The Lifeboat Clique (11 page)

“I'll take my chances.”

“Nah, don't give up. That rope is what you call a metaphor.”

“For what?”

“For something we want to do but can't yet. But we will someday. We just can't give up.”

There was one girl who was even more hopeless at climbing the rope than we were. Her name was Stephanie Caldwell, and she was one of those miserable, overweight, dejected-looking girls who are scattered through this land, populating gym classes from LA to Pittsburgh and beyond. Surely there are Stephanie Caldwells in Russia, Denmark, and Uganda, and their purpose is to make everyone else feel superior and sad. Her inner life meant nothing to us: whether she stepped on spiders or let them go, or if she liked frozen yogurt or had a natural sense of direction or sang into a hairbrush. We didn't care. She was a type, there for a Hollywood script to find and usher in the captain of some mythical football team who would love her for her heart. Some talent agent who would hear her sad, mournful song in some lonely park and make her into a world-famous pop sensation. But for now she was Stephanie Caldwell who couldn't climb the rope.

She'd take a few great lungfuls of breath, as though preparing to go underwater, then grab the rope and take a little hop, briefly positioning herself on the first knot before falling flat on the mat with a terrible thump while Ms. Hanson sighed and the other girls looked on, stone-faced.

One time Abigail caught Sienna smiling, moved over close to her, and whispered, “What's so funny?”

Sienna's lip curled. “Nothing. Mind your own business,” she said, and then Ms. Hanson said, “Less talking, more climbing,” and broke them up. But before they moved away from each other, Abigail whispered to Sienna, “You laugh at her again, and I'll punch you in the face.”

We kept trying to climb that bastardly rope, symbol of everything wrong with school and LA and the world. The knots were only there to taunt us, pretending to give us an advantage. Abigail made me call them “why knots.” She said this would encourage us. Something about rope and girl still would not communicate. But we were inching higher and higher.

Meanwhile, Ms. Hanson got an audition. She wouldn't say what it was, but the first week in March she was on a high so high she completely neglected us, her day job, these students that she would jettison and forget in a second for the right role. Or any role. Nevertheless, her excitement was contagious. The glow on her face was hard to resist, and we cheered her on.

She was absent one Wednesday on a trumped-up medical emergency we knew meant “possible sitcom.” We got a substitute who was a monster at volleyball and whose boobs didn't move when she jumped for the spike. She had
gray eyes and a square jaw and a faint, blond mustache.

“I will suffer no bullshit!” she'd scream for no reason before making us do laps.

Abigail and I found her refreshing.

“I bet she traps feral cats and then sedates them and spays them herself in a lab in the basement, for the good of the community,” I said.

The next day Ms. Hanson was back and full of hope. The audition had gone well. She had a callback on Saturday. She smiled at us, was nice to us, remembering at least half our names. If all went well, she could forget us by Sunday.

Monday morning she came in with a blank and distant stare. They had given the part to another woman, a younger woman. Someone without even half her talent. Someone who was not funny, had not memorized her lines, and did not have that special charisma that everyone had noticed all of Ms. Hanson's life, from her sixth-grade drama teacher on. She was too depressed to lead the class and so we spent the time making a big poster out of glue and different colors of glitter that said
WE BELIEVE IN YOU, MS. HANSON
, which we did not, as she slumped on the bench, staring at her cell phone.

The next day she was back and ready to be an angry, discontented bitch again. It was rope-climbing time, and
damn it if we weren't all going to climb it, because life was full of ups and downs (i.e., her disastrous tryout), but the best of us (i.e., she) would overcome adversity (i.e., her shitty job as a gym teacher) to triumph (i.e., forget us all).

Sienna dominated the rope easily, as did a few of the others. Then it was Stephanie Caldwell's turn. She did her usual halfhearted routine and then gave up with a heavy sigh.

“No,” Ms. Hanson said. “Do it again.”

Stephanie Caldwell looked at her in surprise. This was not the routine. The routine was: try, fail, and then slink back to the shadows. We all exchanged glances, because Ms. Hanson had an edge to her voice, an edge meant to cut the flesh of chubby girls, and it made us all feel a bit nervous.

“Again?” Stephanie Caldwell asked. I don't remember her ever speaking before. Her voice was faint, uncertain.

“Do it again. You can't just quit, Jennifer.”

“Jennifer?” I whispered to Abigail. “She's not even close.”

