Learning to Swim (11 page)

I suddenly realized he was staring right at me. I wanted to say something profound and eloquent, as if I was in Keith's philosophy class, but I was so afraid to screw it up. I knew if I kept looking at him I would, so I turned my attention to the water and inhaled the salty air. “No one's ever what we expect them to be.”

Whoa. Where had that come from?

I glanced back at Keith, and his eyes were glimmering.

Who cared? He'd obviously liked it.

“That's true,” he said, grinning. “Anyway, I didn't mean to drag you into all this.”

“It's okay.” I smiled.

“Thanks for being so understanding.” He stretched his arms over his head and then put his hands on his hips. “All right, ready to go swimming?”

I was so ready that I shed my clothes in less than
twenty seconds. Meanwhile, Keith pulled out a long piece of rope from his duffel bag and untied it.

“You're not nervous, are you?” he asked.

I shook my head. It was really weird, but I wasn't nervous at all.

“Good,” he said. “There's not much of a current, but I don't want to take any chances.” He looped one side of the rope around my waist before tying the other side around his own.

Keith tucked a kickboard under his arm and we walked side by side across the hard pebble-filled sand and into the warm, dark water, wading in until it was up to our waists. I was remarkably cool and collected. At least, I was until I saw the giant white fleshy creature speeding toward me with fangs bared.

“Jellyfish!” I screamed, practically hopping into Keith's arms.

He plucked the white glob out of the water and held it up. “Paper.” He smirked. “This water can get kind of gross this time of year. But the good news is there's no jellyfish yet.”

“Great,” I said weakly. Suddenly I realized that Keith still had his arm around me. He seemed to realize it at the same time, because we both took a step backward and cleared our throats.

“Here you go,” he said, handing me the kickboard. “Just start kicking,” he said. “I'll walk alongside you.”

I glanced out across the bay. The masts of several
sailboats dotted the horizon, bobbing lazily in the dusk. It was a clear night, and I could see the skyline of Annapolis in the distance as lights began to fill the shoreline. It was an altogether peaceful scene. It did not look like the bay my mother had described: a seemingly tamed beast that was capable of turning ferocious in an instant. It was just another thing that we saw completely differently.

“Go on,” Keith said, encouraging me.

You can do this
, I reassured myself. I would not be one of those silly squeamish girls who let their fears hold them back. And with that final thought, I leaned over the board and began to kick. After a while, I forgot about the crabs and the jellyfish. (They hadn't arrived
yet.
What did that mean? Were they on their way?) Finally, Keith took my board away and tossed it back onto the beach.

“I want you to move your hands like this.” He showed me the stroke once again. As he reached forward and then back, the muscles in his arms popped to the surface. “Got it?”

I nodded and dropped back into the water. He lifted me up, and I began to kick and move my arms. “Good,” he said. He moved his hands out from underneath me and I immediately began to sink.

“Are you okay?” he asked, lifting me back up.

“Fine,” I said, pushing the hair out of my eyes.

“Concentrate,” I heard him say.

And then a thought popped into my head. He was close enough to kiss me.

Suddenly, I was completely underwater and Keith's strong arms were pulling me to the surface.

I coughed up the water I had inhaled, but fortunately, there was no barf involved. It was gross nonetheless. The bay is pretty much grody salt water mixed with motor oil (i.e., not much better than the pee water in the pool).

“Let's take a break,” Keith said, hastily removing his hands from my waist.

As I followed him back to the shore, I couldn't help noticing that he seemed disappointed, like a teacher whose star student had just flunked.

“I'm sorry,” I said softly after he had untied us.

“Don't worry,” he said, grabbing his towel and plopping down on the sand. “You'll get it.”

He handed me my purple beach towel, and his thumb grazed mine. I tied the towel around my waist before sitting down next to him. And there we were. Two people sitting side by side. In kissing proximity.

“I saw your mom last night,” he announced out of the blue.

My eyelids started twitching. “Barbie?”

He nodded. “After I had dinner with my dad, I went to a party on the beach. There were a lot of people from the club there.”

