Authors: Vahini Naidoo
A swing set.
Once upon a time, this place must have been a real park. Tame and neat. Echoing with children’s laughter. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we found a lion prowling around here today.
Amy and I used to play here as kids, even though it was already wild by then. We used to play hide-and-seek. We’d curl ourselves into the weeds, hide away, and wait for the other to come looking.
I’d take hours finding Amy, inevitably losing other things in the process.
Lost: sandals, butterfly clip, jacket.
Found: Amy. Sometimes.
Now I look at the weeds and I wonder. I wonder whether, when she jumped off my roof and landed smack-bang in the curling, whispering weeds of my garden, she thought of this place.
The weeds we damn near lost ourselves in.
I think it’s time for me to get lost again.
I jump over a clump of them. My sneakers sink into loosely packed soil on the other side of the weeds.
“Trust me,” I say, out loud this time. “Do you have the gnome, Petal?” It’s my way of easing their concern. There will be Pick Me Ups today. We still need our ref.
They’re moving now, following me now, even though they don’t look too happy about it.
“Yeah, I’ve got the gnome.”
“What’s the gnome?” E asks.
“The gnome?” Mark replies. “He’s the one who’s watching your every move.” A laugh dances underneath the waves of his voice. Good vibrations.
“Sounds like some short commando dude or something.” Explosive Boy seems genuinely confused.
Drama queens like me are allowed to be into orgies, new-kid hazing, and lying. But garden gnomes? Shit, even I think that’s screwed up.
They’re moving faster now. I wait for them to catch up, too scared to brave the park on my own.
Petal’s nearly there now. She jumps over a clump of weeds and joins me under the cool shade of the trees. She’s frowning, but she’s staying with me. She and Mark are both staying with me. It feels good not to be alone.
I wonder how Amy felt. No one jumped after her.
“So where the fuck are we going, Ella Logan?”
Petal’s mouth is close to my ear. She doesn’t want Explosive Boy to hear this. Warm breath sliding into my eardrums, swirling with the sound of her words. “This most definitely isn’t the way to the barn.”
I lean close to Pet, feeling bad about my own stale breath. “We’re going to the bridge.”
“Are you crazy?” she hisses.
But Pet’s always been bad at telling people not to do things that are unhealthy for them. She was born to be addicted to something, to everything. She loves her burgers and fries, her alcohol, her adrenaline rushes. Her Pick Me Ups.
And the bridge? The bridge is new and exciting. The
drop isn’t far, but we’ll be falling into water instead of bales of fluffy hay.
Hopefully, it’ll be exciting enough that I’ll get a memory back.
“You’re crazy, too,” I say, and continue marching through the weeds.
Mark rolls along with it, even though he still has no idea what’s happening. He laughs and chants, “Left, right; left, right. You lead the way, Sarge Ella.”
I hear E’s soft cursing, the breathy fear in his voice.
That’s right
. I smile to myself as I keep rhythm with Mark’s chanting.
What the fuck have you gotten yourself into?
T
HE BRIDGE ISN
’
T
really a bridge—not for cars, at least. It’s a walkway. There’s a river in our town, and people built the walkway to make crossing over easy. Now, though, the stream’s pretty much dried out. In some places, like under the bridge, it gushes and roars. Mostly, though, it trickles along as slow as life in this town, becoming a creek as it passes through people’s backyards.
Crisscrossing through gardens. Connecting the dumbass townspeople.
The kind of dumbasses who won’t demolish a rusty, rickety health hazard of a bridge and a cluster of abandoned houses.
It’s not as if we need the bridge anymore, because if you wander a half mile downstream you can just walk across the river. Sure, it’ll slosh around your legs a little, but most people would rather risk wet jean bottoms than walk over the rusty, fall-apart-in-a-second bridge.
Not that anyone bothers to cross the bridge, anyway. Abandoned houses aren’t most people’s cups of tea.
We call it Ghost Town. It’s empty. Small. Haunted by ghosts and local children who go there to throw sticks and stones at each other. To break each other’s bones with their cruel words.
No adults, no limits
. It’s the secret motto of every kid in this town.
