Lake Overturn (40 page)

If Abby’s mother were dead.

“I guess it’s not a big deal,” Liz said. “I’ll let him down easy. He’s not a bad guy.”

“You haven’t talked about it?”

“Not yet.”

A
T THE
J
ARRETTS’,
Lucy began to appear regularly after Wanda put other children to bed. Apparently, Mrs. Jarrett didn’t mind if Lucy stayed up late watching TV, and Wanda liked the company.

“Have you ever ridden a plane?” Wanda asked her one night.

“Yeah. We flew to Phoenix to see my grandma.”

“I just flew to Portland.”

“For what?”

“To visit my best friend. She’s an architect.”

“Neat.”

They fell into silence for several minutes, then Lucy scooted down the long couch toward Wanda. “Look,” she said, turning her notebook to reveal what she had been drawing.

It was Wanda, rendered in colored pencil. The likeness in the face astounded her—Lucy was good!—but that’s where the accuracy ended. Wanda’s hair was a flaming yellow mass, and she rode a winged unicorn with a pink mane. Their eyes, both Wanda’s and the unicorn’s, were huge and mournful, fringed by thick lashes that licked up at the tips. Wanda was naked, and though her lower body was obscured behind the unicorn’s wing, her breasts were round as softballs and pink-nippled. A rainbow-trail marked the unicorn’s flight across a sky full of multicolored stars.

“Wow, that’s really pretty,” Wanda said. “Thanks for the boobs.”

Lucy released an embarrassed laugh, then wiped from her chin the spittle she had blown from her braces.

“Can I look at the rest?”

“If you want.”

As Wanda slowly turned the pages, she learned that this dorky girl lived in an incredible world full of sailboats, elves with pointed ears, jewels the size of houses, mountaintop castles, crashing oceans, human-headed birds, and bird-headed humans. There was no gravity; everything floated in a wreath of pastel-colored mist or flew on butterfly wings. Lucy herself appeared, not as a chubby girl but a graceful, redheaded sorceress who was always accompanied by a floating crystal ball. There were many women with orb-like breasts and buttocks, but only one man—or boy, really—a brown-skinned, sweet-faced boy, who sometimes rode behind Lucy on her steed, encircling her with lithe arms.

“Who’s this?” Wanda asked.

Lucy pulled one curtain of her bob across her face to suck on its tip. “This boy at school, Enrique. He’s a year under me.”

“What’s he like?”

Lucy heaved a great sigh. “He’s really quiet and sweet and smart. Like, supersmart, the smartest one in his grade. I see him sitting out on the curb after school sometimes, just by himself, thinking, waiting for his brother. Sometimes I think he’s kinda like me. But he’s probably got a crush on a popular girl. He doesn’t know I exist.” She took back the notebook.

“Well,” Wanda suggested, “if he is like you, then he doesn’t care about the popular girls, right?”

Lucy shook her head. “Boys are different.”

“You can say that again.”

Lucy pulled her legs up under her. “I bet you were popular in school.”

As she considered it, it seemed to Wanda that she had spent her youth spinning: exaggerating the severity of injuries just for the attention, cutting class to give the new girl a tour of the haunted house out on Amity Road, bargaining for rides after school, hopping from this clique to that all across Eula, spreading rumors and forging alliances and breaking promises—all in the hope of finding someone who would like her. “I wasn’t popular,” she said.

“But you were pretty,” Lucy said, beginning to sketch.

“Popular or pretty—that doesn’t mean people like you.”

“Yeah, it does.”

“You know what? That world you have there is worth more than boys and popularity and whatever. Sure, roll your eyes. I would have too, when I was your age. But I wish I had had that—what’s in that notebook. It would have saved me from doing a lot of things I didn’t like doing.” Wanda saw a smile stir in the corners of Lucy’s mouth. “You kind of know that, don’t you, Lucy? That what you have is worth more?”

Lucy drew for a while, then she shyly said, “That’s why I like Enrique. I feel like he knows it, too.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Wanda asked.

Lucy nodded without looking up.

“Seriously, can I tell you a secret that you can’t tell anybody?”

“Yes.”

