In Too Deep (10 page)

I
t wasn’t quite like being in the water, but there was something about the dive shop that took the edge off of my day. I felt different there, with the constant traffic on Pico Boulevard, the sun reflecting off the windshields, scattering bursts of light along the walls. Maybe it was the smell of the neoprene—all that rubber, the hoses, the BCs, the wetsuits, the fins. It smelled like comfort.

I was alone behind the counter, my feet propped up on the glass case. I should have been working on Bio, or reading whatever book had been assigned in English, but instead I was staring at my phone, scrolling through the pictures I’d taken of Cortés’s golden disk.

One side was a series of different-sized rock formations, like a family of shark fins emerging from the water. The detail was exquisite: individual boulders on the rocks, tiny sea foam on the waves. The other side was more of an archway, although there was no indication whether it was above or below the water’s surface. It could have been coral in Thailand or a sandstone in Moab for all I knew.

The door buzzer sounded, and the noise of the traffic got louder, and before I had the chance to look up, a
People
magazine was slapped on the glass counter, and Gracia said, “So it didn’t go well. That’s okay. To use a metaphor you might be able to relate to, there are other fish in the sea.”

“It’s not that.” I put the phone away as quickly and, I hoped, nonchalantly as possible. “Josh was fine.”

She flipped to a page and spun the magazine around. “Josh
is
fine.”

The picture spanned the entire spread. His mom perched on a red director’s chair, the shiny brunette curtain cascading over her left shoulder as she gazed at her son. Josh stood with his hands on her shoulders, wearing a sky-blue T-shirt and that easy smile of his. He looked confident. He looked like Josh.

I sat forward and scanned the article quickly, feeling the heat rise to my cheeks whenever my eyes passed over his name. The gist was that even an Academy Award winner couldn’t do it alone, and that the teenage son of now-divorced Jessica Rebstock provided both the support and inspiration that she needed to survive the cutthroat world of Hollywood. The fact that he’d recently spent his spring break on a humanitarian mission to aid hurricane victims in Mexico only underscored how grounded the Rebstock family had managed to remain in the face of all the hype.

I spun the magazine back around and shrugged. “It’s a good picture of him.”

“Oh, lord—”

“What do you want me to say? My relationship with Josh is fine. Borderline agreeable, even. We’re partners for the final project in Alvarez’s class.”

The door buzzed, and I looked up to see the guy who’d been the cause of my hybrid fin argument with my mom. Mr. Pockmarks again. He waved.

“Are you following me?” I said, laughing.

“I like a family-owned dive shop. What can I say?”

“How’d the fins work out?” I said, putting on the retail charm.

“Pretty good,” he said, but that was all. I let him wander around the shop by himself.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Gracia said when the guy was closer to the back, “and I know it has nothing to do with Josh. I can see it in your eyes. They dart.”

“My eyes dart?”

“Like minnows.”

“What is it with you and the marine-life similes today?”

“Secretive little silver minnows,” Gracia said. “I can be patient. See? Here I am, standing right in front of you, being patient.”

I put my feet back up on the counter and pretended to answer the dive shop telephone. “Fleet Diving?”

Gracia stuck out her thumb and pinkie as if talking on a phone. “Yes, I’m calling about a girl named Annie? You may have seen her around: freckles, terrible swimsuit, always used to tell her best friend the truth?”

“Hold, please.” I paused for a moment before returning to the fake call. “Yeah, she wants to know if the topic of a certain clandestine romance with Baldwin Forneau would be included in any exchange of information.”

We stared at each other for at least ten seconds, frozen with our phones pressed to our ears—Gracia’s imaginary; mine real but with nobody on the other line. She raised her left eyebrow a fraction of an inch, sensing weakness in me. I hung up. “Okay, fine.”

I started narrow, focusing only on Josh and Katy: the cute little nudges on the seawall, the pole-climbing lesson, the way her hands lingered on his waist, and the way he didn’t try to make them not linger. I told her about the night at Club Starzz, how the two of them grinded the night away.

“You’re worried about Katy?” she said.

“If you had seen what I saw, you’d understand.”

