by Laura McNeal
Perhaps Clay had been watching from a distance, though, because by the time she’d crossed Orange Avenue and was riding along Seventh Street by the park, he was there. On a bike. Beside her. Jerome’s best friend, and surreally handsome. She couldn’t even look straight at him without blushing.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” he said.
“What?” she said.
“You should open it.”
“Why?”
“Because you might want to answer me.”
“Okay,” she said, though that wasn’t what she’d meant to say. She wondered if he meant for her to stop right then, in the street, at the corner where the Catholic kids were standing around in their red shirts and their parents were waiting in a line of shiny idling cars.
“Maybe I will,” she said, and she kept riding slowly along. He stayed beside her for another block before he said, “You’re killing me.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yes. The suspense.”
“I turn here,” she said. She stopped her bicycle, and he stopped his.
“So maybe you should open it now.”
“All right.” Again, that wasn’t what she wanted to say. She needed more time to think. Clay Moorehead had asked her to trust him? Clay Moorehead had sent her a message informing her that pleasure awaited her by the sea? Not love or romance, but pleasure?
She slowly peeled off the sticky plastic. She tried to remember that she was not a bimbo and she didn’t need his approval. The kind of thing her mother always tried to tell her when Thisbe’s feelings were hurt.
“So do you have a fortune cookie machine at home or what?” she asked. It was hard to breathe because everything was strange. The sky was extra high up and the trees were in sharp focus. She wished she weren’t wearing her dorky bike helmet.
“No.”
“Do you order them from somewhere?”
“No. I make them. Someone else bakes them and I write the messages.”
“Who’s the someone?” she asked. She had it all unwrapped now and held the sweet, sticky curve of it in her hand.
“Lourdes.”
She raised her eyebrows. People kept streaming past them in cars and on bikes, students from the high school most of them, but none of them, thank God, were Jerome.
“Oh,” Clay said vaguely, as if he was embarrassed, “she cooks for all of us.”
“Lourdes makes all the cookies for all the girls?” Thisbe said. She could look at him, she found, right in his dark brown handsome eyes, if she was challenging him in some way.
He frowned and she noticed his dimple. He said, “All what girls?”
She tried to sound jaded and indifferent. “You know. The others.”
“What others?”
She was still holding the cookie, but she hadn’t opened it.
“The other girls you’ve”—she searched for the right word, peering at the blossoms on the orchid tree—“been with. Like…Penny Wheeler.”
“I didn’t give her any fortune cookies.”
“Serena Tringman?”
“No. Just you.”
“Just me. Why did I get fortune cookies?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes you have to pull out the big guns.” He smiled at her, and his dimple was deeper when he did that.
“Really.” She cracked open the cookie and pulled out the slip of paper. It said, DINNER AT CLAYTON’S TONIGHT? “Clayton’s, the coffee shop?” she asked.
“Yeah. Is that bad? We could go somewhere else.”
“No! I just didn’t know if Clayton was your full name or something.” She didn’t say she thought he might be asking her to eat at his house while referring to himself in the third person.
“What?” He laughed and seemed a little confused. “No.”
She loved the coffee shop. Maybe she could go to dinner with him and see what he was like before she told her mother anything about it. This idea hung in the air like the drowsy blossoms on the orchid tree.
“What’s with the lucky numbers?” she asked. They were on the back again: 25 29 66.
“They spell my name.”
“How?” she asked.
“Like on a phone keypad. Remember that time in English, freshman year?”
She didn’t.
“We had to make up codes like in that one book. You don’t remember?”
She did, dimly, but she was studying her phone keypad and the numbers on the slip of paper. 6 equaled MNO, so 66 was…“CL-AY-NO?”
He stood close enough to touch her and shielded her screen from the sunlight with his hand. “Oh my God,” he said. “I didn’t think of that. Moorehead is too long, so I did my nickname. Claymo.” He laughed the way a confident person could laugh at himself and stepped away. “I guess it wasn’t the greatest code.”
She remembered that whole long day, sitting on her bed, waiting for Jerome to write back. “Depends,” she said. “It’s great for being hard to crack.”
