by Sarah Gailey
I glance over at her, and she’s staring down into the water with a little secret smile on her lips. Her hair hangs down over her shoulder in a waterfall of tousled waves. I lean back onto my elbows and close my eyes, listening to the splashing and yelling that echoes up from the water. I can’t pick out any individual voices—they all blend together in a wash of summer-noise. I swing my legs through the air and wonder if, a hundred years from now, some other girl will be swinging her legs in this same spot, feeling all the same things that I’m feeling. I think probably not, but maybe something close. Maybe she’ll feel everything I do, minus the murder-anxiety.
“Hey.” Roya’s voice is about an inch from my ear, and I jump, and she lets out another big laugh. “You startle so easy, Alexis. If I was meaner, I’d think it was funny.” Her hair is brushing my shoulder and her face is right next to mine, so close that almost all I can see is her eyes, but then I look down and I realize that I was wrong because I can see her mouth, too. She boops my nose with hers and then leans back onto her elbows, mirroring my pose. “I’m gonna miss this,” she says.
“Hnngmh?” I’m going for nonchalant-interrogative, but it comes out slightly strangled, because of the way her hair slid over my shoulder.
“Hanging out like this,” she says. “In the fall. It’ll be hard, being apart from everyone.”
“We’ll still hang out, though, right?” I say. Do I sound clingy? I hope I don’t sound clingy. I hope I don’t sound desperately afraid that she and Maryam will abandon me the moment we all set foot on campus at State. “I mean, like … at school and stuff?” I add in a pathetic attempt to remain nonchalant.
“Of course we will, dummy,” she says, shoving my arm with one hand. “Like all the time, are you kidding? Me and you and Maryam are gonna be all sewn together into one giant three-headed sweater. You two aren’t allowed to stray more than a hundred feet from me at any given moment.”
“Okay, okay, I get it—”
“It’s just that I’ll miss this,” she says. She gestures at the reservoir. “I mean … I want to leave and everything. I want to get out of here and never look back and all that. But … I don’t know.” She runs a hand through her tangled hair, pausing to tug thoughtfully at the end of one twisted-up tendril. “I’ve never lived anywhere else, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say. And I do know. I’ve been talking all year about how I can’t wait to leave. About how great it’ll be to go somewhere else, where everyone in town hasn’t known me since I was knee-high to a tree frog. And I mean it. I really do. But I also can’t help but feel a little spark of fear, like … what if I leave, and it turns out that this town is the best place there is? What if I go out there and I’m too small for the rest of the world? What if I can never come back, and everything out there is too much, and there’s no place for me after all? “I’ll miss it too,” I add, because that’s the only way I know how to say it.
“But at least we’ll be together,” Roya says, and she bumps her shoulder against mine. “Me and you and Maryam.”
“Yeah, us and Maryam,” I say, because I don’t want to say yeah, but me and you.
“Anyway,” she says, and she gets up and brushes her hands on her shorts. Then she unbuttons them.
“What are you—” I start, but then I realize that she’s wearing a swimsuit under her shorts. “Were you wearing that all day?”
“No, weirdo,” she says, sliding the shorts down her legs and stepping out of them, one foot at a time. One of her feet lands right next to my hand, and almost against my will, my fingers rise to wrap around the gentle curve of her ankle. She leans down and rests a hand on my shoulder for balance as she picks up her shorts. “I put it on after school. It’s why I took forever getting out to the parking lot.” She pulls her shirt off over her head, exposing a long stretch of heavily muscled abdomen. Her lats are swollen—her coach has been drilling her on her hundred-meter fly. I’m almost grateful for the reprieve when she throws the shirt at my head. “Hang on to that for me,” she says, and by the time I get her shirt off my face, she’s started walking away.
I look around just in time to see her slinging an old backpack over her shoulders. It’s one I haven’t seen in years—a tiny old string backpack covered in flowers. She used it all through middle school, until one day Kevin Ng spilled Dr Pepper all over it. It’s still stained brown in a lot of places. I don’t know how I missed her bringing it with us.