Gracia shook her head and hummed as though I were an item on sale and she couldn’t decide whether to buy me. “If that’s all—that
is
all, right?”

Of course that wasn’t all—there was the matter of me smuggling into the country a golden artifact that may or may not have been the key to a priceless treasure, and the nefarious treasure hunters who may or may not have still wanted to kill me, one of whom may or may not have been my history teacher—but when I thought of it all like that, it just seemed ridiculous. I reached for the shop phone again.

“Okay, fine. Just no more fake phone,” Gracia said. “Like I said, if that’s all it is, then you have nothing to worry about.”

“I could have sworn you and I just had a conversation,” I said. “You were standing right there, wearing those exact same clothes. Josh, Katy, the freaky freaky.”

“You just have to make him jealous,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

“That is exactly
not
what I wanted to hear. Pretty much on the button.”

Mr. Pockmarks came to the front with a save-a-dive kit—basically a bunch of seals and O-rings and replacement straps for just in case. “These are the best,” I said. “But I hope you never have to use them.”

“And I hope your college résumé is now more robust.” He smiled and handed me a credit card, and we completed the transaction with the standard pleasantries. I leaned back in my chair.

“Aren’t you the friendly saleslady?” Gracia said when he’d left. She knocked my feet to the side, and the chair’s spring-loaded back shot me forward. “By the way, now that you’re playing in the big leagues, I see a makeover in your future. And not to ruin the surprise, but we may have to start by getting you a pedicure.”

Now my
feet
were the problem? I happened to like my feet, even though the nails weren’t necessarily polished, per se. “My feet are—”

“Your feet are a window to your soul, Annie. Treat them like dirt, you’re broadcasting to the world that you’ve given up.”

The door buzzer rang again. Sounds of the street filled the shop. I glanced up, and the laugh died in my throat.

I snatched Gracia’s hand across the counter and gave it a squeeze. “Please,” I whispered through a smile, “don’t be you.”

“Your eyes just did the minnow thing again,” she said. “What—”

“Hello, ladies,” Josh said as the door swung closed. The street traffic became muffled once again. Or it could have been the sudden thrashing of my heart blocking any sound from my ears. At school there were so many potential distractions that seeing Josh wasn’t such a huge deal, but this wasn’t school. This was
my
place. The last time he was here, he’d almost died in my arms. And now the only distraction was my anxiety about the sparkle in Gracia’s eyes and whatever that meant.

She turned his way with an easy smile of her own and leaned an elbow on the counter. She rested her other hand on her hip and gave her hair a little twirl. “Of all the dive shops in all the towns in all the world, you walk into Annie’s.”

I reached for the
People
, but Gracia was too quick for me. And where my instinct would have been to hide it—or chuck it into the trash can, or
something
—hers was the exact opposite. She held the magazine up with both hands, out in front of her, so that the cover picture of Josh’s mom was almost at his eye level. “We were just finishing the crossword puzzle.”

I was surprised my cheeks didn’t blister right off my face.

“It’s a tough one this week,” Josh said.

“What are you doing here?” I managed.

Josh wandered around the front of the shop. His hair looked professionally unkempt, as always, and he wore a cream-colored polo shirt over plaid board shorts. “Unfinished business.”

Her face still properly hidden by the magazine, Gracia raised her eyebrows at me and bit her bottom lip. She even squealed so that—I hope—I was the only one who heard.

Josh was acting differently now than the last time he was here. Back then, he could have been asleep for all the attention he paid to the place. But now he wandered through the store noticing things. He poked through the BC rack. He picked a fin off the wall and flexed it back and forth. He chose a mask and pressed it to his face while he looked in the mirror.

“That’s totally you,” Gracia said.

“Inhale a bit through your nose,” I said to him, trying to keep it professional. “If the mask stays in place, it’s a good fit.”

“Looks like a good fit to me.” Gracia again.

I swatted her on the arm. “Stop it,” I whispered through clenched teeth.

Gracia pointed to the ground at my feet and whispered back, “You stay right here. Don’t move, not even if the place catches on fire.”

She left me behind the counter and meandered closer to Josh the way salespeople do when they try to hover without hovering. “What, exactly, is the nature of your unfinished business?”