“So will you?” he asked.
A date. With Clay Moorehead. Who had made up a code for her.
“Sure,” she said, but she had not ridden a single block before she began to feel unsure.
—
“Thisbe?” her mother said, her voice buffered by the bedroom door.
Thisbe hated how you couldn’t keep feelings in a box the way you kept the stuff that inspired them. All she could do when she relived the fortune cookie morning was wish it had never happened. “Don’t come in!” she said.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” She stared in the mirror as she said it, and she didn’t look un-fine. Did she look sane? She made the face her mother always made when she was driving late at night and felt herself getting sleepy: mouth open in a huge, arrested scream, eyeballs bulged out.
Her mother spoke again. “Do you want to watch a movie with me?”
Thisbe let her face relax into a fake, lips-only smile, an emoji only she could see. “No. Thank you.”
“Do you want to play a game?”
“No, thanks,” Thisbe called, watching herself say it with a deceptively normal face. “I’m going to the bay.”
“Why?”
Her mother’s voice had changed now. Thisbe heard with superdog ears the way her mother paused to take a supposedly centering breath. Everyone believed way too much in the power of breathing, that’s what Thisbe noticed.
“I just like it there,” Thisbe said. “It’s low tide.”
Thisbe hadn’t actually checked the tide chart, but it didn’t matter. You could see a stingray whenever.
“Are you sure? I could make the sauce.”
Chocolate poured boiling hot over ice cream. Extremely tempting once upon a time. “No, it’s okay. I want to go out for a while.”
Her mother was disappointed, as per the norm. Her bare feet thudded down the stairs. She reappeared on the front steps, still worried, when Thisbe crossed the wet grass, to remind Thisbe to turn on the front and back lights of her bicycle even though it wasn’t dark yet, even though she’d told Thisbe ten million times to remember the front and back lights, to latch her helmet strap, to be careful. “When will you be home?” her mother called as she rode away.
“I’ll text you!”
Summer was pretty, you had to give it that. A few jacarandas were still blooming that crazy purple color, and the flowers that fell down popped under her bicycle tires. White house, blue house, funny little garden with pinwheel birds spinning. The cone-hat roof of the Hotel Del like a cake topper with a paper flag. What if she saw Jerome right now? What would she say? Would he pretend she wasn’t there?
She didn’t see him, though. The last rays of sunlight were lacquering the rocks when she parked her bike near the Glorietta Bay boat ramp. The tide was high, not low, and the bay was lilac under a lavender sky. Things loosened, flattened out, stilled. The clean white hulls of yachts were like…what? Beautiful, anyway. She saw no people, luckily. One heron, three swallows, and an egret.
Her ph
one was nearly dead, so she turned it off and dropped it in her basket, then picked her way across the pointed boulders until she reached the slab that was nearly flat on top and had thus been perfect for setting up her specimen jars. She stood ankle deep on another familiar rock, one that was lower down and positioned like an underwater stair, feet dry inside her rubber boots, the pink ones Ted said were her nerdaloshes. Instead of watching for a stingray, her eyes went to the boats. She tried to see which, among the boats moored at the yacht club, was the one where Clay Moorehead was probably sitting right then, ignoring every one of her messages, which maybe she should have baked into a pie or rolled into a cigarette or stuffed into a tiny baggie of weed! He’d notice them then, wouldn’t he?
Clay was living aboard his parents’ powerboat for the summer because his parents had rented out their house and gone to Mexico on business. That meant he was alone a lot. Thisbe wanted to ride her bike into the yacht club parking lot on her way home, walk to the door of the Surrender, and knock. If Clay answered, she’d tell him he was a crapping crapper of a human being and she’d never felt one particle of a speck of interest in him because he wasn’t worth any interest.
Which is why I slept with you and tanked my exams.
She waited until the sky was indigo and she couldn’t see the white crowns of owl limpets anymore, let alone a stingray. She steered her bicycle down Glorietta Boulevard, headlight off, helmet unstrapped, and remembered that she didn’t have a key to the yacht club gate in her bike basket, so how would she go in there and say, I hate you and I was just using you too.