“I didn’t know you still had that,” I say, and she looks over her shoulder with a shrug.
“My mom found it in the garage the other day,” she says. It hangs oddly, and I realize what must be inside it a moment before she turns and walks back toward me. She crouches in front of me.
“I’m gonna put it in the reservoir,” she murmurs.
“But—”
“It’ll sink,” she adds. “I put a cinderblock inside. By the time the fabric rots away, the arm will have rotted too.”
I look around, but no one is close enough to hear us. “Is the leg in there too?”
“Nah,” she says, “it wouldn’t fit. Besides, Marcelina said something about doing the pieces separately and I think she’s right.”
“She told me that too,” I whisper, nodding. “I get it. But what about—people will notice you dropping a bag into the water, won’t they?”
She gives me a smile and a wink. “I’m not gonna drop it in,” she says. “I’m gonna leave it in.”
And then she stands up and runs off the edge of the rock. I hear her high whoop, followed by a huge splash. I peer over the edge of the rock, into the water. When Roya surfaces, her hair is draped over her face.
“You look like a sea monster!” I yell down to her, and she parts the hair over her mouth so I can see her beaming.
“Jump in!” she yells back.
I shake my head even though I know she won’t see me. I could yell down a million excuses—I’m not wearing a suit, I have to watch our stuff, the water is cold, I don’t have a towel. But none of them would matter. Roya would yell at me to jump in, and I would listen, and our stuff would get stolen and I’d catch a cold and I wouldn’t regret a second of it.
Instead, I watch her. She swims over to the kid who she told to jump in, and she gives him a high five. I look around at everyone else in the water, watching for anyone who might have seen the backpack, anyone who might have noticed her dropping it. There are a lot of eyes on Roya—but not a soul is looking for the backpack she ditched. They’re watching her, watching the way she cuts through the water like a shark, watching the way her hair fans out behind her. Watching her legs, her arms, her back, her smile.
I look down at my own legs and frown. They’re fine, as far as legs go. I’m not insecure about them or anything. But every now and then I wonder if I’m supposed to be insecure about them. My thighs spread out when I sit down, and I don’t really know if that’s normal or not. There are some girls at my school who brag about the gaps between their thighs. I don’t have a gap, but then, I don’t really want one either. A long stripe of dark hair runs up the side of one of my calves, where I missed a whole section of my leg when I was shaving. I don’t have the huge defined quads that Roya and Iris do. Just like in everything else, I’m ordinary. Just plain old Alexis. Nothing to see here.
As I inspect myself, I notice a dark spot on my knee. At first, I think it’s a shadow, but I look up and there’s nothing between me and the sun. When I look back down, my breath catches because it’s spreading. It’s deepening. It goes from brownish to blue-black, with a green corona around the outside of it. I watch the bruise grow with increasing horror—and then I realize that my hands are tingling.
“Gah!” I clench my fists and try to stop, even though I don’t know what it is that I’m doing. It works, although I’m not sure if it’s my startled reaction or my attempt at control that does the trick. What the hell just happened?
What did I just do?
I peer over the edge of the reservoir and spot Roya.
She lifts a hand to me, then heads toward the ladder from there and starts climbing. I can’t see her goose bumps from where I am, but her shoulders are hunched and she’s shivering a little. I aim a small thread of magic at her. It’s tiny enough that anyone looking could mistake it for a sunbeam, or a butterfly maybe, or a leaf on the wind. It reaches her and she looks up at me. She’s only halfway up the ladder, but because of my magic, she’s warm and dry. I give her a thumbs-up.
“Thanks for that,” she says when she’s up the ladder and back to me.
“Least I can do,” I answer, and she shrugs. “Hey, can you look at something for me?”
She lifts an eyebrow. “What’s up?” I point at my knee, which is mottled with purple and green bruising that wraps almost all the way around my leg. “Oh shit,” Roya breathes. She crouches to look closer. “What did you do?”
