High and Dry Read online

  When I was done, Bridget was staring at me with her big cave eyes.

  “That was the craziest voice mail I ever heard.”

  “Be glad it wasn’t meant for you, then,” I snapped.

  “I’m jealous, actually.”

  “Then you match the light,” I slurred, pointing ahead.

  “What?”

  “Green means go. And I’m the drunk one?”

  Wind shook the car, making Bridget clutch the wheel and struggle to stay in the right lane.

  We have serious gusts of wind year-round. It’s the distinguishing characteristic of Palm Valley, the daily traffic warning on the electronic billboards that light up the 14 Freeway. It’d be nice to see “Coyote Attack” or “Child Abduction” messages every once in a while instead, just to mix things up.

  “High Winds Ahead” loses its luster once you realize the wind’s never going to be high enough to carry you away and drop you someplace else, like on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains.

  “You better not vom in my car,” said Bridget direly. “Especially not over Ellie Chen.”

  “Can I vom over your driving?”

  “Smart move, by the way, giving Ellie your keys so you’d have an excuse to talk to her tomorrow at school.”

  “She already told me she’d talk to me.”

  Bridget gave me a look like, You naive little boy. “Suuuure.”

  We drove in merciful silence through downtown, past the civic center. The windows of all the buildings were dark, like eyes shut against the world. Maybe they were pretending they were somewhere else—different buildings in different towns, where perhaps the sun didn’t shine as much, but when it did, it meant it in a way it never seemed to mean it here.

  Bridget felt the need to reminisce about our past. “Ellie never thanked me, you know. Not even once.”

  “For what?”

  “Teaching you how to use your tongue sophomore year.”

  “Maybe you taught me too well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s the only thing she ever wanted to do.”

  “You dated a year and you didn’t have sex?” Bridget said.

  “Eight months.” I frowned. “You seem to know a lot about our relationship.”

  “I keep tabs on my exes.”

  “How? Alphabetically? Or is it like counting sheep?”

  “You’re funny when you’re drunk,” she remarked. “Funny and bitter. I keep tabs on the ones that matter.”

  “Aw,” I said sarcastically.

  Bridget was still running around the nostalgia track. “Charlie Dixon, soccer hottie. Why did we break up again?”

  “You dumped me because I wouldn’t put out,” I reminded her.

  “That’s right. You weren’t fast enough,” Bridget said, and chuckled. “Hey, I just thought of something. If you and Ellie didn’t do it, that means you’re still a virgin.” She reached over and ruffled my hair. I gripped her wrist and returned it to her lap.

  “So?” I said. “She is, too.”

  Bridget smiled, slowly and deliberately. “You sure about that?”

  “Knock it off.”

  “I hear Fred’s a skilled orator …”

  “You heard wrong.”

  But I wasn’t so sure.

  We reached the street between our two driveways. My heart was a lead ball, rolling downhill. I felt sick. What if Ellie had moved on? (Worse, what if she’d moved on before she dumped me?) I couldn’t move. I was back in Café Kismet, paralyzed.

  Bridget leaned over, all the way over, to undo my seat belt, and this somehow involved her breasts brushing against my chest. Her lips hovered above mine. They were dark red, luscious, and wet. Unlike Ellie’s, they would definitely leave a lipstick mark.

  “Come inside? For old times’ sake?” she said.

  “Why so chummy tonight?” I wondered.

  She was straddling me now and I placed my hands on her hips to keep her at bay. I honestly couldn’t figure out how we’d gotten into this position.

  “I waited a long time for you guys to break up,” she said.

  It was flattering to think she regretted losing me, but she was being awfully friendly for someone who hadn’t bothered to wave back when I saw her outside her house last month. Something wasn’t right.

  “Well, this is my stop.” I gripped her arms and tried to dislodge her without hurting her. “Can you, um, move?”

  “Sure.” She smiled devilishly and started a slow grind with her hips. “How’s that?”

  “Come on, Bridge, get off my lap.”

  “So I’m Bridge again, huh?” The swiveling continued.

  “I mean it.”

