The Incident on the Bridge

by Laura McNeal

  An invitation. To Thisbe’s house. Would he like to come over? On my way.

  He already knew where she lived. Five blocks away, but a much nicer street, where it was all wide houses and wide yards and little picket fences. Hers was a two-story reddish-brown wooden house, tall and serious, just like her, with black shutters and a wicker sofa on the front porch and a Ping-Pong table in the side yard. The front door had a black iron thing on it he remembered from trick-or-treating years ago: a disembodied hand holding an orange, which was the door knocker. Coolest Halloween decoration ever, he’d thought then, but it was still there, so obviously it was not for Halloween. He stood in the dark beside the wicker sofa and an empty stone bowl full of water. Did they have a giant dog?

  Her hair looked shiny when she opened the door. Maybe she’d changed her clothes and put on lip gloss for him. After she stopped smiling, though, she got that Maddy-ish look in her eyes: concerned and doubting. Everything else was confident: the way she walked, the way she said, “We can sit in here,” and led him to the dining room, where a girl—Thisbe’s sister, he guessed—sat doing her math until Thisbe said, “I told you to move.” The girl said, “Are you Jerome?” and when he said yes, she said, “I saw you playing tennis. Thisbe made us stand outside the fence like spies so you wouldn’t notice us.”

  He blushed, and Thisbe went scarlet. She looked at her sister with a loathing he didn’t share. He’d never been so grateful to anyone’s sister before, and he liked her very much. “Get out,” Thisbe said. The sister thumped her book shut and gathered her pencils and her calculator and made a face.

  “Bye, Jerome,” she said.

  Thisbe couldn’t or wouldn’t look at him when they sat down. He had time to study the wood grain of the dining room table, the leaves pressed against the window glass, the painting of a yellow beach beside an orange sea.

  “So that was you,” he said. “I saw your legs.” The green mesh at the high school courts started about two feet up, so you could see the ground, old tennis balls, leaves, legs.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you think we were the biggest dorks ever?”

  “No.” He thought they were watching Juan Carlos, actually, who was playing on the next court. Juan’s nickname was Sexi Mexi.

  Thisbe tapped her pencil a couple of times and said, “I just didn’t want to make a big thing about it. Like have the whole team see we were there.”

  “It’s okay. Thanks for coming to watch.”

  “People said you were good. They’ve always said that. It’s the only thing I’ve ever heard about you. But I hate basketball and football. And oh my God don’t get me started on watching soccer.”

  He waited. He hoped she wasn’t going to ruin what he’d felt after her sister said they’d spied on him through the fence.

  “Jesus,” she said. “It’s incredible, the way you play.”

  He looked down. He didn’t want her to see that it meant so much or that he was freakishly happy. “Depends,” he said. “I guess you came on a good day.”

  “I guess. My sister said you were a beast.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It reminded me of—don’t think this is weird—it reminded me of how, like—” She stopped and looked embarrassed. “Never mind.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “It’s, like. I don’t know. When I’m playing Beethoven or Bach or anything fast and really complicated and it’s crashing up to this really hard part with a million sharps in a row and you think, Don’t miss, don’t miss, don’t miss, and you don’t, you know? You get it all right to the last note.”

  Silence as she looked at him, her cheeks pink, her rounded lips pressed uncertainly together, as if to stop herself from saying what she’d already said. “That was probably the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about tennis. God.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not.” The part about not missing, about everything being in a row and really fast, that made sense. “It is like that.”

  She nodded and they didn’t look directly at each other for very long but it was long enough.

  Somehow they found their way to the homework. It was a way of not talking about how he felt sitting near her, which was like a hovercraft. He heard himself saying, “I just wrote down what Shao said about the poem and I circled some stuff. I have no idea what I’m going to say in the paper.”

