I wasn’t sure.
Did I look like that?
I touched my face, couldn’t feel my fingertips on my cheeks, on my lips, realized I was still wearing the mannequin mask I’d bought earlier at the dollar store. It was just a blank, Band-Aid-colored face, didn’t even match my neck skin, my big ears.
I’d bought it for two reasons. The first was that, when Tim had seen me, seen my actual me-face, I’d nearly lost it, nearly quit, nearly had to run away. Second, if I looked like Manny, and if I was doing this because of Manny, then it was really like I wasn’t even doing it, right? It was like Manny was here himself by proxy, me as his mini-avatar, who could fit into the tight, human-sized spaces. Like this, I was an extension of him, doing what he was going to do, just, not taking out half the school to get it done, not flattening a whole church bus or family reunion or funeral.
But the funerals aren’t yet.
And I hadn’t meant to leave the mask on for this big meetup, must have forgot I was wearing it.
I took it off like you take a contact out, grabbing the whole thing at once and both lowering my hand and pulling my head back at the same time, to break the seal as gently and painlessly as possible.
My face behind it wasn’t even sweating or anything, and my hand wasn’t shaking the way it felt it was.
What I looked up to was the flurry of whatever JR was doing down at the end of the dock.
He’d taken his right shoe off, had it hauled back like a baseball from centerfield.
I stepped ahead fast, alarmed, and he sailed it out into the lake.
It floated for maybe ten seconds there, like not sure what to do, like asking was this all right, was this on purpose, did anybody maybe want to take this particular action back, but then it took enough water into its padding and tongue that it had to dunk under, gulp down with a hungry bubble.
JR screamed after it like he was mad at it, then he was hopping, taking his other shoe off. It made him fall down on his ass and he nearly rolled off into the water, but he never stopped pulling on that shoe, finally got it off, threw it like it was on fire, or crawling with red ants.
Next was his shirt, and his belt, and then he was stepping out of his pants.
When he threw them they unballed in the air, caught some air and fluttered back, snagging on the side of the dock, one leg wet, one hanging on. He ran to that dry leg like he hated it, lay down to push the pants away, away. Probably somebody driving past on the bridge looked over and then looked over again, to be sure what they were seeing was really happening.
“What stage of grief is this?” a voice said from right directly over my left shoulder, practically in my ear.
Somehow I didn’t flinch, just looked around.
Danielle.
Without drawing any attention to it, I pressed the back side of the mannequin mask harder to the front of my thigh, said a prayer that JR, stripped down and crying in a very public place, would be more eye-grabby than anything I might or might not be holding.
“The third stage?” another voice said, and I turned around to it faster, already grimacing because I’d recognized that cocky, Danielle-kissing voice.
Steve.
He tossed his chin up at me in hey, as if we’d been doing this for years in the halls of all the schools we’d both gone to.
I drilled my eyes into Danielle and she shrugged in a way that told me she didn’t have to explain to me about who she chose to bring to our meetings.
It’s probably best we were all dying, right? We were falling apart anyway. Too much was changing.
I looked out to JR with her.
“It’s the stupid stage of grief,” I said, kind of stating the obvious.
“Sounds like somebody’s scared,” Danielle said back, and I felt more than saw—though I definitely saw, too—her blue button-up shirt peeling up over her head, the two cups of her lime green bra flashing fast in the sunlight.
“All passengers keep their eyes in their heads . . .” Steve drooled out special for my ears only, and then jerked forward because evidently Danielle had his hand, was pulling him with her to the dock, her shirt trailing from her other hand.
On the way, Steve kicked out of his shoes—they were good ones, expensive—and, halfway up the dock, Danielle somehow kept in motion and managed to wriggle out of her jeans.
Right when JR turned around, hearing them, she tackled him back into the water.
Steve had to sit down to get out of his socks and pants. He stood in his boxer briefs, looked back to me.
“It’s a sad day,” he called back. “Anything goes, man.” And then he pushed over the side, careful not to snag his underwear on the splinters, and went under with hardly a slurp.
I looked past him, past all of them, to the center of the lake.
Just before Manny surfaced, I knew, there would be a slow bulge out there, like a giant bubble that had been rising for years, was finally, in its ungainly way, coming up to the surface to taste the sky.
I shook my head no about this ridiculousness but pulled my shirt over my head all the same, careful to let the mask stay inside it, and then I stepped out into the sunlight to take my pants off one slow foot at a time, so Steve couldn’t say anything about me playing chicken.
To prove I wasn’t, I stepped out of my underwear as well.
“What the hell is that!” I yelled then, coming up onto my toes to see past them, to the Ferris wheel or wind-turbine blade or whatever that wasn’t actually coming across the bridge.
When they jerked their heads around to see, I ran for the dock, was in the air by the time they turned back around, cannonballing them before they could think about breathing in, and like that, even with Steve there, it was like all of our summers before, like one last gasp before we went under for good. We splashed each other and sputtered and dove for each other’s feet, and—I guess this is why we were doing this—we even smiled some, kind of on accident, and came as high up as we could to wave at the mom pushing her baby stroller past. With two of your lifelong friends dead, that kind of stuff’s all you’re really looking for, I guess. A moment or two where you forget about being sad.
When we walked up onto shore a few minutes later—no cops there yet, but they always show up eventually if you swim here—when we sat up on the hot pebbly flatness of the water spout hugging our knees, that was when I started crying. Not JR, not Danielle, me, who had seen Tim dead before his parents, even. Who had had the longest of anybody to deal with it, had the least reason to be losing it. But I guess I was crying for everything I still had left to do, too. Everyone. Swimming with them and then drying out with them, it was the best I could have asked for, but it was also the worst thing I could have done.
I stretched my chin up, trying to get loose, get control, and then turned away from them, kind of like to see all the way back to our neighborhoods.
The cops probably weren’t here harassing us because, right now, according to all the hushed telephone calls, they were poring over Tim’s online interactions to find out if he’d been talking to some internet predator, some drug dealer, some catfisher. When they’d asked me who might have had it out for him, I’d shrugged, licked my dry lips, my chin the stupidest prune of a traitor, and then shook my head no, said it was nothing, it couldn’t be him.
Every flip notebook in the room stretched out the spaces between its ruled lines, waiting to clamp shut on whatever I said next.