Float, page 26
“The whole reason I spent the summer here instead of taking bogus art history classes in Madrid was so I could enjoy it.” She punctuated this with a kick of her heel against the surface of the pool, sprinkling us with a few drops of chlorinated water that dotted her floral romper and also landed directly in my left eye, because that’s just the way things go for me.
“You could’ve gone to Madrid?” I cried, sounding a bit more alarmed than I actually was because, hello, chlorine in my eye.
“Yeah,” she grumbled in response. “My mom knows a professor at some university there. She had an affair with him, I guess, and she was gonna blackmail him into letting me enroll late. I think his wife is, like, important in politics or something. Whatever. So, yeah, I was going to spend the summer in Madrid, but then—then I started hooking up with Ethan, and my mom got mad.”
Alissa shrugged, as if this was a perfectly common chain of events that could happen to any high schooler.
“Your mom’s kind of cool,” I said without thinking.
Then, with the kind of sudden burst of panic that you might feel after stepping on an upturned thumbtack or closing your front door and realizing your keys are on the kitchen table, I remembered that Alissa had told me she’d liked hooking up with Ethan for the sole reason that her mom had been mad enough about it to talk to her for the first time in four months.
“I mean,” I hurried on, “awful. She’s just the worst.”
Alissa sighed and offered me a half smile, like she’d gotten used to my foot-in-mouth routine and didn’t fault me for it.
“She’s my mom,” she replied with a shrug. “I mean, I guess I love her. You’re supposed to love your mom, right? But . . . I wish, sometimes, that she was better at it.”
She admitted this last bit in a very quiet voice and followed up by clearing her throat and gathering chunks of her long, pin-straight hair over one shoulder. She flared the tips in front of her face, examining them for nonexistent split ends.
A hard breeze whisked across the yard, ruffling the grass.
It was cold. Not Arctic cold, but still.
“My parents are divorced,” I said suddenly, staring ahead at the water in the pool and twisting a bit of fabric at the hem of my dress. “They’re professors at the same university. Same field, but they have totally different views. And they’re both brilliant—I mean, truly, some of the nerdiest people on earth—but they’re idiots for ever getting married. I think they just wanted the challenge. Trying to change the other’s mind, you know?”
Alissa was quiet for a long moment.
“My mom’s on her seventh marriage,” she finally said.
“I think mine’s sleeping with one of her students,” I offered.
“My mom has told me—on multiple occasions—that she regrets having me because I messed up her modeling career.”
“Nobody’s ever helped me with my homework,” I admitted. “I failed physics my freshman year. I had to retake it over the summer to catch up. And you don’t even want to know how bad AP bio kicked my ass last year.”
Alissa sighed, then mumbled, “I got a five.”
“I got a two. I don’t even get college credit for my suffering.”
She laughed. And I laughed, too, because all these things seemed smaller now that we’d laid them out side by side.
I knew talking about things didn’t change them. My parents still weren’t what I wanted them to be, and they probably never would be. I still dreaded going home to Alaska, even though I had an impending return flight and one last year of high school to finish before I got to flee the state and never look back. I’d still gotten a two in AP bio and couldn’t go five minutes without saying something I regretted.
These things were true.
But I’d be all right. I had Aunt Rachel, who had tried, unlike either of my parents, to appreciate me in all my mess-ups and mediocrity. I had Jesse and Lena, who’d shown me, for better and for worse, what I was missing as an only child. I had Alissa—the kind of girl I thought I hated, with her perfect hair and overflowing confidence—who’d proved to be a lot more like me than I’d ever thought possible. And I had Blake. I had a boyfriend. And he was patient when I rambled, and he was actually quite funny when you got past the social awkwardness he’d buried beneath mountains of broodingly handsome glaring, and he always kept my secrets, even at the beginning, when I hadn’t trusted him as far as I could throw an empty red Solo cup.
I’d found my people.
