“I’m not gonna let you two do it without me!” Maureen said, whooping. She scared off a duck that had been eluding the lifeguard. The three of us skipped to the pool’s deep end, weaving through clots of kids. The sun was hot, baking the chlorine smell, but we huddled in the shade of the fifteen-foot platform, shivering as we waited our turn.
“I can go first,” Maureen whispered. “Show you it’s safe. That okay, Heather?”
I nodded. I think I already knew there was no way I was climbing up that ladder.
We watched Maureen’s butt hike toward the sky, and then when her turn came, she ran off the edge with a rebel yell. She plummeted past us, cannonball-style, eyes wide open and nose plug in place. Brenda clutched my wrist, not letting go until Maureen resurfaced with a grin and a thumbs-up.
“I can go next if you want,” Brenda had said, looking at me, her mouth slack, like she’d just realized she’d made a terrible deal.
The same face she wore now.
Maureen, who were those men? Do they know you jumped off the high dive so I didn’t have to?
“Are you okay?” I asked Brenda.
She nodded dumbly and dropped next to me, even though we were right by the sick. She grabbed for a blade of grass and shredded it.
“Are we gonna get in trouble?” Junie asked. “I’m sorry I opened the door.”
“We don’t have to remember,” Brenda said, ignoring Junie, her eyes as deep and hopeless as the quarries. “We don’t have to have seen anything.”
“Come on,” Junie said, whining. “What was in there?”
“Nothing,” Brenda said, eyes still locked on me. “It was too dark to see.”
She held out her hand. I gripped it. It was shaking and cold.
“Swear,” she said, her voice grinding like a rock tumbler. “Swear it was too dark to see anything.”
But I didn’t need to be told not to tell. My brain was already scooping away what was left of the memory. I released the pieces I was trying to make sense of, the story that kept trying to form. Let it go. You don’t have to remember.
Brenda mistook my silence for doubt.
“Her reputation,” she said. “Swear it was too dark.”
There it was. Not only the horror of what we’d seen, but what it’d cost Maureen if others found out. I heard Father Adolph like he was standing over us, smiling sadly that he even needed to say it: A good reputation is more valuable than costly perfume.
I squeezed Brenda’s hand, then coughed, my throat tender from throwing up. “I swear.”
The memory returned, Brenda, Maureen, and me at the Muni, three Musketeers against the world. That would never be again. In that handshake, a piece of Brenda closed off to me and me to her, and we both turned away from Maureen.
BETH
The first time, Beth thought she’d lose her mind.
The next time, she went numb.
In the unending hours since she’d been kidnapped, she kept returning to that place. The Emptiness. The Not Here.
She wasn’t a virgin. Mark was her first, had been her only. She’d punched his V-card, too. He’d wanted to wait until after their wedding, but she knew matrimony wasn’t in their future. When she’d convinced him that she was never going to get married—to anyone—he’d finally agreed to do the deed. The first time had been fumbling, dry and painful, but since then they’d figured out each other’s bodies. Now it was one of the few things she looked forward to with him. She wished she’d had the courage to break up with him cleanly. He deserved that.
But she couldn’t think about Mark, not now, or her brain would snap loose and float away like a knobby pink balloon. She tried to think about college instead. She was good at school but exceptional at sports, had been offered a track scholarship to several state colleges as well as Berkeley. Her parents said it would be a disservice to her God-given gifts to choose any career other than law or medicine.
In other words, any job that didn’t come with prestige and money.
She adored kids, though, loved their grubby little faces and their ridiculous giggles and the perfect precious light they brought into this world. She wanted to be their teacher, that person they could count on no matter what, the one who saw their specialness, whether it was being good at reading or listening or drawing hand turkeys with color crayons. Was there any higher calling than teaching children?
A gurgling moan of a noise startled the lantern-lit room.
Beth realized it was her.
He’d entered her room moments earlier, had been standing over her, undoing his belt.