Stephanie looked to the rest of us as if we could do anything about her situation. She grabbed the rope again and tried to climb it. Cords stood out in her neck. Her arms shook. She made it up two feet and then she let go, landing in a heap on the ground.

And this is when you quit. This is when you call it a day. This is when you realize that you are perhaps not cut out for the rope, that you have other things to give the world besides the red, ugly stripes on your palms.

But Ms. Hanson wasn't buying it. Hollywood had been cruel to her, so she was going to take it out on Stephanie.

“Again!” she barked. “Again!”

“Really?” Stephanie asked in a whisper. Her eyes were red. Tears welled and began to fall down her face, and we all cringed a little.

“I don't feel sorry for you, Jennifer,” Ms. Hanson said, repeating the same speech Hollywood had given her. “And you shouldn't feel sorry for yourself just because you're overweight.”

An audible gasp went through the room. Swing Tits had gone there.

“Now get up and get back on that rope!” she ordered.

“I can't,” Stephanie said, and now she crossed the line into ugly crying, the kind you see on babies. A line of spit formed an unclimbable thread from her upper lip to her lower. Her face crumpled up, and she began to sob. “I can't I can't I can't!”

“Leave her alone, Ms. Hanson.” I turned around to find the idiot in the gym who had dared challenge this moody Hollywood also-ran and found it was myself. “Who cares
if she climbs this stupid rope? It's all bullshit, anyway.” I was horrified at my words, yet I couldn't shut up. “You're just being mean to her because your audition didn't work out, and that's bullshit, too.”

Stephanie gaped up at me, openmouthed, her saliva rope broken by the shock of it all.

Ms. Hanson seemed shocked herself. Her eyes burned. “What did you say to me?” she asked as a murmur rippled through the throng of girls.

Before I had a chance to answer, Abigail appeared at my side. I had forgotten about her for a second, but suddenly, as Stephanie crawled away, there she was.

“Ms. Hanson,” she said. “I'm awful sorry about my friend. She did not mean to be so rude. She was kicked by a milk cow in Wisconsin when she was eight years old, and it kind of tilted her brain all catty-whumpus. I would like to volunteer to climb this rope for Stephanie.”

“There are no substit—” Ms. Hanson began, her world collapsing, little gym bitches being sassy to her and James Cameron turning his camera on someone else. But Abigail had already taken the rope and started climbing, and suddenly the drama went vertical again.

We all stood watching as Abigail struggled up past her last high-water mark and kept inching upward, not effortlessly like Sienna, but huffing and puffing and turning red
as she paused to look down at me and see my encouraging thumbs-up.

“I'm coming, Abigail!” I shouted. I ran to the rope and began to climb it too.

“Get down here, both of you!” Ms. Hanson protested.

But we paid no attention. We inched up the rope, determined to succeed for Stephanie and every single Stephanie in the world.

I was sweating. My hands and shoulders ached. But I kept going, inspired by the efforts of my friend, who huffed and puffed above me.

Abigail reached the top first. She looked down.

“Come on, Denver!” she called to me. “You can do this! Easy-peasy!”

Ms. Hanson had abandoned her efforts to stop us and was staring up at us, arms crossed, wearing a furious expression.

I kept inching toward Abigail, who was anchored at the top, waiting for me. “Ya got this, cowgirl!” she called. “You got it, you got it, you got it. . . .”

Suddenly I was there. At the top. The class broke into a cheer. Abigail and I let one hand go of the rope long enough to high-five each other.

“Get down here,” Ms. Hanson called up crossly as we
clung together, looking down at the class. “It was not your turn.”

But Abigail wasn't done. Maybe it would have been better if she had been. She took something out of the waistband of her shorts and held it out so everyone could see it.

My stomach lurched.

I looked down at the bench. Ms. Hanson's cell phone was gone.

“Is that my phone?” Ms. Hanson demanded, her voice rising into a shriek.

“Call from James Cameron!” Abigail announced, her distinct drawl carrying through the gym.

“Abigail,” I whispered. “What are you doing?”

She just smiled.

“You give that phone back to me!” Ms. Hanson shouted.

Abigail looked down at her. “You want it? You want it?” she taunted.

“GIVE ME BACK THAT PHONE RIGHT NOW!”

“Sure,” she said, “I'll give it to you, since that's all you care about. You sure don't care about being no gym teacher, that's for damn sure.” She threw the phone as far as she could. It soared and fell in slow motion, Ms. Hanson diving for it, but too late. Gravity sucked it down,
completing the betrayal, and it hit the gym floor and shattered. I heard the entire gymnasium draw a collective breath as time stopped and everyone froze in place, staring at that useless phone.

