The Lost Lagoon is long since closed by the time Leigh’s van screams into the big empty parking lot. She slams us into a spot in the very back beside the stucco wall surrounding the lot, crushing the brakes underfoot, and the whole car shudders. My body rocks forward, the seat belt burns against my skin, I clip my tongue with my teeth and taste the blood. “Chingado,” I hiss, but my exasperation melts away as I look over at her. Weak moonlight and the dim glow of the park through the windshield ignites just a sliver of Leigh’s skin here and there—a slice of jawline, a bare shoulder, an eye, river-bottom dark—but I love the puzzle the pieces make.
“Shall we?” She wags her eyebrows and pops out of the car, pausing to grab her backpack from the trunk.
“What about cameras?” I ask. “Our contract said we’d be filmed for security.”
She shakes her head. “Only at the front entrance and in the buildings, the stores and stuff.”
“Which you know because . . . ?”
“Lucas. In June these kids hopped the fence after close and got caught messing around on the slides. They wanted to go down without the water running. The security guard checks those regularly—”
“So they do have security.”
She waves one hand. “They have Mike. I casually interrogated Lucas. So stealth, right? It’s almost insulting that he wasn’t suspicious. He said the staff does a sweep when the park closes at eight, and the janitorial crew cleans up for a few hours, but unless there’s a work crew fixing the piping or a ride or something, it’s just Mike after that. When he actually caught the kids, he just yelled at them for trying to break their necks before he kicked them out. No actual cops called. Anyway, we’re not going on the slides, and we’re not going in through the front.” Leigh starts to hike toward the park, then stops to slip her fingers through mine and squeeze, so hard it almost hurts. “Hey, you want to turn around?”
As if I’d say yes.
When we’re halfway across the lot, we juke to the side, angling for a part of the brand-new chain-link fence away from the main entrance and illuminated turnstiles. It’s twice as tall as I am, but not exactly impenetrable. No barbed wire curling meanly along the top, no sun-bleached skulls of past trespassers on pikes. Maybe security’s so lax because the Lost Lagoon is out in the desert. It’s fifteen miles off the highway, surrounded by scrubby, barren plains and sandy ridges and hills freckled with mesquite shrubs. Kids have to be the ambitious kind of assholes to graffiti penises onto these waterslides. But tonight of all nights, I wouldn’t care if there were cameras or sharp spirals of wires or severed heads. I don’t want to worry about the consequences. I don’t want to worry about anything more distant than the pavement directly underfoot, still freshly laid and velvety black.
Besides, it’s the frailty of our plan that makes it perfect.
We follow the fence, aiming for a spot between the public entrance and the utility entrance, which I know to be just behind the park security office. That’s where misplaced children wait for their parents, or staffers scold double-parked cars over the speaker system. If Mike is chilling anywhere between rounds, it’s probably in the office. When we can’t see the parking lot anymore, Leigh picks a place. Hitching up her backpack, she wedges one toe of her ratty brown Vans into the chain links, curls her fingers around the new metal. I hesitate for a moment, but then I jam my tennis shoe in and I’m pulling myself up, racing to the top. She’s hard and lean and I’ve got twenty extra pounds to haul, but my arms are strong, stronger than hers. It’s a quick, thrilling climb. Leigh’s barely swung over the top and started down the other side when she drops to the ground, staggering. “Ven acá, guapa,” she says, stretching her arms out as if she’ll catch me. I let go and hit the dirt half on top of her, the shock of impact singing up through my ankles.
And then we’re both inside.
Naturally, the park looks different at night, so it takes a second for me to place us. We’re in a corridor of dust behind one of the waterslides. It looms over us against a blue-black sky. The way it ripples downward, I can tell it’s the one called the Tide; it shoots out park guests into a deep, circular green pool with plastic starfish and clay barnacles plastered to the walls. Leigh stares up at it; her neck craned backward, the arc of her throat silhouetted. I dart in to kiss it. She wraps her fingers around my chin and pulls my lips to her. My lip gloss squelches against her warm, dry skin.
