by Leah Stewart
“Not even Monopoly? Or a musical instrument?”
I shook my head. “Do you play a musical instrument?”
He looked at me a long moment, like he was gauging my trustworthiness. “I play guitar,” he said. “But I’m no good.”
He was so intimidating, with his good looks, his self-assurance, that it was a relief to hear the uncertainty in his voice. “My father plays,” I said. “I bet he could teach you.” I imagined Will coming over every Saturday afternoon.
“I don’t want anybody to teach me,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want anybody to monitor my progress,” he said.
“How are you going to learn?”
“I’m teaching myself.”
“But if you had lessons, you’d learn faster.”
He frowned. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t want anybody to hear me.”
“But how will you get any better?”
“You don’t get it,” he said, in a tone that suggested my ignorance extended far beyond the topic at hand. “Just forget it.”
“Fine,” I said, as angry with myself as I was with him. “It’s forgotten.”
He stood there another moment, and then he said, “I’ll see you, okay?” He left without waiting for my reply. I focused on the woman in the red dress, resisting the urge to watch him walk away, and then, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I looked. He was already gone.
Several awkward conversations later, I slipped away from the party, looking for the bathroom, mostly so I could have a few minutes alone. I heard music coming from the end of the hall and followed the sound to stand outside Will’s room. He hadn’t closed the door all the way, and through the gap I could see him sitting on the edge of his bed, guitar in his lap. He didn’t see me. “Won’t you let me . . . ,” he sang, and then he stopped, tuned his guitar, and started again. “Won’t you let me walk you home from school.”
I didn’t recognize the song, which I later learned, after much searching, was “Thirteen” by Big Star. The lyrics were about wanting to meet a girl at the pool, take her to a dance—they were about how he’d leave her alone if she told him to. I wouldn’t have guessed this boy, with his long silences and jokes, would choose a song in which love was laid out with such bare simplicity. He played the song in a key that was too high for him, but the way his voice strained after certain notes gave the performance that much more emotion—he sang it like he meant every word. I wondered if he was thinking of a girl he’d left in Virginia. No matter what he’d said, he was really, really good. Watching him sing was like catching a glimpse of him naked.
I stood there in the hall, my heart racing, afraid that at any moment he would look up to see me spying on him, unable to walk away. I’d found him attractive before, but as his voice cracked over the word you, I felt a longing so big it threatened to swallow me. I was fifteen, I was familiar with longing, but at that moment I seemed to understand for the first time exactly what I wanted out of everything in the world. I wanted Will Barrett to be singing that song to me.
And then he looked up, and at the sight of me he stopped singing in the middle of a word. He jerked to his feet like I’d caught him doing something shameful, and a flush spread up his neck and brightened his ears. “I told you I’m no good,” he said.
I couldn’t think of anything to say that was remotely adequate to what I felt, and even if I could have I wouldn’t have been able to say it. I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I pulled the door shut and walked away.
Monday morning I walked into my first-period government class, and there was Will Barrett, sitting in a desk next to Glenn, the class president, a boy with spiky hair and an easy smile who had practically climbed over his own desk in his eagerness to talk to Will. He was always trying to persuade somebody of something. When I walked in, Will was leaning back in his chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him, but when he glanced up and saw me, the muscles in his jaw tightened and he sat up straight. Glenn looked up at me and nodded, not pausing in what he was saying, which I now heard was something about school spirit and the basketball team.
I took a seat two rows back from Glenn, behind Michelle Martinez. Will’s hair was a little long on top, but in the back it was razored into straight lines. I wondered if this was some kind of compromise with his father, who, if he was anything like my father, believed every man in America should have a military haircut. I wondered if Will was always going to hate me. He had a smattering of freckles on the back of his neck. He reached up to rub his neck, as though he could feel my gaze, and I looked away. As the bell rang I decided I didn’t care if he hated me. I would hate him, too.
