By the time we made the left turn at the sign for the lake, she was humming something to herself. I didn’t recognize it, but it was catchy.
First order of business: a couple of warm-up jumps into the water from the side of the dock. Me first, then Danielle. Then together at the same time, both of us holding our noses. Then I showed her how to get down on one knee, point her hands into a jackknife, look at her belly, and trust.
“I’m afraid,” Dani said.
“It’s only water. I promise it’s soft and wet, like always.” I sat down a few feet away from her.
She stayed still for a long time, then finally took a deep breath and leaned all the way forward until her head broke the surface of the lake. Her feet barely cleared the dock as she went in, which made me flinch, but I wouldn’t tell her that.
“Yee-haw!” she yelled when she popped out of the water. She climbed back up the ladder to the dock, and did it again. And again.
“Whenever you’re ready, you can do it from standing,” I finally said.
Danielle looked nervous but intrigued. “Will you show me, Ari?”
I couldn’t remember the last time I dove. I used to do it constantly when I was a kid, from the board at the end of this very dock. But the older I got, the higher the board seemed. The harder the surface of the lake looked. One day, I just didn’t feel like it anymore, the way I didn’t feel like doing a lot of things. Tiny things. Too small to put a name to, especially a giant one like depression.
“Okay,” I said to Dani now. “Watch.”
I stood up. Bent my knees, stretched out my arms. My body remembered.
In that last second before I broke through, the water looked suddenly green instead of brown. The shock of cold, of water in my nose, the dirty-clean and foreign-familiar taste of it. Then, a sensation of being welcomed back to something but only briefly, before the laws of buoyancy lifted me away. My eyes were closed but I could feel the light growing on my face as I floated toward the surface. When I came up, Danielle was cheering.
And Camden Armstrong was standing on the dock.
I blinked away the sting of the water a couple of extra times to make sure.
“Hey,” he said, sitting down so his ankles were in the lake. Then he motioned toward Danielle. “I want to see if she does it.”
“I will,” said Danielle.
“Will you?” asked Camden, narrowing his eyes. I caught a teasing gleam there.
She matched his expression. “Duh. But I have to do five more kneeling first. Okay?”
“Okay. Then, go.”
As Danielle was setting up for her dive, I climbed the ladder quickly but not too quickly, feeling self-conscious about the ten pounds I’d gained as a side effect of my medication. Then I sat down on the edge of the dock a few feet from Camden and crossed my arms so my scars weren’t showing.
“I forgot,” I said as the splash from Dani’s dive sprayed us both. I was determined to talk to him first, and this was the best start I could come up with.
“Forgot what?”
“What it feels like, to dive.”
“Why did you decide to remind yourself just now?”
Because suddenly it felt Possible.
“I wanted to show her,” I said. “I can’t teach her if I can’t do it myself, right?”
Camden looked me in the eye for a gripping second, then glanced away. I was close enough to see his eyelashes for the first time. Thick and long. Almost girlie.
He drew one leg out of the water to scratch his ankle and said, “Forgive me for the cheesy-pick-up-line quality of this question, but do you come here often?” My heart crumpled for a moment, that he didn’t remember me from last year. Then he added, “I mean, I know you’ve come here a lot. In the past. But this summer. Do you plan to come often this summer?”
Danielle splashed down in another dive, and I took advantage of the sudden distraction to swallow hard, breathe normally. What was he really asking?
“It’s the lake,” I said as calmly as I could. “Everyone comes here often.” I paused. “I thought you were going to ask me something like, ‘What’s your sign?’”
Camden looked straight at me again, almost surprised. Crap. Those eyelashes. “I’m an Aries.”
“Oh.” Oooookay. “I’m a Libra.”
“And an Arrowhead, apparently,” said Camden.
I smiled. “That, too.”
“I don’t generally like labels, but every once in a while, it’s nice when you can say you definitively are something. ‘I am male. I am six feet tall.’”
“‘I am a fan of a campy sci-fi TV show,’” I added.
Camden laughed and I waited for him to ask me more about Silver Arrow. Wanted him to. Badly.
“I go to Dashwood,” he said instead, and the way he said it, it didn’t seem like a change of subject. “Do you know where that is?” He stared out at the water as he spoke, squinting slightly, as if trying to see the words as he formed them.
“Up by the nature preserve, right? I’ve never been there, but I’ve heard of it.”