17

6/50: CLIFFS

THE NIGHT before 6/50, Esther couldn’t sleep. She was lying in her bed, drifting off, when she got one of those jolts your body gets that made it feel like you were falling down stairs. The sensation brought her back to full consciousness, and her brain suddenly fed her the image of a wave of water crashing into her house. Windows shattering, debris pinning her to the walls. A tsunami. They lived an hour’s drive from the coast, so the fear was totally irrational and she knew it was totally irrational, but that didn’t stop it from replaying again and again and again in her head, a wave (ha) of adrenaline surging through her each time.

After two hours of failing to save Eugene and drowning in the murky water of her bedroom, she gave up on sleep, collected her bedding, and went to lie on the kitchen bench, which seemed a moderately safe place to be in the unlikely/impossible event of a tsunami. (Wood floats, after all.)

This was not a new phenomenon. The first time the fear cascade happened, she was about eleven, and the irrational dread that kept her awake was that a cougar (not native to that area—never so much as sighted in that area) was going to slink in the back door (which was locked), make its way to her bedroom door (which was closed), and maul her to death. She spent the whole night in Eugene’s room, sitting in a corner, staring at the door, waiting, waiting, waiting for the moment the big cat came to eat them.

She’d been so certain it was going to happen. It did not.

When Jonah arrived in the morning, Esther still hadn’t slept. Her eyes were burning and she didn’t feel like doing whatever stupid, reckless thing he had planned for the day. (The fear was “cliffs”—it was always going to be bad.) So she did employ her “get out of doing the fear for a few hours” ridiculous excuse of making millinery. She sat with Jonah on their yellow couch and made hats out of cereal boxes, toilet rolls, and wire they salvaged from the trash. He even stuck little paper flowers and butterflies on his, and made a feather out of tissues.

“Show off,” she muttered, shaking her head when he put his hat on and started prancing around the living room sipping tea from an imaginary cup.

Then it was time to tease Death. Jonah told her to change into beachwear. The only thing she had was a swimming costume she’d bought at a thrift store, an early twentieth-century style knee-length monstrosity complete with pale yellow stripes, Peter Pan collar, and a large bow at the back. When she changed, he spent a solid two minutes facedown on the floor laughing at her outfit.

“The finishing touches,” he said when he finally recovered, and he removed his cardboard hat from his head and placed it on hers and fastened it under her chin. “Ready for a day at the beach in the year 1900.”

“What’s my acceptable excuse next week?”

“You’re too busy going on a date with Jonah Smallwood to be bothered with cornfields.”

“I don’t date boys who laugh at my excellent swimwear choices.”

“I’d be wary of anyone who didn’t laugh at your swimwear choices.”

“Jonah. Be serious. We have to focus on the list. I’m worried about Eugene.”

“So bring him along, get him in on the nightmare action. It would do him and Hephzibah good. And I am being serious. Go on a date with me.”

Jonah was staring at her, waiting for her answer. Esther felt a strange sensation in her chest, like a thread around her heart had just been pulled taut. It was something she’d felt before, when they were in elementary school, and Jonah would sit with her at recess to stop the mean kids from taunting her about her hair or her freckles or her clothes. Esther remembered the way his brow wrinkled and the ferocity in his brown eyes. They said, “Nobody screws with you when I’m here.” They were saying that again now, and Esther wanted to believe them, because Jonah was beautiful and good and smelled like bliss condensed into the shape of a person.

But he’d made her feel safe once before, and then he’d left, and she still hadn’t forgotten how much it hurt to rely on somebody and then have them let you down. “I’ll have to consider how desperate I am to stay away from cornfields,” she said finally.

“Desperately avoiding fear. That’s how I get all the girls to date me.”

“Dated lots of girls, have you?”

“Don’t try and slut shame me, Esther Solar!” he yelled out the window. “I will not be slut shamed!”

Esther clapped her hand over his mouth. “Christ, all right, let’s go do this.”

Jonah grinned underneath her hand. “Bring your bro.”

“Eugene hates the ocean.”

“All the more reason. You go get him while I organize this,” he said, unzipping the black duffel bag he’d brought with him. Esther noticed for the first time that it had mesh panels.

“What’s that for exactly?”

