Rites of Spring (31 page)

“No,” Clarissa said, as if coming to a decision. “I don’t mean that. I just can’t help it—my dad’s voice echoing in my head all the time. I don’t want to be that person. But I’m not sure I’ve figured out an alternative. And I hate all you people who have.”

I sighed. Well,
I
hadn’t. “We’re not what your dad predicted we’d be, Clarissa.”

“No?” she said. “I am. I’m treating the girls here like I do my friends everywhere else. I’m jealous and competitive and awful.”

“You’re not awful,” I said, recalling how, even a year ago, I thought the exact opposite. “You’re ambitious—even if you don’t know what for—and that comes with a strong sense of competition. It doesn’t make you evil to think bad things about your friends from time to time.” At least, I hoped it didn’t, or someone should fit me for a black hat and a twirly mustache. I was regularly jealous of Lydia, and vice versa. But we loved each other, and we stood by each other when it counted.

“My dad didn’t do that. Not with the Diggers.”

“That’s crap,” I said. “Diggers are the same as everyone else. You don’t think they stab one another in the back? You don’t think they choose other concerns over this society? Kurt Gehry screwed P—Jamie over when he didn’t agree with him. The President tossed Gehry to the wolves last month. No matter what our oaths are, we’re not always going to be friends with someone just because they’re Diggers. And it’s not just this year, not just the addition of women. It’s all of us. Look at your dad and what he did to us.”

“Dad didn’t think we
were
Diggers.”

“He was wrong. He’s wrong now, too. We haven’t devolved into a dating club just because some of us have hooked up.” I put my hands on her shoulders and faced her. “You are going to figure out what you want to do. And when you do, I pity the people who get in your way.”

She smiled then, weakly, but still with a hint of the Cuthbert spark. “I’d better,” she said. “Because I don’t have any more Monets to give away.”

I chuckled at that, but was still worried. In this atmosphere of sharing, should I reveal my own secret?

“I wonder what Jamie was doing lurking around here,” she said. “You notice he’s always hanging around? I kind of got the idea on the beach earlier that Malcolm was trying to get away from him. Guess he finally wised up about that weirdo.”

Maybe not.

And I wondered if Clarissa was right in one respect—if Malcolm was trying to leave us alone with each other. Poe said he hadn’t told his friend about us, but that didn’t mean Malcolm couldn’t figure it out for himself. George had.

“Actually,” I said, and took a deep breath. “I’m supposed to meet with Jamie right about now. He’s helping me with swimming.” Okay, so not the whole truth.

Clarissa’s expression flashed from confused to polished almost instantaneously. “Really? That’s…nice. I didn’t know.”

“Yeah.”
And we’ve been making out. Quite a lot, to be honest. And he’s a pretty good kisser. And funny, which you don’t realize at first, but yeah. Really funny. I think I’m starting to like him, Clarissa. Also a lot. So stop calling him a weirdo.

And yet, none of those things made it into verbalizations. I slipped my feet in and out of my borrowed flip-flops.

“Shouldn’t you go catch him?”

“Are we done talking?”

Clarissa tossed her hair back. “I’d say so. I’ve never been one for endless therapy sessions.” She squeezed my hand as I stood. “But thanks, Amy. It felt really good to get that off my chest.”

“I know the feeling,” I said. But the truth was, I only wanted to.

The afternoon passed quietly. Poe actually did take me for a swimming lesson—a real one, and for the most part, we kept our hands off each other. He taught me to blow bubbles, to float on my back, to tread water, and, finally, to do something incredibly scary called the dead man’s float.

“Breathe, Amy. When you breathe, you’re lighter than water,” he said as I spluttered to the surface again, saved from hysteria as much by Poe’s sure hands at my waist as by the fact that we were only chest-deep. “The reason this is good to learn is that it doesn’t take much energy to just float, unlike treading water. So if you ever fall off a boat again, you can do this for a lot longer.”

“Yeah, but I can’t hold my breath!” I said. “Just thinking about it freaks me out. Why can’t I float on my back instead?”

“Go ahead,” he said. I did, and promptly got a face full of water. “Oops, guess there was a wave.”

I coughed, scrambled to my feet, and splashed him back. “I call foul!”

He splashed me again, angling his palm against the water to produce maximum effect.

“Not fair!” I cried, pushing water back at him. “You’ve had a lot more practice than me.”

“You can say that again.” He placed his fist on the surface and squeezed, sending a cunning little stream right at me. I hopped, and splashed back, but my own waves fell short.

Poe kept advancing, both fists now squirting jets of water in tandem.

“Stop!” I cried, laughing and wading away as fast as my feet would take me. But Poe was quicker, and then he leapt for me and we both went under.

I held my breath this time, and when he pulled me to the surface moments later, I wasn’t coughing at all.

“There,” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist as we bobbed. “You can do it.”

I pulled him close. Amazing how much less afraid of water I was when it became my preferred make-out spot.

