If anyone could inspire Noemi to immediately ally herself with Jonas, it was Gaetan. While Lyle and Tyler chatted about their respective summers, Noemi kept her eyes on Gaetan and his friend, now in the process of lighting matches and shaking the flames out right behind Jonas’s hair. Gaetan held a lit match beside Jonas’s ear, and the freshmen sitting on the bench nearest him inched away from the fire.
Tyler Olsen was in the middle of telling a story about a family trip to Yellowstone, but Noemi stepped right across his sentence. “Lyle, I need your water bottle.” Her friend surrendered her plastic, refillable bottle, no questions asked.
Climbing carefully one row down on the bleachers, Noemi sipped from the water, then sat directly beside Gaetan. A sloppy grin spread across his face. He had very white teeth. The thought of Gaetan wearing a bib in a dentist’s chair, having his teeth cleaned, amused her.
“To what do we owe the pleasure?” he asked.
“Can I have a match?”
“What for?” Gaetan asked.
Steve handed her one without waiting for her answer.
She frowned at the single matchstick in her palm. “Well, I need the box to strike it.”
He reached to pass a sleeve of matches to her, but Gaetan intercepted it before it crossed his lap. Noemi squeezed Lyle’s water bottle, and a forceful stream splashed across Gaetan’s hands, the matches, the knees of his jeans. She had planned to unscrew the lid and drop the whole matchbook in, but this worked just as well.
“What the fuck?” Gaetan shook his hands dry and dropped the soggy matches on the floor. “You are such a fucking buzzkill.”
“It’s water,” she said. “You’ll survive. Try not lighting fires an inch from people’s heads.”
Tyler chuckled behind them, and Gaetan turned his glacial eyes on him. “You’re awfully cheery for someone dressed like an Allstate agent.”
Tyler shrugged.
“Too bad this wasn’t coffee.” Noemi nodded toward the bottle.
“Piss off.”
She stood and mouthed an apology to Lyle. Jonas didn’t say anything or even turn around, but he did give her a sideways glance.
Though she had not felt it vibrate in her bag, Noemi checked her phone anyway, to see if her mysterious texter had chosen to weigh in on the encounter. Nothing new since their last exchange, before Jonas had even arrived.
She returned it to the inner pocket of her bag before Lyle, Tyler, or anyone else could see, just as the gym teachers summoned them all to homeroom. Jonas waited for her at the foot of the bleachers, and she allowed him to walk beside her.
The Flood
I dreamt that water seeped up from the ground and crept across the front yard of our house until it became a lake. My mother walked outside carrying a bucket. She filled it with water, but there was no place to pour its contents but back into the waves lapping at her legs. She redistributed the lake around her as though spilling the flood into itself would rescue the lawn. Finally, she released the bucket, lifted the water instead with bare hands, and splashed it into her pockets.
Even in dreams, water could not be held in a fist. It fell between her fingers and rained down onto the cotton folds of her skirt. I watched from the window of one of the bedrooms. In the nearby bathroom, something slapped against the dry inside of the claw-foot tub. I left the window and walked toward the sound.
The bathroom should have been white, but instead it was blue, as it had been when I was much younger. A sea lion spun out of the drain, whiskers first, into the basin of the tub. It was small and gray, and it undulated like a slug through a garden. I remember thinking how strange it was, not that our pipes had birthed it, but that they had done so very far from any ocean.
Chapter 3
Jonas
Jonas and Noemi had been placed in the same homeroom, but he was seated a few rows away in the Ls. She held a copy of a book open on her desk, though rather than read it, she spent the entirety of homeroom talking to a girl in a plaid jacket with a bob haircut the color of pesto-drenched pasta. Jonas wasn’t sure he had ever seen anyone wear heels as high as Noemi’s in high school before, but somehow they didn’t look out of place on her. Each of the heels was impaling a little toy skunk, which made it look like she was walking perched atop two mini carousel seats.
Because Noemi turned out to be in advanced classes, Jonas didn’t see her for the rest of the morning. He spent his day among other average students who didn’t seem interested in the new kid. Each of his teachers loaded him down with another textbook until he had no choice but to return the mountainous stack of them to his locker.
On his way back from the locker to English, he saw the sneering boy who’d been lighting matches by his hair that morning, and Jonas ducked into the lavatory to avoid another unwanted encounter. The water from the sink smelled sulfuric, but he rinsed his face in it anyway, raked his fingers through his hair so it only just covered his ears.
Despite the violent circumstances under which his previous school year had concluded, Jonas did not go searching for trouble. Typically, he tried to escape notice altogether, and trouble with it, but sometimes people like the boy with the matches didn’t let that happen. When trouble sought him out, Jonas kept his frustrations tightly coiled; unfortunately, those frustrations were then prone to building up pressure.
Last spring he’d erupted into a classmate like a cold-water geyser. Now, he was depressurized, a near-empty, placid pool, but a shove in the hallway or a match behind his hair could change that. Someone might stir memories Jonas had worked to push down: in first grade, his classmate gluing his shoes to the floor during math, or a “friend” sneaking a dead grasshopper into his tuna sandwich at lunch. He wondered if everyone at his new house or in his new classes could somehow sense the small, pathetic truth of him: that he was still a sensitive, sheltered little boy who did not know how to exist in a room with other people.
The English teacher reprimanded him for walking in as the bell sounded, and Jonas didn’t bother to offer any excuse.
They had to form small groups and talk about the summer reading Jonas hadn’t known about, but which he had read at his old school by coincidence. He watched as the people around him paired off, leaving him an island in a sea of awkwardness. Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and Jonas turned to see a boy with light brown skin and black-framed glasses he recognized from the gymnasium that morning.
“Jonas, yeah?” the boy asked.
“Yeah.”
“Tyler Olsen. You live with Noemi Amato, right?” He pronounced her name with only two syllables: No-mi.
“Noemi? Yeah. Our parents live together.”
“Nice. Noemi’s really cool.” Tyler pointed toward a plump, bearded boy in a yellow T-shirt who had slid into the desk next to him. “This is Brian Kowalski.”