  “Or what?” she asked.

  If I couldn’t have Ellie, I didn’t want anyone.

  “Bridge, Bridge, Bridge,” I said, tapping her nose with each name, “I needed to learn with you so I could impress her. You were nothing to me but a bridge to Ellie.” It was a dirty rotten lie, but it got the desired effect: she slapped me so hard my face burned. It felt like the perfect coda to a horrible evening.

  “What do you think she’s learning from Fred right now?” Bridget whispered nastily. “Make no mistake, Dix, it was you and me in the beginning and it’ll be you and me at the end,” she added, before slipping out the driver’s side and slamming the door. She pulled her jacket up around her neck like a cape against the wind.

  It was still early, only nine. I walked next door to my house. The den light was on. My parents were watching Flip That House. I pushed the door open so they could see me nod goodnight.

  “We didn’t hear the garage,” Dad said, pausing the TV. “Where’s the car?”

  “I had too much to drink. Bridget dropped me off,” I said in a rare moment of stark honesty. I’d recently—as in two seconds ago—settled on a new diplomatic policy with my parents. It meant not only would I rip off the Band-Aid, I’d set it on fire and throw it at them.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have let him have all that wine at Christmas,” Mom wondered. “Maybe he developed a taste for it.”

  “I don’t think the kids at the party were drinking wine,” Dad replied.

  Okay, yeah, in desperation, I’d tried to appreciate wine over Christmas break. It flowed easily at holiday parties, and my parents thought it was better to treat alcohol casually, let me have a glass here and there “in moderation,” rather than act like it was forbidden and drive me into its arms.

  I never gave them any trouble, so I think they felt it was a reward.

  When I’d brushed my teeth on Christmas Eve after two glasses of Cabernet, I’d expected to spit out a mouthful of red, but the residue was black, like I’d been chewing black licorice all night, or like tar was building up in me, like the problem wasn’t liquor at all, but something inside me that turned everything black.

  These were not the kinds of things I could talk to my parents about.

  “Who throws a party on a Sunday night, anyway?” Mom asked.

  “Maybe Sunday is the new Saturday,” Dad teased.

  Their diplomatic policy toward me, it seemed, hadn’t changed; which is to say it was conducted over and around me, like the first stage of a science project: hypothesis and counterhypothesis, for each other’s ears alone. My life was an amusing petri dish they liked to observe, and occasionally poke a stick into. What will he do in Scenario A? What if the conditions are changed? Will he go nuts?

  “Do I need to be here for this, or can I go?” I asked, pointing to the hallway with my thumb.

  “I’m proud of you for getting a ride,” said Dad, refocusing on me. “And you know you can always call us if there aren’t any designated drivers. No questions asked.”

  The idea of Bridget being my designated driver was minorly hilarious.

  Flip That House was frozen on screen, impatient. Without my parents’ attention, the house remained unflipped. The show didn’t exist without them watching it, just like I didn’t exist without Ellie as my girlfriend
. Unbeknownst to her, Bridget had spent the last few minutes trying to make out with antimatter.

  I felt nauseous and dizzy as I crawled into bed. In lieu of brushing my teeth, I swallowed more of my Christmas present from Granddad and swished it around in my mouth. Alcohol kills germs better than toothpaste anyway, right?

  All warmth had left me, and I was back to hating the way liquor tasted. Mom’s theory was wrong: I hadn’t developed a taste for anything. That’s why I usually covered it up with coffee, juice, or soda. The sharp acid burn of whiskey dirties up everything it comes into contact with, and there’s something satisfying about that. I mean, here’s a substance that can never be fully absorbed; it will ruin everything you add it to, and it’s never the opposite: the thing you add it to, however vast, cannot make it right. One part per million, and it’s the one part that has all the power.

  It made sense, though. I mean, I wasn’t drinking to enjoy myself; I was doing it to get through the day.

  I wished it had been Ellie who’d slapped me. At least that would mean she still had feelings for me. She always wore those chunky rings she designed herself in jewelry class. They made her fingers look even more delicate, and they would’ve destroyed my cheek.