  She had perfect skin. No zits. Not one. He studied her cheek while she told him that in the poem, the angel of reality was the real world presenting itself to you. He said he didn’t know what she meant by that and she said it’s like when you’re at the beach and you’re obsessing about where you should go to college and your chem homework and what would happen if you didn’t get a 4.5 and you’re barely even seeing the beach or the ocean and then a dolphin leaps out of the waves, you know?

  She had a 4.5? Jerome had to do well to play tennis for a decent school, but not that well.

  “You know how everything stops?” she asked, her lips mesmerizing, the most beautiful color he’d ever seen. “You just wait for the dolphin to surface again?”

  He made himself think of what she was saying. It was nice when that happened at the beach. When you were looking at the water and a wild animal showed up. “I don’t see where he calls the dolphin an angel, though,” Jerome said.

  “Well, he’s not talking about a dolphin per se. That’s my example.”

  Per se. He would have thought it was pretentious if some guy his age said that, but she was sitting close to him and her bare arms were a millimeter away. “See where he says, I am the necessary angel of earth? Where he says that if you see him, you see the earth again? The dolphin makes you look outward at nature, reality, earth, the world. See it. Not yourself. That’s how it saves you.”

  For a second, it was all connected like a string of beads. When she was sitting beside him and reading the words, the poem made sense in the way a dolphin rising up in the waves made sense.

  He was wondering if there was any chance that her breast would accidentally touch part of his arm while she was leaning over him to point at phrases in the poem. It was then that Clay rode by the window the first time.

  He never should have told Clay where he was going when Clay asked—it must have been some competitive part of him, just like Clay said—though he never could have dreamed that Clay would ride by Thisbe’s house on a skateboard, grinning in at them where they sat at the dining room table. At first Thisbe didn’t notice, because her back was to the window, but then she saw Jerome’s frozen face and she said, “What?” and turned to look.

  “Nothing.” He could still hear Clay’s skateboard ka-thudding over cracks.

  “Was that Clay Moorehead?” Thisbe asked. She looked a little too excited, honestly.

  Jerome pretended he wasn’t sure, but in a few seconds the ka-thud ka-thud and the scraping wheels returned, and she turned and saw the full drive-by, Clay Moorehead balanced on a skateboard, facing the window, this time not only grinning but holding a paper sign that said WAY TO GO, ROMEY.

  “Romey?”

  “He used to call me that.”

  “Cute.”

  She went back to reading or at least staring at his notes, but she was smiling to herself. Was she smiling because of Clay? Did she like him, which was something you could say about a million other girls?

  “Can we close the curtains, maybe?”

  “I’m kind of curious what else he’ll say.” Clay was rich and handsome, and she wanted to keep looking at him. Clay’s weird power strikes again.

  “Please let’s not find out,” Jerome said. She didn’t move to close the curtains, and the next time Clay went past, he held up a sign that said CRAAAACKADILIC, BABY! And he gave them a thumbs-up with a big Clay Moorehead clowning-around smile.

  “Are you guys best friends?”

  “Yeah,” he said, though at that moment he hated Clay a little bit.

  “You’re kind of different from
each other.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Forget I said it.”

  “His family’s got, like, a billion dollars, you mean?”

  “He’s different from just about everybody in that way, right? There are the rich people, and then there are the crazy-rich people.” Jerome noticed she left out the poor people. Middle people, too. “It’s just—never mind.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

  “I think I’m taking it the wrong way.”

  “Sorry. Okay. When I told my mom you were going to come over here and study, she said, ‘Jerome Betchman? Isn’t he a stoner?’ ”

  No air flowed into or out of the room. Not only was she interested in Clay, but she thought Jerome was the one she needed to watch out for. “Why did she say that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because you hang out with Clay.”

  “He’s not a stoner.”

  “He’s not?”

  Jerome thought about it. “If you’re a total idiot and you smoke weed, you’re a stoner. If you’re smart and you smoke, you’re not.”

  “That makes no sense!”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “But he throws those big parties by the bay.”

