High and Dry

by Sarah Skilton

  “If she’s in bad shape, we’ll just file the insurance claim. That’s what it’s there for, right?” Dad said.

  I was numb. “Right.”

  “And maybe this goes without saying, but now that the holidays are over, no more drinking.”

  “Not even in moderation?” I teased.

  His smile was thin. “Not even then.”

  “Hey, Granddad’s the one who gave me the flask,” I pointed out.

  “It was a family heirloom. And times were different when he was growing up.”

  I nodded shortly, acutely aware of the spiked thermos of coffee in my backpack.

  “What do you say we catch Blood of Mars this week?” Dad said. “There’s a preview on Wednesday night. Could take your mind off things.”

  When I was younger, Dad and I bonded over sci-fi movies and TV shows. We watched everything from Star Trek: Next Generation reruns to Battlestar Galactica and Starship Troopers. We went to the comic store every Wednesday, when new issues of X-Men arrived, and spent an hour perusing our favorite titles.

  But that was before we moved to Palm Valley, and I’d had to reinvent myself as an athlete to survive.

  As for Blood of Mars, I’d been planning to take Ellie’s little brother, Jonathan, to the sneak preview. By indulging his own nerdish qualities without revealing my own, I’d scored massive points with Ellie. In her view, it was even sweeter for me to provide this act of charity, considering I was a jock who supposedly couldn’t tell a Klingon from a Na’vi and loathed being around anyone who could.

  “Can I get back to you on that?” I asked Dad.

  He clapped his hand on my shoulder. “Of course. Go get ’em today.”

  It felt good hearing that my dad didn’t suspect me. I’d been pretty sure he didn’t, but having proof of his unconditional trust was still nice.

  I had library duty first thing, so I slid behind the information desk and logged on to the school server to check the Web site of the local paper, the Palm Valley Register. They jam our smartphones on campus (another one of my mom’s initiatives), but the library’s connection is sound.

  To save money, the school has our librarian only come in three days a week, and the rest of the time the staff consists of senior monitors like me and a rotating schedule of volunteer teachers.

  The sun had risen just high enough to cast slanted lines on my desk through the blinds. Part of my body was in light and part in shadow.

  My library gig was punishment for an altercation in the stairwell last November. I’d caught a creeper named Carl trying to look up girls’ skirts. I’d stomped his camera and shoved him against the wall but stopped short of actually hurting him; Ellie hated violence. No witnesses came forward against me because the girls who saw were all happy I’d done it. In retrospect, I should’ve noticed Ellie wasn’t among my supporters. Maybe that’s when things started to go sour.

  Despite the lack of witnesses, Carl had evidence on his side, in the form of cracked camera equipment—a piece of which was lodged in my soccer cleats. I didn’t mind doing time because the library sounded like peace and quiet. For the most part, it was. My shift didn’t officially start for another twenty minutes, and I enjoyed the solitude.

  The local crime blotter had been updated with a cursory mention of my troubles. Maria Salvador’s parents urged anyone with information on their daughter’s overdose to come forward. She was eighteen, so they included her name and photo, culled from last year’s yearbook. With a pang of regret, I realized she was the sad girl with the dark eyes from the party. Guess she’d found that tragedy she was looking for. Should I have talked to her? Asked her what was making her so sad?

  She was in choir with Maria Posey, but Maria Salvador looked nothing like her blond, blue-eyed namesake.

  “We call them Sound of Music Maria and West Side Story Maria,” said a wry voice.

  I looked up. Bridget. She was flushed and a little out of breath. “If we’re feeling generous, that is,” she added. “Most of the time we call them Maria and Other Maria.”

  “Why don’t you call them by their last names? That’s what guys would do.”

  She looked at me like I was stupid. “Because then no one would feel bad.”

  She tossed my cell phone onto the desk. It bounced once, and I winced before pocketing it.

  “You left this in my car last night. Threw it, actually,” said Bridget. “Before calling me a starter girlfriend.”