I imagined my mom dancing in her bra and under-pants, or something else that would ruin my life forever. My eyelids twitched faster.

“It's the first time I ever talked to her,” he said. “She seems nice.”

I knew that I should have accepted this as the compliment it was intended to be and moved on. But instead I blurted out, “She's crazy.”

So much for eloquent and profound.

He raised his eyebrows. I thought I could see the hint of a smile.

“I mean, not certifiably insane but, well, she's very different from me.”

“How so?”

Wrap it up
, I cautioned myself. “She has affairs with married men.”
Yep, that ought to do it.

“Married men?” he repeated incredulously.

I picked up a stray twig and began playing with it absentmindedly. “That's why we move so often. Every time a relationship breaks up, she wants to start fresh. At least, that's how she justifies it.”

Keith kept his gaze on me. “How often have you moved?”

“Fourteen times.”

His eyes widened in surprise. “Wow, so every year you go to a different school?”

“Almost. This is the first time I can remember that
I'm actually going to be attending the same school two years in a row.”

Keith stretched his legs out and leaned back on his arms. “That's got to be tough. My mom and I moved to D.C. when my parents separated and I was in middle school. I still remember how weird it was to walk into the cafeteria and see all these people hanging out and talking to each other and realize that I didn't know a single person. There wasn't one familiar face.”

“Story of my life,” I said, breaking the twig in half.

“Have you thought about where you want to go to college?”

“In state, that's for sure.” I told him about the small but growing tuition fund that my mom and I had set up. I put in seventy-five percent of my Tippecanoe earnings and she matched it, even if it meant she had to work an extra shift.

“That's nice that your mom's helping you.”

This comment irked me. I rarely thought of Barbie as being helpful. “Yeah, but what's not so nice is that she's threatened to walk with my money if I don't go to college. She told me she would just use it to take herself on a really nice long vacation—sans yours truly.”

He chuckled. This irked me too. Barbie's dysfunction was rarely funny.

“So you think that's amusing?” I asked.

Keith took his foot and tapped it against mine. Magically, I wasn't irked anymore. “I don't mean to laugh.
Really, Stef, it just sounds like she wants to make sure you have a better life than she's had.”

I already knew this, of course. And now that I thought more about it, it was sweet that he had made my kooky mother's threats about absconding with my hard-earned money sound sane.

“Have you thought about what you might want to study?” The sun was dropping every minute, but it was still warm. Keith's swim trunks were almost dry.

“Psychology. I feel like I've been my mom's therapist for years.”

Keith let out another laugh. This time I was happy I was the cause of it. “No kidding.”

“Yeah, it would be nice to actually get paid for my work. And to have patients who actually listen to my advice.”

His eyebrows rose again. Adorable. “Your mom doesn't listen to you?”

“Unfortunately, no,” I said, shaking my head. “If she did, our life would be a lot different.”

“How so?”

“Well, for one, she wouldn't be working as a cocktail waitress. She could've gotten about ten degrees with all the time she's wasted on dead-end relationships.”

He grinned. “You seem like you've got it together, Stef. I know your life can't be easy, working and going to school like you do. But I think it's cool. You're like Alice in that way. You don't need money to be happy.”
He glanced out at the bay. “Maybe you can give me pointers. Up until now, I've only had to pay for all the incidental stuff at school, like books and stuff, and my dad has paid for everything else. But as he informed me a couple weeks ago, nothing comes for free.”

I must've looked confused, because he said, “He's willing to pay as long as I study law or medicine.” All of a sudden he cupped his hands together and opened them. He had caught a lightning bug. How cute/gross! “The problem is, I don't want to be a lawyer or a doctor. I want to be an entomologist.”

The fact that he was holding a bug should've been a clue, but I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I want to study bugs,” he added.

A nonchalant
How interesting
would've been an appropriate response. Instead, I said, “I love bugs!” Me. The one who screamed whenever a bee flew near, the one who had never met a spider she hadn't squashed.

“You do?”

I looked into those glimmering eyes and nodded.

He furrowed his brow. “You're an unusual girl.”