“Maybe we should just live up here,” I whispered.

The aftermath? Not good. Abigail was suspended for a week, and I was given five hours of detention for swearing at a teacher, even though, if you wanted to get technical about it, I was swearing at a rope.

“Are you in a lot of trouble?” I asked Abigail over the phone.

“My parents are stirred up good. On the one hand, they are proud that I took up for ‘the fat girl,' as my ma calls poor Stephanie. But my daddy the lawyer says I was legally at fault, and ‘willful cell phone destruction is actionable.' That's a quote straight from him. Legal bullshit. My mother is headed for Sedona next month. The neighbors have a really loud lawnmower man, and our property taxes went up, and I suppose this was a rope too far.”

The shop teacher, Mr. Crower, was in charge of my detention class. His feet were up on the desk, and he was reading a book with a bare-chested Jim Morrison on the cover. I walked in, and a bunch of loser-weirdo-criminal types looked up at me. I dropped the detention form on Mr. Crower's desk.

“I'm not supposed to be here,” I announced.

He glanced up from his book and read my detention slip.

“Says here you are.”

“I'm a political prisoner. I'm not like these people. I was protesting the treatment of a member of our society who—”

“Sit down.”

I found an empty desk as the losers continued to stare at me. The guy across from me, who had sideburns and a yellow tooth, leaned over and said, “You think you're better than us, don't you?”

“Yes, I do. All I did was say ‘Bullshit,' and you probably blew up a bus, so leave me alone.”

OUR PARENTS HAD
met once, on a Saturday when my parents had dropped me off at Abigail's house. But now, of course, they had to schedule a dinner to talk about what delinquents their two daughters were and figure out which one was the bad influence on the other. The four of them hit it off and started going to each other's houses and playing cards. But that was only the beginning of a much less happy story. Like an earthquake that shakes the coast. And you think it's over, but it's not over and the wave it causes just keeps coming and coming and coming.

MIDMORNING ON THE SECOND DAY AT SEA, I HEARD SOMETHING
in the sky. I jerked my head up and moved the compact around, flicking my wrist frantically.

“Do you hear that?” I asked Abigail.

“No.”

“Listen.”

Then it came into view. “Look!” I shouted, pointing. “It's a plane!”

It was very high up there, in between the clouds, but we were all full of hope despite being abandoned by the ship. I continued to signal some desperate code of sun and mirror that was meant to say, “WE'RE DYING
DOWN HERE,” as my companions waved their arms and shouted.

But the plane kept going higher and higher until it disappeared into the clouds.

I slumped, defeated, into one of the seats at the back of the boat.

“That mirror thing didn't work,” Hayley said accusingly. “Again.”

“Yes, I think we can all agree on that,” I said. “Thank you, though, Hayley, for pointing that out.”

“The plane was too high,” Trevor said helpfully. His fingers went up to his tanned chest, but he was too languid to drum and let his hands fall back down into his lap. “We're screwed, man, screwed.”

“Well, I don't know about you guys, but I'm not going to die without a fight,” I said. “I'm going to keep trying to live.”

Abigail's face was a bright red, and all her freckles were back, including backup freckles I'd never seen before, freckles that had lurked beneath the surface for years, little understudies waiting for the stage. The wind and sun had done terrible things to her hair. Her eyelashes were crusty, her lips dry.

“Well, I'm gonna live too,” she said. “I just don't rightly have a plan this exact minute.”

“Well, I do,” I announced, as Abigail gave me the evil eye. “Everyone look away.”

“Why?” asked Sienna.

“Never mind.” I went to the other side of the boat, turned toward the sea, and took off my shirt.

The warm sea air hit the bare skin of my arms and belly. I took off my bra.

“Dude,” Trevor said. But then he resumed his drumming and the others fell silent, waiting to see whether or not I had gone mad.

It was an old underwire bra I never wore unless I wanted my boobs to look perky. It was the one I had chosen for the fateful meeting with Croix at the Malibu house, and it had served me well.

I put my shirt back on. Then I ripped at the fabric of my bra with my teeth.

“She's eating her bra!” Hayley cried, and I wanted to turn around and remind her she was an idiot, but decided that would be a waste of energy. I wrestled with the wire on one of the cups, savagely bending it back and forth until I could finally separate the wire from the fabric. I began working the wire into the shape of a hook. Finally I turned back around and showed it to my fellow voyagers.