  She was a hangover’s hangover: annoying in and of herself as well as a reminder of my own less-than-chivalrous behavior the evening before. I took a deep breath. “Sorry for what I said last night. I didn’t mean it, about using you to get to Ellie. I was drunk.”

  She picked up my dirty coffee, took a sip, and made a face. “You’re still drunk. Do you mean what you’re saying now?”

  “I’m less drunk. I’m 73.5 percent sober,” I said. “And I am sorry for what I said. What we had—it was fun, I just wasn’t ready—”

  She rolled her eyes. “I know. It’s okay.”

  “Then why’d you slap me?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never slapped anyone before. I thought it might be fun.”

  “Was it?” I asked, with an edge.

  She laughed. “See, this, right here, is why I couldn’t be with you. It’s not because you didn’t want to have sex sophomore year. I mean, that’s part of it. It’s because you’re always apologizing. The boy who got drunk and spiteful last night? Him, I like. But you … We’re just not a good fit when you’re regular you.”

  Glad to have that over with, I jerked my head toward the computer screen. “You think West Side Story Maria’s gonna be okay?” (I refused to call her “Other Maria.”)

  Bridget shrugged. “She took a lot of LSD. I hear it messes with your spine, and sticks there, and you could have flashbacks, for, like, years.”

  “A spine is somewhat vital,” I agreed. I’d read in the paper that a dissociative fugue state causes loss of identity, and could last days or even months. It sounded horrifying.

  “She knew the risks.”

  I was taken aback. “Harsh. I thought you songbirds all flocked together in a loving V-formation.”

  “You and your soccer buddies always see jock-to-jock?” she countered.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Okay, here’s my official reaction.” Eyes wide, emeralds aglitter, breathy voice: “‘It’s awful what happened. I can barely function.’” She grinned. “That’s what I’m telling the sheriff’s department later.”

  “You’re talking to them later?”

  “Everyone is. Everyone at the party, anyway. I just passed the front office, and I heard Jeffries agree to let them interrogate people all day as long as parents are present. The stay-at-home round-robin emergency callers have never been this wet.”

  I took a sip of my spiked coffee. I’d felt I deserved it after my personal visit from the authorities this morning.

  “It was my car that dropped her at the hospital after the overdose,” I said carefully, hardly believing the words as they fell out of my mouth. “Apparently, I barely hit the brakes before peeling away. May as well have the word ‘guilty’ spray painted on the hood.”

  Her eyes widened again, taking up even more of her face, which I didn’t think was possible. “They think you did it? No way.”

  “Yeah. I might have to lawyer up.” My hands shook.

  “Wow, Dix. You suddenly got interesting again.”

  “Fuck off,” I said mildly. “They’ll dust the car for prints and find someone else’s on top of mine, and I’ll be home free,” I added, with a bravado I didn’t possess. “And, once she stops hallucinating, she’ll tell everyone it wasn’t me.”

  “If she stops hallucinating. I heard an urban legend once, about a drug messenger who kept the product in his sock. It seeped through to his skin, several tabs of it, and sent him to the asylum.”

  “I stopped listening at ‘urban legend,’” I lied.

 
; “There’s not much you can do to clear your name.”

  “Everyone at the party saw you give me a ride in your car,” I protested.

  “No, they saw you give your keys to Ellie. No reason you couldn’t have come back to the party later. No one’s gonna stick their neck out for you, not when it’ll help deflect blame from them.”

  If Bridget felt any sympathy for me, she was extremely good at hiding it. She flipped a chair around and straddled it, propping her elbows onto the information desk. “Anyway. Enough chitchat. I’m here because I need your help.”

  I frowned. “With what?”

  “Friday morning I left my flash drive in one of the computers here, and when I came back to grab it, it was gone.”

  “What’s on it?”

  “Only my college application essay.” She groaned. “Someone stole it! And now all they have to do is replace my name with theirs and they’re golden. They can snake my spot at some school and no one will ever know.”

