The Lifeboat Clique (2 page)

MY NAME IS DENVER REYNOLDS, ASSASSIN OF DREAMS
, Killer of Friendships. Had I stayed in Wisconsin, perhaps I could have been something else. Maybe Denver Reynolds, Openly Tolerated Semiwallflower. Or Denver Reynolds, Girlfriend to Someone Fairly Cute. Or at least Denver Reynolds, Nontraitor.

I moved to LA four years ago, when I was twelve, and I hated it from the start. The myth is that LA can create you, turn you into everything you ever thought you could be. Fill you up with that kind of sparkle that makes for huge houses and adoring crowds. But the truth is, LA can turn on you if you're not on your guard.

The first time I saw a tsunami evacuation sign near Venice Beach, I thought it was a joke, or some kind of advertisement for a product whose logo would later be added to the bottom right.

“That's nothing,” Abigail, who was then my best friend, told me when I breathlessly reported what I'd seen.

“Nothing? Stop me if I'm wrong, but that sign mentions the possibility that a giant wave is going to come along and drown everyone.”

Abigail let out a gust of air so that her bangs fluttered, her sign that my thoughts were ridiculous and barely worth her time. “There's also the possibility that any second a goat will kick you in the face, or a tornado will suck you up and drop you down in Fresno. Or maybe an asteroid will come out of nowhere and turn you into a dark stain on a crosswalk. Back in Texas, a longhorn would just as soon stomp you as look at you. I don't care about no longhorn, and I don't care about no wave. I'm gonna be a soccer star, stomped or unstomped, wet or dry.”

YEARS HAD PASSED
since I'd seen that sign, and I had almost forgotten it. Other signs had taken its place. Invisible signs that sometimes rose up when I was taking a shower or walking to class. In the darkness of my
bedroom, when I was trying to sleep, the signs were in helpful neon.

YOU HAD ONE FRIEND, AND SHE TURNED ON YOU.

SUCKS TO BE YOU.

LA COULD GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOU.

SO COULD THE ELEVENTH GRADE.

YOUR STUDENT COUNCIL DOES NOT CARE WHETHER YOU GET BETTER CAFETERIA FOOD OR WHETHER YOU LIVE OR DIE. THEY ARE POWER-CRAZED DITZES AND WOULD-BE ALPHA DOUCHES AND YOU ARE ONLY WORTH YOUR VOTE WHICH ACTUALLY MEANS NOTHING SINCE THE ELECTION IS RIGGED.

If you noticed, the signs were getting longer and losing their punctuation. But there was no sign that said
LOOK OUT FOR THE EARTHQUAKE AND THE RESULTING TSUNAMI
. And I really could have used one.

The morning of the great wave started like it always did, just me trying to sleepwalk through high school. Because that is what you do. You sleepwalk. You have a role and a place and a mark on your head that designates
your rank. You are certain, when you walk through those doors, who will talk to you and who will not. You know if the jocks will be mean to you, if your voice will be heard in class by anyone but the teacher. You know if you are the hunter or the prey. You know if people think you're smart or funny or pretty or geeky or annoying or cool or—worst of all—if they don't think anything about you. Everyone is neatly separated, like a stamp collection.

And I was a commemorative 3-cent noncollectible with a moon scene. It would take over fifteen of us to even mail a letter.

And if I sound bitter, that's because I was. A bitter little stamp left off the envelope of life. But no matter what, I was determined to survive high school. I, Denver Reynolds, would survive.

AT LUNCHTIME, IN
the cafeteria, I received my first surprise of the day. I got The Look. An unmistakable moment that led to an unmistakable night and insured that I was in the absolute wrong place at the wrong time.

I'd given up on high school. Given up on anyone trying to understand me or like me or see my value. Having lost Abigail in such a sudden and spectacular way, I had given up on trying to make new friends. I was a bird in a cage, waiting for graduation day: that window that would
open as I turned my sad beak to the possibilities of the sky.

But at that moment, The Look gave me hope.

Our high school lunchroom was set out in an orderly grid. If you Google-Earthed it and zoomed in from above using the satellite setting, you would find that the students were carefully designated by tables. The geek table, the loser table, the student council table, the deeply committed Christian table, the drama table, the jock table, the rising young felon table (from which oily-looking, detention-bound shoplifters and fire starters glared balefully), and several uncategorized tables, where I sat with various other students who didn't really fit into a group and who ate their lunch fast. There were, in addition, half a dozen tables of ascending social importance that led to that hallowed table in the center of the cafeteria where the most popular kids sat.

