What Happens Now (7 page)

“What happened?” I asked, partly to her and partly to her counselor, a college student with a headband and clipboard.

“She fell.”

“Not by accident!” barked Dani, then shot a dirty look at two girls standing nearby.

“Danielle and those girls were on the playground, and they were involved in some kind of game,” said the counselor, trying hard to sound calm and professional. Not really succeeding. “I guess there was a disagreement and Danielle got angry and ran away from them.”

“To Lava Island,” corrected Danielle.

“To Lava Island,” said the counselor with emphasis, “but she fell. The nurse checked her out. She’s fine. We didn’t feel it necessary to call anyone.”

“But it still hurts!” cried Danielle, the tears coming again. “And if they hadn’t made me run away, I wouldn’t have fallen!”

I took my sister’s hand and started leading her out. “Thanks,” I called back to the counselor. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”

I marched a weeping Danielle through the parking lot, me not saying a word because what was the point in saying any words, and opened the door for her when we got to the car.

“Get in,” I said, rubbing her back. She did.

“We were pretending we all had imaginary ponies and then the other girls changed it to actually
being
ponies, and that wasn’t how it was supposed to go!”

“I know.” I reached over her to snap her seat belt. When I looked at her face, I saw one stray tear traveling down her left cheek. I pressed my finger to it, then pulled my finger away, and it was like it had never been there.

“I want to go home,” said Dani, her voice shaking.

“We can’t go home. Mom’s sleeping. We’re going to the lake.”

“I don’t want to.” Danielle sniffled.

Yes, we could have gone somewhere else. But I’d told Max I’d be at the lake. Max had probably told Camden I’d be at the lake. I was going to the lake, dammit, melty kid sister or not.

“But I want to teach you how to dive this year, and today’s
the day we’ll start.” I pulled that one out of nowhere. I wasn’t afraid to admit I was good.

After a few more sniffles, she said, “Okay.”

By the time we made the left turn at the sign for the lake, she was humming something to herself. I didn’t recognize it, but it was catchy.

First order of business: a couple of warm-up jumps into the water from the side of the dock. Me first, then Danielle. Then together at the same time, both of us holding our noses. Then I showed her how to get down on one knee, point her hands into a jackknife, look at her belly, and trust.

“I’m afraid,” Dani said.

“It’s only water. I promise it’s soft and wet, like always.” I sat down a few feet away from her.

She stayed still for a long time, then finally took a deep breath and leaned all the way forward until her head broke the surface of the lake. Her feet barely cleared the dock as she went in, which made me flinch, but I wouldn’t tell her that.

“Yee-haw!” she yelled when she popped out of the water. She climbed back up the ladder to the dock, and did it again. And again.

“Whenever you’re ready, you can do it from standing,” I finally said.

Danielle looked nervous but intrigued. “Will you show me, Ari?”

I couldn’t remember the last time I dove. I used to do
it constantly when I was a kid, from the board at the end of this very dock. But the older I got, the higher the board seemed. The harder the surface of the lake looked. One day, I just didn’t feel like it anymore, the way I didn’t feel like doing a lot of things. Tiny things. Too small to put a name to, especially a giant one like
depression
.

“Okay,” I said to Dani now. “Watch.”

I stood up. Bent my knees, stretched out my arms. My body remembered.

In that last second before I broke through, the water looked suddenly green instead of brown. The shock of cold, of water in my nose, the dirty-clean and foreign-familiar taste of it. Then, a sensation of being welcomed back to something but only briefly, before the laws of buoyancy lifted me away. My eyes were closed but I could feel the light growing on my face as I floated toward the surface. When I came up, Danielle was cheering.

And Camden Armstrong was standing on the dock.

I blinked away the sting of the water a couple of extra times to make sure.

“Hey,” he said, sitting down so his ankles were in the lake. Then he motioned toward Danielle. “I want to see if she does it.”

“I will,” said Danielle.

“Will you?” asked Camden, narrowing his eyes. I caught a teasing gleam there.

She matched his expression. “
Duh
. But I have to do five more kneeling first. Okay?”

“Okay. Then, go.”

