I might not like what he’s about to say, but I can handle it.
“Marcos, oh, my God! What happened?” Jacki Guzman halts, her cheeks flushed. “You know, my mom’s a nurse.”
Marcos flashes her a reassuring smile. It’s not the real one that reveals the crooked tooth. “I tripped. I’m not as coordinated as this one here.”
Once Jacki has walked away with several promises to provide him with homecare tips from her mom, he says, “My boss got into it with some guys at work last night.”
Immediately, I recall the night he said he’d called the cops. According to him, they’d done nothing. But he’d stayed out of it that night.
“They came in saying that all the goddamn Mexicans need to get out of the country and that they’re sick of seeing signs in Spanish because this is America. Meanwhile, they think we can’t understand them. My boss tried to kick them out, but that just made them angrier. One of them pushed him.”
He checks to see if I’m enraged on his behalf. It reminds me of Always Late Nick’s words down at the beach, kicked up a vicious notch. I wait to hear the climax, the part that Cassie’s going to jump all over.
The long exhale. “I kind of pushed the one guy back.”
There it is. “And he punched you.”
He nods. “I slept at Dre’s because Victor would beat my ass.”
“As he should.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m serious.” I look him in the eye and try not to wince. It’s a shiner, all right. “That’s what the police are for. You don’t have to be the beacon of justice everywhere you go.”
“The police don’t care,” he says vehemently. “When they came to Pav’s the night those drunken idiots were there, they told them to knock it off and went home. What’s the point?”
“Wouldn’t that still be better than this?” I gesture to his face.
He gives me a sad half smile. “You don’t get it. I don’t want to be that guy who stands around and does nothing if someone’s about to get hurt. I’ve been that guy for too long.”
“I do happen to think it would be beneficial if you stayed out of jail, didn’t get into situations where multiple guys could beat you up, and otherwise didn’t jeopardize your future,” I say. “Oh, yeah, and wasn’t there a scholarship you really wanted? So maybe I don’t get it. Sorry.”
He sighs. The beginnings of a sheepish smile creep up. “When you put it like that–”
“You’re welcome,” I say. “Let’s get some ice on that.”
“OH, NO, YOU don’t,” says Cassie as I approach the library doors at the start of sixth period. “You’re all mine.”
She hugs me, and I’m momentarily buried in her tangerine-colored scarf woven with gold threads. “This is going to blow your mind. I have a math question that I legitimately want to know the answer to.”
“I’m impressed.” My voice is muffled under the scarf. I shove my way out of it.
“My dad’s been sitting at the kitchen table every night with this chem textbook he ordered from the Internet,” she says. “He doesn’t say anything, just looks at me like a puppy who wants a treat. He’s clearly begging for me to ask him for help. It’s obnoxious yet kind of cute.”
She looks and sounds like the old Cassie, the one who wasn’t afraid to walk into school. She holds her head higher, her voice confident and infused with a touch of humor. She seems normal, and that’s what worries me.
Her eyebrows knit. “You’re looking at me all weird.”
Is this Cassie when she’s normal? Or is this the façade she puts on to hide the Cassie who clung to me when we walked into school on her first day back? The one who was scared, confused, hurting?
I shake my head. “You should throw your dad a bone. He just wants to help you.”
So do I.
The library door creaks open and Marcos stands in the entryway, backpack on his shoulders. Despite the ice pack pressed to his eye, his swollen and cracked lips are still too visible. “I was wondering where you were,” he says around his wrist.
Cassie’s arm tightens around me. “What happened to you?” It sounds like an accusation.
Marcos’s jaw clenches. His good eye turns to me– told you so.
“You know what, Savannah already told me.”
I flinch at the lie.
She draws herself up taller. “Let me tell you this, Marcos Castillo.”
Oh, God. This sounds like Cassie on the phone with Beth O’Leary the day of Regionals. The tone that spells fire.
I attempt to distract her. “What was your math question, Cass?”