“I’m, uh. I’m not sure,” I say. It’s hard to come up with words when I can feel her breath on the soft skin at the inside of my leg. “It kind of just happened?”
She lets out a low whistle, then rubs her hands together fast to heat them. “This thing’s so ugly it’s almost pretty,” she says. She presses her palms to my leg, and immediately, a deep, bright heat spreads through the joint. My breath catches in my throat as her fingertips graze the hem of my shorts.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
“Not too much.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” I swallow hard.
“How’s that?”
When she lifts her hands away, the bruise is gone.
“Thank you. You’re amazing,” I say, grinning up at her.
“Aw, shucks,” she says in a goofy voice, bracing her hands on her thighs to push herself upright.
“No, seriously. Thank you. For everything.” I say. “It’s … it means a lot to me that you’re helping with this.” I gesture at the water so she knows that I don’t just mean her help with my crazy, sudden bruise.
“That’s what friends do for each other,” she says. Something inside my stomach drops. Right. Friends.
“You’re a good friend,” I say, looking out over the water.
Roya doesn’t answer. We’re quiet for a while, and then, without either of us having to say we’re ready to go, we grab our stuff. Roya slides her shorts back on, jams her shirt into her bag. She eases into the driver’s seat, and it’s cooled down enough outside that she doesn’t turn the air-conditioning on. She doesn’t even start the car right away. She twists in her seat to look at me.
“You okay?” she asks.
I don’t answer immediately. I don’t want to lie to her. “I don’t know,” I finally say. She grabs my hand and gives it a squeeze.
“I don’t just mean since prom. I mean … are you okay?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, even though I do.
“It’s just not like you,” she says. “To go with somebody to their room at a party. You’ve never done that before, not even people you were in relationships with. You don’t have to tell me about it, but …”
I can’t look at her. I can’t. “I’m okay,” I say, and I squeeze her hand back so she knows I’m sorry for lying.
“Okay,” she says. “If you want to talk about it—”
“I’m okay,” I repeat, a little harder this time. A little louder.
“… Okay. Sure.” Roya turns the car on, and when I look up at her, her face is closed off. A muscle in her jaw is clenching and unclenching, a sure sign that she’s hurt and angry. Her eyes are shining, so I know she’s furious. Roya pretty much only cries when she’s mad.
She’s right to be mad at me. I’m mad at me too, and I don’t have nearly as much right to be mad as she does. Even if she doesn’t know why.
We’re both quiet on the drive to my house. When she drops me off, she gives me a big, tight hug. It’s the kind of hug that means she’ll forgive me once she’s done being mad. I inhale the mint-and-reservoir-water smell of her and hold my breath until she’s gone. Then I exhale. I breathe a little cloud of Roya out into my front yard. It’s not the same as having the real thing here, but it’ll have to do until tomorrow. When I get to see her again. I breathe in and try to taste the hint of mint left on the air. Until tomorrow.
I go inside to check on the heart. It’s no warmer than it was when I left for school—it’s no softer, no closer to normal. But it’s still a little bit warm, and it throbs in my hands once every few seconds, a slow spasm that ripples irrepressibly across the glassy surface.
The idea that’s been slowly taking shape inside my head solidifies. Roya just got rid of a piece of Josh’s body, but the heart isn’t any different. Something was different this time.
Something didn’t work.
9.
ON TUESDAY MORNING, DAD INSISTS on dropping Nico and me off at school.
“But it’s so early,” Nico whines. He’s not wrong—it’s way too early, and I’m exhausted anyway. Which is weird, because every night, I’ve been sleeping deeply—but it feels like I’ve barely rested at all. It’s not bad dreams, either. I’ve been scared of nightmares since Josh died, but I haven’t had any.
In fact, I realize, I haven’t had any dreams at all.
That can’t be right, I think—but I can’t remember the last time I dreamed, not since prom, and something behind my navel twists with dread. That can’t be right, I think again.
