Left Drowning

by Jessica Park

  Twenty minutes must go by. His pace remains the same, but his physical pain is easy to see. He has to be hurting. She stands up and brings her hand to shield her eyes.

  Ten more minutes.

  Stop, she whispers. You have to stop now. It’s too much.

  Who knows how long he’d been doing this before she noticed? This is insane. But the boy keeps going, focused and unfailing in his routine. Even when he stumbles and spills half of a bucket, he continues.

  Jesus, stop! she pleads silently. Put the buckets down. You’re going to pass out. What the hell are you doing?

  Finally he pauses, turning his back to her as he looks toward the trees. Holy shit. His back is badly sunburned. If she can tell from this distance, it is definitely bad. It must hurt like hell, or at least it will later. He continues looking toward the trees for a bit, craning his head to the side. Looking for something? Someone? He drops the buckets and leans over, bracing himself with his hands on his legs. Catching his breath, for sure. The boy moves toward the water, looking down as he wades in a few feet. He seems to be shaking his head.

  When he raises his head, Blythe finds herself clearly in his sight. She should probably be embarrassed, having been caught staring at this stranger, but she isn’t. She takes her hand from her eyes and stays where she is. The boy is looking right at her. His exhaustion, his sadness, his hopelessness, they all travel over the water and rip through her. Something is very wrong here.

  She lifts her hand and gives him a tentative wave. He returns the gesture.

  Blythe cups her hands to her mouth. “Hi.”

  “Hi, back!”

  “Are you … okay?”

  He puts his hands on his hips and looks off to the side for a second before answering. He calls back, “Yes. I’m fine.”

  “What are you doing?” She tries to feign curiosity rather than concern. “With the buckets. Are you in training for something?”

  She can see him laugh. “Sort of!” he yells.

  “You’ve got a terrible sunburn. You should put on a shirt.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “No, really. It’s bad.”

  “I’m gonna be all right. Promise.”

  “Is that your house? Please just go grab a shirt.”

  He glances behind him. “I can’t. I shouldn’t … I can’t really talk. I’ll be fine.”

  Blythe frowns. “I’ll give you mine. I can row it over to you.” She crouches down and starts to untie the boat from the dock, but he stops her.

  “No! Don’t do that!” The alarm in his voice is startling and worrisome. He looks behind him again and then back at her. “Just … no. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” She can feel her heart pounding as she stands back up.

  They stand silently. She can’t take her eyes off him. Desperation and exhaustion radiate from this boy. Blythe is afraid to move, afraid he’ll drop to his knees if she breaks away. So she holds their unspoken exchange. Whatever this is, it isn’t forever. It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. She is nodding to him. I’m here. I’m right here.

  Finally he says, “I have to keep going.”

  Blythe is unable to speak for a bit. She doesn’t want him to keep going. She doesn’t understand what is going on, but everything about this feels off. Dangerous.

  She nods. “If you say so. I’m going to stay with you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I’m going to. I want to.”

  “Thank you.” She thinks that she hears his voice break. He picks up the metal buckets and begins pointlessly filling them and transporting water from one side of the shore to the other. She knows precisely how hard it is to walk through the heavy wet sand at low tide. Your feet sink in deep, making each step trying and draining. It can be fun if you are digging for clams, even funny when you lose a shoe to the thick sludge. This? Whatever this boy is doing, this is not fun. He only pauses once to slowly take something from the bucket and set it a few feet deeper into the ocean.

  Near tears, Blythe peels off her shirt. She looks around for a solution, since he’s made it so clear she should not row to him. Then it hits her: the life vest. She sits down with it. It takes a few minutes, but she manages to tie her Matthews shirt and her water bottle to the vest by using the straps. She moves to the end of dock, her toes hanging off the edge, getting as close to him as possible. Blythe throws the life vest as far as she can. “The tide is coming in,” she yells.

  The boy looks her way as he walks.

  “I’m not leaving you.” Now her voice nearly breaks.

  He nods again.

  Blythe sits down and tucks in her knees to her chest. No, she will not leave him. So for the next hour and a half she stays, willing some of his hurt to come her way. She would take this away from him if she could, somehow share whatever this is. For minutes at a time, she closes her eyes, sending him strength.

  This will not break you. This will not break you.

  He isn’t crying, so she doesn’t either. The battle against tears is one she almost loses several times. He is consistent, steady now. Brave. The only time that he stops again is when her life vest reaches him. She holds her breath as he struggles to untie the shirt and water bottle. His hands must be weak and trembling. He clumsily gets the wet shirt over his head, peeks behind him to the trees, and then downs the water. He raises the bottle in her direction as thanks.

  Later, when he has completed his … goal? job? … he suddenly hurls both buckets off to the side, slamming them into sea-worn boulders. The sound echoes across the water, making Blythe flinch. He paces erratically, almost manically, for a minute, and then turns to her and raises both hands into the air, his palms held high, fingers spread.

  Blythe raises hers, too, reaching out to him as though she is pressing her hands against his. She folds her fingers as if they could fall between his as he follows her movement. The boy moves his hands over his heart, and she does the same.

