As much as I wanted to go up and get in the hot tub, it seemed better to wait until everyone else was already in, their parts mostly submerged. I climbed a couple of stairs and watched them. Ty was in the tub, laughing and splashing Althea London, who had one nipple pierced. Isabel got in next to Ty, and Sage next to her. Someone passed beers around. I was seeing the secret world of cool older people, the world Sage slipped off into every weekend while I stayed at home with my fish or made cookies with the sisters Padmanabhan. I took a breath and looked up at the stars. It was November. Orion was bending his bow in the sky above us.
“Hey, Maddy,” Isabel called from the hot tub. “Where are you?”
I climbed the stairs and headed for the Jacuzzi as if this were the kind of thing I did all the time. Isabel moved over to make space for me, and I got in. Our thighs pressed together under the water, her skin slick-smooth. The water steamed and rolled and burbled around us. Ty Thibodeaux handed me a beer, and I sank down in the water up to my neck and drank. The beer was bitter and bready and cold. I thought maybe I could develop a taste for it if I tried.
There was some talk about people at school, kids I’d seen but never spoken to. Someone had gotten a tattoo gun from his cousin in New York; someone else had thrown up in Calculus class from eating pot brownies. I laughed along with everyone, as if the people they were talking about were friends of mine. After a while, when I was feeling braver, I told a story of my own: Last week a wiener dog had run into our gym class and peed on a rack of basketballs before anyone could stop him.
“I heard about that,” Isabel said. “I heard Miss Cortland freaked.”
“She completely freaked!” I said. Ty laughed and handed me another beer.
Then, as if he couldn’t stand that people were talking to me and acting like I belonged there, Sage had to start telling the story about my fifth birthday, the pool story. I tried to make him stop, but he wouldn’t. “She was drinking Sprite all morning,” he said. “Gallons of it. We only got to drink soda on our birthdays, because of our dad saying it would rot our teeth.” People were listening, lowering their beers and leaning forward so they could hear him over the bubbles. “We were on the pool deck,” he went on, “and she’s dancing around like she has to pee, and our mom’s like, ‘Maddy, do you have to go wee-wee?’ ”
“Shut up, Sage,” I said.
“No,” Sage said. “I’m just getting to the good part.” He winked at Ty Thibodeaux across the rolling water. “So I look in the pool five minutes later and there’s Maddy with this peaceful expression on her face. Our mom saw it too. She got everyone out of the pool in like five seconds flat. She made them go in and have cake. Everyone was like, ‘Why can’t we swim anymore?’ Meanwhile Maddy tried to act like she hadn’t done it. She still won’t admit it, will you, Maddy?” He poked me in the shoulder.
“So what?” Isabel said. “Little kids pee in the pool all the time.”
“I called her the Mad Pisser that whole summer,” Sage said.
“That story’s a lie,” I said, though probably everyone knew it wasn’t.
“You’d better not have too much to drink,” he said, grabbing my beer away and taking a sip. “The Mad Pisser might ride again.”
He wouldn’t let it rest. He kept poking me in the shoulder and saying, “Think you can hold it?” with me staring into the water and wishing he’d stop, until Isabel climbed out of the tub and stood there shivering in a towel, looking out at the empty backyard. When she started putting on her clothes Sage tried to stop her, but she pulled away and zipped her sweatshirt up.
“Why do you have to be such an asshole?” she said.
“It was funny,” Sage said, and looked at Ty. “Wasn’t it funny?”
“I don’t know, man,” Ty said, as if he didn’t want to take sides.
“It wasn’t funny,” Isabel said, pulling her jeans on.
Sage turned away and kicked a beer bottle off the deck, and I wondered whether we’d all just go home now. Part of me hoped we would. Then the next minute floodlights were flashing and a shrill alarm was screaming. The house security system had gone off. We hadn’t even known there was one. Althea London had triggered it when she tried to climb in through a window to use the bathroom.
Suddenly everyone was screaming and running around, elbowing one another as we tried to get our jeans and shoes and coats on. I was so scared I couldn’t even manage to put on my pants, and Isabel had to grab my hand and run us to the front of the house where her car was parked. We got in and she started the motor.
