Eli’s eyes flew open. The smell of rain clouds reached her, then the rumble of thunder, the roar of a river unleashed. The rush of water filled her ears as Eli’s body shifted, blurred, shimmered in the fading light. He rose above her, reeling back on the muscular coils of his body, a great snake, a serpent of gleaming white scales, his head like a nodding dragon, his back split by iridescent fins that spread like wings behind him.
“Eli…” she tried to say, but the sound that left her mouth wasn’t human.
She raised a hand to her throat, but her arms were too short, the wrong shape. She turned and felt her body, strange and strong, thrash through the shallows, as her back arched.
In the sunlit water, she glimpsed her reflection, her scales deep gray and alive with rainbows, her fins the bruised violet of twilight, a veil of starlight cast against the darkening sky. She was monstrous. She was lovely.
It was her last human thought. She was diving into the water. She was curled around … who was this? Eli. The dim echo of a name, something more ancient and unpronounceable, lived at the base of her brain. It didn’t matter. She could feel the slide of his scales over hers as they slipped deeper into the lake, into the pull of the current, together.
HEART
When they found her bicycle leaning against a pine near Little Spindle, Annalee did her best to explain to Gracie’s mother. Of course, her mother still called the police. They even sent divers into the lake. The search was fruitless, though one of them claimed that something far too big to be a fish had brushed up against his leg.
Gracie and Eli had summers, three perfect months every year, to feel the grass beneath their feet and the sun on their bare human shoulders. They picked a new city each summer, but they returned most often to Manhattan, where they’d visit with Annalee and Gracie’s flummoxed mother in a penthouse on the Upper East Side, and try not to stare at their beautiful host with her running-water skin and river-green eyes.
When fall came, they shed their names with their bodies and traveled the waters of the world. The lake hated to give them up. She threatened to freeze solid and bind them there, but they were two now—sinewy and gleaming—monsters of the deep, with lashing tales and glittering eyes, and the force they created between them smashed old rules and new arguments. They slipped down the Mohawk to the Hudson, past the river god with his sloped gray shoulders, and out into the Atlantic. They met polar bears in the Arctic, frightened manatees near the Florida Keys. They curled together in a knot, watching the dream lights of jellyfish off the coast of Australia.
Sometimes, if they spotted a passenger leaning on the rails of a freighter by himself, they might even let themselves be seen. They’d breach the waves, let the moonlight catch their hides, and the stranger would stand for a moment—mouth agape, heart alive, his loneliness forgotten.
I don’t realize how early I am until I open the door. The rows of desks and chairs are empty, the room is silent, and Mr. Trout peers at me from behind the podium.
“It’s been a few years,” he says. “I got a note that you’re auditing this class?”
“Yeah. I want to brush up.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. My future?”
He laughs. “I’m not supposed to say this, but you don’t really need this stuff for your future. You need it for high school. It’s a box to check, and you’ve already checked it. Perfectly, if I’m remembering correctly.”
“Maybe I just want to feel really good at something.” I cross the room and claim a front-row desk. “Maybe I just happen to love geometry.”
“All right. Whatever floats your boat, Flora. But I have never in my career had a student repeat a class for fun. And during summer.”
He turns to the window, the bright morning light streaming in as if to prove my foolishness. But I look instead to the stacks of geometry textbooks on his desk, and I swear, the sight of them sends beams of light straight to my heart.
“I can pass these out,” I offer.
“Sure,” he says.
As I’m centering them at each desk, placing the bright yellow textbook checkout slips inside each cover, I send silent thank yous to Jessica for letting me do this. It was the last week of school, and the impending summer at home with my parents—with both of my best friends away the whole time (Rachel working at a summer camp in Tahoe, Tara in Barcelona with her cousins)—was closing in on me. It was like a creeping fog. So much heaviness. “What do you need?” Jessica asked me. Even she wouldn’t be here for me over the summer break, and my weekly visits to her office had become the best part of school. I was going to miss the way she touched her fingertips together when she asked me questions, and her plants by her window, and even her tissue box, perched next to me like a suggestion to cry. I told her I didn’t know what I needed.
And then I said, “Actually, maybe I need summer school. A reason to get out of the house every day. Homework, so I can stay in my room whenever I’m home.”
“I don’t know what we’re offering this summer…” she said, opening her laptop and pulling up the schedule. “Too bad there isn’t art or theater.”
“What about geometry?” I asked.
She cocked her head. “Aren’t you in trig?”
“Maybe I could audit.”
Her fingers tapped the keyboard. “Tim—Mr. Trout—he’s teaching it on the Potrero campus.”
I smiled. Even better. He was my teacher the first time I took it, my freshman year. He’s the one who first talked about axes and symmetry.
“Perfect,” I said, and she enrolled me right then. She made it so easy, even though it wouldn’t have made sense to any other adult.
I finish passing out the books, and Mr. Trout and I make small talk for a few minutes, until he tells me, “Okay, go take a lap. I need a few minutes to plan the first lesson.”
