“What?” I ask him, because he’s still staring at me and now his eyes are squinting a little, like maybe in a judging way.
“Anyway,” he says. Again, like that means something. He doesn’t get it; his parents don’t relay messages through him like he’s an assistant schedule-maker or something.
I huff at him and go inside where Mom is waiting.
The texts come in all at once that night as I’m brushing my teeth.
Brianna: i didn’t see your text this morning
Brianna: emily texted me last minute about the movies
Brianna: i know you don’t really like to go to movies
(Not true, but she’s right that I don’t go often.)
Brianna: i think she only invited me because she got my party invitation
Brianna: also my mom is becoming friends with her mom because we live near them now
Brianna: eden says having a big party will make it more fun and my mom thinks so too
Brianna: want to come over tomorrow to swim? the pool is finally ready!
Brianna: are you mad? please don’t be mad
Brianna: text me when you get these
She knows that my phone sometimes doesn’t deliver texts right away because of the signal problems in Twin Pines Park. I read all these texts while I brush my teeth for a full minute. Mom keeps a plastic hourglass timer that we got at the dentist on the sink so I’ll know how long to brush. I rinse my toothbrush, fill a cup with water, swish, and spit.
Then I take my phone into my room and get under the covers. I don’t want to answer Brianna right away, because I’ve had that stabby pain in my stomach since I saw her at the mall, and I want her to feel it too.
I wonder when she originally sent the texts. I picture her feeling anxious all day. It’s nine p.m. now. Is that enough worrying for her? I do want to go swimming tomorrow.
And I guess it makes sense that Emily invited Brianna to the movies after getting the pool party invitation. But are they friends now?
Claire: Fine. I’ll come swimming.
Chapter 11
The next morning at ten a.m., there’s a knock on my door.
I open it and am surprised to see Brianna and Eden outside—I didn’t hear anyone drive up. But I peek around them and there’s Brianna’s mom in a little silver car. I wave to her. “Wow, that thing is quiet.”
“It’s new,” says Eden. “It’s a Prius. Everyone in Nashville has them—they’re eco friendly.”
“Oh,” I say. “Cool.” I promised my mom I’d give Eden “the benefit of the doubt,” and besides, I’m not mad at her for not being invited to the movies. I’m still a little mad at Brianna, honestly, but I also really want to swim.
I put up a finger. “I’ll go get my bag!”
I turn and head into my room to grab the backpack I stuffed with my new swimsuit and my favorite flowered towel. When I get back to the living room, Eden and Brianna are both standing inside the door.
“I’ve never been in . . . one of these,” says Eden. Then she smiles and a little laugh escapes her frosty lips. They’re Pink Peeve again. “It’s almost like one long room.”
I look around my trailer and see the tiny tray Mom put next to the door for keys and the phone so we’d have an entry. And the way she angled the two chairs at our small folding table to make something like a dining area. Things are neat and clean, just the way Mom and I like them.
But then I watch Eden’s face as her eyes move around. She’s looking at the peeling linoleum spot on the kitchen counter, the small coffee stain on the rug under the TV stand that Mom can’t seem to get out, even with lots of scrubbing. Eden shifts her weight and there’s a slight creak, and I think about how the floor sometimes feels a little lumpy under our feet.
Brianna’s just standing there.
“So, if you wanted to,” continues Eden, “could you, like, travel in this? Like if you hooked it up to a car?”
I tilt my head. “What?”
She grins and waves her hand at me. “Never mind,” she says. “That was probably a dumb question. Sorry, first time in a trailer.”
“It’s okay,” I say automatically.
“Let’s go, you guys,” says Brianna. She holds the door open as Eden and then I walk outside to the silent car.
“Sorry again,” Brianna whispers as Eden walks ahead. I know she means about yesterday.
“It’s okay,” I say, deciding to let her off the hook. “I didn’t want to see that movie anyway.”
Brianna and I sit in back while Eden takes the front seat with Brianna’s mom, who asks how I am and then about my mom. Thankfully she’s happy with one-word answers.
