Surfacing (5 page)

So Maggie picked Nathan.

She picked him because he looked nice, and from what Maggie could tell, he
was
nice. He was a junior, a year older than she was. He wasn’t on the wrestling or football team; he wasn’t popular, but he wasn’t
un
popular. He had dark, wavy hair and was tall and thin, borderline skinny — nothing like Matthew James. He didn’t have a girlfriend. He worked after school. He didn’t look like the big drinking type, though who could really tell?

And the first thing Maggie decided to do was to leave a flower on Nathan’s car as a kind of subliminal message (another reason she picked him — Nathan had a car, which seemed integral to her plan). If all went well, by Thanksgiving break Maggie would no longer be a virgin. Matthew would reap the benefits, and beyond that she hadn’t really thought it out all that well.

“Why are you buying flowers?” Julie asked. “I thought you didn’t like strong perfumey smells. Lilies smell like crazy, you know.”

“Just one,” Maggie said. The drama club had a table set up in the hall for their annual Blossoms for Off-Off-Broadway fund-raiser. Cari Stone was manning the table. “It’s for a good cause.”

Julie looked skeptical, but Cari nodded enthusiastically.

“It is,” Cari said. “We’re doing
Twelve Angry Men
this fall. Only we don’t have enough boys trying out, so we’re changing it to
Twelve Angry Jurors
, but it’s going to be great.”

Cari was always enthusiastic. It was her most annoying quality.

Last year in the girls’ bathroom, and in the time it took to stand side by side at the communal sink washing their hands, Cari had told Maggie her life’s story.

“I’m an actor, and actors have nothing to hide. That’s what being a good actor is all about,” Cari said, and then proceeded to explain to Maggie why she didn’t want anyone to know that her grandmother was such-and-such famous movie director, because then everyone would think that’s why she got the best parts in the school plays. Maggie wanted to tell Cari that everybody already knew that and that it probably
was
why she got all the best parts, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Because now all Maggie wanted was to buy a flower. It was step one of her plan.

“That’s five dollars, please.”

“For one flower?” Julie asked.

“Well, it
is
a fund-raiser.”

Maggie reached into her coat pocket and took out a ten-dollar bill. “Want one?” she asked Julie.

“Sure,” Julie answered.

Nathan never got the flower — not that he would have known what it meant if he had (subliminal message notwithstanding) — because Maggie put it on the wrong car. She snuck out to the parking lot during lunch and slipped it under the windshield wiper of a dark-blue, four-door Volvo with a banged-up bumper and a missing passenger-side door handle, but apparently there were two of those at the high school.

But it was a bad plan anyway. She didn’t leave a note, which turned out to be a very good thing, since the other blue, beat-up Volvo sedan belonged to the health teacher, Mr. Edgerton, and he might not have understood. Anyway, even if Maggie had found the right car, she wouldn’t have known what to write.

Hello there. I have been trying to lose my virginity and I picked you to do it with. Wondering what you’re doing later on this afternoon?

In hindsight, Maggie realized she hadn’t worked out the kinks in her plan. It might be better to try to be in the
right place at the right time
— an accidentally-on-purpose kind of thing. It wasn’t such a big school. Not even that big of a town. One market. One post office, liquor shop, pharmacy, hardware store, dry cleaner. Friendly’s Ice Cream, of course. It would be a matter of making the most of the right time when it materialized. It was early October. She had to be patient.

There was a text message on Maggie’s phone when she got out of swim practice the next afternoon. It was from her dad telling her that he was going to be about ten (which meant twenty-five) minutes late, and Maggie decided to start walking toward town rather than wait. She figured her dad would see her on the road and stop. Worst-case scenario, he would get to the high school and call her cell when he didn’t see her standing outside the entrance to the pool. The other girls were filing out of the gym, to their cars or waiting parents, or friends. Maggie assured Julie that her dad was on his way, and she started walking. Maggie made it about ten yards down the road.

