Everyone Remain Calm

by Megan Stielstra

  That was when she saw him.

  It was hard to see exactly, the sun was so bright, but she knew it was a guy from the tennis shoes and cut-off shorts, knew it from the way his biceps shoved out of his T-shirt like baseballs, knew it from the way he stared at her, mesmerized.

  You’d think her first thought would have been fear, like Oh my God, naked alone with a man in the middle of nowhere! Or maybe humiliation, like Oh my God, he saw me naked! Or maybe logic, like Oh my God, I’ve got to swim over to the shallow end and get into my clothes right quick! Eliza didn’t think of any of those things. What she thought was this: It’s him. Him as in the faceless guy she thought about before she fell asleep at night. Him as in the guy you see standing next to you when you’re forty and fat with little yellow-haired kids. Him as in the Mr. Someone that you always wait for, and compare everyone else to, and pine for, and hope for, and cry about. And for exactly two seconds Eliza locked her blue eyes on this silhouette of man-of-my-dreams, and dropped hopelessly into little-girl love.

  And then the third second ticked by and another guy showed up at Mr. Someone’s elbow, this next one sunburned and shirtless, sporting his high-school quarterback chest and swiggin’ from a can of Old Style that somebody’s older brother must have bought for him. “Yee-HAW!” he cried when he made it to the tip of the ledge and noticed Eliza naked in the water. “Whatja got here, cuz!” His voice echoed around the quarry and he slapped his knee in delight, the same kind of joy he’d get finding his dad’s Penthouse magazine laying around the living room. “Hey y’all!” he called over his shoulder, “Come see what Wes found!”

  Eliza looked back at the first boy, half-hoping for him to take a gilded sword out of his pocket and drive it through this enemy’s chest . . . I mean, after all, she’d shared the most beautiful two seconds of her life with him, had been coming here for years on the slim chance he’d bust up out of her imagination as a real flesh-and-blood perfect person. And now, here he was, with his hands stuck way down deep in his pockets, looking back and forth between Eliza and his friend like he didn’t know what to do, and, Duh, instead of having to make a decision I guess I’ll just do nothin’.

  That’s when Eliza felt all those things that should have punctured her gut from the get-go: humiliation and helplessness and dull raw fear. Boys were coming out from the circle of trees, two more of them, four more, five more, six, ’til there was almost a baseball team (starters and relief) lined up single-file on the edge of the ledge and looking down at Eliza like she was a seal at Shed Aquarium, hootin’ and hollerin’ and slapping their thighs, chugalugging on their beer cans and giggling like they’d just tapped into the free-porn channel on cable access.

  Eliza back-paddled slowly, barely disturbing the water around her, until she was crouched down in the shallow end of the pool with her knees locked into her chest and her long hair plastered wet to her back. Sitting there was agony, pure and shameful with red-hot embarrassment flooding her cheeks, but even worse would be to leave. In order to leave, see, she’d have to stand, and run over to her clothes, and the thought of putting her little-girl nakedness on display made her ache down to the tips of her toes. No, getting up with them watching her like a Coney Island freak was out of the question, but she couldn’t stay, either; remaining in that water like a chicken in a boiling pot sent panic creeping up the back of her spine.

  “C’mon, baby!” they called, slugging one another in the upper arms and reaching for more beer. “C’mon, stand up! We just want to see you is all!” Everything inside Eliza tensed. She tightened her arms around her chest and watched her thighs glow white under the water, trying to focus her eyes down, not wanting to look up, not wanting to let her fear escape her, not wanting them to see it along with everything else she held secret and alone.

  “We just wanna see you!” yelled the shirtless boy.

  “Yeah!” yelled another, and yet another saluted her with his empty beer can and promised, “We ain’t gonna do anything to you or anything! We just wanna look!”

