The Lifeboat Clique (14 page)

“Yeah.”

“Well, my dad and your mom ordered the same thing. Same salad, same entrée, same dessert.”

“Twinsies,” she said. “Not usually evidence of hopping in the sack together, but it could have been a clue. How 'bout the time we went to the beach, and they wandered off together?”

“Right,” I said. “They supposedly were planning my mom's surprise birthday party.”

“Well, who knows what else they were planning?”

“Exactly.”

“Doesn't matter,” Abigail said. “They're together now.”

A long silence.

“You were great yesterday, Abigail,” I said. “You were a monster on that field. And if fifty percent of our parents screwed our lives up, that was still a victory.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“And no matter what,” I added, “this won't come between us.”

THE BIZARRE LOVE
story moved like a shock wave through my world. Over the weekend, my father got an apartment on Wilshire Boulevard, and Abigail's father got a month-to-month in Marina del Rey, where all the sad, abandoned husbands go. My mother and I stayed in our home, but it didn't feel like home anymore. And Sonny Boy, sleeping on my pillow, did not give a shit about any of it.

I wished I didn't give a shit. Wished I had a cat's indifference to a family dynamic that was suddenly destroyed. But I did care. My mother was so hurt and stunned that my faithful dad could have run off with the jittery blonde from the Palisades.

Truth was, we didn't work well as a family without
him. We had just assumed he'd always be there, and once he was gone, the holes were obvious. All the conversations, discipline, advice, and philosophies had to be retooled, as well as the special pancakes, and no one had the energy to do it. So we just sagged, a waterlogged-paper-hat kind of a family.

My mother started going to a divorce group, but it seemed to depress her so she stopped and eventually discovered Robert Pathway. She'd sit listening to his CDs for hours, a faraway look on her face as though trying to learn a new language from a country where people bounced back from misfortune. She stopped cooking, and we began to eat a lot of Chinese takeout food. The fortune cookies were full of weirdly optimistic phrases, like “A stranger will make your day today,” which never turned out to be true.

My father called from time to time, and when I did talk to him, the conversation was frosty on my part, pleading on his.

“I'm sorry,” he kept saying. “I would do anything to fix this with you.”

“How about fixing it with Mom? Don't you care about Mom anymore?”

“Of course I do. I still care for your mom. She's a great person.”

“Then come home.”

“I can't.”

My good-bye was bitter and consistent. “Whatever, Dad.” And I would feel catlike saying that. My Sonny Boy heart cold in my Sonny Boy chest. Before my dad had abandoned us, there had not been much wrong in our family. It was a unit of three, humming along just fine. Now suddenly I knew I could lose the people I loved at any minute.

For a time, Abigail and I were closer than ever, brought together by our shared family drama. I went to every single one of her soccer games, filming her and cheering her on alone as the LA sky darkened and Abigail, with her peculiar meandering gait and awkwardness, somehow managed to lead her team in goals. She was living her dream.

She'd managed to score a learner's permit, and after the games, we'd drive back to her house, which was invariably empty, as her mother was out with my father. Soon we began raiding the liquor cabinet, because we were teenagers and from newly broken families, and we had some acting out to do. We made vodka tonics and margaritas and watched movies and drunkenly danced in the backyard. We enjoyed the badness of it all. We couldn't control our parents—that was true. And it was liberating to know that they couldn't control us, either.

IT WAS A
cold, clear night after the game. Abigail and I had climbed out from her bedroom on the second story onto her balcony, then onto the roof. We were supposed to be watching her little brother. Instead we were drinking tequila.

Three shots had made me dreamy. “So this is what we'll do. You become a famous soccer player, I become a famous filmmaker, and I'll make documentaries about you.”

“Deal,” she said, pouring more shots. “'Nother one? I got to have at least one more to stand the sight of my brother.”

“Hey, you know what?” I said. “Maybe I'll learn soccer, too.” I stood up. “I've got some moves.”

“Whoa,” Abigail said. “Watch yourself, cowgirl.”

