The Lifeboat Clique (17 page)

“I'm not drunk!” I insisted, hearing my own voice slurring the words and confirming that I was, indeed, a tiny bit off my sobriety. “I was just drinking this punch. . . .”

“So you're saying Abigail planned this party, and you knew nothing about it?”

I sighed. Even in my drunken, angry, humiliated state I could not rat out my best friend. “It was both of us,” I admitted.

She braked for the red light at Sunset. “I will never trust you again.”

“Well, guess what, Mom? It doesn't matter, because I'm not gonna ever go anywhere again because Abigail has turned into a BITCH and that means, ESHENSUELLY, that I have no friends!”

She handed me a Kleenex and kept driving. “Don't say ‘bitch,'” she said. “And I have no idea what the other word you're trying to say is.”

“I AM INNOCHENT!” I was making a great effort to control my enunciation.

“You are not innocent. You deliberately took advantage
of my vulnerability and lied to me to get out of the house.”

“Eshuenshually,” I admitted.

“You are grounded, and I am extremely disappointed in you,” she said, her voice close to tears. “I thought I could trust at least one person in the world, but apparently that's not true.”

The sound of her weepy voice made me desperate to win her forgiveness, and my rat genes kicked in. And I reversed my earlier loyalty and threw Abigail under the bus. “Look, you should have seen Abigail! All drunk and staggering around and falling on the floor! She was a mess! And I was trying to help her. And they shoved me out of the party. Like physically shoved me!”

I began to cry at the humiliation of it all.

My mother sighed. “That poor girl,” she said, directing all her pity at Abigail and ignoring her own daughter's tears. “It's not hard to believe she's gone off the straight and narrow, what with the role model she has.” There was considerable bitterness in my mother's voice. The divorce papers had finally come the week before, and she'd been extra-grim all week.

“Poor Abigail?” I echoed. “How about poor me?”

“Sometimes, Denver,” my mother said, “you are your own worst enemy.”

SUNDAY WAS GREAT,
just great. I had my first real hangover, Abigail didn't call to apologize, the kiss by the pool was a fading memory, and my mother wasn't talking to me. I had no idea of the aftermath of the party, if the house was wrecked or the police came. All I knew was that the friend I thought I had was proving to be an entirely different person.

That afternoon I got a text from Quinn. I have no idea how she even got my number, but there it was.

What happened to you at the party? Heard you had a fight with Abigail? True? I was in the back yard, I think. Kind of blotto at that point.

Nursing my hangover, feeling sorry for myself, my indifferent cat by my side, I poured my soul into a megatext that went on forever.

Well, hey, Quinn. Got to tell you Abigail was pretty awful to me. She pretty much bossed me around from the start of the party. I thought it was something fun we were going to throw together. Turns out she maybe just wanted me there to videotape. She was really drunk and was dancing with this other girl and fell on the floor and I started filming her, just to show her the next day what an ass she was making of herself, in case she
didn't believe me. Anyway, she ended up telling me to leave and a bunch of girls, led by Sienna Martin, threw me out. Just threw me out of my own party. So anyway, today kind of sucks. Thanks for listening.

I hit Send and then wondered if I'd said too much. After all, Quinn was buddies with Abigail. All I needed was to alienate the only other girl in school who talked to me. But a few minutes later the reply appeared.

OMG! That's terrible, Denver! Are you ok? I can't believe she did that. And after all that filming you did! Let me know if you want to talk.

Thanks, Quinn,
I wrote, feeling better.

A few minutes later another text appeared.

Hey. Mind if I see that footage you took of Abigail drunk? Just curious if it's as bad as you say.

I quickly texted back.

Oh, it is! But I probably shouldn't show you. I'm guessing she wouldn't like that.

But Quinn assured me:

Just send me a tiny bit of it. I'll delete it!
:)

I went back into my files. There was Abigail, rolling drunk on the floor, caterwauling “Yee-haw!” in her Texas twang. It really was kind of funny, in a super-embarrassing kind of way. I texted back:

Nah!
Can't do it. But it is pretty funny!

Immediately her answer appeared.

Come on, Denver, now you've got to show me! What's the harm?

I looked at Sonny Boy. “What's the harm?” I asked him.

As usual, he offered no advice. He neither shook his sleek, pelted head slowly, nor shrieked a warning, nor threw his entitled, ten-pound body over my keyboard to stop me from downloading that video onto my phone.