It only takes five minutes to get to Brianna’s house. It’s so close that I could probably walk if I felt like it, but it does involve a major road, so it wouldn’t be, like, a nice stroll or anything.
We have a few still moments in the car, though, and I look out the window and squint at the bright morning sun. I think about what Eden said about my home, and I can feel something that hurts, like, physically, in my chest.
And the hurt takes me by surprise because I know most people live in houses and not trailers. But I’ve always liked my home, and I’ve never been bothered by trailer park jokes or whatever. I’ve heard them.
But I guess it’s different . . . hearing random comments and jokes out in the world versus hearing someone who’s standing inside your living room saying something.
I take a deep breath, which is a thing we learned in preschool but that still works for strong feelings. I focus on the fact that soon I’ll be swimming, splashing around with Brianna in the heat.
I look over and smile at Brianna as a square of hot sunlight settles in between us on the back seat. I really am excited about her pool. She grins back, and I exhale some of the bad feeling.
At Brianna’s new house, there are lots of trees out front and a long driveway, so you can’t see much from the street. When we get close, though, I feel my breathing slow a little because . . . it’s big. Not like a mansion, I guess, but way bigger than the house she had before, which I always thought was extra special because it had a living room that was only for sitting and talking—the TV was in a “den.” But I bet this house has, like, three dens.
“Tour!” shouts Eden when we walk in through the big double doors, and Brianna looks at me, shrugging.
“Do you want to see . . . ? I mean, we don’t have to—”
“No, sure!” I say enthusiastically. “Show me your room!”
“Shoes, please,” says Mrs. Foley. Once we’ve kicked them off, she says, “I’ll go make some refreshments.”
Then Eden takes over and leads me all around the house: to the home office with dark wood shelves, to the den with a real light-up jukebox, to the fancy living room that has one wall of all windows that look out on the woods. We go upstairs to see five bedrooms, plus four bathrooms, all with sparkly clean tubs that shoot whirlpool jets—one has a huge skylight too.
“This is so cool,” I tell Brianna, and it is. She smiles at me but doesn’t say anything.
“I know, right?” Eden responds like it’s her house.
We end up in Brianna’s room. “Isn’t it pretty?” says Eden.
Beautiful is more the word for it, with its lacy curtains and pale-pink walls and flowered rug. But the best part is the window, which sits inside a big archway. There’s a pastel polka-dot pillow there, and I imagine Brianna might curl up on it and read or listen to music while she looks out at the trees.
The window in my room, the one I look out to see Mrs. Gonzalez’s wildflowers, suddenly seems really small.
“Now we’ll show you the basement,” says Eden. “It’s—
“No, that’s enough!” interrupts Brianna. “She can see it later. Let’s change into bathing suits!” She claps her hands to officially end the tour. And I’m relieved.
Brianna’s mom pours us watermelon juice, which I didn’t even know was a thing you could have, but it’s
really good and she serves it in glasses that are frosty cold and we get to sit around the pool in reclining lounge chairs like we’re famous. There’s a fluffy towel on each chair and extras in the corner in baskets, so I didn’t even need to bring mine.
Eden and Brianna wear loose-fitting dresses that Eden calls “cover-ups” so they look like Hollywood stars. I just have my cutoffs and tank top, but I’m glad I got the new bikini from Gemma. It fits like I bought it for myself.
I finish my pink juice and strip down to my suit. “Let’s get in!” I shout. Then I pencil-jump straight into the deep end of the pool.
The water is cool and refreshing, with that chlorine smell that reminds me of vacations. Mom and I stayed at a motel with a pool in Florida two summers ago when we went to visit her aunt and uncle. I keep my head submerged for a beat because I love the heavy silence that only happens underwater. Then I kick my feet and a string of bubbles comes out of my nose as I rush up to break the surface.
I smooth my hair back and swim to the side of the pool, pulling my upper half out and resting my elbows on the stone edge with my feet hanging in the water. Even the ground around the pool is nice. It’s not rough concrete like the pool area at the apartment complex where my dad lives—it’s smooth and white. Maybe marble! I think about the arched window and the jet-stream bathtubs and this deep-blue pool, and I guess that Brianna is rich now.
