The Last Days of California: A Novel (13 page)

Once we were settled, we turned our attention to the three boys drinking beer at a table. They were listening to the radio. The station played Nirvana and The Doors and Elise started naming all of the rock stars she could think of who had killed themselves or OD’d at twenty-seven.

“That guy from Sublime,” she said. “What was his name?”

“I’ve never heard of Sublime,” I said.

“But maybe he wasn’t twenty-seven, I’m not sure. Do you know Blind Melon? You know Blind Melon, right?”

“No.”

“That song about the rain, with the bee? How’s it go?”

“I don’t know it,” I said, watching a father and son in the pool—the boy was learning how to swim. “Let’s just do it one more time,” the father kept saying, and the boy was trying everything—he was tired, he had a stomachache—and then he was bawling. I looked over at the table of guys and the blond caught my eye. It forged some kind of bond between us. And then the blond and his friend were out of their chairs, walking over to us.

Elise lifted her sunglasses and said, “Hi, y’all,” in a ridiculous accent.

“You guys aren’t from here,” said the blond.

“That’s right,” she said.

“We’re from Montgomery,” I said. “Alabama. We don’t really talk like that.” I smiled and he smiled back. It was crooked and made his eyes disappear. Unlike nearly everyone, he was more attractive when he wasn’t smiling. They introduced themselves as Erik and Gabe, and said they had a cooler full of beer if we wanted to join them.

“Maybe in a minute,” Elise said, her voice normal again.

They went back to their table and their other friend laughed and tossed a can at them. It went into the pool and the father threw it back.

“We don’t have to go over there,” she said. “They’re clearly assholes.”

“I kind of liked the blond.”

“Just listen to them,” she said. They were laughing, probably at nothing. No matter how smart boys were, they always seemed so dumb.

“We don’t have anything better to do, and the blond’s cute.”

“Okay,” she said. “But you don’t have to drink.”

“I know.”

“Drinking doesn’t make you cool.”

“Am I in a public service announcement right now?”

“That’s funny, a public service announcement.”

I stood and slipped on my dress. “Weren’t you the one feeding me straight whiskey last night?” I asked.

“There was ice in it.” She kept lying there, her ribs and pelvic bones on display, the baby hidden neatly inside. I couldn’t stop thinking about it—how no one knew, no one could see. If I hadn’t found the box, if she hadn’t wanted me to find it, I wouldn’t know.

She waited a minute before following me over to their table.

“Hey, girl,” the blond said to me—Gabe. His hair was so pale it was nearly white, his chest smooth and muscular. The popular boys in my class were scrawny; it wasn’t cool to go to the gym. It wasn’t cool to appear to be trying to be anything.

The boy we hadn’t met introduced himself as Charlie and got up to grab another chair while Erik passed around beers. They were so cold and everybody was so good-looking I felt like I was in a commercial. I pretended to take an interest in the father and son. The father was swimming laps while his kid sat on a step. I wondered if his mother was waiting in one of the rooms, but more than likely his parents were divorced and the man only had his son a few weeks every summer. To make things exactly even, they drove the same number of miles and exchanged him in the middle, which happened to be this shitty little West Texas town. It would explain why they were so disappointed in each other.

Elise took a Marlboro out of somebody’s pack and lit it with her bedazzled lighter before any of the boys could reach for their Zippos. I pressed my finger into a tiny flower on the table. It stuck and I thought about making a wish, but I’d been making a lot of wishes lately and they were the same generic wishes I always made. I was going to have to start being more specific.
Gabe,
I thought, blowing it off.
I want Gabe.

“What are you guys doing here?” Charlie asked.

“We’re going to California where we’re going to witness the Second Coming of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. In Pacific Time,” Elise said. She told them we were the chosen ones, that they were going to suffer through terrible fires and earthquakes before the earth exploded into nothingness.

“Stop,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re making a joke out of us.”

“I’m not making us a joke,” she said. “I’m making
them
a joke.”

“But we’re here, too.”

“We’re kids,” she said. “All we can do is act like jerks.”

“You do a good job of that,” I said.

She blew smoke past my face, rolled her eyes.

