The First Time She Drowned (13 page)

MY SHOPPING BAGS
bounce against my legs as I dash up the stairs to my room, nearly colliding with two girls who live at the end of our hall—theater majors, I’m guessing, by the fact that they blast
Les Mis
é
rables
on a nearly endless loop in their room. I’m hoping Zoey is back from her classes so I can show her all the loot my mother bought me.

I battle through the door with all my stuff and find her lying on her bed with a Norton anthology in her hands and an open box of crackers and crumbs beside her. The TV is on, but muted.

“Hey!” I say, and raise the shopping bags gleefully in the air.

Something is wrong. It takes Zoey a moment too long to look at me.

“Where were you?” she says, turning back to the TV. “I looked everywhere for you.”

I freeze. In the shock of my mother’s arrival, I forgot that I left Zoey back at the psych building.
Shit.
At once I know I’m in the wrong here and also that I can’t let her see that, see that she has the upper hand. My own inability to anticipate her anger infuriates me. I know better than to ever let my guard down with anyone. I
move toward the closet with my shopping bags. “I took off,” I say coldly. “I didn’t feel like waiting around.”

“But we were supposed to have lunch together. I wanted you to meet some of my friends.”

“Yeah,” I snap. “And then you left me sitting in the stupid counseling center for, like, a year.”

I stare into my closet and take stock of all my belongings. I calculate how fast I can pack up my clothes, my toiletries, my bedding. I do a mental run-through of the key code to my original dorm room to make sure I still remember it, thankful I never notified housing of my change. Already I’m picturing myself back there, within those white walls, all that silence. I tell myself I don’t care, that it’s better this way. I know how this story ends.

“You’re right. It did take longer than I thought,” Zoey says quietly.

I stand in the closet, holding my breath. I’m not quite sure what’s happening.

“What?”

“I said you’re right. I didn’t mean to keep you waiting. I’m sorry.”

The words are so foreign and shocking that my brain is unable to process them right away. I will myself to look at her, but I can’t quite trust it or get a handle on what I’m supposed to do here. I’ve never heard anyone say, “I’m sorry,” or at least not in a real way, not in the heat of a fight. Part of me just wants to step outside of the moment and ask, “How did you
do
that?” because it’s so
incomprehensible that someone would leave themselves open like that. I want to turn around, confess that
I’m
the one who should be sorry, but I can’t make the words come out, can’t let myself be that vulnerable. Instead I say, “Forget it. I just don’t like waiting around for people.”

“You were probably smart to bail anyway,” she says. “Molly and Piper spent the whole time talking about current events like I care and refused to check out cute boys with me. Plus I’m pretty sure the mystery meat of the day was fried catcher’s mitt.”

I turn and laugh, so relieved I want to cry. I hate myself for twisting things.

“So, I’m going to a beach party tonight if you want to come.”

I start to say no—the idea of being around so many people seems daunting or at least exhausting—but then I wonder how many more times I can do that before Zoey decides her other friends are more fun than me. “I guess I should start meeting people,” I say.

“Yes, you should! What’s in the bags?”

“My mother was here. She took me shopping.” There is relief in being able to say this, to be just like every other kid here whose parents come to visit.

“What? I didn’t get to meet her?”

“Next time. She had to split.”

I hold up my new outfits one at a time while I clue her in on my mother’s affair so she’ll know what to do if my father calls.

“Wait,” Zoey says. “She wants you to lie for her?”

My whole body braces.

“She shouldn’t ask that of you, Cass.”

“You don’t get it,” I say. “She needs this. She needs me.”

“You’re right,” she says. “I don’t get that.”

She stares at me with concern, and a small seed of distrust sprouts in me. Of course Zoey with her perfect life wouldn’t understand that sometimes being needed is enough. Or, at the very least, it’s better than nothing at all.

IT’S ABOUT AN
hour before sunset when Zoey and I arrive at the beach party. The light is champagne and the water sparkles. In the near distance is the staticky distorted sound of a radio turned too loud and at least a hundred students gathered in a large dense circle, partying.

“Are you sure I’m invited?” I say.

“It’s a
beach party
,” she says. “Everyone’s invited. Plus, I know the girls who organized it.” She kicks off her sandals, loops them through her fingers and starts down the sand. Her hair is picked up by the wind, creating a wistful picture as she moves. The air smells of fire and ocean and late September. Of endings and beginnings.

A group of girls shout, “Zoey!” as we approach and she waves to them and then whispers to me that she needs a beer before she can deal. We head toward the keg where a ruddy-faced football player is doing a keg stand while others around him cheer, “Go! Go! Go!” A few feet away, a group of girls sing really loudly and very badly to a song on the radio. They sway and stumble. Everyone seems so young and open, so easily amused. It’s completely alien to me, this innocence. I watch them with envy, hating myself for not being able to be like them.

“Hey there.” Someone nudges me.