It had room for sixteen, and those sixteen had the shiniest teeth, the best hair, the fastest cars, and the sleekest abs in the eleventh grade. The table almost glowed with promise. We, the non-sixteen, couldn't help staring at it. And there, right in the middle of that shining table, was my old ex-best friend, Abigail Kenner. She sat among them, ruling them, passing notes down the table, planning her stupid parties, and laughing her braying laugh that swept over the room, reminding the rest of us that she was in and we were out.

I had never heard that laugh before in our years of best-friendship. It was something she put on for her junior year, along with her penchant for illegal party planning. This was not the Abigail I knew and loved like a sister, but an entirely different person. Her kinky red hair was smoothed down, and she apparently used some kind of chalky camouflage makeup to hide her freckles.

I missed that kinky red hair. I missed those freckles.

Back in middle school, she had once shown me in a notebook her ten-step plan for gaining social acceptance with that upper strata, which at the time she claimed was just an exercise, as she didn't care about those kind of kids, what with her future soccer fame and all. I remember glancing over it, but I only remember one of the steps:

4. Treat them with contempt.

One day last fall a skinny, quiet kid whose name I never caught and who sat at the loser table must have gone crazy, because he got his tray and, instead of heading over to his table, made a beeline straight for the popular table, which was filling up with cool people. He sat down with them and then just froze.

I don't know what the poor kid was thinking. He must have missed the science class where the cause-effect relationship was explained—too much sunlight and the avocado plant wilts! Too many electrolytes and the cell buys
the farm!—and he thought that sitting at the table would lead to his acceptance instead of the other way around. Or maybe he was protesting this whole unfair structure where you had to sit according to popularity. Maybe he was the modern version of the Buddhist monk pouring gasoline over his own head and setting himself on fire.

But I think the Buddhist monk suffered less.

At first, the other kids at the table just reacted in shock and confusion. Like a wolf pack that Bambi has stumbled into and asked, “Hey, anyone seen my mother?” They tried to ignore him, but as the table filled up and left one angry popular person circling without a seat, some of the kids at the table started glaring at him and mumbling things.

It was a train wreck. And the kid whose name I can't remember was the one perched frozen on the tracks.

But none of us knew how to stop it. We just stared as the whole sad drama played out. The kid was just sitting there. I'm not sure whether he was making a last stand or was just unable to move. His hands gripped his tray. He stared straight ahead, saying nothing. The clock ticked, and the horrible chicken on our plates began to congeal.

No one knew what to say or do, although I suspect most of the people felt what I did: the helplessness of the onlooker. I fought the urge to get up and pull him back
to where he belonged so we could all pretend this never happened.

But I didn't move. Nor did anyone else.

Finally the popular kids stood up and went over to the drama kids' table and kicked them out of their seats and took over their table, leaving the poor unnamed kid sitting at the popular table all alone—except, that is, for Audrey Curtis, the saint.

She really belonged at the Christian table, but her great beauty, grace, and fantastical cheerleading abilities let her crossbreed with the populars. On this day, she chose not to follow the other kids but instead slid her tray down next to the frozen kid and sat beside him.

Perhaps it was her kind gesture that broke him, or perhaps the fact that everyone knew Audrey was a saint, and he suddenly felt like a leper now that Mother Teresa was in such close proximity, delicately peeling the skin off her baked chicken, because suddenly he jumped up and fled the cafeteria and never came back.

We heard he was transferred to another school. Staring at that golden table, which was shimmering like some mirage in the desert, it was easy to empathize with the poor skinny kid, name forgotten, maddened by the thought that he could be one of those chosen few.

Audrey was later killed by a baby grand piano, but I digress.

Where was I? Oh yes, the moment my life changed. The moment when I began to believe that something better lurked within these repressive walls.

Mistake.

Just a little trick played by Fate, so Fate could laugh with his asshole friends and go get a hooker for the night. Yes, that's right. Fate went and got a hooker because Fate plays by no man's rules.

Fate sent me Croix Monroe.

Of course Croix was a football star. He also sang in the choir. And he acted in plays. But he was neither a jock nor a choir guy nor a drama kid. He was his own man, handsome in a new, strange way that broke the handsome mold, with one green eye and one blue one and a habit of wearing vintage shirts and Indian bracelets. Once he wore a feather in his hair for a week for no reason at all. But he could get away with it. He was Croix.

Croix was nice to me. He said hi. Like the new Pope, he made divinity accessible. Last year I was in algebra class with him, and he was the one
x
and
y
added up to. Everyone knew it. Even the teacher. Once he asked me about homework . . . what pages were assigned again? I think that was the relevant question. And I repeated the page
numbers and he listened, he really listened and smiled his dazzling smile. I know it's not much, but it was enough to deepen my infatuation.