It’s like throwing myself in front of an oncoming train. She whooshes straight over me, unstoppable. “If you so much as think about getting my best friend caught up in your vigilante nonsense, she will end this faster than you can throw a punch.”
My jaw drops.
Marcos takes a step back and bumps against the door. “Savannah can think for herself.”
“I’m looking out for her,” Cassie shoots back. “I don’t need to beat people up to prove it.”
Marcos pulls down the ice pack, revealing the deep bruising and swelling around his puffy eye. Cassie lets out a small gasp.
“Guess that’s what you were doing when she fell into the water on Senior Cut Day, right? When you stood there watching her?”
Cass grips my shoulder so hard that it’ll bruise for sure. “You mean when you wanted to act like the hero?”
“Cass, stop.” I wriggle out of her grasp. “First of all, Savannah is standing right here and can hear all of this. Second of all, you both need to simmer down.”
My words have the opposite effect. She looks at me with that same fire. “You’re choosing him over me? Is this why you’re all gung-ho about forgetting about the city?”
I reel back. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ll leave you guys to it,” Marcos mutters, retreating back through the doors.
I want to follow him, try to explain that Cassie’s just overprotective, but no excuse in the world can hide her angry words. She meant everything she said.
I stay put, because when your best friend accuses you of choosing a guy over her, you don’t run after him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Cassie says. “Are you covering for him?”
“We had precalc,” I say. “I didn’t have the chance to tell you.”
“Uh, hello, modern technology?” She taps her cell phone. “He’s going to get you both in trouble one day, Savs. I don’t want him to bring you down.”
“We talked,” I say. “He agrees that he could have handled it better.” His heart’s in the right place, even if the execution is misguided.
She rolls her eyes. “Of course he’ll say that. He’s trying to get in your pants.”
“Cassie!” What the heck has gotten into her? I thought she’d be happy for me now that I have a boyfriend. I expected teasing, lots of elbow nudging, jokes about my dad meeting him. Instead, I have the two of them staring each other down in front of the library. If there’s some sort of jealousy, well, she could walk down the hallway and find at least ten willing suitors. She’s never been hard up for guys wanting to date her. “He saved your life.”
“I know that!” she snaps, and her voice cracks. “Did I ask him? Did I get on the phone and say, ‘Hey, Marcos, you wanna be the hero today?’ He was there at the right time and in the right place, but that doesn’t mean I have to trust him.”
“Aren’t you glad he did?”
My question dangles in the air. All of Cassie’s fire vanishes. Her rod-straight back slouches and she drops her eyes to the floor.
“Yes,” she says quietly. “That doesn’t mean it’s not as hard as fucking hell to get up every morning. Sometimes I think it’s harder now.”
“Why?” I step closer to her, expecting her arm to loop around me.
She keeps it pressed to her side. “Before, I could keep it all in. Now everybody knows. They all look at me differently. Even you.”
“No, I don’t,” I say. Sure, ever since the three of us visited Cass at her house, it’s been a little bumpy. That’s friendship, though. We find a way to navigate everything together. We always do.
“Especially you,” Cassie replies. “God, the way you look at me. It’s like you think if you turn your head, I’m going to jump off something. You look at me like I’m broken.”
My stomach drops. “I don’t think that. Not at all.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want to talk about my feelings all day. I don’t want to hear about your life secondhand. I just want you to be my best friend. Can’t you do that?”
For someone who railed on Marcos for using his fists, she might as well have punched me. It would have hurt less.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I’VE LEARNED ONE thing from Cassie. At the front desk, I sign myself out with a shaking hand. Sports event, I write as my excuse.
I text my dad as I walk outside into the blinding sunlight. Matt has another college coach visiting, and he wants Emery and me to come in early. She’s picking me up. I’m done with the message by the time I reach the traffic light.
My legs know where they’re going before the rest of me does.
