Plunge

by Brittany McIntyre

  Plunge

  Prologue: July

  Hannah

  The soles of my feet were scorching as I stood on the sun baked cliff looking down at the water below. It looked inviting; a wide, cool expanse that waited to hide me from the blistering summer sun. I folded my arms across my full chest as I watched my best friend, Marley Cooper, fiddle with the back of her bikini to make sure she didn’t have an embarrassing episode as she plunged into the lake below.

  I had this feeling churning inside me, mixing up my stomach and turning my veins to ice. I wanted to jump; Jake had already made it to the bottom without incident. Small children were even taking the plunge, their tiny bodies soaring through the air to the lake below. I knew there was no logical reason why I felt so frozen in place. The cliff we were perched on wasn’t even that high, so I couldn’t use a fear of heights as an excuse for chickening out. I didn’t have much to justify the fear that was keeping me frozen to that spot, arms hugging ever tighter around my body like an anaconda paralyzing its prey.

  Marley went at it at a run, her feet making wet slapping noises against the stone. Rule number one of swimming is to never run around water, but I guess that kind of goes out the window when you’re about to jump off the side of a mountain. Marley’s cocoa skin seemed to glow in the sun’s glare and take on a golden sheen as her limbs extended. Even if I hadn’t known her since we were little, I would have been able to guess she was a dancer by the graceful way she seemed to float through the air. With my luck, I would look less like I was doing a cannonball and more like I was strapping down two cannonballs.

  Marley hit the water with a splash sending ripples across the surface of the lake. After a short pause, she emerged from the water with a smile stretched wide across her face. She looked charged, like the jump had revitalized something inside her. I tiptoed closer to the edge and looked down. My head was swimming even if I wasn’t. With a hard gulp, I reached into the sky to steady myself, but only found fistfuls of air. In a heap, I thudded down, my tailbone smarting from the landing.

  I couldn’t do it.

  Even as I inched forward, crab walking towards the edge of the landing, my brain felt thinner, like the inside of my mind was somehow being stretched out like taffy. The water below looked welcoming, a calm expanse of sun kissed green. People were dog paddling with their shoulders under the surface of the water and I imagined that their noses were starting to turn pink from the sun’s rays. Stop being such a baby, I willed myself, but I felt paralyzed. I didn’t even want to stand up and climb back down the hillside, so I just sat there with my arm wrapped around my knees as I watched people splashing in the water below.

  On the way home, the energy in the car ran high and Marley and Jake sang along to pop songs at the top of their voices. Neither one could sing well, but Jake’s falsetto squeakiness could make a dog attack. No matter how much I wanted to clown them for their pitchiness and put on my most affected Simon Cowell impression, I couldn’t force myself to speak. Even after I got home, an anxious feeling nagged at me the whole day. There was an itch that danced across my chest and it felt like everyone around me was going in full steam while I was stuck in slow motion. The question of why I couldn’t jump wouldn’t let me go no matter how hard I tried to brush it off, no matter how many times I told myself it didn’t matter. For the rest of the day, any time I closed my eyes I was back there, sitting on the stone and dirt, clutching my knees and afraid.

  Chapter One: December

  Hannah

  “Hannah!” My mom called up to me. “I cannot be late for work because you are being poky. Hurry down or you are going to have to walk to school.”

  We both knew her threat was an idle one since the road leading up to my school was all hill and basically a mile up the side of the mountain, not to mention right by the interstate and near no residential areas, let alone ours. Still, I didn’t want the consideration lecture on the drive in, so I gave myself a once over in the mirror, fluffed my long, wavy blonde hair, tried my best to pull any last wrinkles out of my mustard yellow flannel, and scanned the room to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. My cornflower blue bedspread was still a rumpled heap at the foot of my bed and the last week’s worth of clothes cluttered my floor. Making a mental note to at least somewhat straighten up my messy little den when I got home, I left the bedroom and walked downstairs. As I made my way into the kitchen, I rummaged in my purse for some essential oil and put a dab of peppermint behind each ear. I’d been fighting off a pre-Christmas cold and I was determined not to let congestion ruin my imminent holiday.

