Invincible (21 page)

Well, yes. So far, my actions have had no consequences. Even this. Anyone else would be grounded for sure, but Mom happily gave me a ride to the hospital to “visit Caleb” again, as if yesterday never happened.

“Are you sure you're up for this?” Marcus asks as we start down a dirt path toward the lake.

“It was my idea.”

“Your leg can take it?”

“It's not like we're climbing a mountain. We'll just walk until we find a nice secluded spot.”

He doesn't question this. He doesn't say anything about how I'm still limping. Unlike everyone else, he trusts my judgment about my own body.

Maybe my hip is a little sore. Maybe I sort of regret giving up my cane so soon. Maybe it's tricky maneuvering around these rocks and roots, and maybe this is a lot harder than I thought it would be, but there's no way I'm going back. The air smells like warm soil and eucalyptus, the sun is glistening off the water, Marcus is holding my hand, I have a joint in my pocket, and I'm not worried about anything.

“Where's your cane, by the way?” Marcus says. “That cane was cool.”

“I decided I don't need it anymore.”

“Okay, tough guy,” he says, squeezing my hand. A duck quacks good-naturedly somewhere out of sight.

“I like it when you call me ‘tough guy.'” I stop walking and pull him close. I place my lips on his. His kiss erases my pain.

“Hey, I think I see the perfect place,” he says. He holds my hand as he leads me off the trail.

After fighting our way through bushes and spiderwebs and nearly sliding down a steep ravine, we make it to a hidden beach just big enough for us. The view of the main beach is blocked by a fallen tree. Marcus adjusts some branches to hide us from the trail. No one in the world knows we are here. We are a secret.

Marcus lays out his blanket and pulls a picnic of wine, bread, cheese, and fruit out of his backpack. “FYI, this is a hundred-dollar bottle of wine,” Marcus says as the cork pops. He pours me a plastic cup full.

“Just when I thought you couldn't get any fancier.” I take a sip, but to me it tastes the same as something that came out of a box.

“Fresh from Judge Lyon's custom-made temperature-controlled wine cellar.”

“Very impressive,” I say, lighting the joint I brought.

“Yeah,” Marcus says. “Too bad I'm not. Impressive, that is.”

“I find you very impressive,” I say, passing him the joint.

“I think you and my dad have slightly different standards, unfortunately. You probably don't have as much interest in my being ‘a respectable example of an educated black man in America.'” He says the last part in a very low and very serious voice.

“I guess not,” I say.

“I doubt everyone is really paying all that much attention to me, so I'm not that worried about it.” He takes a long pull from the joint. “Plus he makes me go to the whitest school in the entire Bay Area, so I'm pretty sure that makes him a hypocrite. The only other black kids in my class are these adopted twins who have two white Jewish moms, and another kid who's, like, royalty from Kenya or something. We're not exactly the epitome of African-American culture.” He hands me the joint. “But Judge Lyon has pretty much given up by now and leaves me mostly alone.”

“I wonder how he'd feel about your incredibly white girlfriend.”

“Well, he married my mom and she was white. Or haven't you noticed my smooth, milky complexion?” He bats his eyes.

“
Was
white?”

“Was. Is. She's not in my life anymore, so past tense seems appropriate.”

“I'm sorry.”

He shrugs and picks up a eucalyptus seed pod and throws it in the lake. It lands with a less than satisfying plunk. He looks at me and smiles. “So that other thing you said. About you being my girlfriend.”

“Oh.” Shit. “I said that?”
Shit shit shit
. “I, um—it just came out. I guess I'm stoned. Wow, I'm embarrassed.”

“Don't be,” he says, putting his arm around me and pulling me close. He says nothing more, doesn't confirm or deny the label.

We finish the joint, the view turns into a postcard, and I gradually forget my embarrassment. We could build a little fort out of sticks and branches and steal some fishing poles from the bait shop. We could stay forever on our hidden beach and no one would ever find us.

I lay my head on Marcus's lap and he runs his fingers through my short, patchy hair.

“Your hair is so soft and fluffy,” he says. “It's like a baby duck. I've never felt anything like it.”

