How to Save a Life(13)

Then I remembered that he’d been trying to drown himself, and I went cold all over.

“What the hell?” I seethed, moving toward the shallow end, my booted feet clumping awkwardly over the pool floor. “You can’t do that. You can’t leave your dead, bloated body for some stay-at-home mom and her toddler to find tomorrow morning. For some little kid to walk in on. That’s all kinds of f*cked up.”

“What…?” Evan shook his head, confused. “No, I—”

“If you’re going to kill yourself, do it somewhere else.” I climbed out of the pool. A torrent of water rained from my clothes. My boots were heavy with it. Probably ruined. Goddammit. I sat on one of the loungers and tore at the laces.

Evan remained in the center of the deep end, treading water easily. His longish hair was slicked back from his face and gleamed with gold threads in the lamplight. His eyes were the same color as the pool water would be at midday.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” he said quietly.

“No?” I snapped. “Sure as hell looked like it to me.”

“I was just holding my breath.”

“What the hell for?”

“To see how long I could do it.” He cocked his head. “How long was I under, do you think?”

“Are you f*cking kidding me?” I held up one boot and emptied it over the cement.

“Just curious,” he said, his tone distant now, retracted. Like he’d been holding out his hand to me and now took it back. “Sorry about your boots, Jo.”

“Forget it,” I muttered, then whipped my head up. “How do you know my name?”

He sighed, and suddenly looked exhausted, as if suspicion was a lead weight he carried around his neck. “You sit next to me in Western Civ.”

“Oh, right,” I said quickly.

“I’m sorry I scared you. I didn’t mean to.”

“Yeah, well…” I didn’t have words to finish my thought, mostly because I felt like I should apologize to him. I couldn’t imagine what for. He was the one who scared the hell out of me, wrecked my boots, probably cracked my cell phone, and ruined my night.

A silence stretched between us and I felt my anger dip a little. “Four minutes,” I said, taking off my other boot to empty it.

Evan brightened. “Really? I was under for four minutes? Holy shit, that’s long.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said dryly. “It’s Houdini-long. Is that what you’re training for? Join a circus or a frea—”

Freakshow.

I’d caught the word before it could escape but it hung between us loud and clear anyway.

Evan’s expression darkened and he turned away. I immediately and in all ways felt like total crap. Which made my hackles rise. I didn’t need this kind of aggravation in my life. But there was something about Evan that made being pissed at him feel ugly and wrong.

I wrung out my hair over the side of the lounger. “Why don’t you buy a water proof watch and time yourself?”

“Not in the budget at the moment.”

“You work at your Dad’s auto-body shop, right? He doesn’t pay you?”

It occurred to me I was being insanely intrusive into business most definitely not mine. Not to mention the abuse Evan suffered at the hands of his brothers could very well—and most probably—carried on all the way up the family food chain to Ma and Pa Salinger. Or started there and filtered down.

To my relief, Evan nodded and said, “Yeah, he pays me. But I’m saving up for something else.”

“What’s that?”

“Getting the hell out of here.”

Evan turned his gaze to the water park, to the town beyond, and whatever horizon he was seeing in his mind. I found my own eyes following, but I couldn’t see past the bars around the pool area.

“Where would you go?” I asked, one dripping boot upside down in my hand.

“Anywhere. No, the Grand Canyon. I’d go to the Grand Canyon. Ever been?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

A silence stretched between us. I got the impression Evan wanted to talk more, but didn’t. This conversation appeared to be over, and I tilted my chin down, frowning.

“So. Anyway. Four minutes is really long. Congratulations. I gotta go.”

I stripped off my socks and stuffed them into my boots. Walking home barefoot was going to suck, but not as much as squelching home in heavy, sodden Doc Martens. Next time, I bike it. But was there going to be a next time?

Evan said nothing and I thought he’d continue to say nothing, but as I turned to go, he glided to the edge of the pool and rested his arms on the concrete.

“Thanks for saving me, Jo.”

I stopped, jolted by his choice of words. “I didn’t save you. You weren’t drowning.”

“True. But you didn’t know that.”

I turned and looked at him again. His smile was back. Words ordered themselves in my mind the way they did when I was contemplating a new poem.

A smile with a burden: sad, hopeful, heartbreaking.

I shut that train of thought down, pronto. No poems, no fluff. Going soft over a cute guy with a sad smile was not in the schematics.

“Yeah, whatever,” I said finally, the two most unpoetic words in the English language.