Laughing, I shake my head loose.
I steer Leigh around the Tide, and though it’s not pitch-black, it’s pretty dim. There are barnacle-encrusted iron lamps along the concrete path between attractions, but only every third bulb is aglow. And all the signage on the rides and on the abandoned popcorn booths and ice cream carts scattered throughout the Lagoon is dark. I wouldn’t call it creepy—though the crumbled statues look more convincing in the dark—but it does look unnatural. There’s no evidence of people, no trampled snow-cone wrappers or cigarette butts or busted flip-flops. The janitorial crew took care of all that. But I swear, I can still detect the sweat and sunscreen smell of them.
“What if the park never actually closed, and everyone here was just abducted by aliens?” I ask Leigh. “And we’re the only ones left?”
“Don’t I wish,” she snorts.
In that moment, I wish it too.
Lights or no lights, people or no people, I know my way to Mermaid Cove. Keeping our eyes peeled for Mike, we stick to the dirt just off the paved path. We’re careful but not that careful—because honestly, what’s the worst that can happen to us?—as we snake past Neptune’s Pool, the little temple at its center looking particularly ruinous after hours. Toward the back of the park we creep, by the looping slide called the Shipwreck, the spiraling slide called Charybdis, passing nobody before we reach the arched, fake-ancient wooden gates set in the cinder-block wall around the Cove.
I’ve never been in through the gate, only the employee entrance hidden in back, inside a fake cave in the rock. There’s a very real metal padlock on the latch, but the painted wall isn’t much taller than us. After I massacre Leigh in Rock-Paper-Scissors, she sets her back against the wall, squats, and braces herself to boost me up. I put a foot on her thigh and a hand on her shoulder as she wraps her hands around my calf. Then I can reach the top of the wall. My palms scrape rough cement. She pushes, grunting in a way that’s unflattering for both of us, and I haul myself up like I’ve done so many times on the basking rock. Once I’m perched on the foot-wide shelf I lean down, to help Leigh drag herself up after me. Sweating and panting and scratched, we drop down the other side. There are no lights on in the Cove, only the very faint haze of the lamps on the other side of the boulders and the moon and the stars, but all we have to do is follow the path. It spits us out on the footbridge over the water. Our footsteps are hollow thuds as we cross it to the very center, where we lean our elbows on the wooden railing, peering down.
And I thought the black-painted pool was murky in the day.
“Um.” Leigh’s voice echoes around the boulders, unexpectedly thunderous. “You didn’t tell me you worked in the sunken city of R’lyeh.”
“Huh?”
“Home of Cthulhu? Underwater monster god? Possibly your boss?”
The pool looks bottomless and icy and alive, oil sequined with moonlight. Like the house bejeweled in cow skulls by the lake, I think it’s beautiful, in its way.
Leigh dumps her backpack on the wooden beams of the bridge—I hope she’s got big fluffy towels in her overstuffed bag, because it’s after eleven by now and the desert air has long since cooled. I’m still only in my T-shirt and Tinkerbell shorts. Shaking in the dry breeze, I scuff my legs against each other and try not to recall how cold it was in the water with the heater off that first day at work. Instead, I problem-solve a route to the pebbled pool deck that’s supposed to be inaccessible to tourists. If we backtrack to the foot of the bridge, climb the railing, and push off, it’s only about a three-foot drop to the deck—
Leigh’s shed tank top whaps me in my face. Then the sweatpants she’d worn rolled to the knees not a moment ago. Pawing her clothes off my head, I turn just in time to see her in her black sports bra and Y-fronts and bare feet, mounting the slim railing. She straightens and wobbles with her toes over the edge, brings her arms out, biceps tight, and bends forward just as I realize what she’s doing.
The dead center of the bridge where we stand is at least five feet up from the water, the top of the railing another three.