“Look at me!” I said, pretending to juggle a ball with my feet and weaving around in the process.

“Sit the hell down. You're drunk!”

“Goalllll!” I shouted, kicking my foot the way I'd see Abigail doing it, so the imaginary ball bounced off my imaginary laces. Suddenly I felt dizzy. I waved my arms, trying to restore my balance as I reeled backward.

“Denver!” she cried, grabbing for me, but momentum was carrying me toward the edge of the roof. “Denver,
noooooo!” she screamed as I fell off, plunging down through the cool, thin air of the Palisades to the ground below, landing with a thump.

I opened my eyes. The world spun slowly. Abigail was standing over me in the grass.

“Denver!” she gasped. “Say something!”

My drunken, relaxed body had plummeted down onto wet grass, which helped to break my fall. I was unharmed. I sat up.

“I just feel like doing stupid things, you know?” I told her.

“I know.”

MY FATHER AND
my mother went out to lunch one day, and I had hopes they were about to get back together. Until Abigail called.

“You'll never reckon what they got planned now,” she drawled.

“What who has planned now?”

“Those two dogs in heat we call parents! Your dad is moving into our house!”

“No way.”

“That's what he's telling your mom, right this very instant.”

“You're kidding,” I said. “How am I supposed to come
over when he's living there? It's too weird.”

“Hey, it's even worse for me. I have to live here. And see them every single day while my daddy rots in a corporate apartment in Marina del Rey.”

Something about her voice was funny. Almost like she blamed me. Like I had brought my dad into the world instead of the other way around.

I DIDN'T WANT
to go to Abigail's house anymore. I felt that it sent some kind of signal that my father had my approval to move in when he absolutely did not. Not that Abigail was inviting me over very much. She was hanging out more and more with the other members of the team, lean, athletic girls who loved nothing more than to kick around balls for hours after school. We'd make weekend plans and then she'd blow me off and not even call. We stopped talking on the phone every night. I was lucky to get ahold of her for a decent conversation once a week. She was living in her own soccer world, where me and my two uncoordinated feet couldn't follow. But I still went to the games, still filmed her. And I was still proud of her, despite the fact that I could feel her slipping away from me.

I didn't know what to do without Abigail. Having a best friend was like having a sister—you kind of take it for granted until it's not there anymore. I was so used to
having a funny thought or a sudden memory or reading about something interesting and then immediately sharing it with her. Now I just kept it to myself. I didn't like this lonely feeling, the way I woke up with it in the middle of the night. I felt I'd lost both my father and Abigail within a few short weeks of each other.

During my free time I'd walk around my neighborhood, filming things that interested me and then putting them together into movies on my laptop in my bedroom while my mother studied Robert Pathway and his forced march into happiness downstairs.

I desperately wanted some alone time with Abigail. We still ate lunch together, but now I was forced to sit at a table full of junior varsity soccer girls and feign interest in the soccer small talk. Sometimes I didn't even get to sit next to her. It really wasn't like having lunch with her at all.

“Hey,” I said into the phone one night when she picked up. “What's going on? Want to get together?”

“Huh?” Abigail said over loud music. “Can't hear ya.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm over here at Pizza Corral with some gals from the soccer team.”

“You know I love Pizza Corral,” I said crossly. “Why didn't you invite me?”

“Ah, you know. Just didn't come up. But I'm asking
you now. Come on over.”

“Nah,” I said. “I'll take a rain check.”

That's how the rest of the fall passed: Abigail turning into a stranger, my dad filing for divorce, and life just sucking. My answer was to film life as much as I could, as though I could shoot it into not sucking. I had gotten pretty good, though, not just at framing shots, but at editing them together, making something out of nothing. I felt peaceful when I was doing that kind of work. Then I'd switch off the laptop, and I'd be lonely again. I suppose I should have been making new friends, but I kept hoping that when the season ended and we adjusted to the new configuration of our families, Abigail would come back to me.

Then one day she sent me a text:

Got a grand idea.

How was I to know it was the beginning of the end?

