In the Same Boat

by Holly Green

  “You’re relentless,” he says. A long moment passes. “She was my girlfriend.”

  “Was?” I put my paddle back in the water at the top of his next stroke. It was stupid to slow us down just to get him to answer. “Then why’s she following you?”

  He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Conversation over.

  Which is kind of a shame, because it’s a break in the monotony. Dad and I talked a lot during the race. I even told him why I broke up with Jason Bartow.

  Instead, I focus on the rush of the water. The birds in the trees. The tickle of the breeze on my damp skin.

  Another twenty minutes pass. My back and my shoulders hurt. My butt, too. A spot on my right hand rubs and stings, and with every stroke I can feel the top layer of skin slip.

  I need something to take my mind off it.

  “Why are you racing?” I ask.

  “Same reason as you. Because it’s hard.”

  “Very funny.” At least he doesn’t try to make it dirty like Erica did. But paddling isn’t at the heart and soul of his family, so I don’t really understand. “What’s riz-dee? I heard Gonzo say something about riz-dee.”

  “You really like to pick at all the scabs, don’t you?” he snaps.

  We paddle in silence.

  “Did you really make that T. rex?” I ask.

  “What?” he asks. “Oh yeah. Part of my art portfolio.”

  I can’t bring myself to say that I love it. That it makes me smile every time I drive by. That I always loved watching him draw. He made it look effortless.

  Minutes pass.

  “Where do you think you’ll go to college?” he asks.

  So now we’re people who make small talk. I can’t keep track.

  “Not sure yet,” I say, although barring some miracle, I know exactly where I’m going to school. My college fund wasn’t big to begin with, and it got wiped out when our house flooded a few years ago. It’s in our floors and our rugs and the piers we used to lift the house so it won’t flood again. After I graduate, I’ll still be living at home, commuting to Texas State University.

  “I got into riz-dee.” He says it like I should know what that is.

  “Riz-dee?”

  “Rhode Island School of Design. R-I-S-D.” He waits for a reaction that doesn’t come. “It’s kind of a big deal, getting in.”

  “Oh.” He’s moving to Rhode Island? “Um, good for you.”

  “Dad wants me to go to Texas State and major in business.”

  Not surprising. Johnny Hink is a developer. He’d probably love for John Cullen to help him take some beautiful land and mow down a bunch of ancient live oaks and bald cypresses and turn it into one of those neighborhoods with tiny barren lots.

  But it’s already summer—isn’t this all supposed to be decided by now?

  “I thought you had to make that kind of decision in the spring,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, he sent a deposit to RISD under one condition—that I race. That I make top fifteen. That’s why I’m here.”

  Must be nice, having someone who can afford to pay for it all.

  “Why the race? What does that have to do with college?”

  “He thinks I can’t do it. He won’t say it, but … ” He trails off for a few strokes. “He says that finishing the race will make me a man.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re eighteen years old. Doesn’t that automatically make you a man?” I say.

  But didn’t I just argue the opposite about my brother yesterday? Does age really have anything to do with being a man?

  I remember when they separated the boys and girls after lunch one day in fifth grade. We watched this awful, outdated video about our periods and how when you got your period you became a woman. It made me squirm on so many levels. I mean, I was ten. My main goal in life was skipping a rung on the monkey bars. Crystal Stevenson already had hers, and she still wore high-tops that looked like kitty cats. And anyway, I’d learned enough about gender at that point to know it’s not about your plumbing and it’s not binary. We weren’t women, or anywhere near the verge of becoming them. I don’t even feel like one now.

  I broke up with Jason because he gave me a gift-wrapped condom. It might have been funny if I’d been ready, but I wasn’t. Nowhere close to ready. At least Johnny Hink isn’t one of those guys who tell their sons that having sex is what makes you a man.

  “Is that what makes someone a man? Being eighteen?” John Cullen asks after a long while.

  And all I can say is “Hut,” because it doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. But I’m not sure what does.

