Plunge

by Brittany McIntyre

  “What?” I asked, pausing the movie, despite knowing it so well I could act it out.

  She shook her head at me. “I don’t know. There’s something weird about you. You have things on your mind and you haven’t mentioned them.”

  I glued my eyes to the screen in the hope that Marley would just give up, but she just kept on with her staring, totally comfortable with the kind of silence that made me itch like an army blanket.

  “You know how so many of these movies revolve around this insane familial pressure to get married?” I asked her without making any eye contact. She was completely silent, waiting for me to get to some sort of point. She reminded me of Ms. Preston when she asked everyone a question that she knew we could answer, but no one spoke. Just staring and waiting like a game of verbal chicken. With a silent curse of her stubborn nature, I continued: “Sometimes I wonder if it’s just an excuse they make. Like maybe they don’t care what their families think at all, but they don’t want to admit how lonely they are.”

  I thought about my mom at Christmas. Since Ari and I had been getting older, she had to be lonely during the time at home, and I imagined her doing all the Christmas shopping, meal planning, and event preparation, everything that goes into the holidays, all by herself. For the last two years, Mom had spent so much of her holiday in a ball on the couch with a hot drink that she had basically become a human marshmallow while Ari and I were off doing stuff with friends. She wore all these sweaters with big, droopy sleeves and pulled the woolen mess down over her hands like it was just going to swallow her whole and I have had the thought that on some deep psychological level, it’s probably a substitute for human touch.

  Marley moved closer to me and leaned her head against my shoulder. I reciprocated the gesture, resting my head down against hers. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I know that most people would explain Marley’s knowledge about my troubles as empathy or highly tuned social awareness, or even just write it off to a long lasting friendship, but she has always been able to see something in other people that I can’t. She knows when someone has a crush on someone else at school. She knows when people have parents who are splitting up. It’s not gossip, either; she’s kind of above listening to people talk about each other. It’s almost like she is a little psychic. For a minute, I thought about just shrugging off her concerns because I wasn’t really in the mood to get into the whole thing about Lennox again. Not fixating on her and her sexuality had been a pretty serious goal I had set for myself. I also didn’t feel right about spilling someone else’s maybe-not-even-real secrets, especially if it sort of outed them, but Marley was my best friend and she was giving me that knowing, I-am-not-going-to-let-you-push-play-until-you-spill-the-tea look. Plus . . . I really did need to get everything off my chest.

  That was all it took. For the next twenty minutes, we sat facing each other with our knees almost touching as I recounted every second that I’d spent with Lennox since the last time I’d talked to Marley. I described the looks, the absence of looks, the way she stared into the distance, the way she clammed up about certain things, but seemed to want me around. For every comment, Marley sat nodding me on, her eyes rapt with attention as she took mental notes.

  “She just said she won’t be gay and then shut it down? Just like that?” Marley asked, taken with the whole forbidden love at first sight vibe of my story.

  Hesitant, I paused before answering. Is that what she’d done? Had she really just shut the whole thing down? Picturing her sullen stare at the floor, I realized that was a pretty trademark Lennox move: shutting down anything that wasn’t pleasant. I remembered what she’d said about her mom always just taking her dad’s lead and refusing to face anything unpleasant head on and it kind of made sense that she was like that. I knew Marley was going to encourage me to push it like I could force Lennox to open up to me and honestly, life probably worked like that for Marley, but it didn’t work like that for me. Just because I had some sort of crush at first sight fixation on Lennox that had started pretty much Day One didn’t mean I had a right to force my way into her inner thoughts.

  The sudden acceptance that my crush had been so instantaneous kind of floored me. Had I really liked her that first day? It wasn’t like I went home and wrote her name over and over in some secret notebook with little hearts between the L and the X. Thoughts had been there, sure. Some of those thoughts even of the tingly, fluttery stomach variety. Maybe more than a crush, though, it had been a curiosity about this new girl in town who had appeared on the day when I so desperately needed anything to be different. Maybe I saw her as this sign that I was on the right path with my mission to spice up my life. Or maybe I was kidding myself. Because no matter how much I tried to argue that I had just been curious about her or wanted to get to know her, her face had left a residue in my mind that hovered until we saw each other again.

