“Don’t you want to swim?” Poppy asked. It was as if she thought the ocean could change him, and she was right. It could. The ocean could change him from hot to cold, change the air in his lungs to water, change him from living to dead.
Michael looked down at his feet to anchor himself but got dizzy watching the small pebbles crash against each other, roll forward, skitter back, forward, back. They were powerless, grinding down to nothing against each other.
The air tasted like salt. Gulls swirled overhead and the wind ripped at his hair. Children misbehaved and their parents in plaid swim trunks and polo shirts scolded them in their strange East Coast accents. Daniel, I tooold you not to put sand in your brotha’s eyes and Whea’s your noodle? They were the kind of people who belonged here, people who set summers aside from the rest of the year, people who had money and families, who knew how to swim and thought nothing of it. People who thought this beach was relaxing.
Ann reached for his hand, and her touch sent a familiar shock through him. “Isn’t it amazing, Michael?”
It was amazing and it was theirs—the roaring ocean, the old vacation home, their nice parents, everything. The girls thought they were sharing it with him, but he felt like they were rubbing their perfect lives in his face, saying, This is ours, ours, ours—we know all about it, we come here every year. You have no history, you know nothing, you have nothing, you are nothing.
Ann’s hand was nestled into his own, warm and soft compared to the cool ocean spray, but just as dangerous.
On the drive out, she sat next to him in the cramped backseat and pressed her thigh against his. It made him crazy, and he had a feeling from her faint smile that she knew it would. He’d tried his best to concentrate on the family game they called “Anibitz.” Ann and Poppy said they’d made it up and played it since they were little. Someone would name an animal, like a sea lion, and someone else would name another one, like a tarantula, and whoever was “it” had to draw a combination of the two and come up with a combined name, like “sealantula.” Or they’d draw a creature and everyone else would try to guess what it was made out of—a roach, a monkey, a polar bear: a “romopobear.”
By the time they reached Cleveland they could mash together three, four, five creatures into one, and they added real people into the mix, like Prince and Mrs. LaSpisa, the guidance counselor from school who gave him a beeswax candle when she’d heard his mother had died. Michael thought the game was stupid and funny and charming. He was excited to see Cape Cod, and the ride out there—with all of them close together, playing games like a real family—would have been perfect if he hadn’t been so distrustful of his good fortune to be included, and so skeptical that his luck would last.
After their stop in Syracuse, Ann fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. He couldn’t help it: the feeling of her breath on his neck and the fruity smell of shampoo in her long, straight hair made him hard. Of course she turned him on. She was pretty, but there was more to his attraction to her than that. He’d heard kids at school say she was stuck-up, and he supposed she could be, but he admired her confidence and drive. Plus, she’d allowed him to see a side of her that other people didn’t see. He’d be forever in her debt for taking an interest in him when nobody else did. If it weren’t for Ann, he’d be in some foster home or out on the street.
He could practically taste her, smell her, feel her soft hair in his hands. He studied everything about her: the dimple on her cheek, the bump on her nose, the way she frowned when she did homework and tapped her fingers against her leg when she was bored. He couldn’t explain it; it was as if she’d been imprinting herself on him.
The waves kept smashing against the shore, and the wind whistled in his ears. Couldn’t everything just stop for a minute? Couldn’t there be quiet? He didn’t know what to do; he only knew that Ann’s hand felt like an anchor. He wanted her to keep holding on as much as he knew she should let go. He wasn’t her boyfriend.
“Let’s swim,” Ann said. A strand of her hair had gotten caught in the bubble-gum-scented lip gloss she always used, and it was all he could do not to reach out and pull it away for her. In the sun, her hair looked as golden as the tinsel on a Christmas tree, while Poppy’s hair had a copper cast to it. They were both wearing one-pieces, the kind of modest suits girls wear to swim meets, but it was cold near the water and he couldn’t help but notice Ann’s nipples poking through the fabric. Michael looked away, embarrassed.
Ann stepped closer to the water and tugged on his arm. “Come on. Don’t you want to swim?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. Go ahead.”
Ann, as usual, caught on quickly. “Oh my God, you don’t know how, do you?” Her reaction might not have been so devastating if she hadn’t dropped his hand when she said it.
Michael had been so anxious about this moment that he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to swim. He never spent his summers in a place like this. He didn’t know anyone who would have bothered to take him to a pool or Lake Michigan and teach him. Besides, he hated water, because it was his mom’s boyfriend’s favorite form of punishment. When he was little and he got in trouble over what seemed like nothing, Marcus would make him sit in an ice-cold bath, or in water so hot it burned his skin.
“It’s OK,” Poppy said. “I can show you how. But you should learn in the ponds, not here, not with the riptide.”
Michael didn’t know what a riptide was, only that it sounded terrifying: rip.
“I’ve never met anyone our age who couldn’t swim,” Ann said.
Michael’s mother had told him that it’s the people who think before they talk that you should worry about. Because she was so confident, Ann usually just said whatever was on her mind. But that afternoon her words hurt him deeply. He wanted to throw up.
Poppy might have been a space cadet, but she could see the pain in Michael’s face. He couldn’t hide anything from her; she was alert when it came to emotions, a human tuning fork. “God, Ann,” she said. “You didn’t have to say it like that.”
“I just meant that he’ll learn. It’s not hard, nothing to be embarrassed about. Even little kids can swim.” Ann pointed off in the distance at a little boy playing in a pool that had formed between a sandbar and the beach.
“Ann!” Poppy said.
“It’s really not a big deal,” Michael said.
That was a lie. It was a big deal. The stakes never felt higher than they did now. He couldn’t make sense of the recent dizzying turn of events. Six months ago, he was hiding out in the storage locker in the basement of the building near the Marquette campus where he and his mother had an apartment until she’d died. He’d showered at school and slept with his shoes on because he was afraid the rats would bite his toes at night.
That’s when he got to know Ann. They were at a track meet in Wautoma, at one of those hotels with a dome over the pool. Everyone else had a room to sleep in. But Michael couldn’t afford one, so he told his coach he had family in town. He went to sleep in the lounge chair by the pool. Ann found him there. She said she couldn’t sleep because her roommate snored. She sat next to him in the watery green light and they started talking.