“Leigh,” I say frantically, “don’t, it’s not deep enough to—”
She snaps her arms up and dives off the railing headfirst, taking all the breath in my lungs with her, but on the eight-foot fall, does a sloppy kind of half layout just in time to fall into the pool on her back. With a thunderous and sharp smack, the water parts to envelope her, leaving only violent swirls of light on the black surface.
Until she rises a few feet out, swearing. “Motherfucker!” she gasps, palming her short hair back off her forehead. “It’s been, like, five years since I did that. Forgot it hurt like a bitch.”
My breath stutters and restarts. “¿Qué chingados, loca?” But she’s already laughing and then I’m laughing too. “¡Esta noche estás como una cabra!”
“It’s colder than a fucking Eskimo fart,” she chatters. “Get in!”
I peel off my shirt and shorts and scuff out of my sandals. Before I can think about the night air on my skin, I unzip Leigh’s already-full backpack and cram our clothes inside—maybe it’ll keep them warm for us, at least. I wobble onto the railing, the wood grain rough and cool below my fingers and feet, and execute an extremely elegant cannonball into what feels like the just-melted ice at the bottom of a beer cooler. The cold water swallows me, plugs my ears and sets every part of me on fire as I plunge. I sink to the slick tiles, kick off and come up a little way from Leigh. She wraps her fingers around my arm underwater to tug me closer. We’re in the deeper end by the big basking rock, so in a tangle of limbs we tread water, holding on to each other, her warm breath shuddering across my neck. All I’m thinking about is Leigh and all I’m hearing is the gentle lap of the pool and the animal roaring of my heart.
After minutes or hours like that, we paddle our way toward the rock. Leigh pulls herself out, scoots backward across the stone, and hugs herself, legs tucked to her stomach and arms crossed over her knees. Her teeth click together as she stares down at me. I stare back up at her, at the water beading down her neck, her shoulders, her knees, her slim, sharp ankles. If I licked them—though I won’t—she’d taste like chlorine and soap and salt.
“Don’t,” she says.
“Don’t what?”
“You always look at me like that.”
“So?” I ask, bruised. “Why can’t I look? Maybe you don’t like your body, but I do.”
She shakes her head and snorts, hugs her knees closer. I grab on to the rock, resting my chin on my arms. “How can you not see how fucking gorgeous you are?”
“Can’t it be more complicated than that? You’re gorgeous. You love your body?”
“Yes,” I say at once, though it is complicated. I love how I look, I love my hips, my legs, my muscles. I love what my body can do. I hate that it might betray me—or that my brain might betray my body, more like.
She watches my smile fade. “Oh god, let’s not talk about this.” She forces a laugh, and then in a shivering voice says, “I just want to see you do your thing.”
Leigh’s never watched me swim. Even if she’d been to a mermaid show, that wouldn’t be swimming. It wouldn’t be me. Without my legs pinned together, I’m free to go flat-out.
Pressing my feet against the submerged base of the basking rock to push off, I do.
There’s this thing that happens every time I push off the wall. It’s like nothing else. From above, I probably look like any decent swimmer stroking along. I don’t have the perfect body for it, and as I said, I’m definitely no Olympic hopeful. My fastest time in the 100-meter freestyle was barely less than a minute. But below, I feel like some weightless animal, something born down here. Like my body was made to slip through the cold, thick honey of the water, and this is the only way I’m really meant to move. Before I’m tired, before I’m breathless and aching, there’s just potential.
If I could just stay in this moment forever, my body would never let me down.
By the time I make it back to the basking rock, I don’t know how many laps I’ve swam. Not as many as I could, but I haven’t moved at full speed—at competition speed—for so long, and so I am breathless and beginning to ache.
I toss my arms up onto the rock, letting air rip through my lungs. Now it’s Leigh’s turn to haul me up, and I drop down beside her, dripping and gasping and shivering. She rolls over, folds herself on top of me, and grabs the sopping hair behind my ear between her fingers. “You fucking goddess,” she murmurs, her dark eyebrows furrowed. “What are you even doing here?”
