Chapter 13
The stomp ripples through the planks. I curl up all my fingers and toes and count them. They’re sweaty, but they’re all there, which is good. Still, though, I’m afraid to move quite yet. I peek at the leg that’s two centimeters from my face.
It belongs to the boy Lium, flatfooted and peering straight down at me. A small smile touches his mouth. He doesn’t move either, stunned by the landing, I’d bet.
I’m about to share with him my opinion on it, when I hear a whole herd of stomping coming at us. I proceed to curl up again. What can I say? It seems like the best strategy at this point. And I do execute the move flawlessly, if I do say so myself.
The boots and legs calm down after a few seconds and I chance moving again. There, on the spit of walkway that’s no wider than my own two arms, the entire party is gathered.
There’s a bottleneck as they all seem to be trying to get to where Lium and Larissa’s husband are, further down. Lium, ahead of everyone, skirts down the walkway like it’s nothing. He reminds me of one of the guys on the TAG team, actually. One time, this guy, he dropped all his gear at our feet, cracked his neck, which was gross, and leaped up an alleyway. Straight up it. Well, it was more of a zigzag than straight, I guess, but still. I was so happy I was on his team.
Unfortunately for Lium, there’s no way he’s going up anywhere at the moment, zigzagging or straight.
The moment he realizes this is clear. He double-checks, then checks again, even as he hauls himself to a bouncing stop. On any of the other walkways, he could have taken a sharp right or left and circled around all of us. It’s too bad, really, that he chose this one, because this one just ends. Very bad luck.
There’s a splash, followed by sputtering and laughter. Rivulets seep under my fingers while whoever it is gets hauled up and wrings himself out. I gather my skirt and move into a squat, wrapping my arms around one of the nearby poles. I’m afraid if I stand I’ll get knocked in, too. I don’t even know where Andrew is. Oh, Sweet Mother of Mercy, I hope he wasn’t the one that just fell in.
Larissa’s husband, Jeremy is his given name, shouts. He shakes out his hands and starts stalking towards Lium.
Then he straightens. Because Lium has his head ducked and is charging right at him.
The men around me start grumbling and clear out to the sides, a few of them wobbling over the drop-off. One of my uncle’s looks at me like he’s not quite sure if he really sees someone there, then grunts. He reaches a reddish hand towards me and it smells sour. I dodge it with a small tilt. On my other side, a cousin pats me on the head, never glancing away from the action.
Lium’s burst right past Larissa’s husband and into the gauntlet they’ve created. Too fast, I think, because he’s already at the other end. He lets up on his sprint delicately and checks over his shoulder.
He grins right at me. My eyes widen and I glance back at Larissa’s husband, who is positively marching his way down to us.
“Oh,” says Lium. Which I think is an understatement. In what I really hope is the start of a good plan, he darts back the way he came.
The two isles of my uncles mash together, cutting him off. He skids and ducks through the midst of them. He kind of reminds me of a squirrel. Larissa’s husband chuckles, and I don’t like the sound of it.
“I think you’re done, son,” he calls, pressing aside another man’s bedraggled head.
“No way. This is my favorite part,” Lium calls back, scanning the spaces between the men’s knees. Seeing my head down there, he takes the time to grin again. I wince. He yells and all at once he stumbles forward, my uncles and cousins close in around him.
Larissa’s husband squeezes through just as Lium regains his footing. They lock gazes, and everybody tries not to interrupt, except for the ocean who’s splashing away.
Shrugging like he can’t think of anything else he should do first, Larissa’s husband reels back. He lets out a guttural cry and my nose pinches. It goes on, I know, although all I can see are the backsides of my uncles because my cousin’s hand keeps shoving me down. I elbow him in the calf, which just makes him laugh and shove me down while messing up my hair. I hear the hitting, though, the muffled whaps of flesh on flesh. My stomach clenches like it always does, revolting at the awful incongruity, as the soft sounds brush my own ears.
I hear someone laugh. My cousin forgets about me as everyone shuffles around and finds nowhere to go. They start yelling.
Keeping low, I work my way over just enough to see. Lium, mouth blotched with bright blood, hunches over Larissa’s husband, who lies at his feet. Her husband tries to heft himself up. Lium waits until he takes a knee, then stomps on him.
I flinch. I’d like to leave, actually, but I’m as backed in as everyone else. I could hop in and swim…
“Hoh!” says the cousin next to me. A few men clap their rough hands together. I see Lium on the ground with Larissa’s husband standing, at least functionally. He’s a little droopy. Anyways, Lium slithers to avoid the feet that keep coming at him from above. I look behind me and start judging the distance from here to the beach. There’s actually an empty mooring one over, if I could just get a few steps to the side…
I squeal when both Lium and Larissa’s husband crumple near me, the impact jostling my kneecaps. I rock back on my heels, away from their faces.
“Hi, Crusa,” chokes out Lium from the inside of Larissa’s husband’s elbow. “Enjoying the show?”
“No,” I say, my toes curling over the lip of the walkway.
“No? What do you mean, no?” I’m sorry, is this boy crazy?
“I mean, no, I don’t like watching you two punching and slobbering over each other.”
“Slobbering? I’m not slobbering.”
“Maybe, but he is.”
