Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  unstable guest who cannot stay . . .

  The sun’s heart reddens and expands,

  his mighty aspiration is lasting,

  as the shell of his substanace

  one day will be white with frost

  Leigh props her head on my shoulder to read—I hadn’t even heard her approaching—just as I shut the book with a pang.

  “Wait, I want to see how the world ends,” she protests.

  “I don’t,” I say, dropping The Poem and You back onto her desk. Instead, I grab an English to Dutch dictionary. “You speak Dutch?”

  “Sure,” she laughs. “Ik laat een scheet in jouw richting.”

  “Wow.”

  “It means ‘I fart in your direction.’ Or I think it does. I’m new.”

  “You have the basics covered.”

  “I want to know how to ask for a phone, a toilet, and the number two at McDonald’s in every language. And I want to be able to tell people to go fuck themselves. I’ve got Japanese, Dutch, and French down. And Latin, but where will that get me?”

  “Not Spanish?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “We had it in elementary school, but when I moved away I forgot most of it. I can say ‘My German is better than your German’ in German. But it’s the only German I know, so it’s not that useful.”

  “You should do Spanish again. Nobody swears as beautifully.”

  “Your parents speak it?”

  I nod. “Mom only really learned it when she moved here to be with my dad.”

  She crashes back down on the bed. “Can I have a lesson?”

  “Hmm. Okay. Mama huevos loco, que te pasa?”

  Leigh twists her mouth around the words. “Crazy eggs?”

  “It’s slang for, like, ‘What are you looking at, dick-sucker?’”

  “I’ll practice that.” She grins.

  “Is this, like, a self-improvement thing?”

  “Definitely not.” She rolls over and props herself up with one elbow, waiting patiently while I inspect her stuff. “It’s totally practical. Me and Lucas are gonna travel before I go to college. We haven’t decided where, but I want to be ready.”

  I let the dictionary close and drift over to the window. Her backyard is as wild as the front, closed in by a low stucco wall. In the middle there’s a grill, and hunched over it with his tongs and veggie burgers, Mr. Clemente.

  “Your dad is so . . . tall.”

  “Yeah, I hope I grow up to look like him.”

  I laugh. Mr. Clemente’s tall indeed, stick straight and super skinny, while Leigh’s thin, and no shrimp, but I don’t think she’ll grow up to play pro basketball.

  Height aside, Mr. Clemente turns out to be a lot like his kids. When he talks to me at the dinner table, he gets this look on his face and leans forward like I’m the only one he could possibly be interested in listening to. Lucas has it. Leigh too.

  And I’ll just say it, I like Naveen. She’s a little bit of a space cadet, but it’s obvious she loves Leigh and her dad. She asks me questions, mostly leaves Leigh alone, and spends half the meal happily pinching scraps of vegetables off her skewer and slipping them to the dogs under the table.

  When we’re stuffed with non-burgers and kabobs and coconut-milk ice cream, Naveen and Mr. Clemente settle on the couch with glasses of organic wine to watch 1776 (“the second-best musical ever written about the founding fathers!” Mr. Clemente assures me). Leigh and I go outside with a box of sparklers and watch the sun crawl slowly behind the low hills to the west. We sit on the porch glider in comfortable silence, legs swinging. Her hips brush up against mine on every downswing. It’s cooler now and I think about asking Leigh for a sweater or something, but I can’t make myself go inside. Eventually the sky is inked over, and Leigh picks up our sparklers.

  “Come on.” She tugs the skirt of my dress. “I had to swear I’d light these, like, thirty paces away so we don’t burn down the house.” Kicking off her flip-flops, she ditches them under the glider and walks out into the yard.

  I slide off my wedges and follow. There are spiny shreds of plant life hidden in the dark. After the first painful step I go slowly, without picking up my feet. Leigh scuffs bravely through the still-warm dust. Halfway down the sloped yard she digs a lighter out of her shorts pocket. She lights the tip of her sparkler and at the first sizzle of fire presses it to mine. When they’ve both caught, we hold them away from our bodies. Leigh watches hers blaze and I watch Leigh; tongue between her teeth, the orange blossoms of the sparklers in her eyes. She watches until they flare and fizz out.

  “Meh,” she says, and shrugs.