“What exactly do entomologists do?” I was trying hard to act as though I was really interested, like,
Hmmm, maybe I'll forget about this psych stuff and become an entomologist instead!

“There are different kinds. There's forensic entomologists, the guys you see on TV who can determine when a person died by the bugs on the corpse.”

Or maybe I wouldn't.

“But most entomologists study insects that are beneficial or harmful to humans,” Keith explained. “For instance, there's a study going on right now with this form of beetles. They can eat battery acid and turn it into a substance that is harmless. Think of how great it would be if we could cultivate bugs that could eat some of the products that are just overflowing in our landfills.”

I absolutely loved the fact that he was a smartie. “That would be great,” I said. “So what are you going to do?”

“Change my major. I'll figure out a way to pay for it myself.”

I also absolutely loved the fact that Keith felt okay about being poor. Well, maybe not poor, but poorer. It leveled the playing field a bit.

“Come here.” He stood up and offered me his hand. “I want to show you something.”

He pulled me to my feet and led me through the beat-down grass and up a craggy path lined with reeds. We walked in silence, surrounded by the almost deafening hum of crickets. We got to the top of the bluff and stopped on a precipice overlooking the bay. “My mom used to take me here as a kid,” he said.

“It's beautiful,” I said.

“There's a swim meet tomorrow night in Easton.” He hesitated as the smile faded from his mouth. “Watching the pros might help you pick up the strokes much easier. If you want to go, I could take you.”

Did I want to go to a swim meet with him? Did birds fly? Did hearts beat? Did I love bugs?

Then I remembered something. An obligation that I couldn't get out of. And a disease that I just couldn't afford to catch.

“I can't,” I said. “It's bingo night.”

Keith didn't say another word. And neither did I. We just stood there, watching our moonlit reflections wiggle in the current of cloudy water.

Steffie Rogers's most shocking moments (from least to most):

1. When I thought my bra size had increased. (Turns out Barbie had thrown my bras in the dryer by mistake.)
   

2. When I passed chemistry.
   

3. When Keith offered me free swimming lessons.
   

4. When I found out that after years of hating broccoli—I actually liked it.
   

5. When my mother said that a married man had asked her out and she had turned him down.
   

6. When I ate what I thought was a piece of chicken and it turned out to be frog legs. Disgusting!
   

7. When I turned down an opportunity to attend a swim meet with the man of
   my
   dreams to play bingo.
   

Obviously, I was not easily shocked. But turning down a date (official or not) with Keith to play bingo was a topper.

Not that I didn't enjoy the bingo nights. I did. In fact, they were usually the highlight of my life. But that was just the point. I went nearly every other week. How often did I have an opportunity to go to a swim meet? But it was too late for regrets. I had to focus on the positive. Like the fact that even though I was totally into Keith, I had not thrown my friends over just because I had gotten a better offer. (Like Barbie would've done.) I was not a fair-weather friend. Nosiree. And I was fairly certain Alice would appreciate my sacrifice.

“What!” Alice's friend Doris said as we finished our first round of food at the China Buffet. “You passed up a date for a night of bingo and Chinese food with a bunch of old ladies?”

I glanced at Alice for support. “Maybe you should give her some of your Xanax, Dor,” she said.

I rolled my eyes. “It wasn't a date. It was a swim meet. Besides, he has a girlfriend.”

“Mora,” Doris said, as if the mere word was distasteful. She finished chewing a mouthful of fried rice before saying, “Don't get me started on her.”

“Isabella said they've been having problems for a long time,” Alice's other friend, Thelma, added.

“Isabella, Isabella, Isabella,” Doris said. “Can we
have one conversation without bringing up the Coopers’ maid?”

Alice and I exchanged a glance. Doris and Thelma were the odd couple of the island. Although they'd been best friends since the first grade, they were opposites in every way. Doris was thin; Thelma was fat. Doris was blond; Thelma wore a giant red wig. Doris was loud; Thelma was quiet. And of course, Doris was upper-middle-class and Thelma was filthy, stinking rich.