The Lifeboat Clique (10 page)

Trevor took the first shift of the night watch as the rest of us found places around the deck to arrange ourselves. My tongue was dry, but we had already drunk our rations for the day. I wanted to tell the others good night, but somehow it didn't seem appropriate. The expression was too familiar, too ordinary, not quite right to say to a group I didn't belong to on a salvaged boat in the middle of the sea.

The deck carpeting was wet against the back of my head. Stars crowded the skies, so absolutely crisp, like new crackers. My eyelids were heavy. I couldn't help but believe things would be put back in place. I pictured the water retreating from Malibu, the land drying, the dead being counted, the wrecked BMWs being towed to various body shops. And our parents, traumatized, clinging to hope and waiting for news. At what point would they give up on us, and have our funerals?

BACK IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, ABIGAIL AND I WERE OBSESSED
with the science class pet, a parrot named Mr. Shriek. He was an odd-looking creature, with a blue head, a green body, yellow wings, and a tuft of green right above where his brow would be, if he had a brow. His feathers were slightly ruffled, as though someone had just pissed him off or held a blow dryer to his back. His eyes always looked vaguely startled, and his beak never completely closed. But his clawed feet were long and delicate—his best feature, in my opinion—and quite animated. He would lean back and lift a foot off his perch as though making some theatrical point.

Apparently Mr. Shriek was not that smart of a parrot, because he didn't know any words. And though Patrick Ryan would sneak in every afternoon and patiently teach him the dirtiest word he knew, Mr. Shriek could only get out a shrieking
FUHHHH!
sound that no one even recognized, despite Patrick's proud assurances that Mr. Shriek was indeed cursing.

Abigail and I felt terribly sorry for this ruffled, multicolored, stupid parrot, once proud and free, now locked in a cage, stared at and mocked by countless preteens, lacking the ability to defend himself verbally. We'd sneak in during lunch hour and visit him. He would lean in, and Abigail would reach her fingers inside his cage to stroke the side of his head.

“It's okay, Mr. Shriek,” I'd say. “You are a beautiful bird. You just be you.”

“FUHHHHHH! FUHHHHH!”
His eyes would bulge, and he would lift one leg in the air.

“He's trying to talk, poor little winged varmint,” Abigail said.

“I think he might be stupid.”

“Maybe so. But even stupid birds have the right to blue sky.”

Abigail was always saying cool things like that.

Right next to Mr. Shriek's cage was the window and
the prospect of freedom. A sky full of drifting clouds. Worlds unknown. A flock of lady birds somewhere, floating above some balmy island, waiting to greet him and worship him as their idiot god.

We couldn't stand it. The injustice of it all tore at our middle school hearts.

One day in spring when the sky above Los Angeles was a beautiful, evenly toned blue, Abigail watched the door while I opened Mr. Shriek's cage. I held out my finger, and Mr. Shriek walked onto it, gripping it with his long black nails, the warmth of his body spreading down over my knuckles.

“It's time to be free, Mr. Shriek,” I whispered.

I opened the window, and Mr. Shriek took off into the world.

Abigail left her post at the door to join me, and together we watched him fly so far away that he became a murky stab of color, a darker blue patch in the sky. We both stood quietly, reveling in what we'd done for him. It was bird justice, and didn't that make for a better world?

I was just about to close the window when Abigail stopped me.

“Look up yonder.” She pointed at the sky.

“What? I can't see anything.”

But in a couple of seconds, I saw it too, and we could
only watch as Mr. Shriek flew back down, getting bigger and bigger until we stepped away to let him come through the open window and back into his cage, where he made himself at home, gripping his bar and shrugging at us.

“Mr. Shriek!” I said. “What's the matter? Don't you want to be free?”

Mr. Shriek stared at us with his bulging black eyes.
“FUUUUUUH!”
he screamed.
“FUUUUUH! FUUUUUH!”

We couldn't believe it. We let him escape this school where he was not free and where he didn't belong, and he flew right back into his same miserable life.

Abigail shook her head. “He's not the brightest parrot in the world, that's for sure.”

I HAVE TO
admit I was honored when Abigail chose me as her friend. It didn't happen right away. It came after a couple more escapes from gym class—once when she rubbed liquid soap in her eye and said she had accidentally stabbed herself with a pencil, and once when she dropped two Alka-Seltzers in a Diet Coke and drank it real fast to make herself throw up. True to Abigail's words, Ms. Hanson never questioned us. She did not care if we were sick or lying or whatever as long as her phone was all charged up and ready for James Cameron to call.

