So We Can Glow - Stories - Leesa Cross-Smith Page 0,49

head.

“Hey, Jesse James, why do you bring your skateboard to a pool?" Bri asked.

Jesse shrugged. Jimmy started talking. “Why do you keep such a smart mouth all the time? Damn, girl,” he said.

“How old are you losers?” Bri asked, ignoring him. She floated on her back and moved her arms, made snow angels in the water. The sun was hissing out behind the hills. The green-glowy pool lights came on with a soft click—a tender, intimate sound that made me ache for somewhere else. I wanted to drive to California in a gold Camaro with Bri. We’d stop and buy shotguns and gas station lipsticks, blast “American Woman” and “Barracuda” as we drove through the desert.

“Same age as you, probably,” Jay said, “sixteen.”

I nodded. “She’ll be seventeen next month. So will I.”

Jay said they came down to the pool every Friday night, but usually it was moms with their kids and old guys smoking, trying to get drunk on cheap light beer.

“We’re just passing through,” I said.

“You seem like the type to pass through,” he said back to me. I liked how he said it, like we were in a movie and I was mysterious.

Bri was still floating and I stood, knowing the boys were watching every part of me. I walked around, did my prettiest dive into the deep end of the pool. I sank and held my breath as long as I could.

You Should Love the

Right Things

Not how it hurts when you press down on a yellowish-blue, purple-black bruise, but the feeling you get when you lift up. Let go.

And Down We Go!

Sierra is wearing Doug’s oversized Led Zeppelin T-shirt. So black it is nothing. The color matches the smudged rims of her eyes. She considers washing her face before she leaves his apartment, but he’s in the bathroom now and she wants to get out of there.

“Doug, I’m wearing your shirt. I spilled wine on mine last night,” she says loudly after she taps, tells him she is leaving. She looks down, zips and buttons her jeans.

“Cool. I’ll wash it for you,” he says with a muffled toothpaste-mouth. He opens the door.

“I’ll give you a call later?” she says, that question mark hanging over them both, like a puff of gray-white smoke.

“Yeah?” he says. The puff grows. The puff is now a dust tornado.

“Yeah, okay!” she says, adjusting her purse strap up on her shoulder before that tornado blows the whole effing apartment building down.

She is alone now. She smooths her hair and goes in her purse for her compact as the elevator rattles and drops a floor. She licks her finger and wipes some of the eyeliner from underneath her eyes. Reapplies her lipgloss and checks her phone for the time. When the elevator doors open, she has to grit her teeth. She hates Brooks Clark and there he is dressed in his annoyingly perfectly fitting suit with his annoyingly perfectly shined shoes and he doesn’t even look up from his phone as he steps onto the elevator. He stands there scrolling and scrolling and she finally has to ask him if he’s going all the way down.

“Oh. My bad. Thanks. Yeah, I’m heading down to the lobby,” he says, not looking up at her. And duh, of course he is going to the lobby, why wouldn’t he be going to the lobby?

The glowing yellow circle labeled L is already lit up, so she doesn’t have to do anything. The doors shut and the elevator drops again. Sierra can’t help herself from checking out Brooks’s watch and the cuffs of his sleeves and she takes a quick breath to check if he smells good and he does. Entitled asshole.

She sees him laugh at something he reads on his phone and he reaches up to massage his temple before putting his phone in his pocket. He’s probably hungover and woke up with some strange woman in his bed. Dickhead. The elevator lights flicker and shut off, the big metal box they are standing in shakes and comes to a stop. Sierra can hear the screech of an alarm somewhere in the distance. Her heart, her blood, is surely making the same sound, trapped tightly inside of her.

“Shit,” Brooks says into the darkness. Sierra figures some emergency lights will be kicking on soon but right now, nothing. Just deep, static-black and aloneness with some dickhead guy who is a friend of her brother’s.

“I’m sure they’ll fix it soon,” she says, more to herself than to him. She wants