“I’m with you,” I pant, sinking into the hard plaster beneath me. “Obvs.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Her fingers loosen.
“What?”
“You’re not here because of me. Just, take the test or don’t take the test, and if you didn’t have it or if you did, that’s okay, you could still come to Boston! You could go anywhere you wanted. You’re so fucking strong, you can do anything.”
There are so many things I could say. Casual things, flirty things, clever things. But even though my breath is settling, I can’t make myself say any of them. “Sometimes I have these dreams. Like, we take Dad to the doctor’s office, and they draw his blood and look at it through a microscope, and then they say ‘Ah, okay, we see the problem, eat this weird turnipy-looking thing, or burn this piece of paper, or put this dead chicken under your pillow when you go to sleep tonight, and you’ll be cured.’ And I’m so happy. Then I wake up, and I remember it’s not, it’s not just a thing I can put down and leave behind.” I swallow noisily, stupidly. “And I don’t feel strong, just scared all over again.”
“But you are strong. Maybe that’s why Lucas wanted you to be my friend . . . he knew you were so tough, even I couldn’t fuck you up.” She untangles her hand—my head rocks painfully back without the support—and props herself up on her palms to inspect me from above. “He was right, wasn’t he?”
I can feel her sinking into one of her strange moods, but I don’t want to fight, or worry, or think of anything at all. I don’t want to talk about how scared I am, or how stuck. I don’t want to be that girl, not tonight. I just want Leigh, and to be the girl who belongs with Leigh.
The girl who has one good thing.
So I don’t wait for her to answer. Instead I reach up for her, my pruned fingers skimming her arms, and pull her down on top of me. She gives in easy, her chest on my chest, her sharp hips cushioned by mine. I run my hand across the tight skin of her back, the wet band of her bra, and down to her briefs, and with an “Unf,” she slides her tongue between my lips. I nip it with my teeth, and her fingers scrabble at the waistband of my underwear and below. I crawl backward down the basking rock, and do what Leigh taught me to do.
For a while it’s just breath and touch and body heat and the breeze.
We’re like that until we’re not. The next thing I know, Leigh’s pushing off of me, glancing back over her shoulder. I don’t know what noise caught her attention, but before I ask, she points to a spot of light dancing over the boulders by the mouth of the tourist’s path. A flashlight, its bearer coming this way.
So I guess Mike doesn’t just check the slides.
This time I’m the first to move. I grab for Leigh and slip as smoothly as I can back into the pool, newly freezing now that the night air has dried us. Leigh follows me in, and then under, where it’s so dark and there’s nothing but the water bubbling past my ears. I keep a death grip on her hand, my fingertips pressed into her knuckles. I’m trying to tell her not to surface, to follow me. I stroke one-armed, slower and smoother than usual so we won’t make a sound. It’s only ten meters or so till we’re below the bridge; I’ve swam the length of the Cove so many times, I’ve got it memorized. Ten meters isn’t far, and once we’re there we’ll never be seen. We can cling to the ropes for as long as it takes until the security guard moves on. Leigh’s backpack is still up above, but if he finds it, maybe he’ll think it was left behind by tourists. He might just drop it in the Lost and Found. I’m not excited to sneak back to the car barefoot and dripping wet in my underwear, but at least we left our phones and wallets and keys in the unlocked van, so it’s not that—
Leigh’s hand tugs out from mine only a meter or so from the bridge. When I turn and slit my eyes open, I can’t see her in the near-perfect dark. I feel for her, but can’t find her. Maybe she slipped, or got turned around, or maybe she panicked, unused to holding her breath. My own lungs are getting tight, so I surge forward until I think I’m in the shadow of the bridge. I rise as spashlessly as possible to shouting directly overhead—Mike, on the bridge. “Hey, let’s go, get out of there right now!”
