It came at night, sometimes without any rain or warning. A sudden chill and then the pounding of ice that sounded like sand dumped on the roof. It came with force, and it just kept coming. Rook sat in her hot tub as ice fell from the sky, piercing the tops of our heads. We were hot on the bottom and cold on top.
The winter that Rook got a hot tub was the winter lived in water. The hot tub was sturdy, on a deck in her enormous backyard that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. She loved to tell people about her house, designed by her famous architect father; he’d imported the tiles from around the world. Rook’s stepmother designed their estate gardens after Versailles. The cacophonous hail on that roof was a musical every time.
Her mother hated the hot tub and regretted allowing the eyesore on her property. Hot tubs were for the trashy kind of people. And horny teens. But for the first time in her life, Rook got an A, and she was allowed one gift—anything she wanted. Of course she wanted a hot tub, one with all the fancy jets and bucket seats and neon sex lights. Of course Rook wanted to smoke cigarettes and be touched by guys from the beach in that tub with intermittent hailstorms swirling overhead.
Her parents tucked it behind tall trees and concealed a giant tub of water behind lattice walls of night-blooming jasmine. Maybe they didn’t care that Rook was having sex, or maybe they did, but they surely let it happen all the time.
We lived as prunes for an entire winter. We bought bags of sour candy and packs of Camels and soaked in bubbled scalding water until we couldn’t take it anymore. Until the hail made us bleed. For hours, we’d listen to Snoop Dogg and talk about how fun it was to show our tits to strangers. There were hours of stupid existential conversations. We said we wanted to be wild, but I never meant it the way she did. We promised to love each other forever, no matter what.
“My cousin said he can get us into a show in LA,” she said.
“My dad would never let me go to the mainland for that,” I said.
“Don’t tell him,” she said.
We planned it for weeks, and I told Dad that I’d stay at Rook’s for the weekend. She knew a guy with a boat that could get us to the mainland without taking the ferry, without being spotted, without the weather shutting things down. Her cousin would pick us up at the harbor, and we’d stay with him for a few nights. Easy.
Dad and I had a burger at our favorite spot. We talked about Rook’s new hot tub, the recent flurry of garibaldi, the flurries in the sky, whether or not everyone eventually gets chicken pox. It was seamless. He was drunk when he dropped me off. He didn’t know her parents had been in France for three weeks.
“Don’t piss her parents off and sneak out,” he said.
Rook popped out, bikini only, and waved to Dad.
We drank champagne and danced sopping wet to music videos on the TV. Clinked our glasses together and sat in the hot tub until the sky raged. We dressed up, and we recorded our own music video. When we were coming down and exhausted, she said we could go to the mainland in the late afternoon the next day. She was finally eighteen, and joked that she’d take care of us if anything happened.
“I’m glad we’re friends,” I said.
“Forever,” she said.
We sat close on the couch. I thought of all the people who have been left behind, about the lonely people my father warned me about. I adored Rook’s nose, because it was perfect. I admired her capacity to be able to shove all her emotions into some small box hidden in her body, until she was cool and clear and calm all the time. I was reeling. And wondering. And waiting.
Half-asleep, she asked me if I’d ever been left behind. Sometimes, I thought but couldn’t say. I couldn’t tell her because there were more pressing things, like: I had never had good sex. What if my father left me too? What if I never found love? What kind of cheese did I like best?
“You should really sleep with an older man,” she said then. “They treat you good.”
“I need dry clothes and bed,” I said.
I followed her down all the halls and into the bathroom with all the mirrors.
I sensed that Rook had left me behind. While she was standing in the tub and shaving her legs and bikini line and arms, I had rifled through her vanity, spraying all her perfumes, and found a pair of my father’s socks, with the hole in the right toe, and I knew she had decided to abandon me for him. Also: a birthday card for her written in his handwriting, signed, Love you always. Maybe I knew it before, but I’d been so good at believing bad things weren’t so bad.