  Eliza sat there, frozen still, and waited for the anger to come, for some kind of survival instinct to kick in and propel her forward. She let her eyes lift up to the first boy, the one they’d called Wes. He was standing back from his friends, twisting his foot into the dusty ground and looking nervous. Then he looked up, and for another two seconds his eyes locked onto Eliza’s. One one-thousand, two one-thousand—

  “Get up!” yelled the shirtless boy, and there was something different in his tone now, something that was not playing around anymore, and he stood as far down the ledge as he could without falling over. The rest of them picked up the beat. “Get up! Get up! Get up!”—they yelled it like they were at a basketball game cheering for defense—and “C’mon, baby, we just wanna look is all!” like they were nice boys spending a nice afternoon at the art museum or something, and when that didn’t work they said, “We’re not waiting around this long for nothing, you know,” like she was failing to fulfill her end of the bargain, and when that didn’t work they pleaded with her, saying, “C’mon, sugar, you’re killing us here!” like this was all her fault and then finally, after they’d dropped to the ground and sat with their legs hanging over the ledge like little boys on too-high stools, “You’ll get cold sometime, honey!” and there they all sat, everybody waiting.

  Eliza stared at her hands, small and smooth and spotted with sunburn-freckles slowly shriveling with water-wrinkles like raisins, the skin around her fingernails pasty white and brittle like the insides of a grape. She squatted in the water for hours and the sun started to drop, the sky turned pale purple and she tightened her skinny arms around her chest and tried to control her shivering. A small fist of fear in her middle expanded throughout her body. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand—and she stared up at Wes and pretended it was just the two of them.

  “Goddammit!” yelled the shirtless boy suddenly, and Eliza gritted her teeth and winced as he smashed an empty forty bottle against the side of the ledge and stood up. “I’m sick of waiting. We been waitin for fuckin’ ever, it’s fuckin’—” His words slurred together and he looked around at his friends, trying to fuse his mind together into some sort of decision. “Fuck it,” he said, first to them, and then a second time yelled down the ledge at her; “Fuck it. Fuck. It.” He waited for a beat or two, as if giving Eliza one last chance to stand up. She didn’t, and he broke. “I’m gonna go get her,” he slobbered. “Eddie,” he said, spinning aimlessly around, looking for his friend. “Eddie, we’re gonna go get her. We’re gonna go get her, this is fuckin’ shit waiting for all this fuckin’—” and again he cut himself off, pointing his left arm in a clockwise circumference of the quarry. “I’m gonna go around like this,” he said, and then flung his right arm around in the other direction, “and you’re gonna go around like that and we’re gonna get her in the middle. Didja hear that?” he yelled down at Eliza, who looked up at Wes—one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand—“Ya got all that, honey?” The gaggle of guys all laughed stupid drunken laughs. “Honey!” he yelled, encouraged by the laughter, “I’m comin’ down there, honey! Me ’n’ you, honey!” And he laughed at himself and started stumbling left, signaling Eddie to go right.

  Eliza watched the two of them circle around her like vultures on dead things. Even if she wanted to run now, she couldn’t. They’d be sure to reach her before she could climb up of the ledge, and, even so, she was freezing and shivering and there wasn’t any more fight in her.

  She heard it then, heard, “C’mon, Lee, leave her alone,” and as she lifted her eyes she saw Wes following Lee around the perimeter of the pool. “C’mon, Lee,” he kept repeating, “C’mon, Lee, don’t.” His voice was quiet, barely audible over Eliza’s chattering teeth. He stood a good head shorter than Lee and had to take a double step to compensate for every one of his drunken strides, but still he kept up.

  “Don’t what?” yelled L
ee. His voice was terrible.

  “Don’t go down there, man,” said Wes, throwing in the “man” as an afterthought, like it might calm Lee down, keeping his eyes focused on the distance between Lee and Eliza.

  “Don’t go down there, man,” Lee mimicked in a sing-song voice, as he reached Eliza’s ledge and prepared for the climb down.

  Wes grabbed a hold of Lee’s upper arm and held on tight. “I’m serious,” he said. Eliza was almost directly below them, ten short feet down. Now that he was closer he could see that she was shivering, that her lips were blue.

  Lee looked at Wes’ hand on his arm as if he couldn’t understand what it was doing there. His eyes were bloodshot and his voice was low, growling. “You need to let me go,” he said, some horrible intimidation, but Wes held his ground and shook his head. “You need to leave her alone,” he said, taking a step backwards from Lee but not loosening his grip.

  Lee looked back at the hand that was still on his arm. “You need to not piss me off,” he said, inflating himself to full height and looking down at Wes, his body tense, cocked. “Leave her alone,” Wes said again.

