What Happens Now(7)

It was early, the opening day crowd beginning to trickle in. I led Danielle to a nice spot under a tree far from last year’s. As far as I could possibly get from last year’s. Then I did a quick casing of the joint to confirm that nobody I knew was here yet, and that nobody else of particular interest—oh, for instance, nobody I’d had boring-devastating dreams about—had shown up either.

I prayed for him to come. I prayed for him not to come.

Danielle was ankle-deep in the water before I could even get the blanket spread out. “It’s so freezing ice-cold I’m gonna die!” she yelled. “Come in with me!”

“Wow, you really know how to sell it.”

“We’ll play whatever you want. Mermaids, dolphins. Sea monkeys!”

“Tempting. But I didn’t wear my suit today.”

Dani scanned my regulation tank top and black jersey skirt with distaste. Maybe that’s really when you become one of the grown-ups. You come to the lake and don’t even bring a damn suit.

“You’re not leaving those on, are you?” Danielle asked, pointing at my feet.

Oh. I’d forgotten about my boots. I’d worn them every day of the two months since I’d bought them and they didn’t even feel like footwear anymore. They were just soft purple leather perfectly molded around all the stuff at the bottom of my legs. Like I was a doll and someone had painted them on. Actually, that doll existed. I had two versions of it at home, one of them mint in box.

“They’re my Satina Galt boots,” I said. “You know I wear them everywhere.”

Danielle made a face. Which was really rich, coming from a child who often wore the same outfit three days straight, only taking it off for a mandatory change of underpants.

Satina Galt was the character who made Silver Arrow what it was, to me. The boots made me feel strong. They made me feel like something Possible. Maybe if I wore them long enough, I would actually be that something. My mother understood the boots. She never let on, but I could tell by the way she looked at them sometimes, like they were a memory of a memory. Occasionally, she looked at me that way, too.

Something over my shoulder caught Danielle’s eye and her face lit up. “Oh! Madison’s here!”

I turned to see a girl I recognized from Dani’s class, and the kids ran to each other, hugging and squealing like they hadn’t spent seven hours at school together the day before.

When does that stop? I thought. When you’re not afraid to claim your friends, to clasp them to your chest and shout to the world, Mine! When you know for sure, pinkie promise, that the way it is now is the way it will always be.

Kendall and I hadn’t hung out in weeks. We’d both been so busy, of course. She had the special year-end edition of the school newspaper and already started work at Scoop-N-Putt. I had Dani and a job at Richard’s art supply store and a really packed schedule of hanging out alone in my room, lurking on Silver Arrow fansites.

It stung, to watch the little girls now.

I located and approached Madison’s mother: huge sunglasses, stylish beach hat, paperback in hand.

“Hi,” she said, grinning. “How are you?”

“Good. How are you?”

“I’m fine, thanks. I actually meant, how are you? You look like you’re doing really well.”

I smiled and said, “Thank you.”

I said it because I lived in a small town, and people don’t want good stories to end, and everyone thinks they know a little bit about depression, and because these were just a few of the terms I unknowingly agreed to that night over a year earlier.

“I have to go to the restroom. Do you mind keeping an eye on Dani for a few minutes?”

“Of course not, sweetie. She’s lucky to have you.”

Yes, she is, I thought as I walked toward the restroom building, my head swimming. I miss Kendall. There was still gossip about me.

Inside, the cool and the dark and the silence and the quick bliss of being unseen.

I went into an empty stall and jiggled the lock shut. You look like you’re doing really well. What exactly does that look like? What would not-doing-well look like? Because I had once been not-doing-well for a long time and nobody noticed at all.

Turns out, I wasn’t completely alone in the bathroom. I could hear someone in the next stall going, too. It was one of those awkward situations where you find yourself in sync with a stranger.

After I was finished (first!), I stepped out of the stall to wash my hands. I heard the other stall door open and glanced up into the mirror.

“Am I in the wrong bathroom?” asked Camden Armstrong. Like it was simply an intellectual question.

This is where I wondered if I was having a hallucination.

Then in the mirror, I could see a urinal on the wall behind me.

And this is where I panicked.

“Um, no,” I managed to say. “Apparently, I am. Sorry!”

I ducked my head and walked quickly past him out the door. I’m not sure what ducking my head was going to accomplish, but as I mentioned: the panic.

No. No, no. Pleasetellmethatdidnotjusthappen. I stumbled across the beach, my feet not going where I wanted them to go, trying and failing to get away from my own mortifying self.

Once I got back to my blanket, I waved at Madison’s mom and she waved back. The two girls were swimming nearby. I grabbed my phone and texted Kendall with quivering thumbs.