Page 9

The smell of a pool should be bottled up and sold on cold days.

The last two summers, I had an amazing July Fourth with my friends, so part of me wished I was with them today, but mostly I was excited to spend the day with Blair and Hadley. Hadley’d been asking for days when we’d finally go to the water park. On the drive to Pirate’s Bounty, Hadley heard us talking about the kiddie pool and asked to swim in the cat pool instead. We laughed and Blair told her she could go with me if she kept her life jacket on.

The busy July Fourth crowd made it hard to find a spot around the pool. We weaved through parents with their eyes splitting time between phones, books, and their swimming children. We found three chaises farthest from the entrance and set our stuff down.

After Blair helped me put sunscreen wherever I couldn’t reach, I sat crisscrossed at the edge of the pool. I wanted to wait the recommended fifteen minutes for my sunscreen to soak in, but Hadley jumped right in.

“It’s so cold!” she screamed. Her life jacket pulled her to the surface.

“Does it feel good?” I tested the water with my toe.

“Come in!” Hadley held her arms out for me like I was the kid and she was the adult.

Blair insisted nothing bad would happen if I went in before time was up, and she would help me reapply when we dried off. So, I jumped in to join Hadley. Cold water shocked me with teasing pin pricks. I kicked for the air as soon as I went under. Hadley reached for me when I wiped my eyes. I was tall enough in the three feet to be the adult again. The water was like Jell-O with a four-year-old propped on my hip.

“Can we go on the cat slide?” Hadley asked. She looked at the kids walking their foam mats to the mouth of the racing slides. It was a forbidden journey only older pirates were allowed to embark on.

“You’re too little, I’m sorry.”

“Well, can you go on the cat slide?”

“Yes.” Should I tell her that her almost teenaged cousin was afraid of a dumb water slide? Lying was worse, so I said, “But I’m too scared.”

“Oh, okay.” She shrugged. “That’s okay. We still have our pool.”

We found a mostly empty patch of water between the red, white, and blue blur of people. I waited for Blair to look up from her book before I sent Hadley paddling in front of me. She made it a couple feet out, flapping like a bumblebee fallen into water. When she swam back, I couldn’t resist scooping her back in my arms. She wrapped tightly around me until we were a pretzel, soggy from pool water.

We played I Spy, looking around at the kaleidoscope of color before us. Green dinosaur swim trunks, the American flag above the concession stand, the blue umbrella shading Blair. I couldn’t find her “something orange” because it was actually coral: the life raft hanging from the lifeguard stand. After that, Hadley kept assigning something-corals, mystified by this new color I taught her.

I spied the brown of her darkening freckles. She giggled and spied mine right back. We balanced on two pool noodles that floated our way. I stopped Hadley from taking a huge bite out of it, but then she pretended to because it amused her to see me freak out.

Blair made her way over with goggles and pool rings. I tightened goggles around Hadley’s head and felt my own snag at my wet, sticky hair. Blair threw the rings and I kicked off the wall for a hot pink one. Even in the shallow end, the water pushed hard against my ears. My goggles filled up in that slow way that I didn’t notice until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Tiny white bubbles stuck to my arm hairs. I wicked them off my skin, watched them disappear.

This was why I loved swimming so much. It was the only time I could truly be part of a world I didn’t belong in, at least until my lungs forced me back into the real world. I held up the pink ring ceremoniously, then gave it to Hadley who was tired of being trapped in her life jacket and scraping for the rings with her toes.

When we finished eating lunch, I told Hadley we had to wait thirty minutes before we swam again. Blair told me that was an old wives’ tale, which, sure, my mom was old, but she wasn’t a wife anymore.

I was ready to get back in, but Hadley was curled up sleepily in her towel, so I settled in for my own nap. The wet towel sent shivers across my body. I nodded off to the sound of Blair flipping through a book with a shirtless man on the cover. I couldn’t fall asleep, so I watched Blair read and relaxed in tune with the page flips and distant water splashes and palm tree shudders.

“How’s your mom doing?” Blair said without looking up.

I picked at some loose threads on my towel. I knew it was just a formality to fill the silence. Maybe she felt me staring at the new aging freckles burned on her shoulders. Or maybe she was just curious about her sister. She knew I talked to her on the back porch last night while she gave Hadley a bath.

“The same.” My voice was quiet, joining the lulling hum around us.

Blair knew what I meant. To say my mom was the same was to say she still cared too much about pointless things. She went on dates knowing nothing would come of them. She buried herself in her work so the silence didn’t wipe her out.

She walked life afraid.

Untrusting.

Worried.

To say my mom was the same was to say she was exactly like me.

Technically, I was exactly like her. I knew it was apples that fell from trees. I just spent a perfect pool day worried about wet sunscreen and parental supervision and swimming cramps.

Blair nodded and finally looked at me. Her tongue pushed through her cheek. “You know, it’s okay to live a little.” If she wasn’t looking at me, I would have thought she was reading some kid-friendly part of her book out loud.