  4:27 P.M. SATURDAY

  The rumble of the cars hits my ears before we see the bridge on Highway 90, and I still haven’t caught a glimpse of my brother. My stomach twists.

  We paddle around a wall of trees, and there it is:

  TEXAS RIVER ODYSSEY

  MILE 49

  KEEP PADDLING!

  Checkpoint number two.

  The crowds have thinned, but they’re still there, watching from their chairs on the shore, wading into the water, kids floating in yellow and orange and pink inner tubes. We dodge past a few. Honestly, you’d think they’d know better. And then we spot Erica and Gonzo hustling into the river, water splashing around their legs.

  We pull up beside them and Erica grabs the left gunnel.

  “It’s so freaking hot,” she says, taking my trash. She’s not wrong. No trees. No clouds. Just blue sky and a giant fireball overhead. Now that we’ve stopped, I can feel just how still the air is.

  “When did my brother come through?”

  Erica examines my trash. “You’re eating better. Good.”

  “I know you heard me.”

  She grabs a bag from under her tank top strap and hands me a thick slice of something. I don’t even argue, just shove it into my mouth. Banana bread.

  “Thirty-five minutes ago.”

  I force myself to chew and swallow, but the bread goes down my throat like a rock.

  I scan the shore again.

  No Dad.

  Allie’s here, though, in her tiny cutoffs—zipper undone, top folded over—and that same bikini top.

  Wait, no. It’s different. This one has rhinestones. She’s making costume changes. Ugh.

  I turn back to Erica. “Rank?”

  “Twenty-first,” Gonzo answers.

  Only sixteen boats to pass. At least there’s that.

  And I guess John Cullen spotted Allie, because there’s a new fire under him when we leave.

  * * *

  We paddle half a mile along the highway, getting glimpses and hearing the whooshes of cars passing by, and occasionally getting a nose full of exhaust from an old beater of a truck or an eighteen-wheeler. But the river takes a right turn and then it’s all woods and farmland.

  We paddle. And we paddle. And we paddle.

  It’s automatic, like breathing. If breathing made every muscle in your body scream. I try shifting my weight to my right side, then my left, sitting straighter, gripping my paddle a little looser. But any momentary relief it offers doesn’t last.

  Tanner is getting farther away. John Cullen’s pace has been fading.

  Hate John Cullen.

  If he hadn’t taken our number, I would be in a boat with Tanner right now.

  But I’m here. And the river is getting shallower. The current is slowing. And I know we could be moving faster.

  “Let’s pick it back up,” I say.

  Nothing.

  “Hut.”

  He switches sides, so obviously he can hear me. But his pace doesn’t change.

  “Faster.”

  “My entire body hurts,” he says. “Just let me take it easy for fifteen minutes.”

  Paddling slow for fifteen minutes does nothing but get us there slower.

  “The race hurts,” I say. “It’s not going to stop. So just shut up and paddle. People are about to start passing us.”


  He doesn’t nod or agree or even acknowledge that I just said the truest thing you can say about this race. But he does speed up a bit. We paddle on for miles, pick through a logjam, pass an aluminum on the banks, river left. A man is on the ground, on all fours, puking. His partner, a woman, rubs his back.

  I don’t understand pulling over to puke. It’s something you can do over the side of the boat just as easily, and you keep moving.

  Constant forward motion.

  The current slows to the point that it almost disappears. We’re closing in on Zedler Dam. The big building on the left comes into view. It used to be a mill, but someone remodeled it a few years ago. It has a million windows.

  There’s a low concrete wall, river right, that I steer us toward. Erica and Gonzo are on the shore near the wall. The backs of my hands are getting pink. I need to put on more sunscreen. We stop well before the dam and climb out of the boat onto a big concrete slab. My legs are gummy worms. I wobble and stretch and straighten my back.

  “Bring it over here,” Gonzo tells us, pointing to the empty spot out of the way where they’ve got the milk crates close to a solo boat.