“What about Sage?” I said. In my side mirror I could see him coming around the side of the house, his shirt bunched against his crotch.
“He can find another ride,” Isabel said. Then she hit the gas, and we were off.
We tore out of the cul-de-sac at what must have been sixty miles an hour, windows down, Sonic Youth blaring from the tape player. “Woo-hoo!” Isabel screamed. Her hands were shaking as she held the steering wheel, and I couldn’t tell if it was because she was cold or because she was excited. I’d never seen anyone drive so fast. The night was cold and clear, the sky shot with stars, the bare trees whipping by. The vinyl car seat was like ice against my legs, and my teeth were clacking so hard I could feel it in the top of my skull. Isabel was singing along with the tape as we roared over those roads. Every now and then she’d look at me and grin.
“We can drive all the way to Chicago,” she said. “I feel like driving.”
I imagined the two of us walking down Michigan Avenue, parents three hundred miles away, hot dogs in our hands. “We’d be in such deep shit,” I said, and laughed.
“No, we wouldn’t,” she said. “I have an aunt there. She’s cool. We could stay with her tonight and come back tomorrow.”
“Chicago,” I said. “That’s crazy, Isabel.”
“Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s go right now.”
We turned in at Gettyswood Townhomes, a shortcut to US 23, and all at once I knew she was serious. I felt light-headed and frightened and almost in love with her. Together we would zip out along the open highway. We wouldn’t even call our parents until we got there, and God only knew what they would say. Sage would be so jealous he would spontaneously combust. Isabel laid on the gas, and as we came around the curve near the pond I felt the jolt of the curb and a sudden hollow rush in my chest and we were airborne.
The car hit the pond nose-first. The windshield crunched and everything was dark and water poured in through the open windows, so cold it erased every part of me it touched, and suddenly it was in my mouth with its pond-scum taste and I couldn’t breathe. I hardly knew what was happening. In the darkness I felt for Isabel, straining against my seat belt, and my hands brushed something warm and soft, but I couldn’t make my fingers hold on to anything. My lungs began to burn. I shrugged out of the seat belt and felt for the edge of the open window, pushing through, trying to kick up to where the moon wavered like a reflection of itself. I struggled through what seemed like thick black honey, broke the surface, breathed, swam to the edge, and crawled out onto the frozen bank. Kneeling on the wet grass I coughed out water, waiting to see Isabel come up. I screamed to her. The trees beside the pond clicked in the wind. On my left leg a widening cut ran black and hot with blood. I got up onto the numb blocks of my feet and ran toward the townhouses, toward a phone, shouting for help.
Now, four months later, Althea London sits on the edge of the loading dock, shooting me mean glances, blowing cigarette smoke at me like she’s trying to make me cough. I’d like to remind her that she was the genius who tripped the alarm. She has no idea what it was like between Isabel and me in the car, or what happened down under the water.
I crush the wet cigarette with the toe of my shoe and jump off the edge of the loading dock, six feet down, to land hard on hands and knees on the pavement, and then I am limping toward home.
Crime and punishment. That is the pattern between my brother Sage and me. A quiet private criminal justice system is what we’ve created, with Sage as judge, jury, jailer, and executioner. Our system has no checks and balances, and it allows multiple punishments for the same crime. If, in a real court, I’d been proven guilty of killing Isabel, I would have gotten my punishment and been left to live with it. In the world of Sage and me, however, I must pay and pay—even though Sage is guilty in some ways himself.
God only knows how he killed them, whether he fed them poison or put ice cubes in their water or something even worse, but when I get home from school I find eleven of my fighting fish dead, the Sage fish and the Isabel fish among them. They float on top of the water in their plastic containers, still and cold. My fish, the animals I raised from eggs. Their fins are limp, their mouths open, their little round eyes looking at nothing. Five experimental-group fish and six control-group ones. If he were smart he would have killed all the experimental ones, making me think I was somehow at fault. But I know whose stupid fault this is, from beginning to end.