That’s when I see Leigh, halfway out in the deep end of the pool.
From this distance and highlighted only by the guard’s wavering flashlight beam, I can’t see her face. I can’t tell what went wrong. I guess it doesn’t matter. She strokes toward the pool deck without glancing back, leaving me safely tucked away under the bridge.
But I can’t let her get caught alone while I hide. I can’t be Rose, floating on the only flotsam in the ocean while Jack Popsicle-izes. Without thinking—why start now?—I swim out and follow Leigh to our fate.
Water trickles from my ponytail and down my neck, along the rungs of my spine. I’m already soaked through—I tugged my clothes on right out of the pool, feeling tight and coarse and miserable, like a snake trying to slip back into its shed skin—so what’s a little more misery on top of that? But I concentrate on the slow, cold trail it leaves so I don’t have to feel my cheeks burning. I inspect my wrinkled fingertips, the goose-bumped brown skin on my legs, the stupid little pixies printed on my shorts. Anything so I don’t have to look up at my boss.
Eric sits at the little metal desk in the park security office while the guard hovers by the door, hands crossed behind his back, yielding command. “Savannah, I just—” Eric starts. “Do you understand how serious this is? What would’ve happened if Mike hadn’t called me?”
I stare at a loose hem thread curled along my thigh to avoid his eyes. And to avoid the half bottle of Largo Bay atop the desk, and the twisted sandwich baggie of buds, both pulled from the depths of Leigh’s backpack.
Though she sits beside me in her own expanding puddle on the seat of her plastic orange chair, I don’t look at Leigh, either.
We might’ve gotten away free if I hadn’t crammed our clothes inside her bag. When Mike ordered us out of the water, we crossed the deck reluctantly to the spot where the guard could help pull us up over the railing. He let us pause on the bridge to get dressed, cut his eyes to the side while we hurriedly yanked out shorts and shirts and sweatpants. I really think he would’ve shouted at us, told us we were being stupid kids and marched us out of the park, where we would’ve walked and then run to the car, flushed with cold and adrenaline and gasping with laughter by the time we reached it . . . if one of us hadn’t tipped over the backpack in our haste, spilling out the bottle and the baggie. Then we had to give him our names, tell him our story. When he herded us back to the office, I thought he might call the police.
Instead, he called my boss.
“I didn’t mean . . .” I try again. “I didn’t think . . .” Another drop slides down my shirt.
“Of course not.” Eric sighs. “Because if you had been thinking, it might’ve occurred to you that you’re not just a stupid kid.”
That startles me into glancing up at last.
“Jesus, Savannah.” He leans forward. He doesn’t even seem angry, just rumpled and weary beyond an unpleasant wake-up call from park security at midnight. It’s because he’s underdressed, I decide. Without his whistle and bullhorn and park badge, he doesn’t look like the crisp director of performing park personnel. Just like a nice, tired, middle-aged guy. “You’re legally an adult, you know?” he continues. “Do you understand that? And you trespassed on private property with illegal substances. And with a minor. That means municipal court, not juvenile. That’s an arrest and a fine—you could face jail time for this. You should’ve been thinking about your future, at least.”
“I’m sorry,” I mutter, cold through my sopping clothes, through my skin, to the bone. Suddenly I’m shivering so hard I worry I’ll rattle the screws loose in my cheapo seat. Leigh’s smart enough not to reach for my hand, so I wrap my fingers around the hard plastic ridge to keep from shaking.
“Well, I’m sorry too.” He leans back in the squeaking desk chair, scraping a hand over his abnormally furred jaw. “I truly am. You’ve been a great employee. A great performer. But I can’t have you back at the Cove. Not this summer, and not next.”
“You can’t have me back,” I repeat numbly as the words sink in.
I’m fired?
I’m fired?
I’m fired. . . .
Then his words touch bottom, unsettling silt and debris inside of me, and I realize I’m not a mermaid anymore.