This year, my junior year, we had Spanish class together. And those wily verbs and nouns that changed for no reason and pissed me off and made me swear to never go to Acapulco and ride one of their cheap barge cruises and drink their cheap tequila and throw up into their salty waters were suddenly golden in his mouth. He spoke like a native. A godlike native. And every girl in class, all of them—the geeks and the snobby bitches and the crop-top skanks and the quiet, shy girls—imagined him naked in the sand, washed up on the beach and asking for lemonade in a language we vaguely understood but suddenly loved.

Ah, the trills of his
rrrrrrr
's
.

I could stroke them.

Croix sat at the end of the cool-person table in the cafeteria. On that fateful day, as I was navigating my way to the various uncollected bits of humanity table, balancing a tray on which sat the horrors dreamed up by the cafeteria cooks, Croix turned around and smiled at me.

It wasn't a polite smile. It was THAT smile, the one a lonely girl waits for.

I froze.

The sell-by date of the chicken on my plate retreated
farther into the rearview mirror as the seconds passed. It couldn't be true. He was Croix and I was me. I looked behind me, back at Croix. He was still smiling. I went to my table, set down my tray, and didn't eat. My face was flushed red. My heart beating fast.

And somewhere out off the shores of LA, down deep where the crabs skitter, deeper still to where the plates rumble and move, something shifted. Something started the mechanism that would later erupt into the undersea earthquake and cause the great wave that wiped out some of these very princes and pawns.

But right then, of course, I didn't know it. In the blink of an eye, my goal in life had flip-flopped. No longer did I want to just survive high school. Maybe I could actually make something of these miserable circumstances. Be invited to all the cool parties. Be respected, noticed. Bounce off Croix's perfect ass into a stratosphere where I could never have hoped to go before.

I know, I know. All from a look.

But things got better. Way way better. Or way way worse. To put it algebraically: way (squared) worse.

THE FIRST EARTHQUAKE MADE ITS APPEARANCE DURING
Spanish class.

For everyone but me, a minor California earthquake was like a shot of dopamine. It was like seeing a celebrity on the street or eating a handful of M&Ms at once or noticing that ten people just liked your Instagram selfie. It was a mild, welcome respite from a day that, since California has no seasons, would pretty much be like any other day.

But I was from solid, unmoving Wisconsin, and I was terrified of earthquakes, and four years of LA had not dispelled my fears one bit. When I first felt the tremor, I was staring at the back of Croix's head, desperate to find out if
his meaningful look in the cafeteria had been some kind of cruel accident, that he had been staring into the middle distance and I was some kind of fixed point to orient him and he was smiling, actually, at a daydream or a girl whose breasts were bigger than the first two letters of a love note in Braille.

Our Spanish teacher, Mrs. Paltos, was mentioning that
la mano
was a combination of a feminine determiner with a masculine subject and wasn't that special? Then the floor beneath our feet started to rumble. A shudder ran through our desks, and the big window that looked out on palm trees and jacaranda rattled, and the lights swung ever so slightly. The class went
Ohhhhhh
. Mrs. Paltos stopped the motion of her marker against the Smart Board and waited for Earth's outer crust to stop hogging the spotlight.

But I was speechless with terror, my hands gripping the sides of my desk, my heart pumping madly.

“Earthquake!” I managed to sputter, before springing to life and ducking underneath my desk, where all I saw were skinny-jean legs and overpriced shoes.

I heard laughter. The trembling had stopped, but the laughter went on. I was no longer invisible. I was the class joke. But I didn't care. My hands were still wrapped tightly around the chair legs. The earth had betrayed me, and I wasn't taking any chances.

Mrs. Paltos came over to me. I could tell it was her because the shoes were old-fashioned, the dress was too long, and the legs had veins that don't spread that far till way after college. She crouched down.

“
¿Que pasó?
” she demanded, leaning hard on the accent to reaffirm that she was indeed the Spanish teacher.

“Earthquake,” I explained, because she was obviously some kind of idiot who needed things spelled out.

She shook her head, and I realized I had just violated her “no speaking English in Spanish class” rule.

“
¡Español solamente!
”

“
Earthquako
,” I said.

She scowled. “
¡Levántate!
”

But my body was not in the mood to
levántate
or, for that matter, do jack shit. It was in the mood to stay, crouched and trembling, right where it was.

“
¡Levántate!
”

The class had stopped laughing at me and was listening intently. Something intriguing was going on—direct defiance to a teacher. Suddenly, though, she moved, and Croix—yes, Croix—took her place. He wore jeans and a Billabong shirt and looked even more stunning now that he was close. His hair was cut to a perfect length. His strange eyes sparkled, and his cologne made my soul want to grow nostrils.