“Yeah, well, that’s too bad,” Dad says to Nico, checking the expiration date on a yogurt he dug out of the back of the fridge. He scratches the long stubble on his face, which is apparently the beginning of an attempt at a beard. None of us have acknowledged it yet. “I gotta drop you guys off in time for my eight-o’clock conference call.”
“Why can’t we just walk, though?” Nico asks. He and Dad are staring at each other with identical stubborn expressions, and they look uncannily alike. “I’m gonna get to school like an hour before class starts—”
“And I’m gonna get to school fifteen minutes before that,” I say, nudging him. “We can deal for one day, Nic.” He looks at me. I shake off my worry about the dreams and try to make my face significant.
Dad’s acting like he’s dropping us off for no reason, but I saw him and Pop talking this morning before Pop headed out to a client meeting. Pop’s eyebrows were a low furrow across the bridge of his nose. They were looking at each other the same way that they looked at each other last night, when Josh’s face was on the news. “Just go with it,” I mutter to Nico.
He scowls at me, but there’s a question in his eyes. I glance over at Dad and back, giving a quick shake of my head. Nico sighs elaborately and slouches off to his bedroom to put too much gel in his already-sticking-up hair.
“I know it’s not convenient,” Dad says behind me. I turn around to see him putting mayonnaise on a slice of wheat bread. “But I just … would rather drive you kids today.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “It’ll be nice to have some time with everyone before class starts.”
“Yeah?” Dad slices thick chunks of leftover ham and layers them on the bread. His voice is way too casual. “Who are you going to be seeing?”
“Uh, probably … the whole gang?” I venture. “Although Maryam probably won’t show up until a few minutes before the bell—why?”
“No reason. Just want to know what’s going on in your life.”
There’s not a chance I’m going to tell him that. “You’re being weird,” I say, but I lean across the kitchen counter to kiss his stubbly cheek. “You’re a weirdo.”
“Yeah, well. That’s what dads are for,” he says. “Go get your backpack. We’re leaving in five.”
I go to grab my backpack from my room. My phone buzzes in my pocket—I have about thirty new notifications, all messages. Iris is stressing about something, as usual. I skim the group chat for context, but it doesn’t really make sense. Marcelina is talking about how she can’t forget something, but I can’t tell what she’s referring to. I figure I�
�ll ask her at school, or else someone else will understand what she means and I’ll ask them.
I pause before I walk out of my bedroom. I briefly consider grabbing the other backpack—the one that’s under the farthest corner of my bed—but I don’t know how I’d explain two backpacks to Dad. When the time is right, I tell myself. I don’t stick around long enough to let myself wonder when that might be.
When I get back to the kitchen, there are two brown bags sitting on the counter. One of them says “Nico!” in blue Sharpie; the other one has “Alexis!” scrawled across it.
“What’s this?” I call out, even though it’s totally obvious what “this” is. At the same time, Nico barrels out of his bedroom, headphones draped around his neck, backpack swinging from one shoulder.
“What’s what?” he asks, and then he stops short next to me.
I sniff the air. “Why do you smell like Pop?”
He flushes. “Meredith didn’t like the way my cologne smelled, so I’m trying his. Are those … lunches?”
I peer into the bag with my name on it. There’s a ham sandwich, a banana, and a granola bar. Nico shows me his—he has the dubious yogurt instead of the granola bar.
“Why is Dad packing us lunches? He’s never packed us lunches before.”
“Just take it,” I whisper. “You’ll hurt his feelings if you don’t.”
Nico shoves the bag into his backpack. He looks indignant. “I know,” he mutters. “I’m not a total idiot.”
“Hey,” I start to say—but he’s already gone, walking out to the garage to wait for Dad in the car. I sigh and drop my own bag lunch into my backpack. I catch Dad doing his tie in the hall mirror. I give him a hug, a long one.
“What’s this for?” he asks.
“Just … thanks for the lunch,” I say. He rests his scratchy chin on top of my head and gives me an extra squeeze, and I know that my life is better than I’ll ever deserve. Because of my friends. Because of my brother. Because of my dads.
I wish there was some way for me to be good enough for them.