As Danielle was setting up for her dive, I climbed the ladder quickly but not too quickly, feeling self-conscious about the ten pounds I’d gained as a side effect of my medication. Then I sat down on the edge of the dock a few feet from Camden and crossed my arms so my scars weren’t showing.

“I forgot,” I said as the splash from Dani’s dive sprayed us both. I was determined to talk to him first, and this was the best start I could come up with.

“Forgot what?”

“What it feels like, to dive.”

“Why did you decide to remind yourself just now?”

Because suddenly it felt Possible.

“I wanted to show her,” I said. “I can’t teach her if I can’t do it myself, right?”

Camden looked me in the eye for a gripping second, then glanced away. I was close enough to see his eyelashes for the first time. Thick and long. Almost girlie.

He drew one leg out of the water to scratch his ankle and said, “Forgive me for the cheesy-pick-up-line quality of this question, but do you come here often?” My heart crumpled for a moment, that he didn’t remember me from last year. Then he added, “I mean, I know you’ve come here a lot. In the past. But this summer. Do you plan to come often this summer?”

Danielle splashed down in another dive, and I took advantage of the sudden distraction to swallow hard, breathe normally. What was he really asking?

“It’s the lake,” I said as calmly as I could. “Everyone comes here often.” I paused. “I thought you were going to ask me something like, ‘What’s your sign?’”

Camden looked straight at me again, almost surprised. Crap. Those eyelashes. “I’m an Aries.”

“Oh.”
Oooookay.
“I’m a Libra.”

“And an Arrowhead, apparently,” said Camden.

I smiled. “That, too.”

“I don’t generally like labels, but every once in a while, it’s nice when you can say you definitively
are
something. ‘I am male. I am six feet tall.’”

“‘I am a fan of a campy sci-fi TV show,’” I added.

Camden laughed and I waited for him to ask me more about
Silver Arrow
. Wanted him to. Badly.

“I go to Dashwood,” he said instead, and the way he said it, it didn’t seem like a change of subject. “Do you know where that is?” He stared out at the water as he spoke, squinting slightly, as if trying to see the words as he formed them.

“Up by the nature preserve, right? I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard of it.”

It was hard to keep a straight face here. Hard to pretend this was all news, the details of his life we had so desperately hunted down a year ago.

I turned to see Danielle, who was climbing onto the dock, shaking water out of her ears.

“That was five, right?” I said, glad for a break from this conversation that was thrilling me and stressing me out at the
same time. “I think you’re ready.”

She shook her head. “No, not yet.”

“Danielle . . .”

Camden got up. “Look at it this way. You’re not standing. You’re just . . . not quite kneeling anymore. I’m Camden. Can I show you?”

She nodded.

Then he turned to me. “It’s okay?”

“Yes. Thanks for asking.”
That made me crush on you 5 percent harder.

He went over to Danielle and asked her get down on one knee again. Then he gently picked up her bottom leg so her knees were parallel and she was squatting. He held her around the waist.

“I’ve got you. Try it now.”

She took a few moments to psych herself up, and then she did try it. She went into the water clean.

When she surfaced, Camden let out a “Woohoo!”

“I did it!” Danielle screamed, then scrambled up the ladder. “Now I’m going to try it without you!”

“Good,” said Camden, and with that, he dove into the water and swam quickly, almost sprinting, out to the raft. I watched him climb onto it and unfold in the sun. He reminded me of a cat that came up to you for petting, then ran away at the moment he seemed to be enjoying it most.

Maybe I’d offended him. Or bored him. Oh, God. Boring would definitely be worse.

I imagined diving in after him—yes, diving again—and swimming to the raft, too. Reaching for his arm and holding on tight as he helped me up. Sitting down next to him so we could continue our conversation, if that’s what it had been. Showing him how astonishingly un-boring I really was, and maybe even convincing myself.

Then I heard splashing behind me and turned to see Max and Eliza rushing into the water from the beach. Squealing, because that’s how cold the water still was in late June, that’s the kind of pleasure-pain-pleasure dance you did with it.

I watched them swim under the rope dividing the shallow end from the deep end, headed to the raft. Doing the exact thing I’d just envisioned, the distance between me and them growing wider with every kick they made.