A NEW STORY HAD INTERSECTED OUR BOAT OUT OF NOWHERE,
like one of the tiny fish that bumped it at night. Gentle, slippery, quiet.

A story called Hayley and Trevor.

I was the only one who noticed the glances they now exchanged and their tone of voice when they spoke to each other. I'm not sure why they chose to keep their attraction a secret. Maybe it was to have something to themselves. Maybe it was their way of feeling alive when hour by hour the prospects of our dying became more real. On land they'd be strolling to class together, texting each other, going to movies. Making out in the parking lot. But here
their relationship was invisible to everyone but me.

There were no more planes and no more ships, not even distant ones. It was as if the earth had just re-created itself without the people. Repopulating the earth with Trevor and Hayley was a dicey thought at best, all those warbling, drumming humans unleashed on the world.

We had settled into a routine that grew slower as we weakened from thirst and hunger. We still watched for ships, still tried, still hoped, but we slept more and more in our designated places on the carpeted deck, which was dry now but still reeking of the dead organisms that had once swum through its fibers. Occasionally, we would lower ourselves into the water to try to cool off from the heat, Hayley and Sienna holding on to the ladder because they couldn't swim.

Small fish taunted us in groups, moving close to the boat and then darting away, stronger and faster and wiser than us. We hated the fish. Resented them for being so close and yet so far, and able to live in that water that would have poisoned us if we had taken it into our bodies.

Water. It was not in our world. It was in faucets and pipes and swimming pools. It shot out of drinking fountains in school hallways. Sprayed down on BMWs in the car washes of Venice. Poured down from clouds in Seattle. We dreamed about it, talked about it, cried inside for it,
remembered it as though it were someone newly dead and still alive to us. But the only water we knew tasted of plastic and sloshed at the bottom of a gallon jug.

We talked occasionally among ourselves as the boat drifted slowly and the hours passed. The clique had dissolved in the sun. There was no more “us” and “them” by now. No ranking by how cool or pretty you were. We all looked like drowned rats, and we all wanted food and water and our families, and we all deserved to live, and we all were inching closer to death.

We learned a few things about each other.

When Trevor used to walk down Venice beach and saw a heart drawn in the sand, he was always careful to walk around it, because to him that was sacred ground. Hayley was terrified her earlobes were growing. Sienna had fallen out a four-story window as a toddler but was caught by a passing neighbor. And I loved American history so much as a child that I could look at Westerns on TV and tell if the Indians were dressed right for their tribe.

And Abigail? Well, Abigail wasn't sharing. She listened to the rest of us but offered nothing herself. This wasn't the Abigail I used to know. That Abigail talked of anything and everything. But this one was a stranger, even on this boat where we could barely sit cross-legged in a circle without our knees touching.

She had a hopeless, defeated look in her eyes. A look that no longer welcomed the future.

Occasionally someone on the boat would try to engage her or draw her into the conversation, but she would just gruffly say, “Leave me alone. I'm saving my energy,” and that was that.

And while it was true that I still hated Abigail for ending our friendship and turning the whole school against me, part of me still cared enough to worry about her.

“Abigail,” I whispered to her once when I was sitting close to her and everyone else was engaged in conversation. “Are you all right?”

“What do you mean? Of course not. Look at the mess we're in right now.”

“No, that's not what I mean. You just look, I don't know, you just look very different than I remember you.”

Her gaze was dull. “Then don't remember me.”

WE ALL KNEW
it was coming, but it still shocked us. We passed the jug around and took not even a sip, but a puddle the size of a quarter on our tongues, then the last of the water was gone. We had made it six days through careful planning, our bodies crying for it; but we were dogged in our persistence to stick to the sheer math of it, the divided gulps and then drafts and then sips.

We sat in a circle, staring at the empty jug, the boat bobbing gently. Hayley made a crying face, but the water had dried out of the recipe for tears.

“I don't want to die,” she gasped.

Trevor reached over and touched her hair. “No one's gonna die.”

Abigail and Sienna didn't notice the tender gesture. They were in their own worlds, deserts where everything moist was extinct.

