The Lifeboat Clique (5 page)

HOW I GOT FROM MOSTLY DYING TO BARELY LIVING IS STILL A
mystery to me.

I woke up cold and dripping wet, one foot bare and head pounding, my scarf and sweater gone, clinging to what I supposed used to be the roof of a Malibu mansion. The invading teenagers were now the least of the doomed structure's problems. An invading wave had come and wiped that much smaller trouble away.

I heard someone breathing next to me, and I knew I was alive. I didn't turn to see the source of the breathing. Just concentrated on steadying my own.

“Hey,” said a voice in my ear.

I looked over. It was Croix Monroe, next to me, holding on to the roof. He had a cut near his eye that bled in a slow trickle. Looking around, I made out some other faces.

Sienna. Hayley. Trevor Dunlap. Matt Riley, football star. And . . . my breath caught . . .

Abigail, dazed and clinging on for dear life.

I know I hated her, but in that moment I found myself strangely relieved that she was still among the living. Her hair was straggly and wet around her shoulders. Her base-coat makeup had washed off, but the stronger camouflage around her freckle zone remained, glowing ghostlike in the moonlight.

We exchanged a look of stark terror.

I heard screams around me in the darkness but was not sure where we were floating. On the sea or on what used to be land? I couldn't tell. I was about to say something when suddenly our piece of wreckage reversed itself, and we started traveling, faster and faster, toward the horizon line.

“Hold on! Hold on!” Croix shouted. The line of blood from his cut had reached his jaw.

Sienna screamed, “Oh no oh no oh no!” with the cadence of one of the cheers she used to chant during varsity games. But these words were filled with horror, and they weren't going to rhyme with anything.

I dug my nails into the shingles, but I was losing my grip.

Matt Riley was sliding away. I'd seen him earlier, and he was drunk and having a great time. Now he was in shock.

“Matt, hold on!” Croix ordered him. “Come on, dude. Don't give up!”

“I can't hold on!” he murmured. “It's taking me.”

The roof was rotating as it rushed toward the sea.

Croix grabbed on to Matt's wrist.

“You've got to—”

A palm tree came sideways out of nowhere and smashed into Croix's head with a sickening thud, and scraped Matt and him off the roof and into the rushing water.

Now everyone was screaming. We were a horrified choir now, our cries in perfect synchronicity with what we'd just witnessed. The roof spun and moved out past a small family clinging to a floating door, and past all kinds of debris, and people trying to swim or holding on to trees and light poles and pieces of furniture.

My mind just could not believe I had gone from near-kiss to almost certain doom in the blink of an eye. Sights and sounds swirled around me with no meaning. They were like a slow-motion dream, and I understood nothing except the need to hold on.

My nails dug in. Fingers straining. I coughed salt water
as we rushed out to sea.

“Croix is dead!” screamed Hayley. “And Matt! And we're going to die, too!”

I turned toward her and screamed back, “No! We are not going to die. We're going to live, so shut up and believe it!”

TIME HAD PASSED.
How much, I didn't know. Out here, slumped on the roof with the other dazed survivors, no one could be sure. Our roof had borne us far out to where the water was calm and the stars were bright. No one had spoken a word. We were all in shock. Every few minutes I had to convince myself that this was real, that in fact I was floating on the Pacific on a roof instead of at home safe in bed. I had never made that call to my mother, and my phone was somewhere in the dark and endless water. I hoped that she was okay and wasn't too afraid. But of course she was.

I couldn't believe that Croix had been killed right in front of my eyes. I didn't know how much of him I had the right to mourn. I only knew that I had liked him for almost two years and had almost kissed him on what, at one point, was a magical night, and now he was gone. Just ripped away right in front of me. I could still see the look on his face.

I wondered who was dead along the Malibu coast and who was still alive. I mourned the loss of saintly, boring Audrey, who had made time to validate one more pariah before her untimely end. We had released our death grips and were now sitting cross-legged on the roof. I removed my remaining shoe and threw it into the water, where it made a distinct splash. The others regarded it silently.