“Oh, didn’t I mention it earlier? I bought it for the cat. I’m bringing her on our adventures.” Then he scooped Fleayoncé off the couch, lowered her carefully into the carry bag slung over his shoulder, and went on his merry way, feeding her bits of dry cat food and whispering to her as he went. Esther thought the feeling that rocketed through her heart at the sight was something very close to love.

And so, on the sixth Sunday they spent together, Esther invited Eugene and Hephzibah to join them on their quest for Death.

The beach was an hour’s drive from their town, which still wasn’t quite far enough for Reginald Solar, who feared water’s immensity so greatly that he hadn’t so much as looked at a swimming pool since shortly after the war ended. Esther feared the ocean too, mostly because her grandfather did, but also because it contained sharks, piranha, and potentially Cthulhu.

They drove to the coast in Eugene’s car. Fleayoncé sat on Jonah’s lap, purring madly. Heph was dressed in white, long ribbons threaded through her ashen hair. Eugene was quiet as he stared at the flat road ahead. Sometimes, when the mottled sunlight hit him strangely, his fingertips curled around the steering wheel looked like glass.

The beach was bleak and deserted when they arrived. The craggy coastline of cliffs plunged into the flat blue ocean. People came here for cliff diving in the summer, but today the sun was washed out and a cold breeze rose from the water, carrying with it the scent of seaweed and brine. There were no trees for as far as the eye could see. No houses, no stores, no developments of any kind. Just flat grassland that sank suddenly and dramatically into the water.

The four got out of the car and walked abreast toward the cliff’s edge, Fleayoncé on a leash at Jonah’s side. Five feet before the verge, Esther stopped. She couldn’t help it. In that moment, in front of her friends, she wanted so badly to be brave, but her feet stopped working and she shook her head. She found heights actually, physically repulsive. Once she’d watched a YouTube video of two Ukrainian guys climbing the Shanghai Tower; it made her throw up.

She felt a sudden need to have as much of her body touching solid ground as possible, so she lay down flat on her back.

“How you doing?” Jonah asked when he appeared over her.

Esther flopped a weak-wristed hand in his general direction. I’m fine, the gesture was supposed to convey, but was doing a poor job. Jonah sat cross-legged next to her.

“You can do this, Esther,” he said. “Think about everything you’ve done so far.”

“I’m not like you. I’m not fearless.”

“You think I’m not scared? Man, I was nearly shitting my pants in the cave. I watched The Descent, by the way; I’m never going spelunking again.”

“You filthy hypocrite.”

“Look, fearless people are stupid, ’cause they don’t even understand what fear is. If I was fearless, I’d jump out of a plane without a parachute, or eat your mom’s cooking again.” Eugene laughed at this. “Yeah, there we go, he knows what I’m talking about. Point is, you gotta be scared. Fear protects you. You gotta be scared right down to your bones”—he touched his fingertips to her collarbone—“for bravery to mean anything.”

Esther looked over at him. “What if I die?”

“What if you live?”

At that moment, Esther heard a scream. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a pale blur, a tall ghost dressed all in white.

“Was that—” was all she had time to say before Hephzibah Hadid barreled off the edge of the cliff, shrieking and fully clothed, her long limbs flailing in the air for a moment before she disappeared out of sight.

“Holy shit,” Esther yelled as they all scrambled to their feet and bolted to the cliff. Heph was in the water far below, a halo of white lace fanning out from where she broke the surface. She floated on her back, kicking lazily to the rocky shore like a figure in an impressionist painting.

“You okay?” shouted Esther. Hephzibah gave two enthusiastic thumbs up. “Heph’s a daredevil?” She sunk to her knees so she could get a better view over the edge without the fear of being sucked down to her death. “How did I miss that?”

“Heph’s a wild animal,” Eugene said. “How could you not have noticed?”

Esther sidled away from the edge and turned to scale down the path that led to the ocean to help Heph out, but Jonah shook his head and said, “I’ll get her. You jump.” Then he slung Fleayoncé around his neck and she lay there, limp and smiling, the world’s ugliest taxidermied stole.

Esther forced herself to her feet, the wind curling her red hair around her body like a firestorm. As she stood on the precipice, she felt something she’d never felt before. The old fear was there, the grapnel anchor lodged in her chest, the thing that wanted to pull her back away from the edge and whisper no, no, no. Yet there was a new thing: a lure. Something down in the water that whispered yes, yes, yes. Go forward, onward, into the unknown. It felt like something between destruction and thrill.