And in one week, I’ll have to say good-bye.
“You wanna have a belly flop contest?” Alissa asked, nudging my shoulder with hers and beaming in a way that told me she was feeling a lot lighter too. I’d once thought there was some kind of unspoken competition between us, some contest where the prize was the cute lifeguard next door. I’d been so utterly wrong.
“Fuck, yeah I do,” I said.
We both scrambled to our feet, giggling like two twelve-year-olds who’d gotten their hands on their mom’s copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and had no idea what they were in for. And maybe it was the sudden kinship I felt with Alissa that made me say what I said next.
“You know,” I told her as we scampered across the patio and into the grass to get our running starts, “before I got to Florida, I didn’t even know how to swim. Isn’t that crazy?”
“You couldn’t swim?”
The voice wasn’t Alissa’s.
It was Lena’s.
I turned over my shoulder and saw that we’d gotten closer to the back porch than I’d realized. Lena and Jesse were sitting on the steps, both staring up at me with wide, unblinking eyes. Everyone else had heard, too, it seemed, and was staring at me—Rachel, Gummer, Boss, George, Chloe, Penelope (the rosé was gone, but she was not), and even Isabel (who, to be fair, probably didn’t give a shit if I could swim and was just watching because she thought Alissa and I were going to take a running leap into the pool and make big splashy).
I glanced back at Alissa. She was frowning at me like I’d just told her I ran a Twitter account dedicated to posting overzealously graphic Fifty Shades fan art.
It was happening.
The thing I’d had nightmares about was actually happening.
They knew. Everyone knew that I couldn’t swim, and they were looking at me the way I’d always known they would. Outsider, their eyes said. You don’t belong here. What kind of pale, long-armed, flat-haired, lopsided-breasted creature crawled off the plane from Alaska and thought she could go unnoticed in Holden? What made her think she could walk in here and pretend we’re her friends, her family?
You don’t belong here. You don’t belong anywhere.
The wave of anxiety I felt was so intense it nearly knocked my feet out from under me. And maybe, if it’d happened at the beginning of the summer, I would’ve let it. Maybe I would’ve allowed the roaring in my head to drag me under and drown me.
But not now.
Not when I knew how to float.
I shrugged with an easiness I didn’t quite feel and smiled like someone who has nothing to lose, even though it sort of felt like I could lose everything.
“Nope,” I admitted. “But I learned.”
Lena was the first to react.
“Oh my God,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose and squeezing her eyes shut. “Oh my God, we took you surfing. In the ocean. Please, Waverly. Please tell me you knew how to swim when we went out there to surf.” Her eyes opened, briefly, and then shut again almost immediately when she saw how red my face had turned. “Oh my God, you didn’t. Oh no.”
“It was great practice,” I insisted, rubbing the nail of my right index finger into the side of my thumb so hard I took off some skin.
I glanced around the yard again.
The realization I came to was long overdue, really. Nobody was staring at me because of the admission that I’d arrived in Holden seventeen years old and unable to swim. They were staring at me because I’d been deeply, fundamentally, atrociously self-conscious, to the point of voluntarily putting myself in an extreme position of peril.
“You idiot!” Lena growled.
Yeah. Yeah, that was fair.
I shrugged again, feeling very small and very young suddenly.
The incredulous look on Lena’s face slipped. She frowned at me for a moment, like she was trying to fit together puzzle pieces, and then shook her head. She pushed herself up from the porch and took three long strides across the grass.
“You idiot.” She sighed, throwing her arms around my neck and hugging me so tightly I wheezed. “I would’ve been your friend, you know. Even if you’d told me.”
I buried my face against her shoulder, humiliated.
“It was embarrassing,” I said very quietly.
She laughed hard, and I felt it rattle in her chest. I threw my arms around her, too, and squeezed. She squeezed back, a little harder, and I quickly ditched any thoughts of engaging in a hugging contest. It sort of felt like I was a first grader trying to arm wrestle John Cena. It just wasn’t gonna work out in my favor.