  “Morning, Han,” my mom said as she handed me a piece of Nutella toast. She dusted her hands off on her sweater and I rolled my eyes at our seemingly genetic slovenly ways. As usual, I made a wish that there’d be a lint brush at the pediatrician’s office where she works, but I can’t imagine it would do much good either way. She’d never use it. I rolled my eyes again at the toast. I’d been trying to talk to her about this Nutella thing and all the potential for chocolate mouth corner she’s forcing on my little sister and I, but she was dead set on us needing something to consume in the morning, so I jammed an edge into my mouth and chewed as I balanced binders, bags, and books to follow her out to the car.

  Before I even crossed the threshold into school that morning—really, before I even left my mom’s car— I was so done. It’s not that I didn’t like school. For the most part, I did. I had friends, I had activities—yearbook and the GSA—and I even had a crush. Not only did I have a crush, but most people knew about my crush and no one gave two thoughts to the fact that my crush was a girl. Not to say it was perfect. I mean, said girl, with her tight black curls and constantly smug smile, didn’t like me back and was decidedly straight, but even that wasn’t a huge deal. It wasn’t like in a tv show where the contrast between my crush and her straightness led to bullying or ostracism. She even still sat beside me in geometry and would occasionally lean over to ask me about a question, which was nice because then I could smell her orchid scented shampoo. So, you know. That was great.

  No, the problem wasn’t any big thing or really much of a problem at all: it was kind of the opposite. There weren’t any real complications. Nothing big ever happened and the days, while fun, were starting to blend together. It was eleventh grade and even when I tried to tell myself how early that was in the grand scheme of high school, how young sixteen really was, all I could think was that high school was less than two more years and nothing had ever happened to me other than my parents divorcing and my dad kind of disappearing when I was a little over six, right after my baby sister, Ari, was born. The feeling of being so sheltered, of having experienced so little, made me itchy behind my ears. Then I factored in Christmas and it was like the world’s tinsel was giving me a rash or something. Everywhere I looked things were lit up in anticipation of more celebration. I rolled my eyes at myself as I realized how mopey I was starting to sound. My mom would call it having a case of the morbs, something she read about in a glossary of old-fashioned slang and got way too much joy from.

  Last day before break, I reminded myself as I made my way to my first class.

  I took my usual seat next to Jake, and he grinned as I pulled a candy cane from my bag and handed it across the skinny row. He took it with a silent raise of his eyebrows before we both went to work lining up our stuff for class. My stuff: a pristine, barely-been-opened copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, a lip gloss, and a water bottle. Jake’s stuff: a battered copy of the same text, a notebook, two black pens, a highlighter, and a multi-pack of those organizational tabs. If a stranger looked at my desk, they’d think I was some sort of slacker who cared more about my appearance than class, but the truth was that my first copy of the book was so worn, this shelf-ready copy was the second
one I’d bought. If the same stranger happened to glance at Jake’s desk, they’d either think something positive, like that he was a studious young man with a bright future, or that he was a nerd. Jake’s preparedness had way less to do with any kind of academic aspirations than it did with his borderline obsession with our petite, doe eyed English teacher, Ms. Preston.

  He wasn’t alone in that: she’s about five foot even with a tiny frame and giant blue eyes—we are talking anime cartoon levels of big eyes—in her mid-twenties, and incredibly cool. Every single day of class, she rushes in with a minute to spare, holding on to her Starbucks cup like it contained the winning lottery numbers, her already big eyes as wide as Kim Kardashian’s hips. Even though she’s a frazzled mess, everyone likes her because she takes the subject seriously, but is laid back in her teaching style and when she describes something she’s passionate about, she talks a mile a minutes and totally geeks out.

  Once we were settled in, I whispered over to Jake to ask if he had any plans for the break. With some serious side eye, he answered, “Going to Canaan with Mom and Derrick.”

