Maia’s Greatest Hits of the Year (So Far)
1. Alienated friends. Check.
2. Got drunk and made a fool of myself at a party. Check.
3. Got not-drunk and made an even bigger fool of myself at yet another party. Check.
4. Got my tires slashed out of revenge. Check.
5. Fell in love. Check.
6. Felt like an actual person for a little while. Check.
7. Lied my ass off about everything in my life and subsequently destroyed the best thing to ever happen to me. Check. And check.
8. Perfected the art of staying in bed for fourteen hours at a time. Check.
9. Failed at life. Check.
I was staring at my ceiling, trying to think of one last item to add to the list to round it out to an even ten, when I heard Roxie barking downstairs.
My parents were at work, because it was no doubt afternoon already, so I had no choice but to get out of bed. Roxie barked again, and I yelled to her, “I’m coming.” As I started down the stairs I realized how weak my body felt, how achy my muscles and joints were from lying around in bed for the last three days. I shuffled into the kitchen. There was a puddle of pee in the middle of the floor, but no sign of Roxie.
I’d made her wait too long.
She was scratching at the door. I tried to reach down and pet her—a peace offering for leaving her alone down here all morning, but she was not interested; she just wanted out.
I opened the door, and she hobbled down the steps faster than I’d seen her move in a while. I went back into the kitchen to clean up the pee with a bunch of paper towels and the spray cleaner we keep under the kitchen sink. I washed my hands and watched out the window as Roxie disappeared around the side of the house, on the scent of something.
I walked out onto the porch and stood there, letting the afternoon breeze move through my hair and my slept-in clothes. My eyes set, as they inevitably do, on the gray house across the field. The house that used to just be the view from my window, but was now the place where I felt like my entire life began and only a short while later ended. The place I could never go back to. I walked down the steps, the wood warm against my bare feet, something pulling me out onto the grass and into the sunlight.
It was hard to tell how long I’d been standing here. I looked around for Roxie, but I didn’t see her. I whistled and clapped my hands and called her name, but she didn’t come. My legs jumped into action. I rounded the corner where I’d last seen her. No Roxie. I circled the entire perimeter of the house. Nothing.
“Roxie!” I called again. Just as I was preparing to panic, worried that she got confused and wandered off into the woods or out toward the street, I saw something flicker out of the corner of my eye by the barn.
She was there, lying in the sun, right in front of the barn door. She lifted her head to look at me as I walked over to her, probably wary of me trying to pick her up again. I sat down in the grass beside her, and she fell asleep as I pet her, snoring softly.
Just then I watched as a car turned off the road and into our driveway. It was Hayden in her mom’s little sedan, and as she pulled up closer to the house, I could see that Gabby was there in the passenger seat.
With all my sleeping and crying these past three days, I hadn’t found the time to apologize to them or explain my reasons for bailing on our outing the other night. Roxie grumbled as I stood to go meet them—she lifted her head to see who was there but then laid it back down immediately when she saw it was only Hayden and Gabby.
“If you’re coming to yell at me—I know I deserve it, but—can you please not? Not right now anyway,” I pleaded as they got out of the car.
They didn’t say anything as they advanced toward me, and I couldn’t make sense of their solemn expressions.
“Please?” I added.
When they reached me, they both opened their arms and smothered me inside a giant group hug. We rocked back and forth as I lost and regained my balance. When they finally released their hold on me, Hayden said, “We heard Chris left.”
“Yeah,” Gabby said. “We’re sorry.”
There was something inside me that pulsed at the sound of his name, like another heartbeat. “How’d you hear that?” I asked, but I knew—if the population of Carson fluctuates by even one person, it becomes common knowledge.
“Never mind that,” Hayden said. “We’re here on a mission.”
I let out a laugh, a dusty choked sound, from not having so much as cracked a smile in days. “A mission?”
Gabby looped her arm with mine and began steering me toward the house. “More like an intervention.”
“We’re getting you into the shower and out of those clothes, which it looks like you haven’t changed in weeks, and then we have a surprise for you,” Hayden explained as they led me up the stairs to my bedroom.
“Thanks, but I really just want to crawl back into bed.”
“We know.” Gabby was opening and closing my dresser drawers as she spoke, looking for something in particular. “That’s why we’ve gotta get you out of here.” She held up my bathing suit from last summer and stuffed it into my hands. “Hurry up and shower—make sure you brush your hair, please—and then put this on. Meet us in the car in ten minutes. Got it?”
Clearly, there would be only one acceptable answer.
“All right,” I finally relented, and was then ushered into the bathroom.
• • •
Hayden was speeding, going seventy in a fifty-five. I had been spending so much time in the car with Chris, who always obeyed the posted speed limits, that I forgot how fast people drive around here. The rapid movement sent tingles to my fingers and toes, like they had been asleep. I knew exactly where we were going, and they knew I knew, but we all acted like it was a surprise.
Every summer we had three major excursions. Each of us chose one, and every year they were the same.
Hayden chose the beach.