  I walked out from behind the information desk and motioned for Bridget to sit with me at an empty table.

  “Did you check all the computers?” I said.

  “Yes, Dix, I checked all the computers,” she said, insulted. “It’s not here.” She pointed to the left. “I was seated in the corner by the window.”

  “You checked your backpack, your locker—”

  “Do I look like a child?”

  Um. Definitely not. “When were you here?”

  “Second period.”

  I chewed on my pen cap for a second. “For study hall?”

  “Yes. I was editing my essay, smoothing out the rough spots, rearranging sentences. I had everything else for my application done and ready to go. If I can’t find it, I’ll be stuck getting a bachelor of arts at frigging Lambert.”

  She knew full well that’s where I was going. “You’ll always be B.S. material to me, Bridge.”

  “Cute.”

  “You didn’t back up the file?”

  “No.”

  “Not at home, not on e-mail?”

  “Are you trying to make me feel worse? Because you’re really good at it.”

  “I’m good at a lot of things,” I remarked. “Or did you forget?”

  She smirked. “Only because I taught you. I didn’t back it up, okay? I was stupid. But I need that essay.”

  “Can’t you rewrite it or something?”

  “Oh my God. Do you understand what a college essay is? It’s all amorphous nonsense. But I had the nonsense exactly how I wanted it, and I can’t re-create a month’s work in four days! The deadline for UC Irvine is Friday!”

  “The deadline for UC Irvine was November 30th. Try again.”

  “Okay, jeez. Make me say it: The essay’s for a scholarship. Happy now? If I don’t get my essay back, I won’t be going to college.”

  “Look, if you did leave your flash drive behind, anyone could’ve taken it,” I said.

  “I know. That’s why I need your help. You can access the log-ins, right? Find out who was here second period?”

  For a while, people were stealing books off the shelves, so now everyone who came into the library had to swipe their student ID card as they walked in, even if they didn’t plan on checking out anything.

  I shook my head. “It only tells me their ID number; it doesn’t say who it belongs to.”

  She waved that issue away. “I know a guy who can translate those. So you’ll help me, right?”

  Bridget leaned in, allowing me a glimpse down her full-to-bursting blouse. Her leg rubbed against mine beneath the table, like a matchstick looking to ignite, and she implored me with her huge green eyes.

  “Tell me this,” I said. “All that stuff you piled on thick last night, about waiting for me to be single again? Did you really want to get back together, or did you just think if we were back together, I’d help you find your flash drive today?”

  “I figured it couldn’t hurt,” she admitted. “I saw you at the party, remembered you worked at the library, and thought I’d sweeten you up before springing a favor on my once-and-future boyfriend.”

  “I could help,” I said slowly, shaking her loose and standing up, “but why would I?”

  “You’d do it for Ellie,” she pouted.

  I stared her straight in the eyes, just so there was no mistaking what I was about to say, and the degree to which I meant it. “I would do anything for Ellie.”

  She looked genuinely hurt for a second. “So the answer’s no?”

  “The answer’s no. I’ve got too much going on with soccer. We have a big game Friday against Agua Dulce.”

  Bridget stared at me for a second. “Hmm,” she said. “I was afraid of this.”

  My hands started shaking again. “Of what?”

  “Of you refusing. Go ahead and take a look at your cell phone.”

  I felt a slow, icy dread crawl up my spine. “What do you mean?”

  “Look at your text message history,” she articulated calmly.

  I took out my phone and sat back down. Tapped the messages icon and scrolled through it.

  There were twenty texts from Bridget to me, all time-stamped from last night. That wasn’t the horrifying part. The horrifying part was the twenty texts from me to her in return.

  Apparently, I was bringing sexy back. In explicit detail.

  “Find my flash drive by the scholarship deadline Friday afternoon, or Ellie gets an eyeful,” said Bridget.

  “You’re blackmailing me!”

  “You didn’t give me a choice.”

