I peeled open the box and emptied its contents atop my T-shirts. I tore off two from the strip, figuring it was good to have a backup in case the first one, I don’t know, malfunctioned or I dropped it in my nervousness and it got stolen by a raccoon. Or something.
Then I quickly scanned the instructions and diagrams, thanking God for (a) my skill at cramming for tests, and (b) my circumcision. I did not need extra steps to memorize.
It wasn’t that I assumed we would have sex just because Bailey was asking Kane about me. Part of me even wondered if I was jinxing my chances by bringing condoms, the same way my mom thought bringing an umbrella to a ball game can keep it from raining. I just didn’t want to be unprepared.
I stuffed the two chosen ones in my front pocket and covered the rest under a stack of T-shirts. Finally I scribbled a quick message to my parents, on a sheet of paper ripped from my biology spiral notebook:
Mom and Dad,
Had to go out for a while. Be back by 2:30. I promise I’ll be safe, so please don’t call the cops.
David
Before leaving the note on my pillow, I squeezed “Love” and a comma in front of my name.
CHAPTER 33
NOW
I row for another hour and a half while Mara reads aloud from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which she heard was a good road trip novel. The book makes little sense to me, and I sort of hate the bratty son who doesn’t appreciate that his father actually wants to do stuff with him.
Not even the bold cut of green mountains against blue sky, and their competing reflections in the silver lake, can distract me from my fears about my parents. As much as I want to know they’re safe, part of me dreads our reunion. After all, their last memory of me is my abandoning them in the middle of the night.
Then again, that’s also my last memory of them, so I guess we’re even.
While it’s still light, we pull over into a little cove with a decent clearing for a campsite. I can barely raise my arms after hours of rowing (apparently it uses different muscles than pitching), so Mara sets up the tent on her own.
We don’t bother building a fire, since we have nothing but protein bars and cold, soggy hush-puppy remains. Sandy warned us we should eat only in the boat, not the tent, to avoid attracting bears into our bed.
I slip on a sweatshirt I bought at General Store. It says “Bass Man” under a picture of a fish.
“Classy.” Mara shines the flashlight on my chest as she climbs into the beached boat and sits across from me.
“It was either this or ‘Master Baiter.’ Or freezing to death.”
“Or, you know, planning ahead.” She gestures to her own thick blue sweats she brought from home.
“I wish Bailey were here. Then she could sleep between us and we’d all be warm.”
“No offense, but I’d rather have Sam. Assuming he ever speaks to me again after I’ve been avoiding him all week.”
I guess she didn’t trust him—or any of her friends—with our secret the way I trusted Kane and Bailey. “We need a plan of attack for tomorrow. What do we do when we get to Almost Heaven?”
“They’ll probably have lookouts.”
“I bet I could nail a guard with a rock.” I mime hurling a projectile, then wince at the rowing-induced pain. “Ow.”
“That’ll get us off on the right foot,” Mara says. “Injuring one of their people hours from the closest hospital.”
“So we should just row up and say, ‘We come in peace. Take me to your leader’?”
“We do come in peace.” Mara tears open a chocolate coconut energy bar. “It’s leaving again, with Mom and Dad, that’ll be the big problem. Think about it. Sophia’s pretending publicly that the Rush really happened. If Mom could only send us one secret text message, that means Sophia doesn’t want them to have contact with the outside. That means she’ll do anything to keep us from taking our parents home.”
“And we have no leverage.” I remember how Mara convinced Sandy to help us. “Maybe if you cried a lot.”
“Shut up, it did work once.” She shakes her head. “I doubt Sophia will be as easy as Sandy. She’s got a lot more at stake than a rowboat.”
“Maybe we could appeal to Sophia’s sense of decency. Who would want to separate parents from their children? What if we promised her that if we can take our parents home, we won’t tell anyone about Almost Heaven?”
“David, you are so naive sometimes. Why would she believe us?”
“Because it’s true. The Rushers are there by choice.”