Though I know it won’t help, I throw the dead fish into the aggression-trial tank and administer a few electric shocks. Nothing. It’s just as well. If they did wake up, they’d attack each other to death in three seconds flat. I scoop them out, put them all in an empty yogurt container, and snap the lid on. They weigh almost nothing. I take them to bed with me and wrap myself in the quilt. And though I don’t want to let myself cry, I do, because they’re dead beyond the reach of hope or science, and Sage is the one who did it, and no matter what I do to get back at him—burn his room, trash his car—he’ll just find a way to get me back worse.
That night, after a quiet dinner at which Sage does not appear and at which I pretend to my parents that nothing is wrong, I take the yogurt container and walk the mile to the pond, which isn’t even a real natural pond but an ornamental small lake near the east entrance of Gettyswood. I crouch in the grass near a fake dock and unwrap the fish and throw them into the water, one by one. It doesn’t take me long to realize how ridiculous I must look, hurling tiny fish into a pond. They float on top, dark shapes against the moonlit surface, and I know they will probably be eaten by birds or by other fish.
It’s the first time I’ve been to the pond since the accident. Things look almost the same as they did that night, the trees without leaves, the grass patchy and frozen. In the weeds beside me I find a piece of thick glass, blue at the edge, and I can’t help wondering if it belonged to the Toyota windshield. Though I know the car was dragged out months ago, I imagine it there beneath the surface of the water, Isabel still trapped inside. It’s impossible to believe how gone she is, how untouchable. She’s the only one who doesn’t have to know what it’s like here on Earth without her.
The next day I’m waiting for my dad to take me to school, thinking maybe I’ll tell him about the fish, but at the last moment Sage comes down with his car keys in hand. He looks exhausted after his long headache.
“I’ll drive,” he says, his voice scratchy and low.
“You sure?” our dad says.
Sage nods. I kiss our dad goodbye and follow Sage to the car. All the way to school he seems to be getting ready to say something to me. He keeps giving me a squinty look, as if he’s trying to figure out what I’m feeling, but I’m not about to let him know. I keep my face still as stone, just as he did when we were driving home from scuba class. School is not far from our house. We get there before he manages to talk.
“See you at three?” he says as we climb out.
“Whatever,” I say.
I wait for him to say something else, to confess or apologize, but he just turns and lopes across the parking lot.
When we get home from school I find a blue plastic bag on my bed. I open it to find the swim fins and mask I’d admired at Arbor Valley Sea and Ski. There’s no note, but at the bottom of the bag I find a credit card receipt with my mother’s signature. The fins look even better in person than they did in the store window, the translucent blue plastic shot through with green swirls, the glass of the mask almost iridescent. I kick off my shoes and pull the fins on. They fit.
I am so happy, clomping around the room in my new Sea-Quest Thrusters, that it’s a fresh shock to pass by my experimental fish and see the empty containers among them. I take off the fins and mask and put them back in the bag. I pull the experimental notebook from my backpack. I have not recorded blood pressure data in two days, and it almost seems not worth continuing the experiment. Out of habit, though, I feed the fish their flakes and vitamins and take their blood pressures with the HP device. Everyone’s blood pressure is slightly high today. It makes me wonder if they can sense that something went wrong, that they themselves have only narrowly escaped disaster. As I sit down on the bed to record my results, there is a soft knock at the door. “Come in,” I say, hoping it will be Sage. Instead it is my mother.
“You look nice today,” I say, and she does, in black pants and a gray sweater and scarf. Her cheek feels cold when she kisses me, as if she has just come in from outside.
“How are they?” she says, looking into the plastic fish containers. Because she was the one who drove me to Detroit to buy the eggs, and helped me set up the experiment with its control and experimental groups, she knows something’s wrong when she sees the empty containers. She gives me a puzzled look.
“Some of the research subjects died,” I say.
“Why?” she says. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” I could tell her it was Sage’s doing, but I don’t. What happened is between him and me.
She has me walk her through the water temperatures and chemistry, the blood-pressure sensing mechanisms, the fish’s diet. Of course she can find nothing that would have caused the random deaths. She stands there looking into the containers as if an answer might emerge from the water. If it occurs to her that Sage might have killed the fish, she doesn’t say so.
“I’m sorry, Maddy,” she says finally. “You took such good care of them.”
I don’t respond, because I know I will cry if I try to speak.