The Telling (2 page)

The corner of Carolynn's mouth quirks up and she pets her poufy bun's imaginary stray hairs, her gold and white bangles tinkling. She turns to Becca and says, “If
she
wants to jump, it'll be
her
funeral.” Carolynn's the only one of the five who likes to remind Willa and me that we're not part of their
us
. We're add-ons. As temporary as the season itself. Maybe the sun will keep shining through the autumn, or maybe Willa and I will be iced out when classes start.

Here's a secret, though. Who cares? I never thought summers were boring before, and it's only this year, the first without Ben, that I need a distraction. I
need
the core.

Becca's green eyes turn up to me. “You sure it's a good idea, Lan?” She points in the direction she thinks the sun is setting—south. “Can you even see to dive?”

“I can. No worries,” I call. I don't agree with Willa when she says that Becca would miss sarcasm if it were an asteroid soaring straight at her. Becca just wants to think the best of her friends and refuses to see their scratchy edges. She lives down the street from me, and as a kid she'd come over to play while her parents fought. They were divorced by sixth grade and she stopped coming after. That's when I learned that girls weren't all automatically friends based on their shared girlness. Becca's picked up with me like there's no obvious gap in our friendship. Willa doesn't understand how I'm not bitter over Becca ditching me back then. If Ben were here, he wouldn't get it either. It probably should bother me, except Becca has this way of
tugging you in close and delivering a compliment on your eyebrows or the freckle above your top lip that makes you feel as pretty as you
know
she is.

I crave the giddiness that turns my knees, elbows, and knuckles to liquid around the core. I even feel weightless at the perceived peril of this stunt.

“Dive. Dive. Dive,” the boys chant, except it sounds more like, “Die. Die. Die,” by the time I tune back in.

Willa looks down her ski-slope nose at Carolynn, her chin jutting out with the result of a finger pointing. “If Lana jumps, you have to admit that girls can do everything guys can.”

Carolynn's hands move to tame fly-aways. “No, I'll admit that
Lana
can do anything a boy can.” She grins at her cleverness and adds, “Maybe she even jerks off like one?”

Rusty whoops like a monkey and Duncan erupts in a fit of giggles, cracking, “Lana's got lady-balls.”

Josh whips an arm across the surface, splashing Duncan. “Bro, shut the eff up.”

Duncan shields his face with the beer bottle, paddling away from Josh with the other arm. “C'mon. I'm kidding.”

Rusty shouts, “Dude, she's gonna do it. She's
Ben's
sister.” The way he says
Ben
, slightly awed, isn't new.

Duncan snorts. “Lana and Ben weren't blood related.” The past tense burns.

Josh's limbs churn like eggbeaters as he faces me and shouts, “Don't listen to him. You can do it. Right in between the rocks.” His torso and head bob up and down, buoyant on the surface. The three of them have the look of those moles in the carnival game where
you rush to whack their heads. There's warmth radiating from my rib cage that you can probably see glowing through my skin, like I swallowed a bajillion glowworms. Josh Parker stuck up for
me
.

I step forward until my toes curl over the edge. It's the middle of August, but the spring is deep, fed by an underground stream Ben and I spent summers searching for. The shadowy forms of three boulders run like columns from inches below the surface to the spring bed; other than them, it's a clear twenty feet until you hit the bottom.

“On the count of three,” Rusty demands. “One!”

I let myself picture the way Ben looked jumping the last time we came: freckled broad back peeling from a sunburn; blond hair drenched brown; a tattoo on his shoulder already fading because it was cheap and done when I was fourteen and he was sixteen by a guy who operated in the back of a Chinese restaurant and didn't check IDs. Even when it got really bloody, Ben didn't wince. He just kept saying, “Shhh, it's okay,” to me, like I was the one in pain. I sniffled the whole time.

“Two!” Rusty and Duncan shout in unison.

That was
before
. I wouldn't cry now.

“Three,” they howl.

I spring forward. Two seconds plummeting to the looking-glass surface, my reflection a bird diving from the sky, falling like it's not afraid of gravity, of what will come after it hits the ground. I slice into the water like a knife. A world of blue-gray envelops me as I shoot to the bottom. The water is lonely. The snakes that nest in the pockmarked walls aren't eeling through the shallows. Ben is not on the surface with a mouthful of water ready to spray in my face.

