The Incident on the Bridge (11 page)

W
hen Carl came back with two cheeseburgers, he acted like one of them was for Ted and one was for Fen, and then Carl said, “Hey, I've got to go return a phone call, but Fen's going to be in Bronze on Wednesday, Ted, so…”

“Bronze?” Fen said.

“Bronze Lasers.”

“They have bronze ones?”

“It's the starter class.”

Fen was done feeling stupid about boats. “Let me spare you,” he told Ted, not daring to look at his uncle. “I won't be there.”

“You're not quitting, are you?” Ted said. “You did fine. I'm teaching that class—well, like, co-teaching it. It will be awesome.”

“It will not be awesome.”

“You should give it, like, a year.”

“A year?”

Ted shrugged. “Nobody's good at it the first time.”

“You're saying that was a normal first-time experience that showed raw talent.”

“Normal first time.”

Fen noticed that she said nothing about raw talent.

“Exactly!” Carl said. “I'll be back, Fen. Tell your mother I said hi, Ted.”

Fen ate clumps of French fries in silence and saw that a preppy guy their age or older was walking toward them through the parking lot. He was one of those guys who didn't have acne at all. Besides being absurdly handsome, he was pretending not to notice them, heading straight for the snack bar window and digging his wallet out of his jeans pocket.

“I'll have a suicide,” Ted said, deepening her voice so she sounded like a girl pretending to be a guy.

“What?”

“That's what he's ordering. Every soda flavor mixed. It's like he's eight.”

When the guy walked past them with a giant soda, Ted swiveled her head in an owly way. To Fen she said in a louder voice, “I told Barnaby that we need to do that at the work party for sure and he totally agreed with me and I said you could come and help, but I don't know about the others. Did you get the wax?”

“Yeeaah,” Fen said slowly. “I got the wax.”

Then it was like she reversed tactics. She called after the guy, “You coming to the work party, Clay?”

Clay stopped. He had to pretend he'd just noticed humans were sitting at the picnic table. “What? I don't know. Maybe.”

“I'll tell Barn to let you know the time,” she said.

“Awesome,” he said.

When Fen heard the heavy club door suction-close behind him, he said, “So who was that?”

“Clay Moorehead.”

“Boyfriend?”

“God, no.”

Clearly a defensive pose. She loved him.

Ted scowled. “You don't believe me, do you? I
loathe
him, okay? I only talked to him because he tries to pretend he didn't destroy my sister.”

“Destroy?”

“It's too hard to explain.” She reached into a red vinyl bag with the word
TORKA
printed in white over a drawing of a Viking head, pulled out a phone, studied it for a few seconds, and swore. Maybe she was one of those bizarrely uninhibited girls, like Hillary Tieran with her tattoos and her tongue spike.

A woman in a white linen shirt and a huge scarf was striding toward their table. She wore big sunglasses and kept spinning a key chain around one finger.

“Hey, Mrs. Vicks,” Ted said, extracting herself in stages, the way you had to when you were folded into a picnic bench. “Fin Harris, Mrs. Vicks.” She said his name wrong but he didn't correct her. “Fin just moved here instead of to Brazil.”

Mrs. Vicks smiled oddly, as if smiling was very difficult for her, and then she said to Ted, “Honey, your mom sent me over here.”

“Don't worry, I'm going.”

“I'll take you.”

“I was, like, on the water. That's why I didn't call her back.”

“It'll be faster.”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” the lady in the big scarf said.

“Did Thisbe come home from Nessa's?” Ted asked.

It was the first time Fen had heard Thisbe's name
.
The woman who was not Ted's mother said no and didn't smile.

“Sheesh,” Ted said, and rolled her eyes. “Sorry about not finishing the cheeseburger. Tell your uncle thanks, okay?”

“Okay,” Fen said.