  I clenched my fist beneath the table. “She dumped me. Why would she care?”

  “You care, though, don’t you? You think you still have a chance.”

  Her smugness knew no bounds. She wasn’t the cat who ate the canary—she was the cat who bred canaries in captivity and force-fed them to each other, then had a foie gras–style feast off one epic, stuffed bird.

  I shook my head, incredulous. “You sat there in your room all night, pretend-sexting me, and using my phone to write back?”

  “It’s pretty basic, Dix. But thanks, I thought it was clever.”

  I laughed for like two hours. Leaned back in my seat and clasped my hands behind my head.

  It made her nervous. “What? Why are you laughing?”

  “You stupid, horrible … I could hate-kiss you.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve given me an alibi!”

  It took her a second to realize I was right.

  “Show these to the sheriff’s deputy. Don’t show them to Ellie,” I ordered.

  Bridget’s dark red lips parted in a wide smile, exposing her teeth. “Guess that means you’re helping me.”

  I guessed it did.

  RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

  AFTER MOM’S TRIUMPH WITH FRESH START, MY PARENTS could’ve moved on to the next town to work their magic, but Granddad enjoyed having us nearby, and my dad enjoyed his position teaching at Lambert College. Plus, I think they wanted to keep me in the district to prove Fresh Start was a success: “Look! Palm Valley has such a wondrous school system now, we want our own kid to attend. We would never dream of leaving!”

  What my mom and Fresh Start failed to comprehend was that the teachers were only half the problem. The real reason everyone had been bombing tests and never participating in class was because they were terrified of upperclassmen. The bullying of freshmen and sophomores was a religion and a sport, with the combined zealotry of each.

  If, as a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old, you’re constantly calculating which route in the hallway is least likely to lead to disfigurement or dismemberment, or wondering who’ll steal and destroy your homework assignment, piss in your lunch bag, “decorate” your locker, or follow you home for more secluded beatings, it’s tough to give a crap about your grades.

  So how do you stop bullying? By giving everyone a group to run with; a group to call home; a group to protect them. From the moment freshmen arrive now, they belong to something. A t
eam. A program. An after-school extracurricular.

  The second to last week of eighth grade, boosters from the high school show up in the parking lot to recruit prospects. Competition is fierce. Over the summer you can change your mind, but you have to have something else lined up, or someone to swap with who won’t stab you in the back at the last second. The first, best, and only hope for survival is to claim an identity as quickly as possible before stepping on campus.

  It doesn’t really matter what you choose; it just matters that you choose, or else you’ll be orphaned and labeled a nomad, ripe for exploitation and daily beatings, and no one—I mean, no one—can protect you.

  Upperclassmen aren’t supposed to interact with freshmen or sophomores unless they have permission from your group. Anyone who violates this rule is subject to lawless vengeance, appropriate to the size of the violation and the temperament of the group that’s been provoked.

  The library is no-man’s-land, and by junior year the rules loosen up a little. Senior year, anyone in your class can interact unless the leader of a group’s put out an injunction against you.

  As head songbird, Sound of Music Maria could’ve banned me from her party, but I think she found it entertaining to watch me flounder and drown.

  It was obvious who your group was. You moved in packs, between classes, before school, after school, on the weekends. Without a group, you were a sitting duck.

  Ryder Lennox was the most gifted athlete at Tumbleweed Junior High. He was a shoo-in for any sport, in high school and beyond. We became friends during sixth-grade Little League, but we both chose soccer for our group freshman year of high school.

  I was accepted to the team no problem, but Ryder got orphaned from sports after failing the drug test. With no one to protect him, he spent all his time fending off attacks from upperclassmen. One-on-one he might’ve been okay, but the fights were always lopsided. I tried to help him, but I was tied up in soccer every day. If I walked with him in the hall, bullies had to leave us alone or face the wrath of every cleat and beckham, but Ryder hated having a babysitter, hated relying on anyone.