The Waters & the Wild Read online

  “We’re ready,” Bee said.

  She realized when she saw that first one: Haze had never smiled in her presence before. It changed his whole face like a light had been turned on inside of him; it was like finding a light switch when you’d been fumbling around in the dark for way too long. That smile made you forget the things you were afraid of, like Sarah’s singing did. And like Sarah’s singing, it made you want more.

  Lindsey lived in a big, new house on the canals. By the time they got there, drunk kids were staggering off the porch to collapse on the lawn. The house smelled of beer. Boys and girls were making out on the leather couches; the stereo was blasting. Someone had thrown up on the floor. The smell made Bee’s stomach lurch; she wondered why they had bothered to come at all.

  She glanced over at Haze. He looked good in his black Levi’s and black T-shirt, black skater shoes. Sarah had traded in her usual cotton dress for a black sweat suit, and her hair was up in a bun under a baseball cap. Bee could tell they were concentrating on being invisible, but she saw them both. It didn’t seem like anyone else could, though.

  They came in and found the keg, filled cups for themselves. Lindsey walked right by, clutching some older guy, drunk and laughing. If she noticed them, she didn’t care. It was a little anticlimactic, actually.

  “Let’s dance,” Sarah said.

  “Don’t you think they’ll s-s-see that?”

  “Not if we move quick enough.”

  She pulled a CD out of her sweatshirt pocket and put it in the stereo. Then she hit the light switch and started moving around the sunken living room to the Killers.

  Bee joined her. Dancing always helped you feel more like yourself. Whoever that was, anyway. She grabbed Haze’s arm.

  “Dance with us.”

  She could tell he didn’t want to. But he finished the beer in one gulp and put down the plastic cup. Then he started moving, steady and graceful, from the hips, as if he’d been doing this in his bedroom, practicing for this moment with her. Only the coolest boys danced and got away with it. He wasn’t invisible at all. She couldn’t see anyone else.

  Some other kids joined them—mostly girls and a few drunken boys they’d dragged out there, and pretty soon the whole room was jumping with bodies. Lindsey should have been grateful they’d crashed her boring party, Bee thought, twirling in circles so fast that no one could see her as muscle and flesh over bone. All she was was light.

  As they were leaving, someone pushed something into Bee’s hand. She scanned the crowd, trying to see who had done it, but the person was gone.

  It was a flower, small tubular purple blossoms clustered on a stalk, each one the size of a finger puppet.

  Usually it was a nice thing to get a flower. No one had ever given her one before, except for the fancy bouquets from her mom on her birthday. But now, as she jammed the blossom into her pocket, chills were creeping up her back, cold fingers sheathed in petals.

  She, Haze and Sarah had just stepped out the front door when Lindsey spotted them. They had been having too much fun to remember to keep up the spell. The dancing had been fun, too, but the speed with which their bodies moved to the music always reminded them of Haze’s vibrating-particle theory.

  “Party crashers!” Lindsey screamed, like a girl auditioning for a part in a B horror movie.

  Five boys were at Lindsey’s side in what felt like seconds. Bee took Sarah’s hand, then Haze’s hand, and started running.

  They stopped in the shelter of some trees that dripped darkness from their branches like leaves. The water of the canal gleamed under the bridge, light from a greenish moon swimming on the surface like ghostly ducks. Bee closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself as vibrating particles.

  And then—with the curse, or, in this case, blessing, of the unpopular, the unathletic, the overweight, the strange—they vanished like shadows into the spring night.

  8

  Flight

  The friends sat on the hill of grass near the empty playground. They’d been up all night after Lindsey’s party, too giddy to sleep, wandering the neighborhood. They’d told their parents they were staying over at one another’s houses. All three families were so delighted that their wallflowers had plans on a Saturday night, they didn’t question them.

  An airplane flew low overhead from the nearby airport. You could see it perfectly, like a toy model of a plane, but it was so loud that you knew it was real. Even the airplane looked beautiful to Bee then. Weeks ago, it had been another sign of man’s infringement of the natural world, or just an irritant.

  In spite of the queasy feeling in her stomach that had kept her from eating much for days, in spite of the girl in the mirror, she still felt that sensation of wonder she’d experienced that day with Haze at the beach and when she first heard Sarah sing. It was almost all the time now, not just at the obvious moments like a sunset or when you saw a baby smiling. Haze and Sarah wore those weird halos around their heads and the early sunlight had a viridescent tint, reflecting from the grass, she guessed. Maybe she was just hungover from not enough sleep. No sleep.

  The gazebo with the roof like a circus hat had a bunch of balloons still tied to it, remnants of some kid’s birthday party. There were tiny little greenish white daisies and clover blossoms mixed with the grass under her butt. She plucked a clover and crushed it in her fingers, then sniffed the slightly acrid chlorophyll sweetness.

  “I wish we could fly,” Sarah said.

  They both looked at her. She had applied lip gloss in the park rest room after the mocha frappucino from Starbucks, and her mouth was outrageously beautiful.

  “We could if we wanted,” said Bee.

  “Now we can fly?”

  “Yes. We were invisible. Why can’t we?” She stood up and spread her arms. Sarah got up, too.