I heard Will say, “So, what kind of music do you listen to?”
“Top forty,” Glenn said. “A little country, a little Christian rock.”
“Oh,” Will said.
“What else is there, right?” Glenn said.
“Seriously?” Will said.
Glenn laughed like he thought Will was kidding, and as the teacher began to speak I saw Will’s shoulders rise and drop in a sigh. I could have told him that if he expected anyone to know who The Replacements were, this would not be the last of his disappointments. How many times had he moved? Shouldn’t he be used to this kind of thing by now?
I was doodling in my notebook, a minute from the end of class, when Michelle turned and handed me a folded piece of paper with my name scrawled on the front. Inside, in small, neat letters, it said, I hope you didn’t tell anyone. He didn’t even sign his name. I hadn’t told anyone, mostly because Sonia had been grounded since she came in twenty minutes past curfew on New Year’s Eve, and when she was grounded her mother forbade her use of the phone. But I was annoyed by the peremptory tone of the note, by the way he assumed seeing him play guitar was so important to me I’d know exactly what he was talking about. I considered lying and saying I’d told everyone in school. I looked up at him. He was perfectly still, but something about the angle of his head let me know he was anxious about my reply. The back of his neck was slightly pink. No, I wrote. I folded the note and passed it back.
When Glenn handed it to Will, Will nodded once, curtly, and then crumpled the note in his hand. Glenn began to talk the moment the bell rang, and the two of them walked out together. Will didn’t once glance back at me.
By the time Will asked Sonia out, three weeks later, I was thoroughly convinced I disliked him. When our eyes met, he’d give me this blank nod, like I was no one he knew, and because I often found myself compelled to look at him, I came again to feel that he was a picture in a magazine, and not a person at all. I admired, like everyone else, his skill on the basketball court. His father had been right about that. Sonia admired that, too—she spent the game on the sidelines and so was close enough to see the way he transformed when he came off the bench. “When he’s not playing,” she said, “he watches like it has nothing to do with him, like he doesn’t even care who wins. Then the second he goes in there he looks fierce.”
She reported, once they were dating, that all of his apparent disinterest was a mask. He was incredibly romantic, she said. He courted her, leaving roses on her doorstep. I didn’t see this side of him. When the three of us were together he was remote and serious. In my presence he didn’t even hold Sonia’s hand. I didn’t recognize in him the boy she described, the one I’d seen playing guitar. He seemed to me impervious, made of stone, and that was what I believed until late in the spring of that year, the day the town flooded.
Clovis was not built to handle rain. The streets were flat, with no runoffs, and on this occasion, a Monday in early April, it rained so hard that the streets flooded until they were two feet deep in water. I made it to first period, thanks to a neighbor’s pickup, and so did Will. We were the only ones there. We sat at opposite ends of the room, not looking at each other, waiting, for ten minutes. Finally Will turned to me and said, “Should we get out of here?”
“Okay,” I said
. I didn’t really want to leave. I didn’t know where I would go, what I would do, and I was worried that the teacher would show up to find an empty classroom. I followed Will out into the hall and then stopped. The hall was quiet and dark. I had never cut class before. Will kept walking, then looked back. He seemed surprised to see me still standing there. “Aren’t you coming?” he said. It hadn’t occurred to me that, wherever he was going, he wanted me to come along.
I followed him out to the parking lot. He led me to a baby blue Buick with seats like couches. He unlocked the passenger door for me. I looked at him. I felt as though I had signed a contract without reading it. Now it was too late to ask the terms, and I was to be trapped in a car, going who knows where, with a boy who was impossible to talk to. He took my hesitation for a question about the car. “It was my grandfather’s,” he said. “He just gave it to me.” I got in.