I remembered that once, I’d come home from school, and Rook was already there. She was in tiny shorts, sprawled out on the couch so that Dad could practically see her labia. Conveniently, she was at my house a lot. When I wasn’t there. Dropping in to see Dad. Sometimes, Dad would put on Dusty Springfield and cook dinner for us. He’d say that we were his favorite girls. I’d hated Rook for the way she pined over him, but told myself her pain was deep, so was mine, and that things could be fine, that she didn’t mean it the way it seemed. I’d hated Dad for this, too, but made myself believe that they both needed this crush. And I was quiet.
Until the holed-sock in her drawer. I told her I hated her, and I threw Rook’s parents’ fancy champagne onto the bathroom floor, and the mirrors reflected an infinite version of all the glass. Threw the borrowed sweatpants at her, grabbed my things, and left.
She chased after me, crying. She yelled that she’d stop if it bothered me. She said that despite everything, she was in love with him, and she didn’t know what to do. Then she sat on the front porch of her lighted mansion and said if I left her, she’d have nothing. That he’d never choose her over me. She said no one would love her like I do.
Even when I hated her, I believed it, too. I couldn’t abandon her, because then I’d be a person who could leave anyone. She said she’d stop. The hail played a song on the roof, and I couldn’t turn back.
I didn’t go home. Everything was a haze. The sky was up and down, and nothing felt real. An island is round. Even if it’s oblong, it’s round, made of one continuous line that never ends. There’s nowhere to go. Except up into the sky, or underwater, but still, it will always feel like you’re spinning. I rode my bike around until very late, until I was very cold and hail-beaten. The uncomfortable parts of my bathing suit were still damp. I slept in the topiary garden at Ferry Lands, and the hail turned into drizzle, and then nothing at all.
In the morning, I awoke to a gardener poking me with the end of a rake. I told him I was just visiting Mary, and that I was on my way out. I picked a few oranges and sat on the beach, sucking the life out of the fruit and trying to remember that thing people always said: Things will get better. Dad always said: It’s just what happens.
I said I was sick and locked myself in my room. Dad left soup at the door. Rook never went to the mainland to see the show and her druggie cousin. Instead, she lingered around my house until I finally came out, and she held me close, and told me she was the sorriest. She blamed her life. Her eyes ballooned, and I guess we were friends again. Because the worst part was that I loved her. She promised that it was only once, and that she’d stop, and that we’d never tell anyone. I didn’t forgive her, but I said that I would try.
At night, alone on the couch, I listened to the hail tap on windowpanes, and I cried. I cried and cried. I pretended to be fine, to Rook, and to my father. No one taught me what to do with my mad.
And I didn’t speak to my father until I finally did.
“Where is my mother?” I asked my father.
He was shaken by my curiosity.
“I haven’t heard,” he said.
He opened a cheap bottle of vodka.
“Can I have some?” I said.
“Fuck, no, you cannot have any vodka,” he said.
I slammed the front door as I walked out and scurried down the stairs. That betrayal hard as a rock.
My father shouted from the window something about how I needed to be home for dinner. He used his discipline voice. I told him to fuck off, in my loudest, most protesty voice, and I guess he thought it was hormones, because when I got back for dinner, he had two bars of chocolate on the coffee table.
I didn’t tell him that I knew, because I didn’t want to be the one to kill him. So we spoke only about the things required, and I let him believe it was because I was a teenager. Like homework, staying out too late, dinner. When he brought up Rook, I played along, like he was just concerned about her reckless life and missing parents.
But he knew I was different, and I wondered if Rook had told him or if she must have really backed off. And the silence was easier than asking for the truth, and there was more booze then, more nights he didn’t come home, more coke binges, and I didn’t care for a while if he was dead.
On nights he escaped, I did, too, and I rode past Rook’s to see if he had gone there. I never caught them, if they were a them. I didn’t want to. I just saw Rook alone in her hot tub, talking to herself, as if she were being interviewed on a talk show. Or Rook drunk in her hot tub with a few girls we swore we hated from school. Or Rook alone in the darkness, alive only by the light of a movie on a screen, and then more nighttime.