“Hey,” he said. “It's all good. Just a little tremor.”

I was so shocked, I let go of the chair legs.

“Right,” he said, nodding. “Nothing to be worried about. Though I don't blame you. Best to be prepared for the worst.”

I found myself crawling out from under the desk and taking my seat again, my heart still beating fast but totally ditching earthquake for sun god as inspiration for that rhythm. Croix gave me a thumbs-up and went back to his own seat, and that was that. The drama was over. The teacher made us go back to Spanish, which is what every survival handbook will tell you to do after an earthquake.

Abigail turned her head, looked at me briefly, and went back to her notes.

That's right. Abigail was also in my Spanish class. You're probably wondering if she ever acknowledged me, being my ex-best friend and all. Yes, she did. Sometimes she glanced at me and looked away. Not exactly Ariel and Flounder, but whatever. She was the one who had all the parties to which people like me weren't invited. Of course, she didn't use her own house. Her specialty was breaking into other people's houses to have the parties. People away for the weekend, or a house that was still sitting on the market after months of some Realtor trying to sell it for two million dollars over value.

She'd leave the trashed property for someone else to deal with. The police never showed up. She was never caught. Some said her father was friends with someone high up in the DA's office who would divert the LAPD. That was the rumor, at least. LA was the place where your connections got you everything: your script funded, your jury duty excused, or someone else's house to ruin in the name of a good time.

And evidently the minor earthquake had inspired her to throw another party, because she straightened up, turned, and whispered something to limber stick-bitch Sienna Martin. Sienna said something a bit louder that jumped the heads of two nobodies and landed safely in the ear of Madison Cutler, budding alcoholic, probable bulimic, definite boob-jobber, and total cool kid. She smiled a smile that welcomed chilled Jell-O shots and passed on whatever party message she'd received to the next cool person, who leaned back and whispered it to Croix. He nodded politely, still taking notes.

How did I know that a party was brewing when the words never reached my ears? I just knew. It is a skill common to people who are never actually invited to parties, and it brings on a kind of secondary reaction, spontaneous pain in the heart and a spasm of gut that was made of jealousy and longing and what the cliff divers of Acapulco
would call
tristeza
when they missed and hit the rocks.

And why did I want to be invited to a party full of people I thought were assholes celebrating a seemingly C-list seismic event in LA? I don't know. It was some kind of hardwiring in the brain somewhere. That human desire to belong. But what could I do besides raise my hand and, when the teacher picked me, call out to Abigail instead:
“Hey, need any outcasts at this wonderful affair? You could set your drinks on my head.”

But of course I did not. I didn't want to give Abigail the pleasure of knowing I wanted to be included. I couldn't help wondering if she gave these parties just to punish me. As if I hadn't been punished enough.

After the bell rang, I happened to enter the bottleneck at the doorway with none other than Croix again.

He smiled at me and said, “Doing okay?”

My face flushed. “Oh, you mean that little earthquake? Barely felt it.”

“Ah, no worries. You're probably smarter than the rest of us.”

“At least it broke up the monotony of class. And I'll treasure the memory of Mrs. Paltos trying to get me to say
earthquake
in Spanish. She's so determined to weave conversational Spanish into the fabric of our lives.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see other kids
glancing at us. Wondering what was up with this rarely sighted loser/golden boy coupling.

“Some of these phrases, though,” he said. “Are we ever really going to use them? I mean,
Mi amiga esta en la playa.
When would I ever say that?”

Talking to Croix was surprisingly easy. We were doing this. We were having a conversation, and it wasn't awkward, and I hadn't vomited or screamed, “I AM TALKING TO CROIX MONROE, AND IF A BLACK MAMBA SHOULD FALL OUT OF THE CEILING AND BITE ME ON THE NECK, I WOULD REFUSE ALL ANTIVENOM SO I COULD DIE HAPPY!”

“My theory is that we should learn everything possible on the chance that at any given moment, something's going to matter,” I said. “We just don't know what that is. And yes, one day you might have to inform a nonnative speaker that your friend is on the beach. Or if that nonnative speaker is a member of the Mexican paparazzi, you could say, ‘
La Kardashian esta en la playa.
'”

He laughed. “You're Denver, right?” he asked.

He knew my name. GOD SPEED, BLACK MAMBA FANGS ON THE WAY TO MY JUGULAR.

“Yes.”

“I'm Croix.”

“I know.”

“So, are you coming to the party tonight, Denver?”

And that's what made him special. That complete and awesome, genuine or beautifully acted belief that an inconsequential girl like myself would be invited to one of Abigail's illegal parties.