  “I guess she did,” I said, picking at a loose string attached to my couch’s cushion. “She’s kind of hard to get to know.”

  Marley grabbed my hand so suddenly that I kind of flinched back in surprise and her eyes were wide as they bore into mine. “But you want to get to know her, right? So you just have to keep trying.”

  Marley had such a way of getting straight to the root of a thing. Like for her, it was simple: if I wanted to know the girl, I couldn’t give up until I knew the girl. If she was hard to get to know, it was almost like she saw it as that much more worthwhile. For me, it was totally different. For me, pushing to get to know someone who seemed resistant would mean a constant inner monologue of questioning and self-doubt. It would mean practicing conversations before she picked up the phone so that I didn’t say something dumb, typing out texts just to delete them. It would be work. And for what? Was it even worth it?

  But I knew that my own hesitance was just me kidding myself. Of course Lennox was worth it.

  After Marley left, I sprawled out across my bed staring at my ceiling and thinking about the letter I’d written my dad. There were probably things in it that I would want to omit if I read it now, but my impulse was to resist looking it over before sending it. Whatever was in that letter—and I remembered most of it, just not all—was the truth of that little ten year old, that girl who had been Ari’s age when she felt the need to pour out her soul to her absent dad, and I wasn’t going to edit that truth now.

  I wondered if Dad would be surprised when he finally received it. If he would be shocked that I saw him as a bit villainous. Part of me figured that wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he had to justify it by telling himself he wasn’t the one at fault, but how could that possibly work? How must he spin things in his mind to be able to see it anyway other than just like I saw it?

  I decided today would be the day I dropped the thing in the mailbox, but as soon as I sat down to address the envelope, I realized I had a problem: I didn’t have any way to find my dad’s address. It had been over a year since we’d talked, and I didn’t think Mom was likely to secretly be keeping up with his location. I’d have to send it to my grandma on his side, who I hated. She was this uptight, evangelic Christian woman who used terms like “wedlock” and “jezebel” unironically. As soon as I knew I was gay, our parting was inevitable; she was pretty quick to use the word “abomination” to describe me and that pretty much damned any potential for kinship.

  It didn’t matter. I had Grandma’s address in my old address book, and I scrawled it quickly across the envelope in my tight chicken scratch cursive. She would know how to find Dad and even if it took awhile for him to get the letter, if I sent it her way, he’d get it eventually. With feet that felt weighed down and heavy, I made my way out to the mailbox and was relieved to see that there were little flags up on a few mailboxes down my street: I hadn’t missed the mail carrier.

  It had been a shock when Lennox had called me at seven am the following morning, partly because of the ungodly hour and partly because of what she had to say to me when I picked up the phone.
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br />   “It’s going to be a high of forty-eight today and Weather Underground said that’s four degrees higher than the average temperature for this date,” she recited as soon as I picked up, in lieu of an actual greeting.

  I pulled my cell away from my ear and stared at it. My eyes were watering from the sudden assault of sunbeams and my mouth was so dry I wondered if I’d even be able to form words. I could hear her calling my name through the phone as I grabbed a bottle of water and took a long swallow, eyes squeezed shut against the harshness of the glare.

  “Hannah?” she called to me louder.

  With the phone back up to my ear, I responded: “What are you saying to me right now?”

  There was a quiet chuckle in my ear as a response and I glared at her voice since I couldn’t glare right in her face.

  “I’m saying,” she responded, “that you should come pick me up and we should head on out to Grayson because there probably won’t be another day this warm for months.”

