Then it dawned on me.
“Absolutely not!” I shrieked, backing away from the cliff’s edge, throwing my bathing suit at her.
She caught it with one hand and said, “Get naked, Lottie. We’re doing this.”
“We are not doing this, Em. If you think I’m jumping off this cliff . . .”
“I know you’re jumping off this cliff, Lottie. I can see the future, and it very much consists of you and me jumping off this cliff.”
“You’re insane. We will literally break our entire bodies.”
“Oh, relax. I’ve done it before. Abe did it when he was twelve. Don’t tell your parents that. Nothing is going to happen to you.”
“That water is freezing. And very, very far away.”
“Trust me, Lottie. You will be perfectly fine. All we have to do is jump far enough to clear the rocks that stick out—”
“Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.”
“I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”
“Says the lady who’s about to push me off a cliff!”
“I would never push you off a cliff. We are going to jump. Together. It’s going to be great. And don’t you see the parallel here? It’s kind of ingenious.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t know what I’m . . . Alvin Hatter and the House in the Middle of the Woods!”
Oh. Right. At the very end of Alvin Hatter and the House in the Middle of the Woods, the Overcoat Man catches up to Margo and Alvin. He knows they’ve found a way to get into the house that holds all the magic of the world, and he wants them to tell him how. In a final life-and-death struggle, the Overcoat Man pushes Margo to her death over the cliff and then flees. But of course she doesn’t die, because she’s already drank the Everlife Formula, and she’s immortal (Alvin drinks it right after this, because he can’t deny the appeal of not dying when pushed off cliffs).
“But we’re not Margo, Em. We are going to die.”
Em kept trying to give me the bathing suit, and I kept pushing it back at her. Finally she threw it at my feet and took her clothes off. She was wearing her own bathing suit already: black with teal polka dots. She shoved her clothes in her backpack and crossed her arms, staring at me.
“Em . . .”
“Look, Lottie, I get it. I get that you’re scared of hurting yourself and you’re scared of dying, but you can’t go through life that way.”
“I can absolutely go through life without ever jumping off a cliff,” I argued.
“Yes, you can, but you can’t go through life without taking risks. And this is a risk, sure, but it’s a relatively small one compared to the risk of getting into an accident every time you get in a car or the risk of losing your luggage when you go on a plane or the risk of getting a paper cut every time you pick up a notebook. Life is a risk, Lottie. Sometimes you have to answer its call.”
She had gotten more and more exaggerated throughout the speech, and by the time she finished she had jumped up on a rock and was practically screaming.
“Did you practice that?” I asked.
“Obviously, yes. On Jackie in fourth period.”
I stared at her for a minute. She was an inimitable staring-contest contestant; she could go without blinking for hours.
“Okay, fine,” I said, already pulling my shirt over my head, kicking my shorts down to my ankles.
“Fine, fine, fine,” before I could change my mind.
“Fine, fine, fine,” before I could think of the million reasons this was a terrible idea.
Em picked my bathing suit off the ground and held it out for me as I stripped naked. She’d seen me naked a hundred times, but I appreciated that she squeezed her eyes shut (and held her breath, like a dweeb) until I snapped the shoulders of the suit, signaling that I’d gotten it on. She had brought my one piece, a very old suit that was starting to fade. I felt twelve in it, like a kid only playing at the idea of maybe one day being an adult. Em turned around and raised her eyebrows and whistled in appreciation.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Can’t a friend tell a friend she looks like a super cutie?” Em said. Then she dug around in her backpack for her phone, and we took a photo of the two of us. Okay, we took about ten photos, smiling in some and laughing in some and making weird faces in some. Then Em tucked the phone back in her backpack and took my hand. “No more stalling.”
My stomach flipped over as she pulled me closer to the edge.
“What about your bag?”
“There’s no one around. We’ll come back and get it after we jump.”
“What if we die?”
“Then we won’t be around to care about the bag. Win-win.”
I looked down and my stomach flopped again and my heart started racing like mad. I couldn’t do this. If the fall didn’t kill me, the heart attack would.
“What about . . . I mean, we’re going to be wet. So. We’re just going to be really wet.”
“There are towels in my trunk. Relax. I’ve thought this through. You need to breathe.”
I tried to, but my lungs weren’t working right. They’d taken the afternoon off. They’d found something better to do.
“On three,” Em said.
I missed my aunt.
“One . . .”
I didn’t want to die.
“Two . . .”
I wasn’t like Margo.
“THREE!”
I was doing this.
Em gripped my hand tighter and pulled me forward, and I bent my knees and jumped, propelling myself off the cliff with a force that came from somewhere foreign, somewhere new. The air was instantly colder, the wind rushed by my ears in a strange, long howl that mixed with Em’s whoop of pure joy, every color of the world blending together before my eyes and mixing into one beautiful blue and green and red and yellow blur until— We hit the freezing-cold water with an unexpected jolt.
My mouth filled with salt and bubbles, and every inch of my skin was on fire, some strange confusion between freezing and boiling. And Em’s hand had slipped from mine, and I didn’t know which way was up. When I opened my eyes everything was dark. I paddled frantically toward the surface but it wasn’t the surface, so I turned around but that wasn’t the right way either. I had survived the fall, but I was going to die anyway; I was going to drown out here. That seemed exactly like something I would do. If only I had Em’s fearlessness or my brother’s strength or my mom’s perseverance or my dad’s dumb luck. If only I had something . . .
I almost screamed when I felt something wrap itself around my arm (tentacles? teeth?), but you can’t scream underwater, and it came out as a gurgled moan. Then something was pulling me up and up and up, and my head broke the surface of the water and without meaning to I was laughing, laughing, laughing and breathing deep gulps of air and alive, really, and so happy I could cry.
Em was laughing too, and throwing her arms around me and kissing my cheek and practically pushing me under the surface again. We swam and kicked our way to the shore and pulled ourselves onto the rocks there, both just happy in that moment to be alive and together.