As we approach the bridge, I can see the rust flowering over it, can see metal beams that look less stable than rotted wood. Just walking over this thing would be a risk. Jumping from it would take a lot of guts.
Mark, Pet, and I have a lot of guts, so that’s okay. But it’s E who is going first, and no one in his right mind steps off a bridge because his new maybe-friends say so.
If you barely knew the person who was asking you to jump, there’s no way you’d go for this.
Unless you were blindfolded and didn’t know you were going.
Closer and closer. The air seems to buzz.
Part of it is that this place is overdosing on lavender, and bees like lavender, and bees buzz.
Part of it is that E doesn’t have to ask “Are we there yet?” because Mark’s stopped his army chant.
E’s breath catches, and the smell of gunpowder intensifies.
I crunch the last twig, step over the last clump of grass.
Then I step onto the bridge. It squeaks beneath my feet like a seesaw. I can hear the bridge, feel it swaying beneath my feet.
I whoop.
On the edge of the bridge, E laughs. “Oh,” he says as he steps onto the bridge. It creaks and crackles. “I know where this is.”
None of us reply. We just step along the bridge. Normal people would tiptoe, afraid of sending the bridge crashing into the river. Mark and Pet don’t tiptoe; but they both move lightly, on the balls of their feet.
I stride. I thunder like an elephant. Rust flakes away into the rushing white water below.
Clearly
, I think as the metal jolts beneath my feet,
I’m not normal
.
“So, what, are you going to push me off the bridge? That’s really not that crea—”
Mark grabs the back of E’s jacket, lifts him a little, and shoves him over the safety railing. I watch Explosive Boy fall, watch his red hair blow up from his face, his black jacket buffeted by the wind. And that’s when I realize the blindfold might not have been such a good idea.
Because if half his nose is covered, and he can’t see—well, for me it would just mean a greater rush. But I’m in the habit of throwing myself off things. He’s not. Fuck.
E hits the water with a splash. A belly flop into the rapids.
And now he’s winded. Fuck.
At first Petal and Mark laugh; but then I point, and they notice how he’s not struggling against the current. It’s Mark’s yell that splits the air, rips the blue sky in two, and drops the clouds around our heads.
The world crashes.
“Shit. What have we done? What have we done?” Petal says. “Fuck. I can’t believe we did this again.”
I think she’s referring to Amy, but I’m not sure.
What aren’t they telling me?
Can’t focus on that now.
I tear off my jacket and stand up on the edge of the bridge. I pinch my nose, because that’s how they always do it in the movies. And then I jump before Mark and Petal can grab me.
I fall like a vertical bullet. I’m expecting a memory to hit me, but nothing comes.
I crash into the river, my feet feeling as if they’ve shattered upon impact.
Cold and strong, the water surges around me. It doesn’t take long for my feet to touch the muddy bottom.
I swallow my disappointment at not finding a memory and struggle up to the surface, struggle for breath, even
though it would be so easy to let the water put me to sleep.
I can see E floating along with the current. It’s a steady flow, but this river’s washed out. It’s not strong enough to make his limbs as useless as a puppet’s. He might be in shock or something. Not being able to see or breathe right probably isn’t helping.
Stroke, stroke, stroke. I speed up the current’s flow. I’m beside him in what’s not quite a minute, not quite a moment.
Three heartbeats’ time
, Amy and I used to call it. But my heart’s beating so fast, thudding bruises against my chest.
E’s breathing bubbles, all of his air streaming out of him into the water. I put a hand on his shoulder. When that doesn’t get his attention, I grab his head and pull him out of the water. He sucks in a deep breath and then the weight of his head, complete with soggy hair, becomes too much for me and I drop it again.
Bubbles in the water. White rushing above us.
White noise. White sound and fury.
My limbs are giving out. What’s the point?
But I give it one last shot and pluck at the knot I tied in the scarf. It floats away, and I can see it from the corner of my eye. A pink dream, lost in the water.
I pull E and myself up for another breath, but as soon as we’re down again he becomes a dead weight. I swim under him, trying to make eye contact, to threaten him
into moving. But his eyes are closed. His skin is loose, his features slack. Unconscious.