Two white gulls circled the low-tide mud. Ted, walking away barefoot, was a lot taller than Mrs. Vicks was in heels, and also slower. Ted didn't turn around to look at him, but he could tell that she knew he was watching her, so he strolled over to where the grass dissolved into mud, and flakes of rust came to life in the wet cracks and shallows. The flakes of rust turned out to be crabs. “Tack,” he said to one that was giving him an angry stare. It stayed put. “Jibe,” he said. It scuttled sideways into a cliff hole of mud and didn't come back out.

R
iding in Mrs. Vicks's car, Ted read her phone again:
It's Mom. You need to come home right now.

Then,
This is mom again mrs vicks is coming to find you.

“Why is my mom freaking out?” Ted asked Mrs. Vicks.

“They're looking for Thisbe” was all she said.

“Who's they?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Don't worry.”

As they drove past the tennis courts, Ted saw Jerome Betchman with his bike. He was standing still, waiting to cross. He recognized her for sure, locked his eyes right on her eyeballs so hard she blushed. What was it with these guys Thisbe kept pissing off? Was it true what Thisbe had said, that she'd ruined everything with Jerome because of what she did with Clay? If a guy with eyes like that—you thought he was shy and mousy until he laid a stare on you and you saw his eyeballs were light green over white sand—had come over to study with
Ted,
she would have made sure there was a second time and a third and a fourth and not just studying, either. It wasn't so much that Jerome was handsome but that he was so hungry-looking, which Ted wouldn't even have known except Thisbe had made her go along one time to watch Jerome play tennis (Ted had thought it would bore her brains out, watching two guys do the most boring unit in PE), but
playing
was not what Jerome did on a tennis court. He hit the tennis ball the way you might aim an arrow at someone you wanted to kill, and then he killed him. It was electrifying.

“This isn't about Clay, is it?” Ted asked. Thisbe had truly no sense about guys.

“I don't think so,” Mrs. Vicks said. Was she crying?

“What's wrong, Mrs. Vicks?”

“It's going to be okay,” Mrs. Vicks said, though clearly she didn't believe this, and that's when the fear started.

H
e didn't smile at Thisbe's sister but he felt bad afterward. She was nice enough. When he thought of Thisbe, his insides clenched, and when he thought of Clay, he understood why his mother never smiled at his dad when he picked up Jerome for a tournament or dropped off a forgotten sweatshirt. If you trusted someone and they turned on you, it changed everything, not just that one person.

Jerome had met Clay in fifth grade, the year Jerome's parents got divorced and he and his mom moved to an apartment on the island. She said it would be fun; they could walk to the beach on weekends and he could go to the tennis courts all by himself when she was at work, take lessons from a terrific coach his dad found, and the schools would be so much better, she said, but it seemed to Jerome like they were worse because no one would give Jerome the ball when they played football at lunch. They wouldn't throw the ball to Clay, either, so Jerome and Clay sat together. Clay gave him a nickname the second week of school—Romey—and invited him to his birthday party, the biggest, fanciest party Jerome had ever seen, like a wedding in a scene from a movie, with an ice sculpture and a guy playing the piano on the grass. Clay's mom had light brown hair and white skin but she spoke Spanish and called Jerome Hairr-oh-nee-mo, the
r
in
Hairr-oh
a sound he couldn't replicate in Spanish class or anywhere else, and she insisted on kissing him—both cheeks—every single time she saw him, hugging him to her breasts, and when she introduced Jerome to her relatives, she called him Clay's best friend and they all kissed him, too. It was so much more affection than anyone in his family showed that he couldn't help feeling like he belonged there.

Jerome's mom, on the other hand, never smiled when she said hi to Clay, and she never hugged him, certainly, and she hardly ever baked or bought the kinds of snacks you could offer a normal person, so Jerome went to Clay's house after school all the time.

“It's because we're not rich enough, isn't it?” Jerome's mother said.

“No,” Jerome said, wondering if that was true, starting to realize, even then, that it would become true. What was he going to say?
It's because you're not friendly? Because we have nothing to eat but pumpkin seeds and Craisins?