  It’s almost clichéd for teenagers to loathe their stepparents, but in Jake’s case, I understood his angst. Derrick wasn’t abusive or mean or anything, he was just a Mustang driving, Drake Stan who was like the man version of Amy Poehler’s Mean Girls’ character. Always asking Jake if he was “banging” anyone, always trying a little too hard to be one of the boys. The only upside was, like Jake, Derrick was an amazing skier, so ever since he married Jake’s mom, they hit the local ski resorts a lot more than they could afford when she was a single mom.

  “You?” he replied.

  I shifted in my seat with a sigh. “Nothing new,” I replied, and I opened my book to end the conversation before my melancholy spread to anyone else.

  As I glanced down at the text, my eyes glazed over a bit as a fog passed across my brain. Not for the first time, I had the fleeting thought that something was wrong with me. Something deeper than being spoiled and bored, which was what I thought a lot of my gloom amounted to. I tried to shake that feeling off, but it kept fighting its way back through my brain haze. It was tiring. With a loud sigh, I put my book down and rested my chin on the cool surface of my desk. I tried to tell myself it was all normal. Life is boring sometimes. But then that voice was there again, poking and prodding: is life supposed to be this boring?

  As soon as the bell rang to end the day, it was like I was stuck in slow motion; all I wanted was to get somewhere where I could be by myself. When the bus finally pulled up at the stop across from the park, I couldn’t get off fast enough. I walked across the playground, past the screaming, running throng of dirty children, and up the trail through the woods that would lead to my bridge. Mom didn't like it if I came in after dinnertime, but that left me with two full hours to read and unwind in what had become my sanctuary over the years.

  The stone bridge had columns on either end and they were wide enough to prop my back against when I sat down on the bridge rail. I let my feet dangle off the edge and over the mulch below, enjoying the soft clunk noise of the soles as the hard rubber of my new combat boots hit up against the old stone. Like my mom told me she used to do the first time the nineties were cool (in the nineties), I smoked a clove cigarette as I thought up new ways to avoid my friends, my home, my little sister and everything that waited for me outside the edge of the woods. It suddenly struck me as funny for a minute; the only way onto the path that leads into the woods is through the rose garden, a place where people get married, have graduation parties, and take prom pictures, and yet I have to walk through it to escape my own beautiful, over-bright, sunshiny life.

  Since I was nine, I would sneak down the trail to this bridge alone even though I knew my mom would have killed me. She said that there were vagrants on the hiking trails and that it was dangerous for me to go up there by myself. While my mom wasn’t really a very naïve person and usually her instincts were pretty on point, I think she missed the mark on the trails because I almost never ran into anyone down the valley in the middle of the park, let alone anyone up to no good. At most, there were people walking dogs or teenagers stealing kisses where they thought no one could see.

  Even as a kid there was something that drew me to the little patch of woods behind the rose garden; it was quiet and separate from everything else in the park and, though that was a huge part of the appeal, it wasn’t all of it. The way the bridge seemed so out of place in the middle of the woods where there wasn’t really much for it to actually cross made it all the more interesting to my overly romantic brain. It just connected two sides of the hill, but with nothing underneath it, there wasn’t a need. Anyone could have just walked down one side and up the other. I’d always kind of liked bridges, in general; there was so much magic that surrounded the idea of a bridge. Tragic collapses, trolls, desperate people flinging themselves from the edge . . . there’s something about a space that exists separate from anything solid that has always spoken to me.

  When you’re a kid, a bridge can be anything. Close your eyes and make up a little story and suddenly it’s not just a bridge, it could be a tower overlooking a chaotic sea, a jail cell, a train car. The fact that my bridge was so solid with its stone base and metal rail made it all the more irresistible. If my mom knew how many times I had walked over to the park with friends to spend hours on my bridge, she would’ve lost it, but she never found out somehow. She didn’t even know how much time I spent there as I got older when it wouldn’t have bothered her nearly as much.