Nathan was just standing there, on the side of the road, facing her.

It was so odd, and so unlikely, that for a long second Maggie wondered if he had been waiting. If somehow he had gotten wind of her plan and had come to call her out — or take her up on it, as the case may be. For that one prolonged second, she felt caught, and her heart beat nervously. Why was he standing here on the road like that? No one walks to town from the high school. No one even walks on this road.

What am I, crazy?

“My car won’t start,” Nathan offered.

“Huh?”

“That’s why I’m walking to town.”

“Oh.”

“I heard you walking behind me, so I stopped and waited.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, it would seem silly to just keep walking, right? If we’re both going the same way.”

“I guess.”

“Actually, I think I’m just out of gas.”

It was going to take a few more seconds to figure it all out.

“You’re Maggie, aren’t you? Paris? I thought I heard someone behind me. People don’t usually walk on School Road, so I turned around and looked. Hope I didn’t startle you. You look startled. You OK?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m fine. Sorry,” Maggie answered.

He sounded sweet, because, Maggie thought, that word really does mean something.
Sweet
. And up close, he was beautiful. Up close, he was better looking than from across the parking lot or cafeteria, from where she had done most of her reconnaissance. He had blue eyes and half-moon lids, and he seemed really nice.

Sweet.

By the time they had walked less than half the distance to town, Nathan had already told her about his family, his mom and dad, his sisters and brothers. There were five of them in total, five Carpenter children. He asked Maggie about swim team and their next meet, which was tomorrow. He listened when she answered. She found herself telling him about Lucas and Dylan, their funny secret language, and though usually she decided to leave out the part about
once
having had an older sister, Maggie found this time to be different.

“My sister, Leah, died when I was five.”

Nathan didn’t say what everyone always said, something like, “Geez, I’m so sorry.” Or: “Oh, my best friend’s cousin had a friend who died.” Or: “That almost happened to me once.” Which is why Maggie had long since decided it was easier to just omit that part of her history.

So when her father finally pulled up to the side of the road and looked once at Nathan but said nothing more than hello, Maggie felt she had chosen wisely.

No one came to a swim meet unless they had to. Swim meets were probably the most boring sporting events in all high-school history. There was a lot of waiting: so many heats in each race, so many swimmers in each heat. Meets were interminable, and even if you were rooting for someone, once the actual swimmers were in the water, they all looked the same. And swim meets were unrelentingly loud. Sounds echoed off the walls and thudded on the surface of the water. The constant splashing, whistle blowing, and cheering took on a kind of canned, unreal quality.

Maggie hated the actual meets. She usually found herself hiding in the bathroom with cramps just before her race was announced, and because of this, Maggie had sussed out the least-used bathrooms in all the local schools and health clubs, even if it meant using an empty boys’ locker room after school hours.

“Hey, you swim the fifteen hundred free, don’t you?”

Maggie turned from the sink to the sound of a girl’s voice. It was a girl from the other team, Franklin High School. Maggie recognized her from last year and years before that. They swam a lot of the same events.

“You must be as nervous as me.”

“Probably more,” Maggie said. She cranked the handle on the dispenser to dry her hands, but the paper towels were stuck or missing.

“We both better get out of the boys’ locker room. The wrestling team comes in for late practices Thursday afternoons.”

“Thanks for telling me.” Maggie pulled open the heavy door, and both girls stepped out. The boys’ locker room was at the other end of the school from the pool, but the faraway sounds of the meet and the faint smell of chlorine were wafting down the hall.

“I hate swim meets,” the girl said.

“Me too. I’m Maggie.”

“I know who you are. I’m Kiah.” She smiled. “I mean, you always win, so I know your name. That’s probably why you don’t know me.”

Maggie wanted to say something nice to counter that, but it was true, and she couldn’t think of anything.

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t care,” Kiah said after a long silence. “I just don’t want to go back in there yet. Do you?”