“Cute suit,” says Brianna, and I’m glad she likes it. She starts to put her arms up to take off her flowy dress.
“Wait, Bri—” Eden reaches into a small basket on the round table next to her lounge chair and holds up two bottles of nail polish—a blue and a gold. She flips them over and looks at the bottoms. “True Blue or All That Glitters?”
“All that glitters isn’t gold,” I whisper, working out the expression in my head. I think it means flashy things aren’t always special on the inside. I say it loud—“gold”—even though she didn’t ask me, because I think it fits Eden.
Eden raises an eyebrow at me, but then she nods and hands the bottle to Brianna, who puts her arms down again and sits back on the chair.
“You guys, come swim!” I say. “We can paint our nails later.”
Eden ignores me, but Brianna looks over and bites her lip. “I promised Eden I would do hers,” she says. “I’ll be quick.”
“Whatever.” I whisper it as I push back into the pool. I don’t even feel that mad. I mean, really, whatever. I’m in a pool, and I’m gonna enjoy it.
I lie back and float in “starfish” which is a move we all learned in YMCA swim lessons when we were four.
When I lift my head back up a couple of minutes later, Brianna is about to do a cannonball right on top of me, and I scream-laugh, paddling out of the way as she splashes into the middle of the deep end.
“Bri!” Eden shrieks as a wave of water surges out of the pool and onto her outstretched legs. She holds her hands up in the air in mock horror. “These are drying!”
On second thought, maybe her horror is real. She doesn’t seem like she can take a joke.
“Sorry,” says Brianna, and she sounds sincere, but then she turns away from Eden and smiles at me. I sense an eye roll even though she doesn’t actually do it, and I’m happy that she chose the pool over painting her own nails. “Silly jumps?” she asks.
“Yes!”
We play this game whenever we’re in a pool—one of us describes a person or animal and the other jumps into the pool as that character.
“Charlie Chaplin with his cane,” I say. We used to watch this old comedian, maybe he was even the first comedian ever, in short videos online. Brianna does a little penguin waddle and pretends to twirl a cane in the air as she jumps in, toes splayed with heels together in a signature Charlie move.
“A dolphin who can talk,” says Brianna as she climbs the ladder out of the pool, and when I jump in I jerk my head and shout, “I’m a mammal!” She’s laughing when I pop up.
Then I hear Eden’s shriek, so loud it’s like a scream, above Brianna’s laugh. “Oh, this boy!”
“Who?” asks Brianna, walking close and leaning over Eden’s shoulder.
“Ronan,” says Eden, eyes on me as she raises her sunglasses. I climb out of the pool and walk toward her. Then I peer over her other shoulder and she leans away from my dripping hair.
I’m looking at a selfie of Ronan. He has his fishing rod in one hand, and he’s holding the camera up at an angle so you can see the green leaves of the trees and the rippling water behind him. There’s a ray of sun crossing his hair, and I notice all the gold in it again.
The caption reads, Perfect day at the lake.
The lake? That’s definitely the brook. Right? I look more closely. Could it be the lake? How would Ronan get there? But then I realize I’m sure it’s the brook because I see our rock in the corner of the frame.
“He is gonna be cu-u-ute,” says Eden, scrolling away from the image.
“He’s Ronan,” says Brianna, shrugging in this way like, How could we look at him like that?
“Wait till the pool party, B,” says Eden. Then she shakes her head. “I can’t believe you were thinking about just girls.”
“Either way would be fun,” I say, standing up for Brianna. The party should be what she wants it to be—it’s her birthday.
Eden rolls her eyes before she pulls down her sunglasses. I don’t know how long I can give her the benefit of the doubt. I head back to the edge of the water.
Why is Ronan lying online? And what phone did he use to take that picture, anyway? My mind is spinning with silent questions.