“Sure,” I heard myself answering. So casually, as if it were true.

“Great. So am I. Got to celebrate the earthquake, right?”

“Exactly.”

Something of a more plate-buckling nature was happening inside me. For I was deciding that I, charter member of the invisible club, was going to go to that party to which I was not invited. And at that party, I was going to talk to and continue my impossible flirtation with Croix Monroe.

I walked around the rest of that day with an earthquake named Croix roiling inside me, wondering what I would wear and how I'd get out of the house and what lie I would have to tell my mother? I had gotten in big trouble my sophomore year, and she still didn't quite trust me, even though—again—not my fault. I didn't know if the cool kids had to lie to their parents or if their parents let them do stupid and illegal things because their parents were awesome or uncaring or high. Anyway, I was stuck with my visibly nonawesome, caring, unstoned mother, who was also pretty smart.

My only alternative was to sneak out. Easier said than done, because my mother was a night owl. I decided I would exit the house out my second-story window and then drop into the bushes below. I explained my plan to my cat, Sonny Boy, who I could tell anything to because he didn't give a rat's ass. I could escape successfully and go to the most important party in my life. Or I could die. It was all the same to him.

I had this thing I did where I talked to Sonny Boy and then answered myself in a high-pitched voice that was supposed to be Sonny Boy talking back. Try this someday when you find yourself friendless.

Me: Sonny Boy, guess what?

SB (high voice):
I don't care.

Me: I'm sneaking out tonight.

SB (high voice):
I think I have a crust of cat litter stuck to my butt. Could you check?

Me: I've been invited to a party by this dreamy guy named Croix, and this could change everything.

Sonny Boy stared at me with his golden eyes and then licked his paw pads and smoothed down the sleek fur on his small, uncaring head.

Our talk was over.

I waited until ten o'clock and then went downstairs, where my mother was reading a book from self-help guru
Robert Pathway while someone on TV interviewed a Cal Tech scientist about the earthquake we'd had that afternoon. The scientist was pointing to a digital chart and didn't seem alarmed. No one was, because the killer version of the quake hadn't struck yet, and the scientists and everyone else were just alarmed by everyday things like, would not finishing your antibiotics kill you or is the world running out of helium or is your teenage daughter about to sneak out to an illegal party in the name of some desperate, delusional love?

My mother was kind of an earthy type or maybe just the type who struggles with details. She had longish brown hair that never looked quite combed. Her eyebrows were always grown in because she'd forget to pluck them until the job got too big and then she'd just say the hell with it. And her clothes had apparently never read a color chart together. I thought her look was refreshing in this town full of phonies. I suppose my father once did too.

“Hey, Mom,” I said. I bent to give her a hug, and she hugged me back with one arm.

“How are you?”

“Good.”

“You'll be even better tomorrow.” She'd been reading Robert Pathway ever since the divorce and forbade any
negative talk in the house. Which was fine, because that kept my conversation to a minimum.

“Okay, Mom, if you say so.”

“You feel that earthquake?”

“Yes. I hid beneath my desk, and everyone laughed at me.”

“Maybe you were the smart one.”

“I felt like a genius.”

“You know,” she said, “there may have been a gift in that earthquake. Always look for gifts, even in things that seem . . .”

Her voice trailed off. The look in her eyes said she wanted to pull a blanket over her head and wait for a better feeling. She hadn't had too many gifts in a while, and we both knew it. And I wanted to comfort her somehow in that curious way daughters are sometimes called on to comfort their mothers. I wanted to stroke her arm or rub her shoulders or give her that awkward hug you give when one person is standing and the other sitting. But that would take away the lie that was keeping her going: that circumstances didn't matter, they could be banished by the right thoughts or the right words, and she was getting better every day.

So I settled with a “Well, I'm off to bed now” and a kiss on her cheek.

I went upstairs and found my very best outfit. I put on my makeup carefully, screwing up the eyeliner and having to start over, all the while not talking to myself, because if I did, I'd be trying to talk myself out of this crazy plan, and I already knew I was going through with it. I felt bad about sneaking around on my mother, but not bad enough to just go to bed and wake up to the same dismal life.

Sonny Boy watched me impassively. If Sonny Boy were a human, he would be at the cool table in our cafeteria, because he was beautiful and confident and a douche bag. He would have snubbed me in the halls, perhaps making some cruel joke at my expense, and broken the hearts of cheerleaders who couldn't see beneath his sleek, purring facade.

Me: What are you looking at, Sonny Boy?

SB (high voice):
A dipshit who has never seen a YouTube makeup tutorial.