What I Thought Was True

by Huntley Fitzpatrick

  This time Cass has yet more Superman figures for Emory to rescue, and a fist-sized blue-and-green marble. He places that one pretty far out in the deepening water, and tells Em he has to put his entire face under to get it. Em hesitates. Cass waits.

  I squeeze Mrs. E.’s hand. I’ve set up a beach chair for her and am sitting in the sand beside it.

  “My Henry was afraid of the water as a little boy,” she tells me quietly. “The captain was most impatient. He tried everything, saying he was a descendant of William Wallace and Wallaces were not afraid of anything—although I must say I doubt William Wallace could swim—and promising him treats and giving him spankings—that was an acceptable practice back then. But Henry would not go near the water.”

  Cass is lying down on his stomach next to Em, tan muscled back alongside small, pale, bony one. I can’t see Emory’s expression. I have to grip on to the armrest of the beach chair to stop myself from going to the water, pulling Emory out, saying this was a bad idea. Mom’s words echo, that he’s my responsibility, that he can’t care for himself, that it will always be my job. I start to rise, but Mrs. E. presses down on my shoulder lightly. “No, dear heart. Give him a little time. I have faith. You must too.”

  I sit back. “So, how did Henry ever learn to swim?”

  “Well, one day the captain took him to the end of the dock and dropped him in.”

  I’m completely horrified. “What did you do?”

  “I wasn’t there. I heard about it later. You must understand that some people were much tougher with children in those days. I would never have allowed it, but this sort of thing happened.”

  Cass has rolled over on his side in the water, propping himself on an elbow. He ducks his head sideways, completely under, then pops it back up, says something I can’t hear to Emory. I hear the husky sound of Emory laughing, but he still doesn’t lower his head.

  “So what happened? Did he sink? Did someone dive in and save him?”

  “No, he doggy-paddled his way to the pier. He was too terrified not to. But he didn’t speak to his father for two weeks.”

  Can’t say that I blame him. The captain sounds like a jerk

  Slowly, slowly, Em ducks his head. I catch my breath, as if I could hold it for him. His hand reaches out, out, out and then his head splashes up at the same time his hand does, triumphantly holding the marble.

  “Way to go, Superboy. You saved the planet!” Cass calls, and Em’s grin stretches nearly from ear to ear.

  “He’s not your young man?” Mrs. E. leans over to ask, her lavender perfume scenting the salty air.

  “No. Not mine.” Cass is talking to Em, folding his fingers around the marble, pointing out to the end of the pier. Emory nods, seriously.

  “Then I may ask him to be mine.”

  “Gwen, wait up!” Cass calls as I’m pulling out of the parking lot at the beach, Mrs. E. and Emory equally worn out and drowsy.

  He’s got his backpack slung over his shoulder and his hair is still dripping wet, scattering droplets onto his shirt. “I thought maybe I’d come by tonight.”

  Grandpa informed me this morning that he was the bingo host tonight, so no way. If things were awkward with my family, they would be even worse with Grandpa’s friends raising and lowering their eyebrows and nudging one another over the fact that Ben Cruz’s granddaughter is finally being seen with um joven. Even if she’s just helping him with English.

  “Not a good night for tutoring.” I look down at his feet, rather than at his face. Man, he even has nice feet. Big, neatly clipped toenails, high arch. I’m checking out his feet? Jesus. He edges the sandy gravel of the parking lot with his toe.

  “Yeah, well, not tutoring,” Cass says. “I thought . . . maybe . . . I’d just come by.”

  I don’t look over at Mrs. Ellington. Nor do I have to. Her I told you so is loud and clear.

  “Like for another sail?” I squint dubiously at the sky, where thunderhead clouds are moving in.

  “Or . . . a walk . . . or whatever?” Cass slides his hand to the back of his neck, pinching the muscles there, shakes his hair out of his eyes. “Maybe kayaking?”

  I could point to the gathering clouds in their deepening shades of gray, or mention that the wind seems to be picking up. I could remember the poised, distant boy who climbed into the Porsche and say “no way.” Instead I say, “Around six?”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  “Hi, Mrs. Castle!”

