Page 29

JUMPING IN , or On Waiting for Guys

We finished just in time.

Phoebe was literally sewing the bird’s nest onto Oliver’s shoulder in the final moments before he stepped onstage; I was trimming yarn from his feet so he wouldn’t trip all over himself. They performed in the outdoor amphitheater, and Oliver couldn’t have looked more perfect for the spot, as if he’d emerged directly from the woods. Oliver was right—the show worked better as a comedy than as a tragedy—though the Lovesick Falls Gazette praised Oliver for his performance and for bringing “surprising pathos” to the role of the yeti. Benna Bloom and third-year-intern Phoebe Zhao’s “showstopper costume” was also noted in the review, citing its “zany creative flair” and its “silly elegance.” My parents came to see the show, too, as well as the Young People’s Showcase, and they were “blown away” by the costumes Phoebe and I had managed to build. The yeti costume was a lot to maintain—I had to hunt in the woods for brambles nearly every day before the show—but it was worth it to help make Phoebe’s vision come true.

The Young Company’s Showcase was a success, as well: The actors had put together a series of original shorts, and Touchstone performed in Audrey’s clown piece, wearing a red nose and big frown. He was sidesplittingly funny, though not without his own touching moments.

At both shows, I saw Ros. At Touchstone’s show I was seated about six rows behind them and Jess, close enough that I could pick their laughter out of the crowd’s. At Snow Walker , I saw their face, watched them from my post in the wings. The whole show, they held a bouquet of paper-wrapped flowers in their lap. Both times, I entertained the idea of talking to them, breaking the ice between us, but something in me couldn’t quite manage it. When the lights came up, I bolted, disappeared down a backstage rabbit hole where I knew they wouldn’t be able to follow.

And there was still the matter of the Lily Pad.

After our phone conversation, Henry had arranged for some “guys” to come check out the house. 24 These guys that Henry had sent had already been once to assess the damage of the window. On that trip, they’d properly fitted a plastic sheet over the wound. Though I understood it was impractical—I had chased a bird out with a broom and once saw a possum lurking altogether too close—I missed the sailcloth. It rippled in the breeze, whereas this stretched yellow, the skin over a blister.

Today, the guys were supposed to come back to take some measurements, and though the arrival window they’d given me was from ten to six, by two I’d abandoned all hope. I was supposed to meet Phoebe, Audrey, and Touchstone down by the beach for a day of SUN AND FUN (no cooking sherry allowed), but because of the guys, I had to text them my apologies. Instead, I ordered so much Chinese food the delivery arrived with six sets of chopsticks, and I spent the afternoon catching up on laundry and watching old episodes of Power Jam . I had to be up to speed for season three, but it was a different experience, watching the same episodes now. In the first place because I had to keep texting Oliver during different parts, and in the second place, because I saw through some of the magic. I didn’t not love it; I just loved it differently.

The knock at the door came halfway through my trough of General Tso’s chicken, when I’d gotten down to the socks that I didn’t feel like matching. It was close to the end of the arrival window, but still within. I opened the door, expecting to see the guys, but instead it was Ros.

“Hey,” they said.

“ Hi ,” I said. I was shocked: Part of me had truly believed that I was going to leave Lovesick Falls without speaking to Ros again. I figured I’d just see them eventually one day in school, and we’d just pass by each other in the hall, like two people who used to be friends.

“Oh my God,” they said. “That shirt.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, looking down. I was wearing my solar system shirt I’d picked up when I went home the other week.

“That gives me so many sleepover flashbacks,” Ros said.

“Right? I can’t believe it fits me now.”

“Did you have it with you this whole time?”

“No. I went home the other week.”

“Touchstone mentioned,” they said. “How was it?”

“Good,” I said with a shrug. “My mom says hi.”

“Tell her hi back.”

In the silence between us, the sounds of unpaused Power Jam came drifting through, bits of dialogue I knew by heart.

“Finals episode?” Ros said.

“Finals episode,” I said. “You want to watch? I ordered tons of Chinese food, way more than I can eat.…”

“Do you want to go for a walk?”

I checked my watch. It wasn’t like the guys couldn’t wait for me.

We walked along the river where we’d walked the first day, when I’d watched them walk straight in without flinching. It was a painfully beautiful day. The sky was so blue it felt like a cut, and the edges of everything seemed sharper because of the light (or perhaps that was just because I’d spent all day inside watching TV). The breeze felt good; it was nearly four, and I hadn’t been outside all day.