AT SCHOOL ON MONDAY MORNING, I DECIDED TO KEEP A
low profile and let Abigail find me to apologize. I was at my locker after fifth period when Abigail approached me. I saw her familiar gait and kept looking straight into my locker, still deeply hurt but ready to accept her apology and put that terrible night behind me. I had a bruise on my face, no doubt gotten in the struggle to the doorway, and I hoped she'd see it clearly. I felt her drift up next to me.

“You bitch,” she whispered.

I turned to her, shocked. Abigail's eyes were hard and glinted with tears. Her face was red.

“What are you talking about?”

“The video! It's all over the web! It's
everywhere.
”

I stared at her. “It is?”

“What, do you live
under a rock
?”

More students had come up to join the circle around her.

“Listen, I can explain. I just sent Quinn a little clip because she asked . . .”

“That little clip,” Abigail shouted, “is on YouTube right now with two million views!”

I felt the blood drain from my face. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. “Oh, my God,' I whispered. “I never meant to—”

Abigail tackled me, knocking the breath out of me as we both fell to the floor. Before I could protect myself, she punched me in the face, the blow landing just under my eye. I grabbed on to her kinky hair and pulled as hard as I could. Abigail's face was right in mine, her eyes crazy with rage. The other students clapped and cheered.

Suddenly strong hands were pulling us apart. It was Mr. Godwin, the vice principal, and Mr. Brodeur, the ancient history teacher.

“Girls,” said Mr. Brodeur, “this is no way for ladies to act!”

I COULD ONLY
be a witness as Abigail's life—and mine—crashed and burned. I couldn't sleep that night, obsessed by how fast the numbers grew on YouTube. I Googled “Abigail Kenner Drunk” and twenty thousand items came up. She was internet famous—or infamous, as it were.

“What in the world made you do that to your friend?” my mother asked.

“It wasn't me! I just sent the video to Quinn.”

“And she probably sent it to someone, and they probably sent it to someone, and on and on and on. What were you thinking? You know how kids are.”

“Is this a good time to tell you I've got detention all week for fighting?”

She sighed. “I don't need this in my life right now, Denver.”

I had to be nice to my mom because she had the dreadful task of ringing up my father and making arrangements to get my purse and phone back from Abigail's house. “No, Denver doesn't want to talk to you about it,” I heard her say into the phone. “Just drop them off, please.” She retreated to Robert Pathway and her own hurt world, where her husband turned out to be a dirty dog and her daughter a drunk liar who couldn't be trusted.

The next day brought more bad news. The junior varsity soccer team had a strict no-drinking policy, and since
Abigail had been caught dead to rights rolling drunk as a skunk on the floor of her house, she had to turn in her uniform. She was no longer a soccer player. No longer a star.

Her dream was dead. And so was our friendship. Abigail never spoke to me again until the night of the Malibu party and the great tsunami.

FOR THE FIRST
few months, Abigail laid low. She was the laughingstock of the school, and people stopped talking and stared at her when she passed. Then, strangely, unaccountably, Abigail's internet fame led to social acceptance, and then dominance. She started hanging out with the cool kids like Madison and Hayley, and even Sienna, who seemed to finally accept her and welcome her into her exclusive Bitch Coven. Soon enough she was sitting at the popular kids' table, not just one of them, but their leader.

And me—well, I was the class traitor. The snitch who got the soccer star thrown off the team and the sole person responsible for them losing the championship.

I spent the rest of my sophomore year alone and moody, not talking to my father, barely talking to my mother, and knowing everyone at school was talking behind my back. And whenever traitorous Quinn saw me in the hallway, she went out of her way to avoid me.

By our junior year, Abigail had risen to the party girl of the school. She didn't even try out for soccer again. It was as though she'd just given up on the dream after her countless hours of practice. I have to say, I was disappointed in her, even from afar. I had never thought of Abigail as a quitter of anything. Not soccer, not friendship. I hoped she still at least hated her little brother.

People gradually forgot about Abigail's internet story. A football player got an honor student pregnant, and that news pushed Abigail Kenner, Hot Drunken Mess, and Denver Reynolds, Terrible Friend, right off the front page. I suppose I could have found other friends, maybe joined some clubs or something, but my heart wasn't in it.

I had decided to be a lone wolf. Lone wolves are rarely seen getting hurt or not being invited to parties. They simply keep to themselves and mind their own business, and they keep a dignified air about them, and they eat alone in the cafeteria, fake mashed potatoes flecking their whiskers.

All I wanted to do was get through high school. Until that day when Croix smiled at me just when the tectonic plates were planning their assault on the western shore and the world, as I knew it, prepared for its end.