I follow Main Street and step over the cracks in the cement. The stores are already decked with garlands and red ribbons for Christmas. There’s almost no one on the sidewalk, just a few women with strollers, several migrant workers by the bus stop, and me. I pass the sign for Pine Needle Street and instead cut through the alley behind Pav’s and onto Ocean Avenue. Around here, all roads lead to the ocean.
It’s too long of a walk; my scar tissue lets me know with each crack. Too cold.
I continue anyway as the stiff winds of the bay slap my hair against my face like sails. It’s a hissing wind, a little nasty, promising worse to come if you proceed. The bay sparkles so brightly under the sunlight that I shield my eyes. The waves are whipped into tiny whitecaps that will surely be swells on the ocean side. The bridge stretches in front of me, steel and concrete arching up so high that I can’t see down the other side until I reach the apex.
Nowhere to go but up.
My quadriceps clench with every increasingly steep step. Cassie and I walked up here in the summers before Cass had her license and when we were too cool to ask our parents to drive us. “This sucks,” she’d say in cadence to her footfalls. This. Sucks. Still didn’t stop us. We’d get honked at, and she’d throw up her middle finger. “What if we know them, Cass?” I’d say, giggling at her audacity.
Halfway up, I’m already out of breath. As though I’m climbing a direct road to it, the sun’s so bright that I feel a headache coming. I take heavy gulps of the salt air. A seagull swoops overhead, lands lightly on the railing, and then flies off.
Beneath it, the bridge makes room for boats and beach parties at its base and girls slipping into the water in November, not intending to come out.
When I finally reach the top, an American flag flaps against the railing. My cheeks burn from the exertion and the sharp wind. I force myself to lean over and look straight down. Maybe I can figure this out.
Because you can’t know until you’ve been there.
Below me, the deep-turquoise water churns. She could have jumped from up here, right at the heart of the arch. She could have ended it easily.
Instead, she chose the more difficult way, letting herself get cold until she couldn’t feel anything. The car still hummed in the background in case she decided to run out and sprint back in, peeling out of the parking lot like death was chasing her.
I follow the bridge down to the tiny strip of sand where the bonfire was. It’s the kind of place that’s abandoned in the early morning, save the early-riser fisherman or a boy with a metal detector who was up before school that day and went looking to see what people had left behind.
Under the bridge, the tide churns around the concrete supports. I listen to the steady lapping against the pillars. Bits of ash and bottle tops still rest on the shoreline, out of reach of high tide. Out in the water, plastic soda rings, the kind that you see in anti-pollution ads wrapped around cute turtles, bob along meaninglessly.
When Richard became scuba certified, Mom wouldn’t let him dive here. She said you had to know the tides here to a T because they shift so quickly under the bridge. It was a fact I didn’t expect Mom to know. That’s how Cassie intended to go. Down, down. Maybe this bridge is one arching tombstone.
If I yell under the bridge, will it echo? Or will it be silenced by concrete?
Was there a moment when she wanted to turn back before the cold took her, but she couldn’t move? How could the girl who gets bored so easily sit for so long in these currents, waiting for the dark?
I watch the water until I have the urge to wade in. Put my face down, spread my arms, and float. See how it feels. Watching the water, it doesn’t feel so unreasonable. It doesn’t matter that we’re in November. The water is probably warmer than the air. Mom said that, too. Mom and her nautical knowledge. What was it like, Cass? How did it feel to start losing yourself? Were you scared? Did you want it to hurry and be done with already?
Did you see anything?
Did you think of me?
I think of sinking.
I think of relaxing my limbs and ignoring the ache in my lungs that points me to the sky. Of relinquishing the struggle.
Then the image stops.
This is the difference: I cannot let myself sink.
I’m running now. I cross Dune Road, fly through the parking lot, and don’t stop until I reach the rocks, heart pounding. Sand whispers through the tiny spaces in my shoes. In the summer I’d be barefoot by now, leaving divots in my wake as I sprinted to the waves. I climb up the rocks and make my way over to the smooth, cool surface of the one I’d done a handstand on. The white caps hiss, the waves curl and crash onto themselves, the tide floods over the rock and immediately soaks my shoes, and I don’t budge.