“I’m trying to have a baby for these people—my friends in Portland. They can’t have kids, so I’m going to get pregnant for them and have their baby. Like Baby M, but I’m not gonna try to keep it. And if I have a girl, I hope she’s nice rather than popular. And if it’s a boy, I hope I can sit on the curb and just be quiet with him rather than watch him play football. It’s opposite from the way parents are supposed to think, but maybe that’s why the world’s so messed up. You only get one chance in this life, right? Well, when you have a kid, you get two.”

Lucy gave a studied nod of profound agreement, although it was doubtful that she knew what Wanda meant when Wanda hardly knew herself. They turned again to the TV. Lucy drew, and eventually Wanda nodded off. At the sound of the Jarretts’ car in the drive, she woke up and stretched.

“Here.” Lucy tore a sheet from her notebook.

Wanda—Lucy’s version, beautiful and fiery-haired—looked down between her breasts to her belly, where a baby boy, visible by a magical cross-section of the circular chamber, gazed lovingly back. The boy had brown skin, elf-ears, and little bat wings folded against his sides. His face was that of the sweet, introspective boy—Lucy’s crush.

Wanda hung the drawing in a place of honor at the head of her bed, under the mobile. She started and ended every day with it.

O
N A
S
ATURDAY
afternoon Liz walked into the living room to find Winston and Jay watching TV with their feet up on the furniture. Shafts of sunlight lit the slow-moving dust in the air, and the boys had sunk so deeply into the soft sofas as to be flat on their backs. Winston, who had a faded yellow bruise on his chin, grunted a hello, while Jay let his head list casually to the side. His eyes took their time meeting hers.

She gave a caring smile—not affectionate really, but tender. He smiled too and lifted one shoulder in a little shrug. Abby was right, of course. He was cute. But to say so aloud had seemed sacrilegious. One mustn’t admit to everything. Liz listened to Bananarama, but she didn’t talk about it at school.

It made Jay tremble a little, deep in his bones, to look into Liz’s long-lashed eyes and watch them close and reopen. They were like the eyes of a deer, but one that lived around McCall, the resort town Jay used to visit with the Van Bekes. There, all the wives and children fed the deer stale bread in the mornings. Those deer didn’t run off when you came across them on a trail; they simply gazed at you with large, unthreatened eyes and let you pass.

Liz turned and climbed the stairs to her room.

From the moment she had discovered that it was Jay, Liz had forgotten all about how she was going to expose and humiliate her secret admirer. As someone who considered racial discrimination a blot on the kind face of Eula (that was how she had worded it in an opinion piece for the
Eula High Gazette
), Liz would never admit to herself that the reason she never had suspected Jay and the reason she now felt kind and docile toward him were the same: he was a Mexican.

A half-hour later there was a tap on Liz’s open door. She looked up from her book. “Winston fell asleep,” Jay said. His hands were stuffed in his back pockets and his gaze remained on the floor. He had cultured his aloof attitude to mask his shyness. Why hadn’t Liz seen that before? Because she hadn’t cared to look, of course. It was horribly vain, but the singular fact that Jay admired her had made him leap in her estimation, as if it proved his taste if not his intelligence.

“How have you been?” Liz asked.

Jay shrugged. He opened his mouth, and nothing came out but a long, rasping exhale that turned to a laugh as he bowed and shook his head.

“Been sleeping okay?” Liz prodded.

“No, actually,” Jay said. Now he nodded. It seemed he needed to encourage himself to speak with these movements of his head. “Not since Monday.”

“I never once thought it was you, you know,” Liz said.

Jay swiveled side to side for a while, apparently unaware of his elbow knocking the door. “It feels kinda weird talking about it here, don’t you think? I feel like your mom’s gonna show up and tell me to get downstairs.”

Liz quoted the rule from their childhood: “Boys downstairs, girls upstairs.”

“Would you like to talk about it . . . somewhere else . . . sometime?”

“Jay,” Liz said, “I’m going away.”

“I know. Stanford. I was thinking that might be a reason to hang out, rather than a reason not to.”

“I’ve got so much to do before school’s out . . .”

She never would have suspected that Jay would so clearly recognize her first false note. But the light in his eyes went out, and she saw that she had called up the old Jay, the one that lived like a hermit in a dark-windowed house.

Jay, though, saw no change in Liz’s eyes. They were still steady as those of a McCall deer. “Catch you later,” he said as he rolled away into the hall.