  Lee’s eyes burned blue. “Look,” he said, his voice suddenly Mr. Nice Guy, “I know you’re new here and all, Wes, and I know you’ve been through some shit, what with your mom and all. That’s why I’m being so nice about this.” His words slurred together and his eyes were unfocused. “That’s why I’m giving you one last chance to let me go before I get upset. You know, we’re cousins and all,” and with his free arm he reached out and patted Wes on the shoulder, a friendly, brotherly sort of pat. Pat pat pat.

  Wes’ jaw was tense. “Not until you leave her alone,” he said.

  The patting turned hard, violent thrusts into Wes’ upper arm. “I said, let go of me,” Lee roared, and Wes held on tight. “No,” he said, and steeled himself for what he knew was coming next. The first punch landed on his temple and the second in his eye. Dthoom Dthoom, dull pain and Wes hit the ground, instinctively wrapping his hands around his head and curling in his knees to protect his stomach, waiting for the kicks that he knew would follow the punches, hard in the gut, and Wes gritted his teeth and gasped.

  Lee’s breath came faster and he spat out words with every kick. “Told—you—” slamming his foot into Wes’ stomach, once, twice—“not to fuck—” slamming into his groin—“with—” his chest—“me—” slamslamslam and Wes bit down hard on his lip, tasting blood—“You think you can show up in my life—” and Lee was down on the ground, flipping Wes over on his back and straddling him, leaning so close that Wes could smell the beer on his breath, holding the collar of Wes’ T-shirt in one tight fist and punching him with the other: the eye, nose, mouth, jaw, Dthoom Dthoom Dthoom darkness.

  All Wes saw when he opened his eyes were stars—not stars like little cartoon ones that float around your head when you’ve had the shit knocked out of you, but honest-to-goodness aurora borealis stars, constellations spread out on the sky above the quarry like the astronomy map in Earth Science class. He lay there for a moment, looking up, taking it all in, until the inevitable why am I laying on my back on a rock? question showed up somewhere in his battered brain. He stood up real fast—balking at the pain, bending over at the waist, and taking a few deep breaths—when he remembered, his head hurting more from imagining what they’d done to her than it did from what they really did to him. He looked around, panicked—they were gone, no drunken yells. All he could hear was the crickets starting their evening hum. Desperately afraid they’d taken her with them, he ran to the ledge and peered over.

  She was there, still in the same squatting position in the shallow water, now stained midnight blue without the sun. Her back was to him. She was still as stone.

  “It’s okay,” he said, relief washing over him, “it’s okay, they’ve gone. You can get out.” He stood there staring at her back, wondering why she wasn’t moving. Was she hurt? Did she have . . . what was it called? Hypothermia from sitting in there for so long? It was nighttime now, the sky black and starry and a thin strip of moonlight swiping the pool and illuminating her like a spotlight. Then it hit him suddenly—she wasn’t going to get up with him there, either. He was one of them, not a lick different than Lee and the rest. He’d been watching her, too; he was the reason why any of this had happened.

  “I’ll leave,” he called down. “I’m sorry, I never thought that . . . I won’t—” and he couldn’t figure out how to say it without sounding like all the rest of them—“watch,” he finished weakly. “I won’t look at you if you don’t want me to,” and he was all set to turn when she stood up.

  It was hard to stand. Eliza’d been sitting for so long that her joints had stiffened up. She felt tingles in her legs and warm air on her thighs and his eyes on her back. This was what she had waited all day for: not for the rest of them to leave, no, that was too simple. She’d wanted to get back to that moment with him, to see what would happen if they got to the third second. She turned around slowly, letting him take in all of her with his eyes: the backs of her knees and her butt and her spiky shoulder blades, her narrow hips and square waist; she was all straight lines and right angles, but as she turned in the moonlight for that fifteen-year-old boy on the top of the ledge, she felt full and rich and curvy, beautiful and sexy and desirable and all those things that women wait their whole lives for and sometimes never experience.