I always have to fight back. If Marcos hadn’t jumped in after me on Senior Cut Day, I would have found my way out, or tried my damnedest to do so. Cass was right. I don’t need him. I want him, though.
There was no way I could have gone back into the gym with Emery to “say goodbye.” I had to see if there was still a shot that I could flip again. I’m still testing. Part of me has been fighting this retirement for months now, and finally, that part is breaking the surface.
I might not ever be able to fully understand what Cassie tried to do, but I have to help her fight, too.
Ping-ping-ping–my phone erupts with texting tones. I’ve caught the lone bar of service down here. With my eyes on the water, I pull the phone from my pocket.
NEW HAMPSHIRE IS GIVING ME A FULL RIDE I’M SO EFFING HAPPY I JUST CRIED IN CLASS WE NEED TO CELEBRATE.
It takes a moment to process. Words like “great” and “amazing” and “awesome” should come forth right now, but they feel distant. Somewhere back on the bridge above the tides.
HE SAID HE LOVED MY VAULTING ABILITY HE MUST BE DRUNK I DON’T EVEN CARE.
“Congratulations,” too, the obvious one, flat as the plastic rings under the bridge.
I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE THE LOOK ON VANESSA’S FACE.
Vanessa. Matt. Erica and Nicola, bickering with each other yet always in sync. My old teammates who left the gym. Tiana and the little ones, who move through the day at the gym or on the monkey bars of a playground, jackets dangling over their heads. Little girls who don’t feel anything but the sting in their hands after a long practice on bars or the heaviness of the first gold medal around their necks. Nothing but joy.
STOP BEING A NERD AND ANSWER MY MESSAGES. THAT’S SO AWESOME CONGRATS, I finally respond.
Sorry for all-caps. But we need a serious FIESTA!! Fiesta. Just as far away as the playground.
A second message. Srsly couldn’t have dealt with all the stress this fall without you. You have no idea!!! Xoxoxo.
I haven’t helped with anythin
g. I’ve let Emery drive me to the gym and she let me do conditioning next to her. As if being a friend is that easy. Simple participation in the same space.
If I had answered the phone, would Cassie have been jolted awake from the dream?
That’s what you’re supposed to do as a friend. You support the dreams, the good ones, and you shake your friends out of the bad ones. Bad boyfriends, bad haircuts, bad decisions. I was too caught up in forgetting my old dream, competing for Ocean State, to help Cassie out of hers.
I need to be awake.
Not just for Cassie. For me, too.
AS I CROSS the dunes, the reeds bent in the breeze as if bidding me farewell, I call the first person I trusted. Not Cassie, not Emery, not even my parents.
“Savannah?” he says when he answers, sounding out of breath. That makes two of us. The connection’s staticky and unclear. I’m so grateful and relieved that he picked up that I start rambling.
“Slow down, kid, I can’t hear you!” He laughs. “How’s the old man? Driving you up the wall yet?”
“You have no idea,” I say. Since whenever we talk to Richard it’s usually interrupted by him needing to run off, I get to the point. “Do you have a minute?”
“For you? Of course.”
I grin. Richard did his share of teasing me as a kid, but with the six-year age difference, more often than not he was the one babysitting and driving me to the gym if our parents had to work late. Haltingly, I tell him about Cassie.
“You have a boyfriend now?” he asks when I finish. “Has Dad printed out his transcript yet and hung it up on the refrigerator?”
“Richard!”
“I’m kidding. Well, I hope I’m kidding. Anyway, sounds like you’ve had a hell of a fall, kid. I’m sorry to hear about Cassie.” He sighs. “I wish I didn’t relate. Unfortunately, I do. We lost a guy over the summer to suicide.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It happens, I’m sad to say. That’s the thing: you don’t always know. Some people can seem like the happiest and most well-adjusted guys you’ll ever meet, and the next day, they put a gun to their heads.”
I shudder.
Lessons in Falling Page 17