Everything you want is on the other side of fear, she reminded herself. What was fear hiding from her this time?

Here was the thing about adrenaline: She’d never realized, before, how addictive it was. Until recently, adrenaline had been an enemy, something pushed into her veins against her will. She’d never understood how jumping off a bridge with a glorified elastic band strapped around your ankles could in any way be classified as enjoyable. But now she could see that it was about control. Choosing when and where and how the adrenaline spiked, as opposed to waiting for it to find you in your bed as you fell asleep.

Esther still wasn’t sure which force would win, which force would be stronger, until Eugene came to stand next to her on the ledge and said, “Jonah just gave me a pep talk.”

“He thinks he’s a philosopher. What did he say?”

“Something about a dragon and a knight.”

“Of course. A classic.”

“So. We doing this or not?” Eugene extended his hand to her. Always careful to keep his sleeves covering the skin of his wrists.

Far below, Jonah pulled Hephzibah from the water and shouted that he had a good, clear shot lined up with the GoPro and they could jump anytime they wanted.

Esther took Eugene’s hand; his skin was corpse cold against hers. “I curse the day I met that boy,” she said of Jonah, and then sister and brother counted to three, and then they jumped with a scream as one. As she fell, Esther wasn’t worried about being blown off course and plummeting into the rocks below. She wasn’t worried about hitting the shallows and pin diving to the ocean floor and shattering her spine. She wasn’t even worried about Cthulhu. (Okay, maybe a little.) What she worried about was Eugene’s willingness to jump. The way he glanced down at the water far below and looked at it like it was home. The way he stepped lightly from the cliff’s edge, and the way he fell through the air faster than she did, dragged down by earth’s magnetic field. The way he flickered in the sunlight as he hit the water, the same way Tyler Durden flashed on-screen four times before you saw him solidly. Foreshadowing the twist to come.

Eugene was afraid of demons, and monsters, and above all the dark, but he was not afraid of death. That scared her more than anything.

Esther hit the water feetfirst and was sucked down, down, down by momentum and her body weight. The shock of the cold splintered into her bones and made her lungs constrict. By then her brain was yelling up, up, up. Eugene was gone. Everything was gone. It was just her and Cthulhu in the deep cool dark. She scrambled for the surface and broke it at the same time as her brother. They each drew in a huge breath. Eugene was laughing, howling, splashing her with water. She swam to him, pushed him under playfully, noted the way the light passed through him and turned him clear when he was submerged.

How long did she have? How long until he evaporated for good? How long until he flickered out and never came back? Not long enough.

“Hey,” she said to him when he resurfaced, placing a palm on each of his cheeks. There was a strange magnetism in his skin that made her feel calm whenever they touched, some twin enchantment perhaps. “I love you. Don’t ever forget that.”

“Stop being a weirdo,” he said with a grin as he pushed her away. “I want to go again. Let’s find somewhere higher.”

Esther smiled too, eager to attract Death’s attention with their wildness. Maybe he would come here to watch them being reckless, just as she believed he’d watched them once before.

The four of them spent the rest of the afternoon plummeting off the cliffs, getting bolder each time. Higher each time. They ran and jumped. They somersaulted. After lunch, Eugene drove to the Walmart up the coast and bought four inflatable dolphins that they rode off the cliff and into the water, like they were going into battle against Poseidon. The footage, Jonah said, was incredible.

And in the water, Esther discovered the beauty that fear had indeed been hiding from her: the tidal pools filled with orange starfish and green coral, portals to another world; the schools of fish that danced a ballet around her body every time she dived; the salt that dried in swirling patterns on her skin.

They didn’t meet Death that day, but Eugene and Hephzibah seemed happier and younger than Esther had ever known them to be, and for that she was immeasurably thankful.

“See you on Sunday for cornfields?” Jonah asked on the drive home. She was sitting next to him in the back seat, her head resting on his shoulder, Fleayoncé a salty heat source on her lap.

“Sorry, can’t,” said Esther sleepily. This close to him, she felt the sudden desire to press her lips to his cheek and wrap her arms around his neck, which was not a desire she was used to feeling for anyone.

“Why not?”

“I have a date.”

Jonah grinned about as mischievously as she’d ever seen him grin. “See you on Sunday.”