Abigail stroked the jug gently.

“Well,” she said, “we made it last a long time.”

“Not long enough, though,” said Sienna.

“We can't give up hope,” I said. “We made it this far.” I found myself looking at Abigail and speaking to her as a friend, forgetting for a moment that we weren't friends anymore. “Come on, we can do it, just like we climbed the rope! Remember the rope, Abigail?”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “A rope is a rope. It ain't a big, blue sea.”

Sienna suddenly cried, “Give me that mirror!” she shrieked, “Give it to me!” She snatched the compact and began signaling crazily into the horizon. Trevor jumped up and screamed at the sparse white clouds, “Rain, God damn it! Rain! Rain!”

Hayley joined him and, after a few moments, so finally
did Abigail. And we all screamed at the clouds with a fury and a righteous passion as if the clouds had lost a bet and owed us water. I went to the back of the boat and leaned down at a school of fish taunting me. Sacks of scaly fluid with eyes I would have eaten like tiny grapes. I swiped at them, and they scattered, and I screamed, “Come here, you bastards!”

And there we were, screaming at fish and clouds and signaling at passing nothings. Anyone who saw us would have thought,
That is so inspirational. Those kids are trying to live.

THAT NIGHT THE
dolphin came. We had seen dolphins jumping in the distance, but one had never come up close before. Exhausted and weak as we were, we still crowded the back of the boat to watch as it lifted its head out of the water, proving humans still love magic to the end. Parched, starving, dejected, we waved, and it disappeared and reappeared again.

“Maybe he's come to bring us good news,” Hayley said.

It danced and chattered, moonlight shining off its wet skin, its smile meaning whatever a dolphin smile means, maybe welcoming us to a realm we would soon join, some kind of aquatic heaven where we moved in schools and were languid and weightless and free.

Trevor took off his shirt and unbuttoned his jeans, and they fell off his bony frame and piled at his ankles. Now he stepped away wearing nothing but his underwear, and hoisted himself onto the railing.

“Where are you going?” asked Hayley.

“I'm gonna swim with that dolphin.”

“Don't go. You're too weak to swim,” she said, clearly moving into the nagging phase of their tsunami-imposed speed romance.

But he had already disappeared over the side of the boat, emerging with his hair wet and plastered around his head. He lay on his back and faced the starlight. The dolphin vanished and then reappeared by his head. Trevor rolled over and swam a few strokes as the dolphin followed him, and they went back and forth that way, dying boy and living mammal, until Trevor suddenly went under and emerged near the back of the boat.

He held out his hand as the dolphin chattered behind him.

“Come here, Hayley,” he said. “Swim with us.”

“Oh, Trevor. You know I can't swim.”

“I'll keep you safe.”

She bent down hesitantly and put one cautious foot on the ladder.

“Come on,” he said, his voice full of things only Hayley
and I heard. I came up behind her and took her thin arms and guided her down the ladder until she was close enough to drop into Trevor's arms. They went under the water. Hayley came up gasping, but Trevor spoke into her ear as he used his free arm for steady, even strokes. Hayley leaned back against him, floating, her knees, her shins, and then her toes bobbing up to the water's surface, the remains of her last pedicure visible in the moonlight. The dolphin circled and dove and flipped as the couple moved through the starlit water.

Abigail and Sienna and I watched them. There was something so lovely, so alive, so dying, so joyous, so tragic about it that we were able to leave our own selves and our own situation and become spectators to the magic of the sea.

“You know something?” Sienna murmured. “Call me crazy, but they would have made a nice couple.”

EVEN AS WE
waited for the end, I am proud to say that hope did not leave us. Increasingly disoriented and growing weaker by the hour, we still passed around the signal mirror. We still kept watch, although strange things were coming out of the ocean. A boy walking on the waves who would suddenly disappear. A hand coming up out of the water holding a bottle rocket that went off with a
whoosh
but never exploded. A teaming, swirling group of monarch butterflies. We reported these sightings to one another. Sometimes we all saw them at once.