“She believes in it,” Elise said, and the boys looked at me with half-smiles.

“I don’t know if I do or not,” I said. “I might be agnostic.” I liked the way it sounded. I took a sip of beer, which tasted a little less awful than it usually did because it was so cold. Like Elise, I sat in church and felt nothing. I memorized Bible verses same as I did Robert Frost poems in school. But I wanted to believe. I really wanted to. If the rapture was coming, I hoped our parents’ belief would be enough to get us into heaven, like Noah, whose family had been saved because he was a good man.

Charlie opened another beer, placing his empty on the stack. “Every group has its own eschatology,” he said.

“Its own what?” I asked.

He took off his sunglasses so we could see his eyes. “It’s how we deal with death,” he said. “It’s human nature to want the world to end when we end.”

“Hey, girl,” Gabe said, “you want another?”

“Keep ’em coming,” I said, though my beer was still half-full. I liked how he called me
girl
, as if there were too many girls to remember, as if the names of girls would take up too much space in his head. If he liked me, maybe I could become
pretty girl
or even
my girl
. But for this to happen, we’d have to fast-forward past all of this getting-to-know-you business. We’d have to pretend we already knew each other. People were so similar once you got to know them.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye, his body in constant motion—an ankle bouncing on a knee, his hand lifting a can to his mouth. I wanted to feel his body move over mine. Before leaving home, Elise and I had watched a religious documentary that was streaming on Netflix. In it, all of the girls said that they very much wanted the rapture to come, but would prefer if it waited until they had husbands. They didn’t say
sex
. They said
marriage, husband
. They said their parents had gotten to marry and have children and they only wanted the same opportunity.

“He should take that kid home,” Gabe said, gesturing to the man, who was holding onto the side of the pool and kicking, telling the boy how easy it was.

“I know, right?”

“I didn’t learn how to swim until I was fourteen,” he said.

“Really?” I took a larger swallow than I’d intended, and it sat there, pooled at the back of my throat, before I could make myself choke it down.

“My dad died in a boating accident when I was two and my mom was afraid of water after that. She thought I’d drown if I went anywhere near it.” This story made me think he could love me. He wasn’t just a cute boy—he had problems.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He shrugged and said it was okay. “Do you know how to swim?”

“I was on the swim team at the country club for years,” I said. It was actually only two years because my grandfather stopped paying our dues and we couldn’t afford it after that.

“The country club,” he said, “how fancy.”

“Not really. It was the old people country club. My grandparents golfed there and made us eat Sunday dinner with them every week.”

“You any good?”

“No,” I said, laughing. “I only got pink and purple ribbons.”

“I didn’t even know they had those.”

“I was a little better at relay. I swam so hard because I didn’t want to let anybody down.”

Elise opened another beer, lit one cigarette off another. She was unhappier than I’d seen her since the trip began, which was saying something. I wondered if she didn’t like seeing me have fun, if she didn’t want to see me happy.

“Come on,” Gabe said.

I took off my dress and we walked over to the deep end. There was a
NO DIVING
sign, a shadow man hitting his head with an
X
over it, but Gabe dove in anyway and came up, flinging the hair off his forehead with a flick of his neck. Boys made everything look easy; it made me love them and hate them at the same time. I jumped in straight so I wouldn’t make too much of a splash, touched the bottom, and pushed up hard. The father switched to breaststroke and swam around us.

I wanted Gabe to know I could take him or leave him, so I swam to the shallow end and floated on my back, watching a big gray military plane fly low overhead; low-flying planes always made me think a bomb was about to be dropped, though I’d seen hundreds if not thousands of planes and a bomb had never been dropped. It was awful being a girl. All I could think about was whether he thought I was pretty, and if he thought I was pretty, how pretty. I’d only kissed one boy, a guy I’d met at church camp who hadn’t known that boys at school didn’t like me. That more than a mouthful’s a waste. He’d written me emails for months after, but they hadn’t said anything: the places he’d gone; the things he’d eaten; what song he was learning to play on the guitar. I’d wanted to like him but couldn’t, even though he was the only boy who’d ever taken an interest in me.

