Axis of Aaron (23 page)

Ebon lunged. It was swim or die.
 

There was a stretch of beach ahead, fifty yards or less. Farther north, away from the cross currents that came at the lighthouse, waves were smaller. If he swam hard, gulping for air as the waves tossed and rolled and submerged him, he might be able to make it. The sun was on the sand there, looking like an oasis in the eye of a storm. And as he came closer, he saw something too strange to be false: two people sitting on the beach, a man and a woman, their legs long and their arms propping them upright, staring out at the ocean. They looked late fifties, the man wearing a hat like Captain Jack’s, the woman in a large straw bonnet. Loose clothes, the woman’s shirt long, as if she both craved and feared the sun.
 

Ebon yelled, but it was as if they couldn’t hear him, or maybe couldn’t even see the inexplicably rough section of surf as they gazed across the relatively calm one in front of them. It was as if they heard only the music coming from a small radio, like a CD boom box, on the blanket beside them.
 

“Hey!” Ebon screamed. “Help!”
 

They couldn’t hear him. They couldn’t see him.
 

He swam, harder and harder, defiant. The surf would relent. He could make it to the calmer section. He could flee the wind, get out of the overcast pall. Into the sun. He could allow the waves to wash him up like a fish, and then the people on the beach could act as his anchor. They could tell him where he was, could look at the rough surf and verify its reality — the ocean that wanted to kill him and shove him back ashore as a carcass. The people could call for help if he needed it. They would be able to reach Aimee. It would be embarrassing to ask them to walk him home, but he could do it. He
would
do it. If he could only get there.
 

“Help!”
 

This time, the people heard him. They turned. Below their sun hats, the fronts of their heads were smooth pink ovals with no features to mar them.

Ebon kicked and stalled.
 

Then the waves dragged him under.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Exit to Your Left
 

EBON SURFACED, BATTING AT THE THING that had been holding him down. Eventually his oppressor relented, and Ebon was able to blink, wipe the salt water out of his face, and spit. Then he bobbed next to the big blue raft, his feet gripping sand and shells, wondering if he should climb onto the raft and dry off. If he did, maybe Aimee would notice the way he’d been lifting his dad’s weights in the basement over the winter. Or, if he didn’t want to do that, he could pay Aimee back and dunk her too.
 

“You really shouldn’t hold someone under water, you know,” he said.

Aimee answered Ebon by splashing him in the face. She didn’t do it halfway; she used both hands and shoved hard. He had to wipe again, blink again, and spit again.
 

“You really shouldn’t be a wimp, you know,” she answered.

“What if you’d drowned me?”
 

“I know CPR,” she said, as if an ability to resuscitate would excuse temporary murder.

“Oh yeah?” It wasn’t the right response, but she’d disarmed him. Ebon didn’t know CPR, but he knew it involved hands on chests and mouth on mouth. Maybe he should pretend to drown, or drown her so he could place his hands on her chest. Except he probably didn’t need to fake drown to paw Aimee’s chest. She’d told him, in her numerous letters over the past year, how she’d been letting guys feel her up in the past months. It always sounded so casual when he read it in her looping script, and so not-a-big-deal that she was writing to him (a boy — in theory anyway) about her chest. Ebon was fascinated with it all, and not just stymied by unfulfilled temptation. He wanted to ask how long a girl’s boobs kept growing and other such indelicacies, but never found the nerve. Aimee was only fifteen; he figured the answer was “a while longer.” Given that after today he wouldn’t see her for most of a year (or maybe longer), he’d probably have a delightful surprise waiting next summer.
Two
delightful surprises, to be accurate.
 

“Yeah,” said Aimee.

Ebon climbed up onto the raft, trying to flex his arms and hold in his stomach as he did. He knew it was a joke. His stomach was flat because he was practically a preadolescent skeleton and his bulked-up arms were actually still twigs. Fortunately, he had even more years to grow than Aimee. He was thirteen, and plenty of his friends were getting armpit hair. Maybe next year he could boast a proper beach physique.
 

Once he was up, Ebon began subtly sliding toward Aimee. She was at one corner of the raft, running a hand over her hair, clearing the excess water. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, careful not to be distracted by her somewhat loose swimsuit top, and tensed his legs under him. But when he leapt for her, she proved again that fifteen was wilier than thirteen, or at least that Aimee was wilier than Ebon. She was ready for his supposed sneak attack and dodged easily, leaving him to roll in the water without more than a glancing brush of his hand along her side.
 

“Nice try.” She laughed.

“I wasn’t trying to get you,” he said. “I just wanted to splash you.”
 

“Sure.”

“Seriously,” he said, insistent. She was right; he’d definitely been trying to wrestle her under and had been outfoxed. But the urge to lie was born from her being bossy and annoying, just as she’d been last year.
 

Between the two of them, Aimee had always been in charge. She’d been in charge for last year’s summer months, and she’d been just as in charge for this year’s. Over the intervening fall, winter, and spring, she’d managed to stay in charge, flooding Ebon’s mailbox with handwritten letters that read like diary entries. Ebon had read them all with edgy giddiness, memorized every word, then composed a single short letter in reply that carried none of her suggestive overtones. This would give her permission to send him another dozen letters — or one letter of epic proportions — in which she’d again confess entirely too much.
 

Ebon, even though he’d never really understood girls, had figured out one thing: The letter-writing was much more about Aimee than it was about Ebon. They were friends, but she mostly wrote because it gave her a thrill. Richard would throttle her if he knew that she was writing so much to Ebon and
what
she was writing to him (lots of kissing boys, some groping, some experiments in self-exploration that should probably be kept private), and she always had to write them furtively and sneak downtown to mail them herself in secret. Much of what she wrote was so mundane as to be boring, but the few too-honest tidbits were worth poring over again and again. They were worth memorizing and making permanent inside him. Sometimes Ebon suspected that she put those things into the letters (which were otherwise droll and rambling) as another way of pushing him around from a distance, and proving yet again that she knew lots of things that Little Ebon Shale didn’t know at all.
 

