Dark Water (6 page)

“So I guess I’ll see you later,” I said.

“We could do Pedro’s,” Hickey said. “I’ve got, like, this gift certificate.”

Fallbrook High doesn’t have an open campus, so I said, “But we’re not allowed to do that”—the sort of nerdy remark I’d been making since the age of about four.

“Hickey is,” Greenie said. “He’s eighteen, so he’s got a pass.”

“He does, but we don’t.” This, too, is the sort of thing I’ve
been pointing out since the age of four. But Greenie just gave me a pained look, so I followed her to Hickey’s car, and nobody saw us.

The taco stand was maybe five minutes away, right on Main Street, an old white cube of a building that my mom says was a
darling
little hamburger and ice cream stand back when Fallbrook was more like downtown Disney. It was my favorite place to eat, and I always ordered the shrimp burrito and horchata, a yummy milk and cinnamon drink. “I’ll pay you back,” I told Hickey after we shouted our orders in the general direction of the outdoor menu.

“No need,” he said. His arms were freckled, and he jiggled the gearshift slightly as we idled at the drive-up window, watching a Hispanic woman fold a tortilla like you’d wrap a newborn baby.

“Let’s go eat at the river,” Greenie said as soon as Hickey handed over his gift certificate and took three paper bags.

“There isn’t time,” I said immediately.

“We only have two classes after lunch,” Greenie said back, un-Greenie-like.

There was a truck full of construction workers behind us now, waiting with hostile expressions. “Right or left?” Hickey asked.

Left was back to art class and the return to compliance, provided nobody asked us what we were doing off campus.

Right was the river. Sun glinted on the hood of Hickey’s car.

“Right!” Greenie said gleefully, and without asking for my vote, her Hickeyman turned right, speeding us past the fake
Irish pub, the Art and Cultural Center, the Mission Theater, the Mexican market, the stoplight, and the brown stucco apartments with sheets draped over the windows.

“You recall that my mother is a sub, right?” I said. “I’m going to get in gigantic, life-threatening trouble, Greenie. So are you, if you care.”

“We’ll be back before the end of school,” Greenie said. “Relax, you big stress cow. You love the river!”

“But I’ll be marked absent in art. They’ll notice right away what’s happened.”

“I worked as an aide in the attendance office last semester,” Greenie said, poking her straw decisively into her horchata. “They aren’t always totally on the ball, I promise. And you know who happens to be working as an aide this period?” She gave me a look I didn’t find at all comforting. “Paula Menard. Who totally owes me one.”

I adjusted to the situation the way I suppose people adjust to being on a hijacked plane. “So, Hickey,” I said, feeling miserable and a little sick. “What’s up with the name?”

“You’d have to ask my great-great-granddaddy, I guess.” He shifted into gear and went faster than any intelligent person would drive on the tight sunlit curves. Huge oak and sycamore trees grow beside the road to De Luz, and the gullies are full of wild cucumber leaves. It was like traveling, much too quickly, down the green-glass tube of a waterslide.

“Hickey’s his last name, dummy,” Greenie said with what I guess was an affectionate tone. Her loyalty was with Hickey now. I could feel it.

“What’s your first name, then?” I asked, clutching the seats on every curve.

“You won’t believe it,” Greenie said, delighted with what she knew and I didn’t. She sucked horchata through her straw. “Try to guess his name.”

“Rumpelstiltskin.”

“Ha, ha. Guess again.”

“How am I going to guess his name?” I had gone from being panicked about missing school to being annoyed at how tightly I had to clutch the back of Greenie’s seat.

“It starts with O,” Greenie said.

“Ollie. Oral.”

“Oral Hickey! That would be hysterical! But no,” Greenie said. “Three wrong, none right.”

I was stumped, also carsick. I couldn’t think of any other
O
names. Mr. Hickey downshifted with one freckled arm to take the right fork to De Luz. We were less than a mile from the trailhead if we didn’t die in a fiery crash.

“What if a police officer sees us out here on a school day?” I couldn’t help asking. “Won’t they know we’re truant?”

“Truant,” Hickey repeated in a slightly mocking voice. Hooted, actually. “Where I come from, we just call it ‘ditching.’ ”

“Guess his name,” Greenie urged me. Her perfectly brown, perfectly smooth legs were pressed together underneath her denim miniskirt, which, like most things that Greenie wore nowadays, was millimeters from a dress code violation.