  I’m changing in my room (for only the second time—progress!) when I hear Cass’s deep voice. Followed by Mom’s uncertain one.

  “Oh. Cassidy. Another tutoring session? Gwen’s just showering. Come in! Do you want a snack? We have . . . leftover fish. I could heat it up. I’m sure Gwen will be out in just a minute. Here, come in, have a seat. How are your hands?”

  I grimace. Obviously I come by my babbling genetically.

  “Or are you here for Emory? How’d you say your hands were, honey?”

  The smile in Cass’s voice reaches through my closed door like sun slanting through a window. “They’re fine. Better. No snack. Thanks. I’m not here for Emory. Or tutoring. I want to take Gwen out.”

  “Our Gwen?”

  Shutting my eyes, I lean back against the door. Nice, Mom.

  “Oh! Well. She’s . . . in the . . . I’ll just call her. Guinevere!” She shouts the last as though we live in a mansion and I’m hundreds of rooms away instead of about six yards.

  I emerge from the bedroom, mascara on. My hair is wet from the shower, dripping a damp circle on the back of my shirt. But he looks at me like . . . well, like none of that matters, and then, of course, it kinda doesn’t.

  “You don’t want the fish?” Mom asks. “Because I could wrap it up. It wouldn’t be a big deal at all. Must be hard to be living on your own without a home-cooked meal. I mean, you’re a growing boy and I know all about teenage boys and their appetites.”

  She did not just say that. Note to self: Strangle Mom later.

  “What?” Cass says, his eyes never leaving me. “Sorry, Mrs. Castle. I’m, uh, distracted. Today was long. Ready, Gwen?”

  Flustered and flushed, Mom says, “You sure you don’t want some cod?”

  “No cod, Mom,” I say tightly.

  “I’m sure it’s delicious, Mrs. Castle,” says the prince of good manners.

  Finally, fortunately silent, Mom watches us leave.

  Cod?

  God.

  “Sorry about that—she gets—um . . . well . . . I mean, she’s just not used to me going on a date. Not that that’s what this is. I mean . . . Should I go back and get my copy of Tess? We’ve only done it once. Tutoring, I mean.” I feel my face go hot. “How are your hands?”

  He’s laughing again. “Gwen. Forget my hands. Forget Tess. Let’s just . . . go to the beach and . . . figure it out from there.”

  All these questions crowd into my mind. Figure what out? Why am I doing this again? Or is it different now? But for once, for once since that no-thinking night at Cass’s party, I just push it all away. I focus on the pull of Cass’s hand. Let myself be pulled. And say, “Okay.”

  As we head down the hill, the clouds that were gathering seem to have hesitated in the sky, moving no farther in. The breeze is sharp and fresh, only faintly salty. High tide.

  Cass says, “I finished it. Last night. Tess. Still hate it. I mean . . . what was the point of all that? Everything was hopeless from the start. Everyone was trapped.”

  As his “tutor,” I should argue and say that Tess’s choices, and Angel’s inability to forgive them, doomed them, that it wasn’t really a foregone conclusion, things could have gone another way. But the reason I hate the book is just that—that from the start, everyone is hopeless, even the family horse, who you just know is going to drop dead at the worst possible moment. “You know what I hated most about that book?” I offer. “The line that made me want to pitch it off the pier?”

  “I can think of a lot,” Cass says.

&
nbsp; “Tess moaning that ‘my life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances.’ I mean, I know she’s unlucky, but she feels so sorry for herself that you stop caring. Or I did at least.”

  “The one that got me,” he says, his voice low, “the only one that did, and that wasn’t sort of overdramatic, dumbass drama, was that paragraph about how you can just miss your chance.”

  “‘In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things,’” I quote, “‘the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.’”

  “Yeah.” He exhales. “That. Bad timing with what could’ve been a good thing.”

  Well.

  That statement hangs there in the air like it’s been written in smoke.

  I clear my throat.

  Cass kicks some gravel off the road. Then he laughs. “I can’t believe you have it memorized.” He glances at me, and I shrug, my cheeks blazing. “Actually, yeah,” he says. “I can.” He smiles down at the ground.

