The Lifeboat Clique (4 page)

“Hey,” I said.

“How's it going?”

“I'm having a great time.”

“I don't usually see you at the parties,” she said, but her tone was nothing like that of Sienna and Hayley. It was kind, encouraging, as though my presence made this party everything it could be.

“Well,” I said, “I tend to be quite picky over which party I attend. But this one seemed to have promise.”

Audrey smiled and nodded as though I were perfectly serious. “Can I sit with you?”

“Sure,” I said, grateful that someone actually wanted my company.

She daintily sank down beside me, crossing her legs at the ankles and sipping at her drink.

It looked like Coke. Or a rum and Coke. She followed my eyes.

“Oh, it's just Coke!” she said. “I like soda. It does fun things in my mouth.” She wiggled her nose as if to prove her nose liked to party with the soda bubbles. She laughed at her own whatever and then looked around the room.

“I love the decorations!” she cried. “So cute!”

I didn't answer. I had a sudden pit in my stomach that was burning with a fiery heat. For I had just made two lightning-quick, stunning realizations:

Audrey Curtis had the personality of a slowly turning rotisserie chicken.

Audrey Curtis was a saint, and I was the leper to whose
sores she was applying her conversational iodine.

Now I knew exactly why the kid-whose-name-I-never-caught fled the cafeteria after that fateful day Audrey lingered with him at the otherwise-empty table. That emanating kindness she directed at him, and now at me, had a withering effect. For it was then that I realized just how sad and desperate and loser-y I was to merit her attention. It was a painfully dissolving feeling, as though I were a chord from Audrey's harp fading in the air of a chapel.

My face was hot. Tears flooded my eyes.

“Denver!” Audrey said. “What's wrong?”

I didn't answer her. I jumped off the sofa and staggered for the stairwell, the room gray and disorderly around me, the chaos of jokes and laughter and gossip and urgent whispering and some new Katy Perry song and drunken howls forming some kind of cool-kid white noise. I hurtled forward, trying to right myself, tripped over the zebra rug, and stumbled to the floor before quickly picking myself up, leaving my unopened beer behind.

People were drinking on the stairs, more people who belonged there, and suddenly it seemed as though the whole world, in fact, was there, not just the cool kids of my high school but from every high school in LA—no, every high school in the country, with more cool kids pouring
in from Belgium and France, cool kids from Austria and Nepal humping each other in the bedrooms, cool kids from Denmark high-fiving cool kids from the Ukraine, more cool kids joining, cool kids from Venus and Mars and Jupiter and planets not yet discovered.

I elbowed my way to the bottom of the stairs and hurtled through the crowd, jostling people, knocking their cups of beer. I heard curses and annoyed mutterings, but I paid no attention. Finally I made it to the front door, grabbed the handle, and threw it open.

Croix Monroe stood in the doorway.

HE LOOKED GREAT, OF COURSE, IN AN UNTUCKED BUTTON-DOWN
shirt and faded jeans. I was so stunned to see him that I just stood there in shock.

“Hey,” he said. “You're not leaving, are you?”

“Well . . . it's getting kind of late.”

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and glanced down at it. “It's a little after eleven o'clock. The night is young.”

I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to go back in there, but here was the reason I came, all friendly and smiling and ready for the great time I had just been denied for the last forty minutes.

“My mother really needs her Subaru back,” I said, then flinched inside. I might as well have said,
“I have absolutely no social skills or way of relating to the world. I was raised in a basement by a madman with no human contact. I was fed Cheetos through an air duct, and my only companion was a termite.”
But then again, “My mother really needs her Subaru back” was much more concise.

He smiled again. Neither one of us had moved toward the doorway. Small insects from the light above buzzed around his head but did not land on him lest they be zapped by his majesty.

“Your mother doesn't actually know you're here, does she?”

“No,” I admitted. “She doesn't.”

“You sneak out the back?”

“Out the window. I hurtled into some lantana bushes and broke several branches.” (Sonny Boy's high-pitched voice in my ear:
“Shut up, idiot.”
)

He laughed. “Good strategy. Glad you're still in one piece.” He nodded at the door. “Shall we go in?”

I'd just escaped that horrific den of popularity, atmospheric salt for my invisible wounds, but now Croix was here, and everything had changed.

Something made me say, “Sure.” We entered the foyer as the crowd parted. All the drunk guys were happy to see
him, and all the drunk girls were giving me icy stares. He gave out a few high fives and several fist bumps, and then guided me to the living room, into a corner where two overstuffed chairs faced each other by a bay window.

He gestured to a chair. “What would you like to drink?”

“Oh, anything.”

“How 'bout a beer?”

“That would be great.”