“Ohm,” I said.

“Now you’re not even saying names. Four wrong, none
right.” She paused theatrically, then couldn’t wait anymore. “It’s
Ormand,
” Greenie said, dragging it out for full appreciation. “Isn’t that the closest you’ve ever come, in the flesh, to that guy who’s maybe a man, maybe a woman—Orlando?”

Ms. Grant was a big Virginia Woolf fan.

“Watch the comparisons to the half-women types,” Hickey said, though he didn’t sound that annoyed. He was flying into the dirt parking lot, sending up beige plumes and sprays of white gravel. A big middle-aged guy in a baseball cap was removing the harness from his horse beside a dust-streaked trailer, and I could tell he was making a mental note of the rules we were breaking. When Hickey and Greenie got out of the car, they didn’t walk toward the trail I always took with Robby, which was through a yellow stile about twenty yards from the car. Instead, Hickey pushed his burrito into a little white cooler that had been sitting beside my feet the whole time and headed with Greenie toward the road, which they then started to cross.

“Where’re you going?” I called.

“There’s a swimming hole over on this side,” she yelled back. “Hickey showed me.”

Except for the horse owner we were alone out there. The hills were covered with purple wildflowers and the green shrubs I didn’t know the names of then but can now rattle off like a rosary. The willows in the riverbed were doing that thing I loved, releasing their downy seeds like sideways floating snow. Greenie didn’t slow down but kept right on crossing the street, one hand entwined with Ormand Hickey’s.

I didn’t have a plan, so I followed. I slogged after them through deep sand and powdery dust and oak shade to a steep, crumbling bank where a creek joined the river and made a near U-turn. The water was deep but opaque and khaki-colored in the shade, sky blue in the sun. Reeds clogged the currents that flowed away from us and disappeared around another sharp bend. I felt like I’d reached a foreign river, one where I wouldn’t be able to find my way.

Greenie and Hickey kicked their shoes off and sat down in the warm sunshine, and that’s when I learned that what Hickey was carrying in his square white cooler was not just his Pedro’s burrito but a six-pack of Budweiser. Cold. Pre-purchased. Ready for the not-spontaneous spontaneous outing. I tried to get Greenie’s eyes on mine when he snapped a beer out of its plastic bracelet and handed it to her, but Greenie didn’t meet my eyes as she casually popped the metal tab. She took a sip, screwed the bottom of the can into the sand so it wouldn’t tip over, and began to unwrap her taco like we were all still in Normal World.

I heard the swish of a car on the road. The breeze was soft and sweet-smelling, neither too hot nor too cold. I took out my burrito and though I’m not proud of it, I ate with my usual gusto. The sauce dripped like it always did into the folds of my hands, and like always I didn’t have quite enough napkins to get clean. I sucked down in a few gulps the cold, sweet horchata. It was like if I finished the food, I could go back and nothing bad would happen. No one would know.

But I finished, and we were still there. My shoes sank into white sand by the khaki water. I balled up the foil wrapping and stuffed it into the paper bag, which I then shoved into my backpack. I tried walking in the direction of the current, and for a minute the glittery water had its old charm. Nubby tadpoles flitted away from my shadow and bright green moss trailed like hair from a piece of driftwood, but when I tried to follow the river around the next curve, I could go barely fifty yards. There was no trail on this side, just reeds and bleached piles of sand and trash—more trash than I’d ever seen on what I considered the real river. The reeds trapped cups, plastic bottles, broken glass, McDonald’s wrappers, straws, beer cans, bottle caps, and cigarette stubs. A diaper had been folded into a bundle and left on a shoal like artificial pastry. It disgusted me enough to make me walk back to where Hickey and Greenie were holding hands.

“So what’s up with your eyes?” Hickey asked, looking right into them. I was aware this was how I’d framed the question about his name a few minutes ago, so I shouldn’t have been offended, but I was.

“I have magic powers,” I said.

“Really? What kind?” He flipped his head the way you have to if your bangs are always in your eyes.

“One eye’s normal,” I said. “It sees the present. The other eye sees the future.”

“Cool,” he said, humoring me. He took a drink of beer, leaned back on the sand, and asked, “Which is which?”

