The Big Splash (15 page)

“You never answered my question from before,” my mom said, pulling me back into the present.

“What question?”

“How's school?”

“I did too answer it. I said it's okay.”

“What'd you do today?”

“Nothing.”

“Hmm. So it's going okay, and you did nothing. Great answer.”

I shrugged. What was I going to tell her?
I had a great day at school today, except I can't seem to make any headway in this case I'm working on. You see, someone soaked the front of Nikki Fingers's pants. Oh, and someone put Joey Renoni in a diaper, then covered the back of it with chocolate, but everybody thinks it's something else, if you get my drift. Don't know who Nikki Fingers and Joey Renoni are? Oh, well let me describe Vinny Biggs's whole
criminal operation
. It made a discussion with her about sex seem easy by comparison.

“Don't you want to know how my day was?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, relieved by the change of subject.

“It was okay.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, playing along. “What'd you do today?”

“Nuthin'” she said, as if her IQ had just dropped fifty points.

We looked at each other and laughed. When the laughter trailed off, she started in again. “You got something on your mind?” she asked.

“What? No.”

“Matthew, if you want to keep secrets, you're going to have to work on your facial expressions. Now spill it. Pretend for a moment you're not outgrowing your mom.”

I knew I wasn't going to be able to get off the hook without giving her something to chew on. There's nothing more persistent than a concerned mother. They're like rottweilers with good intentions. Even though I hated to resort to clichés, I knew there was one phrase that every
adult expects to hear when a guy is having trouble. “Well, there's this girl at school—”

“Mm-hmm,” my mom said with a knowing smile. “I figured.”

I smiled back, hoping that she read it as slight embarrassment instead of mild triumph. She had taken the bait.

“Does she like you?” she asked.

“I don't know. Sometimes it seems like she does. Then, other times it seems like she hates me.”

“Are you nice to her?”

“Sometimes. But sometimes I'm mean to her, and I just can't help it.”

“Hmm.”

“Then there's this other girl who seems to like me a lot, but I'm not sure how I feel about her. Sometimes when I'm with her, I think that we could be happy together, and I can forget all about girl number one. But then I see girl number one again …”

“And you feel something that just isn't there with girl number two, no matter how much you want it to be.”

“Yeah.” An uncomfortable realization hit me: I was no longer making up a story—I was actually talking about
what was going on between Liz, Jenny, and me. Somehow, my mom had gotten me to open up about what was really going on in my life. She was like a human truth serum. I had to be careful. Giving my mom too much info could make it difficult for me to operate.

“I know, Matt. Trust me … I know. It isn't easy. You're torn, right?”

I carefully nodded yes.

“You think that, yeah, there may be a couple of things that you're concerned about with girl number one, but there's no denying how you feel. You need to see her every day, because if you don't, you feel like there's something missing, something very important that you forgot to do. And those things that you're concerned about, those are just problems to tackle together, things that can be worked out. But you're not sure, because the problems you have with her seem pretty big, and you don't know if they can be solved.”

I nodded again.

“Girl number two, however, is an open book,” she said. “She seems honest and straightforward. She makes her feelings known, and when you're with her, you think to yourself, ‘This is easy. It's so hard with girl number one. It shouldn't be that hard. Maybe I should forget
her and go for girl number two.' The only problem is that, although you like girl number two, you're not sure if you
like her
like her. And you wonder, if you decide to go with girl number two, and girl number one comes around, what the heck will you do then?”

“Yeah,” I said. I felt a little naked. My mom had taken a chunk of my brain and read it whole, like a book she picked up at the library. What else did she know about me?

“Yeah, Matt, I know how you feel. I think everyone goes through something like that at least once in their lives.”

“So what do I do?” The question slipped out before I had a chance to stop it.

“No idea.”

“Oh.”

“Matt, you're going to have regrets no matter what you choose. You'll always have a part of you that wonders, ‘What if I had made the other choice?' But that's true with any choice you have to make. The only thing you can do is choose and hope for the best. Trust me. I speak from experience.” She took a bite of her sandwich.

I tried to guess the experience she was talking about, but I had no idea. I knew very little about her past, mostly because she never talked about it. There were a few old photos of her family in our apartment, but she never let family become a topic of discussion. I knew she had a sister, out west somewhere, I think, but we never saw or heard from her. I knew nothing about my grandparents, other than that both sets were dead. Her life before me was a mystery, one that I hardly ever asked about. When we finally did get to spend time together, the last thing I wanted to do was bring up a tough subject.

“I know you were looking for a more concrete answer,” she said, “but I think you're old enough to realize that sometimes there isn't one.”

“I appreciate the honesty.”

“Thought you might.”

“No matter how unhelpful it is,” I said, smiling.

“What? You want your mommy to solve all your problems?” she said, smiling back.

“Only the hard ones.”

“Sorry, kiddo. You're in the deep end of the pool now, and I already have a pretty good idea of how strong a swimmer you are.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She paused, her eyes never leaving mine. “I want a hot chocolate. You?”

“Sure,” I replied, more than a little confused by her swimmer comment.

