Underwater (3 page)

We came to a halt in the driveway, right at the end of my wheelchair ramp. Evey slid open the door and climbed out wordlessly as the van rocked back and forth. My mother didn’t look at me as we sat there. She just stared at the lake between the house and the garage, twisting her wedding rings around her finger.

“I’m not thankful for any of this.” She spoke quietly. Evey pulled my chair out of the back of the van and unfolded it outside my door. The silence between my mother and me stretched into what felt like forever before she drew in a cleansing breath. “Dad will drop off Declan after scouts. Please try to have your homework done by dinner tonight. You have therapy.”

Closing my eyes, I swung open my door and lowered myself into my chair. I knew I had therapy. I’d been going to physical therapy on this night every week for the past twenty-five months and two weeks. I wasn’t stupid.

Evey waved as the red van sped off, spitting gravel behind it as Mom rushed to her next destination. “Dude. Seriously. Would it kill you to try to get along with her once in a while?” She took the handles at the back of my chair and started up the ramp.

I didn’t try to shoo her away. I just fixed my eyes on the trees and ferns that covered the hillside behind the garage. “She’s so high strung. It drives me crazy.”

“She’s high strung because she loves you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh Lord, you’re kidding me. Am I going to get lectured by you too?”

“No.” She grunted as we crested the top of the ramp onto the back porch. “I’m not blind and deaf. I know Mom’s annoying. But can’t you cut her some slack? The rest of us have to listen to your arguments, you know.”

“Plug your ears then.” I slumped in my seat.

“Don’t be a rag to me. I’m not the one you’re mad at.” She fished her house keys out of her pocket, her movements jerky and irritated.

A flash of black peeking through the damp fern below caught my eye, and I yanked on Evey’s sweatshirt. “Look!”

“Whatever.” She shoved the key in the lock.

“No, seriously,” I hissed, cranking on her arm to turn her around. “It’s
him
!”

She looked down at the slope, and her eyes widened behind her glasses. “Holy crap, I can’t believe it.” She ducked down so that she was as close to the porch floor as I was.

There, below our house, was The Pretty, stomping through the woods, his brown hair damp against his head, his shirt soaked with sweat, and his brow furrowed as he glared over his shoulder.

“What is he doing here?” I pushed my chair to the edge of the porch to watch him lumber down the slope.

He moved fast, more adept on his feet than I’d ever been. He took swift and confident steps, but he looked paranoid as he glowered over his shoulder. He was pale, and pit stains were under his arms, like a junkie in need of a fix.

“He doesn’t look so good.” Evey chewed on a fingernail as she observed The Pretty approaching the waterline.

My lips twitched. “I was just thinking that myself, super sleuth.”

“Well, why is he on our property?” She asked this as if she were completely scandalized.

I pretended not to notice when Evey stared at the side of my face. “I have no idea.”

“I told you he liked you,” she whispered.

“Good Lord, you’re still on this?” I watched as The Pretty stopped walking and hunched over with his hands resting on his knees. Though we couldn’t hear it, he appeared to be panting heavily. His shoulders rose and fell with tangible effort and occasionally jerked as though he were coughing hard. “He does not. He doesn’t even know I live here. He’s probably trying to go home and decided to cut through the woods.”

Evey’s gaze rolled back to him. “He looks like he needs an inhaler.”

“He looks like he needs a shower.” My stomach started to undulate like the water in the lake. Up and down, up and down, building in excitement as it rocked. Geez, how long had it been since I’d crushed this hard on a guy?

There had been a kid, a junior, who’d acted as if he were interested in me at the beginning of the school year. He’d sat next to me at lunch a few times, and we joked about the principal’s comb-over a few times. But just when I was sure I was going to get asked out to homecoming, he’d stopped talking to me and become one of the many people who chose not to notice me anymore. Jerk.

It wasn’t like I was repugnant to look at. I still had the same face. Wide hazel green eyes and full lips that made Angelina Jolie’s look amateurish. And other than the fact that my legs were useless from the knees down, my body wasn’t a monstrosity, either. I was still thin, thanks to all of the exercise I had to do just to move myself in and out of my bed and the car, not to mention my swimming. When my picture was taken from the waist up, I didn’t look any different from any other funky teenager out there. Yet people, namely boys, ran away from me as though I were covered in manure.

