The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (22 page)

“You can’t leave until we see a meteor,” CeeCee told her.

Jill said that seemed fair.

In a month, I thought, Wallis would be living somewhere in Connecticut, I would be hanging out with Liz, Jill would be running half a dozen organizations, and CeeCee would rediscover how important she was and would probably pretend not to see me when we met in the hall.

CeeCee reached across me for the marshmallow bag. “Here’s an epiphany,” she said. “I think when you’re older you should hire a detective to track down your dad. And when you find him, even if he’s eighty years old and drooling into his soup, you should make him feel like crap for missing your childhood. You should tell him how incredibly fun every single second of it was.”

“I don’t think her childhood’s been that much fun, though,” Jill said. She licked some marshmallow dust from her fingers.

“It’s starting to get cloudy,” Wallis said. “That’s why we aren’t seeing meteors.”

“We can’t give up yet,” CeeCee said. “We’ll just have to kill a little time.” She turned on the flashlight and gave it to me.

I asked if she expected me to use it to find a meteor.

“No.” She handed me
The Awakening
.

“You don’t want me to read out loud up here,” I said. But she apparently did.

“I don’t mind,” Jill said. “My parents will probably be making out for another hour.”

Wallis was frowning up at the sky.

“Go ahead. We’re waiting,” CeeCee said.

“Just don’t read the ending, because I haven’t gotten there yet.” Jill popped a marshmallow into her mouth and lay down.

I opened the book, embarrassed but wishing that Ms. Radcliffe could see us, her AP English students on a roof in the dark, eating marshmallows and reading literature under the stars.

Wallis and Jill and I gave a brief summary of the plot for CeeCee: Edna Pontellier didn’t love her husband—and seemed only occasionally interested in her kids—so she had spent her summer flirting with another man. Edna had thought she was one sort of person, but it turned out that she was someone else.

“A slut,” Jill said.

“I don’t think she’s a slut,” I said. “She’s married.”

“Can’t married people be sluts?” Jill asked.

Wallis suggested that I read the part where Edna learns how to swim.

I flipped through the pages until I found it. I read about Edna’s fear of the water and her first clumsy strokes.
“A feeling of exultation overtook her,”
I read,
“as if some power of significant import had been given to her.”

CeeCee lay still. Jill had stopped chewing. Wallis, though she was supposed to be looking for meteors, had shut her eyes. Edna
“grew daring and reckless,”
I read. She swam by herself, away from shore.
“A quick vision of death smote her soul.”
But she finally staggered out of the water; she had learned how to swim.

“I definitely get a bad feeling about where this book is going,” Jill said.

CeeCee stretched. She said that most of the books we read for school ended with someone dying, because teachers liked it when their students got depressed.

I read another page.
“ ‘A thousand emotions have swept through me tonight,’ Edna explained. ‘I don’t comprehend half of them.’ ”

“I wish Edna would stay with her husband,” Jill said. “I hate the guy she hooks up with. He’s a total weasel.”

I read another two pages and then stopped at the end of a paragraph. Wallis stood up. “I need to go home.” It was fully dark.

“Take the flashlight with you,” I said, wanting to be generous. I held it out to her but our hands collided, and the flashlight rolled down the slope of the roof and landed in the gutter with a metallic clunk.

“That’s okay. I brought the headlamp your mother gave me,” Wallis said. She pulled the elastic band from her pocket.

“You can SOS us,” CeeCee said.

I asked if Wallis would be afraid by herself.

“No,” she said. “What would I be afraid of?”

“I don’t know. The dark. Evil people. Monsters. Thieves.”

“I don’t have anything a thief would want,” Wallis said. “And the monsters don’t notice me.”

We took turns climbing back through the window into the attic and, bumping into each other, we navigated our way through the rest of the house. Wallis strapped the headlamp to her head. We walked her to the door.

“Where in Connecticut are you going to live?” CeeCee asked. “I have a cousin in Hartford.”

“We’ll be in a small town,” Wallis said.

We stood on the porch, looking into the yard. It was one of those moments that in real life is probably short, but it stretched itself out, Wallis’s hand reaching behind her for the metal latch on the door. One day we would read about her, I thought, when she discovered a new planet or a cure for cancer, and we would see her picture on TV or in the paper (by then she would probably wear her hair in a bun and have glamorous glasses) and I would wish I had found a way to tell her that we should keep in touch; that was what I was thinking, that I had to extend the moment before she opened the door and walked out of our unbearable book club and into the dark, and then Jill leaned forward to hug Wallis goodbye while at the very same moment CeeCee suggested that—even though none of us were supposed to be out; in fact, she herself was actually grounded for the first time in her life—she and Jill and I, for old times’ sake and because it was our last evening together, should walk Wallis home.

17. CLIMAX: A climax is the high point or exciting part of something. Which doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good. Terrible things can happen during a climax. That’s what I learned the night CeeCee and Jill and I walked Wallis home
.

E
very step we took that night brought us closer to a bad idea.

I looked back at my house, receding behind us. I pictured my mother coming home and finding the attic window open, a candle and some massacred hot dogs on the kitchen table, and a trail of spilled marshmallows leading to the roof.

But we couldn’t let Wallis walk home by herself—which was why the four of us headed into the darkness under the trees, every light in West New Hope extinguished because of the storm.

“Your headlight’s dying,” Jill said as the oval light from Wallis’s headlamp shivered and dimmed.

“Let me see it.” CeeCee took the elastic strap from Wallis’s head and shook it, then tapped the headlamp several times against the ground. The light went out completely.

“Well done,” Jill said. She walked ahead of us. We were all moving slowly because of the fallen branches; leaves that should have dangled above us erupted, strangely, out of the ground.