THE NEW SUPPLY OF WATER ALLOWED US TO KEEP GOING, LIVING
and breathing and hoping for rescue. We saw several freighters pass in the distance and signaled frantically, but they kept chugging along until they disappeared out of sight.

We had stopped talking about the tsunami. It felt like a phantasm that lived only on land, and land was something sliding from our consciousness. The dead had already been counted, I was sure. The missing chalked up as dead. The twenty-four-hour news cycle talking about poor California would instead be mourning poor Thailand or Japan or Turkey or whatever country had gotten its attention with their body count. Maybe by now we were old news.

I know I was not old news to my mother. I imagined her deep in mourning, giving up on life, quitting, walking around in her robe and bursting into sudden tears, grabbing up Sonny Boy's limp, uncaring body to weep into, misinterpreting his desire to sleep all day on my pillow as his young soul grieving, forgetting that what he routinely did in normal times was sleep all day on my pillow. Taking all her Robert Pathway books and throwing them into the fire and lighting a match, all that positivity blackening and curling. My mother's pain hurt me. Though I couldn't see or hear it, I knew she was suffering somewhere.

I wanted my best friend with me in this terrible time. But she was not. She was merely in the same boat. You'd think we would have talked by now, made up finally, forgiven each other. I could tell by the expression on her face that she just wanted to keep pretending I was invisible. It was maddening. It was unfair.

But there were more pressing things I had to worry about. Now that we had slaked our thirst, our hunger was growing ferocious. We had last eaten over a week ago, and I had to do something. No birds ever swooped low enough to catch. And the fish that swarmed in taunting groups around the boat were too fast for me, even though I took off my shirt and tried to use it like a net.

I found the remnants of my bra and fashioned the
remaining underwire into another fishhook and then threaded a few of the twisted rope strands through it as a line. The problem was, we had no bait. I tried using bits of passing seaweed, but it had no affect. I looked around the boat. Sienna and Abigail slept, an increasingly common habit to all of us, and Hayley kept watch, using her signal mirror. She was lost in her own world, no doubt thinking of Trevor, the boy she had loved so briefly and with such secrecy. Her eyes were hollow, her face thin. Her hair a tangled mess. The only artifact left from the days of high school glamour, other than her Fendi purse, was her single dangly earring, still catching the light in dazzling glints.

I stared at it, an idea slowly forming in my head. I approached her.

“Hayley,” I said, “I need you to do something for me.”

She kept flashing her mirror. “What do you need?” she murmured.

“I need you to let me use that earring.”

She finally lowered the mirror and looked at me. “Why?” she asked. Gone was the Hayley who talked in run-on sentences. Now her words were given up reluctantly, as if each one had been sewn into her clothes.

“I have an idea to use it as a lure. Maybe something will strike at it.”

She nodded and gazed back at the water.

“Hayley?”

“Yes.”

“Can I have your earring?”

“Okay.”

She took it off and handed it to me. Without the earring, she seemed naked, somehow. I held the earring carefully.

“You always have such good ideas,” she said wistfully.

“We're going to survive this, Hayley.”

“But Trevor's not.”

“No, he's not.”

“I suppose I deserve this.”

“No one deserves this,” I said. She didn't answer me. I took the sparkly earring and carefully folded the earpiece until it had closed in a tiny circle. I slid the earring onto the hook and lowered the contraption over the side of the boat and into the water, wrapping the extra line around my hand.

I waited, alone with my task, jiggling the lure up and down, imagining it glittering in the ocean depths and hoping it would lure some fish who might not even be hungry but simply curious or just dazzled by the strangeness of it.

“Come on, fish,” I breathed. “Come on come on come on.”

The minutes passed, but I didn't give up. I couldn't.
This was our last chance. My wrist grew tired and my eyelids heavy. Out of nowhere, I felt a tug, then another, then something angry and struggling in the depths of the sea.

A fish was on the line.

“I got one! I got one!” I screamed. Hayley came over, and Abigail and Sienna woke up.

The battle was on. I gritted my teeth, but I didn't let go of the rope. I was terrified that the line would break any minute, so heavy and powerful did that fish feel, but I kept on moving backward as the rope quivered and jerked.

“Help me!” I commanded, and all four girls pulled together, so little strength left among us. But we pulled and pulled and pulled, and finally a wet fishy head with bold, flat eyes appeared over the rail, and suddenly the beast was flopping around the deck and we pounced on it, holding it down.