Gabby chose the amusement park.
And I chose river tubing—I always thought it was the perfect way to end each summer: just two miles of nothing to do but be taken slowly downriver by a gentle current, no choices to make, no mistakes, no worries.
I suspected they had already gone to the amusement park without me while I’d been occupied with Chris, but that was okay—I was never a fan of roller coasters and spinning in circles.
Gabby twisted around in the passenger seat and reached across the car to slather streaks of thick, pasty sunblock across my cheeks and down my nose, and then she pulled out my big floppy straw sun hat, which she must’ve found somewhere in my room, and planted it on my head.
I cleared my throat—an explanation was in order. “Y’all? I know I’ve been acting crazy. I know I haven’t been a great friend lately—” I began.
Hayden interrupted me. “We don’t have to do this, all right?”
Gabby added, “We understand.”
“No, I want to say this. I think I’ve been more messed up than I wanted to admit since Mallory”—I paused to give her name a moment to breathe—“and then the whole thing with Chris, it was—he was what I needed. I didn’t mean to disappear on you. And I didn’t mean to fuck everything up with him either. I just—I don’t know. . . .”
“We know,” Gabby reiterated. “It’s forgotten, okay?”
I nodded, because if I opened my mouth again, I was afraid I would start crying, and I was afraid that if I started crying, I wouldn’t be able to stop. So I just nodded and looked out the window, letting the wind blow against my face.
Forty more minutes of loud music and no talking, and we were there.
The River Adventures sign pointed us down a long dirt road that fed into dense forest surrounding the river. We pulled up to the cabin, and a boy who could not have been much older than us rented us three tubes and took us to the drop-in point in an old beat-up truck with the faded company logo on the doors, mumbling that he’d pick us up at the exit point in a few hours.
He sent us downriver, and Hayden began distributing refreshments. She came prepared with an inflatable floating cooler full of snacks and tea and bottled water—she could always be counted on for things like that.
She poured us each a plastic cup of tea from a gallon container I’m sure she had made fresh especially for this outing. After she distributed them, she raised hers in the air and announced, “To a fresh start!”
“To a fresh start,” we echoed, tapping our cups together, and as we floated away from each other, I took a sip and immediately spit it out over the side of my inner tube into the river.
“Oh my god,” I coughed. “That is not sweet tea!”
“It is too,” Gabby said. “It just also happens to have some gin and vodka and tequila and cola.”
“Oh Jesus!” I moaned, taking one more tiny sip. “Ugh, that’s terrible.”
Hayden was drinking hers with a straw, and said, out of the corner of her mouth, “Tastes better the more you drink.”
I sipped slowly as I pulled my sunglasses on, then I tipped my hat forward, and lay back, letting my hands dip into the cool water. The sun soaked into my skin, warming me from the outside, the hard tea warming me from the inside as I rocked back and forth on the water. There was hardly anyone else on the river today. It was quiet, peaceful.
“If there is a heaven . . . ,” I began, my voice lazy and sun baked. “I mean, if we all get our own private paradise when we die, this would be mine.”
This is what I said every year as we floated downstream in the current, holding on to each other’s hands. Only this year, I meant it in a new way, because there was a part of me that really wanted—no, needed—to believe it. I wanted to believe that one day I’d be doing this, and there along the shore I’d see Mallory again, waving to me in her two-piece bathing suit, holding her camera up to take a picture, shouting, “Smile!”
“Yeah,” I heard Hayden say in response. I opened my eyes and sat up. Ahead of me, she was floating along, using her arms and legs to turn herself in circles, creating tiny waves that lifted my float up and down.
I looked all around, but Gabby wasn’t there. Her tube was floating alongside me, empty. Before I could say Where’s Gabby, I felt hands pushing against my butt and back and thighs.
“No!” I screamed.
I tried to call out Gabby’s name, but I was already flipped over and under the water—river water up my nose and in my mouth—before I could get any sound out. Underwater, I was reminded of that avalanche feeling once again, of not knowing which way is up or down. But something inside me, some instinct I was not familiar with, turned me around and forced me to kick up toward the surface, which I broke, gasping and shouting and splashing at Gabby, who was already climbing back into her tube.
“New rule,” she said. “Anyone talks about dying, they get flipped!”
“Not funny!” I yelled, still gasping for air and dripping wet, fishing for my hat and sunglasses as I maneuvered myself back into the inner tube.
Hayden paddled herself closer to me, and said, “Kinda funny.” She hooked her foot under my tube and then reached out to grab the handle on Gabby’s. She arranged us in a line, placing me in the center. We floated like that, not speaking, until we reached the end point.
As I looked up at the sky, seeing the clouds moving slowly the way we were moving slowly down the river, I wondered about our toast, whether or not it would really be possible to get a fresh start, to put it all behind me: Chris, and the pictures and Mallory, and my parents, and Neil, and my two best friends whose hands I was holding, and all of the messed-up shit that had happened between all of us.
Was it that simple? Just let go, and float away?