Abigail's hair was almost dry, springy and wild again without her trusty hair spray. Sienna's hair had escaped her ponytail and lay around her shoulders in half-dry straggles. Hayley's bangs had dried straight up like a horn. She kept stroking her horn of hair and sighing. One of her dangly earrings had been torn away, but I noticed with astonishment that she had managed to hold on to her purse. Abigail was missing her cowboy boots, but Sienna was still wearing her short boots, and Trevor . . . had probably come to the party barefoot. There was a cut near his lip and a swelling under his eye. His hair had dried in a pompadour. He was the first to break the silence.

“Holy shit. That was a big-ass wave.” He began to drum his fingers on the surface of the roof. “But we're alive, though. Right? Unless we're dead, and this is how they take you to heaven.”

“We're alive,” Abigail said in a distant voice.

“But our friends are dead,” Hayley whispered, and started to cry.

No one said anything. Her crying was like her speech, going on and on and on. Finally it faded out, and we were left in silence again.

“Maybe some of 'em made it after all,” Abigail said.

“Lots of those dudes were friends of mine,” Trevor said. “And Croix . . . we went all the way back to third grade.” He shook his head, stopped drumming, moved his hands through his hair. “Croix . . . this can't be happening.”

Sienna looked at me. “I saw Croix with you at the party.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We were on a date.” Tears came to my eyes. “And it was going pretty well.”

Sienna's bright makeup was gone, except for the mascara smudged all over her eyes. Astonishingly, she had a supply of emergency bitchiness accessible. “Right. You were on a date with Croix.”

“I was! We were in the living room in the corner.”

Hayley shook her head. “Lying about dead people is breaking one of the Ten Commandments.”

Trevor sighed. “Dude,” he said, as if that explained everything about life and death and sudden loss and whether I was lying or not.

I looked out toward what I thought was the land. I couldn't tell; there was nothing but water and moonlight all around us. “My poor mom,” I said. “She didn't know I was coming to the party. She has no idea where I am. I had a chance to call her after the quake, but I didn't.”

“Well, I called mine right after the earthquake,” Sienna chimed in. “She knew I was alive, at least at that point.” Her eyes watered, and she wiped them.

“I thought tidal waves were supposed to hit countries over there in China or somewhere,” said Hayley the genius.

“Well, that's the way life goes, girl,” Abigail said. “Sometimes what's supposed to happen to someone else happens to you.” A few more strands of her kinky hair had dried and risen, making a metaphorical statement about rebuilding and carrying on. “Haven't you seen all those tsunami evacuation signs near the beaches? Did you think they were a joke?”

I remembered that Abigail herself had once declared them a joke, but I kept quiet. It was slowly sinking in that I was trapped on a roof with my worst enemy.

“I don't want to die!” Sienna cried suddenly.

“We ain't gonna die. We're safe right now. Everybody just calm the hell down,” Abigail said.

“The roof is probably gonna sink soon,” I said.

Abigail gave me a look. “Unbelievable,” she said. “I let
you stay at the party, and now here you are. I suppose this is God's little joke.”

“She's saying that you're not even supposed to be here,” Hayley explained.

“Thanks, Hayley,” I said. “I was feeling so welcome.”

Hayley combed her straggly hair with her fingers as she fumbled with some invisible gate latch and then freed the beast of another run-on sentence. “Everyone remembers what you did to Abigail and no one wants to be around you and this is like the worst moment in my life and half my friends are dead and I'm cold and I'm not like that girl Anne Frank who's just like ‘Everything's okay' when it was totally not and here you are with your big words and all the weird stuff you say and we're all stuck with you and that is not fair it's not fair at all.”

I glared at her. “You're right. I'm going to just swim away and die now since I don't have a Fendi purse. Which, I see, you managed to save.”

“It's a gift from my mother!” Hayley protested, and began to cry again. “I wonder if my mother's dead!”

“It's hard to say for sure how far the water went,” I said, “but I imagine everyone who lived more than a couple miles inland is probably alive.”

“Probably?” Hayley cried harder.

“Dang it, Hayley,” Abigail said. “Calm the hell down.”

