Don't Touch (27 page)

He looks back to me one last time, all questions, before Drew turns him away.

“Caddie, what happened?” Mandy asks, keeping her distance. She knows better than to touch me.

It takes me a second to breathe, to speak. “I'm okay.”

“I didn't ask if you were okay. I asked what happened to make all my friends start acting like lunatics at my party.”

I try to hide the panic. “Mandy, I need to go home.”

Faintly, I hear Livia: “Oh God, it's almost time.”

“Caddie,” Mandy starts, ready to argue, but I see something break in her eyes. She gives up on me. “Fine, then. Let's get you home.”

As I hobble down the hill toward the pool, Mandy follows my steps with her eyes as if they might catch me if I should cut and run, as if eyes are as good as hands.

Just as we reach the pool, the party seems to suspend with one held breath. A taut anticipation ripples down the lawn, around the pool, as one in every five or six people freezes. Mandy curses under her breath and goes rigid beside me. One guy holds a chip between his teeth but doesn't bite down. A girl who's bent over to hike up her tights stands caught in a gesture that's meant to be quick and discreet.

The ones who aren't in on the joke stare in wonder, then laugh, poke at their frozen friends. One very drunk girl's yelling, “What the hell? What the
hell
?”

On the other side of the yard, Peter's surrounded by statues who rest their steadying hands on his shoulders to show that it's me and not him who is strange.

When Peter steps away from their circle toward me, no one stops him. Their hands hang in midair, comforting his ghost.

They'll stay still for three minutes. That was the plan. Peter and I made this together, but because of me, we missed the cue.

That's all right. I've been frozen for months.

Now I need to move.

I feel Mandy shift ever so slightly as I step away from her and closer to the pool, but she stays put. I
feel
Peter coming closer but can't look at him.

The pool lights make the water angelic, blue ripples lit up from inside. It looks clean.

All my fears have come true, but this anxious residue still smothers me and coats my skin. I've been holding on so tightly to what, at the end of the day, is a lot of pretend. I'm not normal, and nothing is fine, so why act like it is? Why not let my crazy show?

I twist, put my back to the water, and drop like a felled tree.

Gold and blue wash me inside and out.

My enormous skirt accordions and reverses itself, forming a cage of hoops around me. I bat at them, upend myself so they unfold around my legs, and I'm free.

Underwater, I laugh, spend the last of my air with the echoey sound.

I could let the chlorine burn my skin away. There'd be nothing to touch, nothing to keep me from touch. Bubbles burst. Everything touches everything else.

When the need to inhale seizes me, I resist.

The water is clean. I want more.

My heart beats at me, pummels my lungs, ribs, screams at them,
make her breathe, make her come up for air.
I flap my arms to keep from surfacing. It's giddy to fight against breathing like this, to fight
against
air instead of for it.
I
decide when I breathe.
I'm
the one in control.

There's a crash at my side. Through a spinning cloud of bubbles, Peter reaches toward me, come to save me from myself. My feet stab at the bottom of the pool. Arms push down. And I kick away from him. My skirts drag, but I'm strong. I kick at the water, up and out, coughing, gasping.

Peter pops up after me and treads water, holds my eyes but keeps his distance. His lips are pale, and his teeth chatter—from fear or from cold, I'm not sure. I cough, take one more sharp breath, and then mine start chattering too. The party's broken its freeze. People stand at the edge of the pool watching us. Peter and I float in a bubble—two people and the freezing water and the black sky.

“You can't touch people,” he says, loud enough for only me to hear. “You swam away from me so I wouldn't touch you.”

I nod, and it feels cleaner than the water, sharp and as easy as breathing, to let Peter know,
Yes, you figured it all out. I'm crazy
.

He looks away, sorting it out for himself, how this changes things.

“You might just have saved me from drowning,” I say.

He laughs, but it's hollow. “How's that? You're so horrified at the idea of touching me, you had to come up for air?”