  Face-to-face, eye-to-eye, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three. Eliza stood calf-deep in the water and stared up at him. His eye was black and his lip bloody, his jaw dropped down into his chest as he stared at her, wide-eyed, scared and excited. “I was just watching you,” he stammered, looking away and then looking back, as if some invisible force was pulling his head from side-to-side, as if he knew he shouldn’t be looking at her but just couldn’t tear his eyes away, that terrible/wonderful feeling you have when you make love with the lights on for the very first time. “I didn’t want any of this to happen,” he said, “I mean, I just wanted to . . . see you.”

  Eliza rested her fingertips against her thighs and let him see, conscious the whole time of keeping her arms at her side and her chin high. She wanted him to see every part of her, every inch, every line. For the first time in her life she didn’t have any shame, and she wanted it to last as long as humanly possible. Moving slowly, she stepped up onto the low ledge and walked silvery and naked across the rocks, getting closer and closer. She tilted her head farther back as she neared the rock wall, trying to keep him in her line of vision, until she reached the base and he was out of sight. He’s up there, she thought, sticking fingers and bare feet into the wall and starting to climb. Left hand, right hand, left foot, right, and pebbles pinched her hands and jagged stone cut at her feet but to a fourteen-year-old girl so close to Mr. Someone—ten feet, nine feet, eight feet, seven—none of that mattered. She didn’t know what would happen once she reached the top, just knew she had been waiting for that moment for her whole life—three feet, two feet, one—her left hand reaching over the top of the ledge, seeking something to grasp, her right hand following, the excitement almost unbearable, pounding at her chest and, using all the strength left in her small, underdeveloped body, she hefted herself on her upper arms and pulled herself to her knees on top of the ledge and—this may have been the bravest thing she ever did—looked up.

  07| Missed Connection

  Chicago craigslist>personals>missed connections

  Last Friday, Trader Joe’s checkout aisle. You: six feet, blue eyes, blue Hawaiian shirt, your nametag said Ted. Me: five-seven, blonde, gray sweater, I handed you my groceries so you could scan their bar codes. Coffee. Bleep. Oranges. Bleep. You didn’t look up at me, just kept working. Hummus. Bleep. Pita. Bleep. “How are you tonight?” you asked. Gouda. Bleep. “Paper or plastic?”

  “Paper,” I said, and you scanned the grapes. Bleep. The pretzels. Bleep.The eggs—and this is where time slowed down. You picked up the eggs an
d looked at me, quick at first like any retail guy looking at his customer—No big deal, right?—but then something changed, and I know this might sound stupid but it was like in that movie Big Fish: Ewan McGregor’s at the circus and there are all these clowns and midgets and dancing poodles, and then he sees this girl, and everything freezes. He walks towards her and she’s all beautiful, blonde hair and big eyes and blue frilly dress, and he just stands there, staring at her and it’s like Yes. This is it. This is the moment that will change my life forever. I’m staring at this girl and I don’t want to know what will happen next because it can’t possibly be as great as this—which is when you dropped the eggs, all of them spilling out over your scanner and cracking, oozing gooey yolk all over your hands. Still, you didn’t look away. You stared at me and I stared back and it’s been a long time since a man has reacted to me that way. The last time was at a baseball game in Humboldt Park. Gary was playing right field and I was walking my dog. I passed him at the exact moment a line drive shot along first, but Gary was watching me so he missed the ball. His teammates started yelling at him and he ran back to collect it outside the chalked baselines, and as he jogged back he stopped to ask for my number. I lent him a Sharpie and he wrote it on his glove. That was three years ago, and we just broke up. He moved everything out last month, but he left that goddamn glove. To torture me? I don’t know. Every night I stare at it. Every moment I think about it, right up until you dropped the eggs, Ted, and then I wasn’t thinking about anything but you.

  That’s when Steven came up behind me, and you broke the stare. You averted your eyes and started apologizing like crazy, mopping up the egg yolk with paper towels. I understand why you did that. You thought he was my boyfriend, and of course you would think that! Look at our groceries: bottles of wine. Two steaks, two sweet potatoes, breakfast food for the morning after. And Steven is not one of those gay guys you can tell is gay just by looking at him. I mean, he’s not very flashy. He had on jeans and a Cubs T-shirt—a Cubs T-shirt! Like he’s a Cubs fan! “What do you want me to wear to Trader Joe’s?” he asked later. “Pink pinstripes?”