My toes glide along the fuzzy, algae-covered rocks. I beat my
arms. I exhale, sending bubbles to the strobe-light surface. There's the outline of legs kicking, swirling bits of plant and dirt with the look of space matter in those posters of the cosmos. A featureless head bobs under the surface; whoever it is can't see me. I hope Carolynn is so worried I've drowned that she's peeing herself. It wouldn't be her fault; I would've jumped if I were alone; if it were snowing; if it were the middle of the night. Jumping is what Ben and I did here. It was my only nerve and mischief.

The veins on my neck swell. I need air. I resist for ten seconds. My mouth opens to gulp . . . can't help it . . . don't want to surface . . . don't want to admit that he's not even
here
. I exhale. My chest flattens.

I am stone.
Unfeeling. Indestructible. I can take it.

I shoot from the bottom, break surface, scrunch my eyes closed, and show the whole world my teeth.
Grin, grin, grin until you feel the smile taking root in your belly
, my mother used to say.
Perception is nine-tenths of everything
. Mom said that too.

Everyone talks in rapid fire. “That's messed up,” one of the guys shouts.

“Such an attention whore,” Carolynn groans.

Becca chants my name in cheer.

“I knew she was fine. She's Ben's sister,” Rusty says.

“Screw you,” Duncan shouts, “You were pissing all over yourself.”

“Told you,” Willa gloats.

Warm hands slip over my shoulders. Josh dunks me for a split second as he tries to turn me to face him. “Sorry . . . sorry.” He's coughing up water with the words. I laugh—can't tell if I feel it taking hold as I drag the hair from my face.

Josh grins, white teeth pearly and straight, water dribbling from
the corners of his wide mouth. He yells over his shoulder, “She totally schooled you with that dive, Car.”

“Bet I can stay under longer than you, bro,” Duncan challenges.

Rusty accepts and they start dunking under, their gasps and splashes background static. Josh's dark-blue eyes stay on me. His hair is caramelized wet. His hands on my waist tow me to his chest. His touch is as warm as his tan skin looks. He feels like ginger tea tastes.

“What about you?” I ask. “You want to go under with me?” I can't believe the flirty girl's voice is mine. I feel my mouth making Mom's coy smile.

Josh blushes. “Yeah, what'll we do down there?” He says it like he isn't the kind of boy who expects stuff or throws away winks.
I hope.
I would have kissed Josh the first night he drove me home from Marmalade's. Becca says he's too decent to make a move while I'm sad. Willa says a girl shouldn't wait for a boy to ask her out.

My smile sends waves into my chest, and I do feel it taking root. Mom was right. Maybe Willa, too. The nervy words are citrus bright waiting on my tongue. I will ask him out.

Duncan explodes on the surface, sending spray into the air. The water runs from his plastered-down hair to his face and neck. Thin ribbons of blood connect his nostrils to his upper lip. His head bobs in a frenzy, eyes darting below. I look too. The water's darkening along with the rose-and-blue tie-dyed sky.

“Dude, what happened to your face?” Josh calls to him.

“Rusty's going nuts down there.” He thumbs one nostril, then the other, and tries to snort up the blood. “He kicked my face.” Josh releases me. I shiver as the water rises and falls, blackening with each crest as the sun sinks behind the shaggy wall of trees. I scissor-kick
faster to lift up. Willa's on her knees, really paying attention to the boys for the first time all day—maybe all summer. She senses the shift in the air.

“You're getting blood in the water,” Carolynn whines, flicking a hand at the discord.

Becca crawls toward the edge for a better look. She snatches up Duncan's skipper hat from where he tossed it and places it on her head. “Blood is soooo gross,” she complains.

Duncan has ahold of his nose and is egg beating in a furious circle. “I think there might be someone else down there,” he says.

My arms slash through the water as I whirl around trying to see under. Josh is asking what the eff over and over. Willa's soprano tells me to get out of the water, “this second.” Carolynn's shouting for Duncan and Josh to go down after Rusty.

