Other people start in: “Yeah, show us, Darcy.” “If you ain’t scared, do it.”
“Okay.” I turn my back on Shea, holding up my hands, stumbling a little. “Okay, goddamn it, I’ll do it.” I toss my beer. “Us girls come here all the time.” Us girls. Nell, in her little-kid underwear, tightrope-walking the cliff’s edge. Mags, swimming out to the deepest point and yelling that the water’s fine. All of a sudden I don’t care what happens. All gone to shit anyway. “Didn’t you hear about the guy who found his ring here? People been doing this forever.” Something is not quite right about that, but all I really remember is Jesse smiling and telling me stories.
Shea’s voice rises over the crowd. “Wait a second. Don’t you usually do this with your titties hanging out?”
Big laughs. I turn slowly to look at him, seeing it in his face, that it was him who spied on us that day. His sophomore wears this sour look, like she’s actually jealous of me. I could tell her all about him. How easily she can end up on the ground under him tonight, how fast it can all happen and how afterward she’ll walk around in a bad-dream haze, trying to remember if she ever said no or just thought it, counting the days until she gets her period and crying when she finally wakes up to find blood on her underwear. I’m too fuzzy to think of a comeback, grateful when Kat calls out, “Pig,” from the smoky darkness. He raises his beer to her.
I go over and grab Kat’s hand. “Come with me.”
She snorts, shaking me off. “No freakin’ way.”
“You’ll break your damn neck.” It’s Jesse. I glance around, but I can’t find his face in the crowd. “It’s too high and you can’t see where you’re going.”
Everybody boos and catcalls. I wave him off. He didn’t get around to talking to me all night, so he can keep his opinions to himself.
I run forward, reaching the edge, seeing that yawning darkness ahead of me, and slam on the brakes, hard.
“Awww, come on! Chickenshit!” They’re all yelling, making fun of me, and I look back at the orange faces in the firelight. These people aren’t my friends, not like Nell, not like Mags. Now I’m so mad that I don’t say a word. I back way up and plow, throwing my arms out to the side, taking off.
For a second, I fly.
Falling. Falling. Hurtling black. A flash of moonlight off the water. A thought—made it, I’m clear—before I split the surface and my left arm explodes in pain so stunning that I sink into white shock.
I drift through whiteness. Slowly it darkens to gray, then black. My feet float above my head. My hands drift out.
My eyes jam open. Can’t breathe.
I kick but there’s no up, no down. I’m swimming through space. I thrash and grab. Nothing. I’m drowning. This is what it feels like to sink with your lungs screaming for air.
I swivel and scissor my legs. Could be heading straight to the bottom. It isn’t until I feel air buoy me, pulling me up the last couple feet, that I know I chose the right direction.
I break the surface with a gasp that echoes across the quarry. Can’t get enough air. I drag it in, coughing and shaking my head, trying to clear my ears.
“I see her!” somebody yells from above. “There she is!” A cheer goes up.
My left arm throbs. I can’t use it. I do a lopsided dog paddle to reach the silhouette of one of the dinosaur-back rocks, scraping my knees as I crawl up onto it. I lie on my side, shaking all over, my left arm tucked like a broken wing.
Time passes. I hear my own breathing, sometimes a laugh or a screech from the party, and then sneakers scraping over rocks. “Darcy?”
Jesse. I sit up, even though I’m pretty sure he can’t see me. “Be right there.”
“You okay? Jesus, when I didn’t see you, I thought . . .” He stops like he’s listening to my harsh breathing.
“I’m fine. See ya.”
“You don’t sound fine.” For some reason, this breaks me. My throat closes and there’s no stopping the tears. I duck my head and sob down into my chest.
“Hold on. I’m coming out there.”
“Don’t.”
Liquid sounds as he lowers himself into the water. “Keep talking. Right or left?”
Finally: “Right. On the last big rock.” I clear my throat. “I’ll come to you.”
As our eyes adjust, we meet each other. His arm goes around my waist. He keeps me above water on the way back in.
We go up the path, dripping and silent, avoiding the party and going straight to the road where everybody’s parked. I can’t stop crying. I don’t know where these tears are coming from, but there’s no holding back, no getting a grip. He opens the door of his pickup for me and I get in, hiding my face in the hand I can use, ashamed to know myself, ashamed to be me.
We drive through town. No hotdogging this time, no more can-you-top-this. We’re both soaked. It’s late. I take deep breaths and blink a lot, trying every trick I know to suck it up and stop crying. Nothing works.
Jesse pulls into the Irving station’s all-night pumps and parks, putting his hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off, not because of him but because I don’t deserve a second of this poor-me bull. I choke out, “Mags is gonna kill me,” before a fresh wave of sobs hits. I cry ugly, crumpled face, open mouth, the whole bit.
He lets me go for a while, then says, “What hurts?”
I motion to my arm. He turns on the dome light and touches me gingerly, elbow to wrist, testing the joints a little, watching me wince. “You hit rocks, huh?” Shallow scrapes ooze blood. “You’re lucky you aren’t dead.”
That gets me going again, and it’s a long time before I can speak. “Mags is right. I’m like him.” Jesse waits. “Our dad. He always pulled numb-nuts stunts until he died, and it was his own fault.”
“I thought he died building the bridge.”
“He fell ’cause he was screwing around.” I knuckle my eyes, picturing that December day I’m glad I was too little to remember except from Mom’s stories, when the Penobscot Narrows Bridge crew was up there freezing their sacks off in thirty-mile-an-hour winds and snow. “Somebody tied a Christmas tree to the rebar. Even had lights. The star blew off the top, and Dad’s buddy bet fifty bucks that nobody was willing to climb back up and set it straight before the storm really hit. Foreman had gone home. Dad didn’t fasten his harness right. He fell.” I close my eyes, nauseous, thinking of my own fall, how Dad had dropped at least a hundred feet farther than that through gray freezing sky, with all that time to think about what was happening to him. I hope his neck broke when he hit. Kinder death than drowning in the dark salt river.
Jesse’s quiet a long time. “So you think it’s like a curse? You have to be your dad?”
“I dunno. Mom says I’m like she was, in trouble all the time.”
“So you got all the bad stuff, and Mags got all the good.” I nod. “Come on. You got a brain. You don’t have to play some role just because your family says so. You can do better than getting wasted every weekend.”