He looks up, away.

Overhead, chilly stars prick the blue-black sky over the pool, fading in with the purple wash that bleeds over the ridge.

Peter floats and I float, lots of space in between.

“Caddie, what were you doing?”

Mandy's voice pops the bubble around Peter and me, making me shake in a more violent way.

The reality of what's gone on tonight works its way in. I'll be a good story tomorrow—the crazy girl playing Ophelia who got acting mixed up with real life.

I tread toward the pool ladder, where the underwater lamp makes my skin glow, tissue-thin. My skirts are heavy, but they don't drag me down. Ophelia would have had on heavier clothes, and she probably didn't know how to swim. My body wouldn't let me drown. I knew that. Of course I knew that.

I meet Mandy's eyes. I think she's more angry than worried.

“Get out,” she says, her voice tired and short, and she turns her back to the ladder, giving me space to climb, but she doesn't reach out her hand. “Come on. Somebody get her a towel.”

Halfway up the ladder, I look back toward Peter. He doesn't take his eyes off me, but I can't read his expression.

We tell Mandy's mother I fell.

“Her shoes,” Mandy says. “The strap at the ankle broke. Caddie tripped.”

“Bless her heart.” Mrs. Bower pulls off this southern ladies' slogan with a perfect blend of insincerity and disapproval.

Mandy does all the talking because I'm still underwater, can't breathe right. The big picture window in Mandy's living room is like one of those giant tanks at the Chattanooga Aquarium, and the party's crowding in to see the show. They might as well press their hands and cheeks to the glass.

Except for Peter. He sits on the brick wall beside the pool and stares straight at the water. He never looks up.

“Well, I guess we should call your mom,” Mrs. Bower says. “I hate to trouble her, but Dad is . . . indisposed.” Mandy's dad gets indisposed often. He gets this terrible condition called scotch on the rocks.

Mrs. Bower leaves, but it only increases the pressure in the room. Mandy exhales heavily and sits straight as a rod on the ottoman at the center of the room. As soon as she's landed, she's up again.

“Do you want some of my clothes?” Mandy asks, maybe just to have something to say.

Her voice is flat, and her eyes don't meet mine.

“I would love something dry,” I say, then, “I'm sorry, Mandy.”

She shakes her head as if to discourage some buzzing fly, and disappears upstairs.

When she brings me the clothes, she lays them across the ottoman where she'd been sitting, and says, “I'm going to try and enjoy the rest of the party. I hope you feel better.”

She says it like I'm a dying stranger in a nursing home, someone she has to be polite to, but who makes her uncomfortable—someone we both know won't ever feel better again.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I stay in bed.

On Sunday, Mom asks, “Did something happen at the party?”

“I just don't feel right,” I say.

When Mom insists on taking my temperature, I run the thermometer under hot water, and she assumes I caught a cold.

“You're going to need a doctor's note,” Mom says on Monday. “I think we should take you in.”

“They can't do anything for a virus,” I say. “There's one going around.”

When she tries to make me talk about the party, I say, “Please, can I sleep? I'm so tired.”

On Tuesday, Mom says, “You're so worn out. What if it's mono? Have you been sharing drinks—or maybe a kiss?”

She says it slyly, like we're best buddies and she's onto me.

I laugh, one sharp, “Ha. I haven't been kissing anyone,” I say, though that's not exactly true.

Peter kissed me. Our lips touched. If there were ever a more awkward, horrifying first kiss, I'd buy tickets to see it.

Mandy calls on Tuesday afternoon, and Mom brings me the phone. I shake my head, but Mom sets it on the blanket and leaves me alone.

“How are you feeling?” Mandy asks.

“Not so great.”

She pauses. “There are all sorts of theories. People are saying you got so drunk you broke all the blood vessels in your face, and you're not coming to school because your it's red.”

“Ha.”

