“ ’Cause it has a slide and a cave and shit?”
Michael lives several blocks over, and so we decide to walk. Days like this, the salt of the ocean sticks in your nostrils and on your skin. Gravel rolls underfoot. There are homes with ivy hedges like forts and homes like wacky sculptures or with windows made up of other tiny windows. Occasionally you’ll see a fading home fighting against being demolished for something in Technicolor.
The boys go barefoot, their wet feet leaving sloppy prints across the concrete.
As we walk, a red double-decker tour bus pulls up alongside us and stops in front of one of the houses. The voice inside it bellows, “This is where Tom Hanks lives.”
“No, he doesn’t!” we say.
Several ruddy-faced tourists stick their cameras out the windows. The dude who actually lives here is an accountant to the stars, according to Courtney. Maybe even to Tom Hanks. So perhaps the tour bus driver isn’t that far off after all. Heather flashes them as they pull away.
Trevor drapes his arm around my shoulder. Everyone thinks he looks a little like Jason Priestley, but I think that’s being generous. Trevor’s my prom date, but I’m not into him like that. Sometimes it’s nice just to be near another person, to feel their warmth and the blood coursing through their veins, and to feel the both of you alive.
“Oh shiiiit, love connection.” Kimberly makes kissing faces in our direction. Michael looks back at us and rolls his eyes.
“Our kids would be so hot,” Trevor says. “Mixed kids are the hottest.”
Then he pulls away from me and retches into Tom Hanks’s accountant’s petunias.
* * *
There’s a hole in the construction fence where you can just raise the green tarp and enter. I pause in front of it. “Guys, maybe we shouldn’t go in there.”
“Are you afraid?” Kimberly says.
Yes. Breaking and entering isn’t exactly something someone who looks like me should do all willy-nilly. Or at all. But I don’t want to call attention to myself. Not like that.
“No,” I say. “It’s just that…”
“You don’t have to come, Ash. Nobody’s making you do anything,” Kimberly says. She says it all sweet and shit, but we all know it’s a challenge.
“Dude, I promise you it’s worth it.” Michael winks.
Inside, the addition to the house is a skeleton, all bones and no meat, not yet. The dust sticks to our bodies as we walk through wood and nails and concrete slabs, but also beer bottles and cigarette butts. A tractor presides over all these building blocks like a promise. The pool remains untouched, an oasis, as though the owners decided that it—and only it—was perfect, which it is.
A few dead flies float on the water’s surface. Trevor bends over to scoop them up with his hand.
Courtney, Heather, Kimberly, and I hold hands and jump. There’s the rush of water, the cold, the velocity of our bodies. We sink, and then back up we pop.
“Marco…,” Courtney yells.
“Polo…” Trevor belly flops in. Just like that, it’s on.
We continue our call-and-response across the length of the pool. Courtney finds Heather first, and then Heather finds Kimberly. Kimberly finds Trevor, and Trevor finds Michael, until the only person left to be discovered is me. I’ve gotten good at being invisible. I swim under the water to the grotto. There, my friends are echoes. Dampened, they sound far away.
Inside, the walls are made of fake rock that’s slightly slimy to the touch. There’s a plastic opening where a light source should be, but the bulb’s broken. Obscured from view, everything in the grotto feels like a secret.
“Marco!” Michael yells. He reaches his hands out and runs his fingertips across my shoulders, my face, my hair.
I don’t say anything back. He splashes the water around us in mini waves.
You should know right now that I’m mostly a good person. I think.
I don’t talk back to my parents, much. I would help an elderly person across the street, if there were any around. I get mostly As, with a few Bs in the subjects I don’t care about. I even listen when Heather drones on about how plastic bags and aerosol hair spray make the planet hotter. All this is to say that I’m a good daughter. A good student. A good friend. A good sister. I don’t have a choice.
“When you go out there in the world, you’re not just you, Ashley,” my grandma Opal said one summer while she braided my hair into four long strands that she embellished with yellow ribbons, “you’re all of us, your family, black folks. You have to be better than those white kids around you. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.”
“I’m good, Grandma,” I said.
And I still am. Mostly.
“I found you…,” Michael whispers into the dark.
You should also know that I wasn’t entirely honest about Michael. Yes, he’s a douche. But he’s also really funny in a New Yorky way, smart and a little overconfident, but also somehow self-deprecating and insecure, and he can be really sweet and a great listener, and he’s got these beautiful curls like the ribbon on your favorite present.
Beneath the surface, he wraps his legs around mine and I wrap my arms around his shoulders until we’re intertwined and our heartbeats pound in tandem. He smells like sunscreen. Water pours in sheets around us like rain. The last time we were alone together it was raining, but instead of some fancy-ass pool, the two of us were in Michael’s crappy car. His lips graze my collarbone, and even though he’s Kimberly’s, together we’re electric.
“Polo!” I yell.
* * *
Kimberly and Courtney get into an argument over the rules of Marco Polo—Kimberly thinks you can get out of the pool to avoid being tagged, but Courtney insists that’s cheating, since we didn’t agree upon “fish out of water” rules beforehand. To broker peace, I suggest we stop swimming and start drinking.
We pass the bottle around like a communion cup. I roll the bitter of the beer around on my tongue. I don’t like beer, but we’re underage, so we can’t be choosy.
“What the hell?”
A crew of burly men in neon reflective vests and white hard hats enters, their faces red and sun chapped.
We scramble out of the pool and run through wood and glass and nails and trash. Pain hits my left foot, deep and searing. A piece of glass, part of a shattered beer bottle, is the culprit. The blood trickles in dark red lines down my foot.
I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be in AP physics right now, reviewing momentum and impulse. Right now, Mr. Holmes would be going into and out of focus.
“I’m calling the cops!” another hard hat yells after us.
“Fuck the police.” Trevor channels N.W.A., laughs, then punctuates it with a belch.
Across town, the trial lets out for the day. The members of the jury step out into the open air and lift their faces to the sky, glad that after a long, dark day, there’s a bit of sunshine left.
No, I don’t care about any of it now. But I will.
CHAPTER 2
THE SQUAD CAR pulls up alongside us as we approach Courtney’s house.