Since we planned to put on the pageant before sunset (“The better to let them see us with, my dears,” as Odile said), the club of D177 congregated in the main house for an early dinner. The Myers were there, of course, presiding over their seafood feast, and some of the other patriarchs showed up to enjoy the atmosphere as well as the drawn butter. Salt was in a great mood, and Malcolm and Poe convinced him to whip up a batch of his apparently infamous Bahama rum punch, which tasted strongly of Campari and dyed red the lips and tongue of anyone who tasted it.

“Watch out for these,” Poe whispered to me on the sly, as I finished my first serving. “They’re sweet and you can drink them like water, but there’s a reason they call it ‘punch.’”

“Party pooper,” I said, reaching for the almost empty pitcher. I refilled my glass with the dregs.

“I’ll get more!” Darren volunteered, laying down his fork and grabbing the pitcher out of my hands.

“Good pretriarch,” George said, and ripped into another tail. We’d invited Darren to join our table for dinner, since he’d given us so much help with the preparations for the skit.

A few minutes later he returned and grabbed his own glass first.

“Uh, uh, uh,” Jenny said, lifting the filled-to-the-brim pitcher out of his hands. “The last thing we need is to get in trouble with your folks.”

“Any more than we already are?” Clarissa said. “Let the poor kid have a drink.”

“Yeah,” said Odile. “Drinking ages are for wussies. It’s not like he’s about to get in a car or anything. There’s no safer place to experiment.”

But Jenny handed the pitcher off to Ben, on her other side, and Darren watched it make the rounds without him getting so much as a taste.

I just rolled my eyes and sipped (carefully!) at my drink. Interesting flavor, but I think I preferred the tang of our official drink, the 312, to the bitter/sweet taste of the punch. Darren pouted for a few moments, then brightened when George sneaked him a flask and a can of Coke.

Thus fulfilling our quota of illegal activities for the evening, we settled down to dinner. I dug into my blackened snapper and watched Ben and Clarissa have a lobster-cleaning contest (Ben won, but admitted he was still ashamed at the trouncing he’d received from Demetria on the tennis court that afternoon).

As the mountain of seafood dwindled and the bottle of Campari started running low, we all drank a toast to our providers, Malcolm, Poe, and the Myers, and packed up for the hike out to the crescent beach. It was decided that Ben and Demetria would take the skiff out around the island, since I wasn’t yet comfortable enough around water to play navigator. I’d only get in the rowboat once they’d pulled it into the relatively shallow zone of the lagoon.

So off we went, into the gathering Florida dusk. The roar of crickets and other insects in the woods drowned out the sound of the waves from the nearby shoreline. I kept my eyes turned toward the treetops, hoping for another glimpse of the ospreys, but we were all making too much noise for them to show themselves.

Odile had a steady lecture going as we walked. “And then, Kevin, you have to make sure to angle the sword so it gets the light of the sun, or they won’t be able to see it. You don’t need to move fast—it’s more for looks than any—” She froze, covered her mouth with her hand, and gagged, shoulders convulsing so hard that she lost her balance and fell to her knees on the path, gasping as she began to vomit into the bushes.

Moments later, everyone else joined her.

17.

Suspicions

There were several occasions, during the horrible quarter of an hour that followed, that I thought I, too, was going to be sick to my stomach. Projectile vomiting is not something anyone can watch with impunity. I almost lost my cookies just from listening to them.

Eventually, they recovered enough to stagger back to the main house. The skit was clearly off, even if half of our costumes hadn’t been ruined in the deluge.

Oh. Ick. Amy…
Would it be okay if I just skipped the details? Suffice to say I can go a long, long time without seeing anything like that again. Or hearing it. Or…smelling it.

“Food poisoning,” I gasped out to Salt as I deposited my last semiconscious fellow knight on the porch. “I think they all need water. Or Gatorade. Or something.”

Actually, I thought they all needed to be airlifted back to the mainland to have what was left inside their stomachs pumped.

Why hadn’t I gotten sick? True, I’d stuck to the snapper rather than the spiny lobster, my Midwestern roots expressing horror at the idea of eating things with obvious eyes.
^*12
But still, every single lobster would have had to have been contaminated.

Harun was standing there, shaking his head at the carnage before him. He looked ill, to be sure, but then again, I bet I hardly looked the picture of health myself at that moment. Had he gotten sick?

“How do you feel?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Sympathetic dry heaves. I can’t stand watching people throw up. Otherwise…fine.” He met my gaze and we spoke in unison. “What did you eat?”

Frank and Kadie Myer appeared on the porch, aghast at the sight before them. “What happened?” the patriarch asked in dismay.

“Your seafood, that’s what,” George replied, rolling onto his side. “Christ, what did you do? Ferment that shit in a shed?”

“How dare you!” Kadie cried, stepping forward (but not, I noted, near enough to be in smelling distance). “We had those fish in ice the moment we caught them! Why do you blame everything that happens to you on someone else?”