The Lifeboat Clique (8 page)

“I'm gonna go tell Ms. Hanson what you did to get out of class. Then you can go tell the principal and tell him
how smart you are while you're getting a detention slip.”

“I should have figured you for a dirty-dog snitch. Well, go ahead. Go back to gym class. But guess where you'll be? Back in gym class.”

I turned to go, but I couldn't. I wasn't a dirty-dog snitch. I climbed on the table and sat down next to her.

“Okay,” I said, “you win. You are less excruciating than gym class, but that's not much of a compliment.”

“There are some things that should never have been dreamed up,” Abigail said, sounding conciliatory. “One of them is the handstand. The other is gym class.”

It was a glorious day—the sky so blue; lean, hungry-looking clouds drifting by. Clouds that went to Spin class.

“You know what's even worse about gym class?” Abigail asked. “They don't have soccer. How dumb is that?”

“You like soccer?”

“Hell, yeah,” she said. “And I'm great at it. I'm gonna be a soccer star like Mia Hamm. I practice every day out in my backyard.”

I pictured her and her family living in a barn in the middle of Beverly Hills with cattle and horses roaming the property as Abigail punted soccer balls, startling groups of chickens. She seemed pretty determined to make it big. My own goals were still a bit shaky.

“Don't we need to go to the nurse?” I asked. “I mean,
you're supposed to be hurt.”

“Nah. The last thing I want to do is hang out with that nurse. She checked the whole grade for scoliosis. I still remember her cold fingers on my back. All she did was go on and on about the Atkins Diet, like I give a shit.”

“But don't we need a note?”

“That gym gal probably doesn't even remember we're gone. She only cares about herself. So we can hang out here awhile and go back in, and she'll never even ask if I'm okay.”

“I call her Swing Tits,” I said.

She nodded, considering the nickname. “Swing Tits,” she repeated, although she said it like “Swang Teyuts.”

Her pale face was turning a bit red in the sun, and the freckles seemed to be multiplying. I wasn't sure whether to point this out or not.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“Wisconsin.”

Abigail pulled her gym shirt down to cover her stomach. “Let me guess. Wisconsin is the most beautiful place in the world, where life is real and you know your neighbor, not like this fake place.”

“Exactly. I hate this horrible town.”

“Well, you're stupid.”

I stared at her. Her expression hadn't changed.

“LA and Wisconsin are the same place,” she continued. “It's just a hunk of land. LA might be warmer with palm trees. Wisconsin might have more doughnut shops and cows. But it's land. You can't hate land. You leave LA alone and it will leave you alone. You can be whoever you want here. You can be whoever you want anywhere. You just need a plan. Like mine. Come freshman year I'm gonna be on the soccer team. Junior year I'm gonna make varsity. Senior year, captain of the varsity. And then on to fame and fortune.”

“You seem very sure of yourself.”

“I have natural talent.”

She was silent for a moment. “Got any friends here?” she asked.

“My friends are all back in Wisconsin.”

“How many ya got?”

“Four best friends. Jessica, Katie, Chelsea, and Emily.” I said their names reverently, as though they had all recently fallen backward off the Grand Canyon attempting to pose for a group selfie and plunged to their deaths.

“Next year you won't even remember them.”

“You're wrong. You don't even know my friends. They are funny and wise and wonderful, and we've known each other since kindergarten! We'll be friends all our lives.”

“Okay, then lemme know when you're ninety years old and hopscotching through the nursing home.”

Her tone annoyed me. “Well, who are
your
friends? I don't see you hanging around with anyone.”

“I don't have any friends yet,” she said calmly. “I am waiting for quality.” She pulled up her gym shirt, exposing her pale, freckled belly and her bra, and wiped the sweat from her face with it. “I had a girl last year I was trying out. Name was Brittany. Big strike already with that name, but she had potential. Then her guinea pig went tits up, and all hell broke loose. She went mad over that varmint. I mean, she had three funerals for it. For months, she went on and on about it. And she made me do a séance with her and her parents so she could talk to it. She said the guinea pig wanted a Japanese marble lamp for its grave and would haunt her unless it got one. So her stupid parents ordered her one for the critter's grave, and then of course it was on the grave for two days and disappeared. Brittany kept it in her closet and took it out at night.”

“So you dumped her for being a liar?”

“No, actually that made me think I'd made the right choice. Pure genius. The thing was, she never did anything smart again. I think that was just a fluke. So I dumped her.”