“This time, we'll use
my
money.” Before I could respond, she crumpled up her empty sandwich wrapper, stood up, and started walking away. She knew about my little contribution to her emergency fund. I wondered again how much my mom really knew about the life I led.

“Well?” she asked, turning toward me. “You coming?”

I stood up and threw my trash in a nearby garbage can—the fancy wrought-iron kind that let people know the town had money. We walked toward the coffee shop that was just about to close. My mom looked in the windows of the stores as we passed. We held hands, but didn't say anything.

we got home that night, it was 9:30. I knew calling Liz that late would be a disaster, but I wanted to anyway. I talked myself out of it. Waiting until the next day shouldn't be too hard. By 3:30 in the morning, I almost had myself convinced. Around 4:00, I finally drifted off into a restless sleep.

I dreamed that I was in school, walking to my locker. The front of my pants was soaked. The hallway was full of kids, all of them pointing and laughing at me. When I got to my locker, I couldn't remember the combination. I kept spinning the dial, like a carnie working the Wheel
of Fortune. The crowd kept growing behind me, their laughter growing with them. Liz walked up to me, but it wasn't just Liz; she was a combination of Liz, Jenny, and Nikki Fingers. “Matt, I really need to tell you something,” she said, as if she didn't see the situation around me. I looked at her with wide, hopeful eyes. Maybe she didn't see what was going on. Maybe I could salvage this. As I opened my mouth to say something, this Liz-Jenny-Nikki girl slowly raised a squirt gun, one the size of a fire hose. She was crying, crying and pumping her squirt gun, building up pressure for a maximum blast. “I'm sorry, Matt,” she said, “but this is the way it has to be.” She turned the gun on me. Its nozzle looked as big as a tunnel, as black as a storm cloud.

I woke up right as she pulled the trigger. I was breathing heavy, drenched in sweat; for a second I thought I
had
been soaked with a squirt gun. But then I blinked away the sleep and recognized my room. I breathed a sigh of relief and untangled the covers that had become twisted around me like a makeshift toga. I looked at the clock on my nightstand. The nightmare had seemingly lasted for hours. In actual time, it was only forty-five minutes.

It was 4:45. I had to wait at least fifteen minutes before
getting up. Waking up at 5:00 means you're industrious, an early riser; waking up at 4:45 means you have trouble sleeping.

As I waited, the unexpected happened: I drifted off into a smooth, dreamless sleep. When the alarm woke me up at 6:30, I couldn't believe that an hour and a half had passed. Time is elastic, shrinking and expanding in certain situations. It loves to sneak past you when you aren't paying attention, and slow to a crawl when you are.

When I dragged myself out of bed to turn off the alarm, my head felt like it was filled with cotton, like a cheap stuffed animal. I had a tired taste in my mouth. I staggered out into the kitchen to grab some juice. On the counter was a note from my mom. It said: “Hi honey, Hope you have an okay day doin' nuthin'. Love, Mom.” I smiled. No more underestimating her.

I showered, grabbed a quick breakfast, and headed off to school. The chill autumn air cleared my head a little, like a cup of coffee I could breathe. In the course of trying to forget my dream and get out the door that morning, I had forgotten that Liz wanted to talk to me. I remembered it now, full force. The tingle in my stomach worked its way up into my chest, nearly completing the job that the
brisk air had started. I was almost awake now, despite the lack of sleep, and the pace of my walk quickened.

My mind drifted back to the first moment I realized there might be something between Liz and me. One fall day a couple of years ago, I had biked over to the Carling house to see if Kevin was around and up for doing something. Liz answered the door and told me that Kevin had gone off with their father on some errand. I was disappointed. I had no idea how I was going to spend the rest of my day.

“I don't have anything going on,” I remember Liz saying.

I initially dismissed the idea of hanging out with Liz all day. Then, since the prospect of spending the day alone didn't thrill me, I thought,
What the hell?
It might still be the best decision I ever made. We wandered around town, talking effortlessly for hours, about everything and nothing at all. There were no weird pauses or uncomfortable silences, just an endless stream of conversation. When it was finally time to go home, neither of us wanted to. We had spent six hours together. I got the feeling that we could have spent six hundred hours together and we would have felt the same way: We didn't want to leave each other.

From that day forward I started to think more and more about Liz, my feelings for her, and what it all meant. I started to think that she might be my best friend, not Kevin. Then other possibilities started popping into my head. What if Liz was more than just a friend? I had no idea what to think about that, and even less of an idea what she thought about it.

That's the frustrating thing about girls … You finally figure out how you feel about one of them, and then you have to figure out how they feel about you. Couldn't girls just send out a signal or something? Maybe they could have an “I like you” stick that they hit you with, or a big neon sign they could place over their heads that tells you “yes” or “no.” All I know is that there has to be a better system than the one we're stuck with.

When I got to school, I was a little disappointed that Liz wasn't in front waiting for me. I laughed at my unrealistic expectations. When I got to my locker, and Liz wasn't there, either, I went through the same cycle. I tried to convince myself that I would talk to Liz when the time was right, but as soon as I heard footsteps behind me, I almost sprained my neck turning around.