Shit. There’s no way I can force him to breathe for long enough. Acting as his personal ventilator is not going to work.
I need him to move fast.
I twist down in the water, spin my way through the current until I’m underneath him, and aim my knee at his pants. Bubbles spurt from my mouth. In this weird gravity, with my limbs floating everywhere, it looks something like ballet to me.
Who’d have thought that kneeing someone in the balls could ever be equated with beauty?
I’d like to say that my ballet-balls threat is what forces Explosive Boy to finally lift his body from the water, but I’m pretty sure he’s still out cold.
Truth? The water releases us from its embrace. Cold mud slicks my back, and suddenly we aren’t moving anymore. Suddenly, the sun is glaring at me and I’m not quite as wet.
E’s eyes sludge open. He turns over, lifts himself off me—because with the water whooshing out from between us, he’s practically on top of me. He sucks in sunshine and air.
I laugh. Triumph always makes me laugh. Living again and again and again always makes me laugh. But
when I laugh, water shoots into my mouth and nose. It floods my lungs. The sun is so bright, and I can’t help but think I’m dying.
I’m dying in a fucking puddle. On a sunny day.
I’ve one-upped Amy. She’s going to be so pissed at me in heaven, or hell, or reincarnation. Wherever.
I splutter. Air slides into my mouth and nose in trickles. I hear voices above me, feel arms under me; but I’m just not getting enough air, and I sink into blackness.
A
MY AND
P
ET
and I are sitting at the kitchen table.
Amy drinks her punch as if she’s downing a shot and then scoops more out of the bowl we’ve hijacked
.
“Let’s play twenty questions,” she says. “Every time you reveal something totally tragic about yourself, knock back some punch.” She grins, golden skin lit by the soft light from the other room. “We all know it’s spiked.”
Because she spiked it
.
Mark dances into the kitchen. He opens my fridge and grabs a beer. “What are you guys up to?”
“Twenty questions,” I say. “You?”
“
Some girl just offered to give me a striptease
.”
“
Well, go have fun then,” Amy says. She drinks half her punch in one gulp
.
“Nah, Ames. I’ll skip it for you, ’cause I’m a good boyfriend that way.”
He takes a seat next to her, slings an arm around her shoulder. She squirms, as if she wants to push him away, then she settles, drinks more punch
.
Pet sets out the ground rules. “So I’ll ask a question and whoever I ask answers, and then they get to ask their victim of choice something.” She’s already tipsy. Her words blur into one another, blend into the crashing music that
thump-thump-thumps
in the next room. “Amy, you can keep count. When everyone’s answered twenty questions, game’s over.”
She starts with me. Lucky number one
.
“
Why’re you such a bitch, Ella?”
She didn’t have to wait until I was playing a game to ask this
.
“
When I was in grade school, there was this kid who used to pinch me every day. She sat next to me, and she’d call me ugly and shit. And then one day I just got sick of it. She had a Coke in her bag. And I slipped my hand into the bag and shook up the soda so, so, so hard. It exploded. I guess that’s when it started.”
I guess. But I’m not quite sure. I’ll never be quite sure. Because when I look back sometimes, it seems as if I’ve just always been this way. And then other times it feels as if I’ve never been this way. As if I’m not a bitch, no matter how much people tell me I am
.
Outspoken, maybe. Harsh, maybe. Bitch? Not quite there
.
I shrug away the thoughts. “Maybe bitchiness is just in my blood. I mean, my mom’s a huge bitch. So it could be genetic.”
Amy meets my gaze. Red clouds the whites of her eyes. She gulps
down more punch. What’s the point of playing for drinks if Amy’s going to keep downing them?
She wants to get wasted. I can see it in the arrows pulling down from the corners of her mouth
.
“It’s weird that you can pinpoint a certain event like that,” Amy says
.
I shrug. No need to tell her I’m not sure that’s the event that actually triggered it
.
My fingers tighten around my glass of punch. Suddenly, my mouth is parched. I wait for someone to give me the go-ahead, though—because drinking games are no fun if everyone drinks, anyway
.