The gate was open, though. Ajar as if to say, Come in.
Don’t mind if I do. She’d been to the club a million times. Her stepfather had started hauling them on beer can races every Wednesday night once he fell for their mom. After Thisbe showed a consistent tendency to barf in the South Bay, Hugh, her mother, and Ted sailed without her. But Hugh let Thisbe and Ted charge burgers to his account all summer, so nobody would be like, What are you doing here?
Thisbe parked her bike and started walking down the ramp with a deliberately pleasant look on her face: composed, serene.
The boats beside her were dark. Yotters who’d gone out for the day were finished now and their cute canvas curtains were closed, dinghies raised, nighty-night, a bronze glow here and there where maybe someone was living aboard, as Clay was at the end of D dock. He was in there. When she stood on the deck by the cabin door, knuckles poised, heart racing, breath shallow, she could hear guitar music and the falsetto voice of a singer Clay liked. She rapped on the door, three light taps, and then, too late, she saw them: a red-flowered bag and a pair of girls’ flip-flops, yellow Havaianas with pink straps.
MAHALO FOR REMOVING YOUR SLIPPERS, a little hand-painted sign on the door said, the same sign that Thisbe had seen and obeyed a month ago. Whoever it was would think Thisbe was just jealous. Crazy jealous stalker girl. She must get off Clay’s boat, walk down the dock like nothing had happened, find her bicycle, say to her brain with her brain that it didn’t matter. Compose her face into a nice emoji.
Back when Thisbe never even hung out with anyone, she was expected only to text her mother when she came in at curfew. I’m home, she’d type, and her mother would wake up just enough to type, Good night xo. Now her mother would be sitting on the couch, waiting for the door to open. One look at Thisbe’s face and she’d know Thisbe had not been counting owl limpets and parts per million. She’d say, What’s wrong? even though she knew what was wrong, and if Ted happened to be awake, Ted would go, Why are you wearing your nerdaloshes?
She should hang here awhile. Not where Clay and his girlfriend could see her, obviously, just around. Be a little stingray under the sand. Wait for Ted to lock herself in her room with her headphones on, and then Thisbe would slip in the front door last minute, right at curfew, when her mom was half-asleep; say, Good night, see you in the morning, love you too.
Thisbe rolled her bike farther down the parking lot, where it wouldn’t be noticed, and wedged it between a couple of FJs, the sailboats the high school team used. Then she lay prone on the carpet of an empty flatbed trailer. When she was little, she had thought stars were gold and silver rocks like mica, each one no bigger than her own body, and she used to imagine herself stepping star to star as in a tide pool. She would do that now: vault her imaginary self up there, leap, pause, leap, pause. A girl in space wearing boots and a hoodie. She was a good leaper, ha ha, traveling light-years in a single bound.
It got darker and later, blacker and cooler, and still she didn’t move. She wanted to see who it was, that was the truth of it. Who was in there with him.
“See you tomorrow,” a man’s voice said into his phone, it sounded like, and then a car door opened and closed. She heard a click and a buzz—someone was opening the gate—and when she sat up to see if it was Clay, she got what she wanted and then it made her sick: she saw Clay Moorehead riding a bike beside Isabel Knapp. Headed to Starbucks, probably, or down to the Del, where the surf hit the rocks over and over and fires burned in little grills set up by the hotel staff, and Clay’s friends sat in darkness, pulling smoke into their lungs.
“Hanging out at the Of,” Thisbe had joked, and Clay said, “The what?”
“The Hotel del Coronado. Del means ‘of.’ ”
“Right!” he said, not really laughing because of course he spoke Spanish so why was she telling him? But sometimes he had laughed. In the beginning he had laughed at everything, and there was something about making Clay laugh that she liked very much. It made her feel like a whole different person.
The gate rolled itself shut, and the streetlights buzzed. They lit the yellow kayak in the boat rack where Clay hid his spare keys: one for the car, one for the door to the boat. “You can take my car anytime,” he’d told her when she said her stepfather never wanted her to drive anywhere. “And this key?” he said. “That’s for if you ever get locked out after curfew.”
