Abigail never came over to Cally’s house. It was an unspoken agreement between them. It was partly because Cally’s room was small and plain, with a west-facing window that admitted scant light. Directly outside the window was her mother’s rose garden, which permeated the walls; no matter how emphatically Cally spritzed her own fruity perfumes, she could never quite cover the room’s damp soil smell. Beyond the garden, the view swept across to Mount Tamalpais. Under the window was a small wooden desk that Cally rarely used. She preferred to do her homework on her bed, which she’d piled with pillows and pushed against the wall. The wall itself was papered in a pattern chosen for the child who had had the room before her: faded yellow balloons floating upward to the ceiling. In places, she had outlined the balloons with marker, had drawn on faces and hairstyles, torsos and hands. At the seam she’d scratched the paper back, exposing strips of ancient glue.
The walls of Cally’s house were thin, and the sounds were layered: as she lay there clutching her phone, she heard her dad shouting at the TV, her brothers fighting in the bedroom next door, the steady silence from her mom’s room on the other side. Since Cally’s mom had gotten sick, her dad had stayed home to care for her and fight with the insurance people, and now he camped out in the living room every day, his paperwork spread over the couch. He slept there too, TV blaring into the night. Cally barricaded herself with pillows but could not drown out the noise of the stupid late-night show, or her dad when he yelled at the commercials: “Oh right, sure, whose house looks like that? Assholes.”
Cally was hungry, but to get to the kitchen she’d have to pass her mother’s room. Her mother would be shrouded in bleached blankets, sleeping. A slight form sinking in the center of the bed. Cally’s dad would tell her, “Go on in, just sit with her, spend some time.” But whenever her mother woke, her eyes weren’t right and Cally didn’t want to see them. Her mother’s eyes were once a bright, unclouded hazel—like Cally’s own, but kinder—and this was the memory she wanted.
Her brothers didn’t go in either. Erik was a sophomore at Valley High and walked to school each morning with razor blades in his pockets. Jake, nineteen, should have been out of the house but wasn’t smart enough to go away to college, and in Mill Valley there wasn’t much for him to do but bus dishes at High Tech Burrito and smoke weed under the redwoods in the park. Jake was the one who came into her room to steal the allowance and birthday money she’d stashed under her jewelry box or rolled into the lace cups of her bras. She’d begged for a lock on her door, but her dad said it was “inappropriate,” a meaningless word adults used to shut down ideas they didn’t like. He just didn’t want to pay for it.
Cally turned over in bed, pulling the sheets over her shoulders. She and Abigail were discussing Ryan Harbinger, who sat next to Cally in English so he could squeeze her thigh under the desk, and copy what she wrote about the books he never read. For the past two weeks he’d been pursuing Cally in PE class, pulling her into the willow trees to make out while they were supposed to be running the mile at Bayfront Park.
OMG you slut, Abigail texted. Tell me more!!
What do u want to know?
U know. When’s he going to make you his gf?
???
Come on. U know u want it!
I think he likes Elisabeth Avarine
That bitch. No way
She’s so pretty I think
^ Obvi
Looks aren’t everything
U have to make him want u
How???
Hmm well u don’t want to be too clingy. U don’t want to be that girl.
No, Cally agreed. Definitely not!
Cally understood that Ryan was too busy to care about things like schoolwork or novels or the volatile feelings of girls. He was captain of the baseball team, and in the hot afternoons of late spring she and Abigail and Emma Fleed would go in their skinny-strap tank tops and miniskirts to watch him play, singeing their thighs on the bleachers. When Cally’s bra strap fell down her arm, she wouldn’t bother to hitch it up. She’d already been dress-coded three times that quarter, but she didn’t care. She would train her eyes on Ryan, tracing his body against the green blare of grass, and when she closed her eyes at night she’d be able to keep seeing him, an afterimage burned onto the insides of her eyelids, her very own personal beautiful thing.
—
The next afternoon, PE class was at the pool. Aquatics and Safety Training. Cally stood with the other girls in their ugly one-piece bathing suits, squinting against the silver swimming pool, shifting on their feet and rubbing toes on calves. The boys were on the bleachers across the water.
Cally hugged her chest and looked around for Ryan Harbinger. Instead her eyes alit on Tristan Bloch, who emerged blinking from the locker room in blue trunks and white T-shirt. Cally became suddenly, intensely aware of her own semi-nakedness, how the spandex swimsuit molded to her nipples and cut into her thighs. She felt a vague, unsubstantiated panic about pubic hair. As Tristan scanned the pool deck, she ducked behind Abigail and Emma. She was hiding there when she heard Ryan’s voice at her back:
“Cally Broderick! You gotta go in!”
She turned and he was there, suntanned and bare-chested and grabbing at her, trying to throw her in the pool.
“Ryan! No!” she shrieked, but he didn’t stop. Terror could sound exactly like joy. Cally ran forward, evading Ryan’s grasp; the other girls scattered like birds. She glanced over her shoulder just as Tristan Bloch knocked Ryan into the water and crashed in behind him, splashing her. Cally stopped short at the edge of the pool and rubbed the sting of chlorine from her eyes. She felt mascara smudging on her face and tried not to let it worry her.
Both boys surfaced.