Swim Back to Me (4 page)

I looked at Sasha, and his eyes followed mine, in time to see her put the picture back on the TV.

“Whoa,” he said again. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

“Sorry,” she said, smiling a big, bright smile like the one she’d given the guys at SCRA. “You seemed cool—I didn’t think you’d mind.”

He half laughed, half snorted. “Cool? How old are you two, anyway?”

“Fourteen,” she said. “Well, I am. His birthday’s not till July.”

“Man,” the guy said—but he went into the kitchen and began rummaging in a drawer, and after a moment we followed, Sasha going in after him while I stopped in the doorway.

He found matches and gave them to her, then rummaged some more and found a needle. She held them both in one hand while with the other she reached down to pull off her shoe and sock.

“You can sit down,” he said.

She sat at his table. I thought of going to help her—offering to hold the needle while she lit the match or something—but I just stood there. When it came time for her to pierce the blister I looked away. There was a red Stanford banner hanging on one wall, and I wondered if he’d done his undergraduate work at Stanford, too.

Sasha stood. She unpinned her hair and then redid it, catching the damp strands that had come loose and working to jam the mangled pencil back through the holes in the leather thing.

“OK?” the guy said.

“Um,” she said, smiling brightly again. “Could I use your phone?”

He smiled, too, but not in a friendly way. “You want to use the phone,” he said, making it a statement rather than a question.

“My parents said I had to call in the middle. They’re really overprotective—they almost didn’t let me do this.
Their
parents were overprotective. I’ll probably grow up to be overprotective myself.”

“Or you could break the mold and surprise everyone.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and then he swept his arm to the side, indicating a wall-mounted telephone.

“Richard,” she said, barely glancing in my direction, “you might as well wait outside.”

I turned and left, walking through the dark living room and out the door. She was in a weird mood, and I almost wished we were walking with some other kids. It was strange Dan and Joanie had told her to call, but so what if they had? That didn’t make them overprotective. I thought of how she’d complained about Dan’s waving us off at the starting point. She had no idea how lucky she was.

The tall guy came out of the house and stood near me, his arms dangling by his sides. I had my gorp open, and I offered him the bag. To my surprise, he reached in and scooped up a handful.

“Thanks, I like the raisins.”

“So does Sasha,” I said. “My friend. Whenever we stop she just picks out the raisins.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’ll bet she does.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. So how long is this thing, anyway?”

“Twenty miles,” I said. “We’re halfway done.”

He looked across the street. A woman with big sunglasses seemed to be arguing with the volunteer at the check-in station. He said, “If I was going to walk twenty miles it sure wouldn’t be around Palo Alto.”

“But it’s
in
Palo Alto.”

“I mean I’d want to
get
something for my efforts. Some payoff.”

“We are. A thousand dollars.”

“
You
aren’t,” he said, and then he really looked at me and smiled. “Unless you two are out to defraud some folks. Are you out to defraud people?”

I shook my head.

“You’re sure?” he said. “May I see some ID, please?”

I giggled, then coughed to cover the girlish sound. “It was Sasha’s idea,” I said. “I just came along for the ride. I’m not much of a do-gooder.”

“Do-gooders do good for themselves,” he said, “not for the people they’re helping. Did you know that?”

“How cynical.”

He grinned, revealing big, square teeth. “How about a couple more raisins?”

I handed him the bag and he dumped some more gorp into his palm. He said, “It’s none of my business, but do you always do what Sasha wants?”

This annoyed me, and I was about to tell him how wrong he was when the door swung open and she appeared.

“OK,” she said as she came down the steps, “let’s get going.”

The guy put his hands on his hips and stared at her. “You get both birds?”

She looked up at him. “What?”

“With one stone. Wasn’t that the whole idea of this stop? Kill two birds with one stone?”

She stood still, on the verge of saying something. I was sure it would be something sarcastic or rude, and I felt nervous. Then whatever it was disappeared and she looked at me. “Ready?”

I nodded.

She adjusted her backpack, then looked up at the guy one last time. “Thanks again, by the way.”

“You’re welcome,” he said evenly. “By the way.”

The last two miles were death. We’d thrown away our water bottles—too heavy—and we were hot and thirsty and incredibly tired, each step a trudge, each curb a mountain to descend with another opposite to scale. My whole body was made of sand, a vast desert that could be moved only by time. Sasha’s face was the color of a faded bloodstain, her hair almost black with sweat.

“A thousand dollars,” she said when we’d entered the last mile, and the two of us began chanting it, “A thousand dollars, a thousand dollars,” over and over again. I tried to think of something I’d buy if I were getting the money, but all I could come up with was grass, I wanted to buy a field of grass to lie on.

The last check-in station was on campus, in front of the Hoover Tower. There were banners congratulating us, tables with free food and drinks, a group of elementary school kids with a row of basins that people were lining up to bathe their feet in. We surrendered our sheets to be stamped one last time, and then we lay down under the closest tree and didn’t speak for at least ten minutes.

“I can’t believe we said we’d walk home,” I said at last, and she laughed.

“Yeah, that was brilliant.”

It was almost six, and I pictured my father in the kitchen, starting work on one of the rudimentary weekend dinners he served. I imagined him casting glances at the box of See’s Candies, looking forward to the moment after we’d eaten when we’d break the seal on the box and each choose a chocolate.

“Maybe I’ll come over,” I said.

Sasha looked at me. “What for?”

“I don’t know.”

She’d been lying there with her eyes closed, but now she got onto her knees and began scanning the area.

“Who are you looking for?” I had an idea she thought Dan might’ve driven over to ferry us home.

“I’m meeting someone. I don’t know when I’ll be ready, so maybe you should just go ahead without me.”

“Who?” I said, but my voice cracked, and I sounded squeaky and pathetic.

“Just someone.”

My stinking shoes lay a few feet away, and I sat up and reached for them. “It’s not like I care.”

“Yes, you do.”

My socks were damp. I had to turn them right side out again, and when I finished I brought my moist fingers to my nose and smelled sweat and rubber.

“OK, it’s Cal,” she said. “From last night. The guy in the vest.”

“I know who Cal is.” I pulled on one sock, then the other. “What are you going to do with him?”

“Nothing. Talk.”

“
He’s
who you called,” I said. “God, I can’t believe this.”

She seemed not to hear me. Still on her knees, she swiveled away from me and craned her neck, and then she saw him; I could tell because she brought her fingertips to her lips.

Now I had a rival. She began meeting him after school, at his apartment, and after the first few times this happened—Sasha simply not showing up for the afternoon bus home—I wasn’t surprised when she announced to me that she was going to start riding her bike to school instead of taking the bus. She said it was because it was spring now, and because riding the bus was for losers, but she didn’t make the excuses with much energy, and I didn’t argue. I switched, too, so we could still go to school together, though of course I had to make the ride home by myself. My afternoons reverted to the old style: a snack, homework, the click of my father’s bicycle as he returned from work.

“I don’t think you should go to his apartment,” I told her, but she didn’t care. She said he was teaching her to meditate, that they smoked, pigged out on Fritos when they had the munchies, sat on his balcony and sunned themselves. The pencil she’d used in her hair on the day of the Walk turned out to be the pencil he’d used to record his pledge the night before, and she guarded it like a treasure, keeping it in a special wooden box on her dresser.

“Are you, you know, boyfriend/girlfriend?” I asked her one afternoon when we happened to meet at our bicycles after school.

“It’s complicated,” she said, but her face filled with color, and I felt something heavy lodge in the middle of my body.

We still got together, but unpredictably—when Cal was busy. I was at her house one afternoon when Dan said, “So you didn’t want to work on the planning committee, too, Richard Appleby?” and Sasha, without giving me time to respond, said, “Richard missed the first meeting and they’re being ridiculously strict about attendance.” Another time, Joanie told me she was sorry to hear my mother was ill, and Sasha shot me a hard stare and then explained later that in order to get out of the house one evening, she’d said I was upset about a health problem my mother was having, and she was going to take a walk with me.

We were at Tressider when she told me this, the student union on campus—throughout the fall and winter we’d often ridden our bikes over and either bowled a few games at the crummy bowling alley or just bought sodas in the little store and absorbed the scene: guys with long hair, girls with bare feet, the sound of someone beating on a bongo drum.

Today, we sat at a table on the terrace and passed a single can of Coke back and forth. “Why did my mother have to be sick?” I said. “Why did she have to be in it at all? Couldn’t you just say we were going to ride bikes?”

“They didn’t want me to go out. They’re being ridiculous these days. I had to think of something they couldn’t say no to.”

“Well, now what am I supposed to do? What if your mother starts asking me questions?”

“She won’t.”

“She might.”

“She won’t. She’s worried about you. She won’t ask you questions.”

I felt my throat squeeze, and I half stood and pushed my chair backward.

“Watch it,” said a voice from behind me, and I turned and saw that I’d nearly run over some girl’s toes. She was pretty, with long straight hair parted in the middle and a leather cord around her neck.

“Sorry.”

“It’s OK, honey. Just be more careful. There are other people in the world, too, you know.”

I pulled my chair back to the table and sat down again. My face was on fire, and I looked away from Sasha, focused on a pigeon pecking between the tables, bobbing for crumbs.

“Do you think she’s sexy?” Sasha said quietly, leaning forward.

I didn’t care. I was furious at her, furious at the girl, furious at Joanie. She didn’t need to be worried about me. She had said to me once that I could trust her if I ever wanted to talk
—About your mother
, she didn’t say,
about what she did to you
—and I’d thought of trying to explain that it really wasn’t that big a deal, my father and I were doing fine. People never seemed to believe me, though—Mrs. Bloom, my science teacher from last year; Malcolm’s mother, who’d cornered me once—and so I’d learned not to bother.

Looking over my shoulder, I slid my chair back again, carefully this time, and squeezed out of it. Leaving Sasha with a puzzled look on her face, I went over to the little convenience store where we’d bought our soda. I had a pocketful of change, and I picked up a bag of potato chips and got in line to pay. I looked out at the terrace and saw Sasha sitting at our table with a bored look on her face. The girl I’d almost hit still stood behind my chair, talking to a table full of other girls. She kept flipping her hair away from her face, which I guessed was sexy. Her breasts were on the small side, though. Malcolm had brought a
Playboy
to school a few days earlier, and I remembered the huge breasts on the centerfold, and the way she had her tongue sticking out a little, just enough to lick her upper lip. We spent lunch paging through the magazine, sitting behind the portables so no teachers would see us. Bob liked the women who held their breasts in their upturned hands, but I thought they looked weird, as if they were about to hand them to you, like little pets that wanted to be cradled.

It was almost my turn to pay. The cashier was a middle-aged woman with pale, fat arms. When I was much younger my mother and I sometimes met my father at the faculty club for lunch, and afterward she and I would stop at this store for Wint-O-Green Life Savers, which I would chew at home in front of the bathroom mirror once it was dark out, desperate to see the famous sparks.

I set the chips on the counter and reached into my pocket—and then suddenly I didn’t want them anymore. I left them sitting there and went back outside.

“What the fuck was that?” Sasha said when I got back to the table. “You didn’t even buy anything?”

I shrugged.

“Look at that guy,” she said in a lower voice, angling her head toward the guy at the next table. He had long dark blond hair in a ponytail, and he was bent over a notebook, writing quickly. Spread out on the table in front of him were four or five open books.

“What about him?”

“Daddy is so fucked up. He says the students here aren’t serious. ‘It’s not Yale, that’s for sure.’ That guy hasn’t stopped writing since we sat down. Last year all Daddy could talk about was how the students at Yale don’t know anything about living. Now the students at Stanford don’t know anything about hard work.”

I thought of the afternoon when Dan came home so angry. I’d thought he was mad at his colleagues, but maybe I’d been wrong.

“He has to stop complaining,” she said. “He has to relax and leave me alone.” She was blushing, and I knew what she was thinking: so she could see even more of Cal.