Trevor seemed to be doing worse than the rest of us. His hallucinations were crazier than ours. Hayley stroked his hair.

“It's okay, it's okay, it's okay,” she murmured, kissing his face with her parched, wrinkled lips. And I saw Abigail and Sienna narrow their eyes as if debating whether such open affection was real or just another crazy image thrown at them by the merciless sea.

I wondered what it would feel like to die.

I remembered a story my mother once told me about when I was a baby and got very sick, how she refused to sleep and stood guard over me, listening to my breathing all night long. I imagined that she was with me right now, listening again.

We dozed off one by one, slumping in our places.

I awoke to the sound of gulping. The others were still asleep, but Trevor sat in his swivel chair, his head thrown back, drinking out of the gallon jug. But that was impossible. There was no water in the jug. I was seeing things again.

“Trevor?” I whispered.

He stopped drinking and smiled at me. I reached out
and touched his knee to make sure that I was awake and sane and he was real.

“What are you drinking, Trevor?” I asked, a pit of fear growing in my stomach.

He smiled and took a deep, happy breath. “Seawater.” He shoved the jug at me. “Want some?”

“NOOOOOOO!”

I grabbed the jug from his hands and poured out the rest over the rail. But it was too late.

“Trevor,” I said, my voice breaking. “Why?”

The others woke up, sweaty, crusty eyed.

“What's the matter?” Sienna asked.

“Trevor drank seawater!”

“Oh, my God,” Hayley gasped. “Tell me you didn't.”

He shrugged. “I know they say not to, but there's a ton of things they say not to do, you know? Like don't surf after a storm 'cause all the shit from the sewers washed out into the bay.”

“That's not a good idea, either,” I said helplessly.

“This seawater is cool and refreshing,” Trevor shot back, “and if you're too dumb to drink it, that's your problem.”

“Oh no, oh no,” Abigail murmured, her eyes filling with tears. “Your goose is cooked, Trevor!”

He laughed, and his laugh was warm and wet. For an
instant, I envied that dark, slick throat.

“Bullshit, dude. I feel fine.”

Half an hour later, he was not fine. He was not fine at all. His face turned red, then a pale, slightly bluish color. He breathed in deep, heavy breaths. That's when, as Hayley sobbed her tearless sobs and hugged his knees, he started talking about Ranger Todd.

How Ranger Todd once caught a wave in Malibu so gnarly he almost drowned. And how Ranger Todd wanted to fight fires in Santa Barbara. And how only Ranger Todd had ever really understood him.

“Baby, please, sweetheart, please stop,” Hayley begged him, and it finally sank into Abigail's and Sienna's brains what I already knew: Hayley had fallen in love with him.

But she could not save him, and neither could we. He and Ranger Todd were in their own world. We could do nothing but witness the horror until events played out and one thing led to another, and suddenly Trevor went overboard. He swam briefly, and then the water closed over his head.

“Oh, my God!” Hayley screamed. “This can't be happening! Abigail, tell me it's not happening, because if it is happening then this can't be real, and if in reality it's not happening then it must be a dream, and if it's a dream then I want to wake up and when I wake up I want to
drink a pond full of water with a straw, not even one of those straws that filter out the yucky stuff, I don't care about the yucky stuff I just want the water. Trevor, oh God Trevor. . . .”

She tried to go in after him, but we held her back as we waited for him to surface. He never did.

Hayley went on and on and on, ranting and raving, and we all felt too sorry for her to tell her to shut up. Finally she collapsed on the deck and lay still. I would have thought she was dead, but she was still breathing. No one else moved. We were all stunned by what had just happened.

It was shocking to see Trevor day after day in the boat, all day long, so close, so real, and then not to see him anymore. The swivel chair sat empty. No more drumming. No more sudden, random thoughts. No more lyrics from Death Stare. And that's the thing. I couldn't say that I had liked Trevor, but he was familiar to me in the way that people are when they're in such close proximity. I had slept next to him. Inhaled his increasingly acrid body odor. And I had grown accustomed to this particular Trevor who was the only one of its kind in the world.