“I saw the show,” they said. “The costume turned out amazing.”

“It was mostly Phoebe.”

“I looked for you after,” they said. “I brought you a bouquet.”

“I had a lot of work to do,” I said, which was true, I did. “I’m sorry about the flowers. I’m sure they were beautiful.”

There was a long silence between us.

“So,” Ros said. “Remember that pie ?”

“Unfortunately,” I say.

“Don’t say that,” Ros said. “It was a really fucking good pie.”

“You didn’t even get to try it.”

They shot me a look.

“You didn’t ,” I said. “Ros, there was GLASS in that pie, it’s probably like, shredding your stomach lining.…”

“Oh my God, I ate it BEFORE. How dumb do you think I am?”

“But we didn’t eat it—”

“ You didn’t eat it. I ate some. When you followed Oliver around the front. And then I covered it back up with whipped cream.”

“You weasel .”

“I have no regrets. Because it was absolutely delicious.”

“Well,” I said. “I’m glad you got to try it.”

They nodded. We paused on the riverbank and looked back up at the Lily Pad. The plastic sheeting was yellowish, rippled.

“It reminds me of dead skin,” I said.

“Gross,” Ros said. “When does the new window go in?”

“It doesn’t,” I said, and I found myself getting oddly choked up. “I guess—it’s, like, really difficult and expensive to get a piece of custom glass that big? And Henry wanted to do some work on the house anyway.…”

“You’re kidding,” Ros said. “No window ?”

“I think there will be windows,” I said. “Just smaller. And like, more throughout.”

“That’s awful,” Ros said.

“I know. On the other hand, maybe fewer birds will fly into it.”

“Maybe,” Ros said.

As if listening to us, a flock of starlings took off from the bushes, made new shapes in the sky. We watched them for a moment, considering the ways they shifted. They made me think of a river, with their own ebb and flow.

“So what’s going to happen in the fall?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—you’re not actually staying here, right?”

Ros’s face darkened. “No. I don’t think so.”

“What about home? Are we going to…”

“Are we going to what?” said Ros.

“Be the same,” I said finally. “As we were before. Are we going to be that close?”

Ros didn’t answer for a minute, and in that long, painful pause I wished the summer had never happened, and that we were back home, watching Power Jam and hoovering Chinese food. I wished nothing between us had ever changed, that I’d never gone swimming that first night, never worked on costumes, never drunk the water from Lovesick Falls.

“We’ll be friends,” said Ros finally. “Though I think it will be different.”

“Different how?”

“Maybe we won’t be the Triumvirate. We’ll be more… fluid. Porous. It won’t be just the three of us all the time. Maybe we’ll let more people in.”

In spite of my stubbornness, I softened then, thinking of all the people that we had let in that summer: not just Jess but Phoebe and Oliver and Audrey, even Benna and Jacques (okay, maybe that last one was a stretch). In spite of what the spring’s waters had promised, we were leaving Lovesick Falls with more love than we’d had when we arrived. When I thought of it that way, I was glad that the summer had happened, and my heart expanded with all the love I felt. I didn’t want to wish the summer away but instead wanted to hold it tight in my palm, like a stone made smooth by a river.

“Three can be a tricky number, anyway,” I said slowly, remembering my mom’s long-ago speech about triangles. Then, thinking of our absent third side, I said, “I feel so bad about how we treated Touch.”

“I do, too,” said Ros. “I apologized to him, but it doesn’t feel like enough.”

“No apology could ever feel like enough. We forgot that he existed,” I said. “We were so hung up on our own problems that we wound up being awful to him.”

“I know,” they said. “We’ll find a way to make it up to him, I’m sure.”

“Maybe he needs flowers.”

“A bouquet of red noses,” said Ros, and I giggled a bit.

We walked in silence then, thinking of and missing Touchstone, wishing he were with us. He’d been such a good friend to both of us—we wouldn’t be in Lovesick Falls if it weren’t for him—and we’d let him down so thoroughly and completely. It wasn’t at all how I wanted the summer to go. It wasn’t the sort of person I wanted to be.

“I’m glad you’re coming home,” I said, thinking of our life after Lovesick.

“I’m not,” they said with a snort.

“Can I ask you why you wanted to stay here? Aside from Jess.”

“I just wanted a fresh start,” they said.

“Isn’t there a way to have a fresh start at home?” I said. “Like, can’t you get a drastic new haircut and call it a life?”

Ros laughed. “Celia. Do you know how strange it was to be without my dad this year? Like, do you really know?”

