, you know.”

  That was so unexpected that I didn’t know what to say. Denny waited, but when I didn’t answer, he said, “Is it
really your dad, or do you not want to?”

  “I don’t know if I want to. I’ve always felt like it was something that wasn’t open to me, you know? So I haven’t even thought about it. It’s like…” I tried to think of something to compare it to. “It’s like if you had, I don’t know, diabetes and you didn’t know whether you didn’t want ice cream because you knew you couldn’t, or because you really didn’t want it. I’m sorry, that makes no sense. But it’s kind of like I have no-jump syndrome, and I can’t tell if—”

  “Because if it’s only because of your dad,” Denny said, “why don’t you make a jump someplace else?”

  “Make a jump someplace else?” I sat up.

  “Why not?” Denny stared up at the sky, his arms behind his head. “That other place, the Jump Ranch…it isn’t too far away, right? And you already know all about jumping and the safety procedures, right? From watching all those classes? It’s like you already took the class a hundred times. So if the planes are okay, like you said they were, it should be just as safe as Knoxton.”

  It was very simple why I couldn’t make a jump someplace else. I’d have to prove I was eighteen, even at the loosey-goosey Jump Ranch, and when I couldn’t, they wouldn’t let me make a jump, not even a tandem. Maybe I should tell Denny how old I really am, I thought. It was bound to come out sometime, like if someone at the DZ said something to me about going back to Hawkins High or asked if I was thinking about where I was going to apply to college.

  “I’m not…” But I stopped. The problem was that I liked Denny thinking I was older than I was. I liked the way he treated me, as though I could take care of myself without a big strong man to protect me.

  “You’re not what?”

  “I’m not sure I want to.”

  He propped himself up on his elbows. “Really?”

  I thought about my observer ride with Norton, and how much fun it had been to play in the clouds. I thought of the whoops and hollers of students as they landed, how their faces were shiny, how they felt triumphant, even though with a tandem jump they hadn’t really done anything.

  “If you decide you want to,” Denny said, “just let me know. I’ll drive you out there.”