“Do you want me to push you down there so you can say hi?”

“No way.” The last thing I needed was to roll up in the brush behind this guy with my sister in tow. It was hard enough getting down the ramp to the small dock we had on the water. I didn’t want to have my first conversation with The Pretty happen while my younger sister acted as chaperone.

He stood upright, and Evey and I both held our breath. Looking in all directions, he swatted at the branch of a thick evergreen tree and resumed his walking. We watched in revered silence, my hands trembling again as I gripped the armrests of my chair, until he was swallowed by the trees.

I blinked at the green a few times, trying to catch sight of his black clothes again. I wasn’t ready to be
done
watching him yet. I mean, I didn’t want to have a convo with the guy, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to enjoy the view. “We have to follow him.”

“What?” Evey hissed.

“Let’s see where the hell he’s going.” I turned my chair around on the porch and aimed it at the ramp. “Come on, we can take the path to the Rogersons’ place.” There was a dirt path that ran the quarter mile between our house and the neighbors’ house, owned by an elderly couple, the Rogersons, who insisted on giving us a fruitcake every Christmas.

Right after the accident, Mr. Rogerson had gone out to the path with a shovel and spent the next three weeks widening it just enough for a wheelchair to pass through easily, citing that I needed to have a way to get to their house in an emergency. I usually stayed off of the path, unless I was particularly pissed off at my parents and needed to get away somewhere where they
wouldn’t
call the National Guard to come look for me.

“You’re crazy.” My sister dropped her backpack in front of the backdoor and took hold of my chair. “You’re becoming a stalker.”

“No, I’m not.” I bit the insides of my cheek to keep from smiling. “He’s on our land, you know? And headed for the Rogersons’. Let’s think of it as a neighborhood watch system.”

She snorted and pushed me down the ramp. “You’re certifiable.”

“That’s what they tell me.” I shoved my wheels. We bounced across the gravel driveway, Evey groaning as she rolled me over an underground root that blocked the entrance to the path. “Hurry, or we’ll lose him.”

“He’s still there.” Her voice was hushed as she crouched down next to my ear. “You can see the black of his T-shirt through that tree.” She pointed down the hill. Sure enough, there was The Pretty, his shoulders hunched as he tromped along.

We moved along the path, almost parallel to his movements, with the exception of a hundred feet of trees and foliage separating us. Every three or four steps, The Pretty would stop for a beat, look over both of his shoulders. Then, after his shoulders would hunch up, and his arms would clench around his middle, he would knock branches out of his way and continue.

“He’s almost to the mouth of the bay,” Evey whispered.

The tiny bay our old house overlooked had been named after my great-great-grandmother Luna, who’d drowned in it as a young woman. She’d been swimming late at night in the summertime, and they’d found her nightgown floating in the weeds at the edge of the bay two weeks later. She was presumed to have drowned, and the bay—which was just a small, rock-lined notch in the shoreline—was called Moon’s Bay after that. My parents bought the old farmhouse on the hill from my mother’s great uncle while she was pregnant with me, and when I was born three months later, they named me Luna, after the drowned relative and the water that took her.

“Come on.” I rolled myself forward. At the bottom of the slope, the Pretty stood at the edge of the dark, midnight water, panting. He was right at the edge of Moon’s Bay, at the open mouth of the great Pend Oreille. “What is he doing?”

Evey stooped down next to me and blew into her cupped palms. “I have no idea. But it’s freezing out here.”

I looked down at my hoodie and zipped it up. I hadn’t noticed the frigid temperature outside, because of that pesky molten lava thing he did to my stomach. It was like having a space heater inside of my gut.

“Maybe he really is lost.” I watched as his arms went rigid, then relaxed, then went rigid again. The sweat mark on his shirt had grown, despite the fact that the weather was cold enough to dump early spring snow on our heads. Now his black T-shirt looked heavy. “Maybe he needs help. He looks sick or something.”