“Yeah.” I inhaled, exhaled, waited a million years, then said, “I do. With the twins. And Mason and Jorge. I mean it, it’s been a busy summer so far, doing all this living with them.”

“Talk to me. What adventures do you get up to after I drop you off?”

“You know.” I shrugged. “The usual itinerary things.”

Mom always let me get away with “fine” when she asked how school was, but Blair looked at me with one dark eyebrow raised until I gave her a proper answer.

My lips drew pink lines in the sky and made bullet points from hearts as I filled the air with all the summer’s events so far.

“We go to Sunset Scoop and ride our bikes to the beach. We sit at the dock while Holden and Mason fish. Sometimes I join in but I haven’t caught anything since my first time fishing. We eat a lot of Hammerhead’s leftovers. Haven even caught a fish with the hushpuppies as bait. Oh, and Holden and Jorge have been trying to teach Mason how to skateboard. I’ve tried a little more too, but I’m still not very good. Haven and I would rather collect shells on the beach. We’re in a competition to see who can find an unbroken sand dollar first.”

I smiled, thinking about Mason almost face planting in the road until Holden caught him. Thankfully I’d loaned him my knee pads. I thought about how dry my throat got after too many hushpuppies and the unbeatable way orange soda made it all better. I thought about the jar of sand dollar shards that made a home of my bedroom windowsill, and how amazing it would feel to replace them with a perfect one. I thought about how my skin hardened when I licked melted ice cream dripping down my arm.

Sometimes I managed to do things like that without a care.

“Also, we actually go inside the twins’ house some afternoons to play cards and watch movies. We try not to fall asleep on the couch but we end up doing it anyway since the A/C feels too good after a long day in the sun. Haven calls it ‘sun tired’ and, boy, does it feel like that.”

After blabbering every thought as soon as it came to me, I finally came up for air. Blair looked at me with an expression that mirrored mine, like she was living the itinerary through me.

“That sounds like living to me. Completely-unaffected-by-all-that-shit-you-went-through kind of living.” She slapped her hand over her mouth like she couldn’t believe it had just betrayed her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to curse or say anything like that. I didn’t mean that.”

Whether she meant to or not, I knew what she was talking about. For me to have gone through “all that shit I went through” was to say that I couldn’t do any living without running from the shadow trailing right behind it. Good times were only a sign of bad ones to come. The world needed that kind of balance.

Blair meant to say that I walked life afraid.

Untrusting.

Worried.

“It’s okay. I hear bad words all the time at school.” I ignored all the other things inviting the shadows to encroach.

“You’re a good kid, Q.” Blair smiled, different this time. It matched the sorrow in her brown eyes. “You know, sometimes I worry about how growing up with divorced parents will affect Hadley, but then I think about how great you’ve turned out. I can only hope Hadley turns out half as great.”

I didn’t say anything, just smiled with my mouth closed and tried not to let the shadow find me under this umbrella. It wasn’t Blair’s fault I felt this way. Plus, she thought I was great, so maybe I was just a little bit great.

“I hope you keep doing all that living. It sounds pretty fun.”

“Pinky promise,” I said, then I decided I’d better force a nap to ward the shadows off.

We swam until the sky changed colors. We swam until those changes spilled into darkness. We were still swimming, cold water clinging to our skin, when the fireworks were about to emerge from the night sky.

It was almost time for the Piper Island Fishing Pier firework show. Although we weren’t on the shore, Pirate’s Bounty was a popular place to watch them without fighting the evening traffic. The last two years, my friends and I never made it in time and ended up watching them through some trees at a gas station pump, then we lit sparklers in the twins’ driveway as consolation.

Hadley and I claimed a shallow spot in the kiddie pool as Blair walked back from the concession stand, a shadow against the colorful concessions lit up orange.

She offered each of us a Rocket Pop. “An homage to summers past.”

“Thank you,” I said between my first licks.

It tasted like the past two July Fourths, melted fast in my hand, the juice dripping into red, white, and blue droplets in the water.

The floodlights cut out, followed by a blip of silence. A whole different set of lights cut in. Our eyes traced a glimmer of light, lost sight of it, then found it again as a dandelion puff against the night sky. A chorus followed, booming, whistling, and crackling so loud I couldn’t help but blink even when I knew it was coming. The air smelled like Haven’s room when she tried to straighten her damp hair. The lights danced on Hadley’s face, too many colors to spy before they fizzled out in curly smoke ribbons in the next blast.

Hadley watched the exploding sky in awe. She puffed her cheeks up and blew air out to extinguish the fireworks hundreds of feet away. To her, fireworks were just birthday candles ready for a wish, a simple obstacle before frosting and cake.

I wished I could see the world the way Hadley did, concerned there was a fire in the sky that needed blowing out, confident her breath was powerful enough to put it out.