“Hi,” I said to the kid. He picked up his head and blinked. He was only seven or eight and already had dark circles under his eyes like an insomniac. He was so sad and ugly, I didn’t feel sorry for him any more.

“It looks like your kickboard got attacked by a shark,” Gabe said.

The kid’s father stopped swimming and looked at us like we might try something crazy. Then he took the boy’s hand and hauled him out of the pool. I felt sorry for the kid again. He couldn’t help being ugly—no one
wanted
to be ugly. Sometimes I had to remind myself.

When they were gone, Gabe held up his hand and I slapped it, a nice solid connection as opposed to the half-misses I usually managed. He dove under and pulled my legs, the water giving him courage he wouldn’t have had on land. I came up laughing and then went under again to smooth back my hair. I wondered what his friends thought of me, if they thought I was fat. But when I glanced over at the table, they weren’t paying any attention to us. They were trying to engage Elise in conversation, trying to make her laugh.

All Gabe knew about Alabama was “Sweet Home Alabama,” a song that Elise and I hated because we’d had to hear it every day for our whole lives and we would continue hearing it unless we moved far away and never went back. “ ‘In Birmingham, they love the govna,’ ” he sang.

“Please stop.”

“That’s your state song,” he said. “You should have some state pride.”

“Like y’all have in Texas?” I said, throwing my arms around him.

“That’s right,” he said.

I was having a great time until I caught my sister’s eye, and then I was embarrassed. And then I was angry for being embarrassed, for always having to be the person she knew.

Elise and the other boys got into the pool with us. After less than a minute, Erik suggested we take off our tops and Gabe told him to go fuck himself and pointed out that I had on a one-piece and Charlie said I could take the whole thing off. Elise got out and put her dress on, lit another cigarette. They insisted they were kidding, only joking.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“You can go,” I said, wrapping my legs around Gabe’s waist. No wonder people liked to drink—you didn’t have to be who you were,
you could change who you were.
I ran my fingers through his wet, clumpy hair. There was a pimple on his neck and I made note of its location so I wouldn’t look at it again. “If I don’t get raptured, will you come for me?” I asked.

“What? Like if you’re left behind?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you were agnostic,” he said.

“Exactly. I haven’t ruled anything out.”

“Well, it’s a lot to ask, but okay.”

“You promise?”

He placed his hand over his heart with a smack. “I’ll cross the Mojave.”

“What else?”

“I’ll ford the Mississippi,” he said. “And the Nile. The Nile, too.”

“That’s amazing.”

“I know, I’m pretty amazing.”

“Did you know that the Nile is the longest river in the world? It runs through ten African countries,” I said. These were the kind of useless facts I retained. Whenever I demonstrated my knowledge, I did it like this, without weaving it into the conversation at all. I pushed off of him and floated on my back, staring up at the huge cloud blocking the sun. The rays shot out in straight thick lines like a child’s drawing.

“Jess,” Elise said.

I swam over to the side and held on to the ladder. “Why are you doing this?” I asked. It was nearly dark and she was far enough away that I couldn’t differentiate her pupils from her irises.

“Do I need to go get Dad?” she said.

I swam back to Gabe, held onto him, and put my wet cheek against his.

“You better go,” he said.

“She won’t get my dad,” I said. “She’s just being a bitch.”

He whispered “room 212” in my ear and got out. I treaded water and read the
POOL RULES
. No cutoffs. No glass containers, food, or drinks. No smoking. No running. There were always so many rules, most of them unnecessary. I noticed a cricket and scooped it out. I looked around—there were a bunch of them. I scooped out another and another but they seemed to be multiplying, or else launching themselves right back in. I scooped out a fourth one and waited to see what it would do—it watched me watch it, still and patient.

I swam over to the ladder and climbed out.

On the way out, I said goodbye to Gabe, who was laughing and drinking with his friends as if he’d never met me.

Almost to our
room, I hit my head on the low branch of a tree. The boys were still laughing—not at me, they hadn’t seen me—but I felt it in my throat, my chest. Boys would always laugh at me. They’d never want me.