“Should we call 911?” Evey twiddled her hair.

Shaking my head, I pulled my hood up. “I don’t want to embarrass him. If an ambulance comes, everyone will know by dinnertime, and he’ll never live it down. It’s hard enough sticking out like a sore thumb at our school.”

“Even when he sticks out for being
hot
?”

I glanced at my sister. The only sound between us was the sound of the lake water lapping against the rocky beach. “If he falls into the water, we’ll call 911, deal?”

“Fine.” Evey’s voice cracked. “Hey, what’s he doing?”

My head snapped back in his direction just in time to see him peel his shirt over his head, then fold it carefully before resting it on a large boulder. I sucked in a sharp breath and held it. He was beautiful. Every muscle in his back was visible and subtly defined, much like his arms. When he started to unbutton his jeans, I was immobile, no longer just paralyzed from the knees down. Now it was from the eyes down.

“We should stop looking,” Evey said, unmoving.

“I know.” I didn’t attempt to cover my eyes. It looked as though the buttons were a struggle. He jerked forward and paused between each one. At one point he lurched as if he were going to throw up.

“He’s sick. He’s gonna pass out.”

I nodded. “Get out your phone.”

Evey scrambled to tug her phone free from her pocket. He dropped to his knees on the rocks. Ghost pain shot through my kneecaps as I watched The Pretty struggle to stand back up. He clawed at the trunk of a nearby tree, his fingernails digging so deep into the bark that slivers and chunks fell to the ground. I couldn’t be sure, but I was pretty sure I heard him groan.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered.

Next to me, Evey nodded her head. Her cell phone was in one hand, with the index finger of her other hand poised above the keyboard. “Should I call?”

He stumbled to the left, and the jagged trunk of a fallen tree obscured our view of the lower half of his body. Which was probably a good thing, because his torn black jeans were promptly thrown onto the rock with his shirt.

Evey gasped and covered her mouth. When she spoke, her voice was muffled by her own palm. “Dude. He’s naked.”

“No…” I leaned forward in my chair.

“No, really. He is. His pants just came off.”

His body, crisp white against the dark water, straggled to the edge of the lake. I shook my head. He wasn’t crazy enough to jump in. There was no way. It was March, and the weather reports were predicting several more weeks of winter-like weather. The water would be thirty-five degrees at the surface, and only God knew how bitterly arctic it would get several feet down. He would be hypothermic within minutes.

“No. No, no, no, no!” I pushed my hands down on my armrests and raised my butt off of the seat. “Hey! No! Are you crazy?”

He turned around with jerky movements, his bare chest and stomach visible above the brush. His eyes scanned the hill above him, the sweat on his forehead glistening in what little light was filtering through the thick, gray clouds above. The lava in my stomach started to churn like a washing machine.

“Luna!” Evey gasped, ducking down so low to the ground she was now tucked in between her own knees. Her trembling hands covered her head, and the cell phone landed in the dirt in between us. “He heard you!”

I made no move to hide. If he looked hard enough, he would see me, but I didn’t care. Our eyes met through the green tree branches and brush, and the panic in his eyes melted away. My fingers dug into my palms as one corner of his mouth tugged upward in that all-too-familiar smirk that had everyone in the hallway stopping to stare. It was a smile saturated in appeal, but peppered with just enough waywardness to trigger something inside of me. My mother always said that if it was something dangerous, I was immediately attracted to it. I had a feeling that this guy was exactly what she was talking about.

“Is he looking?” Evey whispered from her ball on the ground.

“Yes.”

He held my gaze for another beat, then turned and jumped. His body arched over the choppy waves, then sank down into the lake with scarcely a splash at all. Gasping, I lost my grip on the armrests and dropped into my seat with a
thunk
. Evey’s head popped up just as the streak of white disappeared into the darkness.

He was gone.