“I once used my dead grandfather to get out of a piano recital,” I offered.

“Did you kill him?”

“What? No!”

She snorted. “Then, lame.”

I couldn't tell if she was kidding or not. I hadn't met anyone quite like her before. She annoyed me, but she intrigued me. I wanted to leave, but I wanted to stay.

“When will you know when quality has finally come along?” I asked her.

“I'll just know.” She looked at me meaningfully and I felt flattered despite myself. “And by the way, I don't love this town. Ain't got nothing on any given town in the great state of Texas. But I like living here. It's too dumb to hurt you too much. You always hear about people who've had terrible childhoods. How they're screwed the rest of their lives, and they never do what they really want to do. LA is fine and my parents are fine and I hate my little brother, but that's fine too. Nothing's gonna bother me on my way to the top.”

She pressed a finger to her face and announced, “I'm beginning to fry. Curse of the redhead. We should probably go inside now. Here's our story in case anyone cares: the Atkins nurse put ice on my nose and the swelling went down, and everything's peachy now. Got it?”

“Got it. I'm sure Coach Swing Tits will find that tale acceptable.”

Abigail got up and headed toward the doors. I caught up with her, and we walked inside and down the silent hall together.

“Swing Tits,” she mumbled. “Funny.”

IT WAS SHOCKING HOW CALM AND CLEAR THE SEA WAS THAT
morning. Like some monster that just ate a bunch of people then stuffed its hands in its pockets and whistled an innocent tune. Looking into the stretch of flat blue on all sides of us, it was possible to believe that nothing had happened at all, that we were just taking a leisurely ride on a boat with no motor. The boat also lacked a GPS system or a radio, but did have three flares. Whoever owned this boat was a schizophrenic who wanted to be found and wanted to be lost and wanted to sail the seas but didn't want to go anywhere.

Trevor inspected a flare. “How do these things work?
Oh, I see. You flip this switch and then just point and pull the trigger.”

“Could you maybe not point that damn flare at me?” Abigail said crossly. “Put it down. Ain't a toy.”

We hunted through the hatches of the boat for supplies. We found a gallon of water, two cans of Spam, and half an opened wax bag of crackers that looked really old.

Abigail took a cracker and bent it in half. It did not break but simply stayed in a U-shape.

“I'm not gonna eat that,” said Sienna.

“You will if you get hungry enough,” Abigail said.

“I'm hungry already. And I want a cigarette. Not an e-cigarette. I want a regular cigarette with real smoke.”

“Gotta pee,” Trevor announced. He turned around, unbuttoned his jeans, and whizzed over the side, his urine forming a lusty arc in the air.

“I've gotta pee too,” said Hayley.

We all did.

“Well,” said Trevor, facing away from us, his elbows shaking up and down to indicate he was finished, “you are SOL.”

I'll spare you the details, but the girls had to lower themselves down the ladder one by one in the back of the boat while clinging to the rail. The ocean's not big on dignity. It goes flat, it gets riled, it kills things, it keeps
things alive. But it doesn't care. The ocean is like a giant Sonny Boy.

A few minutes later the wind started blowing and the waves grew higher. Hayley suddenly rushed to the side of the boat and threw up. Finally she steadied herself, still gripping the rail.

“Try not to do that too much,” I said. “Vomiting speeds along the process of dehydration.”

She turned back to shoot me a disgusted look. The sunlight glinted off her earring.

“Why are you always acting like such a smarty-pants? And how can I help being seasick? I've never been to sea.”

“But you live in LA!” I said.

“So?”

“Never mind.”

“It's just that you're saying it like it's my fault I've never been out to sea just because I live in LA. Maybe you don't know this, but there are a lot of things to do in LA before you get to the sea (turns to throw up) and I just never got around to it, but it's not like it's a federal crime (turns to throw up) or it's my fault in any way, it's just a coincidence, and anyway (turns to throw up) maybe I'd get seasick anyway even if I had gone before, did you ever think of that?”

She slumped down, exhausted, into a seat.

Sienna paced and took drags from an imaginary
cigarette (e or regular, I wasn't sure). She looked dazed. Her makeup had finally worn off. It was weird to see her barefaced and her hair a mess.

Trevor leaned back in the swivel chair, eyes closed, drumming fingers at rest while we waited out the choppy seas, but now he opened one eye.

“I once did it with a chick on a raft,” he said. “Not so easy.”

Abigail was watching the sky and then staring out to the horizon.