“I told Annie today, I need to get certified.”

“Really?” I said.

“I even read the manual this time,” he said. “Cover to cover. There’s no way I’m getting stuck pacing the sidelines again.”

“What are you talking about?” Gracia said.

He looked at Gracia, whose face was blank, and then at me. I gave him a quick little “no” with my eyes, and he seemed to get the meaning, because he shrugged and moved away from her and toward the shelf of repair equipment.

“Check it out, Annie,” he said. “O-rings.”

Gracia hurried back to me and whispered, “I have an idea. Tell him to make an appointment.”

“What?”

“Just do it. Tell him—”

“You’ll have to make an appointment,” I blurted.

Josh turned to me and squinted, as though our conversation had suddenly veered in an unanticipated direction. “For what?”

My mind was blank. Why was my mind blank? I looked at Gracia for help.

“Your lesson,” Gracia said to him. “But it can’t be for tomorrow. She has a date tomorrow.”

I gritted my teeth. “Gra—”

“You know Franklin Deveraux? He’s a year older than you, I think. He would be a senior, but Pinedale kicked him out. Drugs and stuff. He’s a bad boy, but really cute, and—”

“Gracia,” I snapped. She shut her mouth. Finally.

“That doesn’t seem like your type.” Josh didn’t look at me, but he did cock his head to the side a little bit. He could have been thinking about the price of a wetsuit for all I knew.

Gracia checked the polish on the tip of her middle fingernail—her nonchalance a bit too obviously played for my taste—and said, “Annie doesn’t have a type.”

Josh completed his tour of the shop, ending right back at the counter. He leaned on the glass. “I’d like to make an appointment to get certified in open water diving,” he said.

“Tomorrow’s bad,” I stammered. Apparently I was trying to out-idiot myself every time I opened my mouth.

“So I heard.”

I broke free of his little spell and turned to the sanctuary of the big calendar behind the counter. I took a pencil from beside the register and wrote down his name. “The day after?”

“Done.” Josh motioned with his chin to the
People
in Gracia’s hand and said, “I can sign that for you.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to ruin the resale value.”

“Remember,” he said, patting himself on the chest with an open palm, “behind every successful woman is a strong man.”

Gracia turned to me and threw up her arms in mock surprise. “Annie! That’s what we’ve been missing! A strong man! A man of strength and courage! Don’t you think we could totally ace Bio if we had one of those?”

Josh rested his hand on the door handle and smiled. “See you guys later.”

“It’s on the schedule,” I said, pointing at it, as if to put the cherry on top of my cake of awkwardness.

When the door was properly closed and the lull had settled back into the shop, I collapsed into the chair and tapped my forehead on the counter and groaned.

Gracia whistled. “Interesting.”

“There’s a speargun over by the fins back there,” I said into the glass. “Just put me out of my misery.”

“So tempting.”

I grabbed the magazine—ten minutes too late—and threw it in the trash. “Who the hell is Franklin Deveraux?”

“Beats me,” Gracia said. “But doesn’t he sound hot?”

“You made him up?”

“If you’re going to use one boy to make another boy jealous, you have to have complete control of the situation. And the convenient thing about using a not-real person is that you can tailor the nonexistent boy to target the real one’s soft spots. You saw the look on Josh’s face when I mentioned drugs? He’s a good guy, Annie—he cares about you.”

“What if he asks around? What if he finds out that Franklin Deveraux never went to Pinedale, much less got kicked out?”

“Then you know he’s interested, and that’s when you lay all your cards on the table. Tell him you made it all up to see what he’d do, and now that you know he checked up on you, you think it’s sweet. He’ll be so flummoxed it won’t be an issue.”

“Flummoxed.”

“Let me put it another way: even the best checkers players in the world can be beaten,” she said, “if you play chess instead.”

“Sometimes I wonder if even
you
believe half the stuff that comes out of your mouth.”

“Whatever. The point is, Franklin worked today. Trust me.”

The door buzzed again, and I thought for a moment that Josh had come back to torment me, but it was just my mom. She rested her purse on the counter and sighed. “Bankers,” she said, more to herself than to us.