Chapter Three

Before we left for school the next morning, I escaped Mom’s watchful eye, claiming that I needed to take out the garbage. She liked my doing typical chores around the house and constantly told my father that it was good for me to have a sense of normalcy. Even being partially paralyzed hadn’t excused me from scrubbing toilets and taking the trash to the outside bin. As soon as the backdoor swung closed behind me, I sped down the ramp, behind the minivan, and across the driveway. I aimed for the root that blocked the path, and hit it full force, nearly tipping myself sideways in the process. Muttering obscenities that would have made even my father blush, I righted my chair, and sped to the spot where Evey and I had watched The Pretty strip down. Breathing a sigh of relief, I leaned against the back of my chair.

The clothes were no longer sitting on the boulder. Either he’d come back for his clothes after Evey and I stopped searching the waterline for him, or one of the Rogersons had spotted them and come down to collect them. I doubted it was the latter, as old Mrs. Rogerson would have surely come knocking on our door to gossip to my parents about her discovery. So I assumed The Pretty had come back for his clothes. Eventually.

I found myself watching for The Pretty at school all day. By the time seventh period rolled around, I’d decided that Evey and I had probably witnessed a drowning and probably needed to call the cops or something. That is, until I heard a voice behind me.

“Why were you watching me?” His deep voice wrapped itself around me, and the warm fuzzies settled in. My stomach was rolling around like kittens with a ball of yarn when I turned my chair around to find The Pretty smiling down at me with that half smile of his. Screw that smile. And screw my reaction to it.

I opened my mouth, but only air came out. A couple of years ago, I’d have slapped a hand on my hip and announced in a voice loud enough for the entire hallway to hear that it had been
him
watching
me
. Which wasn’t the truth, but that wouldn’t have mattered to me. However, The Pretty had an effect on me that made my tongue shrivel up and slide down the back of my throat. That was most annoying, considering the fact that sometimes it felt like my wit was all I had left.

Clearing my throat, I looked up at him through my long black bangs and noticed that he wore the same clothes he’d stripped off his body in the woods the day before. Huh. For a kid living in Moon’s Bay, I would have thought he had more selection in his closet.

“You were sick,” I croaked.

He furrowed his brow as he gazed down at me.

I cleared my throat a second time and reminded myself to relax my grip on my wheels. I pried them loose and dropped them in my lap, watching them pink back up. “Yesterday. You looked sick.”

“Oh, right.” His gravelly voice made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. He knelt down, so we sat eye to eye. “Yeah. I was feeling…under the weather.”

Nodding, I glanced away from his icy gaze. “Are you better now?”

“Much.” When my eyes wandered back to his face, I noticed that the line between his dark brows had smoothed out. “Thank you.”

I folded my arms across my chest and pressed my lips together. “That wasn’t funny, you know?”

The corner of his mouth slipped down. “What?”

“That trick.” I glared at him, fixing my eyes on a spot along the hallway where someone had stuck their wad of gum. “You scared me. I mean, you scared
us.
”

“I didn’t realize you weren’t alone.” He spoke slowly and concisely. There was a lilt at the end of his sentences that made me think English wasn’t this guy’s first language.

“My sister was with me. Evey.” I glanced at him and looked away again. The lava had returned to my stomach, and I was starting to feel all slow roasted again. “It’s cool. She didn’t see anything.”

One of his eyebrows arched high on his forehead. “But you did?”

I snorted. “No. Too much brush to see much of anything, sorry. Get over yourself, buddy.”

He laughed, and it echoed between the thick cement walls. “You’re funny. I like that. Listen, I’m very sorry I scared you. I didn’t mean to.”

“What in the world were you doing?” I asked, sitting forward in my chair. “You could have died. Do you get that?”

He shook his head, his brown waves flopping into his eyes. “I was fine.”

“Yes. By some miracle.” I rolled closer to him, my footrests bumping into his bent legs. “You stripped naked in the middle of the woods in northern Idaho and dove into freezing water. If you wanted to show off, you could have dropped down and done pushups, you know.”

He leaned in. “I said I was fine, Luna.”

My breath caught in my throat, and sweat piqued at my hairline. The lava in my stomach was kicking into overdrive. “That’s not fair.”

“What isn’t?” He glanced upward as a group of boys in baseball uniforms passed by.

“I don’t know your name, but you know mine.”

Again, his mouth tilted upward, and he held out his hand. “That’s a good point. I’m Saxon.”