Lena finally released me and stepped back.
“You could’ve told us, Waverly,” Jesse piped up from beside his sister, offering me a lopsided smile. “I mean, it’s not that big a deal, but Blake and I are both trained lifeguards. We could’ve—”
He stopped, abruptly, his mouth still hanging open as he blinked.
Oh no.
“Wait,” he drawled, narrowing his eyes at me.
Oh no.
“He knew. Blake knew,” Jesse concluded. Then he gasped and beamed at me. “He was teaching you, wasn’t he? That’s why he kept sneaking out of the house and going to the pool! He was teaching you!”
I tried not to make eye contact with Blake’s parents.
Oh my God, if they knew how many hours I’d spent staring at their son’s bare chest—
“He what?” Chloe snapped.
For one short and terrifying second, I thought her sudden burst of anger was directed at me.
Then Blake stepped onto the porch, as if summoned to return from his anxiety-driven bathroom break by the sheer willpower of his stepmother’s wrath, and I remembered that he’d been grounded for most of the summer.
Well. Oops.
Blake went from cautious, as he glanced at Santiago’s chair, to relieved, seeing as it was now empty. But then he looked up at Chloe and saw that the parental hellfire wasn’t over yet, because his tiny, blond stepmom was staring at him like a warrior Viking goddess preparing to vanquish some dumbass man.
My dumbass man.
“Mrs. Hamilton, it was my fault!” I blurted. “I asked him to!”
But Chloe didn’t listen.
“Jesse,” she said, eerily calm. “Hold the baby.”
He scrambled up the porch stairs and collected Isabel from her outstretched arms. Isabel, delighted by the new development in the chain of events that’d caused the Fletchers’ casual backyard barbecue to more accurately resemble the season finale of a telenovela, twisted wildly in Jesse’s arms to watch her half brother receive what was sure to be the ass whooping of the century.
“He was only helping me!” I insisted. “It’s my fault!”
Blake glanced at me, eyes wide in confusion, and then back at his stepmother, who was—luckily for him—stuck on the opposite side of a very long table (which was, unluckily for him, also covered in things she could easily throw at him, should the urge strike her).
“You were grounded,” Chloe seethed.
Blake’s face sank.
Yeah, he’d realized what she was all fired up about. For a split second, I saw everything on his face—the sheepishness, the terror, the embarrassment—before he squashed it down and leveled her with a very cold, very bored expression.
“I’m almost eighteen,” he said, rolling his eyes and folding his arms across his chest. “I’m not a kid anymore. You can’t just ground me. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Well, you’re still seventeen,” Chloe pointed out. “And until your next birthday, you abide by our rules. I made the decision to ground you after you took your sister to that stupid party. If you can’t respect my call, then—”
“Then what?” Blake asked, his voice tight.
It was only then that I noticed his hands, which he’d balled into tight fists and shoved under his armpits, were shaking.
This was his greatest fear.
I mean, he’d been a complete asshole to me the first night I’d spent in Holden all because he was worried I’d tell all his friends that I’d seen him get chewed out by his stepmom. We’d wasted so much time being hostile and snapping at each other because of it. And now, here, in front of all his friends, it was happening.
For me, it was déjà vu to the first time we’d met.
“Then you’ve lost the privilege of having your phone,” Chloe said, grinding her teeth together. I winced when she reached across the table and said in a low voice, “Hand it over.”
Blake stared down at her hand, manicured fingers arched like claws, and shook his head.
“I’m not giving you my—”
“Blake,” she snapped. “Phone. Now.”
His eyes drifted. He looked around the porch, where the other parents were watching in tense and solemn silence (save for Penelope, who was chuckling ever so slightly, because I guess that’s what one does when one has had an entire fucking bottle of wine to oneself). Then he looked across the lawn at his friends. At me.