  Like a shot, I was up, rubbing the sleep from my still blurry eyes. With a nod of my head, I started thinking about my outfit and ran through the process of getting dressed in such detail that it took me a minute to remember I was still sitting there, tucked into my blankets on my bed. It was mostly Lennox’s enthused voice that brought me back to reality.

  “Yeah, I’ll be there in an hour,” I said and hung up the phone, dropping it on my comforter. It didn’t occur to me think about her reaction to me hanging up on her.

  For the first time since we had met, I was not excited by the idea of seeing Lennox. Instead, my guts were on fire and my mind was racing with doubts about my own sanity. What on Earth had made me think that I should take my biggest fear and compound it by adding freezing cold water?

  Lennox was sitting on her front stoop when I pulled up, her smooth, rounded cheeks red from the morning chill. She said it was supposed to warm up later that day, but just then it was thirty degrees, overcast, and windy. Her face was tilted down towards the ground, so I assumed she was looking at a phone screen, but as I pulled up in front of her house, I realized she was just waiting. She didn’t look up as I approached, but she was quick to jump up and get in the car, so she must have heard my car. With a groan, she buckled her seatbelt and tilted her torso towards me.

  “It is early and cold,” she stated flatly.

  I could feel myself smirking at her. “You are the one who called me to come get you at this ungodly hour. I was still innocently sleeping,” I answered.

  She batted at my arm and I understood that the griping and grumbling was an act; she was far too playful to really be annoyed. I glanced at her quickly and noted the way she leaned heavily against the back of the seat, her body molding against the upholstery. She was all legs and arms, lean and long. I liked the way she was built; she was thin, but strong, and while her muscles weren’t popping below the layers of her clothes, I could definitely tell she was toned.

  I blinked back at the road, not wanting to either wreck the car or get caught making googly eyes at my new platonic friend. Asphalt stretched out into the rural setting and my eyes watered from exhaustion. It was way too early to be on a road trip, especially during a break from school. As much as I liked Lennox, I felt the call of my bed and wished I could crawl back between the layers of flannel sheets, quilt, and comforter.

  “So, tell me again about the point of this mission,” Lennox said, as she cracked the window. A gust of bracing wind entered my warm car.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her with a scowl.

  She looked over at me and in an exaggeratedly patient voice explained, “I am trying to wake up.”

  With a quick drum of my fingers against the steering wheel, I tried to ignore the howling noise that the force of air was making. Eyes never leaving the road, I picked our conversation back up.

  “This summer I drove out here to Grayson with my two best friends. You’ll probably meet Marley and Jake when school starts and you’ll really like them. Especially Marley because everyone likes her. We were going to go cliff diving. Totally Marley’s idea. She always wants to do something, ya know what I mean? Like, she never wants to just sit at someone’s house.” I snuck a glance at Lennox to make sure she was still awake and listening and our eyes met for a full second before I tore mine away to look back at the road. “Honestly, though, everyone around here goes cliff diving at Grayson. It’s a thing. You can even find YouTube videos of it. So, imagine my surprise when we get there and I just freeze. Marley jumps, Jake jumps. I don’t jump.”

  Color makes its way into my cheeks and I get that itching feeling again. I know I am blushing, I feel the heat all the way into my earlobes, but I’m not sure why. It’s not like I think Lennox will judge me because I couldn’t just plunge off the side of a hill into the lake below. There was something nagging me, though: a lump like a mass that felt heavy in my stomach. It came on suddenly, just like it had the day I didn’t jump.

  “After I didn’t jump, I just felt awful. I can’t even explain it. It shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but it felt like a huge thing had happened. I was anxious and weird all day, like something was just off and I couldn’t get it back on track,” I paused before summing the whole thing up in a way that should have been clear to me from the start, but wasn’t. “I guess I want to jump so badly so that I can. Get back on track, I mean.”

