Staring Chick puts up her hand. She’s wearing her hair down long today. Looks lighter, more sun-streaked, than when she hides it in a ponytail. The teacher nods for her to begin.
“I think Shakespeare messed up with that ghost.”
Mrs. D grins at her. “Do you think the Bard messes up often?”
“No. Look at Romeo and Juliet. He totally tapped into the innate desire everyone has for a passion so consuming you’d rather die than live without your beloved.”
DeeDee snorts to a football jock drooling next to her. “Like she knows anything about passion.”
Staring Chick’s cheeks go red like when i catch her staring at me every freaking day. “The ghost just isn’t convincing. Spirits aren’t like that. They are bright and beautiful and emanate goodness.”
DeeDee’s jock, i think his name’s Troy, snorts. “You been holding séances?”
Mrs. D ignores him, focuses on Staring Chick. “So Hamlet is right to doubt?”
“I guess so.” She purses her lips. Thinking? Pouting? I don’t know. She could be getting ready to kiss the teacher. Or spit at that jock. She’s got nice lips. Full enough. I don’t like skinny lips. If you’re into someone, it probably doesn’t matter if her lips don’t look pink and wet like Staring Chick’s, but it helps.
Mrs. D is droning. “So you are saying Hamlet is right to doubt and wrong to act? Is he wrong to avenge his father?”
“It just leads to a pile of dead bodies.” The sun from the classroom window makes Staring Chick’s hair glow.
DeeDee frowns. “Hey, don’t ruin the ending.”
Mrs. D walks over to Staring Chick and stands right in front of her desk. “But isn’t this a tragedy?”
“Okay.” Staring Chick shakes her hair back and gives the teacher a friendly grin. Makes her pretty—that smile. “The ghost serves a dramatic purpose, but—”
The teacher raises her eyebrows, takes a step back to include the rest of the class.
Staring Chick continues. “Hamlet and Ophelia were in love.” Her eyes look blue today. “Maybe as much as Romeo and Juliet.”
“Cool, do they get it on?” Troy flips ahead in the text searching for a skin scene.
Staring Chick turns away from him like he’s garbage on the roadside. “The ghost ruined that. They didn’t get to marry and have children.” Her voice is intense.“Hamlet could have been a great king.”
“Tragic?” Mrs. D delivers the winning blow.
Staring Chick drops her head. Her hair curtains her face so i can’t see if it’s even pinker now.
Mrs. D moves in for the kill. “So Shakespeare didn’t mess up?”
DeeDee and Troy smirk. Everyone else is zoned.
Mrs. D raps on a desk for attention. “Anybody else want to weigh in?”
DeeDee raises her hand. “I loved a guy like that for two whole weeks. It is pretty cool. Especially the passion.”
“Ouch, you’re slaying me, Dee.” Troy winks, and she licks her lips like she wants him for lunch.
Mrs. D’s losing the class. That’s what she gets for turning on Staring Chick. They’re usually allies. Remind me not to dis the Bard around her.
“Let’s get back to Hamlet.” She dumbs it down. “Ghost: good or bad?”
Troy doesn’t bother to put up his hand. “I think the ghost was good. He wanted justice. That’s good. Hamlet should do what he says. Anything else is wimping out. Getting even. That’s what it’s all about.”
Staring Chick’s head goes up. Her mouth is set in a firm line. “Regardless of the consequences?”
“Who cares about consequences?” DeeDee jiggles for Troy.
“Michael.” The teacher catches me sitting up, listening. “Did you want to add something?”
i shake my head and put it back down on the desk trying not to think about consequences and what they’ve done to me lately. To my parents, my dive buds, even that waitress i barely knew. That night at the crab fest, her hands shook as she served us platters of steaming crab. She didn’t look hot with her eyes red and puffy, mascara leaking down her face. When she left our table, Dive Dog leaned in and whispered, “I heard her in the hall crying to the captain. She wanted to get off the boat.”
“Her kids are in Belize City at her mom’s. She’s scared for them.” i grabbed a big crab claw. “Give her a break.”
Dad gave me a sympathetic look, had spied me chatting her up earlier.
“Poor thing.” Mom watched the girl spill beer at the next table.
Dad and i descended into the pile of steaming legs, cracking the claws, ripping the joints, breaking the long sections in two, sliding fat chunks from the shell, swirling the sweet meat in butter. Inhaling the whole platter. We both went for the last leg. With a quick jerk, i tore it out of his hands. He shook his head and smiled at Mom. “When are you going to teach this boy respect?”
i laughed—we all did. i squirted Mom when i broke the leg open. She frowned, wiped her face, leaned forward. “Hold still.” She reached to wipe the butter dripping down my chin.
i pulled back, wiped it with my own napkin, still steaming over her new free-dive rules.
The Festiva jerked against her moorings, and the waitress stumbled, spilling a platter of crab legs. The captain scowled at her while she scooped them back on the platter and hurried out of the salon to get a fresh tray. i wondered if he’d let her call home. She looked so scared. He should have let her leave. i should have said something. Told the jerk off. But we had a platter of crab to deal with, and everything would be fine, right?