His face flushed red.
He looked very young all of a sudden—young and unsure.
Chloe didn’t look much better. There was something wild in her eyes that reminded me what Blake had said, about the fact that she hadn’t slept much the last seventy-two hours because Isabel had been fighting a cold. She was probably exhausted. And it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have the first clue how to raise a teenage son who’d never asked for a replacement mother.
She was trying.
Trying counted for a lot.
Chloe quirked her eyebrows and glanced down at her empty hand, huffing in impatience. I knew she was just acting so tough on Blake because she had an audience; she didn’t want to look like the woman whose stepson walked all over her.
Blake stared at her for a long moment before he shoved his hand into the front pocket of his shorts and dug out his phone.
Chloe exhaled, her shoulders hunching under the intensity of her stepson’s glare. She didn’t look the least bit triumphant as he dropped his phone into her open palm.
“Thank you,” she said.
Blake leveled her with a look so cold it sent a shiver up my back.
“There,” he said. “Now you can stop pretending to be my mom.”
“Blake!” George exclaimed, standing up in a rush from his seat at the table and fumbling out something about having respect and, in more eloquent terms, not being a total dick to your stepmother.
But the damage had been done.
Chloe flinched, as if Blake had slapped her clear across the face. I watched, completely helpless, as her hand went slack and Blake’s phone slipped through her fingers. She tried to catch it—I saw her. I caught the flare of panic in her wide, dark eyes and the little twitch of her arm as she moved to correct the mistake. She didn’t do it on purpose.
But it was too late.
Blake’s phone plunged into a pitcher of sweet tea.
It went without saying that the party was over.
Chapter 21
The rain started about five minutes after Rachel and I got home. We were in the kitchen playing fridge Tetris with all the leftovers the Fletcher family had forced upon us when I heard it—little pitter-patters against the roof, like the world’s tiniest drum circle.
I gasped in delight and said, “It’s raining!”
It was like all my brain cells had jumped ship, and only Captain Obvious remained on deck. Rachel shoved the last of our reusable glass containers into the few remaining square inches of fridge space, then stepped back to admire her handiwork.
“Well,” she said, “it’s a shame the barbecue ended like that—”
With the complete decimation of Blake and Chloe’s relationship, she meant.
“—but look at all this food! I think we’ve got enough leftovers to last us until the end of week, if we freeze some.”
The end of the week. The end of my time in Holden.
I shook off the thought and crossed the kitchen to stand at the sliding glass doors and watch the rain come down. Behind me, Rachel puttered around cleaning up, then—
One new message.
“Rachel,” my dad’s voice said from the machine. “Hi. I just landed in Fairbanks. Our trip got cut short because of a pretty bad snowstorm, and I just saw the news that you’ve got a tropical storm moving in down there in Florida.”
My heart stuttered with a spark of hope. Say I can stay longer, I thought. Please give me more time. Even if it’s just a few more days.
Instead, my father’s crackling voice said: “I just booked a new flight to Holden tomorrow, and I got our flights home bumped up to Monday morning. It was the soonest I could get. Hopefully, we’ll beat the storm. I’ll email you the confirmation. Give me a call back when you can, okay? All right. Take care.”
The answering machine clicked.
I felt it like a physical blow to the chest.
My dad was coming early. He wanted me to leave early. How was I supposed to tell my friends? How was I supposed to tell Blake? I turned to Rachel, who was wide-eyed and watching me with something like concern, and had the brief and strange urge to ask her to hide me. To let me stay here, like a stowaway, in her house. Forever.
“Do you have any books I could read?” I blurted.
I needed to be away from myself for a while. If I was left to stew in my own thoughts, I’d undoubtedly come up with a laundry list of things I’d miss about Holden, and then I’d end up sitting on the bench under the window in my bedroom with my forehead against the rain-streaked glass, like some kind of early-2000s music video, and I didn’t want to be that girl.