We were sitting outside on our favorite table in our gym clothes when Abigail said, “We're friends now.”

“You mean, like just this minute we became friends?”

“Yep.”

And that was that. I know it sounds ridiculous now, but Abigail made me feel like being her friend was something special and sacred, like having my birthday party inside Noah's Ark and eating cake off the hump of a camel. She was just that way.

My mom was very excited that I had made a friend. “That's wonderful, Denver. She sounds very nice.” Then she said, a bit wistfully, “I need to make some friends, too.”

When I first met Abigail's family, I expected a bunch of rednecks with Stetson hats and cattle prods singing Dwight Yoakam songs and doing the two-step. I was completely stunned to find that they were nothing like this at all. None of them had Texas accents. None of them wore boots. They spoke with perfect grammar. They were like every other family in LA. Only Abigail, it seemed, had taken that giant state and its way with words to heart.

Abigail's mother did ride a horse, but not a Texas kind of riding. More like a Pacific Palisades style. She had a toned body and a pretty face, thick lashes, high cheekbones, and short blond hair that was shaved high in the back and left longer in front. She had a palomino she kept
in the stables at Will Rogers Park and rode in tournaments, so sometimes when I came over we found her wearing jodhpurs, and her little crop would be sitting on the counter ready to go, and she'd shake it for emphasis when she talked about how bad the traffic was or how she was sick of not having four seasons and wanted to move to Vermont. She also talked about something called “The Other Trail” a lot, which Abigail explained to me was a meditation retreat in Sedona run by a guy who had a sweat lodge in his backyard. But for someone who was so into meditation, Abigail's mother seemed kind of wound up about a lot of things. The height of the next-door neighbor's fence, for one thing.

“It's ten feet high. How do I know this? Because I measured it. It's only supposed to be nine feet. Why does this matter? Because of sunlight. My hydrangeas have never been as pink since that damn fence went up.”

“What can I say?” Abigail told me. “She has periods when she's pretty cool with everything and then she starts complaining more and more about little stuff, and then my dad sends her off to Sedona to cram herself into a sweat lodge with all the other women who hate ten-foot fences, and the cycle repeats itself.”

Abigail's lawyer dad had short, curly red hair and freckles and a beard he kept neatly trimmed. I thought
he'd had Botox, because when he laughed, lines would form around his eyes but his forehead would never move. He was a nice enough man, although he said very little, and his mind always seemed to be somewhere else. Every time I saw him—even on the weekends—he was always wearing a suit.

Abigail had a little brother named Maxwell whom she hated for mysterious reasons. “I don't know,” she'd said impatiently when I asked her. “He is evil and has many faults. Too many to mention, so just be glad you're an only child.”

I didn't get why Abigail was so Texan and her family wasn't. “Oh,” her mother said one day to me, “we were only there for three years, and I couldn't wait to get out of the place. So much humidity, and utilities were
ridiculous.
But Abigail really identified with Texas. You know Abigail. She goes a bit too far with things.”

AS WE MOVED
into the fall season, which LA did not acknowledge with a change in weather, I found myself Skyping my friends in Wisconsin less and less. They lived in a different world. A world where leaves turn colors and are raked into piles, and fathers crowd the televisions, obsessed with the fate of the Green Bay Packers. I continued on in
T-shirts as my friends to the east transitioned to sweaters and then coats. We tried to talk about the kids from my old school, but it didn't seem to matter anymore.

“You've got to keep the friendship going,” said positive, pink-toned Jessica. “We'll be friends forever, right?”

“Right,” I said.

But really, by that point, it was all about Abigail. We made a good team. I was consumed with learning about every little thing, no matter how seemingly mundane, on the chance that it might matter someday. Abigail was the master of the grand plan, but she hadn't bothered to learn much, as she was so busy sketching out her ten-point steps for soccer stardom. (Ex.,
Beat old personal best record in fifty-yard dash. Practice kicking on the laces. Do balancing exercises.
)

We were happy. Absolutely content with each other's company. Abigail came to my house once or twice, but mostly I went to hers, which was nicer and had more cool things, including a swimming pool and a small balcony outside her bedroom whose rail we could use to climb up onto the roof and watch the exclusive Palisades world unfold below us, the beautiful lawns and the too-bright flowers and the swing sets and the biggest play houses I had ever seen.