  “Pretty, though.”

  “We can do better. Hold up a minute.” She tromps back toward the house but veers off and ducks into the garage instead, leaving me behind. I’m scared to step on a beehive cactus or something, so I stand still and wait until Leigh bursts back out, carrying a box the size of a toaster oven. Under the light of our phones, I can see the fireworks on the box, their strange names in bold font, exclamation-pointed: FORTRESS OF FIRE!!! SCREAMING MEEMIES!!! WHIRLIGIGS!!!

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Traded for them,” she says mysteriously. “Want to light them with me?” Leigh doesn’t wait for my answer, already ripping apart the cardboard. “Which do you want? We probably only get one shot.”

  I pull out a bright pink paper tube attached to a long stake that shouts: THE GLITTERATOR!!!

  She dips her arm in and surfaces with four different tubes, hands me something called THE SKY ROCKET!!! “You light those. I’ll do these.”

  Though the directions on the box definitely warn against shooting off multiple fireworks at once, I take a second lighter Leigh hands me. We stab the stakes a few feet apart into the hard earth. Then we stand, me on the right and Leigh on the left, and hold our lighters at the ready. This is dumb, maybe perilously dumb, but at least that dull and paralyzing drip-drip-drip is replaced by something sharp, something now, something bright.

  “One . . .” she counts.

  “Two . . .” I count.

  We dart forward, and I hold my lighter under the short wick of THE GLITTERATOR!!! until it catches, then, ignoring the prickly weeds, I throw myself to the right toward the SKY ROCKET!!! I flick the lighter desperately until it sizzles, while Leigh darts between the other three.

  Then we run.

  One moment Leigh’s a gray smudge in the dark, and the next our fireworks bloom in the sky above us. It’s a short-lived, spectacular mess. There are pom-pom-looking fireworks, fireworks that crackle, fireworks that scream. Leigh sticks out her arm and puts her hand on my breastbone, above the scoop of the dress’s neckline, and brings her lips to my ear so I can hear her over the noise. “Did you feel that one?” she asks after a bright red starburst and the loud pop that follows. “Did you feel that one?”

  Her skin catches all the colors.

  I do feel them, and I feel the warmth of her hand, and I feel her fingers press into my skin. I feel the dirt under my feet and the dry breeze through my hair, and above all that I can feel my heart. The fireworks only really last a moment, and after they’re gone, I still feel my heart in my ribs and ears and fingertips, like this rocket in my body.

  “I guess that’s all, folks.” She smiles a little sadly and drops her arm.

  I jump as the front door slams open, and Mr. Clemente is a dark shape suspended in the rectangle of TV light. Naveen stands beside him, cradling a saucer-eyed dog in each arm. “What’s going on out there?” she asks, not pissed so much as spooked. “That wasn’t you girls, was it? Is everyone all right?”

  Mr. Clemente is less concerned. “Inside,” he says through his teeth in the ringing quiet, very much like Lucas at the drive-in. “Now, Leigh.”

  She ducks between him and Naveen, and I follow her to her bedroom, mumbling “Sorry, sorry” as I pass.

  Leigh drops heavily on her bed, face lit with that hard snow-cone smile. On the
floor beside her, there’s a sleeping bag laid out with a pillow—Naveen or Mr. Clemente must’ve set it up for me. I start to sit cross-legged on the bag, but she looks over the edge of the mattress and sniffs. “Don’t be stupid.”

  I lie down beside Leigh on top of the sheets.

  Her hands shake as she toys with the buttons on her vest. “Where would you go right exactly this second, if you could go anywhere?”

  I glance at the books on her nightstand, but I don’t need to. “The ocean,” I say easily.

  “Like, the Pacific, or the Arctic, or . . . ?”

  “Just an ocean, I guess.”

  “The Atlantic,” she decides for me, nodding her head. “Last year, we went to Harborfest—it’s, like, this four-day party from downtown Boston up to Cambridge and along the waterfront for the Fourth of July. And some of it’s stupid, like eighteenth-century chocolate-making classes, and super-dramatic readings of the Declaration of Independence. But one night we went to see the fireworks over Long Wharf, and that was kind of awesome. We got there ridiculously early so we could get a spot on the dock, but we forgot a blanket, so Lucas gave me his hoodie to sit on. He had approximately one million bug bites the next day.”