Lium steers Larissa’s husband’s head up to face him. He cocks his head to the side. Then one of them seizes a smidge of space and they scrabble around. Larissa’s husband ends up on the top.
Then on the bottom.
Lium pulls up the collar of the other man’s shirt and wipes his chin.
“There. Are you happy now?”
“Not really.”
“You. Are impossible.” He coughs, and then rolls away.
Both men get to their feet and pant at each other. They start circling, but they each run into a wall of my uncles. Lium backs up one long, careful step after another, towards the next mooring, and the next, and the other man follows. In a more straightforward fashion.
The walls melt in. Both men are out of breath, streetlights making their skin shiny. It’s as if they simply fall into one another, rest against each other, though their faces and veins strain as if they would rent apart. The other men start getting excited.
Larissa’s husband collapses to one knee, and the jeers cut out. Her husband stops panting. It’s only Lium I hear, snatching his hands purposefully from one spot to another, some pattern it seems he’s practiced many, many times.
My uncles stop fidgeting. All too cool and controlled to be natural, as they prepare for Larissa’s husband to loose.
But again, he is making me nervous. Something’s wrong. I squint at him. I think I notice an angle, then the tiny shift, it’s all that’s needed, and it sends Lium’s whole body sprawling over his shoulder and flat over the edge of the walkway.
With a resounding clatter, he hits the rowboat I just used a bare foot to shove in between him and the water.
He swears and sits up. The boat swings sharply.
“Ow,” he groans. He reaches over and grabs Larissa’s husband’s ankle. The man yells as he’s yanked down into the boat as well. All the men, plus me, crowd at the edge of the mooring.
We needn’t have hurried, as there’s really not much happening. Basically, the two men are just flopping around down there between the benches.
They roll too far into the stern, so I stomp down on the prow. It throws them off balance, and now they both swear.
>
“Honestly, after all that, now you complain?” I squeal.
Lium just frowns in my direction.
“What are you doing?”
“Keeping you from bellyflopping.”
“Well, it didn’t work.”
“I guess not, but you didn’t land in the water.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“It’s a less wet thing. Are you two done yet?”
They turn to each other. Larissa’s husband punches at Lium with no follow through. Lium pops the man’s knee out from under him, and then lays back on the bench. I can see the lower part of his ribcage rise and fall again and again.
“I’m just getting started,” he says, and waves an arm in the air.
“Me, too,” says Larissa’s husband from somewhere on the floor of the boat.
I’m about to start channeling my zizi, I’m pretty sure, and feel pretty powerful just revving up to it, but my Uncle Groton appears beside me.
“It’s done. You did well. We’ve got what we needed. You, nephew,” he finds Lium’s gaze and holds it. The boat rocks. “I’m trusting you. We all are. You will not let us down. I’m proud to call you my own. You, come on up, old man,” he reaches an arm down to Larissa’s poor husband.
The men start talking and milling around. I decide it’s a good idea to grope the mooring post like it’s my future husband again, just in case. I’m kind of surrounded, so while I wait for them to clear out, I make some conversation.
“So. No offense, but as you do live on an island now, you really should work on figuring out where the land ends and the water begins,” I remark to the guy still sprawled out in the rowboat.
“I know where it ends.”
“Well, then, maybe you should work on remembering it.”
He lifts his head up.
“For your own safety, I mean. It’s not your fault, don’t worry. Maybe the ocean just wants to eat you.”
“Well, I am delicious. Here, come taste me.” He flings his arms out and they flop over the sides.
I try not to snort. “Uh, no thanks.” I lower my voice, “Hey.” He doesn’t look up so I nudge the boat. He grips the sides. “Not that I think you taste bad, but…what if it tried to eat you because you’re cursed?”
“That’s even better. I think I want to be cursed.”
“How is that better?”
“Because when you bit into me, you’d fall asleep, princess, and then you’d be just perfect,” he smirks at the sky.
“Hey!” I kick the boat. It sways out and jerks on the ropes.
Gripping hold again, he laughs at me.
“Crusa,” Andrew is there beside me. Thank the ancestors, he’s dry. I reach up for his arm and he lifts me out of my crouch. “I think it’s time we get you out of here, come on.”
I wave over my shoulder, down to the boy who looks like he might just spend the rest of the night there, and Andrew and I head for the uphill path.
On the way back, he tells me that island fights are not nearly as sophisticated as fights in the city. I say I’m sure they aren’t. He then takes the opportunity to enumerate all of the similarities and differences plus the significance of each one. Apparently, if he’s passionate about a subject then he is able to walk and talk, albeit at a rate of approximately twenty-percent less words per second.
“I was worried about you when you disappeared in all of those guys. Why would you do that? You could have been hurt.”
“It was fine,” I tell him. “I was off to the side. And Larissa’s husband was going to drown that kid.”
“That wasn’t a kid.”
“He still could have drowned.”
“He wasn’t going to drown, he was fine. He didn’t need help.”
I hesitate. Because when I think about it, he’s probably right.
Andrew sighs, “Let’s just not do that again, ok?”
“Alright.”
We’ve reached the green, and he tells me goodnight. I ask him inside for tea, but he says he’s arranged to enter the base at midnight so we say goodnight again and he leaves me standing on the steps.