Now that we were moving instead of sitting still, a piece of my epiphany started to come back to me. This was my chance to talk to Wallis. This was my chance to understand what her story was. I did have a theory: she and her mother were in hiding. That was why they were moving; it was why they had changed their last name and why Wallis’s mother never went anywhere and never showed up at book club. That was why Wallis didn’t want her picture taken and why they lived in an unnumbered house on Weller Road—they didn’t want their stalker to know where they lived—and that was why Wallis’s mother had (possibly) carried a gun. All I had to do was lay out the theory and say, “Is that right?”

But I didn’t do it. Wallis would probably tell me that they weren’t hiding: that her mother had gotten a job and they had changed their last name because her parents had gotten divorced. And she would say that they lived in an unnumbered house because they liked the quiet and that she had gotten a scar on her forehead because she fell down.

Jill asked how my leg was holding up; I said it was fine.

We walked through the playground: three cement tubes
to crawl through, a slide that led to a pile of foul-smelling sand, and four rusted swings. We walked past the road that led to Jill’s. But it was only when we crossed the soccer field that I understood where we were going. We didn’t have to walk past it on the way to Wallis’s, but maybe out of habit, or maybe because we sensed that, like the heart-shaped pointer on Jill’s Ouija board, it might have the ability to tell us something, we ended up at the pool.

With the lights off, at night, something about the fence and the trees around it looked very different. There was the spot where we usually sat; there were the diving board and the lifeguard chair; there was the gate near the locker rooms. And around the corner behind the locker rooms, there was something else.

CeeCee put her hand on the chain link and followed the path around the fence.

“
Un
believable,” she said. And it almost was.

A tree had fallen. Its roots had torn themselves out of the earth, clutching several large rocks in their wooden fingers. As if it knew we were coming, the tree had fallen directly onto the fence, which had crumpled at the top like a piece of tinfoil.

“This is a black walnut tree,” Wallis said as CeeCee pulled experimentally on one of the branches.

“Don’t,” Jill said. “I know what you’re thinking. And we’re not going to do it.”

CeeCee turned toward her. “Do you wear your seat belt at the dinner table?” she asked. She backed up toward the tangled roots of the tree, then leaned her weight against
the trunk. “It’s totally stuck,” she said. “Feel it. It’s not going to budge.”

The trunk was at least a foot in diameter. The branches were caught on both sides of the fence, which kept the whole tree still. It was a rounded balance beam with handholds.

Jill reminded me that I didn’t want to hurt my leg. “I’ll lose my job if anyone sees us.”

“It’s August,” I told her. The tree seemed to have laid down its life for our benefit. “How much longer were you going to work?”

CeeCee was already halfway up the trunk. I could barely see her; she had been swallowed up in the foliage.

“If this is fate, I don’t like the looks of it,” Jill said. “We’ll jump in and then out, CeeCee,” she called.

“Whatever you say,” CeeCee agreed. “Wallis, are you coming? We’re finally going to teach you to swim.”

Walking up the ridged, uneven slope of the walnut tree, I understood that we should have turned around and gone home. But it felt like the crucial moment that our entire summer had been leading up to: the moment when the four key members of the Literary Trespassers Association for Delinquent Girls would climb over a locked chain-link fence during a blackout to get back to the place where everything had started: the pool.

Wallis was in front of me, her flat feet gripping the tree trunk in a simian way.

“I’m going to be fired tomorrow,” Jill said, for the third or fourth time.

I grabbed the next branch, looking down at the crinkled fence below. A few more steps, and the four of us stood on the tar-paper roof of the locker room. Jill muttered something about juvenile court and about how CeeCee was going to look in her orange road-crew vest, picking up trash along the highway. But she was the one who pointed out the branch that led to the stack of reclining chairs; she was the first one to kick off her shoes on the way to the pool. “Let’s hurry up if we’re going to do this,” she said.

CeeCee took off her shirt and unbuttoned her jeans. I couldn’t help noticing that her bra and her underwear matched.

“Watch and learn, Wallis.” She walked to the edge, near the
NO DIVING
sign, and neatly dived in.

I felt like a person under a spell. The water looked like a blank page on which we had been invited to inscribe ourselves.

Jill took off her shorts and dropped them by the lifeguard’s chair. She hung her shirt over one of its rungs. “Wallis, you have to stay at the shallow end,” she said. Then she followed CeeCee, who had resurfaced, into the pool.

Something graceful and dark—a swallow or a bat—swooped over the water.

Trying not to think about the underwear I had put on that morning, I took off my shirt and then my shorts and quickly groped my way down the ladder. I kept a close eye on Wallis, who had taken off her shorts but kept her shirt on. She clutched the ladder and came step by step into the shallow end. I saw her take off her glasses and set them carefully at the edge of the pool.

“Lesson one,” CeeCee said, swimming toward Wallis. “You have to learn how to float. Lie on your back.” She held a hand under Wallis’s rib cage, but every time she took it away, Wallis sank. “Your bones must be made out of lead,” CeeCee told her. “Take a breath. You have to fill yourself with air.”

Wallis opened her mouth in an O, breathed in, and then clamped her lips and eyes tightly shut. I could hear CeeCee laugh. Wallis threw her arms out to the sides and lay down on the water; five seconds later, one inch at a time, she began to submerge.

“Taking a breath like that, you should be unsinkable,” CeeCee said. She hauled Wallis up.

“That’s why I haven’t learned,” Wallis said. “I always sink.” She wiped her eyes.

Jill and I tried to teach her by having her stand in waist-deep water, turning her head from side to side, and paddling her arms. She looked like a circus animal practicing a strange new trick. I think all four of us were happy at that exact moment. I held the back of Wallis’s shirt while she tried to paddle, still sinking, between CeeCee and Jill.