And in that moment I decided for sure to make that distance go away. It wasn’t going to be now, because it couldn’t, but it could be—
would be
—soon.

“Come on,” I said to Dani. “If you do one more dive on your own from standing, I’ll buy you any treat you want from the snack shack and we won’t tell Mom.”

6

Kendall had finally
learned to make the soft serve end in a perfect point. Last summer, they always flopped over no matter how hard she tried. Now, when she leaned down through the order window at Scoop-N-Putt and handed me my chocolate-vanilla swirl in a sugar cone, I didn’t even want to lick it, it was such a work of art.

“I’m not done until nine,” she said.

“That’s okay,” I said, sliding my money across the counter. “I’m just happy to hang. Mom’s at work and Richard told me to go out and do ‘teenage things.’”

“It’s on me.” Kendall pushed the money back. “Take advantage of the perks.”

I sat down at a picnic table with my copy of
Silver Arrow: Velocity Matters
spread open flat so nobody could see the cover. A moment to appreciate the fact that it was eight thirty, yet the sky was still light enough to read by. The beauty of ice cream that melted exactly as fast as I could lick it. The gnome over there at Hole 1, always with the broken fingers on one hand that made it look like he was flipping you off.

Half an hour later, Kendall was done with her shift. She came out of the building wiping her hands on her shorts.

“I’ve started dreaming about ice cream,” she said. “But not in a good way.”

“Like, nightmares?”

“Yeah. Like,
The Blob.
” She sat down next to me, but facing the other way, with her legs out. She pulled one knee to her chest in a stretch.

“Do you have to go straight home?” I asked.

“Not really, if I’m with you. What did you have in mind?”

“Remember last summer when we weren’t allowed to drive at night yet, and we kept fantasizing about taking a ride somewhere after dark?”

Kendall smiled knowingly. “Your car or mine?”

“I’ve got Richard’s, with the moonroof.”

Once we were driving west toward the mountains, our hair whipping and snapping, Kendall kicking off her shoes to press her blue toenails against the windshield, I turned the radio up. Night air, finally dark and thinning out, puffed through the car and we simply lived in it for a few minutes.

This was an okay silence. It was the silence of knowing how to be with someone.

“Tell me some gossip,” I finally said. “You must get premium dirt through this job.”

“You don’t really care about that stuff, do you?”

“But
you
do. This is me making an effort.”

Kendall smiled mischievously. “Okay. Well. Chris Cucurullo’s brother got arrested for DUI. That’s the latest good one.”

I hated Chris; he was a walking stereotype with his varsity jacket and excessive use of the word
bro
.

“I have to admit that neither surprises nor upsets me.”

“It makes you a little glad, right? I hear the brother’s a bigger douche bag than Chris. See, now you’re getting the whole point of gossip.”

We laughed.

“I talked to Camden yesterday.” That just came out. I hadn’t even been sure I wanted to tell her yet.

“A conversation?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. “Not like,
I’m sorry I’m in the men’s room and we accidentally urinated together
?”

“A real one. Several minutes long. He helped Dani learn to dive off the dock.”

“So . . . what? You’re obsessed with him again?”

I shrugged. I’d had a Camden Dream the night before. In it, we were sitting side by side, reading the same book. Who has lame-ass dreams like this?

“You don’t know anything about that guy,” said Kendall.

“I know enough.”

“Oh, right. Dashwood and the pink church and his painter mom.”

“Lavender. You said it was lavender, or turquoise.”

Kendall closed her eyes and held them there. She seemed exasperated.

“And his mom isn’t a painter,” I added. “She’s a fabric artist.”

“He told you that?”

“I Googled it.” We were quiet for a few moments. Not the good quiet, anymore. “I’m sensing disapproval coming from that side of the car.”

“I’m remembering how much it hurt you last summer to see him with that girl, how pissed off at yourself you were for not doing anything when you had the chance. Or in your case, a whole shitload of chances.”

That made me wince. “He’s not with that girl anymore. He may be with someone else, I have no idea. But I need to at least investigate further. I don’t want to have any regrets like last summer.”