here, he wouldn’t get it either. It probably should bother me, except Becca has this way of tugging you in close and delivering a compliment on your eyebrows or the freckle above your top lip that makes you feel as pretty as you know she is.
I crave the giddiness that turns my knees, elbows, and knuckles to liquid around the core. I even feel weightless at the perceived peril of this stunt.
“Dive. Dive. Dive,” the boys chant, except it sounds more like, “Die. Die. Die,” by the time I tune back in.
Willa looks down her ski-slope nose at Carolynn, her chin jutting out with the result of a finger pointing. “If Lana jumps, you have to admit that girls can do everything guys can.”
Carolynn’s hands move to tame fly-aways. “No, I’ll admit that Lana can do anything a boy can.” She grins at her cleverness and adds, “Maybe she even jerks off like one?”
Rusty whoops like a monkey and Duncan erupts in a fit of giggles, cracking, “Lana’s got lady-balls.”
Josh whips an arm across the surface, splashing Duncan. “Bro, shut the eff up.”
Duncan shields his face with the beer bottle, paddling away from Josh with the other arm. “C’mon. I’m kidding.”
Rusty shouts, “Dude, she’s gonna do it. She’s Ben’s sister.” The way he says Ben, slightly awed, isn’t new.
Duncan snorts. “Lana and Ben weren’t blood related.” The past tense burns.
Josh’s limbs churn like eggbeaters as he faces me and shouts, “Don’t listen to him. You can do it. Right in between the rocks.” His torso and head bob up and down, buoyant on the surface. The three of them have the look of those moles in the carnival game where you rush to whack their heads. There’s warmth radiating from my rib cage that you can probably see glowing through my skin, like I swallowed a bajillion glowworms. Josh Parker stuck up for me.
I step forward until my toes curl over the edge. It’s the middle of August, but the spring is deep, fed by an underground stream Ben and I spent summers searching for. The shadowy forms of three boulders run like columns from inches below the surface to the spring bed; other than them, it’s a clear twenty feet until you hit the bottom.
“On the count of three,” Rusty demands. “One!”
I let myself picture the way Ben looked jumping the last time we came: freckled broad back peeling from a sunburn; blond hair drenched brown; a tattoo on his shoulder already fading because it was cheap and done when I was fourteen and he was sixteen by a guy who operated in the back of a Chinese restaurant and didn’t check IDs. Even when it got really bloody, Ben didn’t wince. He just kept saying, “Shhh, it’s okay,” to me, like I was the one in pain. I sniffled the whole time.
“Two!” Rusty and Duncan shout in unison.
That was before. I wouldn’t cry now.
“Three,” they howl.
I spring forward. Two seconds plummeting to the looking-glass surface, my reflection a bird diving from the sky, falling like it’s not afraid of gravity, of what will come after it hits the ground. I slice into the water like a knife. A world of blue-gray envelops me as I shoot to the bottom. The water is lonely. The snakes that nest in the pockmarked walls aren’t eeling through the shallows. Ben is not on the surface with a mouthful of water ready to spray in my face.
My toes glide along the fuzzy, algae-covered rocks. I beat my arms. I exhale, sending bubbles to the strobe-light surface. There’s the outline of legs kicking, swirling bits of plant and dirt with the look of space matter in those posters of the cosmos. A featureless head bobs under the surface; whoever it is can’t see me. I hope Carolynn is so worried I’ve drowned that she’s peeing herself. It wouldn’t be her fault; I would’ve jumped if I were alone; if it were snowing; if it were the middle of the night. Jumping is what Ben and I did here. It was my only nerve and mischief.
The veins on my neck swell. I need air. I resist for ten seconds. My mouth opens to gulp . . . can’t help it . . . don’t want to surface . . . don’t want to admit that he’s not even here. I exhale. My chest flattens.
I am stone. Unfeeling. Indestructible. I can take it.
I shoot from the bottom, break surface, scrunch my eyes closed, and show