I leave my backpack on a front row desk and head to the corridor. For a week or two, when I was a freshman, I rode the bus here after school to hang out in the front quad with Blake. He liked to stand with his arm around me. I liked being mysterious, the girl from Baker High. All these random kids would come up to me and ask if I knew their cousins or exes or friends, and I would say yes and yes and yes, and Blake’s arm would be there around my waist the whole time, and I usually liked having it there.
I never got past the front quad then, so I give myself a tour now. The main buildings are squat, a faded blue, and behind them are rolling hills, golden with summer. I trace the campus’s edges, along the basketball court and the pool and the administration wing, and the morning is so bright, and I’m glad to be here, about to learn something I already know. I reach the parking lot. Heading toward the stairs to the campus entrance is a group of three kids, and my breath catches.
They’re taller now. A little wilder. Louder.
Travis stops walking and squints at me.
“Hey,” Mimi says. Her hair is the same length as it was then, but now part of one side is buzzed short. Her cutoff overalls are only clasped on the right, the left buckle dangling. I feel my face get hot at the sight of her. “It’s you. Blake’s ex-girlfriend.”
I force a laugh. “I didn’t realize that month of my life would define me forever.”
Hope, still kind, says, “Our long lost Flora!”
“Hi, you guys,” I say.
“Please tell us you’re here for geometry,” Travis says.
I nod because I can’t speak. Sharing a class with them was the furthest thing from what I imagined when I thought about what summer school would offer me. When I chose this class, I was choosing shapes and logic, angles and numbers, strangers and anonymity. Not this gang of three who I never thought I’d see again. Not this girl whose presence makes my head tingle and my hands shake. Even though I’m trying to look anywhere else, I can’t help but stare at the bare skin of Mimi’s hip, between where her overalls end and her tank top begins, as I follow the three of them up the stairs.
When I was a freshman and stood i
n this same quad with Blake, I knew that it would never last between us. Even when I was enjoying the feeling of his arm around me. Even when I liked the way he looked at me, liked being his girlfriend. Because, even then, certain truths about myself were floating up from the depths of my heart. Standing right here, now, in the corridor outside of a class I don’t need to take, those truths flare up again. Because Mimi Park was what dislodged them in the first place.
Back then she always had at least one earbud in, and often she’d be looking into the distance, and her head would bob so slightly it would have been imperceptible to anyone who wasn’t riveted by her. Once she asked me if I’d heard a certain song, and I said no, and she took the right side out and fit it, gently, in my ear. It was Nirvana, “Come as You Are.” Kurt Cobain had been dead for almost twenty years, and I’d heard of him but never heard him, and now he was singing to both of us at the same time. Only us. His voice in her left ear, my right one. We listened through the whole song, right there in the quad, and I smiled and nodded early on so that she wouldn’t take it away, but after that I couldn’t look at her face anymore. Too much happened when our eyes met. I looked at my Converse and a gum wrapper. I looked at her Vans and a yellow flower growing through the concrete. The guitar sounded like it was being played underwater. The lyrics were confusing and contradictory, a lot like standing with your boyfriend’s arm around you while sharing earbuds with a girl you wished you were kissing.
When the song was over, she reached to my ear and took it out.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“It was good,” I said.
And now it’s the summer after junior year, and I’m remembering what it was like to be chosen out of a quad swarming with people to listen to a song. I’m remembering asking her if she’d be at homecoming, and how she’d said something about going camping. I’m remembering how hard I cried when I broke up with Blake, and how so much of the sadness was about losing those afternoons on the Potrero High campus and the riot of light that filled me each time I saw Mimi in the distance.
We’ve reached the classroom door. They cross the threshold ahead of me and head toward the back. If I had my bag still slung over my shoulder, I would stay in their group and sit back there, too, but my stuff is at the desk in the front, where I left it. I would have to cross the room, gather my things, and then go back to see if a desk next to them was still empty. I don’t know if they want me there, adding a fourth member to their group, so I sit where my stuff is. Maybe tomorrow can be different.
Mr. Trout stands at the whiteboard. I thought he needed to prepare for his lesson, but instead he used the time to draw a giant fish on the board, covered in scales. When he has everyone’s attention, he writes a “Mr.” right before the tip of the fish’s nose.
“Welcome to summer school,” he says, but the rush of calm I imagined from being here doesn’t come, because Mimi is also here, sitting five rows behind me.
* * *
No one is home when I walk inside. I go to hang my bag on the coatrack but stop when I see a Post-it stuck to it that says Leave. The coatrack is brass, each hook in the shape of an animal. I touch the rhino’s horn, the elephant’s trunk. I put my bag back on my shoulder and head into the living room, but everywhere I look are more Post-its. The clock on the mantle says Craigslist. The portrait of Granny has a question mark. The side table, its surface covered in faded rings from mugs of coffee and tea, says Goodwill.
I turn my face to the floor, step around more Post-its safety pinned to the rugs, and walk through the house and up the stairs to my room. I drop my bag. I step out of my sandals. I pull back my sheets and climb into my bed. I make myself small. I make myself sleep.