  “That sounds nice.” I stare at the ceiling. “Would I really like Boston?”

  She shrugs her shoulder against mine. “Why don’t you find out? You’re eighteen, you’re out of school. You’re not stuck, like me.”

  I could tell her everything I told Mrs. Short when she called me into her office, advised me to concern myself less with the upholstery of Oriel Trejo’s backseat and more with my future. But I did think about my future, I told her. I would spend meaningful time with my dad while I could, help my mother at home and with the restaurant, work and save so that when I went to school I wouldn’t cost my parents anything. The same speech I gave Mom and Dad. It’s pretty easy to turn a lack-of-plans into a plan itself, to turn not-exactly-lies into the truth, if you say it with conviction.

  Except in this moment, having my only real friend not know me feels lonelier than when I didn’t have any friends at all.

  The air around us smells of Irish Spring, and I take a deep breath, as much as I can hold and not enough. Then I say good-bye to the Vanni who Leigh thought I was, and tell her the actual truth.

  “I was supposed to go to college this fall. But my dad got sick a couple years ago. I mean, he was sick for a while before that, but we only found out when it started getting bad. And now he can’t do a lot of the things he used to do without hurting himself. Like cook, or go for hikes with his friend Chris, or . . . just get himself far away from the house. And there’s no cure, so someday he’s not gonna be able to walk or talk or swallow, because that’s Huntington’s, you know? That’s just what happens, and for some people it takes ten years to die of it and for some people it’s thirty. But they don’t think it will take long for Dad, because he got it young and it’s happening pretty quick already, and he has a lot more repeats in his gene, which is this whole other thing. . . . But in the end you get pneumonia or just fall too hard or you can’t swallow anymore. And that sucks completely.

  “And what else sucks is I’ve got, like, a one-in-two shot of getting it. I mean not like, it is one in two. I’d already have it, it’d be in my genes. Sometimes it starts even earlier for kids of HD patients, in your early twenties or late teens, even, especially if you get it from your dad. Which is so random, right? My grandpa might’ve had it but he died kind of young anyway, so we don’t know. Nobody knows when it can start. Or if it will start.

  “And I could take this test to find out? To see if I have it? You’re not supposed to before you’re eighteen, unless you have symptoms, and then you can decide. So now I’m eighteen, and I can apply—I have the application on my laptop, actually—and then I’d have to take this psych test to prove I could live with the results and after that, I’d know. But I don’t know if I want to know. I can’t fucking decide, and when I try to it’s like I can’t breathe.”

  I swallow hard and drive a knuckle into my eyes.

  There’s a deafening silence like the quiet after the fireworks, and then beside me Leigh murmurs, “Shit.”

  Without meaning to, I snicker. “Right?”

  “That’s . . . a lot. So . . . there’s a test?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you don’t know if you’re gonna take it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it because you’re scared?” she asks in a low voice.

  “Pretty much always. I mean, lots of people don’t take the test, and some people do, but I don’t get it. I don’t get how they’re anything but scared all the time, either way. How do they all just live their lives?”

  “How does anybody?” she asks, as if it’s a question she genuinely wants answered.

  She looks at me and I look at her, and we’re both still staring stupidly at each other when there’s a knock on Leigh’s bedroom door.

  “Are you girls all right? Can I come in?”

  Naveen.

  Leigh lunges for the light switch and turns it off. “We’re sleeping,” she calls. After a pause, Naveen’s shadow vanishes from beneath the door and footsteps carry her away.

  Quietly, we change into our pajamas with the lights out, turned away from each other, and I hunt blindly through my backpack for a makeup wipe. Now that we’re “asleep,” I can’t exactly run to the bathroom. By the time I’m done, Leigh’s back in bed below the sheets. I can see her outline, the peaks of her short hair and one small-strong shoulder and the shallow slope of her hip. She can’t be actually asleep yet, but she doesn’t say anything. Instead the room is full of our breathing, and our settling bodies, inches apart in the dark.

  When I wake up the next morning I know it’s early. The sky out the unfamiliar window is the blue-gray of a fresh bruise. Confused, I roll over in bed and remember where I am, when I nearly smack faces with Leigh.

