The Start of Me and You (27 page)

I jerked my head back. “That’s not fair. I just didn’t want to deal with what people would think of me.”

“I get that,” he said. “But you’re already here.”

I wanted to be the girl he thought I was. And, even as my palms began to sweat, even as my heart rate galloped in my chest, I wanted to be the girl I used to be.

“What if something happens? There’s no lifeguard and—”

“I’m a babysitter, Janie. CPR certified.”

We stood there, yards apart, and I bounced on my toes. If I did it, I could check this off. Get it over with, here and now, in the company of someone who made me want to be brave.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll stand on the low dive. But … I don’t know if I can jump in.”

Max nodded encouragingly. “That’s a really big step.”

I moved toward the diving boards. Max stayed put, as if he might startle me. The board was colder than I expected, and it felt coarse against the bottoms of my feet. Grasping the metal bars with both hands, I took two steps, and then one more. Muscle memory kicked in, beneath the fear. My body knew this sensation, and I could almost smell the sunscreen and drippy popsicles of my pool days.

When I was about halfway to the edge, the board gave a little, bending at my weight. I froze, my whole body tensing. Max stayed quiet, but I could feel his eyes on me. I took one more hesitant step, staring down into the water.

My hands balled into fists. I stood still, not daring to make that last step forward. It was only a foot or two drop into the water, but pieces of my nightmare flashed through my mind. Instinctively, I squeezed my eyes shut, and clips of an underwater struggle screened on the back of my eyelids.

“I’m right here,” Max reminded me. I opened my eyes.
He stood off to the right side, waiting with the white towel in his hands. “I’m not going to let anything bad happen.”

“I know,” I said, my pulse ticking higher and higher. “But I don’t think I can.”

“You can. Stop looking down.”

I shook my head, eyes locked on clear water. I imagined being deep within it, trapped like I always was in my nightmare. The heavy smell of chlorine hung in the air, and my stomach flipped inside of me.

“Paige, don’t look down. Look up at me.”

I tilted my chin up, enough to rest my eyes on Max. His eyes were locked on mine, as he drew out his words, slowly so I would understand. “Hey. You’re already there.”

My chest tightened so much that my lungs ached. The pool fanned out around me in every direction, and the broad scope made me feel dizzy, like the reflections were in a kaleidoscope. My breathing became ragged, almost gasping.

“I can’t,” I said, moving my left foot to step back. But as I tried to turn around on the board, my foot slipped.

Before I even realized what was happening, my body struck the water. The sting hit my skin as water closed over my head. I tried to react, to push my arms out, but my body was paralyzed by the shock of going in. Aaron’s face flashed into my mind, the panic he must have felt. I felt the ache that must have filled his lungs, the burn against his open eyes.

I thrashed, struggling against walls of water closing in all around me. The weight from the water above me was pushing me down—I could feel it. Underwater, I screamed, too panicked to think about losing the very last of my air supply.

An arm wrapped around my waist, pulling me upward, and I gasped for air when my mouth met the surface. Max propelled me toward the ladder and hoisted me up to the first rung. Grasping the handles, I stepped up, and my feet shakily found the cement. Max was out of the pool right behind me. In a blurred moment, he guided me to a lounge chair and wrapped the plush towel around my shoulders.

Crouching in front of me, he asked, “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I lied, out of reflex. But my body wouldn’t ease from its adrenaline rush, chest heaving with gasps instead of breaths. I felt every prickling sensation in my body, and I felt totally numb, all at once. I pulled the towel closer, but my clothes were soaked and stuck to my body. And then the past minute’s events passed through my mind, and I changed my answer.

“No.” I labored to inhale enough to speak. “No, I am
not okay
.”

I stood up, jerking away from him. I stumbled, still wobbly, and Max caught me by the elbow. Pulling from his grasp, I turned to face him. His glasses were off, his hair dripping, and his clothes were at least five shades darker, shirt matted against his chest.

“Just because I tell you things,” I yelled, “doesn’t mean you know everything about me!”

The blood was rushing through my veins faster than the water rushing out of the jets, and I couldn’t think straight.

“I’m sorry, Paige. I’m so sorry.” Max stared at me, completely stricken. My pulse thumped in my ears, too loud and too hot.

“I could have
died
!” I heard how loud my voice was, but I felt helpless to it. The tears came, hot on my wet face, but I didn’t feel embarrassed. Just angry. Max stepped toward me, his hands out in surrender, and I took a step back.

“You can’t try to
fix
me like I’m a project.” My words bounced off the tiled floor, echoing through the room. “You don’t even have your own life figured out, so I don’t need you trying to figure out mine.”

“Hey,” Max said sharply, pulling away from me. “I was just trying to help.”

I’d hit a sore spot—all of his anxiety—and I knew it. But I couldn’t stop. “This is not how you
help
. How would you feel if I pushed you into seeing your dad?”

“That is
not
the same.” His voice was hushed.

“It
is
the same, Max,” I yelled. “You’re not brave enough to see him, and that’s your problem. I’m not brave enough to swim or go out with someone new or jet off to some place by myself, but those are
my
problems.”

The tears that fell from my eyes cleared my view of him. His forehead was creased in anger, his eyes squinted at me.

“Well,” he said, with a measured bitterness. “It’s nice that you realize you’re not the only person in the world who has problems.”

My jaw dropped, and I made the guttural noise of someone who was kicked in the stomach while already in a fetal position on the ground.

As I sat there, slack jawed and aching to my core, he pressed his face into his hands. “Shit. I didn’t mean that, Paige.”

Too late. Way, way, way too late. “Just
go
.”

I buried my face in my towel and sobbed into the nubby terrycloth. I heard Max’s footsteps padding toward the edge of the pool, and I looked up as the sound moved back toward me.