  Everyone at Maria Posey’s party probably thought I was a lush, but there was nothing sloshed or lush or liquid about me.

  I lived in the Mojave Desert. I was dehydrated. I was drying out more and more each day, and quenching my thirst with salt water.

  At six a.m. on Monday, two deputies from the Palm Valley sheriff’s department came to our house and said a girl named Maria Salvador had been dropped off at the Palm Valley ER a few hours ago.

  She was alive but in critical condition, hallucinating out of her mind and speaking gibberish. She’d overdosed on LSD and entered a dissociative fugue state. They suspected she’d been given five times the normal dose.

  Not surprisingly, her parents wanted answers. According to them, she never would have taken acid, or any other drug, voluntarily. Someone had drugged her. The best and only suspect so far was the dude who’d dropped her off.

  Dad was confused, and asked the deputies how we could help. What he meant was, “Why are you here?”

  The answer to his unspoken question quickly became known.

  My car had been caught on hospital security cameras, dumping the girl and peeling away from the curb. It was then discovered in a ditch by the 14 Freeway. The license plate led the sheriff’s department right to my door.

  It was a frame job, clean and clear.

  In my hungover sleep deprivation, I could only manage a few thoughts:

  1. Who was Maria Salvador?

  2. Would she be okay?

  3. Why hadn’t anyone tried to frame me for something sooner?

  THERE ARE NO PALM TREES IN PALM VALLEY

  AND THERE NEVER WERE.

  In the 1880s, a bunch of Europeans settled here by mistake. They were trying to reach the Pacific Ocean, and believed the existence of palm trees meant they were close to the water. What they were really seeing were Joshua trees, named by the Mormons for the way the branches seem to be reaching up toward God in prayer.

  I think the trees are begging God for rain, and He’s saying no.

  You’d think that once people recognized the error they’d stop coming to Palm Valley, but a hundred and thirty years later, here we all are, putting up golf courses and water parks in the desert and pretending it’s normal.

  Palm Valley’s a charter city, which means we’ve gone rogue. We have our own constitution, and citizens vote directly on all local decisions, so when Palm Valley High was labeled a failing school in 2007, the city council hired a private corporation called Fresh Start to fix everything.

  My mom’s the regional director of Fresh Start, which is why we moved here from New Mexico when I was in sixth grade.

  The first thing Mom did was fire all the teachers, even those on the tenure track, and make them reapply for their jobs. Half didn’t make the cut, so they were swiftly replaced by recent grads who were okay with signing yearly contracts that could be revoked at any time. Good-bye, union. Good-bye, benefits.

  Everyone in Palm Valley got whiplash, like, “Huh? When we voted for this proposition, we didn’t think it would, like, change anything. Betrayal!”

  You know how in movies from the ’60s people always get bricks thrown in their windows by a hostile, dangerously ignorant populace? That happened to us a few times. We were prank-called constantly and had to get an unlisted number. I used to worry about my mom whenever she left for work; protestors and former teachers screamed and spat at her every morning for the entire summer.

  It wasn’t just her they went after. While my dad was at work, his car got egged and vandalized, mainly because of where it was parked: the Lambert College faculty lot. His very existence was a traitorous insult to the school system; how could he put up with my mother’s hard-line stance when he, too, was a teacher? Nay, a professor.

  After my parents got a death threat in the mail, we were assigned our own protection, Deputy Sheriff Thompson. Mom and Dad always had a hot thermos of coffee and a plate of dinner waiting for Thompson when his shift started, but he rarely accepted. His wife and brother used to teach at Palm Valley High. That was the thing—everyone knew someone who’d been affected by the layoffs.

  As for me, the brakes on my bicycle got cut when I left it outside Rosati’s pizza. I ate gravel on the ride home, had to fling myself sideways to the curb when I realized there was no way to stop. If I’d been on a steeper hill, I might’ve broken my neck.

  While sitting on the curb, recovering from my fall, I watched my bike get run over by a semi. I never asked my parents to replace it.

  By the time I was in eighth grade, my mom’s decisions had been vindicated: Test scores and graduation rates were way up, and she was suddenly embraced as a positive force in the community.