* * *
It’s Monday again. Mimi and Hope and Travis are standing by the open classroom door as I approach it, and I try to work up the courage to talk to them. I think I messed it up. I should have joined them on the first day, or at least on the second. Now too much time has passed, and they haven’t asked me to sit with them, and our conversations have consisted solely of heys and good-byes.
But I don’t need to find the courage, because Hope spots me and says, “Flora, come see Mimi’s tattoo!”
So I join them. It’s a life-size California poppy on the inside of her right forearm.
“I can’t believe your mom let you get it,” Travis says.
“What can I say? I’m the daughter of a rebel.”
“It’s gorgeous,” I say. “The petals—they’re so perfect.”
And I feel myself flush while I say it, because it’s so close to saying that she’s gorgeous. The truth is that the tattoo is beautiful, but even that vivid orange and green are no match for her face or her knees or the way she’s posed now, with her arm extended toward us, no hint of self-consciousness.
“I want to get a tattoo,” I say. “I have it planned out.”
I show them where, up the inside of my bicep.
“What of?” Travis asks.
“Words. A phrase. ‘The end of love.’”
Mimi squints. “What’s it from?”
“It’s just something in my head.”
It’s something that hurts, that I can’t seem to get out, that keeps me up in the early morning. I think that maybe if I could do something with it, write it on my body forever, I could get it out of my heart.
“It sounds like a song,” Hope says. “Or a book, maybe. I can’t really picture it as a tattoo.”
“It’d be like a warning sign to chicks, though,” Travis says. “All the girls would know to stay far, far away.”
My blush returns. I didn’t think I was significant enough to be gossiped about at Potrero High, but turns out that I am. I glance up, see Mimi watching me.
“You guys,” Mr. Trout calls from the classroom. “This may blow your precocious young minds, but class is held inside the classroom.”
I almost follow them to the last row, but before I do, I see that there are only three open desks back there, so I take my usual spot at the front.
Today Mr. Trout is introducing polygons, though he hasn’t announced that yet. I can see it from the shapes he’s drawn on the board. I know all of their names. Triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, nonagon, decagon …
“What do all of these have in common?” he asks us.
“They’re all shapes?” people murmur. “They have straight lines?”
“Yes,” Mr. Trout says. “What else?”
I write down everything I know about polygons in my notebook. How they are bound by a finite chain of line segments. About all of their edges, and the points where two edges meet. How the space inside is called the body.
I write about convexity and nonconvexity, about simple polygons and star polygons. I write about equality and symmetry, and each word steadies my heart. Mr. Trout is talking about all of these things I know already. Most of the time he sounds a little bored, but it doesn’t matter. His words leave his mouth, carry across this room, and I’m filled with wonder because she’s listening to them, too.
* * *
My parents are in the dining room when I get home, stationed in front of the china hutch with their Post-its.
“Look at this,” Mom scoffs, holding up the serving platter. “What were we thinking?”
It’s the platter they’ve used my whole life. I don’t see anything wrong with it, but Dad scoffs along with her and throws up his hands.
“What can I say?” he says. “It was the nineties.”
“Goodwill pile? Unless you want it.”
“Oh, Goodwill for sure,” he says.
He carries it to the dining table, where there are three Post-its labeling the piles. Hers, His, and Goodwill. The Goodwill pile has expanded, taking up the entire table.
“You guys aren’t keeping anything?” I ask.
“Oh,” Dad says. “Hi, Flora.”
Mom waves from across the room. “I didn’t even know you were here!” she says.
In my room, I open the textbook and begin the homework that, as an auditor, I don’t technically need to do. Mr. Trout assigned only the odd-numbered problems, but I decide to do them all. Halfway through, just as I’m drawing a perfect cyclic with my protractor, a knock comes at my door.
It creaks open, even though I haven’t said to come in.
“How’s it going?” Mom asks.
“Fine. Just doing homework.”
“Is the class challenging?”
I shrug.
“What is it again?”
“Geometry.”
She nods, cocks her head. “For some reason I thought you already took geometry.”
I don’t respond, but it doesn’t seem to matter. She’s already scanning my room. My chest constricts, and my stomach clenches, and I can practically hear Jessica telling me to give these feelings a voice.
“Any thoughts yet on what you want to keep?”
“Everything,” I say.
“We could get you a nicer desk. Something more modern.”
“I only have a year left at home anyway.”
“Well. Let’s see how it looks in your new room, and we can decide then.”
“I was just getting into this,” I say, pointing at my textbook.
“Oops! I’ll leave you alone. I’m looking forward to Saturday. A friend told me about a new shop in Berkeley that I thought we could check out.”
“Are you sure you want to go curtain shopping before you know where we’re living?”
“I already know the style I want. Turkish-inspired. We can see what’s out there.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Fantastic. Back to work for you. Dad and I are tackling the hall closet next. You know, we’re having a really good time through all of this.” She flashes me a smile as though to prove it. “Closure is so important, and we keep reminiscing and laughing. We’re getting rid of so much stuff, and it just feels great.”
My vision tilts and then rights itself. There’s a beehive in my body, swarming and dangerous, but I tamp it down and say, “That’s great for you. I really need to get back to this.”
Summer Days and Summer Nights: Twelve Love Stories Page 4