  We’re quiet again.

  “I thought maybe I was wrong, just not getting this book,” he adds finally. “Half the stuff I read doesn’t stay in my head. Maybe more than half. I can’t write a paper to save my life. The words—what I want to say—just get jumbled up when I try to put them down on paper.”

  “You know exactly what to do with Em, though,” I point out, seizing on the change of topic like a life raft. We’re nearly to the beach, walking so close together that I keep feeling his rough knuckles brush against my arm.

  “It’s no big deal, Gwen. Like I said, that’s my thing. I might have started working at Lend a Hand—that camp—because of my transcript—and because Dad got me the job, like he’s gotten me every other job—but I really got into it. Swimming’s always been big for me. Figuring out how to make it work with different issues—that I can do. And Emory . . . he’s easy. Not autistic, right?”

  I shake my head. “We don’t know what he is, but that’s not it.”

  “Yeah, I could see he was different with the water. When you teach kids with autism, a lot of times there’s this sensory stuff. You have to hold on to them really tight. And it’s easier to get all the way into the water right away with them instead of going slowly, like Emory.”

  I slow, glance at him, fall in step again. “How do you know this?” A side of Cass I’ve never seen.

  “When I’m interested, I get focused.” He kicks a rock away from the road, hands in pockets, not looking at me.

  I’m trying to decode his mood, which seems to keep shifting like the wind coming off the water, both of which now have a sort of electricity. There’s a storm coming. I can feel it.

  When we get to the beach, Cass reaches into his pocket and pulls out a loop of keys, unlocking the tiny boathouse, which smells both damp and warm, flecks of dust swirling in the air. The dark green kayak is buried under several others, so there’s a lot of shifting around and rearranging and not very much conversation for a bit.

  He hands me a double-handed paddle after we drag the boat down the rocky sand. “Want to steer?”

  “I’ve never even been in a kayak before,” I tell him.

  “Bet you still want to steer,” Cass says, grinning slightly as he trails his paddle into the water and heads into the inlet near Sandy Claw.

  We snake around turn after turn in the salt marsh. I keep sticking my paddle in too far, flipping it out too fast, so sprays of water flip up, soaking Cass. The first few times he pretends not to notice, but by the fourth, he turns around, eyebrow lifted.

  “Accident,” I say hastily.

  “Maybe we should just use one paddle. You’re potentially more dangerous with this than the hedge clippers. Let’s switch places.”

  Holding on to the side, as the kayak rocks precariously in the shallow water, I wedge myself around him. He settles back, then lowers his hand, gesturing me to sit. I sink down. There’s water in the bottom of the boat and it seeps into my bikini bottom. Cass takes my paddle out and rests it on the kayak floor, lifts one of my hands, then another, situating my palms on the two-sided paddle, under his. “See, you can still have control. I know how you are about that.” His voice is so close to my ear that his breath lifts the stray strands of hair that curl there. “Dig deep on one side, let the other drift on this turn up here.”

  I do as he tells me, and the kayak slowly turns, snagging briefly in the sea grass, then moving on.

  We’re only a few bends in the inlet from the beach when the clouds finally break and fat raindrops begin scattering around us, plopping into the water, splattering onto my shoulder. At first just a few and then the sky opens up and it’s a deluge, as though someone is pouring a giant version of one of Emory’s buckets onto the kayak. We both start paddling like crazy, but I’m trying to pull the paddle back and Cass is moving it forward, which stalls us till he again shifts his hand on mine, tightening his grip, says, “Like this,” dipping the paddle in the right direction, so we’re in sync at last.

  Finally, we reach the beach and get out. Cass hauls and I shove and soon the kayak is at the door. He shouts, but I can’t hear him above the rain. He hooks his toes under the kayak, flipping it upside down so it won’t fill with water, then kicks the door open and pulls me inside the boathouse, yanking the door shut.

  “I could have planned this a little better!” he shouts, over the barrage of rain pounding on the roof like drumsticks.