“Luna.” I placed my hand in his, and he shook it slowly. “But you already know that.”

Again, he laughed, and the sound bounced around my head a few times, making me feel drunk. “Yes. Listen, I never meant to scare you. I knew what I was doing. I promise.”

“Then what were you doing on my property?” When he tilted his head to the side, I clarified. “Or, my parents’ property.”

“I’m sorry for trespassing.” He frowned. “I was going home.”

“Where do you live? The bottom of the lake?” I chuckled at my own joke.

“Which of the houses in Moon’s Bay do you live in?” He rested one of his hands on my knee. I looked down at it and wished I could feel it. “The one with the red roof?”

Shaking my head, I used my trembling hands to roll my chair back. The space between us grew by a few inches, and the heat in my belly cooled by a couple degrees. “No. The white farmhouse. Which house is yours?”

Saxon thought for a beat and then shrugged. “You can’t see it from your place. But I remember the white house. It’s the one with the ramp by the backdoor, right?”

I fingered the spokes on my wheel. It just figured that the new guy in school—who was also the hottest guy Sandpoint High had ever seen—lived in my neighborhood. Now I would never be able to roll myself up and down that stupid ramp without feeling completely paranoid. I swear, if Saxon offered to push me even once, I was going to run over his toe. There was one thing worse than being a charity case, and that was being a charity case to the one guy who made my stomach bubble like one of the coffee percolators in the Deep Lake Coffee Company.

“So the ramp is for your…” His eyes dropped to my wheels. “Chair?”

Saxon examined my chair, a line appearing between his mahogany eyebrows. He looked confused by a chair on wheels, and I noticed his fingers twitching the tiniest bit, as if he wanted to move it an inch or two. It was as if he’d never seen a wheelchair before.

I sat there with Saxon’s head half a foot from the chair for a few seconds before shifting in my seat uncomfortably. “I…just…um…dude.” When his head popped up, I wrinkled up my nose. “You’re kind of in my bubble.”

He returned my frown. “Your bubble?”

“Got it.” I felt more comfortable with his head up where it belonged. “You’re from out of town. Yeah, you’re in my bubble. My space. You’re invading my personal boundaries.” I drew and invisible circle around myself with my finger.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” The muscles in Saxon’s shoulders bunched as he prepared to stand.

“Wait.” I touched his hand and felt the heat expanding from my fingertips, up my arm, past my shoulder, and right down into my belly. “You don’t have to go. I don’t mean to be…”

I didn’t know what I meant to be. I spent so much of my time being prickly as a cactus that when I wanted to be
nice
to someone, it felt like major work.

His features softened, and he nodded his head toward the parking lot where Evey and I always waited for my mom. Light cascaded through the door behind him, and all I could see was the silhouette of his muscles and wavy hair. “Want to go for a walk?”

My tongue grew to be about three times its size, and it took me a few tries before I could articulate an answer. Seriously, the effect this guy had on me was ridiculous. I reached into my bag and pulled out my cell phone to check the time. “OK, but I’ve only got about twenty minutes until my mom will be here, and I don’t want to freak my sister out.”

“We won’t even leave school grounds.” He held open the door, and the wind hit me in the face like a slap.

I wheeled myself through the door and down the ramp. I could see every head on the football field turn in our direction. There I was, rolling around with an adolescent crush on the hot new guy, when he most likely considered me to be some sort of service project. Probably a good deed to add to his Eagle Scout project.
Make friends with the crippled girl. Check!

As soon as I reached the bottom of the ramp, I saw him move to take the handles on my chair through the corner of my eye. I swung my chair around just in time to stop Saxon in his tracks, his hands hovered above the handles.

“I, um, was going to push you.” He tucked his hands into his jeans pockets. “I won’t, though. Sorry.”

I chewed the inside of my lip. It wasn’t very often that my snarkiness was rendered unnecessary. “Sorry. I just don’t like to be pushed around. It makes me feel all weak and pathetic. And I hate that damsel in distress crap.”

“Got it.” He came to stand beside me, and we headed toward the track around the football field. “So why are you in that chair all the time?”