There it was, food food food, and Trevor's pocketknife was open and in my hand, and I was stabbing that fish, gutting it, cutting it into pieces, and then we devoured it, tearing into the raw flesh. We couldn't stop ourselves. We were ravenous animals shut out of the cafeteria of life for so many days, and now we had burst through the doors. When at last we were finished, we lay exhausted, fish blood all over us and fish parts scattered all around. We
were so exhausted we couldn't speak for a while.

We stared at one another's bloody faces, and I found myself looking at Abigail. She looked away, of course, even though I had given her the gift of food and possibly had saved her life. Over the last few days, she had gone from insulting me to simply ignoring me, which I found suddenly intolerable. Anger welled up in me, and I couldn't help myself but let her have it.

“A bit of trivia,” I began.

The other three looked at me.

“Abigail's mother is married to my father. Both of them left their spouses for each other.”

Abigail looked startled. “Stop it, Denver.”

“Destroyed both families,” I continued. “
Boom
.”

“Oh, my God,” Hayley gasped. “Is that true?”

“Yes, it's true, all right,” I said, nodding. “And I suppose my father and her mother are very happy together. Hard to know, because I never hear any news.”

“Shut up.” Abigail's voice had a hard edge to it.

“You'd think we'd still be best friends,” I added. “Being related and all. I mean, she's my stepsister, sort of, isn't she?”

“You know why you're not best friends anymore,” Sienna said. “Everyone knows why.”

I was ready to talk about this. Newly restored by protein, covered with fish blood, angry and hurt as if it had just happened. The ocean was my forum. And I had the floor. “Okay, right, I'm a traitor and a snitch. I got Abigail thrown off the soccer team, and I ruined her life.”

“Exactly,” said Abigail.

“No! You know what, Abigail? YOU got yourself thrown off the soccer team.”

“Bullshit!” she said as fish-stained and angry as me. “You're the one who filmed me all drunk and sloppy, and you're the one who spread it around the world! I invited you to my party, and that was my thanks!”

“I was trying to PROTECT YOU!” I screamed. “No one else even cared that you were making a fool of yourself! I just took the video to show you how stupid you looked and to keep you from doing it again. It was your pal
Quinn
who said she'd keep it to herself and didn't!”

Hayley looked anxious. “Let's not fight, okay?” she asked. “It was a long time ago and everyone's forgotten all about it and—”

“Nothing would have happened,” Abigail snarled, looking at me with hatred in her eyes, “if you hadn't filmed me drunk to start with. And you know why you did it? 'Cause you were jealous. Jealous because I was a soccer star and I was making friends and having parties and you were
just a nobody with no goals and no life and you still are.”

The boat was silent.

Some surfacing dolphin would have been amazed that girls in such dire circumstances could be arguing about something that had happened over a year ago back on the dry land they might never see again, but neither one of us cared. I got to my feet and so did she and we faced each other, our faces still flecked with blood from our frenzied raw meal. Abigail and I were breathing hard, inches from beating each other with the last of our strength.

“Well, you know what?” I said at last. “I'd rather be a nobody than a drunken, whiny quitter who just blows off the dream she's worked so hard for. You could have tried out for the soccer team again this year, maybe even the varsity soccer team. But you'd rather just trash people's houses and hang around with a bunch of girls you used to hate and pretend you're better than everyone else. You know what? The Abigail I knew would think you were a
total asshole
.”

Abigail looked a bit taken aback. But I wasn't done

“You know what your problem is, Abigail?” I said. “You never take responsibility for anything. Nothing is ever your fault. Well, listen, I may have filmed you and sent a clip to Quinn, and that was a mistake. But you had the party, and you got yourself drunk. You screwed your
own dream, not me. You just love playing the victim. Well, wait until we get back to land, and you and your mother can go sit in a sweat lodge in Arizona together and talk about how people fail you with their fences and their texts.”

Abigail looked positively murderous now. She raised a bloody fist.

“Go ahead,” I told her. “Hit me.”

“Hey,” Hayley pleaded. Her voice was full of pain. “We're probably going to die out here. Can't we all be friends? Can't we do that?”

“No!” Abigail and I both snarled, and for once we were in agreement.

A FIGHT LIKE
that doesn't make for a pleasant castaway experience. We all said very little as we cleaned the blood from the deck and saved the organs of the fish to use as bait. That night, as we were all preparing for troubled sleep, I felt a soft hand on my arm and looked over to see Hayley's face inches from mine.

“I'm sorry. About your dad and about Abigail. I know you probably didn't mean to get her into so much trouble. And if it makes you feel any better, none of the popular kids really know Abigail. She kind of lives in her own
little world. She's like one of those Malibu properties with no public beach access.”

Hayley was being nice. And had made a successful metaphor.

Death was surely near.