  Haze stared at them. The talking-cat look again. Bee had an impulse to kiss him.

  She put out her arms like wings. “Come on. We can’t do this without you.”

  He stood reluctantly, wiping his hands on his thighs. She could tell he felt foolish, was only doing it for her and Sarah.

  “What are we supposed to do?”

  “This!”

  Bee took off, running down the grassy slope, yelling, feeling the breeze lifting her hair, whipping it against her face. Sarah followed her, then Haze, all of them screaming as loud as they could.

  It felt as if they levitated—who knew? There was no one there to tell them it hadn’t happened.

  When they collapsed into a heap at the bottom of the hill they were out of breath, panting. Bee lay with her head on Sarah’s warm stomach and her feet sprawled over Haze. Her belly hurt, but she didn’t tell them. The yellowish glow of the world pulsed before her.

  She put her hands into the pocket of the boy’s black suit jacket she’d found in a thrift shop (the gray sweatshirt with the missing cuff freaked her out too much to wear now) and felt something there; she’d forgotten the flower.

  “Look what someone gave me at Lindsey’s party.”

  “Who was it?” Sarah grinned at her.

  “I didn’t see.”

  “A secret admirer?”

  Haze was scowling at the plant. She didn’t like how worried he looked all of a sudden. She wanted to see the smile that changed his face so much, when you could get one out of him.

  “It’s a weird-looking thing,” she said. “Do you recognize it, Haze?”

  She handed over the crushed blossom. He examined it gingerly, pushing his taped glasses back up on his nose. “It’s not a local plant. Digitalis purpurea. Foxglove. It’s also called dead man’s bells or witches’ gloves.”

  “That’s frightening,” said Sarah.

  Haze took the flower over to a trash can and tossed it in, then wiped his hands on the grass.

  “Go wash your hands, Bee.”

  “Why?”

  “Digitalis is a deadly poison,” Haze said.

  9

  Hand in Hand

  It was a
stucco house with barred windows, off Venice Boulevard. Haze lived there with his parents, who were both middle school teachers. Luckily, not at the school he went to. He was already unpopular enough. His father taught math, would stand at the front of the classroom scratching his head so that dandruff snowed onto his shoulders. When he got upset, he stammered. Haze believed that even though he had black hair (no dandruff, thank you!) and the same speech impediment, he was not his father’s son. He believed he had learned the stutter and that his hair color was from his mother. It made much more sense to him that his father was an alien who had abducted Haze’s mom for the sole purpose of spreading his (its?) seed. He sometimes wondered why the alien had chosen his mother, though. She had been much thinner at the time, and her black hair was not yet streaked with gray. She was smart, too. Maybe the alien liked her large eyes that reminded him of his own species. She almost never took her glasses off, but the alien could have seen her eyes through his alien-viewing device while she was sleeping.

  Haze imagined the abduction as sterile, anesthetized. His mother never felt a thing. So he hadn’t been born out of pain, but there was exploitation, and no love, either. What did that say about him?

  But, on the other hand, maybe his mother desired the alien. She wasn’t that interested in his father. Maybe this had been her brief means of escape. Who knew? Stranger things had happened; they were happening now.

  The birds of paradise outside Haze’s window were huge, with leaves like shields and thick char-black weapon beaks. They seemed threatening to him—vicious, almost. Weren’t these plants supposed to be delicate orange flowers that looked as if they once grew in some kind of Eden? He pulled down the dusty venetian blinds so that he wouldn’t have to look at the violent birds. Maybe he would sleep now in the dust-mote-strewn dimness. His eyes stung and his head hurt from the all-nighter they’d pulled, but he didn’t feel sleepy.

  He was sitting on his twin bed, the one he’d had since he was a little kid. He even still had the Star Wars quilt, but he planned on flipping it over to the plain blue side if he ever had anyone over. In his lap was a book by Yeats. The poetry made him feel better. It made him think of her.

  For he comes, the human child,

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

  There was so much weeping now, Haze thought. Even in his own brief thirteen years. The twin towers crumbling before him on the TV screen, and the war alone would have been enough to make him want to cry and never stop. He wasn’t like the boy in the poem (except for his solemn eyes). There were no warm hillsides with lowing calves, no kettles singing him lullabies or cute little brown mice. No, there were angry birds of paradise tapping their black beaks on his window. There was a screaming kettle and frozen dinners in the tiny kitchen with the stained linoleum and cracked tiles. The waters were the Pacific Ocean off Venice Beach, so polluted that some days you couldn’t even go in; the surfers got infections. The sea levels and shorelines changing from an overheated climate. Far away, the ice melting, and dying polar bears. And the wild was—what? The tangled beach garden he had glimpsed behind Bee’s gate, burning up as the ozone thinned. But yes, there was weeping, just more of it. The weeping that spanned continents and generations. Sarah understood. She carried the weeping of a three-hundred-year-old practice like a scar on her back, as if it were happening today, and in some ways it was. Pain didn’t ever really stop, he thought; it just changed forms.

  And yet maybe there was a different “waters and the wild,” somewhere hidden, farther than the eye could see. There was a girl who had taken his hand.