“There's got to be a ship or a plane or some damn thing,” Abigail said.

“Like I said,” I told her. “We're not top priority.”

“Well, maybe
you're
not top priority, but I consider myself pretty damn important.”

“Great,” I said. “The Abigail Navy will be here soon to pick you up.”

The sun had brought out Abigail's freckles. Back in middle school, she had liked her freckles. Had gotten around to naming thirteen of them. She let me connect the freckles with a green Razor Point marker we thought was water-soluble. She found a picture of a spider on LSD web on the internet, and we used that as a pattern. I was very proud of my job, but when she tried to wash it off, the web stayed. Her mother flipped out, but Abigail took
it well. She went to school with her face looking like a Just Say No to Drugs ad and people laughed at her, but she cared not. She had a best friend and a soccer dream, and life was good.

Now she caught me studying her face and ran her fingertip over her nose.

“What are you looking at?”

“Just the freckles,” I said. “They're really starting to show.”

“And your snakeskin is starting to turn red.”

“And your hair,” I said. “A total kinky mess.”

She looked at me closely. “Ya know what? I know you used to be very proud about your nose, and I thought you should know. It looks a little crooked. Did it get hit by the roof, or is that where I punched you last year?”

My hands flew to my nose before I could stop myself. “My nose is
just fine
,” I said, yanking away my hands.

Trevor took a big gulp of air and closed his mouth, and I was not sure if he was making a statement or what. But then he began thumping on his puffed cheeks and went back into his own world where he was drumming solo in front of the teeny-bopping whores whom he would later lure out to the alley, and I realized that Trevor and Hayley could start their own hellish band together and tour the country.

THE OCEAN GREW
calm again, and we all quieted down, each to our own thoughts. That's something I had never learned about shipwrecked people, castaways, and generally people who had screwed up or been washed away and were now floating in some vast, lonely space. All the thinking they must do.

The other girls had collected under the dented sunshade to keep the bright rays off their faces. They spent a lot of time speculating over who had survived and who had not, who might still be out there clinging to something, and how lucky Nina Hanrahan was, because she'd pulled a tendon in drill team practice and stayed home from the party. They also went over every celebrity they could remember living in Malibu and even Venice, in case the wave stretched farther south. Once in a while, Sienna would burst into tears over the assumed fate of Madison, not the city in Wisconsin but the drunk. Abigail talked philosophically from time to time about the nature of fate, relating it somehow to the insemination of Brahman bulls, and Hayley responded with bursts of nonsense when she wasn't trying to pray her iPhone back to life.

Trevor lounged in the swivel chair, turning slowly with his shirt unbuttoned, exposing his tanned surfer dude chest, a shade very close to that of a Behr Premium Plus
offering called Gobi Desert. I knew this because Abigail and I used to spend countless hours obsessing over which paint shade we were going to use on the inside of our solar-powered RV, in which we would ride around the country righting wrongs and rescuing strays while she demonstrated her soccer prowess to raise money for charities.

No one talked to me. It was shocking to me how fast cliques could re-form even on a lifeboat. Like wisteria vines, they could be cut and replanted and bloom their exclusive colors in some alien garden.

Nature was impressive.

Sometime in the early afternoon, Trevor said, “Hey, getting the munchies here, and I'm not even high, ya feel me?”

I went to get the crackers, but Abigail darted in front of me, grabbing them first.

“I'm in charge of food,” she announced.

“Why are you in charge of food?” I asked.

“'Cause I'm the captain of this ship.”

“You are captain of nothing, Abigail. But go ahead, if it means so much to you.”

Abigail's bull-like domination of everything had once seemed curiously charming to me. But now it was just one of the many things that annoyed me about her.

Abigail got out the crackers. “Trevor,” she said, “open the Spam.”

Trevor stopped drumming and looked up. “I don't know what Spam is. Is it made from an animal with human-looking eyes? Because I don't eat anything if it has human-looking eyes.”

“I don't know what varmint it's made from,” Abigail said.

“Then I don't wanna eat it.”

“Well, then you and Sienna can starve. That would leave more for us. We got to ration it. We only got two cans, and God knows how long we'll be floating around on this crate.” She lifted up the gallon jug. “We got to go easy on the water, too.”

“A gallon holds sixteen cups of water,” I said. “That's a little more than three cups of water for each of us. And that might have to last awhile.”

“How long is awhile?” Sienna asked. “I'm thinking we're gonna be rescued any minute.”