He plopped my shoes down beside me. “I’m not leaving you here.”

“I’ll call someone to pick me up.” With all my friends at stupid Whitewater Lodge and my mom at an interview, my dad would be my only shot. But I’d take it. I’d rather wait, shaking and soaked beneath this towel, than ride home with him in the tense, contained silence.

“Paige,” Max said. “Please. Just let me take you home.”

We had derailed so quickly and so irreparably. I tried to
hear his voice the way I’d heard earlier, reverent and excited over something as silly as airplanes. Through blurred vision, I pulled my shoes back on.

I followed behind him to the car. We were silent on the ride home, while I seethed. My clothes were cold, plastered to my skin. I felt trapped by them, trapped by the towel, trapped by the car and by Max and by my own past.

When he pulled into the driveway, I was relieved to see that my mom wasn’t home yet. I could dry off and clean up with no explanation. I had nothing left to say to Max, and my hand went immediately to the door handle. I slammed the door behind me so hard that it reverberated over the whole car.

It struck me as I hurried inside: I’d never left Max’s car so quickly. I’d divulged dozens of secrets from the passenger’s seat, laughing and listening. His car was safe harbor, but now, with my trust fractured so completely, I shuddered at the thought of spending one more second in that enclosed space with him.

I went straight into the laundry room. Grabbing a clean towel, I peeled off my wet clothes and tossed them into the dryer. I couldn’t put drenched clothes in the laundry hamper, and I needed to shower before my mom got home. I didn’t want her to know that I was out by myself with Max without permission or that we had gone to a pool, where I had almost died from being such a complete therapy case.

Before I stomped upstairs to the shower, I looked out the front window. I wanted Max to be there still, his head bowed against the steering wheel in helpless regret. He was gone.

I turned the shower on, and as the hot water hit me, tears formed again. This was something that I used to do in the months after Aaron died. I didn’t want my mom to know how upset I was, so I’d sob in the shower, masked by the sounds of running water and the bathroom fan.

With my back leaned against the shower wall, I slid down into a seated position. I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. The smell of chlorine released from my skin as steam filled the shower. If only it were so easy to release everything else I had pent up inside of me.

Because I felt the truth, pelting me like water: I wasn’t just mad at Max. I was mad at myself.

I was mad that I was still so vulnerable after all this time. Mad that I let myself be defined by one tragic accident. Mad that I slipped into the water, that my reentry had been hapless flailing. It was a fall, not a jump. It should have been a jump. I owed myself that.

At that moment, I felt like I had just thrown a stick of dynamite at whatever chance I had with Max, burning and crackling and exploding as I slammed the car door in his face. The steam in the shower wafted like smoke, clearing after I set fire to what could have been.

I was standing up when a knock at the door nearly startled me out of my bare skin.

“Paige!” my mom called. “Just letting you know that I’m home.”

“Okay!” I yelled back, scrambling to my feet. I needed a fast lie, as my mom would surely notice a single outfit—right down to my bra, panties, and socks—rotating in the dryer.

It came to me as I patted my hair dry. I would say I spilled coffee on myself. That was simple and easy enough to believe since half of my clothes had coffee stains from Alcott’s to-go cups.

When I came downstairs, my mom was standing at the kitchen island, sifting through the day’s mail.

“How was your day off?” she asked, glancing up at me.

“It was fine,” I lied.

I opened the refrigerator, turning my back to my mother. This gave me a purpose for being in the kitchen and would hopefully show nonchalance.

“Doing laundry?” my mom said.

“Uh-huh,” I said, pretending to survey the contents of the refrigerator.

“Just one outfit?”

Crap. She had looked in the dryer. I never did my own laundry, so of course she would have noticed right away.

“I spilled coffee.” I didn’t turn around for fear that she would see the lie on my face.

“Huh,” she said from behind me. “That’s weird. It smelled more like chlorine than coffee.”

My body froze in place as my thoughts bounced around, searching anywhere for a lie. I scanned the refrigerator shelves, as if a believable story would materialize next to the yogurt.

“Paige,” she said.

As I turned around, I knew the exact expression that would be on her face—her jaw tense, her eyes unblinking. Instead, I found a soft expression of understanding. Almost That Look.

“Why don’t we go out to dinner?”

I wanted to decline, so I could stay home and continue fuming at Max and myself. But, considering that I had left without her permission, almost drowned, and then lied about it, I had no bargaining chips.

“Sure.”

“I have to finish writing up my notes from the interview,” she said. “Then we’ll go.”

Over a hearty portion of lasagna, I confessed to my mom in a corner booth at Arpeggio’s Italiano. She was mostly quiet, nodding along as I described the incident at the pool. I skipped our trip to see the airplanes, because those moments with Max were still mine. When I told her that I couldn’t get into the water, she didn’t look surprised. Here
I thought it was a big secret, but of course my own mother would have noticed that I stopped taking baths, that I didn’t come home wet from Tessa’s pool once last summer.

“Honey,” my mom said when I was finished. “I’m not excusing the fact that you lied to me today, but I do understand why you went with Max.”

“You do?”

“Of course,” she said, resting her fork against her salad plate. “Of course I do. And moreover, I think Max had a point in taking you there.”

My eyebrows creased in reaction to this betrayal. My mom had taken a liking to Max over the past few months—a “nice young man,” she called him. But I wanted her to validate my anger. “Even though I could have died?”

“I’ll admit—I don’t love the fact that there wasn’t a lifeguard there, but I do think it’s an important step. I don’t want you to be held back by fear.”

“It’s not holding me back,” I grumbled, staring down at the red-and-white checked tablecloth.