Rusty hits the surface hacking up a lung, arms flailing, palms slapping hard to the rope ladder hanging from the rocky lip of the spring. The chorus is drowned out by his huffing, “There's a girl. . . . She's . . . at the bottom.”

W
hat comes next happens fast. It's getting dark and everyone is out of breath, their panting magnified in my ears. Becca's whimpers are desperate and grinding, bouncing off the trees. I want to tell her to shut up already, I need to concentrate. Josh leaves the surface, and there's only black lapping water where he was.

Duncan makes it to the shore and his voice booms, “Carolynn, call 9-1-1.”

And she says, “My effing cell is in the car.”

Willa shouts, “Run for it.”

And then they stop making noise—except for Becca, who's still wailing—so I assume Carolynn runs for her phone. I get caught up in the enormous unlikelihood of seven of us and not one cell, and then I want to smack my forehead because there's no service at the spring.

Rusty vanishes too. He and Josh are diving for the girl. And I think,
What is she doing down there?
A split second later, I dive also.

I swim blind, the surface gone too dim to illuminate below. I
wriggle through the black, my chest squeezing with the increased pressure. My hands jab the bottom. It's soundless as death, and I wonder if Ben can hear anything where he is. Stupid to believe he could be anywhere, dead is dead. And I'm not dead, even if sometimes I wonder if we'd be together if I were. That's a nightmare thought, the kind that filled the first month after we buried Ben's empty coffin.

There's a ripple in the water to my right—Josh or Rusty scouring the spring for the girl.
The girl.
I was below a minute ago and there was no one except loneliness and memories of Ben—but aren't those two actually the same? My arms sweep back and forth, legs propelling me forward. Pressure behind my eyeballs. Too long since the surface. And that
must
be the case, because I have the inkling that I'm an astronaut in space and I'm only dreaming that I'm in water.

My arms close around something—no,
someone
—waxy and firm. I take hold and yank and yank, ripping the form free from an invisible grip. She's slender in my arms, all sharp angles and poking bones. I wonder if she's a kid as we surface, and I gasp so hard it's a punch in the lungs.

“Help,” I sputter. Everything is silver edged. Rusty's arms windmill toward me. His hands skate over mine to get a grip on the girl, which is good because she's slipping, her breasts smushed against my arms as I try to keep hold.
Breasts
, so she's not a kid. Rusty floats her on her back, and with an arm hooked under hers, he cuts through the water.

“Over here, man,” Duncan calls, crouched on the shore, blood smeared across his face. Josh jerks his head to the ladder, and we swim for it. Rusty must have reached the shore, because Duncan adds, “Lift her. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a bit higher.”

My arms go shaky and dumb as I climb from one rung to the next. I'm at the top, swinging a leg over a boulder, when Duncan shouts, “Holy shit, I know her.” Becca cries out from where she's curled on her towel, the skipper hat and her face ducking intermittently behind her knees. “It's Maggie Lewis,” Duncan says.

I scramble for a handhold on the slick rock, anything to sink my nails into before I fall. Maggie.
Maggie Lewis.
The name is a fist around my heart, giving it an extra pump. Like a gossamer screen overlaying the here and now, I see Maggie in the halls at school, the hearts and quotes she doodled in Sharpie standing out against the washed-out denim of her jeans. I see Maggie on the field through the rear library windows. She's sitting cross-legged with the hippie-wanna-be, hemp-wearing, political kids, and she's tossing chunks of her sandwich to a scraggly seagull. It was the nicest thing I'd ever seen her do.

I walk haltingly toward the huddle. I want to collapse. Becca's already on the ground, arms latching her knees as she rocks, her wavy hair a mane she's retreating into. I decide I don't like the way completely-freaking-out looks, so I stay standing.

“Is she breathing? Is she?” Becca asks.

Josh kneels next to Maggie. He throws her pale arms to the sides and places the heels of his hands, one on top of the other, at her sternum, over her transparent white shirt. Her body jolts as he pumps. Josh's mom is a firefighter; he knows what to do. He'll save Maggie. Except that doesn't ease the fist's grip on my heart. It wouldn't. I hate Maggie Lewis. Maggie is the reason Ben was driving the night he died. He was taking her home.