“Not really.”

The girls pressed their backs to the wall, bent their knees, and let their bottoms sink to the floor.

“I should probably watch my best friend’s race, though. She always cheers
me
on.” Maggie meant Julie. Julie swam the early heats. She wasn’t expected to place, but you never knew.

“You have a best friend?” Kiah began. “I have a best friend. Or at least I used to.”

Sometimes Maggie had a warning, and sometimes she could even look back and see how she had affected the whole thing, maybe by asking leading questions or seeming overly interested, but sometimes these intimate confessions came out of nowhere, out of the blue. There was nothing Maggie could pinpoint as evoking such intimacy with an acquaintance, someone she knew vaguely or just met. It was almost as if the less connected she was, the closer she could become.

“My best friend hates me,” Kiah went on. “We just had this huge fight. She says I talk about her behind her back.”

Maggie didn’t ask for further clarification, but she nodded, and that was all Kiah seemed to need. “I don’t say anything I wouldn’t say right to her face, you know. Some people just can’t stand hearing the truth about themselves. Like, I told her she shouldn’t go out with that guy from West Hill — people will think she’s a slut. I didn’t say she
was
a slut.”

Maggie stood up. “I better go. Good luck with your friend.”

“Yeah, thanks. You too. Nice talking to you.”

Just like that, people told her things, drank her in, a wellspring in the wilderness.

Maggie hadn’t expected to see Nathan at the meet. She had no way of knowing how long he had been there.

That was him, wasn’t it?

It was. There he was, sitting at the very top, on the highest bench of the bleachers, his back leaning against one of the metal poles. Everyone was gathering their bags, their towels, slipping on pajama bottoms and sweatshirts. Parents milled around while coaches confirmed times and future competitions.

When he thought he had caught her eye, Nathan waved. Maggie tried to remember if he had told her he had a sister on the team, or on the other team. Why else would he be here? He must have come to see her. Maggie lifted her hand and waved back, just enough to show interest but not enough to seem too interested. After all, this was
her
plan, and it needed to go accordingly.

Maggie couldn’t swim, but Leah could, of course. Leah had passed the deep-water test at Camp Jekocee, though maybe that was because the camp lifeguard was flirting with the girls’ third-grade counselor when Leah had held on to the side of the pool on her way back.

But the morning the two sisters sat in their bathing suits, green-and-yellow daisies and sun-bleached bunches of red berries, by the stairs at the shallow end of their condo pool and cooled their feet, no one was thinking about that.

“So isn’t this good?” Maggie said. She splashed the water.

“Yeah, this is good,” Leah agreed. She let her eyes wander to the front windows of condos A–C, the ones that looked out onto the pool, the one where Meghan lived. “We gotta go back soon, though.”

“I’m gonna swim, then,” Maggie said. She stood up and took two steps into the water.

“Oh, no, you’re not.” Leah turned back to look at her sister.

Suddenly this little adventure struck Leah as very wrong. Leah was the responsible one. She was the older sister. She was supposed to be watching Maggie. All they had to do was stay in the house. Her mother would be mad, so mad. She would see the wet bathing suits. She would see footprints on their front step. Maybe she would come home early.

No, Leah hadn’t thought this through at all. They needed to get back to the house before their mother did. Air-conditioning or not.

“What?” Maggie twisted her hips around. The water was already up to her knees. Her feet looked funny, distorted, like they weren’t attached to her body, dissolving in the sunlight that reflected off the surface.

“You can’t go in,” Leah said.

Can’t?
There were so many things Leah could do that Maggie wasn’t allowed to, so many more things Leah
told
her she couldn’t do. Leah got to stay up later. She got to say no when she didn’t want to eat something. Maggie always had to
try it first
. Leah got to sit in the front seat when there were only three of them. She got to order a whole meal in a restaurant, and half the time Leah didn’t finish hers, either.