“Look,” Abigail said, sweeping her arm to the left. “It's
the ten-foot fence that puts my mother in the sweat lodge once a year. I don't really mind it so much myself. Gives us more privacy.”

Abigail's bedroom was covered with posters of famous women soccer players. She made me watch endless videos of Mia Hamm, her idol.

“She's a forward,” Abigail told me. “That's what I'm gonna be. She scored the most goals in soccer history. What a badass.”

I spent hours kicking a soccer ball to Abigail, helping her practice her one-touch passes, shooting form, juggling, and figure eights. I wasn't that interested in soccer myself, but I was ready to be the good friend and help her attain her life's ambition. I noticed that Abigail wasn't very coordinated at all, and most of the balls she kicked went into the pool rather than the homemade soccer goal constructed from the cinder blocks her pale father had laboriously hauled in from Home Depot and set up for her near the back fence.

“You suck,” Maxwell would announce, watching from the porch.

“No, you suck!” she'd shriek back at her tormentor, but then he'd cross his arms and stand there, staring at her, until she'd finally get unnerved enough to go fetch her mother.

“Little agger-vatin' son a bitch,” Abigail muttered. “Brothers and dreams don't match up. They're like rain and suede.”

We had two classes together in school—science and gym—and we met in the hallways after class and ate lunch together in a cafeteria that had not yet stratified into the social haves and have-nots. Back then, table space was on a first-come, first-serve basis. There were girls who you could tell would someday rule high school—like Sienna and Madison—but at the time, we barely noticed them.

One day in December I realized I hadn't Skyped my Wisconsin friends in three weeks, and they hadn't contacted me, either. They were there, and I was here. They were outside the Sphere of Abigail, and I was within it. They were not dead to me as Abigail had predicted, but they weren't quite alive, either. They had their coats on somewhere. Snow was falling.

And I was wearing shorts.

GYM CLASS WAS
proceeding without much drama, with Abigail and me in the bottom twenty-five percent who failed everything from spiking a volleyball to throwing a basketball into a hoop to doing a cartwheel, and Sienna Martin continuing to exceed at everything, including kissing Ms. Hanson's ass. Apparently Sienna was the only
person in class deranged enough to think Ms. Hanson was really going to make it in Hollywood and had some equally deranged idea her narcissistic gym coach would then be happy to open doors for her. We couldn't imagine Sienna had any acting ability, but she could put her natural bitchiness to good use in a reality show called
My Useless and Delusional, Smug Life.

“We'll pitch it to Lifetime,” Abigail said. “Everybody wins.”

In early February, the Great Rope-Climbing Campaign of Swing Tits began, a regime of terror and dread, where gravity became a subject awkward girls were doomed to fail.

Fail we did, over and over, and we had company, although of course Sienna hauled her stick body right up that knotty rope. We shouldn't have cared. But Abigail and I wanted to climb it. We wanted to do it because it could be done, and if it could be done, why couldn't we do it?

“We need a plan,” Abigail said. “Stage one, the will. We've got that. Stage two, greater upper-arm and leg strength.”

“Pilates?” I asked. “Don't make me do Pilates.”

“Nah. We'll go traditional. And we need to do brain exercises, too. Picture ourselves climbing it easy-peasy.” She closed her eyes. “I'm climbing it now. It's so easy, like
hating my little brother. I can feel the rope in my hands. I can feel myself rising. My body suddenly is light as a feather. And now I'm at the top. And now I'm letting go. I'm falling on top of Sienna. Crushing her as Swing Tits screams.”

“That's beautiful,” I said.

She opened her eyes. “Now you try it.”

“You know what?” I said after a month of summit attempts. “We're not meant for climbing that stupid rope. And what's the point, anyway? Is the world out there full of knotty ropes you have to climb? Do you have to climb one to drive a car? Get a credit card? Go to heaven?”

Abigail gave me her half-smile-and-nose-twitch combo that signaled disapproval. “Aren't you the one who said you need to learn everything, on the chance that something could be important?”

“I changed my mind. There is nothing about this stupid rope that could ever be important in any way.”

“You've taught me lots of stuff, like big, important words I'll never use and highfalutin grammar. And that you just never know what might come in handy someday.”