  Again, I risked a quick glance her way. Her face seemed serious, like she was really mulling over what I’d said. We hadn’t known each other long, but it had already started to stress me out when she would shut down or stare off into space, so I liked this side of her that was still kind of quiet and reserved, but more obviously thoughtful. Most of my friends, especially Marley, just said the first thing that popped into their head. Marley chattered so much that sometimes she reminded me of Ari, like she was a little kid who needed to fill every second of silence. Lennox was the opposite. With her, every word counted even if sometimes her words left you craving more.

  Just under an hour later, I made the turn into the parking lot nearest the lake. The pit into my stomach felt like it had grown, like if it had started as an olive pit it was definitely a peach pit. Everything about the task ahead set my nerves on edge: yes, I was scared of the jump, but there was also the cold, the wet, the grime in the lake. I was not looking forward to any of it.

  There was a pause before we started the trek up the side of the hill, one where we both looked into the water and imagined what it would be like to dive into that cold. For half a second, I thought about pushing pause; I didn’t want to skip out on my chance to face my fears, but I could wait until summer. There was no rush to jam all my life experience into one two week period. Before I could even give backing out a second thought, Lennox grabbed my hand, her fingers lacing through mine and began leading me up the well-worn trail.

  “Might as well get this over with if we are going to do it,” she said.

  It took me a moment to process what she was saying. I had assumed I would be on my own in this. That she would wait patiently at the bottom like I’d waited for my friends, maybe even get a kick out of watching me shiver my way back onto shore with rattling teeth.

  “We?” I asked stupidly, making sure I wasn’t engaging in wishful thinking.

  “Well, yeah,” she said with an exaggerated shrug. “You asked me to join you on your voyage. I’m not here to be a spectator.”

  In that moment, walking side by side up through the bare grey woods, looking at the discarded soda bottles and occasional clothing items people had abandoned over the years, I felt more scared than I had felt at any other point that day, but suddenly the water and my impending leap seemed the least of my fears. Or maybe it was leaping that scared me, but it was going to be a different type of jump, one with a landing that might be much harder to brace myself for.

  We made it to the top and across the smaller boulder to the one I had chosen for my leap. I pulled off my sweater and jeans and Lennox followed suit, reve
aling a cute, turquoise one piece bathing suit. Her legs were more muscular than her small frame implied, and she was very lean throughout. Our eyes met and my cheeks burned as I realized she’d noticed me checking her out. I tiptoed to the edge of the rocky surface and looked down into the choppy green water below.

  “Shit. You know what?” I turned, looking back at her. “We should have left our clothes at the bottom. It would’ve sucked walking up here in our bathing suits, but it’s going to suck more walking back up here soaking wet.” Again I peered down at the water below. It was churning and foamy and I swear I could see how cold it was. “Maybe we should do that now. Walk our clothes back down there, I mean.”

  Lennox didn’t answer my obvious attempts to stall the jump. Instead, she once again took my hand and urged me forward. We stood that way for a moment, feeling the chills spreading across our bare bodies in the December wind. My arms felt like they were lined with tiny razors from the sharpness of my arm hair standing on edge and goosebumps had covered pretty much all my available surfaces. Lennox’s fingers felt like icicles between my own, but even as hard and cold as they were, they felt like safety, too.

  “One,” she counted. “Two. Three.”

  Before I had a chance to protest, I was lurched forward by her jog and the pull from our connected hands. In under two seconds, we were airborne and her hand slipped from mine. Time slowed down and it felt like I was gliding through the air forever, my hair whipping my face as the wind ripped through it. Just in time, I held my breath. My body hit the water.

  It was like everything I’d ever feared it would be; the water smacked my skin like a thousand tiny needles all over me. For a second, I had the thought that this must be what it would be like to get a tattoo if instead of ink there was ice water, but I was so cold that I couldn’t even follow that idea to the end of its trail. Arms flailing and feet all jerky movements, I did something that was a cross between dog paddling and jerking my limbs straight out from my body until I made it to the shore.