I got home from the pool after midnight through the side door. I stripped off my shirt and dumped it in the laundry. Norma never asked why my clothes reeked of chlorine. I think it was a concession she made to me. As if she knew I needed whatever I was getting at the pool. So long as I didn’t get caught for trespassing (or let anyone at school know about those visits), she didn’t ask questions.
The house was dark and silent but for Harris’s snores—like ripping linen—coming from the bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall.
I closed my bedroom door and a strange feeling crawled up my skin.
Someone’s been in here.
I flipped on the overhead bulb and scanned the room. Everything looked the same as when I left it. I inhaled through my nose, as if I could catch a remnant on the air. A telltale waft of someone else’s skin cells hovering in my space. Nothing. Stupid to even try. But the feeling wouldn’t leave. I almost checked the lockbox on my dresser. Or my under-the-table pay from Harris that I kept under a loose board under my bed. But I shook off the urge.
This is the kind of shit that gets you in trouble, I told myself. No one’s been here. Act normal. Go to sleep.
I crawled into bed, thinking sleep would be impossible after a night like this. But I must’ve slipped under quickly because the next thing I knew, my old digital alarm clock went off at 6 a.m., waking me from a vivid dream. A normal person’s dream. A good one. One of the best I’d had lately.
Jo Clark. At the pool. The moment when she tried to pull me from the water. She thought I was drowning myself and tried to save me.
Me.
We were face to face and the water had pushed her hair back. The jagged line of a terrible scar was visible in the moonlight, white and shiny and almost blue-ish. Translucent. But it didn’t mar her. Not to me. She was too beautiful. Pale skin. Large, dark eyes fringed by long lashes and framed by dark brows. And her mouth…
Damn.
In my dream, her mouth was parted slightly in surprise, her lips open and inviting. Instead of being pissed at me—like she had been in real life—she was happy to see me. That beautiful mouth widened into a heart-stopping smile and her dark eyes lit up. She was about to say something to me, and I was sure whatever it was would make my entire waking day. Then the damn alarm went off and Jo vanished as I opened my eyes to the sloped ceiling of my bedroom.
A good dream, but it would never happen. Josephine Clark was closed up like a metal safe. Iron chains wrapped around and a padlock the size of a shield. She’d never smile like that—so open and free, and certainly not at me.
Even so, there were worse ways to wake up in the morning than with a dream where a pretty girl is happy to see you.
“And she saved me,” I murmured, smiling faintly.
That wasn’t entirely true either. Like Jo said, I hadn’t been drowning, but most days in the Salinger household felt a little like that anyway. Suffocating. Restricted. I was trapped between who I was and who they wanted me to be and it was crushing the life out of me so I could hardly breathe.
I sat up on my small bed, in my small, book-filled room. Outside the window overlooking the front yard and street, the sun was struggling to rise over Planerville.
Is this where I’m from?
Is this my home?
Is this my family?
I didn’t know who or what I was asking. Maybe the same unknown place within me where the dreams lived. The answer was always a definitive No, on all counts, but that offered no relief. I’d read that adopted children, no matter how wonderful and loving their adoptive parents are, still seek their birth parents because family. Tribe. Belonging.
I got dressed and went downstairs where breakfast was underway. I could tell by the sounds before I even arrived at the kitchen. Spoons scraped against oatmeal bowls, making my teeth ache.
Four minutes, I thought to distract myself. I was under for four whole minutes.
That was a record. I’d been going to Funtown since it opened last year, to submerge myself under the quiet water, but mostly to hold my breath. I don’t know how or why it became important, but I felt like a long distance runner training for a marathon. But that wasn’t quite right. I didn’t know what I was training for. Only that the need to stretch out the minutes, to stay under for six, seven, maybe even eight minutes… It burned in me the way champion runners yearned to run faster and faster. I couldn’t see the finish line that my ‘training’ was taking me to, only that I was going to get there. I had to get there.
But four minutes? I smiled to myself. I had no idea. I wondered how long I could have stayed had Jo not jumped in. My smile widened.
She saved me.
That idea wouldn’t stop echoing my head, either. Like a song that gets stuck on repeat, only not annoying. Not annoying at all. I wasn’t used to anyone giving a shit what I did.
Shane snorted over his food. “Look at Evan smiling like a dope,” he said to Merle. “He looks retarded.”