“Can you let me talk to Joey again, for a minute? And then you guys can swim. Tell Joey to do a cannonball for me, okay?”
“Okay.”
Joey and I trade the dog and the phone.
I hear Shadow say, “You’re amazing, brother. You reached out when you needed to and that was exactly the right thing to do.”
Joey angles his head, mumbles something, and then hands my phone back to me.
“I think I left my suit in Colorado. I remember swimming in a lake and hanging it in a tree to dry and that’s the last I saw of it. I don’t think I have another one,” he says.
We both turn at the sound of a tap on the patio door. Ryleigh is standing there in her pink-and-green swimsuit. She holds up an inner tube.
“I think I have an idea,” I say, smiling.
* * *
—
Gage’s swimsuit is a little droopy around Joey’s skinny waist, even though he tied it as tight as he could. He was always pretty thin, but it looks like he got skinnier in rehab. It must have been all the hiking. The suit has surfboards and sunsets on it. “I hope this doesn’t fall down,” he mutters.
“He said to do cannonballs,” I say, lowering myself into the water.
Ryleigh shouts, “Cannonball contest!” And jumps in the water, splashing Joey.
“All right, now, that’s war,” he says when she bobs to the surface. “Prepare to be drenched.” He takes a run, lifts, and tucks himself tight. Ryleigh squeals as she’s pulled and pushed in the waves.
When Joey comes up, he’s got a grin on his face. “I bet I can do fifty. How many can you do?”
“One thousand. Do you know this one guy once did eighty-nine cannonballs in twenty minutes? He was wearing a Speedo.”
Joey treads water. “This is a lot better than the lakes we swam in this summer. I could never see the bottom. That kind of freaked me out. I like to know where the bottom is, you know?” He smiles at me, ducks back under.
Each wave bumps more and more water against me, which feels nice, like being in the ocean when we went on vacation to San Diego. Joey and I spent whole days in the sea, going farther and farther out, holding each other and screaming as the waves tried to knock us down. At night, my parents would go to dinner in the fancy hotel restaurant and give us money to walk the boardwalk in Mission Beach and get hamburgers at Woody’s. We ate on the beach as the sun went down, our hair still crunchy with salt, Maddie digging her toes in the sand. Sometimes Joey would give me one of his earbuds and we’d listen to music together. Sometimes he’d light a joint if no one was around. I don’t know where he got it or if he was stupid enough to bring it on the plane. The beach seemed like you could probably get it anywhere, from somebody.
It didn’t seem like a problem then. And it was nice being with Joey, looking at the sea as the sky changed colors, watching the waves as they went from blue to black, music in our ears. I felt like I could live beside the ocean forever.
I wish we could be back there. I wish we could go back, way back, to before all this ever happened.
“Ryleigh!”
Gage is leaning over the wall. His eyes slide to me and then back to Ryleigh.
Ryleigh yells back, “What!”
“Mom wants you to come in. You’ve got a hair appointment.”
“No!” She scrunches up her face.
Gage holds out his hands. “Sorry, kid. Clarissa at Curl Up and Dye waits for no one.”
He looks at Joey standing at the edge of the pool.
“Hey, Joe.”
“Hey.”
“You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.” Gage squints. “Are those my trunks?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“I let him borrow them,” Ryleigh says, getting out and wrapping herself in a towel. “You have like fifty million.”
“I do?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’m coming in.” He disappears.
I can feel myself flush, so I duck under the water really quick. Joey’s sitting on the pool steps when I come up. “Thanks,” he says. “I feel better. That was one thing about Blue Spruce, they kept you really active, so whenever you’d start to feel crazy, it was hike time or gym time or time to make dinner. I still feel like shit, because I have no friends now, but whatever, right?”
“You’ll make friends,” I say. “Different ones.”
“Says the sister who has no friends.” His face reddens. “Sorry. Maddie told me. Screw them, though, right?”
“Yeah,” I say, grateful. “Screw them.”
Gage drops over the wall.
I try to keep my cool as he dives into the pool. I’ve seen parts of Gage without clothes, but not in the daylight, and I’m not sure how I feel about keeping it together while he’s wet and in a swimsuit in my pool. He used to swim here all the time when we were little, before Joey tried to fly off the roof, but his parents didn’t let them come over after that. It was Maddie who convinced Mrs. Galt last summer to let Ryleigh come over. “It’s hot, Beth, let the girl swim. Let’s move on.” I was shocked how easily Maddie let Mrs. Galt’s first name roll off her tongue, but that’s just Maddie, I guess, and Ryleigh has been a mermaid in our pool ever since.
Gage flips his wet hair out of his eyes. “God, this feels good. You guys ready for another year of Heywood High Hell?” He’s not serious; he makes that jerking-off gesture that guys like, which is gross.
“Not particularly,” Joey says.
“You’ll be okay, Joe. Gotta have a goal, is all. Work toward it. You don’t have to get screwed up.”
“Everybody’s screwed up at Heywood,” Joey says. “Half your teammates sell their pain meds on the side.”
Gage shrugs. “Maybe. But not me. Never touch the stuff.”
And then his eyes are on me. Like we’re just normal neighbors, enjoying an afternoon in the pool. “What about you, Em? Ready for dance team again? Shimmy-shimmy.” He wiggles his hips. Joey laughs.
“I can’t because of my knee,” I say.
Gage grimaces. “Ah, no. I guess I didn’t realize it was that bad.”
Suddenly I realize there weren’t any texts from Gage when I checked my new phone. Hazy as I was in the hospital, I sort of got why he didn’t visit me. It would look weird, to suddenly have Gage-from-next-door there.
But he didn’t text, either. And no one would have seen those.
He could have texted. Just once.
Maybe he was just too busy getting ready for his pitching camp. Maybe…a thousand things run through my mind.
“You okay? You look weird,” Joey says.
Gage and Joey are both looking at me.
“I…it’s no big deal,” I say. “I wasn’t any good, anyway. I was just an alternate.”
“You looked pretty good to me.”
I splash water on him, trying to be playful, but mostly so some gets on me, too, and washes away the awful feeling in my stomach.
He could have sent one text. Just one. That wouldn’t have been breaking the rules.
From the corner of my eye, I see Joey frown and I think Gage notices, too, because he quickly says, “Hey, Joe, you still got all those games, man?”