“Seawater's not good to drink, right?” Hayley said.

Abigail was looking at Hayley's Fendi. “What have you got in that purse?” she asked.

Hayley started going through it. “My iPhone, two tubes of lipstick, two Kleenexes that are soaking wet, a pressed-powder compact . . .”

“Stop,” I said.

“What?” asked Abigail impatiently.

“Let me see that compact.”

“Why?” Hayley asked. But she handed it over.

I opened it, blew away the loose powder, and polished the mirror with my sleeve. I held the mirror to the light and watched it sparkle.

“So?” Sienna said.

“I saw this show on the Discovery Channel that said you can use a mirror to signal passing ships. It's much easier to see this over miles of water than our little boat. A ship might come and investigate. And then we can set off the flares.”

Sienna sneered. Her nicotine withdrawal put an extra curl in her lip. “Useless,” she said, meaning the compact and possibly me.

“Give me my compact back,” Hayley said.

“No.” I put the compact in my pocket. “It could save our lives.”

“LISTEN!” Hayley shrieked, tears welling up. “I have been through so much and given up so much and so much has happened and I'm here on this stupid ocean in this stupid boat and I don't give a shit about your dumb Find Something Channel and you weren't invited anyway, why don't you just—”

She stopped talking and rushed at me, knocking me over onto the dried-out but still-stinky carpeting of the deck, and we struggled there, wrestling for the compact mirror as she screamed, “Give it to me! Give it to me!”

I felt someone grab my foot, possibly Sienna by the feel of her claws.

Hayley's crazy-eyed face was in mine, and she displayed surprising strength for a post-tsunami simpleton.

“Give it back!” she screamed.

Abigail stepped in and pulled us apart, also dislodging Sienna's talons in my foot. “Stop it, all of you. Break it up. Break it up.” Her voice was loud and full of authority, and finally Hayley and I were extricated and faced off, huffing and puffing and glaring at each other.

“Let her keep the compact,” Abigail told Hayley.

“What? Why are you taking her side? It's my compact and just because we're stranded out here doesn't mean I have to listen to some stupid girl and her science talk and there's something called property rights I think and I'm just saying—”

“Stop,” Abigail said. “Sea Snake might have a point, for once.”

“Thank you, Freckle Fish,” I said.

“Don't call me that,” Abigail growled.

Hayley looked crushed and Sienna shot me a look of
death and Trevor laughed, and that was that.

Our friendship was growing.

“What else is in your purse?” Abigail asked Hayley.

Hayley sighed, put-upon, and resumed her search through the open Fendi. “. . . a ballpoint pen, my dad's credit card—oh, God—he's going to kill me—a five-dollar bill, a lighter I was holding for Sienna, and a pair of toenail clippers with a built-in nail file.”

Abigail considered the items.

“The credit card. Give it to me.”

“Why?”

“We need something to slice the Spam.”

“Gross,” Hayley said.

Trevor did the honors, twisting the key around the side of the can and then carefully pulling off the top, leaving half a pink slab of potted meat glistening in the sun.

Hayley made a gagging sound. “E
wwwwww.
That looks so horrible. I can't even tell you how horrible that looks. That can't be food. If I saw that on the street, it would look like someone threw up and the throw up was just like a block of—”

“Give me one of those Kleenexes,” Abigail interrupted.

“They're wet.”

“But they're clean, right?”

Abigail took the Kleenex and spread it out on the flat
area near where the engine used to be and laid the open can on its side on top of it and pressed the credit card into it, peeling off a thin slice with the skill of a surgeon. She took out one of the ancient crackers and handed it to Hayley with the slice of Spam. Hayley put the sad cracker/Spam combo together and took a quick bite, making a face as though she'd just been forced to put on a belt that didn't match her shoes.

“Ugggg!”

She held out her tongue to reveal the shimmering wreckage of the cracker and the mass of deconstructed Spam, then the tongue slowly went back inside her mouth, and she swallowed with an exaggerated effort.

“Horrible.” She gobbled down the rest and reached for the gallon of water.

“Just two swallows,” Abigail warned.

Sienna, whose remarkable bravery about eating canned meat and stale crackers was an inspiration to us all, was next. Abigail gave me my Spam and cracker without comment. They weren't so bad. They tasted a bit like homework would taste if that homework would keep you from starving.

“Okay, Trevor,” Abigail said, “eat the damn Spam and cracker. Forget about the eyes. It's all we've got.”