  I could have pointed out that I knew it was going to rain.

  Which I totally knew.

  And ignored.

  We’re both drenched. His hair’s plastered to his forehead and cool rivulets of water are snaking down my back. There are no lights in the boathouse; only two tiny windows and a dirty fly-specked skylight. Outside, all you can see is a gray wall of torrential water and, suddenly, a flicker of lightning.

  “God’s flicking the light switch,” I say.

  Cass shoves his hair out of his eyes and squints, assessing my craziness level. Which of course means I keep talking. “Grandpa Ben used to say that, when Nic and I were little and scared of storms and you know, hurricanes and stuff. Lightning was God flipping the switch and thunder was God bowling and . . .”

  He’s now cocking his head, smiling at me bemusedly, as though I really am speaking a foreign language.

  I trail off.

  “Um,” I say. “Anyway. What are you thinking?”

  “That I’ve gotten you wet and cold again.” Cass lifts the bottom of his T-shirt, squeezing water out of the hem, then pulls it entirely off. Sort of like detonating a weapon in the tiny, warm, confined space.

  I shiver, glancing around the boathouse for something to dry us.

  There are a few old tarpaulins piled in one corner, but they look mildewy and rough and smell musty and are probably full of earwigs and brown recluse spiders. There’s another flicker of lightning with a loud crack to follow, like a giant is splitting a huge stick over his knee. The rain seems to pause for an instant as though gathering strength, then an angry grumble of thunder rolls out.

  “What d’you know?” Cass says, bending down and pulling something out from behind the Hoblitzells’ dinghy, named Miss Behavin’. He tosses it toward me. A pink towel, which lands neatly at my feet.

  I pick it up. “You can’t get warm if you put the dry clothes on over wet ones,” I quote, wondering if he’ll remember saying that.

  He grins at me. “As a wise man once said.”

  “Man?”

  “You’re questioning man? I was betting you’d go for wise.”

  “Which would be more insulting?”

  He picks up another towel and sets his fingers and thumb at the back of my neck, urging my head down, then starts rubbing the towel through my hair to dry it.

  He’s just drying my hair. With a towel. This should not feel so . . . amazing.

  “Insulting each other, Gwen? Is that what we’re doing here?” His voice is low, so close to my ear.

  I don’t k
now what we’re doing here.

  Or maybe I do. He stops, dumps the towel to the ground, says gruffly, “I think you’re good.”

  “Yes, totally.” I back up, pull my soaking T-shirt up over my bikini, drop it to the floor with a squelch. Cass freezes. The atmosphere inside the boathouse suddenly feels more electrically charged than the storm outside.

  We’re only a few feet away from each other.

  “You’ve got, um—” He makes this gesture with both thumbs under his eyes, which I can’t interpret.

  Another flash of lightning. A really loud rumble of thunder. For a second, since he’s not moving, I wonder if I should act terrified of storms just for an excuse to throw myself at him, then I can’t believe what a lame thought that is.

  He reaches out his thumb, very slowly, and brushes it under one of my eyes. I close them both, and the thumb smoothes under the other one. Both of us take a deep breath in, as though we’re about to speak, but words fail me. It’s Cass who talks.

  “Mascara . . . uh . . . here.” Another graze of his thumb.

  I step back, rub impatiently under both eyes with the pink towel. “Makeup. Ugh, I’m terrible with it. I mean, I can do it, but just the basics. Forget the eyelash curler, which is like some sort of medieval torture device anyway and . . . Maybe I should just give up completely on trying to be a girl.”

  “That would be a shame. Here, you’re getting it all over. Let me.”

  “I should at least have gotten . . . the . . . water . . . proof kind.” Now he has set his fingers on either side of my face, tangling in my wet hair, with the pads of his thumbs still pressing over my cheekbones.

  “Water would help . . . clean this up,” he says, his voice as quiet as mine. He nods toward the boathouse door. “I could go out and—”

  Another crack of lightning, followed almost instantly by thunder. The storm is nearly directly overhead.

  “Get struck by lightning? Uh, no,” I say. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I know what I want to do with them, but . . .