  I lifted my camera to my face and wished, again, that I could get something a little more antique, something with a big, wide lens that would better match my aesthetic but, I reminded myself, there was nothing wrong with the Fujifilm camera. It’s not like the pictures I was taking were serious photos; all I could see were the gray trunks of the fast asleep trees that surrounded me and those pictures would, at best, end up on Instagram. I wished for snow, picturing last year’s blanket of slush and the way it made the woods look even more like something from a fairytale. It had been a dry winter so far, and there didn’t seem to be much of a reason to believe that was going to change any time soon.

  I took another hit of my cigarette, but this time something choked me up and I started to cough and gag like it was my first drag. I must have been making so much noise that everything else was washed out because I didn’t hear anyone come up behind me; I still thought I was alone until a low, raspy voice whispered in my ear: “One hit wonder?”

  I turned which such jerky shock that I almost fell off the bridge, but the girl behind me grabbed my arm to steady me.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.

  Even accounting for my coughing fit, it was baffling that I hadn’t heard the crunch of dry leaves underfoot as she’d snuck up on me and I wondered how lost in thought I’d been. When my heart slowed and I could focus on something other than my breathing, I gave her a once over, liking her vibe, but trying to figure out where she could’ve come from. With her fluffy undercut and crisp, v neck t-shirt layered beneath a worn looking letterman’s jacket, she didn’t look like anyone else in good ole Huntington and, unless she went to one of the religious high schools, I would’ve had to have seen her in the hallways at least a few times.

  “Do you go to Huntington High?” I asked, before feeling like a dope for blurting that out without even so much as a what’s-your-name to ease into a conversation.

  “I will,” she said, reaching over and plucking the cigarette from between my finger before taking a long drag and passing it back. Fuck, she was cool. If I tried to reach over and take someone else’s smoke, I’d look like a theater kid trying to catch a football, all fumbles, but she was pure swagger. “I just moved here from Columbus.”

  While my knowledge of Columbus was, admittedly, limited to the zoo and COSI, I knew enough about it to know she had traded down with her move. Don’t get me wrong, Huntington wasn’t the worst place you co
uld live. There was enough of a population that there were festivals and shows to see, decent restaurants, a Starbucks. Compared to Columbus, though, it was tiny and quiet and not necessarily in a good way and this girl, this lanky, female James Dean, definitely belonged somewhere with a city backdrop.

  “Oh,” I answered. “Why?”

  Again, I internally kicked myself for my blunt response and seeming inability to follow the guidelines of a normal conversation. Again, the girl answered me like I wasn’t a circus freak, gliding by my awkward mannerisms and nosey questions like they were nothing.

  “My dad just got a position teaching chemistry at Marshall. Apparently, someone abandoned their position mid-year and it was a pretty urgent move, which was nice because he’s been adjunct faculty at community colleges for a while and that really sucks.” She smiled at me and I noticed that one side of her mouth curved up a little higher than the other and that curve led into a deep dimple. “I’m Lennox.”

  Do not say anything weird I ordered myself. It worked, I guess, because my response was the totally predictable: “I’m Hannah. Hannah Justice.”

  She ignored my addition of a last name, or at least didn’t offer up her own. With agility I couldn’t even begin to imagine possessing, she hoisted herself up onto the rail beside me and surveyed the woods around us. There was a spot on the bridge next to her finger where the paint was chipped and she absently flicked the edges, widening the hole so that more of the metal underneath was exposed. Gray steel in a sea of gray paint.

  “I was supposed to start school today. We moved in over the weekend. Then my parents thought it would be awkward for me to start, go for three days, then leave for break and let everyone forget me.”

  “I don’t think anyone would forget you,” I blurted. Immediately I felt the heat rising into my face. I considered flinging myself from the bridge just to avoid having to make eye contact again. “I mean, that’s such a great hairstyle,” I added, trying in vain to seem less horrible at communication.