I turn to see the surfer boy, Chris, and jump back in such an
extreme way that he says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you!”

“Hi!” I say in a ridiculously high-pitched voice. I try again, flat and cool this time. “What’s up?” Out of the corner of my eye I see Zoey watching me with a shit-eating grin on her face. She obviously suspects something.

“Hi, there,” she says, stepping forward. “I’m Zoey.”

“I’m Chris,” he says, and shakes her hand warmly.

“So you are,” Zoey says and gives me a wink that Chris catches.

I want to kill her.

“This is Murph,” Chris says, elbowing his friend, who’s in the midst of shotgunning a beer. Murph stops and burps and nods in our general direction.

“Hi, Murph,” Zoey says, twirling her fingers through her hair. “Do you know where a girl like me can get a drink like that?”

“Follow me,” he says, and leads her deeper into the party.

“Wait! Where are you going?” I call after her. She turns and waves at me, nods in an obvious way toward Chris and then disappears into the crowd, hugging and waving to people as she goes. I want to call, “Don’t leave me here. I don’t know how to do this!” Instead, I turn to Chris. “Where are they going?”

“I think your friend wants us to be alone.” He traces sand with his shoe, then looks up and smiles, embarrassed.

“That’s weird,” I say, and look away.

I go to light a cigarette and he cups his hands around mine to shield the wind. I lean in, feel the heat of both the flame and his nearness. Our eyes meet. The cigarette catches.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” he says.

“You shouldn’t lecture.” I turn my face and blow smoke in the
opposite direction.

“I’ll stop if you stop.”

I roll my eyes and he grins. I look toward the ocean, envision myself out there beyond the breakers, fighting to stay afloat.

“Waves look good,” he says.

“So go surf then. There’s still light.”

“How do you know I surf? Have you been stalking me?”

“No!
God!
” I say. “I just assumed by the way you dress.”

“I’m kidding! I do surf, but why would I do that now? You’re here.”

“I don’t need you to entertain me.”

“That’s not what I meant.” His face, in profile, hardens.

I don’t want to be this cold, defensive person and yet here I am, being exactly that. Chris pulls two beers out of a cooler near his feet, cracks one open and hands it to me. A thin blond girl runs past us and vomits a short way down the beach.

“Lovely,” I say, and we both turn away and laugh.

“Wanna walk somewhere less . . . uh . . . ?”

“Pukish?” I search the crowd, all those strangers’ faces, Zoey nowhere in sight. “Okay, I guess.”

We move toward the water. The sun is dropping, setting the surfers against a pink sky. They look like seals, playful and fearless as they tumble off the tails of waves. Even the wipeouts seem like a part of the fun, as if the surfers never anticipate anything but a soft bottom.

“I’ve always wanted to learn,” I say as one of the surfers leaves the water and passes us. “You’re not afraid of sharks?”

“They say you have less chance of being eaten by a shark than—”

“—of being struck by lightning. Yeah, I’ve heard that. Which
is also why I don’t stand outside in a thunderstorm with a metal pole.”

“There are bigger things in life to be afraid of,” he says.

“Really? Than being eaten? Like what?”

“I don’t know.” He looks toward the water, then back to me. “Like missing out because you’re too afraid to try, for starters.”

“That’s deep,” I say, and roll my eyes.

He turns to me, a quick glance, but it contains something I’ve never seen before, a way I’ve never been looked at. It is not even sexual so much as hopeful. A hopeful, innocent wanting.

“What happened to all the seashells?” I say quickly, staring down at the sand. “Didn’t it seem like there were more of them around when we were kids? Or did we just look harder then?”

I’m talking fast and I can hear that my own voice sounds unnatural. Something in me has been stirred by his glance. Both a happiness and a fleeting urge to cry—to bawl, really. “My mother used to say you could hear the ocean in a shell, but I could never hear it. I always thought there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t.”

“Wait here,” he says abruptly, and starts down the beach, leaving me wondering why I brought my mother into this moment and ruined things.

His head is bowed as he moves toward an area strewn with seaweed. There is a small tattoo on the back of his ankle, which I decide is stupid, just like he is stupid, just like I am stupid, just like this whole thing is stupid.

I go and climb the lifeguard chair to show him that I won’t do what he tells me to. From above, I watch him in his madras shorts
and striped shirt, so boyishly mismatched that my heart yearns and leaps before I have a chance to shut it closed again.

I finish my beer and then he is climbing up to me, stopping on the last ladder rung so that we are face-to-face. His eyes are liquid brown and grow shiny and soft as he looks at me. In his hand is a shell just like the one I found in Maine, and he smiles and puts it to my ear so earnest and sweet that a tiny bell pings in my chest and my stomach drops. Then he cups my other ear protectively, blocking out the external noise. His hand is big and hot. His body is close enough that I can smell his soap. My heart beats so hard, it feels like waves slamming into the sand.

“Hear it?”