  Blythe grins.

  He just kicked a little ass.

  He nods almost imperceptibly and then slowly turns and begins to wearily walk away from the water and back to his house.

  The glow Blythe feels from their connection fades once the boy is out of sight, and a new restlessness sets in. She can’t relax.

  After rowing back and tying up the boat, she takes the path to the house, pausing on its deck for a last look at the cove. One of the deck’s lounge chairs beckons, and she falls into it, staring out at the water and feeling exhausted.

  A few minutes later, she hears James’s steps coming toward her across the creaky wooden deck. “You ready to go? I saw you come back a while ago. What are you doing out here?”

  The lounge chair is digging into her back, but she still doesn’t move.

  “Blythe? You okay? What are you looking at out there?”

  “What? Oh yeah.” She keeps her focus across the cove. “Just looking at the water. The whole view.” She closes her eyes for a moment and then pulls herself away. “Sure, let’s go.” She stands up.

  “You’re going to need to put on something over your bathing suit. I’m not letting you drive me around town half dressed. Besides, it’s going to get cold soon. You know how the nights are up here.” James looks around. “Where’s your Matthews shirt?”

  “Oh. That. I don’t have it … .”

  “What do you mean? You lost it? How could you lose it?” He frowns as he unzips his own sweatshirt and hands it over. “That’s your favorite shirt.”

  “Thanks.” Blythe slips her arms through the sleeves and fiddles with the zipper.” It’s okay. My shirt … found a new home.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.” She smiles at him as they head into the house. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “You’re a really good brother. I love you. And I love our family.”

  James fakes a serious look. “Are you dying? What’s wrong with you?”

  She la
ughs. “Shut up. Seriously, we’re lucky.”

  “Does this mean that you’ll let me drive?” James swipes the car keys from the counter and dangles them in front of her.

  “Hell, no, you’re not driving.” She snatches the keys from him. “Not only do you not even have a learner’s permit, but I wouldn’t trust you to get us through that narrow rut that’s passing as a driveway.”

  “Fine, fine,” he grumbles. “Let’s go get dinner and hope this roadside seafood shack of yours doesn’t sell us clams that land us in the ER.”

  “That’s the spirit!” She holds open the front door.

  “Blythe?”

  “Yeah?”

  He puts one hand on top of her head and messes up her hair. “Even though you won’t let me break the law in what is really a minor, minor way, I love you, too.”

  Blythe sighs. “God damn it. Fine. You can drive. Don’t you dare tell Mom and Dad.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Finding an Always

  Chris has worked some sort of magic with my playlist. Minute eighteen is not so awful. Running is not so awful. This is my second full week of going out every day, and even though it’s still impossibly hard, I’m not giving up. I feel a little bit stronger every day.

  It’s just pain.

  I crank up the volume. Chris is right. Competing with music does nothing to help speed or endurance. It would never have occurred to me to run to the slow rhythms he’s provided, but it is working. Granted, the lyrics and mood of half the songs are killing me: love, lust, angsty yearning, rage, desire, sadness. But the truth is that I can relate to all of these feelings. It is surprisingly comforting to know that other people in the world suffer like I do. It’s a stupidly obvious realization, but I’m starting to understand that it’s been hard to see outside of my own pain. Chris and his siblings have survived their mother’s death, and that was surely incredibly difficult. Is it harder to lose a parent when you’re a little kid or when you’re a teenager? I feel a stab of sympathy for Chris. He was so little. His father must have had so much to deal with, not just his own grief, but that of four young children. I wonder if he ever remarried. Maybe I’ll ask Chris. Or Sabin, since things are less awkward with him because I have not sexually assaulted him in his own dorm room.

  But the point here is that other people have problems and haunted pasts, just as I do. I am not alone. Yes, I have lost both of my parents in a pretty dramatic way, which I generally consider a pretty damn good excuse for total devastation, but … Maybe Chris nailed it by saying that I am holding on to the past because I think it’s all that I have. And by clinging to my guilt, I get nowhere.

  He managed to find something besides pain, and I can, too.

  The music in my ears changes, and I feel the urge to walk for a few minutes.

  No, no, no! You are not walking! I yell at myself. Listen to the music. Toughen up. There are people who have it much worse than you do. Stop being so selfish and … and … narcissistic. Fuck, the world doesn’t revolve around you and your grandiose sense of pain.

  My phone chimes and I look down. A rush of feeling rips through me: it’s Chris. He has just sent me more music. Another thirty songs, maybe more. The first new song starts and while the first line of lyrics nearly breaks my heart—my energy, or at least my motivation, is renewed.

  It’s just pain.

  I am not going to quit. I focus on the music and the lyrics and ignore my body’s protests.

  I want to fantasize about Chris to distract myself, but since we haven’t exactly been cozy since our ill-fated encounter on his bed, I try not to. He’s clearly not fantasizing about me. When he’s seen me on campus, he hasn’t obviously bolted in the other direction, but he hasn’t gone out of his way to talk to me, either. It is entirely possible that the connection I felt between us simply doesn’t exist. Maybe my reaction to him just stems from not having touched someone or been touched in years. Honestly, the last time I probably had a lot of physical contact with anyone was when I got a whole lot of hugs at my parents’ funeral—and that kind of touching is not anything like a horny, dorm room make-out session. So maybe it made sense that I was freaking out.

