The Most Dangerous Place on Earth(3)
Her brothers didn’t go in either. Erik was a sophomore at Valley High and walked to school each morning with razor blades in his pockets. Jake, nineteen, should have been out of the house but wasn’t smart enough to go away to college, and in Mill Valley there wasn’t much for him to do but bus dishes at High Tech Burrito and smoke weed under the redwoods in the park. Jake was the one who came into her room to steal the allowance and birthday money she’d stashed under her jewelry box or rolled into the lace cups of her bras. She’d begged for a lock on her door, but her dad said it was “inappropriate,” a meaningless word adults used to shut down ideas they didn’t like. He just didn’t want to pay for it.
Cally turned over in bed, pulling the sheets over her shoulders. She and Abigail were discussing Ryan Harbinger, who sat next to Cally in English so he could squeeze her thigh under the desk, and copy what she wrote about the books he never read. For the past two weeks he’d been pursuing Cally in PE class, pulling her into the willow trees to make out while they were supposed to be running the mile at Bayfront Park.
OMG you slut, Abigail texted. Tell me more!!
What do u want to know?
U know. When’s he going to make you his gf?
???
Come on. U know u want it!
I think he likes Elisabeth Avarine
That bitch. No way
She’s so pretty I think
^ Obvi
Looks aren’t everything
U have to make him want u
How???
Hmm well u don’t want to be too clingy. U don’t want to be that girl.
No, Cally agreed. Definitely not!
Cally understood that Ryan was too busy to care about things like schoolwork or novels or the volatile feelings of girls. He was captain of the baseball team, and in the hot afternoons of late spring she and Abigail and Emma Fleed would go in their skinny-strap tank tops and miniskirts to watch him play, singeing their thighs on the bleachers. When Cally’s bra strap fell down her arm, she wouldn’t bother to hitch it up. She’d already been dress-coded three times that quarter, but she didn’t care. She would train her eyes on Ryan, tracing his body against the green blare of grass, and when she closed her eyes at night she’d be able to keep seeing him, an afterimage burned onto the insides of her eyelids, her very own personal beautiful thing.
—
The next afternoon, PE class was at the pool. Aquatics and Safety Training. Cally stood with the other girls in their ugly one-piece bathing suits, squinting against the silver swimming pool, shifting on their feet and rubbing toes on calves. The boys were on the bleachers across the water.
Cally hugged her chest and looked around for Ryan Harbinger. Instead her eyes alit on Tristan Bloch, who emerged blinking from the locker room in blue trunks and white T-shirt. Cally became suddenly, intensely aware of her own semi-nakedness, how the spandex swimsuit molded to her nipples and cut into her thighs. She felt a vague, unsubstantiated panic about pubic hair. As Tristan scanned the pool deck, she ducked behind Abigail and Emma. She was hiding there when she heard Ryan’s voice at her back:
“Cally Broderick! You gotta go in!”
She turned and he was there, suntanned and bare-chested and grabbing at her, trying to throw her in the pool.
“Ryan! No!” she shrieked, but he didn’t stop. Terror could sound exactly like joy. Cally ran forward, evading Ryan’s grasp; the other girls scattered like birds. She glanced over her shoulder just as Tristan Bloch knocked Ryan into the water and crashed in behind him, splashing her. Cally stopped short at the edge of the pool and rubbed the sting of chlorine from her eyes. She felt mascara smudging on her face and tried not to let it worry her.
Both boys surfaced.
“The fuck are you doing?” Ryan yelled across the water.
Tristan struggled to stay afloat, arms chopping. His T-shirt bubbled around his face and threatened to swallow him.
Ryan streamed through the water, rose, and barreled down on Tristan’s head, plunging him under. It happened so fast. It went on forever. Cally was steps away, conceivably she could do something, but it felt like watching TV. Everyone gathered around the pool and stood there, waiting to see how far Ryan Harbinger would go.
Finally Tristan pushed out from under Ryan’s hand, gulping the air, panicked, like a lost little kid. Abigail and Emma yelled at Cally to get away from the edge, but she couldn’t move a single limb.
“Want more, faggot?” Ryan pushed Tristan under again.
“Stop it!” someone, not Cally but Dave Chu, yelled.
“You like it, fag?” Ryan was grinning at Cally now. “You like it?”
“Please,” she said, too quietly to matter. She backed away to huddle with Abigail like they were nothing more than spectators.
When Mr. Gifford charged out of the locker room, eyes on his clipboard, Ryan released Tristan and vaulted out of the water. He was back with the boys before the teacher looked up. Tristan broke the water’s surface, heaving for air.
“Tristan Bloch!” Mr. Gifford yelled. “What the hell are you doing in the pool?”
Everyone laughed, so Cally did too. She guessed Tristan would regret having given her the silver crane, would be disappointed at the kind of girl she had turned out to be. She’d saved herself.
—
Cally found the note in her locker the next day after school. A sheet of binder paper folded into impeccable quarters, her initials neatly printed on the front in pale blue ink. The handwriting was not what she’d hoped for: Ryan’s hurried scrawl.