There are so many things I never said, because how can you say all the things when no one is ever listening? What I should have said, loudly: I really hate hot tubs. I hate everything about them. That hot water feels like it is penetrating my heart. It makes it skip beats, my skin goes red for hours, I can’t sleep, I feel so hot, and with the hail, it’s worse, and confusing. A tiny pool of murky water is not my idea of a good time. Also, I bet there were traces of cum all over that fucking hot tub. Also: How could you do this to me?
Rook told me about a guy named Sam, who knew that Bunny was dating some rich summer girl. Sam said they were falling in love. Rook said that if I wanted, she could break up Bunny from his girl. She told me that Bunny fucked this girl on the empty lifeguard tower just last week. Rook told me that I should just get over Bunny, and meet someone new, like she’d done.
I didn’t say anything about my father, because the days and weeks that had passed were somehow erased from our lives. Because I was so good at participating in that kind of forgiveness, the kind that meant only to be forgetful.
I told her I was not ready to give up on Bunny, that I thought I loved Bunny, and she told me to shut the fuck up, and to calm the fuck down, and to chill the fuck out.
“Let’s go to the hot tub,” she said. “I’ll tell Sam to bring a hot friend.”
“The hot tub is too hot,” I said.
She laughed, and told me I was the most wicked funny person she knew. I tried not to hate her. I wanted to tell her that I worried about weather, my father’s dental bills, climate change, the sea—oh, everything in it, even the bad, dark stuff—worried that I was a bad kisser, that my breasts were crooked, my nostrils too big, about my mother, smog, and that I never, ever knew where I should be going, even in the light, that I knew she never really meant forever. But mostly, I wanted to tell her that I really hated hot tubs. That drinking vodka in there made it worse.
We slid in, and she turned the lights to flashing purple.
“Do you think it’s bad that we don’t have any other friends?” I asked her.
“We do,” she said.
“Who?”
She named, then, girls (mostly) from school who we shared cigarettes with after class, or who she got hammered with at parties; she even named the school janitor, who if you asked me, she really liked and had probably kissed at least once.
“And your dad. He’s a cool guy, and a good friend.”
I shriveled. We smoked more.
I’d imagined my father passed out on the bathroom floor, where he’d been trying to clean up his own mess.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.
“Never,” I said.
But I had known so many ghosts.
“I can show you one.”
Then more bud, more vodka, and us drying quick in the cold wind and us squeezing our damp bodies into cool clothes. She was so comfortable being topless, with her perfect nipples. She must have known she flaunted them to me, or to the staring-back sea, or to the moon.
We rode our bikes, with all that wet hair, and pedaled and huffed nicotine, and then more hail came. I didn’t ask where we were going, because anywhere was better than going home. Even if it meant going someplace with her.
Down a dark road was a house with a koi pond. Rook leaned her bike against the bamboo fence. She urged me to be quiet, to leave my bike behind. She pointed to an upstairs dimly lighted room. I told her I didn’t see anything. She told me to wait, and we kept walking. I followed her to the house, through the unlocked gate, into the garden. She promised ghosts.
“All you’re promising is to get me arrested,” I said.
The yard was only a concrete wall from the bay, and there were leftover wakes slapping lightly against it. The grass was cold and wet, and it soaked our shirts when we lay down. She talked softly, and everything was so dark, and she had a granola bar in her pocket. We split it and sipped the plastic bottle of vodka. We were mostly warm, even with the pricks of ice that dented our faces. That yard was magnificent.
“This is where I come for shooting stars,” she said.
“It’s too foggy,” I said.
For a minute, I forgot about the ghost and snuggled next to her.
“Stay awake,” she said. “A dead old lady is going to walk by the window.”
She quietly sang to me, and I felt loved and whole, even with all that betrayal. Then, I couldn’t keep my eyes open for any ghost anymore.
Eventually, I went home to my father. I helped him sober up again. I got him a job on a boat, and he’d be gone for a few months. I told him to come back with money. He told me to tend to our weed. We didn’t talk about our spinning web of tiny betrayals. He’d return, and I expected that I’d tell him that I loved him, and then I would probably eat lobster for dinner for an entire week.
Before he went, he looked up to me and said, from the small, decrepit balcony, “I think the hail has finally stopped.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked.