The Incident on the Bridge (16 page)

“Both. Hey, I'll talk to her. Tell her you're the man.”

“Please don't, okay?”

“Why not?”

Jerome paused, and then he said something untrue: “I don't care that much.”

By the beginning of March, Jerome had three matches a week plus practice plus lessons with his private coach at Barnes, and he found himself looking obsessively through the green mesh before home matches, hoping to see Thisbe standing there, but she never was. Jerome's father took time off work and drove over the bridge and watched, and Clay watched, and the mothers of the other players chatted and kept their faces more or less facing the courts, and that was it. After tennis, Jerome went home and did hours of calculus and English and chem and Spanish, and on free weekends when he would have been at Clay's house, sitting on the green lawn, looking at the bay flow by like a river, eating the crab cakes the Mooreheads' housekeeper, Lourdes, made on Saturday nights, he stayed home because he thought maybe if he did like her and he got the courage to try again, she'd be able to tell her parents he was not a party guy at all.

On April 1, Clay started razzing him about getting a date to prom so they could double, even though Clay hadn't asked anybody, either. “Who would you ask if you
did
ask someone?” Clay said.

“I wouldn't.”

“But if you did.”

“I wouldn't,” Jerome said.

“Just pick somebody. How about that hot girl from Belgium?”

“No.”

“Tell me, bro, because I really want to ask somebody.”

“Who?” Jerome was curious. Clay never took anyone to a dance.

“You first.” Clay was acting weird. Nervous, almost.

“Okay,” Jerome said. “You really want to know?”

“Yeah. I really do.”

“Same girl.”

The look on Clay's face was odd. Surprised. “What do you mean?”

“Same girl I said the last time we had this stupid conversation.”

“Really?” Clay said. “This is not an April Fools' joke, right?”

“No. Why would it be?”

“Thisbe?” Clay said.

“Yeah.”

“I thought you stopped liking her, bro. You said you didn't care.”

“Well, I was wrong. Or I lied to get you off my back. What difference does it make?”

“None,” Clay said, and Jerome left it at that.

The very next day somebody was talking about how they never would have thunk it. Not Frisbee Locke and Clay Moorehead! She was out on his boat, somebody said. After curfew, no less. Jerome couldn't find Clay anywhere when it was time to go to lunch, so Jerome got a protein bar and was eating in Spreckels Park when he saw the two of them on a bench by the swings. Broad daylight, lunch, but there she was, kissing Clay on a bench. You were never more than two feet from someone who knew your mother in Coronado, so not only did Thisbe not care what her parents thought, but Clay didn't care what Jerome thought.

Jerome turned around and walked back to school without eating the rest of the protein bar, which he threw into the trash on his way to English. He thought about cutting class so he wouldn't have to see her, but his feet carried him up the stairs. When Thisbe slipped into her seat across the room, he stared stone-faced at the whiteboard, and he didn't look at her until Shao called on her. Thisbe's eyes slid sideways—dark, scared—to meet his after she answered the question, so Jerome stared at her as if to say,
Yes, I saw you,
and she opened her mouth as if to say something, but he looked immediately and deliberately away and refused to move his head in her direction for the remainder of the lecture, on which he took no notes. When the bell rang, he was the first person out the door. All the way across the quad he imagined her chasing after him, tapping him on the shoulder to say,
It's not what you think,
but no one chased after him and if anyone else spoke to him, he didn't notice. Clay called him later, and texted, and then came by, but Jerome managed to elude him until the day of the party, May 17.

C
lay only answered the phone because he thought it was Rite Aid calling about his Solodyn. He'd already gone a week without taking it because he was always forgetting to renew the prescription, which only lasted thirty days, and the last time he called it in, they'd said the price would be $1,125 for thirty pills. Thirty pills! The trial period during which he could pay $35 a month to not have disgusting acne was over. “Are you sure?” he'd said, and the pharmacy woman said she'd check and call him back.

But when he answered, it was not Rite Aid. It was the police. The police! They'd towed his car, which was unbelievable.

“I was going to pay the renewal fee,” he said, thinking the old bag who parked her Mercedes right next to him at the club and liked to give him coupons for Sparkle-Shine Car Wash must have ratted on him. She'd complained once already about his sticker being expired—he hadn't wanted to ask his mom if she'd taken care of it because it would give her a chance, again, to say he had no idea how many things she did for him every single day and how expensive he was—but you'd think the club could just give him a reminder or something, not call the police. He started ripping through the cabinets on the
Surrender
in search of a clean button-down shirt and an unwrinkled pair of pants to wear to the police station, thinking what he would say to pruney old Marni or Larni or whatever her name was. Then the policeman said they'd towed the car because it had been found on the bridge. Parked and abandoned.

“No way,” he said, but it was his, all right. A white Honda Accord registered to Renata Moorehead. “Okay. Yeah, I'll be right down there. As soon as I change.”

How would he convince the police that the car
must
have been stolen right out of the yacht club parking lot? No way was he paying an impound fee of five hundred dollars for
not
parking his car on the bridge, but he'd been with Isabel, smoking weed in the dunes, last night. Not a supergood alibi. Problem number two was getting the car out of the police station before they felt the need to search it for evidence of who took it and why, because although he certainly wanted to know that information and was definitely going to track that down, he thought there was a fifty-fifty chance that weed he'd once carried or maybe was still carrying in his car could be detected by a drug-sniffing dog, unless it was all bullshit what the cops said in those Say No to Drugs assemblies. Had he cleaned it all out last time? Had he felt under both seats?

He hadn't heard a word from Jerome since the party, so he was glad to see Jerome's name on his phone even though the message was,
did you hear about thisbe?

Jerome must mean how Thisbe had made out with that total dickwad from Point Loma and then fallen down because she was too drunk to walk, and cut her head open right when the cops were rolling the party. Jerome must have heard about that, finally, and wanted to hear what Clay thought. But he had no time to go through it now.

Jerome didn't answer.

Clay found a pair of pants that didn't show the wrinkles too bad and a white shirt with a small ink stain on the cuff, which would have to do. He took a Prozac with the rest of his Gutter Water Gush and combed his hair and hoped to God Teddy Locke wasn't still sitting at the snack bar when he left.

G
retchen had known Clay Moorehead's routine by the time he came in with Thisbe. All the girls who worked with her at the coffee shop had filled her in.

“His family has, like, a plane,” one of the girls told Gretchen.

“He throws parties when his parents are in Acapulco running hotels.”

“It's not Acapulco.”

“It isn't?”

“I don't know. Somewhere.”

When Clay brought in a girl, he always ordered the same thing and played the same corny song on the corny jukeboxes that stood on the tables in every booth and at intervals along the counter: “Unchained Melody,” which was a weird song for someone his age to know, but all of the songs were ancient so it's not like he could pick something current. He got the chocolate milkshake with no cherry, an order the counter girls made crude jokes about (
the cherries he's already gotten are enough,
ha ha). Stared into the girl's eyes and barely ate his food. Held her hands in a sweet old-fashioned way.

It was a sweet old-fashioned place, so Gretchen could see why the girls fell for it. People came to Clayton's for the not-foodie food: grilled cheese and fries, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, pie à la mode, burgers and shakes. They came for jukeboxes, red vinyl booths, and the waitresses, who, whether they were seventeen or forty, wore tight striped dresses, red lipstick, and saucy ponytails. This all helped people pretend, while they were sipping hot coffee out of thick white china mugs, that they were in a play or a movie or maybe, if they were really good at pretending, the past. Even Gretchen fell under the sway of this illusion at certain times of day, usually in the evenings when the light came in like liquid gold and struck a full milkshake glass that had just been topped with whipped cream and a cherry, and the cool, salty air floated in through the propped-open door and even the cars rolling by on the street seemed like props. These moments of delusion didn't keep Gretchen from feeling sad. Just because the place was tricky-good at fooling you into a romantic vision of your life didn't mean the spell lasted through the end of the shift, when she got on her bike in the dark, feeling grimy, tired, and old, and went back to life on a cramped boat with her inheritance: two talking birds.

Clay didn't bring the same girl in more than twice. According to Lauren Davis, who was a senior at the high school, date
numero
tres
with Clay Moorehead usually took place on his yacht. “He makes her dinner,” she said. “Steak and chocolate mousse.”

“Does he cook it?” Gretchen asked, intrigued.

“I don't know. The girls act like he does.”

“Then what?”

“What do you think? The boat's called the
Surrender.
”

“You're kidding.”

“I'm not.”

It had seemed impossible at first. Why did girls fall for him if it was a cycle? But he was handsome, he really was. The forehead smooth and wide, the hair black and just the right amount of shaggy, the white teeth blocky and strong, the dimple on one side making his smile seem even more sincere. He could really do a number on you, just sitting at the counter, smiling at you, saying, “Nice dress today, Ms. Ryman,” in a way that was innocent but somehow sexual because he looked frankly at her breasts and made her think about how sometimes women her age and boys his age…It made her ashamed to have even thought it. She wasn't that way. It was just her maternal instinct gone crooked or an animal response to a handsome male by a not-quite-past-childbearing-years female or the way Clayton's made it hard to remember what decade it was.

Which was why Gretchen hadn't liked seeing Thisbe Locke come in one afternoon before sunset, on a glorious spring day when the light might as well have been champagne.

“Now, that,” Lauren Davis said, filling two flared glasses with ice, “makes no sense at all.”

“Do you think he drugs them?” Mandy Shue said. “She should know better.”

“How would she know?” Lauren said. “She's too stuck-up to go to anything.”

“Come on. I know her. She's really nice,” Gretchen said.

Lauren snorted. “Depends on what kind of nice you mean.”

“I mean
nice
nice.”

“She thinks she's so much better than everyone else,” Lauren said, and went to take an order, so Gretchen didn't say that Thisbe's mother, Anne, had been a little that way, honestly. Anne of Green Gables, as she had been known then, went away to college somewhere back east—Vassar, maybe—and married a rich guy who died in a plane crash, so Green Gables moved back to the island with her two girls, renting, as it happened, the house next door to Gretchen's mom at about the same time Gretchen came back from Hawaii to take care of her. To Gretchen's surprise, Green Gables was always sending over cake or cookies or soup or bread that she thought might tempt Gretchen's mom to eat. The girls brought it over on what looked like the good china. Thisbe was the older one, lying on a towel in the backyard, reading fat books, or playing classical stuff on the upright piano, her mother's daughter to a tee, and Ted was the wild one, it looked like, and was always heading off in a wet suit or a life jacket. Then Green Gables started dating Rich Guy #2, the lawyer, and Gretchen was happy for Anne, she really was, even though he seemed kind of pushy and critical the few times Gretchen heard him in the backyard. He had a big old house on B, so when they got married, Anne and the girls moved over there, no more than six blocks away but six blocks was like thirty miles on the island, especially if you weren't really friends.

“Hi, Thisbe,” Gretchen said. “Hello, Clay.”

Thisbe smiled incandescently. “Hi, Gretchen! I didn't know you worked here! I thought you were doing, like, scuba diving for the police. My stepdad told me. That is so amazing!”

“I was.”

“Search and rescue, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But you didn't like it?”

Thisbe and Clay waited for Gretchen to explain why she would give up an amazing job. “Diving is one of those things you have to do for fun or it gets ruined,” Gretchen said.

“Oh,” Thisbe said. “But you're living on a boat, right? Ted is so jealous!”

The Lockes were members of the yacht club Gretchen couldn't afford to join. Gretchen felt bad for wondering, but maybe Anne or her snobby new husband had been among those who had helped decide that Gretchen could not be grandfathered in and given a slip, which forced Gretchen to moor at Tidelands instead, where you didn't have any amenities, and every time you needed to go ashore, you rowed your dinghy from the boat and back again and dragged whatever you were carrying—water, groceries, laundry—across the mudflats.

“I hear Ted's sailing a lot,” Gretchen said.

Thisbe nodded. “She's so into it. Clay sails, did you know that?”

“No!” Gretchen looked right into Clay's face, which she honestly tried not to do anymore, and he flashed his dimple. He shrugged. He tried to look modest.

“He offered to let Ted crew for him in some big regatta but she wouldn't. She's obsessed with being skipper. Which is cool.”

Clay shrugged his handsome shrug. Gretchen was heartened, somehow, that Ted could resist him. “Well, you've gotta hand it to her,” Gretchen said, and the way Clay was holding the menu she knew he was ready to order now and stop all the chitchat.

Gretchen wanted to take Thisbe aside before she left with Clay and ask if she knew what she was doing, but there was no chance. Thisbe went to the bathroom after the cheeseburgers, the hand-holding, the melody unchained, so Gretchen found herself standing there with the check, saying, “Thank you,” and then she just went for it. “You wouldn't break her heart, would you, Clay?”

“Who, me?”

“Yeah. Seriously.”

Amber light touched the edges of the little flip-down names of songs in the miniature jukebox, the crumpled edges of napkins, uneaten fries. Even the dirty milkshake glass, coated with dried foam, gleamed.

“Thisbe's a very unusual girl,” Gretchen said, not even sure what she meant by that. Her voice came out a little severe, like she was insane or something. “She's very innocent.”

“I know,” he said. “Don't worry.”

“Consider me worried.”

“It's all good,” he said. His smile seemed a little anxious, and for a minute she wondered if she was listening to too much gossip. Maybe Lauren and the other girls were jealous, so they spread stories that weren't true. Nobody said you couldn't bring more than one girl to a diner when you were in high school, or that you couldn't play the Righteous Brothers for all of them.

Thisbe had come back from the bathroom, wearing freshly applied lip balm and smelling of the hand lotion she was still rubbing into her hands. Clay had hustled her out as Thisbe was smiling and saying, “Bye, Gretchen! Thanks so much! I miss you! Take care.”