  Another tandem and a four pull in after us. We lift the boat over the wall and onto the concrete. It’s heavy. Water sloshes in the bottom. We carry it across the pad to Erica, who is waiting to switch out our water and ice socks and food. We dump the water and our trash falls out. I grab it after we put the boat down.

  “When did Tanner come through?” I ask.

  Erica shrugs one shoulder. “Before we got here.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Take this,” she says, handing me a slice of cold watermelon. Clearly, they’ve been here a long time.

  While Erica leans over my boat, doing all the work for me, I bite into my melon. It’s cold and sweet and gone in a few bites. Juice drips down my chin and I wipe it with my sleeve.

  A lean, white-haired man in shiny yellow leggings and a yellow-and-black-striped shirt paces back and forth beside his tandem, alternately stretching and rubbing his lower back.

  An old woman in a matching shirt stands on the other side of the canoe. “I don’t care about your back. Pick up your half of the boat. Let’s move.” The sun glints in the spit that flies out of her mouth.

  John Cullen locks eyes on me.

  I bend down and clip my water tube into my new jug. “See you soon,” I tell Erica, and then we’re off, climbing down a bank of big rocks, our canoe bumping my thighs. We put in on the water, climb into our seats, and we move.

  The couple with the boat is still up top. The way that guy was acting, I don’t think they’re going to make it down the river. She might, but not him.

  John Cullen skips a stroke to dip his paddle into the river and fling some water back at me. It hits my face and my arms in cool drops and leaves beads of water on my sunglasses.

  “How did it feel, looking fifty years into your future?” he asks, teasing me, almost like we’re friends.

  It takes me a moment to realize what he’s talking about. So maybe there’s a parallel between me and that lady, but I’m not going to apologize for it.

  “Feels like I’m still going to have terrible luck with partners,” I say.

  His shoulders shake a little, like maybe he’s laughing, but I don’t hear anything.

  A gust of wind sweeps in, whipping one of my braids across my face. A cracking sound comes from somewhere onshore—I’m not sure where until a small tree branch plunges into the river with a splash.

  Up ahead, beyond the river and the trees, the sky is thick with dark, roiling clouds.

  I was twelve and Tanner was fourteen. It was night, and the only light in the whole house came from the TV in the living room. My thumb rested on the play button on the remote, ready to press it as soon as my brother came back from the bathroom, when the first thud came from across the house. There was another one, higher pitched, with a crack to it, and then splat, splat, splat.

  “You hear that?” Tanner’s voice came from behind me as he walked back into the living room.

  “What do you think it was?” My thumb slid off the remote.

  “Dunno.”

  It wasn’t the first time our parents had left us home alone at night, but it kind of creeped me out. Watching a zombie apocalypse movie probably didn’t help. Still, I wasn’t one to run upstairs and hide in the closet, so I walked to the door and pulled the curtain back on the window.

  Some sort of liquid goo ran down the glass. And dark pieces of something, too. Shell. Splat! I jumped back as something exploded on the window in front of my face. More shell. More goo.

  Mazer joined me at the door and barked.

  “We’re getting egged,” I told my brother. It was something I’d heard about but never thought I’d experience.

  My brother rushed to the living room window behind the couch and pulled back the curtain. An egg hit the window and splattered in front of his face.

  “Why would somebody egg us?” I asked. Our house wasn’t in one of those crowded neighborhoods where you might get picked at random. We lived in the country. You couldn’t even see our house from the road.

  Tanner cupped his hands around the sides of his face and pressed his nose to the glass. “Too dark to see anyone out there.”

  Two more eggs splatted against the door. Three more thuds came from the side of the house. “Must be more than one person,” I said.

  Mazer bounced and barked again. Maybe they would think we were about to set a Doberman loose on them. Although anyone who actually knew Mazer would know he’d just run outside and beg to have his ears scratched.