He took off, and I sat there waiting for him, my heart racing. The leper shame Audrey had given me was wearing off, and the lesions were fading. Croix's interest had not come from my desperate imagination. It was real. It was the top half of the story, the one above the clouds, the one I deserved. And all I had to do was not blow it.

Sonny Boy appeared at my elbow to say something about my chances, but I pushed his face away.

“Not now,” I whispered.

Croix returned with two bottles of beer. He handed one to me and sat down.

“Do you have a cat?” I asked, adjusting my crown as the worst conversationalist in the world. I took a few gulps of my beer, hoping that would loosen up the conversation. The beer was so cold it hurt my throat.

Croix just smiled. “No. We used to have a dog, but he died of cancer.”

“What kind of dog was he?”

Croix looked wistful. “A Lab.” I suddenly imagined Croix crying, shirtless, over his Lab's dead body. Since it was my own inner fantasy and I could play God, I added some sunlight to flash across his abs. Not the dog's. Croix's.

“I'm really glad you came,” Croix told me, and flashed his dazzling smile. He really was a handsome guy.
El chico esta muy guapo.

This was swiftly turning into the best night of my life.

“I've been wanting to talk to you,” he added. “Get to know you better.”

“Really?” I said. I took another couple of nervous gulps from my bottle. “Why?”

He took a sip of beer as he considered the question. “Well, because you're different from the other girls. You're really smart. And funny. And ordinary things don't seem to matter to you.”

“What things?”

“I don't know.” He searched for the words. “Girly things.”

Girly things. I wasn't sure what he meant, but his tone of voice said it was a compliment.

“Thanks.” I wondered if he'd heard the rumors about me that Abigail had spread around, and I wanted to tell him I wasn't a traitor or a terrible friend, just an innocent victim. But I decided not to say anything. Why ruin a great conversation with unfair gossip about myself?

“So, anyway,” Croix said, “I thought tonight would be a good chance to find out more about you.”

“We could talk in Spanish,” I suggested, hoping he knew I was joking.

“Sure,” he laughed. “
Mi amiga esta en la playa
.”

“
¿Por qué?
” I asked.

He shrugged. “
No se
.”

“Well, that's it for me. We've come to the end of my Spanish vocabulary.”

He took another sip of his beer and nodded. “Mine, too.”

Just then the house moved.

The paintings on the wall rattled, and the chairs shivered. Someone had turned off some lights in the few minutes Croix and I had been talking, and in the dimness around me, I heard cheers and shouts. Instinctively I grabbed the arms of my chair, fighting the urge to cry out or dive into a corner.

But suddenly Croix reached over and took my hand in his, and I was just frozen there, frozen by my fears and
my amazement at his touch.

He raised his eyebrows at me. “It's nothing,” he said. “Just like last time. Just the earth not ready to sleep yet.”

“It should sleep,” I said weakly. “It's a school night.”

He kept looking at me. My hand was still in his. My face flushed hot, but my heart rate slowed until it was just in the infatuation zone. I drank the rest of my beer and Croix got me another, and I was halfway through that one when the next earthquake hit.

It was sudden and violent. My beer fell out of my hand and rolled on the floor. Paintings fell from the walls, furniture fell over, glass shattered, girls screamed, guys went “
Dude!
” and the house rocked and shook. It was like God took his big finger and thumped his planet over and over again. And I found myself in Croix's arms as he pulled me down from the chair and into a corner as the furniture slid around and the plasma screen fell on the marble floor with a huge crash.

“Whoa,” Croix murmured in my ear. “Got a wild one this time. Just ride it out. We're good.”

Finally the shaking stopped, leaving Croix and me still wrapped around each other in the corner of the room.

“It's done now. It's done,” he said. All around us people were talking excitedly and stepping over broken glass and getting online to see what number the earthquake had hit.
I could barely breathe. I was scared but in kind of a murky way, because I'm a lightweight, and the beer had started taking effect. I disentangled myself from Croix and tried to stand up.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I need to get back home. My mom's gonna check my room now that we've had this quake to see if I'm okay.”

“And you'll be in trouble, right?”

“Yes.” Trouble meant looking into her sad, disappointed eyes. I hadn't exactly lied to her, had I? Just neglected to mention that instead of going to bed, I was sneaking out to a party. Okay, fine. I had lied.

“You don't want to be on the road during an aftershock. It's not safe. Also, you seem a little drunk. Just stay here for a while and sober up and then call your mother.”

“She'll be worried,” I said. “I should call her now.”

“Wait a few minutes.”

“Okay.”