“No.” My legs are shaking. I have never been this close to a boy before, not without a shield of platonic indifference between us. I wonder if this is how my mother felt when she was first with Pete.

“Nothing?”

“It’s really faint. And I don’t believe it’s the ocean.” My voice is half swallowed. I’m trying so hard to be normal, but I’m leaking pure terror.

His free hand moves down my neck, and my spine tingles. His eyes watch me. “I’ve heard it’s the sound of your own blood pumping,” he says.

“So I’m hearing myself?” I wish suddenly for a mirror. I want to make sure everything is in place, that there’s no avenue for him to see past the made-up face before him and find the unlovable ex–mental patient underneath.

“Yep. And you sound like the ocean,” he says, smiling. He presses his forehead lightly against mine, takes my wrist into his
hand and rubs the veins along it.

“Where do you think Zoey is?” I say too loudly, pulling back.

Chris doesn’t answer, but nods to himself and gets quiet. He sits down beside me, only farther away than before, and looks out at the sea. I finally spot Zoey a short ways down the beach lying with Murph. They are kissing, and I make fun of them for it so that Chris doesn’t think I want to kiss him, even though I sort of do. I keep chattering, filling up the distance I’ve created with meaningless babble, pausing only to drink a second beer in the six-pack that Chris has brought. The beer hits all at once, killing the anxiety, making me floaty and relaxed.

The sky has turned dark without my noticing, and the moon leaves a stripe of pearl light on the water. The rest of the ocean looks like a black undulating version of the sky, ancient and alive. It occurs to me that I am on the beach with a cute boy at night in a lifeguard chair, the kind of thing that happens to other girls, the kind of thing I never imagined possible for me. With my fear drowned in alcohol and Chris sitting at a safe distance from me, the urge to kiss him returns and grows stronger, but I don’t know how to make it happen. I inch closer, let my shoulder press against his, leaning, daring. He doesn’t respond, and I know it’s because he doesn’t like me anymore, that he got too close, saw too much, saw that I wasn’t really pretty.

“Are you drunk?” he says.

“No. Why?” I pull away, sobering instantly.

“Because,” he says, laughing, “you’re sort of acting like you like me all of a sudden.”

It feels like an accusation, like I’ve revealed something terrible and foolishly misguided. “Uh, wrong,” I say. “On both counts.”

In the distance I hear voices moving toward us, a quiet murmuring, and then Zoey’s boozy cackle.

“Zoey!” I jump to my feet.

She and Murph are black shapes in the darkness, barely visible until they are almost under the lifeguard chair.

“Oh, look at you two lovebirds up there,” Zoey slurs.

“As if,” I say, and toss an empty beer can at her feet.

“Not nice.” She waves her finger at me and then picks up the can and shakes it to see if there is any beer left in it to drink.

I climb down the chair, almost losing my balance as I near the bottom. Chris catches my arm and I shake free of him and go to Zoey. She grabs my shoulders and tilts toward me, almost pushing me over as she does.

“Did you kiss him?” she whisper-shouts as if the boys aren’t standing right beside us. Her breath is so full of alcohol, it burns my nose.

“Ew, no,” I say, humiliated.

Chris bends his face to the sand as if I have hurt him, and I immediately want to take it back. I’m such an asshole sometimes.

“I’m sure the feeling was mutual,” I add quickly.

“No, it wasn’t,” Chris says, and our eyes meet, and the world does that thing where it stops for a second again and there is only him and me.

“I kissed Murph,” Zoey continues to whisper loudly. She is staggering even as she is trying to stand still. “It wasn’t that great.”

“Hey!” Murph says.

“I’d probably do it again if I was drunk enough, though.”

Murph gives a thumbs-up. “Works for me!” he says. “I’m gonna see if I can score some more beer.”

Chris and I help Zoey to Chris’s old beat-up convertible, but despite our efforts, she falls three times en route. On the drive home she tries several times to stand up, only to have Chris lean back to help me pull her down. At our dorm, he helps me assist Zoey up the stairs, and then she breaks free of us and runs to our room. We watch her make several tries with the keypad, and then she enters and quickly shuts the door behind her, deliberately leaving Chris and me alone in the hallway. We hear the door lock from the inside and the sound of Zoey cracking herself up. Chris and I laugh too at the awkwardness of the moment. Our eyes meet again.

“I guess I’ll see you in class,” I say.

He nods, makes a move to go. Stops. “You want to hang out this weekend? I promise I won’t try to kiss you.”

Before I can answer, the door swings wide open and Zoey kicks me hard in the foot.

“Okay,” I squeak through the pain.

Chris laughs but appears slightly alarmed by it all. “How about Sunday? Pick you up at noon?”

“She’ll be there,” Zoey says, and then yanks me inside and closes the door on him before I can change my mind.

We listen as his footsteps disappear down the hall, and then she turns to me and sings, “You have a daaaate!”

I must be drunker than I thought, because I run to the bathroom, drop to my knees and grip the bowl.