“What?”
“Yeah. You’re, like, on the golf course, say, and the cops are out. You have a key to the yacht club gate, right?”
She nodded. Her family did, anyway.
“This is the key to our boat.”
“So, what,” she said, “I’ll let myself in when you’re not there?”
“Or when I am there.”
Stay out after curfew, run from cops, and go to a boy’s boat? Why did he think she would do that?
Because she would, it turned out. Not the running-from-cops part, but slip out of the house after eleven o’clock and meet him at the boat, stay two hours, sneak back home? Yes.
Ted had caught her in the bathroom afterward, the one that connected their rooms and so gave them pretty much no privacy. She said, “Clay? Clay Moorehead! You know he deals, right?”
“No, he doesn’t,” Thisbe said, though of course he did.
Thisbe knew where he kept the dealables, too. She could use the spare keys right now, while he was down at the Of with Isabel. She could walk back down the ramp and unlock the door of his now-empty yacht cabin.
Black sky overhead. The stink of wet iron and mud. She found the key under the yellow kayak: simple. Walked down the ramp to the slips, turned right, then left, then right: simple. Stepped onto the deck like she’d been sent there on an errand. Laughed a little and said, “Whoopsy!” when she lost her balance. Turned the lock like she’d been sent back for a lighter or blanket or coat. The yellow Havaianas and the flowered bag were gone, as she’d known they would be. She didn’t even have to flip on a light, because he’d left a bulb burning. She could see blankets heaped on the unmade bunk, Clay’s hoodie on the deck, unwashed dishes askew in the sink, bits of food—noodles and blobs of steak fat—stuck to them. Two glass cups where chocolate mousse had been scraped out with greedy spoons. Same exact food to do the same exact thing. “You know he has about a million girlfriends a year, right?” Ted had asked. “He’s like a serial killer, only with, like, girlfriend changing.”
&
nbsp; What kind of person fell for a guy like that?
It was now 10:55 p.m., so she had five minutes to make curfew, six percent power on her phone. She could just type, I’m home, and hope her mother was upstairs in bed, not on the couch.
Risky.
I’m at Nessa’s, she type-lied. We’re watching a movie. Can I stay?
There it was, the devil’s cabbage, ha ha. Hidden in Starbucks bags all lined up like books on a shelf. Just one bag, mahalo. A pound of French roast to go.
Her mother’s reply was so gentle that it gave her a stab-and-twist: Ok. Call me in the morning. Have fun!!
She was not having fun. People should stop telling her to have it. Still, her mother was so good. She was trying to be nice. Thisbe walked past all the boats with a bag that said Starbucks but was light as air. She’d had Clay’s permission to drive his car anywhere, anytime, when he so-called loved her, so mahalo, Clay! Mahalo, tiki doll swinging from the mirror! Mahalo, yacht club gate, which opened as she touched the clicker Clay kept by the gearshift. Maybe she would toss the clicker in a trash can later on. The club made you pay to replace those and it was always a big fat deal, like you’d given away the keys to the White House and now everyone would get boat-robbed!
She had no place to go, but that was the whole, entire, total, unchanging problem. She’d killed her chances to leave, and she’d mucked up any chance she had with Jerome. She had to do something with Clay’s weeded-up car.
Frank Le Stang rowed to Coronado Island from the Sayonara with his usual supplies: the week’s garbage, a clean Hefty bag for any recyclables he might find in the park trash bins, duct tape, stun gun, wallet, canvas sail bag. It was not, however, an ordinary night. The girl in pink boots, the one who came all the time to the boat ramp near Glorietta Bay Park, filling jars with seawater, measuring creatures—she was Julia reborn. Julia was here, on this very island, 229 nautical miles from the place where she died, and he had found her. It was akin to sifting sand every day for forty-eight years and finding, in the very last handful, the pearl that had fallen out of its setting all those years ago, the pearl that he alone—he alone—remembered.