“And then I heard one that you slept with both Oscar and Peter that night, and that's why they were fighting, and now you're having the baby of one or the other, but it's too early to tell which one yet, and that's why you're not coming to school.”

“Creative.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Which one is it? Or is it what I think . . . that you're so mad at me you can't deal with seeing me again?”

This takes time to absorb. “Why would I be mad at you? I wrecked your party.”

“Okay, so you think I'm so mad at
you
that you can't deal with seeing me, one of those two.”

“No.”

“Or you're embarrassed about Peter.”

Yes, yes, and yes, and more and more.

The other night at the party, it's like a wall that hid my darkest self fell down. Even if I was drunk, even if I was acting out or getting my life mixed up with Ophelia's, there was some tiny, impulsive part of me that thought it might be nice to drown.

“Mandy, I don't—”

“You don't want to talk about it. I know.” She sighs, but she sounds as frustrated with herself as with me. “I'm really calling for something official.”

Here we go.

“Nadia wants to know how many more days you're going to miss. She has April playing your part—as an understudy, for now—but if you can't come to rehearsal . . .”

“I know.”

“Well, she
wants
you to know. And she wants you to come back. She'd rather have you in the part, she told me.”

“Mandy . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing. Never mind.” I hang up the phone.

On Wednesday, Mom tells Dad I've been sick in bed for four days and asks him to talk to me. “I hear you went ice swimming,” he says.

“Something like that.”

“Well, you know, it's not really being cold that makes you catch cold, I was telling your Mom, so it doesn't make sense that you'd catch it that night.”

“Did you make Mom feel stupid for believing me?”

“Did I—No, no.”

I almost miss his stubborn rationality. Nothing can't be fixed with a bit of logic.

“Maybe someone at the party gave it to me.”

“Maybe.” He doesn't sound convinced. After a dead space, he says, “You know your body loses heat in cold water nearly four times faster than in air?”

“Dad, what does that have to do with anything?”

He makes a sound somewhere between a cough and a sigh—a fizzle. “Nothing, nothing.”

Dad wears a mask too, it's so clear to me now. When he can't handle reality, he retreats into science. I swear, he could look at a ten-car pileup on the highway, fourteen people killed, and he'd start comparing the tensile strength of the cars' metal frames.

I'm sick of the stupid masks, sick of pretending.

“I don't think I'm doing very well,” I say.

“No? Do you think it might be time for you to see someone again?”

A cold hand squeezes me, colder than under the water. Dad always said my problem was an overactive imagination, that I'd outgrow it. He calls psychology a soft science. He must think I'm a mess if he's suggesting a doctor. Or maybe he just wants someone else to sort me out so he won't have to worry.

“I'd be fine if you were here,” I say. “I wish you were here right now. I wish you could give me a hug.”

If he would come back, maybe things would go back to normal. I'd drop all my games.

“I'd like that,” he says.

“No, you wouldn't,” I say.

He goes quiet for a long time, clears his throat. “You know what?” he says. “I
do
wish I could give you a hug. I would like to do that very much, and I'm sending a hug to you over the phone. Can you feel it?”

He sounds like an ad for a long-distance carrier. “Nope, I can't.”

“Well, I'm sending it to you.” He clears his throat again. “And maybe things would be better if we were all in the same city and could see each other more, but I don't wish . . .” His voice trails off.

“What?” I don't try to keep my voice from sounding hard. I let it be as angry as it wants to be.

“I don't wish that I was back living there with your mother because it seems to me like this is a change for the better.”

“Ha! Of course things seem better to you. You're not here and never call.”

“Caddie, your mom and I weren't so good for each other. Doesn't your mother seem happier to you?”

I don't have anything to say to that, so we stay on the line in silence. I listen to him breathe. It's better knowing he's taking the time to be silent with me, even if we don't have anything to say to each other, than to hang up and go weeks wondering if he'll ever call the house again.

Finally, he says, “The work I'm doing here, Caddie, has the potential to help a lot of people.”