“What is that?” Sienna asked.

“It's a fishhook. Or it will be when I'm finished.”

“What are you going to use as bait?” Trevor asked.

“Spam.”

“But we need to save the Spam!” Hayley cried. “Abigail, don't let her use up our Spam supply.”

I gave Hayley a withering stare. “I'll use a piece of mine.”

Abigail was watching me. Processing everything. “Hell, let her try,” she said at last. “Unless you got a better idea.”

“Hayley,” I said. “I need your nail clippers.”

“Give her the nail clippers,” Abigail said.

Hayley didn't even argue this time. She fished around in her purse and handed them over. I used the nail file part as a tool to bend the wire and completed the process with my back molars, grimacing with the effort and feeling like my enamel would crack any minute. But finally the wire bent double, and I had a crude loop through which to run a string.

I sat down, put the other end of the wire against the metal side of the boat, and pressed down hard, laboriously scraping the tip of the wire back and forth. The others were quiet, intrigued. Even Trevor stopped drumming. It was peaceful work for someone who didn't know what she
was doing, and I imagined that's how midwives must feel their first time around. Just faking everything, pretending to be in charge.

Ten minutes later I had a point that felt sharp against my fingertip. I looked around for some line.

“Give me the rope,” I said.

“I have a question,” Hayley said, almost sounding polite.

“Yes?”

“What's the use of catching a fish if we run out of water?”

“Fish have water in their bodies,” I explained. “Next to the spine, and in the eyes. Might buy us some time.”

“Discovery Channel?” she asked, breathing the words.

“
National Geographic
.”

Abigail handed me the rope. I unraveled a few strands of it and used Hayley's clippers to cut them at a length of about five feet. I twisted the strands carefully. They kept unraveling, and I had to start over again. Finally I had what looked like a long piece of string having a very bad hair day. I forced the string through the hook I had fashioned and tied a quadruple knot in it.

“Dude,” Trevor said, “you could have used this.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a pocketknife.

“You have a pocketknife?” Abigail snapped. “Give me
that! You're a jackass, Trevor.”

He handed over his knife and shrugged. “No one asked.”

Hayley already had a tiny piece of Spam cut and waiting for me. She handed it to me with a look that didn't necessarily mean anything.

“I don't want to suck a fish eye,” Sienna said.

“I'll bait the hook,” Abigail offered. “I used to catch catfish out of a pond in Texas. I was a pro.”

“Fine,” I said. “Bait it.”

I lowered the baited hook over the side of the boat into the water, wrapping the other end of it around my wrist. The others crowded around me, watching. Trevor moved in so close to me I could smell his underarms where the Old Spice deodorant had jumped ship long ago.

I waited for what seemed like an hour. The others moved away, bored, and started talking among themselves. My arm ached and then went numb. I felt my breasts falling forward now that their underwire support was tempting some unseen fish in the ocean depths. The sun was hot on the back of my neck.

At last I felt a tug. Then a distinct, hard pull, so hard it almost drew me down into the water.

“I got something!” I shouted.

“No shit?” Abigail cried.

“Help me! This thing weighs a ton!” Trevor reached
down and grabbed the line just below where I had it, and the two of us struggled together.

“Damn, that's a big fish!” he exclaimed.

Slowly we dragged in the line as sweat poured down our faces and the others urged us on.

A giant fish head came out of the water, mouth gaping open and the hook stuck inside it. Its eyes bulged. It shook itself, and suddenly the line went slack.

We pulled the line out of the water, and there was no bait left, no hook either, just a few rope strands unraveling in the sunlight.

I heard the collective sigh behind me, the auditory equivalent of the empty weight in my hands, that tactile, real, perfect defeat, that sinking heart of a moment. Suddenly I was so angry at that fish that I wanted to smash in its face. And I was going in after it.

Nobody had time to stop me. I dove off the back of the boat into the shocking chill of the water and down under the sea, my bare feet kicking, my arms moving, my teeth clenched behind my closed lips, my blood boiling.

I was looking for that fish.

That was my fish, my reward for learning and trying and caring more than the others. For my ingenuity and craftsmanship and grit.

Underneath the sea, the water was surprisingly clear. I saw pools of fish around me, little stripes on them, blue and red, beautiful and just out of reach.