  “Turn the lights on,” Tanner said. “Maybe it will scare them off. Make them think Dad might come out.”

  I walked to the panel on the wall and put my hand under all the switches that were flipped down until something occurred to me. Instead of hitting all the lights, I flicked up the floodlights on the porch. We almost never used them because of light pollution, but this was the perfect reason.

  “Oh shit,” Tanner said.

  “Shoot,” I corrected him automatically, because the Cussing Lamp wasn’t on. I rushed back to the door and peered out the window. Two figures ran for a couple of bikes lying on the driveway. One of them I didn’t recognize. The other was unmistakable.

  “It’s Cully,” Tanner said, and even though Cully had been my best friend, not his, it was still clear he felt the betrayal. Cully was egging our house.

  We watched them pick up their bikes and ride off as fast as they could.

  After the tree house, it was all little things. Someone asked me if it was true that my mom’s cookies were made with crickets and said that Cully had told them. His dad fouled my dad in a race. My dad called him on it and Johnny got disqualified. But egging our house … Egging our house after so much time had passed. I don’t know, it was just so much worse.

  “I can’t believe it’s Cully,” Tanner said, sinking onto the couch.

  I couldn’t, either. Except, that person throwing eggs at my house, he wasn’t the boy who’d held my hand at the finish line. He wasn’t the boy who’d hammered board after board onto that tree house with me.

  “His name’s not Cully,” I told my brother. “It’s John Cullen.”

  6:03 P.M. SATURDAY

  The sky is getting darker. Too dark for this early in the evening.

  The air is heavy.

  We won’t see Erica and Gonzo for another ten miles or so until we get to Palmetto.

  If things go well, if we keep moving at a decent clip, that’ll be about two or two and a half hours from now. But I don’t see any way we could have gained on Tanner. We haven’t been moving fast enough.

  If I were home right now, I might be lying in a hammock reading a book. I might be curled up on the couch with my dog watching The Good Place on Netflix. Or The Great British Baking Show. I might be at the bakery, icing HAPPY 6-MONTH ANNIVERSARY on a cookie cake for some guy to give his girlfriend
.

  Instead, my body moves in a constant rhythm. Pull. Pull. Pull. My feet press into the bar in front of me with each stroke. I’m alone in a boat with someone I hate. Someone who hates me back just as much. Someone who thinks my future includes yelling at old men about their back pain.

  The river keeps bending. The silence between us is punctuated by the huts and the splashes we make in the water.

  God, I could use a laugh.

  I miss Mazer. I wish there were room in the boat for him to curl up at my feet. He’d probably knock the boat over in the first two minutes. Or knock me out with his killer farts.

  I wish that Tanner hadn’t ditched me. That I were in the boat with him.

  Or Mom.

  Or even Erica.

  Or Dad. I wish he’d given me a do-over. That we were here together right now.

  I miss him so much. I’ve been missing him for the last year.

  Doing this race, doing well, was supposed to bring us back together. To bridge the miles between us. But being here with John Cullen makes the divide grow wider.

  * * *

  The sun is getting low. The fading light reflects off the water. The current is slow.

  The ache in my shoulders has turned sharp.

  Achoo!

  John Cullen’s sneeze cuts through the silence. The boat shakes as his entire body contracts.

  Achoo! Achoo! Achoo!

  His paddle stays frozen in the air.

  I paddle one … two … three strokes before he finally straightens out.

  “I forgot you sneeze in fours.”

  “Quadruple sneeze for life,” he says, taking a stroke.

  I pause a second, paddle poised, then match his catch in the water.

  Everything about him is different now. His body. His voice. The hue of his hair. Even the way he laughs. His temper.

  Volatile.

  I’m kind of glad that this one thing about the kid I knew lives on.

  That, and I guess his art.

  There’s a scraping noise. Something pushes up from below the canoe and we slow to a stop.

  A rock?

  No, a log. I can see it from below.