I sat back down on the floor next to Croix and he took my hand, and we watched people stepping around the broken glass and fetching themselves new drinks and shrugging and going back to being idiots. They were probably sad that the earthquake had wrecked the house and would now get all the credit. We started talking again, leaning in close to whisper to each other. Just ordinary
things you'd say in a tipsy state after an earthquake, about aftershocks and wood-framed buildings.

I wasn't sure how much time had passed, but I was thinking about calling my mother again when I suddenly realized Croix's lips were getting closer and closer to mine, and things were going my way, the sky opening up over Portland, the sun shining down. Below us was fog and a blanket of nothing, but here the sky was blue, so blue, and his lips came ever closer; they were going to touch mine in a moment, a blink. . . .

A girl screamed.

Then another.

Croix and I stopped and looked toward the sound. Everyone was crowding by the windows.

“What's going on?” I asked.

Croix stood and pulled me up, and we rushed over to join the screaming, pointing kids at the window. I looked out and couldn't believe what I was seeing.

The ocean was eating California.

A wall of water had rushed over the Pacific Coast Highway. Cars were being swept away. Houses that lined the beach were crumbling, and the water was racing up the short bluff toward us.

“Oh, my God,” I said.

“It can't possibly come this high,” Croix murmured.

More people were screaming now, even guys. I simply watched, stunned, as the water rose higher and higher, uprooting a row of ornamental palm trees that were arranged near the back deck. I saw things floating in the water: cars and bicycles and surfboards and kayaks and couches. Another surge came, and the water rose up to the bay windows.

“It's going to get us!” someone cried.

I felt something wet. I looked down at the floor. I was standing in a puddle spreading out from the wall. The water rumbled outside the windows. It was churning, terrifying, roaring like a train.

Moments later it broke through the windows and poured into the house.

People were stampeding for the stairs now. Croix grabbed my hand and pulled me along with him. We joined the bottlenecked crowd trying to get up to the second floor.

“Hey, don't panic!” Croix shouted, but no one paid attention. People shoved and swore and banged into one another. Someone's elbow caught me in the ribs, and I gasped. The people from the bottom pushed us along, and we tried to keep from falling down and being trampled.

When we were halfway up the stairs, I looked down and saw water continuing to pour through the broken
windows, filling up the room, sweeping away chairs and tables and bookcases and lamps. Some of the kids who were still on the first floor were frantically moving in slow motion, waist deep in the swift and rising waters, trying to get to the stairs. Some still held on to their drinks, trying to keep them above the water, displaying a human tendency to save small, ridiculous things when their lives are at stake.

A girl fell under the surface of the water and a guy pulled her back up, and she gasped for breath. The water was rising so fast that some of the kids were swimming now. Swimming in a room where just ten minutes ago they had been drinking and laughing.

“Come on,” Croix urged in my ear. “Keep moving.”

Finally, we reached the second floor, where waterlogged kids were waiting, some of them frantically texting as though somehow that could save them. As if the reporting of the wave were stronger than the wave itself, and the act of seeing and witnessing was somehow going to make everything okay. But all the texting in the world didn't stop the endless water from pouring in and taking anything it wanted.

“Are you okay?” Croix asked me.

Before I could answer, I heard a deafening crack. A sickening, unforgettable sound. The sound of a house
losing. A wave winning. A monster come to visit. A pariah called death invading a party that was supposed to be about living as much and as fast as you can.

The upstairs windows all smashed at once, and a wall of water rushed through, picking up the baby grand piano like a five-pound weight and hurling it across the flooding room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Audrey rushing toward us. She had her mouth open to say something when the piano flew into her and smashed her through the back window, and she was gone.

I tried to scream, but I was pulled under the cold, dark, rushing water that dragged me down and held me as the sounds and the sensations around me extinguished. No more music. No more popular kids. No more Croix. No more fizzy beer. No more ins and outs and cool and not-cool and dreams and hopes. Just water. Strong, merciless, unrelenting, terrifying water.

I couldn't see a thing. Furniture and people bumped against me. I felt the brush of fingers and the hard edge of a chair.

I was drowning.

And it was interesting, drowning. Not what I'd thought. Not desperate and flailing. Not like high school. Just quiet, sort of. Like being trapped inside an echo of something that was horrible when first spoken but now,
hundreds of years of echoes later, was just a vague rumor. I didn't flail and kick. My body went limp, and I got the feeling I was headed somewhere new. I closed my eyes and got ready to accept death, here at the height of my popularity, forty minutes into the only date of my life. On the night of my first deviation ever from the game plan of survival, I was not surviving. I was dying. Drowning. And it was okay.

That is, it was okay until I felt a wet, warm paw against my face and heard a high-pitched, disembodied voice in my ear:

“Kick, you idiot. Kick!”