  “Morning,” she says.

  “Morning,” I say back.

  My hair is completely deflated and my a.m. breath tastes like last night’s non-burgers. It is not sexy. Nothing about this moment screams passion.

  But Leigh is smiling almost sweetly at me, and it’s real, and her eyes are huge in the new light, her short hair pillow-rumpled. There’s this funny feeling in my head like I’m boiling over.

  I lean in and I kiss her. Her lips are dry and warm and crushable. She untangles her hand from the sheets and her fingers drift along my jaw.

  I don’t know what it means, exactly. This is all I know: I’m Savannah Espinoza, I’m eighteen years old, and Leigh Clemente is my best kiss yet.

  TWELVE

  Because Scoop Girl has to work early, sprinkling sprinkles and waffling cones for the breakfast crowd, Lucas gets home from Albuquerque while Leigh and I are foraging for our breakfast. He winks at me, steals a granola bar out of Leigh’s hand, then pulls her into a gentle headlock that she elbows her way out of. I guess all really is forgiven, at least by Lucas; their dad and Naveen are drinking coffee on the back porch and murmuring at each other way too quietly to hear through the glass of the sliding doors, but I doubt they’re discussing a raise in Leigh’s allowance.

  “Great show yesterday, Savannah,” he says around a mouthful of granola. “Very synchronized. Knew you’d make a killer mermaid.”

  “If you’re gonna write an ode to her, do it over there,” Leigh snaps, shoving her brother. “You’re blocking the cereal cabinet.”

  Since the Best Kiss Yet, we seem to have shuffled backward. Right after, Leigh practically vaulted out of bed. “Gotta piss before I spring a leak,” she claimed, but she never came back to her room. After a while I forced myself out of bed, found a baggy, red, Leigh-smelling DU Pioneers sweatshirt on the floor, pulled it on over my camisole, and padded out to find her in the kitchen.

  Well, what did I want? Breakfast in bed? Poetry composed in my honor? A proposal?

  I wrap my arm
s around my chest and dig my fingers into my elbows through my sleeves until they ache. Damn it, be cool, I tell myself. So what if you kissed her? You kiss all kinds of people. If you had a diary you wouldn’t even put something like this in it, because why waste ink on “Dear Diary, today I woke up, had churros for breakfast, worked at the restaurant, kissed my bazillionth person, went home, watched some inspiring YouTube videos in my bedroom, and washed my hair.”

  Except Leigh isn’t people.

  “No work today, Vanni?” Lucas asks.

  “Just at the restaurant, and not till two.”

  “How’re you getting home?”

  I glance at his sister, digging some organic, farm-fresh version of Mini-Wheats out of a box by the fistful with her back to me. “My mom’ll pick me up.”

  He pulls a bowl out of a cabinet and shoves it at Leigh. “Use it, you heathen,” he says, and then to me, “I can give you a ride, no problem.”

  Leigh shoves the bowl back across the counter. “I can drive her, she’s my friend. Grab your stuff, okay?” She pries Lucas’s keys out of his hand, and I wonder, is it possible to take a walk of shame even if you aren’t alone, you aren’t walking, and (sadly) have done nothing to be ashamed of?

  As we motor along the Turquoise Trail toward La Trampa, Leigh seems fine to the casual observer—she talks, she laughs, she drums the steering wheel to Carlos Santana like her brother does. But the casual observer wouldn’t spend the ride studying the shape of Leigh’s lips, the right angle of her spine, the just-offbeat hammering of her fingertips.

  Something is wrong. So says this professional observer of Leigh Clemente.

  Only a few miles to go before she drops me home. The old, slow, trickling fear is back, and in it I can hear my future. Tonight we’ll pave over the awkward not-quite-silence with jokey texts, and we’ll hang out again, double with Lucas and Scoop Girl, sneak away and drink in the dark. But maybe Leigh won’t wash up in Mermaid Cove after last night, won’t ever ask me to sleep over, won’t ever kiss me again. And if I don’t say something now I’ll never figure out why she won’t, or exactly why I want her to.

  “Um, can we stop at my parents’ friend’s place real quick? It’s only, like, a couple of minutes out of the way. I’m supposed to be checking on it while he’s out of town.”