After Jerome's mother met Clay's mother at back-to-school night, his mother said, “What do Clay's parents do, anyway?” and when Jerome said he didn't know, she said, “They live where?” and he didn't want to show her, but he told her where to turn until they were parked outside 714 First Street. She not only parked but turned off the ignition. Jerome was worried the whole time that one of the Mooreheads would drive up and see them staring out the car windows at the green grass and the gleaming metal wall.

“Here?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, proud of Clay, almost, for having something that impressed his mom.

“
That
one.” She started to laugh.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just be careful.”

“Can we go now? Before they come back?”

She pulled away from the curb, and he asked her what he needed to be careful about, and she said, “Don't worry about it. I got you into this by moving here. I just mean that you're something, too. You don't have to think they're better than you because they have more money.”

It hadn't occurred to Jerome to feel inferior until she said it, but he and Clay stayed friends, mostly because Clay didn't care that Jerome always came to his house rather than the other way around and because Jerome was so busy with tennis lessons and tournaments that he never made friends with laxers or basketball players or guys on the water polo team. On Jerome's sixteenth birthday, Clay gave him a fake ID. “See? Two copies!” Clay said. “If one gets confiscated, you still got your backup.”

“But this is a picture of Reggie Toksun,” Jerome said.

“No. It's Reggie Toksun's older brother. People are always saying you and Reggie look alike.”

Other people thought this; Jerome didn't.

“They're not going to look that close, man,” Clay said. “Some aren't going to look at all.”

“This doesn't mean I have to be your mule, does it?”

“It's for fun, dude! Aren't you excited? Aren't you gonna thank me for my awesome gift?”

“Thank you for your awesome gift.”

Jerome barely ever used it—just that one time in Imperial Beach over winter break when he passed out for three hours and threw up in a girl's shoes. He felt so awful the next morning that he lost in the first round of the Norwood Classic, and his dad said, “What the hell is the matter with you?” It was a kid he never should have lost to, a total dweeb who kept saying, “Let's go!” every time Jerome made a fricking unforced fricking error. Never again, he decided. The tournaments were far away lots of times, anyway, in Ventura and Palm Springs and Las Vegas, so he and his dad left on Friday nights. Weekends were not for lying around with friends, taking hits on somebody's bong, but for killing kids who said, “Let's go!” in the round of sixty-four to make the round of thirty-two to make the round of sixteen to make the round of eight and so on to the finals, to be ranked and recruited, to play Division I tennis, to live, ad infinitum, where the green court smelled like hot paint and the ball kept coming at you like a thing you thought you had already killed. For this his mother had brought them to live in the Deckerling Arms on Fourth Street, grilling chicken on a crappy balcony and taking care of old, sick people in the Shores, though tennis was not a game she understood or liked or even came to watch when the high school had a home match. It was his fault, in a way, because when he was still playing in under-twelves, he had lost when she was watching and he screamed at her not to watch him anymore and she said, “Okay, I won't.” She didn't. Not ever again. Plus, she had her job.

Kids who hated Clay said that anyone who was friends with him was in it for the bling, but those same people were the first ones to show up when Clay threw a party, because his sister was happy to buy the booze. The Mooreheads' house was right on the water, and sitting in any part of it, you could see the Hyatt and Seaport Village across the bay, “the whole toolbox,” as Clay's father had called it one time, showing Jerome how the Hyatt was shaped like a flathead screwdriver, Emerald Plaza was a set of Allen wrenches, and the One America building was a pointy-cross-shaped Phillips head. In the blue current that was deep enough for container ships and aircraft carriers but narrow enough that you could fantasize about swimming across it someday, an endless parade of boats went by. It mesmerized Jerome to sit there on those weekends when he lost in the round of thirty-two or sixteen and came home scared and Clay said,
You're the best, man. Don't worry about it.
The bayfront walls of the Mooreheads' living room were made of thick glass, hooked together by hinges in a slot that allowed you to fold the whole house open, and when you did that, the living room extended to a lawn planted somehow on a platform that hovered right over the rocks and slabs of broken concrete that rose from the mud at low tide. It was there you could feel for whole seconds at a time that you were on the way to the best, that you certainly had the best in front of you, so there was no need at all to worry. This was the feeling money could buy.