  “That’s not being a stoner.”

  “They drink there, right? And smoke. When his parents aren’t there. My mom”—she turned around to see if her mother was still in the kitchen, but the room looked empty now—“obsessively keeps track of everybody and who they hang out with and whether their parents go out of town a lot and who goes to the parties where there’s drinking. I said you didn’t seem like that type.”

  “I’m not!”

  “But you go to Clay’s parties?”

  “I go because he’s my friend. When I’m not at tournaments. But I don’t get drunk.”

  “Good. Getting drunk is the stupidest thing on earth.”

  That had been the way it had felt in Imperial Beach. But it was death to talk like that around certain people at school. Most of them. Was she tone-deaf? Really good at poetry but couldn’t figure people out? Not that he cared. He didn’t care if she hated drinking. “So how come I still get to be here?” he asked.

  “I told her you take AP classes and have been recruited for tennis.”

  “Oh. Excellent.” Though it wasn’t, quite. He paused an absurdly long time, rolling his pencil back and forth over the shiny table. And then he just went for it. He wanted to know if she was interested in him or not, once and for all. “Would she, um, let you do anything else?”

  Clay rode by again with a sign that said JERONIMO!!! but Jerome didn’t smile this time.

  “Jeronimo?”

  “Spanish for Jerome.”

  “Would my mother let me do anything else like what?”

  “I don’t know.” He rubbed at the edges of his notebook, thumbed them so they fluttered. He said, “Like, you know, go out somewhere with me.”

  She pinkened. She turned her face and read the poem again or maybe pretended to read, and, without looking up, she said, “Probably not, to be honest. She’s scared of my stepdad. If we don’t do everything perfectly, he thinks it’s her fault.”

  “But you do everything perfectly, right? You did get the 4.5, didn’t you? The one you were worried about on the beach when you saw the dolphin?”

  “I got it. But it’s an ongoing thing, right? You do one thing and then you have to do more. And more. And more. And still you might not make it.”

  “Yeah. Like tennis. You win one point but then you have to win the next one. You win a game but then comes the next one.”

  She nodded, and then she went back to studying what she’d written. She typed something, held her hands still. He desperately wanted to see her again, so he said, “I’m totally boring, to be honest. Ask anyone. Even Clay. I’m the most boring person you can imagine.”

  “I sense that. I sense your boringness.” She smiled; then her face went sort of blank. “I just don’t know if he’d think that.”

  “Who?”

  “My stepdad.”

  “And that’s because I’m friends with Clay.”

  “Yeah.”

  It made him angry and a little defensive. Clay wasn’t that bad—as a friend, actually, he was very loyal—and the parties were not that terrible, either. If Clay didn’t throw fiestas, as he called them, some other kid would. If no kid threw a party, the ones who wanted to drink would fill water bottles with vodka, walk down to the dunes or Stingray, and get just as wrecked. More importantly, Jerome could not possibly be anyone’s idea of a stoner. He had a 3.8, for God’s sake. He’d played number one varsity singles the last three years. You could not be stoned and do that.

  He tried to concentrate on the poem again and write stuff about the angel of reality because he didn’t want her to see that he was angry. He typed: Am I not, / Myself, only half of a figure of a sort.

  What did that mean? He could ask her, but he didn’t feel like it. “I have to go,” he said.

  “Now?”

  “Yeah. I have chem, too. And Spanish.”

  “Okay.” She looked miserable but she said, “Thanks for coming over.”

  “You helped me a lot more than I helped you.”

  “No,” she said. “Your notes helped me. Also, you know, talking it out. It’s easier than just writing it cold.”

  She could feel it, he knew, the heaviness. It was like an anvil hanging from the dining room chandelier. He was going to tell Clay the next morning what a cheesing stoner he was and how his terrible reputation was wrecking Jerome’s chances with girls, but what really wrecked them was that Jerome didn’t know how to talk to girls. A girl liked you or she didn’t, and Thisbe didn’t like him. “See you later,” he told Thisbe, and it was over.