I looked up at him through my hair. People never asked me about my injury or my chair, even when they first met me. It was sort of like asking the fat lady if she was pregnant. Nobody wanted to be the schmuck who did it, but everybody wanted to know. “My family was in a car accident two years ago. I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. The L2 in my spine was compressed by a hematoma, and now I’m useless from the knees down.”

Saxon’s eyes widened. “And that’s why you’re in the chair?”

I shrugged nonchalantly, even though my heart sank in my chest. “The doctors and therapists think I might have the chance to walk with braces and crutches eventually. I’ve got feeling in my thighs, but in my knees and south of my knees…nada. So, what gives? You act totally shocked by my wheelchair.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” He shook hair out of his eyes. “We don’t have wheel…chairs…where I come from.” He slowed down his pronunciation, and I almost chuckled at how carefully he said it.

“What, do you throw all of the handicapped people in an institution or something?” Shuddering, I swerved around a pothole. “Glad I’m not from your hometown.”

Saxon’s gaze turned serious, and I felt the weight of it on the side of my face. “Of course not. We don’t have handicapped people where I’m from.”

I stopped rolling and gaped at him. “You want me to believe that nobody has any sort of special need where you’re from? No wheelchairs, no crutches, no brain injuries or learning disabilities? No special ed? Nothing?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head back and forth slowly. His expression was so deathly serious, I found myself wanting to believe him. “I’m from a very small community.”

We held each other’s eye contact for a beat, then I looked away. Saxon’s eyes were so intense that they hurt to look into for long. Whenever I did, I started to feel myself losing my edge, and I hated it. My edge was the one thing I’d not lost. I wasn’t about to lose it over some guy. No matter how good he looked…in the woods…with his clothes off.

“So you’re from Stepford, are you?” Snickering at my own joke, I pushed my wheels with my gloved hands again.

“No.” Saxon kicked at a rock and smiled down at the ground. “I’m local. Well, new to this particular town, but I’ve been in Pend Oreille my whole life.”

“In?” I raised an eyebrow at him, as we started our first lap around the track.

“On,” He corrected himself quickly. “On. Around. At.”

“Did you duck out of class or something?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Then how did you sneak out before the bell rang?” Whatever this kid’s trick was, I wanted the inside scoop. It took me ten minutes of begging to get Mrs. Illinkall to let me use the hall pass.

“Oh, right.” Saxon smiled down at me and topped it off with a wink that made my heart stutter. “I just walked out.”

“How do you manage to do that? Who’s your seventh period with?”

“Math.”

He didn’t offer more, so I rolled my chair closer to the side of his leg. “Dude. We’ve got three math teachers. Klinger? Harris? Bothman?”

When he shook his head, his longish hair caught on the wind. I wondered if he was cold in his T-shirt, but there weren’t any goose bumps on his arms.

“I don’t remember the teacher’s name. It doesn’t really matter, anyway. I’m out now. And so are you.”

I looked at the track ahead. He didn’t want to share his secrets; that much was clear. “Got it.”

The gym teacher blew his whistle and told the class to head inside to shower, but most of them stood there, transfixed by the sight of pathetic Luna Prosser walking with the new kid. Sighing, I stopped pushing my wheels and waited for Saxon to notice.

After a few steps, he looked over his shoulder. “Are you all right, Luna?”

“This whole public service thing was nice and all.” I swallowed the lump of resentment growing in my throat. I hoped it would hit the lava in my stomach and cool it down. “But you don’t have to do it.”

His chin tilted down. “Don’t have to do what?”

“This.” I gestured between the two of us. I needed to bring this little powwow to a close. I was reacting like a tween who saw Justin Beiber, with the heart palpitations and all. I needed to calm down, get back to the parking lot, and find Evey. “This whole hanging out with the broken chick thing. I get it. You’re a nice guy. I’ll tell everyone I know.”

“Wait, what?” Saxon knelt next to my chair and rested his hands on the armrest, a mere centimeters from my elbow. Heat spread through my trunk like a radiator blowing steam, and I shifted in my seat. “You think I’m talking to you because of your chair?”