Wrong.
She’s dead now. So is Mom, Dad, Dive Dog. Everybody in that dining salon except me and the stupid, imbecile captain, who should have let her go, is dead.
That’s consequences for you. Party on, friends. You’re invincible.
But now you’re dead.
chapter 7
TRIPPING
MICHAEL’S DIVE LOG—VOLUME #8
Stuck on a stupid field trip. i wanted to ditch it, but i was dumb and slept last night. i woke up at 2 a.m., covered in a layer of cold sweat, twisted in the pants quilt, shaking from a nightmare. Mom was in it, sinking, breathing in water, screaming my name as she drowned. That didn’t happen. It couldn’t. There was nothing i could do.
i had to get away from that bed, Dad’s old room, Gram, that hideous crack in the wall, the whys and whats that ricochet in my head. Two hours on a school bus that smells of baked dust watching DeeDee make out with half the football team brings me to Grand Coulee Dam.
The pound of falling water, the sweet liquid scent pours through me as soon as i get off the bus. i didn’t think about hearing it, seeing it, smelling it again. i probably wouldn’t have come.
The dam itself is worth seeing. Massive. The old guy who guides our tour says his father helped build it.
“We were starving to death down in a California Hoover-ville. I can remember picking fruit for ten cents a day. Ten lousy cents. We come up here. Dad got a job pouring. Big man, my father. Strong as an ox. Had to be. Still, it took him and a couple of others to tip those buckets. They come out swinging on a gondola. Timing had to be just right or you’d have a whale of a time. My dad was the best.”
Big man. The best. Can’t this guy talk about something else? Not dads. Especially big ones. Best ones. Dead ones.
Stan called again last night. Recovery divers got Dad’s body out of the wreck. i’m supposed to be relieved, but why? What are we going to do with a toxic, waterlogged body? Seemed to make a difference to Gram. i didn’t get a chance to talk to Stan about a coffin and bringing the body back before she took the phone. She shut herself in her room and talked a long time.
“This dam saved our lives.” The wiry old man reels off some facts about its size, something about three times bigger than the Great Pyramid.
Why didn’t someone, something save our lives? Why didn’t we just get off that stupid boat and find someplace like this? Isadore’s surge was just thirty feet high. Grand Coulee Dam
is a thousand feet high, a mile across the river, concrete, reinforced with steel. A safe place to be in a storm.
The jerk teacher, Taylor, makes us watch A Century of Water for the West in the visitors’ center. Then we eat lunch in a grassy picnic area that overlooks the dam. Benches, seagulls, bored kids sprawling all over the place. What a treat.
The river cascades down the dam’s concrete face, churning into white foam at the bottom. i don’t freak. Crap. Maybe i’m as numb to water as i was to DeeDee. No. There it is. i feel the pull. The rushing wet of it. i need to get closer.
i walk to the edge of the overlook where seagulls squawk on black stone lumps and scan, searching for a way down. i break off a chunk of sandwich and chuck it. Gram packed me tuna. Mom would faint. The birds scream and fight, flapping around the spot where it lands. A couple of greedy gulls about take my hand off vying for more. i throw the whole smelly thing at them.
“Aren’t you hungry?” intrudes from behind me.
i turn around. Staring Chick is sitting cross-legged on a bench a few feet behind me with a vintage suede jacket draped on her shoulders. She’s never actually said anything to me before. At school she just rants in class and sits on the stage reading or scribbling in a notebook. Her hair is long again today.
“i don’t eat tuna.” i turn back to face the river.
Staring Chick joins me, dumps potato chip crumbs on the rocks for the gulls to fight over. “I boycott my mom’s tuna casserole every week.” She pulls a Save the Dolphins necklace from under her T-shirt and jingles it—half smiles.
i start to tell her to get lost and, by the way, quit staring at me all the time, but she smells nice. Tropical hair stuff. Baby powder. Old suede leather. Freaks me that i can stand here with the scent of water all around me for the first time since Belize and breathe in this girl. Maybe i’m not completely wrecked. She shakes her hair back, nervous, releasing more intoxicating tropical vapor and a full-blown smile that really does make her beautiful.
“Do you think anybody dives down there?” i nod toward the river far below.
“You mean right off this cliff? That’d be crazy.”
“Scuba.” i know this is just a river. Lousy conditions. Currents. No vis. But it’s wetter than a wheat field.
i can tell she’s reading the back of my jacket—Eagle Ray Dive Club, Marathon, FL. Everyone knows i came from Phoenix. She’ll want to know why my jacket says Florida. As if you can dive in Phoenix.
Up close, her eyes have a blue ring around the iris that turns green in the middle. Those eyes drift from my face to the river and back.
My gut muscles tense.
She bites her lower lip and draws her eyebrows together. “Wouldn’t you get sucked into the hydroelectric turbines? Didn’t you watch the film?”
My stomach relaxes. “The current probably goes down-stream.”