“Their kids aren’t. You heard what Ezra said about Eve. She wasn’t even ready to go to heaven, much less some heavenly knockoff out in the sticks with no friends and no Internet. Can you imagine how she felt, especially since her brother got to stay behind?”
“She probably felt kidnapped by her own parents.” I crumple the protein-bar wrapper and shove it back in the ziplock bag. Still hungry, I fish out the last package of cheese puffs. A nearly full moon rises over the lake.
“As pretty as it is out here,” Mara says, “I can’t imagine Mom agreeing to live so far away from civilization.”
“Maybe she’ll open her own Starbucks so she can get a decent French roast.”
Mara laughs. “Then she could cross off the ‘Almost’ in Almost Heaven.”
“Dad, on the other hand, must feel totally at home.”
“Getting back to his hillbilly roots.” She brushes the crumbs off her lap. “I’m going inside the tent to read, where it’s warmer. You coming?”
“In a minute. Don’t use up all the flashlight battery.”
She leaves me alone with the lake and the mountains and all the chirping, tweeting, splashing creatures.
In this setting, God seems close enough to hear me unamplified. I don’t need to raise or fold my hands, or hear the “Let us pray” introduction. Here we can just talk.
Rapture or not, I know this earth won’t last forever. Billions of years from now, the sun will swell into a red giant and swallow our part of the solar system. This lake will boil and these mountains will melt. I know it won’t be pretty, but I do pray that the earth gets to die of natural causes. I pray that it doesn’t get cut down in the prime of life, by you or us or some combination thereof.
That’s probably a sin, right? I should be praying for you to come back tomorrow, or the next day. If I really love you, I should want you to show up now. Nothing personal, God, but . . . you’ve made something good here. I think you should see it through to the end. The natural end, not the one humans have written.
Amen. No, wait. PS: Help me and Mara—let’s face it, probably Mara—figure out a way to get our parents back. Amen again.
I zip up our food bag, place it in the storage compartment, and carefully step out of the boat onto the bank.
Inside the tent, Mara is already asleep, the book on her chest and the flashlight fallen to her side, its beam pointed at the ceiling. The sleeping bag is folded out to create a mattress. A thin flannel blanket is our only cover, since a second sleeping bag wouldn’t have fit in the boat.
I switch off the flashlight, then slip under the blanket, shivering at the sudden warmth. My head rests on a solid surface I recognize as one of the life vests. Nice.
I drift off to sleep, feeling strangely at peace.
CHAPTER 34
THREE HOURS BEFORE THE RUSH
I slipped through the woods between my backyard and Kane’s, then made my way a few doors down to Stephen Rice’s house. From the music and laughter, it was obvious which yard held MMHS’s hottest after-prom party.
I entered through the gate behind the pool house. When I came around the small blue building, my senses were swamped by the spectacle.
The Rices’ backyard was like an oasis without a desert. The crowded kidney-shaped pool and humongous hot tub were surrounded by sandstone and slate rather than ordinary concrete. On the pool’s near edge, a waterslide curved around a waterfall lit from beneath by blue and
green lights. Karaoke was going on under the gazebo, outlined with white lights, and the wide, level lawn nearby was packed with partygoers lying on beach towels. Some of them were doing a lot more than lying.
“Coop!” Kane was hoisting himself out of the pool. He walked briskly over to me, his feet sending splashes of water out before him. “You escaped—that’s awesome. Come meet Jon. Um, I mean, Jonathan.”
A guy with reddish-blond hair swam to the edge of the pool. I squatted down to shake his head and exchange a “Hey.”
Suddenly someone grabbed my shoulders, and for a moment I teetered, about to plunge into the water fully clothed.
“David Cooper! David Cooper!” Stephen Rice repeated my name as he yanked me to my feet. “I cannot tell you how glad I am you’re here, bro.” He looped his arm around me, speaking vodka fumes into my face. “Check you out in your old stealth swag. I remember those times back in middle school, right? How many miles did we log running from the cops? Sucks you had to go to home school. Tell you what: You can borrow a pair of my swim trunks. I’ve got, like, forty million.” He gave me a light push toward the pool house. “Bathroom closet.”