M
R.
D
ODD’S “TRIAL
period” was nearing its end, and Enrique had all but decided he would stay on the team and compete in meets—he had even toyed with the idea of taking on another event, the 880 or the long jump—when he made a terrible mistake.

One of Enrique’s new friends was an eighth-grade girl named Annie Schiff. A big girl, taller than any of the boys, she was the best long-jumper and an important leg in the relay race. With only two events she was able to spend a good amount of time lounging at the center of the field before Mrs. Wheeler squealed for her, “An-nieeeeee! Long jump!” Mrs. Wheeler was harder on her than she was on the other girls, perhaps because Annie, who braided her red hair into pigtails for practice, was the one who most resembled Mrs. Wheeler. Tommy once said, when Mrs. Wheeler approached with Annie at her side, “Make way for the East German Olympic team.”

When Annie was called away, her boobs often became the subject of discussion among the lounging team-members. They were far and away the biggest boobs in junior high and rivaled many of those in high school. Enrique, Tommy, and the other kids were never cruel, merely observant—making dry guesses as to her bra size and speaking with a distanced kind of respect, as if Annie had done something revolutionary in growing them so big so early. By the way Annie carried herself, one could see that she considered her breasts both precious and embarrassing. She always crossed her arms over them when she was standing alone on the field, up until that moment right before she would break out in a run and take flight over the sandpit. She seemed to have resigned herself to letting them go their own way when she was in action. Having obviously confined them in the strongest bra she could find, what more could she do?

Enrique had taken on the role of a needling younger brother with Annie. One afternoon he furtively drew a smiley face on the rubber tip of her sneaker. When she noticed, she seemed irked for only a moment before she twisted her foot around to better see the face and said, “Cute.” By the end of practice that day, he had nearly covered the exposed white rubber of her sneakers with different faces.

But on the afternoon in question, Enrique went too far. The girls were practicing the relay race. Annie stood in her spot, halfway around the track, arms folded over her breasts. Once the race was underway, though, she unshielded herself and took her stance: one hand fisted and raised to run, the other open and waiting for the baton. Enrique happened to be standing near the track and, a few seconds before the baton was passed to Annie, saw an opportunity and took it without fully thinking it through. He quickly darted in, undid Annie’s bra, and darted out. Annie looked down at herself, and appeared, by the way her eyes receded into her head, to register what had happened the very moment the baton hit her hand. She took a few awkward steps, then lifted her shoulder, nudging one breast up with her arm.

Mrs. Wheeler, who was standing halfway down the track, hadn’t seen what happened. “Annie! Go!” she shrieked.

Annie went. Slowly at first, then more quickly she ran, trying to manage her flying breasts, which, unleashed, seemed much bigger. She was like someone who had stolen the contents of a fruit cart, hidden it in her shirt, and was attempting to escape. “What’s wrong with you? Hustle!” Mrs. Wheeler cried.

A jolt of unbearable remorse struck Enrique. To watch Annie now was like seeing a horse fall in battle in an old western—heartbreaking, that this gentle thing was subjected to such vain abuse. This remorse, though, was followed almost immediately by anger.
It was just a joke. It isn’t my fault her boobs are so big.

Annie stumbled when she handed off the baton. Then she gathered herself and ran, crying, under the bleachers toward the locker room.

Enrique glanced at the others lounging in the center of the field. They all had seen. Slowly, with a casual air, he took the path Annie had, under the bleachers toward the gym. Maybe he could apologize to her and make it seem like some sort of mistake. But he was glad when he got to the boys’ locker room without having encountered her. He changed clothes and rode his bike home.

Between classes the next day, Tommy walked up to Enrique in the hall. With a steadied voice, as if he had been nominated ambassador from the track-and-field kids, he said, “Enrique, what you did to Annie yesterday was really mean.”

Enrique’s heart pounded and his face burned. “It was a joke.”

Tommy squinted. “It wasn’t funny. She’s still upset about it. You should apologize.”

Enrique allowed silent laughter to percolate in him, bouncing shoulders up and down, a gesture he had learned from Jay. Then he said, “C’mon, Tommy. What’s the big deal?”

It worked. Tommy hesitated.

“Don’t be a priss,” continued Enrique. “What? Are you afraid of seeing her boobs? Do they
scare
you?”