  10

  The Imposter

  Deena was sitting at Bee’s bedside when she woke late the next afternoon. She’d gotten home around ten in the morning and thrown herself down on the bed, still dressed, teeth unbrushed.

  “Baby?” Deena said, stroking her tangled hair. “Bee?”

  The light in the room made Bee’s eyes hurt, and her stomach shook as if inhabited by some nasty goblin.

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

  “My stomach hurts,” Bee said. “I feel like I’m going to vomit, but then I don’t.”

  “We’re going to the doctor.”

  “No, I’m all right. I think I’m just over-stimulated or something.”

  “Do you want to explain that one to me? Do we need to take you to buy some condoms?”

  “Mom! No.”

  Deena felt Bee’s forehead again.

  “I’m okay, really. There’s just a lot going on.”

  “Like what?”

  What was she supposed to say? I’ve been having visitations from my doppelganger. This boy I like thinks he’s an alien. We got invisible together. Who knew? We flew. Yeah, right.

  “Let me take your temperature.”

  But Bee jumped out of bed, ignoring the belly goblin. “I’m fine, okay? I just needed to rest. You worry too much.”

  “That’s what mothers do,” Deena said. “You’ll see. But not any time soon.”

  “That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.”

  Bee thought of Haze, his smile, how he looked at her. There were a lot of girls that were already having sex, but she knew she wasn’t nearly ready. Would she ever be? She hadn’t even gotten her period yet. She just wanted to be near him, listening to him recite poetry, maybe holding his hand, his eyes transforming her into something magical. It wasn’t much different from what she wanted with Sarah.

  But her friends wore halos. She had, if only briefly, belonged. The world she had never loved before had turned to gold.

  Under the ground seep the toxins of the population that lives above. If you have to, you will eat roots and earthworms. It is always night. Candles burn in lanterns made from tin cans. When it is nighttime up above, you can crawl out, but only for a little while. You feel ashamed of your matted hair, your torn clothes, the dirt on your face. Who would want to speak to you? They are all shiny and pretty. They have parents and houses with gardens. What do you have? The earth. Whole handfuls of it. The lizard people with their slit eyes and scaly skin. Your loneliness. Your longing.

  The girl missed her mother in a monstrous way. She missed her with a fanged longing, a zombie ache. Not having her mother was like not having a soul. She was sure that she had a soul somewhere, but it did not feel that way. Maybe she did not have a soul at all. Maybe it had been taken along with her mother, along with her entire life.

  The girl watched her mother as she slept. Her mother’s mouth was a rosy bow, like the ones on top of the changeling imposter’s birthday gifts.

  The man lying next to the girl’s mother had gray hair and needed a wheelchair to get around. He sat with the imposter in the garden and spoke gently to her. He valued what she had to say. Smiled proudly at her. Even though she was not related to him by blood, she was his.

  The girl was nobody’s. Except her mother’s and her mother did not know it yet.

  Now there were two other people that the girl needed to watch. One was a badly dressed overweight girl with dark skin and a musical voice. The other was a skinny boy with a stammer and broken glasses. The girl doubted she would have befriended these two outcasts. She imagined herself as one of the popular girls.

  She turned and watched her mother sleep. She had an impulse to touch her olive-toned, lightly freckled skin, to smell her dark hair. She knew it would smell even more of lavender oil if she just leaned closer….

  But in the other room the imposter moaned in her sleep. And the girl slid out the open window, back into the wilder night, where she had never belonged.

  test for a changeling

  cook my dinner in an eggshell

  see if i say a word

  bathe me in foxglove poison

  repeat the lord’s prayer

  place steel on my bedsheets

  whip me drown me shove me in the oven

  then you will see
that i am not a piece of glamorized wood

  not a sullen hairy beast with a venomous bite boils on my skin

  blood between my legs

  only a girl trying desperately to grow

  into a woman

  11

  Test

  In her dream, Bee was walking along a road that wound through a canyon. The eucalyptus leaves leaned down, silvery green and medicinal-smelling, trying to shelter her, kiss her or clutch her, she wasn’t sure. Every once in a while a car sped by, dangerously close, blinding her in its headlights, and she pressed herself up against the dirt where wild evening primrose bloomed pinkish lavender by day, but now it was night and they slept gray in shadow. The ruins of an old castle crowned one ridge. The crumbling stone balustrades, balconies and cupolas, the foundation overgrown with weeds. She wandered up there, knowing this was the place, though not sure how she knew, or what place it was.

  Among the castle ruins was a low stone bench covered with vines. These she knew to part like hair. She peeked through into an opening, a small tunnel just big enough for her to enter on her belly.

  The earth smelled dank, and she heard the murmur of distant water. She slithered through the opening, down, down into the darkness.

  “There you are!”

  Bee turned her head so fast that her hair whipped her face. The strands felt sharp for a second, as if they weren’t hair at all but little thorns. The doppelganger was standing in the shadows of the grotto room.

  Bee crouched down on the dark stone floor and wrapped her arms around her legs. She could hear the soft rush of water that ran through the grotto. Her body shook like the eucalyptus leaves in the breeze of her mother’s garden. But there was no real breeze down here.