* * *
—
I watch from a chaise lounge in the backyard as Maddie does somersaults off the diving board, bouncing into the air and then curling into a tight ball, barely splashing as she enters the water. It’s sticky outside and I flap my T-shirt to get some air on my body.
As Maddie slithers and sidles through the pool like an eel, I sneak a look over the brick wall separating our yard from the Galt’s yard. Let my eyes travel up the ivy snaking the siding to the corner window, the one that’s right across from my own bedroom window, a room I haven’t been in for weeks, because of my knee. Sixteen stairs from the first floor to the second.
The blind is still drawn. He’s not home from pitching camp yet.
I thought he might visit me in the hospital. Break our rule. Just that once. But he didn’t.
I check my new pink phone. I start to open my texts and then, before I can stop myself, I’m switching to Instagram to check his feed. I can’t help it. I want to see his face. He’s like my drug.
There he is, smiling, in sunglasses and his ball cap, the picture of glossy, perfect health.
Feelin great, he posted.
And then, beneath that, a tornado of messages from girls. Triple hearts, smiley faces, fire. Ur so hot, Gage. Gage you’re the best. Miss you. You are fire. DM meeee.
My body fills with heat.
I wonder what those girls would say if they knew I’d kissed that perfect mouth. A lot. Not very far from this chaise lounge, in fact. Just over there in our pool house.
You are perfect, CuteCathy commented.
Scrumptious, said PristTine.
I look at Gage’s plump mouth again.
It’s nice this way, he said the last time, his fingers tracing my neck. Just you and me, this way. Private. Our own thing.
An ache runs through me.
“You are bright red. Whatcha looking at there?”
Maddie’s voice startles me. She’s standing above me, squeezing water from her thick hair, the droplets landing on my bare legs.
“Nothing.” I press the phone against my thigh.
“Ah, secrets.” She winks. “I get it. Well, you deserve some fun. But I’ll get it out of you. I have my ways.” She starts tickling me and the pink phone slides off my thigh and onto the damp patio. She snatches it up and starts tapping.
“Maddie!” I make a swipe to take the phone back, but I’m not quick enough.
“Oh,” she says quietly. Her smiles dies. “Oh.”
“It’s not anything,” I say quickly. “It’s stupid, really—”
Maddie looks at me and she doesn’t look mad, like I thought she might. Instead, she looks sad. But why would she look sad about Gage Galt and his Instagram feed?
I grab the phone from her.
My heart drops.
She wasn’t looking at Gage Galt. She was reading my messages.
Tasha. I blink, scrolling down.
The first texts were just a day after the accident.
OMG are u ok? Please call me
What happened???
I can’t believe this
Call me
And then a few days later.
Hey Emory, call me if you get a chance
There’s a lot happening, rumors and stuff
Why were you in a car with Luther Leonard
I can’t believe Candy’s dead God I’m so sad
I went by your house and no one’s there
I take a deep breath. There are others, from the girls on the dance team. Mary, Madison, Jesse. Candy was on the dance team with us freshman year. She was nice, bubbly and friendly and laughed at herself when she’d mess up a move. Then she moved on to Drama Club.
Everyone loved Candy MontClair.
Listen I’m really sorry, Tasha texted a week ago.
Leaving for dance camp tomorrow sorry we can’t talk
But there’s a lot going on
I’m really sorry, Emory. I hate this but
I think maybe in the fall
When school starts
You should lay low, ok? Some of the girls
Well, they’re just, I mean, we’re all sad
And there’s just so much to deal with
Did you know that Luther guy had drugs in the car?
I mean, that’s awful and kind of scary and we all talked I mean, they just feel really uncomfortable with all this So it’s better I think if you kind of back off a little bit Until everybody is feeling more comfortable
My heart’s thudding. I can’t look at my sister.
“You’ve been dropped,” Maddie says. “I was worried that might happen. Kind of wondered why no one’s come around to see you since you’ve been home.”
I heard about your knee, that really sucks
You probably can’t do dance team anyway
And let’s be honest, you didn’t really like it
I’m really sorry
“Emmy,” Maddie says, touching my shoulder.
I turn the phone facedown on my stomach. Shake my head. “Doesn’t matter,” I say. “No big deal. We weren’t friend-friends, really, anyway. I was just on the team.”
And it’s the truth. I wasn’t close with any of them, but I was on the team, and that meant built-ins like eating lunch together, hanging out when I wasn’t worrying about Joey. Being on the team meant a kind of protection at school. People to be with, so you didn’t appear to be completely alone. Some kind of social umbrella, by proxy, since I am not like Maddie, outgoing, beautiful, chatty, popular. All the things I should be, according to the family I come from, the house I live in. My mother.
And now I don’t have even that.
And the person I most want to talk to about it, who would list each and every thing wrong with each and every one of those girls, even if he didn’t really believe it, would be Joey. Screw them, he’d say. Snooty bunch of hags. Who needs that? You’re better off.
But he’s not here. And I can’t even call him, because Blue Spruce doesn’t allow phone calls. Something in the family handbook they sent us about building a base of inner strength before reentering the outside world.
“Let’s get you inside,” Maddie says gently. “Take a shower, maybe eat something. We can talk about this. I can help you.”
I nudge her hand off my shoulder and stand up, wobbly on my weak leg. My knee is starting to hurt again, more than I admitted at the doctor’s office, and I’ll have to ask Maddie for a pill, and my mother will wonder why I need it, and my brother is an addict, and now I don’t even have what little friends I thought I had, and I just want to disappear.
“Hey, be careful, Em, what are you doing?”
Just…disappear.
I hobble away from Maddie and her concerned face, ignoring the pain vibrating in my knee, and stand at the edge of our ridiculously large, too blue, achingly beautiful pool in our achingly beautiful and carefully landscaped backyard.
Then I let myself fall in.
My shirt and shorts billow out across me and I swim beneath the surface, with just my arms and one good leg, encasing myself in silence, away from an accident, a dead girl, and my broken brother, and I decide, then and there, my lungs bursting, that I will spend the rest of the summer underwater, weightless and unharmed and silent and safe.
7
A STAR IS MIGHTY GOOD company.
Those are the words from a play we read last year in American Stories. They float up in me as I bobble on my back in the pool, arms out, water lapping my cheeks, the sky a dark, speckled tapestry above me. The story of a small town, small lives.