FILLING MY BELLY with vodka and beer. Hope nobody wants these pretzels, because I’m eating them all. No wonder Kat weighs ninety-seven pounds: she called three ice pops and a handful of green olives supper. That was hours ago, at her place, before she sent texts and got everybody out here, quarry-side.
Hard edge to the night, and it’s not just me. Everybody’s drinking more, laughing louder, forcing it. End of summer, almost back to school and senior year and the big unknown after graduation. I’m not the only one who feels like their world is ending.
“Remember Mr. Eldon-Tower?” Kat’s loud and doesn’t know it. “God, he was suuuch a freak. Remember?” She duckwalks around the bonfire while all us girls shriek laughter, then drops back onto the granite slab, her sweet, earthy, weed scent settling over me. “He wrote my name on the board once for, like, nothing. I literally did nothing and got in trouble.” She grabs more beer and gives me one, because she knows I’m hurting without having to ask what it’s about, which makes me love her. Mags is stupid to always be dumping on Kat. Oh well. She hates me now, too, so there you go. I gotta stop eating these pretzels. They’re soaking up my buzz.
Shea’s here. One minute I’m singing with Kat and Emma and Maddie, feeling really floaty and good, and then he’s standing over there, back from the firelight, beer in his hand, with that sophomore—I guess she’s a junior now— who pulls her thong up so high you can see it over the top of her jeans. He’s watching me, a hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Smiling. Sonofabitch shouldn’t be here. Nobody invited his ass. I’m not scared, but I guess my heart is, because it starts sprinting without me.
Kat feels me stiffen, sees Shea, blinks like she can’t focus too good. “Screw ’im. I’ll take care of ya.” Slings her arm around my neck and pulls me back down into the singing.
A couple girls get into a shouting match and one of them shoves the other, sending her down so close to the pit that we see sparks. Makes me think of Nell last night, her shoulder grinding into the mud under me. Not that she’s been off my mind for a second all day. I try not to picture her lying white and stiff with unblinking eyes in a ditch somewhere, but I can’t help it.
Jesse shows up with Mason and a couple other guys, wearing his plain white T-shirt and worn-out jeans, that sexy-as-hell Springsteen uniform that still melts me. He and Shea see each other. Major unspoken friction. As I watch, Jesse presses his lips together and keeps moving through the crowd to the other side of the clearing. Guess he decided Shea isn’t worth it. It doesn’t bug me that Jesse’s here. I mean, live and let die or whatever.
Not sloppy drunk yet, because I can tell where Braden Mosier’s lips begin and mine end. When you’re sloppy, your faces feel like one big warm glob, which can be nice until later when you wonder who saw you sloppy-globbing and how many people they’ve told. I close my eyes and think about Jesse in the field, sweet hay under us, my fingers in his black hair.
Braden’s chewing my earlobe like Double Bubble and whispering, “You’re so hot.” I go into a giggle fit because, come on, seriously. “What?” he says. I think he’s mad. “What?” And I’m just so done.
Moon is out. People toss things into the quarry: empties, rocks, a flaming log. “God,” Maddie says, standing at the edge looking down, “that’s like . . . really, really far.”
I’ve been clique-hopping, pretending not to be freaking out since Kat forgot about taking care of me and went into the woods to smoke even though she knows I’m too drunk to have good radar. So I keep moving, keep acting like I’m having the best time. That way Shea can’t come up from behind. I chug more beer, washing down the acid in the back of my throat, and say to Maddie, “Don’t you ever swim here?” I’m loud and laughing.
“You jump?”
Burp. Tastes awful, coppery. “It’s not that high.”
“Are you serious? It’s like forty feet.”
“Show us, Darce.” I hear him but don’t turn. I catch enough of him from the corner of my eye: Shea, sitting on the ground, forearms on his knees, that sophomore curled up beside him. He talks in that way he has, like we’re buddies, like we’re both in on the joke. “You done it before, show us.”
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.”
“I didn’t see you turning down any beers tonight.”
“Didn’t say I was smart. All I got is good taste in women.” He surprises a laugh out of me and shrugs. “I came because I was hoping you might show. Then when I saw you, figured you’d just ream my ass again, so I stayed away.”
Good figuring. I fish a paper napkin out from between the seats and blow my nose.
“Mostly I wanted to tell you that I thought about it, and you were wrong.” Jesse’s mouth is set. “About it being some guy-ego thing that made me go after Shea. He hurt you, and yeah, I lost it. Same as I would’ve if you were my best friend or my sister. Didn’t have anything to do with sex. You don’t let somebody you care about get beat on. Ever. Bet you feel the same way.”
I nod, thinking painfully of Nell, and look down at my sneakers.
“Let me take you to the ER for that arm.” He waves me off before I get three words out. “Costs too much. I know.”
He takes me home, driving slow. I lean against the door, watching dark woods go by.
We get there and he idles, looking at me. “Kamikaze Darcy. Wait and see if they aren’t all calling you that in homeroom on Tuesday.”
I sit there with my matted hair and wet clothes, and somehow, I feel almost shy. “Well . . . thanks.” I reach for the door handle, then glance back. “Almost said see you at school.”
He looks down, half smiling. “See you around.”
There’s nobody in the kitchen. At the sound of the door, Libby comes out of the living room, but her expression falls flat at the sight of me, and she leaves again, not asking where I’ve been or why I’m all wet.
I go upstairs and take a long, hot shower with my left arm raised, because even the spray hurts. While I’m drying my hair, I hear voices below, and put on Mom’s bathrobe to step out into the hallway.
It’s Nell. She’s back. The tension that’s been driving me for the past twenty-hours or so dissolves so quickly that I almost fall down in a heap. I stand there, straining my ears.
“. . . nobody was home, so I figured you were over here.” Nell’s voice is quiet, dull. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m back.”
“Where have you been?” Libby. “I was ready to lose my mind. You got any idea what you put me through?”
“I needed to go somewhere to think. That’s all. It’s nothing bad, Mom. I just had to go think.”
“Don’t give me that. You tell me what’s going on! What’s Darcy gotten you into?”
“Nothing. You always think everything’s her fault. I’m the one who ran off. Now I’m back. And I want to go to bed.” Nell pauses, using the firmest tone of voice I’ve ever heard from her. “Good night, Mom.”
“Nellie Rose, get back here.” I can almost see Libby standing in the hallway, shoulders rigid as Nell’s footsteps head toward the back door. “Nell.” Sounding weaker. “Baby. What is it? You can tell me.” Her voice breaks as the door closes.
I step back and see Mags standing in her bedroom doorway at the end of the hall, wearing plaid pajama pants and a T-shirt, obviously listening in on the conversation, too. I want to go to her, but before I can move, she turns and walks back into her bedroom.
Another door closes.