  Part of me couldn’t accept that the harassment was over. When you spend a couple years looking over your shoulder and worrying about whether your mom will come home at night, the fear doesn’t go away so easily. I guess I kept waiting for the other Converse to drop; for someone who’d been lurking on the sidelines to strike at me. And now, it seemed, someone had.

  BLACKMAILERS DON’T DO HOMEWORK

  I WAS SHAKING INSIDE, BUT I TRIED TO SOUND CALM AS I explained to Palm Valley’s Finest that I’d left my car down the hill from Maria Posey’s place and gotten a ride home from my next-door neighbor. My parents repeatedly insisted I’d been home since nine last night.

  “We know the exact time because he interrupted our viewing of Flip That House when he came in,” added Mom, with an assured smile in my direction, but I guess that wasn’t good enough for the deputies; they figured Mommy and Daddy would say anything to protect me, and also that I could’ve snuck out and made my way back to the party later.

  I found myself wishing it were Deputy Thompson who’d come to question us. At least we knew him, and toward the end of his three-month stint protecting us, he’d regularly taken us up on dinner. He and I had even kicked a soccer ball around outside a couple times, since my dad’s not much of an athlete.

  I hadn’t seen Thompson in a few years, but I figured he was still around. Palm Valley was that kind of place. Since there was no reason to live here, there was no reason to leave; if you had someplace better to go, you’d have gone there in the first place.

  The badges wanted to know where I’d been from midnight to three in the morning, and whether I owned a Flynn Scientific baseball cap. A blurred figure in his late teens or early twenties, wearing a Flynn Scientific cap, could apparently be seen on the hospital security tape.

  My parents said no way could anyone search my room without a warrant. They even crossed their arms simultaneously and made a sort of roadblock in front of the stairs. I was impressed. I was so accustomed to their competitive psychobabble about my evolution as a person that I’d forgotten how they’d join forces against outside threa
ts. We were an insulated group; I was protected from all angles.

  The deputies grilled me about who else was at the party. I said I didn’t remember.

  “You’d better hope Ms. Salvador doesn’t die, or these charges are going to become much more serious,” one of the uniforms told me.

  I decided I did remember after all. Maybe I should’ve felt loyalty and kept my trap shut, but loyalty to whom? Someone at the party had swiped my keys and set me up. Ellie had placed them in a dish in the kitchen once I’d handed them over to her.

  I gave the badges a truncated guest list, emphasizing Ellie’s new squeeze, Fred, and removing my pal Ryder, who’d left the party shortly after I arrived.

  The deputies refused to give us information about the condition of my car, but since it was in their custody while they dusted it for prints, Dad had to drive me to school.

  We had a decent chat on the way. One-on-one, my parents weren’t bad. When they tried to outdo each other narrating and interpreting my actions, they drove me crazy. That’s when I turned into “he.” (“He probably meant this.” “He probably feels that.”) He probably wants to die. He probably wishes he had a sibling.

  But minus their dueling “Explanation of Charlie” act, performed nightly from eight to ten, they were okay.

  “I don’t want you to worry about this, son,” Dad said firmly in his closing remarks as we reached the drop-off lane at Palm Valley High. “You just worry about your schoolwork today. I know you didn’t have anything to do with this poor girl’s situation. Your mother and I both know that. And I don’t think it’s going to come to this, but we’ll hire a lawyer if we need to.”

  Dad’s always been pretty easygoing in a crisis. Back when Mom was being vilified by the town for her work with Fresh Start, he got trotted out at press conferences like the pro-choice wife of a pro-life politician, as if to say, “My fellow Americans, I’m one of you, so if I can love the senator, you can, too. Be not scared or pissed.” He was always good at calming down the crowd, and his status as an award-winning journalism professor helped as well.

  “What about Amelia?” I asked. Amelia was my car. Granddad and Ellie and everyone else thought I’d named her for Amelia Earhart, and I let them think so. Dad was the only person who knew the truth about my car’s name, and the secret was safe with him.