He swatted at my cards, laughing.
Beggar is a game we learned on a youth ski trip, and while the others abhorred it, Woods and I wasted centuries on the rooftop with a deck of cards and a game of luck. I rarely won. Woods maintained I was secretly competitive, which drove me crazy. I wasn’t nearly as competitive as all the guys believed. I was just good at stuff they didn’t expect girls to be good at.
He dealt, and we played.
He won four straight games.
“Tell me everything you’re thinking,” he said, when I threw my cards atop the cooler.
He rested his weight on his palms, leaning away from me for the first time that night.
I began. “One. Other than my imaginary gigantic balls, I don’t understand why you put me on the guys’ side of the board. Two. Other than your imaginary gigantic balls, I don’t understand why you put Mary Dancy on the board at all. You don’t even know her. Three. When I said I don’t know how I feel about Janie Lee, I meant it. Four. The real messy awkward truth is . . .” He prepared himself by affixing his gaze to Mrs. John’s front porch. “Honestly, I always thought . . . well, I always thought . . . we’d give it a go.”
He said two barely audible words. “Me too.”
I was prepared for Billie, we can’t, or Billie, I’m sorry, or Billie, you’re like a brother to me. Nothing in my emotional response arsenal went with Me too.
I said, “I guess I always thought it worked like this. You talk. You kiss. You fall in love, buy a Buick, and never leave Otters Holt. There’s sex in there somewhere.”
“Me too. Except the Buick. We can do better than a Buick.”
At that precise moment, the wide neck of my sweatshirt had fallen off my shoulder, and he stared at my naked collarbone. Under his lingering gaze, I did not doubt he knew that I was made of girl. I righted the fabric, and he trapped my hand with his. “B, there’s a lot of people I love, but there’s no one like you.”
Exposed skin will do that.
My brain crunched thoughts so loudly it sounded as if I were snacking on Doritos. “What does that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t like Mary Dancy,” he said.
“But you’re attracted to Janie Lee,” I argue.
“And so are you, but that doesn’t change this. Us.”
When we were younger, I tried to teach Janie Lee and Woods how to make friendship bracelets from cross-stitch thread. Each bracelet was made up of a certain number of strands, a certain pattern of cinching knots against each other. This was friendship. We were four strands. Then five strands. Six strands now. And a series of knots, all in neat little rows, made up our history. I had always thought, always believed, we would stick to that design and I would know the future, because I knew the pattern.
Woods was untying a knot. The pattern was changing.
He touched the small of my back, beneath my sweatshirt. His fingers brushed the recessed place at the bottom of my spine. “You have to know that you’re my second skin.” His thumb moved like a metronome.
“And who is Janie Lee to you?”
He spoke, and as he did, I said the word with him. “Music.”
Music in the way she moved, music in the way she spoke, music in the way she listened. She was a melody we both hummed.
He breathed on my chin, my cheek, my neck. His teeth were so near my earlobe I heard his breath inside my chest. “What do we do with all this love?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. Gerry had kissed me, and we’d been fine afterward. Perhaps we were holding our relationship like crystal and it was one of those pink bouncy balls. “Maybe you should kiss us both and see how you feel.”
He didn’t laugh.
I thought I would be nervous.
I thought it would be a big deal.
I thought Saturn might fall out of the sky and cause a tsunami on the other side of the planet.
But when he kissed me, and I kissed him (and I feel like I have to say it exactly that way because it was equal), we were what we’d always been: friends.
I’d really only kissed four people at that point: Fifty, Renley (who moved away freshman year), Gerry, and now Woods. But it was enough to compare. Kissing Woods made me want to say, “If we haven’t found someone we’re in love with by the time we’re forty, let’s get married,” or “Let’s be each other’s backup plan.” Because he was someone I would marry and raise dragons with and let cut my yellow toenails at seventy, but he wasn’t . . . Well, he wasn’t even Gerry.
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? R.I.P.: She never bought a Buick.
I know passion isn’t everything, and relationships aren’t just physical, blah, blah, blah, but we were perfunctory. Shockingly perfunctory. And hiding seventeen years’ worth of collapsed desire took all my energy.
“That was nice,” he said, lips hovering inches above mine. And then he kissed me a second time as if the first hadn’t quite convinced him.
I felt polite.
“Yes, that was very nice,” I said when it was over.
We both wiped our mouths with our sleeves.
I used my poker face, I used my sweet voice, I embellished. “If Janie Lee kisses like that, we’re all really going to have a problem,” I told him.
Because it was one thing to tease him about his imaginary gigantic balls, but it was quite another to deflate them.
THE SHORT PART
before
PART TWO
The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth he can accept about himself without running away.
—LELAND VAL VAN DE WALL
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
The rock ledge felt cool and slippery to Janie Lee’s bare feet. She stood nearly thirty feet off the water, an eternity. Summer sun blazing down, turning skin from pale to olive. She looked down, down, down—her knees knocking, her heart fluttering. Heights: they weren’t friends. They’d been forced into acquaintance two weeks before.
For reasons she understood but detested, her classmates had adopted jumping off Rock Quarry Cliffs as gospel fun. She blamed puberty. The boys had been more annoying lately: jumping off things, hitting on others, making stupid dares.
They ran right off the cliffs like their asses were on fire. To Janie Lee, it was one thing to risk a walk across Vilmer’s Beam and fall into a pile of hay. Another to smack into the lake’s liquid concrete. She wasn’t scared of dying—hundreds, perhaps thousands, had made this jump; she just didn’t appreciate senseless pain. But she was faced with a new decision. The pain of red, smacked flesh or of red, smacked loneliness? She knew the answer.
As so, she had docked her uncle’s johnboat, climbed and switched back over slippery rocks holding on to a green-knotted rope, and scrambled over spray-painted messages from hundreds of jumpers to stand atop Rock Quarry Cliff. To hopefully find someone to eat lunch with this year.
One false start, one running attempt, one set of windmilling arms: she was falling.