“Thanks” was the first word I got in edgewise. I approached the front of the pool house. Through the French doors I could see people gathered in the main room near a fireplace.
One of those people was Bailey.
My hand froze on the door handle, unable to turn it.
“Push it, genius,” said some guy walking behind me.
“I know.” I shove the door open, almost smacking someone in the face.
Bailey, of course. Barefoot. In a pink-and-blue bikini with a bright yellow towel around her waist. The same colors she was wearing the day we first met.
“Hi.” With some effort, I let go of the handle. “As you can see, I’m . . .” I couldn’t think of an adjective.
“Here?”
“Yeah. Here.” I wondered if she could tell that my chest was caving in from seeing her. Or at least it felt that way, with my heart racing and swelling at the same time, overcome with the adrenaline of fear and joy.
“Sorry, can I?” A short, brunette girl was waiting to get in. Bailey drew me into the corner, out of the way of the door. The girl went past us into the bathroom.
“So you know Stephen?” I managed to ask Bailey.
“From Sierra Club.”
“Oh.” Given the Rices’ gigantic McMansion, I would not in a million years have pegged them as environmentalists, but okay. People can surprise you. “Are you guys . . . you know.”
She shook her head, but in confusion, not denial. Then her eyes widened. “No! I’m not with him. I’m not with anyone. I just came because it sounded fun.”
“Oh. Yeah. It seems fun so far.”
We kept nodding and nodding and nodding. Across the room, a small group by the fireplace burst into laughter. It sounded like they were playing a board-game version of Truth or Dare.
“What’s in the bag?” Bailey asked.
“Oh!” I could not stop saying “Oh.” I tossed away the bag, then opened the plastic box with the corsage. “I ordered them for prom. So they would’ve been for you if we hadn’t—I mean, if you were still my—if we were still—just take them, okay?”
She examined the corsage, her eyes turning sad. “I also came to the party because I thought you’d be here.”
“Oh. I am. Here.” And incapable of complex sentences.
She put out her hand like she was going to touch my arm, but ended up just gesturing to my black clothes. “I assume you snuck out.”
“Actually, Saturday night is ninja night at my house. Family tradition.”
Bailey laughed at last, then bit her lip and lifted her gaze to mine. “Black’s a good color for you.”
“You mean it’s attractive or appropriate?”
“Maybe both.”
“That’s a shame.” I bent my arm against the wall over her head, leaning in. “Because I have to take these clothes off now.”
Bailey glanced at a closed door on the opposite side of the room, then frowned. My stomach sank. She used to like the way I flirted.
The bathroom door next to us slid open, and the girl came out. I stepped around Bailey. “I’ll be right back.”
“And I’ll be right here.”
Inside the bathroom, I found a pair of swim trunks my size in the closet, tossed off my clothes, yanked the trunks on, and slid the pocket door open, all in about ninety seconds.
I decided I was done being awkward. I led Bailey outside by the pool, where the loud music and laughter would cover our voices enough for privacy. “Kane said you were asking for me. Why?”
“I was hoping you were all right.” She looked at her yellow flip-flops, tapping the heel of one against the toe of the other. “And I wanted to say I was sorry for what I said when we broke up. I was hurt and scared.”
“Scared of what?”
Bailey fidgeted with the knot in her towel. “It’s one thing to compete with another girl. But I can’t compete with God.”
Yes, you can, I thought. That’s the problem.
Her whole face softened, and I realized I’d said that out loud.
• • •
Bailey and I headed straight for the waterslide. We went down on our butts, our stomachs, our backs; alone, and then finally together, crashing into the sides, plunging deep into the pool, coming apart as we slipped beneath the water, finally finding each other on the way to the surface.
Then Bailey floated back through the waterfall into the tiny cavern created by the slide’s rocky overhang. Her silhouette glowed and blurred in the blue-lit cascade. I joined her in the cavern, where the wall of falling water made us seem alone, and kissed her. Bailey’s lips were cold but her tongue was warm, enough to heat my entire body.