I took a swipe at them, causing them to scatter, but still I swam farther down until I ran out of breath and my lungs felt tight, leaving me no choice but to rise, kicking my feet, following the sunlight that shimmered on the water and pointed the way back to temporary survival. I kicked harder as I swam upward, my lungs aching and crying out for air. Panic taking hold of me, until finally I broke the surface and took a deep, angry, jagged breath as the others watched, mouths agape, from the back of the boat.

“Hey!” Abigail shouted. “Get back in the boat!”

“Dude!” Trevor called. “You'll drown!”

Even Sienna and Hayley were gesturing at me as though mine was a life worth saving. Finally I began making my way back to the boat, my strokes still strong despite two days of Spam and crackers.

I reached the ladder and began hoisting myself up. Trevor and Abigail caught my arms and hauled me aboard, where I collapsed in a heap on the deck, breathing heavily, water running off my hair and clothes and soaking into the rotted carpeting.

“See him?” Hayley asked.

I was too exhausted to answer her or even sign the word
idiot
. After several moments, I caught my breath and managed to make it onto one of the back seats. I moved my wet hair out of my face but said nothing. I felt angrier than I remember ever being, but I wasn't sure at what exactly. There were so many potential targets for my rage: God, tsunamis, the sea, cool kids, underwire bras, fathers, ex-best friends. And the music of Nickelback.

“Well, dude,” Trevor said. “You tried.”

“Yes,” Sienna said with surprising kindness. “You tried.”

Hayley wiped her eyes. “That was the bravest thing I ever saw. Braver than when Jennifer Gilmore had eczema all over her face, but she still tried out for drill team.”

I felt moved by their reaction. Surprised by it, too. I'd expected to be scorned. Called stupid for trying. But I was a tiny, fractional bit of a hero. I looked at Abigail and saw grudging respect on her face.

“Yeah, well, you almost got that slippery bastard,” she said. “Ya came real close, anyway.”

I couldn't help basking in her words. But I was too tired to enjoy the moment for very long. I sank down on the deck, lay back against the carpeting, and fell asleep in my wet clothes.

WE SAW NO
more boats or planes that day. Just ocean, endless sea, there to taunt us with fish that we couldn't catch and water we couldn't drink. The gallon jug was getting lighter, and we cut our rations to smaller gulps. The Spam was salty and worsened our thirst, but it was the only food we had. A seaworthy misery had begun to set in. That feeling of being helpless with nothing to hold on to, tired, salt encrusted, sunburned. We had no idea how far we'd drifted, but the initial relief at surviving the tsunami was ebbing, and the water level in that jug was as scary as a monster. My tongue felt swollen and my eyeballs dry. But the few clouds overhead were fluffy and white and had nothing to give.

That night Abigail took first watch as the stars came out in the sky. One by one, we lay down on the deck to sleep. Hayley inched over toward me until we were lying face-to-face.

“You were brave today,” she whispered. “I wish I was brave and knew how to do things and had all this knowledge like you do and it just goes to show sometimes you don't really know about a person that you ignore 'cause you don't know them and they're not in your group and then a tsunami comes and washes you out to sea and you
discover something about that person. . . .”

“Thank you,” I answered. I wondered if Hayley were whispering to me to avoid being heard associating with a non-cool kid, but that wasn't the reason, after all.

“Do you think we'll survive?” she asked.

I thought about this. In truth, I didn't know. But she looked so desperate that I said, “Sure we will. I mean, we made it this far, didn't we?”

Maybe it was a trick of the moonlight, but her eyes looked haunted. Less fish now, more mammal. Something warm-blooded that feels pain and fear and grief.

“I'm sorry,” she said, keeping her voice low.

“Sorry about what?”

She tried to wet her lips, but her tongue no longer held moisture. “Remember when Sienna said that you shouldn't have lived?”

“Yes, I seem to recall that.”

“Well, that was an awful thing for her to say. And I agreed with her, and that was awful, too. You're a good person and you deserve to live, same as anyone else, even if you're kind of a traitor.”

“I'm not a traitor!” I protested.

“But you ruined Abigail's reputation and made her the laughingstock of the school!”

“You don't know the whole story.” I started to pull
away, but suddenly she gripped my arm and drew me close to her, so close that her lips were inches from mine. She had a tormented look on her face. “I don't blame you so much for that. Really, I don't. And about what Sienna said? I'm the one who should die. I'm a bad person.”

“No, you're not, Hayley,” I tried to protest.

“Yes, I am.” Her whisper caught in her throat. “I've done terrible things, Denver. Terrible things.”