  —

  The first thing Clay said the next day was, “Did you bang her?”

  Jerome didn’t even answer, just locked his skateboard into a rack and walked into the quad.

  “Did you set up some more poetry jams, then?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Word on the street is you did.”

  “Word on the street, actually, is she isn’t interested.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why not?”

  “She thinks I’m a stoner. You too, actually.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “That hurts, man.”

  “Hurts you or hurts me?”

  “Both. Hey, I’ll talk to her. Tell her you’re the man.”

  “Please don’t, okay?”

  “Why not?”

  Jerome paused, and then he said something untrue: “I don’t care that much.”

  By the beginning of March, Jerome had three matches a week plus practice plus lessons with his private coach at Barnes, and he found himself looking obsessively through the green mesh before home matches, hoping to see Thisbe standing there, but she never was. Jerome’s father took time off work and drove over the bridge and watched, and Clay watched, and the mothers of the other players chatted and kept their faces more or less facing the courts, and that was it. After tennis, Jerome went home and did hours of calculus and English and chem and Spanish, and on free weekends when he would have been at Clay’s house, sitting on the green lawn, looking at the bay flow by like a river, eating the crab cakes the Mooreheads’ housekeeper, Lourdes, made on Saturday nights, he stayed home because he thought maybe if he did like her and he got the courage to try again, she’d be able to tell her parents he was not a party guy at all.

  On April 1, Clay started razzing him about getting a date to prom so they could double, even though Clay hadn’t asked anybody, either. “Who would you ask if you did ask someone?” Clay said.

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “But if you did.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Jerome said.

  “Just pick somebody. How about that hot girl from Belgium?”


  “No.”

  “Tell me, bro, because I really want to ask somebody.”

  “Who?” Jerome was curious. Clay never took anyone to a dance.

  “You first.” Clay was acting weird. Nervous, almost.

  “Okay,” Jerome said. “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah. I really do.”

  “Same girl.”

  The look on Clay’s face was odd. Surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “Same girl I said the last time we had this stupid conversation.”

  “Really?” Clay said. “This is not an April Fools’ joke, right?”

  “No. Why would it be?”

  “Thisbe?” Clay said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you stopped liking her, bro. You said you didn’t care.”

  “Well, I was wrong. Or I lied to get you off my back. What difference does it make?”

  “None,” Clay said, and Jerome left it at that.

  The very next day somebody was talking about how they never would have thunk it. Not Frisbee Locke and Clay Moorehead! She was out on his boat, somebody said. After curfew, no less. Jerome couldn’t find Clay anywhere when it was time to go to lunch, so Jerome got a protein bar and was eating in Spreckels Park when he saw the two of them on a bench by the swings. Broad daylight, lunch, but there she was, kissing Clay on a bench. You were never more than two feet from someone who knew your mother in Coronado, so not only did Thisbe not care what her parents thought, but Clay didn’t care what Jerome thought.

  Jerome turned around and walked back to school without eating the rest of the protein bar, which he threw into the trash on his way to English. He thought about cutting class so he wouldn’t have to see her, but his feet carried him up the stairs. When Thisbe slipped into her seat across the room, he stared stone-faced at the whiteboard, and he didn’t look at her until Shao called on her. Thisbe’s eyes slid sideways—dark, scared—to meet his after she answered the question, so Jerome stared at her as if to say, Yes, I saw you, and she opened her mouth as if to say something, but he looked immediately and deliberately away and refused to move his head in her direction for the remainder of the lecture, on which he took no notes. When the bell rang, he was the first person out the door. All the way across the quad he imagined her chasing after him, tapping him on the shoulder to say, It’s not what you think, but no one chased after him and if anyone else spoke to him, he didn’t notice. Clay called him later, and texted, and then came by, but Jerome managed to elude him until the day of the party, May 17.