He doesn't know this is a result of the chemo. Maybe I want him to know. Maybe I'm ready. But first, more pressing issues. “Do you think you could find me some Norco? Maybe some Oxycontin?”

His hand freezes on my scalp. I can feel his body tensing under me.

“No way,” he says. “I don't fuck with that stuff. Do you?” I can hear the worry in his voice.

I turn my head to look up at him. The sun frames his face like a halo. “What? No,” I say, trying to smile as reassuringly as possible. “I heard it was fun so I thought maybe you wanted to try it with me or something. But if you don't want to, that's cool.”

“Don't touch that shit, Evie.” Despite the warm sleepiness that wants me to stay lying down, I can tell this is serious enough for sitting up. “Promise me. Heroin, Norco, Oxy, they're all the same. Meth and cocaine, too—these are all off-limits. Okay?”

“Why?” I say.

“Because they fuck you up big-time. You can't do that shit recreationally. It owns you.”

“I think you're being a little dramatic.”

“I'm being serious. Promise me. Please.”

The concern in his face is real; his worry is sweet, not oppressive like everyone else's. I say, “Okay, I promise,” because it seems like he needs it so much.

“Thank you,” he says. “I feel like I can trust you. You're the first person I've been able to say that about in a long time.”

A knife turns in my chest. I don't want to lie to him. I can't abuse his trust.

I know I should get off the pills. Maybe soon. Maybe I'll start cutting down. Maybe next week. My promise to Marcus has to mean something. But I'm not ready. I can't quit yet. I'm too scared.

He looks out over the lake. A family in a paddleboat floats by. The parents don't see us, but the little boy waves. Marcus waves back.

“Someone hurt you,” I say. I am sick to my stomach thinking I could be that person, if he ever knew.

“You could say that.”

“Tell me.”

He's quiet for a while, lost in his own private world. I want in. I want him to let me in.

“Do you want to go swimming?” he finally says.

“Isn't it illegal? Isn't this a reservoir or something?”

“Yep,” he says, unbuttoning his pants.

“Whoa there, stud,” I say as he pulls them off. I notice a tattoo on his shin. The letters DL in messy black-blue, as if they were stabbed there with a pen. And a date, just a month from now, of last year.

“What's DL?” I say. “Who's that?” I know it's stupid to be jealous of someone he knew before me, but I can't help it. I hate her, whoever she was. I hate that he loved her enough to make her permanent on his body.

“Someone who hurt me,” he says, and pulls his shirt over his head. His smooth, muscled chest is all I see for a moment, and I am breathless. But that warm electricity is quickly extinguished when I notice the scars on his arms. The area between his elbow and shoulder, the part covered by a T-shirt, is scored with uncountable crisscrossing scars of various depths and widths. Nothing natural would make this pattern. Nothing but someone's own hand could inflict this kind of torture.

“Marcus,” I gasp. I look up at him from where I'm still sitting. “Tell me,” I say.

“I will,” he says. “Soon.” Then he dives into the water and disappears.

I strip down to my underwear and bra and leave my tank top on so he won't see my portacath. I am not nervous as I follow him into the water. I am not embarrassed. For once, I am with someone who hurts, someone who's damaged like me, someone who's broken. Maybe I don't have a place anymore with people like Kasey and Will, people who aspire to perfection, who are foolish enough to believe it exists, who want nothing more out of life than to avoid complications. For people like
Marcus and me, complications are all we have. We have scars. He has shown me his, and I want to show him mine, too.

We meet each other in a deep part of the lake next to the fallen log. Our feet cannot find the bottom. The lake could go to the center of the earth and we wouldn't know the difference. We wrap ourselves around each other, held up by only a few fingers laid on the slippery wood. We float, entwined, our foreheads together, the tips of our noses almost touching, our lips half a breath away from each other. I close my eyes and feel his breath tickle my upper lip. We float like this for a long time, listening to the water lap against us, breathing each other in.

“I can't believe you exist,” I say.

“I could stay here forever,” he says.