Brianna breaks my thoughts by grabbing my hand and jumping into the pool, pulling me with her. “Sneak attack!” she says when we both come up smiling.
I splash her, and she shrieks and swims away.
“You know what we need?” she says from the shallow end. “A slide like at your dad’s place.”
I laugh. Every so often Brianna comes with me to Dad’s apartment—once she even spent the night—and the pool there has this twisty waterslide, but it’s ancient and rickety and on hot days your butt sticks to it and doesn’t let you move at all. Plus the pool itself gets kind of janky. We have to use the scooper thing for clumps of leaves and dead wasps. This pool is perfect.
“Your dad has a pool?” asks Eden, sitting up in her chair.
“There’s one at his apartment complex,” I say.
“Oh.” She reclines again.
“It’s so much fun and bigger than this one,” says Brianna, and I smile at her, thinking about how we have spent entire days swimming over at Dad’s. I guess we won’t do that anymore, now that she has her own pool.
We do a few more rounds of silly jumps. I suggest a jack-in-the-box, and then a grumpy gorilla and a venus flytrap. For that one, I find a fallen leafy branch by the edge of the pool and pass it to Brianna as she jumps in so she can snap her trap shut midjump.
Brianna has me do a dog with three legs and a pirate’s parrot and then a runway model.
For that one, I back up to the fence and start a long, strutting walk with a hand on my waist. I put one foot in front of the other with exaggerated hip swishes and an upturned snobby chin. I keep going until I fall right into the pool in a perfect toe-point jump.
“Extra points for the small splash!” says Brianna when I emerge and climb up the ladder. “Models definitely aren’t big splashers.”
“You guys have to see this,” says Eden from her chair.
“What?” I ask, shaking out my hair as I grab my towel. I’m ready to take a break and dry off.
She laughs and waves me over. Her golden nails flash in the sun. “It’s Daniel and Justin—they’re so funny!”
I look over her shoulder again and see that Justin posted a photo of the two of them on some fishing boat. Justin is holding up a big fish, and Daniel is pretending to kiss its lips.
I hear myself laugh but it doesn’t sound like me. I don’t really think the picture is that clever. And
why is Eden following them now? She’s suddenly best friends with everyone here?
She starts typing a comment and leans toward Brianna, showing her the screen. They both laugh, but Eden has her hand covering the side near me—I can’t see what she wrote.
I decide that instead of sitting by the side of the pool with Eden, I’d rather jump back in. So I do. I toss the towel aside and dive straight into the deep end. I dive with so much determination and force, in fact, that my face hits the bottom of the pool.
Hard.
Chapter 12
I can tell right away that it’s bad, not so much by the pain, which is sharp, but by the cloud of red blood that blooms in the water in front of me as I open my eyes. And when I come up, I must look like a horror movie because Brianna’s eyes go huge and Eden starts screaming.
That brings Brianna’s mom outside, and when she sees me she drops her frosted watermelon-juice glass. It crashes to the ground and breaks into pieces.
“Claire, honey, out of the pool,” she says, ignoring the glass and grabbing a towel from the fluffy stack near the deck. She rushes over to me. “Brianna, go get some ice from inside.”
Then Mrs. Foley has her arm around me, and she’s wrapping a towel over my shoulders and leading me to a seat under the sun umbrella. “Let’s see,” she says, wiping at the top of my nose with a second towel—ouch. Brianna runs up with an ice pack, and her mom wraps the towel around it and brings it to the space between my eyes. She presses gently.
“Does it hurt?” asks Brianna.
I nod. “It’s not awful though,” I say, and that’s true. I mean, I definitely whacked my face on the bottom of the pool—I think I probably hit the curve where the deep end becomes the shallow end—but there’s so much blood that it looks worse than it is. At least I hope it does.
When Brianna’s mom takes away the towel it’s soaked in red. “Sweetie, I think you really rammed your nose there,” she says. She puts her fingers under my chin and turns my head from side to side to inspect me from different angles. “There’s a cut on the top. It’s not broken, though,” she says. “You’d know if it was.”
Why Can't I Be You Page 5