“Blue sees you here, brown sees where you’re going to wind up.”

He didn’t look amused anymore. He could tell I was being snotty.

“In case you’re wondering what you see in the background of that future shot,” he said, “the yacht called
I Told You So
is mine.”

Hickey had clearly been spending too much time reading the poster in Mr. Fresno’s room that showed the rewards of a higher education as a mansion with a Ferrari parked out front.

“Good,” I said. “I think I’ll take a little walk on the other trail if you guys don’t mind. The river’s nicer over there.”

“Don’t you want to fish?” Greenie asked, a little too incredulously, I thought, considering we’d never, ever gone fishing together. “Hickey has a net in the car!”

“Nah, I feel like walking,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” Greenie said, her sunglasses obscuring her eyes.

I darted back up the bank, through the sand, and across the road, past Hickey’s car, past the tire tracks left behind when the horse trailer was pulled away, over the yellow stile thingy, and along the narrow, shadowy, unlittered path, which on this side was overhung with oak and willow and white-limbed sycamore. Tiny flowers bobbed slightly in the breeze. Dragonflies the color of blood hovered and then zoomed away in the direction of water. I could hear the river now like a giant draining bathtub. The farther I went from Greenie and her strange new boyfriend, the better I felt, so I ran for a while. I
ran until the path took a sharp turn up into some boulders and I picked my way, goatlike, to the next part of the trail, glad that I had no textbooks in my backpack to weigh me down. Huge trees lay where they had fallen, and a lone duck floated on the water.

I reached the place where I normally left the shady trail for the open sun of the water and found a boulder to sit on. I wanted to do this for a good hour, possibly the rest of my life. I had to think, though, of what Greenie and Hickey would do when they’d finished drinking those beers. Would they start swimming? Necking and fabricating? (If you ask a computer to tell you the French translation for “making love,” you get “
fabrication de l’amour,
” which is what Robby and I had called sex ever since:
fabricating.)

Or maybe Hickey and Greenie would just go back to school and leave me here, unless Greenie made him walk with her along the trail, calling for me like I was a lost dog until Greenie started to worry that I’d been picked up by a serial killer, so she would call the police and give a description of my yellow hooded sweatshirt, my hoop earrings, and my jeans.

At the same moment that I decided to call Greenie and tell her I would just walk all the way home along the river, something I’d wanted to try for a long time anyway, my phone rang inside my yellow pocket. I looked at it first, afraid it was my father again or my mother standing in the attendance office, her face red with the humiliation of having a delinquent child, but it was Greenie.

“Done walking?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Done drinking?” I shouldn’t have said anything. That’s the way it is with friends and family. If you insist on criticizing them, they want to get rid of you.

“It was just one beer, Miss Priss. I told Hickey we ought to head back, anyway. Get there while Paula Menard can still slip us a tardy pass. Otherwise we’ll have to go to Thursday school. Or Saturday school. Or maybe even Sunday school.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Meet you at the car, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, but it came to me that I could stay there in the sunshine, on a rock, on the river, without Greenie or Hickey or anyone to disturb me. I knew my mother had told all of my teachers that my father had left. She’d made a point of it after I flunked a chemistry test. “Why did you have to tell everybody?” I asked at the time. But now I saw that I had a get-out-of-jail-free card. If I explained that my father had called and invited me to his love nest in Paris, my mother would write me an excuse note, I was pretty sure, and I was also sure my teachers would accept it.

“You know what?” I said to Greenie. “I think I’m just going to stay.”

“What?”

“I need to think about some stuff. My dad called.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” she said. “But call me later. I don’t want to worry that a mountain lion is digesting you.”

I told her I’d call. Then I dialed my mother’s cell phone,
which I knew she turned off during the day so it wouldn’t ring during her classes, and I left a message about being fine, just being on a walk, working some things out that Dad said that morning, and I’d talk to her later. Then I did something I almost never do outside of school: I turned my phone off.

I
stood in the river up to my knees and let the water flow soft and cold around me until I felt, for just a second, that I was moving and the water was still. Then I put my shoes back on and hiked farther along the trail than I’d ever gone and I could see no one, no houses, no power lines, even. Suddenly I was in the wilderness instead of five miles from home. I stopped to breathe a little and looked across the river, where instead of reeds and willow bushes a thicket of oaks and sycamores grew.