It didn’t feel like the last night of my life. It felt like the first.
• • •
We sat side by side in the crowded hot tub, my arm around Bailey’s shoulders, our bodies pressed together. I wanted to hear every detail about the last forty days of her life, but first I had to ask the biggest question, as much as I dreaded the answer.
“Did you decide where you’re going to college?”
Bailey’s lips curved into a smug smile. “Yep. I’ll give you a hint: Their mascot is the same as Middle Merion High’s.”
“The Tigers?” I couldn’t think of which college she meant. Surely she wasn’t going to Auburn or LSU. The important thing was: “No Stanford Tree?”
She laughed. “No. Another hint. It’s full of gargoyles.”
It dawned on me then. “Whoa, you got into Princeton?”
“Yes!”
We hugged, then double high-fived, then hugged again. Then she was off, chattering a mile a minute about the campus and the curriculum and how she might decide to be a math major instead of going into molecular biology but had plenty of time to decide, et cetera et cetera, and in the back of my mind all I could think was, Jersey’s only one state away. I can take the R5 to 30th Street Station, then the R7 to Trenton, then New Jersey Transit to Princeton Junction, and then that little train that goes near campus—the Dinky, I think?—and she’d be waiting for me at the station. This could totally work.
Some other seniors in the hot tub joined in on the college talk. I tried to stay in the moment and listen to the lively conversation, but my mind’s eye kept pulling back to marvel at where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing. It seemed so normal yet so surreal. Definitely not the night my parents had planned for me.
Mara was also at the party with Sam, disobeying Dad’s order to come straight home after prom. I caught glimpses of Rajiv and Patrick, the other two members of my old graffiti gang. Nate and Brendan had stopped me near the waterslide to say how much the team missed me.
Somewhere, hovering around the perimeter, were Mr. and Mrs. Rice. Their presence didn’t reduce the amount of drinking so much as drove it underground.
Stephen climbed int
o the hot tub holding a six-pack of Coke. His girlfriend, Alexis, joined him, her eyes bugging out at the high temperature.
“I will never get used to this.” She gasped as she sank into the water to sit beside Stephen.
“Yeah, you will,” he said. “Pass that shit around, okay? But for God’s sake, be subtle. Don’t let my parents see.”
“Check it out, peeps!” Alexis opened her fists to reveal black-labeled mini-bottles, then did a goofy little shoulder shimmy before handing them out. The opposite of subtle.
Meanwhile, Stephen distributed sodas. “Mixers, mixers, one per couple.” Bailey and I took a soda but turned down the liquor.
“What, you don’t drink?” Stephen shifted over to sit next to me. “I thought all jocks drank.”
“Not during the season.” This was technically true. It was also true that I didn’t drink during the off-season.
“But you quit the team. So right now, you’re not a baseball player.” He poked my shoulder with a tiny bottle, looking comically sincere. “You’re just a guy about to have the best night of his life.”
Bailey wore a neutral expression as she popped the top of the Coke can. I took the bottle from Stephen. It was Jack Daniel’s, which sounded rough and intimidating, but its container was barely the length of my middle finger. When I was younger, my dad would go through a whole handful of these bottles in a single evening. It seemed to make him happy (except when it didn’t).
If leaving the house three hours before the Rush was the “cake” of my rebellion, this drink would be the icing.
I twisted the lid, snapping the bottle’s seal, then reached for the can of Coke. Bailey drew it back.
“No way!” she said.
“Come on, Bailey,” Stephen groaned. “Your parents are total potheads. I’m friends with their dealer.”
“I don’t touch the stuff!” she snapped at him. “I don’t touch anything.”
Stephen elbowed me. “You hear that? She doesn’t touch anything. Gotta be a disappointment.”
“Go away,” I told him.
“Suit yourself.” He drifted across the hot tub, into his girlfriend’s arms.
This Side of Salvation Page 25