Nothing is stranger than the familiar become unfamiliar. A house on your street that you never stopped to see before, so that it seems to have been dropped into place with its rosebushes, its bicycles in the yard, like a fairy cottage appearing from the mist. A birthmark on your back that you never noticed in twenty-five years of looking at your own skin. Why, you don’t know anything, do you? The world can crack open like an egg, spill fires into forests, rivers into streets. A boy who was yesterday as unreachable as a movie star drives you today through a town underwater. He is close enough to touch.
The football field was a swamp. Water rose halfway up the equipment shed. The sight seemed to call for silence, and neither of us said a thing as we headed into town, the only sound the sloshing of the tires through water. For several minutes we saw neither a person nor a moving car. “We’re the last people on earth,” Will said. I had wanted to say that, but hadn’t.
We drove through a downtown neighborhood of small houses, rusty old cars, parched lawns—except now the lawns weren’t parched; they weren’t even lawns. They were lakes, and all the houses boats. I turned to watch a child’s plastic toy, bright orange, bobbing in the water, and so I wasn’t ready when Will suddenly jerked the car toward the curb and slammed on the brakes. “What . . . ,” I started, my hand going to my neck, but he was out the door and wading toward a house. He was straining against the water, trying to run, and it splashed out around him like it was fighting to hold him back. He’d left his door open, and the floorboard was getting wet, so I leaned across the seat and struggled to shut it. I got it shut, but in the process I brought more water inside. There was an inch of water underneath the pedals, but I didn’t know what to do about that. Will had reached the sidewalk now and was crossing what would normally be the front lawn of a house, headed toward the side. I could see a cage back there, beyond the wire fence, but I had no idea what Will was doing. I couldn’t decide whether to get out of the car. The water was moving around me so that I felt like the car and I were drifting, and it seemed that to step outside would be to take a raft into high seas. But I didn’t like the feeling, either, that as I sat there, a river was carrying me away.
I pushed open the door, took a deep breath, and stepped out. My shoes filled with water. My jeans grew heavy around my calves. I waded after Will. He was climbing the fence into the backyard. He swung a leg over and then paused. I couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders were tense and I knew he’d scraped or cut himself on the jagged edges of the fence. Then he swung his other leg over and let go, landing with a splash that soaked his shirt. When I reached the front lawn, I shot a nervous look at the door, which remained shut. There was no movement behind the windows, no sign that anyone was home. I didn’t want to call after Will, for fear of alerting someone who might emerge with a shotgun, and I felt irritated with him for putting me in this position. What on earth was he doing—scavenging after a floating toy?
It wasn’t until I finally reached the fence that I saw what he had seen. Inside the cage in the backyard, paddling desperately, with only its nose and terrified eyes visible above the water, was a small brown-and-white dog. Will was crouched in front of the cage, up to his chest in water, even his hair wet now as he struggled with the door. “Good boy, good boy,” he was saying. “I’ll get you out.” His voice was calm, but then he glanced back at me, and his eyes were as desperate as the dog’s. “I can’t work the latch,” he said.
“I’ll see if they’re home,” I said.
“There’s no time,” he said. “He’s drowning!” He grabbed the front of the cage with both hands and began to strain against it, trying to wrench the whole thing apart. The dog whimpered, its eyes trained on Will, who said, “Good boy, good boy,” and then heaved backward with such force he landed with a splash in the water. The cage was still intact. Will threw himself back at it, grabbing the front again.
“That’s not working,” I said, frantic. “Try the latch again.”
The dog slipped beneath the water and bobbed back up. Will let out a cry of frustration, and I began to climb the fence. But before I could swing my leg over the top, Will made another try at the latch, and this time he got it. The door opened, the dog seemed to rush out at him, and then Will was standing with the wet and shivering animal in his arms. I clung to the fence and looked at him. His wet hair had curled at the ends and rivulets of water ran from it down his back. He cradled the dog like a baby, trying to warm and comfort it, though he was shivering himself. “Will,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. I didn’t know what I wanted to say, anyway. What I wanted was to hold him until he stopped shaking.