  What I do remember during the first few weeks after my parents died was the near-constant hugs, arm squeezes, and head pats I got from concerned family and friends. It wasn’t what I wanted at the time. I remember wanting to swat away everyone who came close to me. I started associating touch with death and grief. I don’t know if I actually started rejecting people or if they just stopped trying to console me, but eventually the unwanted affection just petered out. James and I never hug, not anymore, and my aunt has always been so uptight that I’m quite sure she’s as frigid as I am. Well, or as I was—these days, things seem to be looking up for me in that department. So I have spent four years without touch and affection and without wanting any.

  But now there is Christopher Shepherd, the boy who has changed all the rules.

  Not that he seems to want me the way that I want him. I’ve accepted that he probably let us mess around in his room out of pity. Of course, just because he felt sorry for me did not mean that he had to touch me like he did or lie down on top of me with a hard-on. At least fooling around with me hadn’t sent him into a completely flaccid state. Another small victory.

  Whatever. I am trying to look at it as a fun, meaningless make-out session with some pleasant additional groping. Even though it didn’t feel meaningless to me. At all. It felt like everything.

  Fuck.

  I look down at my phone and eye Chris’s new playlist. Handpicked songs. I don’t know how much to read into what he’s chosen to send me, but it’s hard not to see it as some kind of affection.

  And another big question looms over me: Why hadn’t he reacted in the least to my scar? He hadn’t hesitated at all when he touched it, and he didn’t ask about it, either.

  I run harder. My breathing is not as uneven as it was on that first run. On today’s run, my body is starting to feel smoother and more natural. My dorm comes into view, and I check the time. Huh. I have reached the end of my normal route six minutes earlier than I did yesterday, and I’m not ready to keel over. I start to cross the street.

  Damn.

  I turn around. I have it in me to run for another ten minutes. And the playlist is calling my name. Chris is calling my name. Ten more minutes of running will give me ten more minutes to play in my private fantasy world where Chris doesn’t pull his body away from mine, and he doesn’t stop kissing me, touching my hair, or moving his hand under my shirt. He goes further, feeling every inch of my body.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Importance of Being

  Well, these pants are hideous, and there is no way I can be seen in them. I glare in the mirror. My ass might as well have a sign that reads “Proof of Gravity.” The material seems to puff unreasonably, causing strange wrinkles and folds that add to what is already not a perfect shape. Angry, I yank them off and throw them to the bottom of my closet. For once, I actually want to look good, and instead I look like utter crap. I put my hands on my ass and squeeze. Stupid fat. Wait a minute… . There is definitely improvement here. A new firmness. Running is paying off.

  Holy shit. These pants are too big. No wonder they look so terrible.

  I start digging through my closet. I have to own something less horrible that I can wear to Sabin’s play. I locate a pair of inexcusably expensive straight-leg jeans my aunt gave me that I’ve never really fit into before, and I squirm into them now. A peek in the mirror does not cause vomiting, so I keep them on. The good thing about tight pants is that they pack everything in and hold it in place, and these have enough stretch that I can still breathe. My long-forgotten mascara has somehow not caked up, so I darken my eyelashes and then run an equally old tube of pink gloss over my lips.

  The knock on the door startles me. I can’t remember anyone stopping by my room before. “Who is it?” I quickly reach for the closest shirt from the pile of rejects thro
wn on the bed. I may be out of practice having visitors, but I know enough not to answer the door in a bra.

  “It’s Estelle.”

  “Oh. Come in.”

  Estelle opens the door. Great. She is decked out in a sleek navy minidress and gorgeous three-inch heels that tie up her calves with a wide ribbon. Her dark hair now has electric pink streaks running through some of the short pieces around her face. She looks so hot that even I want to jump her. “Hey. You’re going to the play tonight, right? Sabin put us in charge of bringing you, and Chris is going to meet us there. This is our brother Eric.”

  “Hey.” Eric steps out from behind Estelle. Even if I hadn’t been told they were twins, it is obvious. He is the shortest of the three brothers, and if it weren’t for Estelle’s heels, they’d be exactly the same height. Eric has the same strong facial bone structure that she does. They make a perfectly gorgeous pair.

  “Good to meet you, Eric.”

  “So you’re a friend of Sabin’s?” he asks.

  Oh. Sabin was the one to invite me to tonight’s play, not Chris. So I am Sabin’s friend. Am I really friends with either of them, though? True, Sabin has been texting me incessantly about his show: If you don’t show up on Friday night, I’m going to gouge out my eyes with a spork so that gazillions of tears cannot fall and drown the entire campus population. Chris, however, has been as absent as they come. Yes, he held open the dorm door for me last week and was perfectly friendly in the two seconds that it took him to say, “How’s it going?” before rushing off to his class. That seems to be the disappointing extent of our relationship.