“I know it was hard,” I acknowledged.

“ Hard doesn’t begin to cover it,” said Ros. “To look into the balcony at swim meets and not see him there? To drive home and not see his car in the driveway? To not hear him singing along to oldies as he cooked? That was all hard. But it wasn’t just that he was gone ; it’s that without him, I was suddenly famous. Like I was wearing the scarlet letter—like everyone, classmates, teachers, coaches, neighbors, you name it, knew who I was and what had happened to me, and they were all staring at me with these looks . Sometimes like they pitied me. But sometimes it was like they couldn’t get enough of staring at some sideshow freak. I was everyone’s worst nightmare: the Kid Whose Dad Left, and all they could do was stare. I felt like a zoo animal. Even you were looking at me all the time.”

“I thought I was helping,” I said.

“You did help,” Ros said. “You knew that a change of scene would be good for me. And it was. When I was here, I finally got away. No one was looking at me. I wasn’t under any microscope. I wasn’t the Kid Whose Dad Left. I was just me.”

They paused to chew on their thumbnail, and I took the opportunity to look at them, their hair like a tornado, their golden eyes glinting, their snowbrow as alluring as ever. I’d had their face memorized for years, but there was still so much about them that I didn’t know. Still so much about them I wanted to learn, if they’d let me.

They bit off their nail and continued. “I think it’s better this way, going home. Better not to leave my mom all on her own. I’d just be doing the same thing my dad did if I left.”

“Do you think—if I hadn’t brought us here—if I hadn’t done all of this—we’d still be—” I stopped, unsure of which words I wanted.

“I think we’d still be different,” said Ros. “That’s part of it, isn’t it?”

“Part of what?”

“Growing up.”

We were crossing under the bridge now, the one we took to get into town, picking our way along a steep downhill. Beside us, the river gathered speed and the water tumbled down the hill, forming a small set of falls I hadn’t known was there. I turned back to catch a glimpse of the Lily Pad, but from this angle, it wasn’t even visible.

“Maybe the Lily Pad’ll be better,” I said. “Maybe they’ll, like—put in a waterslide into the river.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea. Or, like, a greenhouse.”

“A tree house.”

“Or like, a swim-in fish tank… oh, wow,” said Ros. “Look.”

Just beyond the falls, the river opened up into a deep pool, the kind that practically begged you to jump in. It was the same color as the Lovesick Falls spring—the sort of sparkling cerulean that I didn’t see with my eyes so much as felt with my body.

“I had no idea this was here,” I said.

Ros was taking their shoes off again.

“Wait,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Have you even been in yet? Besides that first night,” Ros said.

“I’m worried about currents, and eels, and I read about this bacteria—”

“Celia,” Ros said. “You have to get in.”

They jumped in first.

I went in after.

It felt amazing.

The water washed over us, and Ros splashed me and I splashed them back, and for a moment, we felt like us again. There wasn’t anything magic about where we’d jumped in. These waters didn’t form a gorgeous lagoon, and they most certainly weren’t a spring that would help us fall out of love. It was just water, a place to dunk one’s head and body, and we were swimming in it together, like any two friends on any hot summer day.

It’d be a steep, wet climb back up in sopping clothes. We’d risk twisted ankles. Bug bites. And the worst of it was that at the top of the hill, they’d say goodbye, and we’d see each other at home at and at school, and we’d be friends, but it wouldn’t be the same, and I was going to miss them. I was going to miss this version of us.

But for now—now we were swimming in the same water, normal, regular water, and that water felt good. Felt best, even. It felt like what we needed.

I would remember this.

Footnote

24 Reader, have you ever dealt with “guys,” or perhaps just “a guy,” singular? Once you live in a place that is your own, things will go wrong with that place, and to fix it, someone will always be sending over guys. Guys will give you an arrival window. The window will not matter. They will show up forty minutes early, when you are still in your towel, or six hours late, after you’ve had to cancel your plans. Maybe they’ll show up on time, but they’ll be missing a part, or because of some bureaucratic mix-up, they can’t actually install whatever it is they’re installing until Thursday, oh, and also, it’s a holiday weekend, so the washing machine your landlord finally agreed to replace will sit in the middle of your hallway for a week, and every time you pass it you must choose: squeeze past, or vault over? For this, there will be no apology. Here is the real fairy-tale happy ending: A guy that shows up on time, fixes the furnace that same day, and rides off into the night, never to be heard from again.