“It’s okay now,” he said to the dog. “It’s okay.” His voice went high on the last word, and he swallowed hard. He seemed to gather himself before he looked at me. “We have to do something,” he said. “We have to take this dog to a vet.”
“But shouldn’t we . . .” I hesitated. “Shouldn’t we check and see if the people are home?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “They can’t be home. Who would leave their dog like this?”
“I’ll just check,” I said. “Stay here.” I waded around to the front. I rang the doorbell and then, impatient, pounded on the door, which opened abruptly just as I was raising my fist to knock again. A woman in a pink terry-cloth bathrobe, her hair sleep-tousled, stared at me. “What . . . ,” she started to say, but the word disappeared into a yawn.
“Your dog,” I said, pointing toward the backyard. It was all I could manage.
She looked at me for a moment with a puzzled frown, and then she said, like she’d just dropped her keys, “Oh, hell.”
“He was drowning,” I said. “We let him out.”
She checked behind me. “So where is it?”
“Backyard,” I said. “With my . . . friend.”
She sighed and waved me inside. “I was asleep,” she said. “I didn’t think about it back there.” I followed her through the dark, dingy house. The smell of old trash wafted out of the kitchen.
Will was standing where I’d left him, up to his knees in water, holding the dog, who was licking his face. As the woman opened the back door he stared at her like she was an alien, and then when I walked out past her he stared at me like that, too. She waved him in, but he just stood there. “Is he going to bring it inside or what?” she asked. She checked the pocket of her robe, found nothing, and sighed.
I waded across the lawn to Will. “We better take him in,” I said.
He shook his head, tightening his grip. “I’m not giving him to her,” he said. “She doesn’t deserve him.”
“I don’t know what else to do,” I said. “It’s her dog.”
He looked at me like I was responsible for all the world’s injustice, and then, without another word, he carried the dog across the lawn. I followed, feeling like I was somehow as guilty as this woman. Inside the house the dog began to struggle to be put down, so Will let him go, and we watched as he sniffed the floor and the woman’s bare feet and then began to wag his tail.
“You should take him to the vet,” Will said.
“Why? It look
s fine.” The woman checked her pockets again and seemed just as disappointed to find nothing.
“He nearly drowned,” Will said, his voice tight. “Something could be wrong with him.”
“It’s not even my dog,” she said. “It belongs to my daughter. She just stuck me with it.”
“So you were just going to let him drown?”
The woman looked at him. “I didn’t know it was going to rain.” She walked toward us, waving us down the hall toward the front door.
Will strode angrily down the hall, but at the door he turned, his face pleading. “I’ll take him,” he said. “If you don’t want him. Give him to me.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want him,” the woman said. “You’re just a kid. Who the hell do you think you are?” She reached around us and opened the door. I walked outside. Will failed to move, and she said, “I’ll call the cops.”
“Will,” I said, but without a glance at me he moved outside and began to cross the lawn.
The woman looked at me. “That it?” she said. Behind her the dog barked once, and she shut the door in my face.
There was one tree in the yard, and that was where Will stopped, and as I reached him, he began to kick it over and over, water flying everywhere so that I had to back up to avoid being hit. He kicked it until I was sure he was hurting himself, I was sure that woman had called the cops, and I was in a panic, I had so little idea of what to do. Then suddenly he stopped, wading as fast as he could toward the car. I was afraid he’d drive off and leave me, but he sat there with the engine running and waited for me to get in.
When I got inside he didn’t look at me. He just began to drive. His face was red. I saw now that he’d torn his pants on the fence, that blood was beading along a nasty scratch on his inner thigh. I didn’t know what to say. I thought he was furious with me for going to get the woman. As we left that neighborhood I realized I was holding my breath.
He yanked the wheel, and we turned into the parking lot of a strip mall. Here, we were on dry land. He stopped the car, but he went on clutching the steering wheel like we were still moving. I looked at his face and saw that he was struggling not to cry. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We should have just taken him.”