Hayley stopped crying, but her face stayed red and her mouth stayed all crumpled, just in case she needed to burst into tears again. My eyes moved from her face down to her purse, a black shoulder bag with a fold-over flap.

“Hey,” I said. “Do you happen to have an iPhone in that purse?”

“Of course,” she managed to sniff.

“Maybe it still works.”

She opened her purse, pulled out her phone, and tried to turn it on while we waited, all staring at the same dark screen.

“It's useless,” I said.

“They say that you can put an iPhone in a bowl of rice when it gets wet, and the rice will suck out the water,” Hayley said in a trembly voice.

“Good to know.” I couldn't believe that a tsunami would be that cruel, to force me to talk to people that stupid.

Sienna put her hands to her face. Her thin, limber back slightly humped and straightened with each sob.

“What is with all the crying?” Trevor remarked. “I wish I had some damn dudes on this roof, but they're all dead.”

Abigail looked at Sienna with undisguised annoyance. “What the hell is the matter now?”

Sienna cried harder.

“What?” Abigail asked impatiently.

Sienna took her hands away and threw her anguished face back to the sky. “I left her!” she wailed.

“Left who?”

“Madison! She was throwing up again in the bathroom downstairs, and the water came in, and I tried to get her out of there and she wouldn't go. I just left her slumped over the toilet!”

For once I really did feel sorry for Sienna. She looked miserable. She wiped her eyes and spread more of the mascara around. What I wouldn't have given for a quart of baby oil and a bag of cotton balls so I could fix the spectacle.

“Oh no!” Hayley shrieked. “Madison's dead, too?”

“Stop it,” Abigail ordered Sienna. “You did your best, right? What were you supposed to do, stay in there with her and drown?”

Sienna sniffled and wiped her face on her wet sleeve. “But . . . when I think of what happened to her . . .”

“She died doing what she loved,” Abigail said.

Hayley hummed sadly in agreement.

“Audrey is holding her hair back in heaven,” I added.

They all turned to me, shocked.

“Back that horse up for a second,” Abigail said. “Audrey's dead?”

“I saw her get smashed by the baby grand piano.”

My roof companions all drew in their breaths. Hayley's eyes filled with tears.

“That can't be true,” she whispered. “Audrey was a saint.”

“Saints die,” I said, “just like the rest of us.”

“But Audrey was special!”

“I know,” I said, but I didn't know. Not really. I didn't know Audrey or any of these people, except for Abigail. And maybe I never really knew her at all.

Trevor drummed on the roof. Nine Inch Nails? Taylor Swift? Hard to say.

“Stop drumming,” Abigail said. “Ain't respectful.”

“Audrey was supposed to be the designated driver tonight,” Sienna said. “She was going to make sure Madison and I got home safe.” She pointed at me. “That's what's so unfair. Why did you get saved and not Audrey or Croix or Madison or Matt? They should be on this roof, not you.”

“She's right,” said Hayley. “She sounds mean, but she's just saying what's true.”

What they were saying was not true but totally unfair and mean, but I knew Abigail wasn't going to defend me. All the rules and roads were gone. We were washing slowly away from land, having just undergone a disaster of epic
proportions, but our social strata were still in place. And I was at the bottom with the shellfish.

Oddly, the hatred for Sienna flooding my body made me feel alive. That brisk, cold rage resuscitated me, brought me to my senses like a mermaid pressing on the chest of a half-drowned sailor until he drooled out seawater and breathed pure air. “It's not based on how popular you are or how good you are. Look at you, Sienna. You're a terrible person. And yet you lived.”

Sienna drew in her breath. She looked at Abigail. “Did you hear what she said to me? Are you going to let her talk that way to me?”

Abigail considered this. “She's got a point, Sienna. You're kind of a bitch. But she's a snake and a traitor, so she ain't one to be talking.”

“Thanks, Abigail,” I said. “Your grammatically compromised defense of me is inspiring. And I'm sorry I was saved over worthier, more socially acceptable kids. And if it is helpful for you all, I will die first.”