“Good thing.” She laughs at herself. “Those turbines looked pretty mean.”
i don’t answer. The water rolling by beneath us has claimed me again. i want to feel it on my skin, sink under it, and swim to a coral head. i need to know if it will welcome me or churn me up and spit me out. Again.
“Washington’s crazy.” Leesie folds up her lunch bag and jams it in her pocket. “We make a shrine out of that ugly concrete ruining this mythical river.”
i give her a confused look. “What?”
“Sad, isn’t it? The Columbia was this wild raging thing—a god to the Native Americans. Look what we’ve done to it.” She nods toward the wall of concrete that rises above the water. Her face is serious again like in class. “There used to be cool falls just north of here. Not Niagara—but the Native Americans who live over there”—she points at the pines across the river—“held a massive jamboree at them every year when the salmon ran. Now it’s buried under Lake Roosevelt. The Salmon People held one last festival before the reservoir wiped out their villages and the sacred fishing grounds. They called it the Ceremony of Tears. Poetic, huh? Can you imagine it? Their lives were washed clean away because of some idiot’s idea of progress.”
Washed clean away? i can relate.
“And then it got worse. Get this. You’re stuck on that reservation, smashed together with a bunch of other tribes, but it’s okay because you’ve still got the salmon. You’ve always lived off the salmon. You worship them. Then every single fish that tries to get back home to spawn dies. No locks. Seventy-five species extinct. They say it only took four years. Can you imagine all those dead fish? Pretty gross.”
“That wasn’t in the film.”
The smile is bigger this time. “Makes the whole dolphin/ tuna boat thing look small, doesn’t it?”
“Unless you know dolphins.”
That shuts her up. Maybe she’ll leave. No.
“Hey, I’m being rude. I’m Aleesa, from physics and English.” And all the rest of my classes. “Friends call me Leesie.”
Whoa. “The Leesie? From the wall in the guys’ john?” i take a step back so i can evaluate her award-winning feature. “This is what the fuss is all about?”
She whirls around, hiding the asset in question. “That’s not fair.” She blushes pinker than the stuff she has on her cheeks.
“You’re above the urinal i always use. It says—”
“I have a brother.” The pink heats to deep red. “I know what it says.”
i never would have guessed Staring Chick is Leesie, Queen of the Urinals. She’s too farm fresh. Tight enough jeans stretched across her nice butt. Incredible hair. Not too much crap on her eyes. Nothing much under that jacket, though. Not the type to inspire graffiti.
“So what’s with all the names and checkmarks?” It can’t be what i thought. Not this girl.
“I can’t believe you’re asking me this.”
Neither can i, but i want to know before i tell her to get lost.
“They pinch me, okay?” She studies the rocks.
i glance over where DeeDee and her friends loll on the grass. Since the bus, Troy and his drones ignored her. “You even beat out DeeDee.”
“I’m not like that.” Leesie pushes a loose wisp of hair away from her face, tucks it behind her ear. Even her neck glows scarlet.
“Obviously.” i take one last deep breath, hold her tropical-fruit-and-leather elixir in my head, and get ready to shamble away.
“You know”—Leesie looks up—“you could use another urinal.”
i exhale. “There’s only two. The other one’s DeeDee’s.” i shake my head. “Way more than i want to know there.”
That gets her to smile again. i decide not to shamble yet. This is my spot, isn’t it? My attention drifts back to the river. i close my eyes and listen to the falling water. “i like the sound of this. Haven’t heard anything wet since—” Belize. Isadore. My mom screaming. My dad trapped in the dining room, drowning with everyone else. Me helpless to do anything but save my own butt.
She shifts closer to me, softens her tone. “Since what?”
My eyes drift open. i can’t go there. Not after bathroom graffiti.
She senses my tension, takes a step back. The look on her face makes me hurt. “i’m sorry,” she whispers. She barely says it—i’ve heard it a thousand times—but the breath of her words feel fresh and soothing as a cool compress held to my forehead.
Then the jerk teacher calls us back inside the visitors’ center for another film.
Leesie turns to leave, stirring up her enticing hair, and walks off. i stare at her famous backside and decide it is worth the fuss. i have a crazy urge to creep after her, sneak into the theater, find a place behind her, and bury myself in that hair. It smells tropical, but not coconut. Coconut would kill me right now. i want a strand to take home. i could glue it on my wall next to the crack. i search the ground. Maybe she sheds.
i glance up, and the place is deserted. The thunder of water rolling off the dam overwhelms the scent she left behind. Could i go back there—in it, under it? Isadore dragged me down again last night. i hate
her. What happened to the joy of coasting along a coral wall with a white-tipped reef shark, surprising schools of juvies hiding out in a swim through, fighting the currents to explore my favorite wreck? Is it lost forever? Stolen by a freaking hurricane.
chapter 8
GROPING
LEESIE’S MOST PRIVATE CHAPBOOK
POEM #27, BUS RIDE TEMPTATION
It gets mostly fringe and armpit—
troy’s hand as it snakes across the seat back
and slams into my chest,
searches, fumbles, finds—
sending the darers howling and me up the aisle, biting