“I’m bored with this,” she said. “You want to go inside and draw or something?”
 

“I don’t like drawing,” Ebon said.
 

“Okay. You wanna go inside and
not
draw, while
I
draw?”

“No.”
 

She rolled her eyes, then began walking back toward the beach. The raft was anchored; it wouldn’t go anywhere as long as the bay stayed calm. In all probability, she’d forget it entirely and be yelled at to wade out and bring the raft in come nightfall, but by then Ebon would be gone. He had maybe six hours before he had to be back to his grandparents’ cottage, and an hour after that before he’d be on the ferry home.
 

It was a sobering thought, knowing he wouldn’t see Aimee tomorrow. At the end of last year, she’d just been a fun beach friend to him, and someone to miss. But over the winter she’d become something more, and by the time they’d seen each other again three months ago she’d become a third thing — this one best of all, and yet most troubling. He’d been telling himself all summer that he had all the time in the world to spin last year’s straw into new gold, but so far he’d wussed out as he always did. It should have been simple: She was a girl, she did stuff with boys, and Ebon was a boy. But he was too young for her, too different. All summer he’d been imagining what her lips must feel like, but tonight he’d leave without knowing. Three full months of chances wasted.
 

“Wait,” he said, moving after her.
 

She reached the beach well before him — a head start met with legs that had grown impossibly longer during his absence. She picked up her towel and began to dry herself off. Ebon willed himself to look away. All last year, she’d worn a juvenile one-piece suit like something his little sister would wear. This year, she’d switched to a two-piece. Talking to her was hard when she was wearing it.
 

“This is my last day at the beach,” he said, emerging. “Last chance to swim.”
 

Aimee ran the towel briskly through her hair. Wetness had darkened it, but the sun had been lightening it all summer. It was a rat’s nest, worsened by salt. She was facing away from him, arms up, her form too tall and too long. Again, Ebon looked away.
 

“It’s not for me,” she said.
 

“I’ll be going back on the ferry tonight.”
 

“I won’t be.”
 

Ebon felt like he should be wounded. She seemed indifferent, like always.
 

“Don’t you want to make the most of our last day?” It was a simpering dig for validation, but Ebon didn’t care.
 

“Sure, but does it really have to be in the dumb old ocean? Let’s do other stuff.”
 

“I don’t want to watch you draw.” Ebon knew how that went from abundant past experience. Aimee got immersed whenever she did anything remotely artistic — anything, judging by Aimee’s studio leftovers, that was like her mom’s old art. He’d spent three hours watching her sculpt clay once. It had been mind numbing. And though she was usually an insufferable chatterbox, Aimee had stayed mostly mute the entire time, at least beyond a string of thoughts on why she liked sculpting and molding as much as she did: so many things in life could slip right through your fingers. But sculpture was something she could touch, a footprint to prove she’d been here.
 

“Then what do
you
want to do?” she asked.
 

Aimee waited for Ebon to grab his towel before starting toward the cottage, but didn’t wait for him to shake its sand and use it as a wrapper on himself. He scampered to keep up, the towel more burden than comfort. The ocean’s salt left a corrosive layer atop his skin, and he could practically feel it drying him out. A sunburn in wait, especially caustic around his eyes and ears and nose.

“I don’t know. Play a game?”
 

“What game?”
 

Ebon caught up to her, realizing he didn’t really have an answer. The cottage had been stocked with games by Aimee’s grandparents when her father had been young, and Richard hadn’t updated any of them. Sometimes the kids played the tattered (and babyish) Chutes and Ladders or the slightly less babyish but tedious Chinese checkers, but doing so was always a last resort. Usually Richard sat in his chair while they played, always at the table near the window rather than on the floor, eyes peeking over his book or newspaper when he thought Ebon wasn’t looking — or, Ebon suspected, specifically when he knew he was.

“My dad’s not home,” she said.

Ebon looked up at Aimee’s profile. He already knew Richard was away. Given how odd the man had been all summer — drunk often, though they both pretended not to know, and usually depressive to boot — his absence was the main reason they were at the cottage now at all. Throughout the later days of the summer, Aimee had mostly come to Ebon’s grandparents’ inferior cottage, or they’d met somewhere neutral. It was a treat for Richard to be gone now, so that they could finally enjoy the cottage without judgment.
 

Ebon thought:
My dad’s not home.

Maybe they could find a bottle. Based on something Ebon had heard, that would give them a fun game to play. You spun it, then kissed whom it pointed toward when it stopped. When only two people played, the game would probably be predictable but still worth a try, if only he had the stones to suggest it. Which, of course, he didn’t.
 

“I know he’s not,” Ebon said. He wondered why she was bringing it up, but guardedly excited by what she might have in mind.

“Well, we could watch TV.”

“Oh.”
 

She looked over. “You don’t like TV.”
 

“I’d just rather do something … you know …
summery
.”
 

They reached the cottage, but instead of going inside, Aimee walked around the back toward a wooden cubicle that was open at the bottom. She slipped inside. Ebon started to follow, but then, realization dawning, retreated in embarrassment. He stood outside and watched her feet atop the wet stone at the cubicle’s bottom, then saw her bare feet dance as she slipped her suit bottoms over her ankles. True to Aimee form, she plopped the garment into a wet heap in the corner half inside out, rather than rinsing it. The suit’s top dropped onto the pile, and shower water began to flow, smacking the stone like hard rain.