“Tell me,” I whisper. “About your scars.” Maybe if we tell our secrets in the water, it will make them buoyant. They will float away like leaves, like flower petals. They will leave us and we will be unburdened, weightless.

“I've never really talked about it with anyone. Not even the shrink my dad sent me to.”

“You're safe with me.”

He takes a deep breath. “My mother left two years ago,” he says, and I hold him tighter. “Just left. One day, she was gone. Didn't even leave a note. Didn't call or write. Took some clothes and jewelry and withdrew a bunch of cash from the family checking account and we never heard from her again.”

I run my hand across the scars on his shoulder, textured like the bark of the fallen tree that is keeping us afloat.

I want to ask about DL. I want to give him my secrets. I want to give him everything. But the sound of a boat motor interrupts our solitude. The magic of the moment leaves us. Our secrets sink to the bottom of the lake.

“You two,” says the garbled voice of a bullhorn. Birds chirp in protest of the interruption. It seems impossible that such a loud, unpleasant noise could be possible here, now. “No swimming allowed. Get out of the water right now and leave the park immediately or you will receive a citation.”

Several yards away is the khakied form of a park ranger in a small boat.

“Yes, sir,” Marcus says. “We were just leaving.”

We swim to shore and collect our things. Our tiny beach has been consumed by shade and is suddenly chilly with the arrival of the evening coastal breeze. The ranger motors away on his quest to ruin more perfect moments. I am wet and cold and covered in pine needles. I want to swim out to that ranger's boat and pull him under.

“Lame,” Marcus says.

“I'm freezing.”

“Let's get out of here.”

We walk to the car quickly, in silence, holding hands. The sunny glow of earlier has been replaced by muted shadows as the sun gets ready to set. My leg hurts from climbing the hill back up
to the trail, but I say nothing. I don't want him to worry. I don't want his pity. I don't want to ruin the moment any more than it already has been.

“School tomorrow,” Marcus says when we get into the car.

“Ugh.”

“I still have homework to do.”

“Yeah,” I say, even though I stopped trying to do my homework a long time ago.

“Can I drive you home? Or do you still want me to drop you off on Telegraph?”

“Drive me home, I guess,” I say, doing nothing to hide my disappointment.

“Hey,” he says, reaching out his hand and turning my face gently toward him. “We'll do this again soon.”

I nod.

The music he plays on our drive down the hill is beautiful and sad. Just a guy and a guitar and his sweet, mournful voice.

“I like this,” I say.

“Yeah, my brother turned me on to this guy,” Marcus tells me. “One of the best songwriters ever, until he stabbed himself in the chest.”

“That's morbid.”

“And such a cliché. Troubled genius and all that. He was a drug addict and an alcoholic, too, of course.”

“He must have been in a lot of pain.”

“We're all in pain. But that doesn't give us a fucking right to waste life like that.” There is a storm across his face. He is talking about something else, someone else. His mother, maybe. Or DL.

There is so much more to say, but we will talk about it later. We are driving back into the real world now. The moment for secrets has passed. Why do I feel like time is running out?

I tell Marcus how to get to my house and he drops me off in front and kisses me good-bye. A part of me thinks I should keep him hidden, as if some magic will be lost if my two worlds collide. But I am tired from the sun and wine and weed and walking. I am too tired for sneaking around.

I walk in the house and straight into my room, not even bothering to say hi to Jenica, who is studying in the living room. I lie in bed and look at the ceiling, making up stories to fill in the holes of Marcus's secrets, until my thoughts become thinner, until they become air, until I fall into a dreamless sleep and they become nothing at all.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Stella,

I'm screwed. I'm seriously fucking screwed. Not only am I out of pills, but my parents and Dr. Jacobs and the whole fucking world knows I was stealing them and now everyone thinks I'm a drug addict and a criminal. I don't know if Mom forgot about Dr. Jacob's speech about tapering off the pills, but she tried to refill my prescription even though the bottle said no more refills. Some red bells probably went off on the pharmacist's computer that said “Warning! Warning! Drug addict alert!” Then Dr. Jacobs called and the shit hit the fan.