We stand in the grass-flecked dust beyond the abandoned football field of El Trampero High on the last day of senior year, a fact I’m on the way to forgetting until a husky voice whispers in my ear, breath hotter than the air around us, “What if somebody sees?”
A fair question. We’re partially sheltered by a copse of mesquite, but not exactly invisible. I can see the dull gleam of the bleachers through the branches, the CONGRATULATIONS, SENIORS! banner still strung up across the scoreboard, the small patch of folding chairs still in neat rows on the field, now cleared of people. If anybody wandered too close to the trees—maybe a janitor cleaning up after the ceremony—and if they bothered to look, I know exactly what they’d see: me, mud-brown graduation cap pressed low on my forehead, mud-brown robes flung open around my jean miniskirt and sleeveless black shirt, unbuttoned up to my bra.
And a tan, muscled hand snaking around my hips, burrowing beneath my skirt, strong fingers sliding against my zipper.
I lean into him, trying to feel Jake Mosqueda’s belt buckle through the layers of polyester and denim between us. The ground below burns the soles of my feet, my heels abandoned on the field. “So what?”
“Your mother will murder you.” His fingers dip a little lower.
“I’m eighteen.”
“Yeah, for three whole weeks,” he laughs. Lower, his fingers strum the elastic waist of my underwear. “Well, then she’ll murder me.”
“Good. Maybe then we can hire a waiter who doesn’t bang all the waitresses.”
The hand starts to withdraw. “Come on, princesita. You know I’m only about you. You’re the one who doesn’t want a boyfriend.”
“Don’t call me that.” I wrap my fingers around his wrist, keeping it in place. I know for a fact that he and Estrella rocked Silvia’s two-stall girls’ room during their shift break last week, because I had to cover my tables and the front door, and then I had to help Estrella tuck her tag into her pearl-buttoned shirt when she emerged. But who cares, because he’s right.
Jake Mosqueda is not my boyfriend.
Max Binali is not my boyfriend.
Oriel Trejo is not my boyfriend.
Will Fischer is not my boyfriend.
Jaime Aguilar is not my boyfriend.
The hand plunges and I forget them all and the whole world with them.
Plodding down Calle Tamara toward the restaurant, I slightly regret sending Jake and his rust-bucket truck on ahead. I’m hotter and damper now than I was sitting on the football field while Mrs. Short droned on about our bright futures.
As I’m patting my cheeks to check my eyeliner for sweat slippage, a too-familiar car pulls up alongside me. Diana leans over the passenger side of Marilee’s red Sebring convertible; her dad’s until last year, when he sobered up from his midlife crisis.
“Umm, hey Vanni, do you need a ride or something?” she asks, while Marilee inspects her signature baby-pink lipstick in the rearview mirror. They’ve ditched their caps and robes for the senior party in the arroyo.
In another world, like a next-door dimension where one tiny butterfly of a thing is different and so everything is different, I would’ve been in the backseat. In fact, who am I kidding? I never rode bitch. I would’ve been in the front, Diana happily and obediently scrunched up behind us.
“That’s okay. I’m just going to work.” I point up the road.
“Right now?” Diana frowns. “But it’s graduation! Aren’t you coming to the party?”
Marilee cranes her neck around Diana to eyeball me with the barest flash of recognition. I heard she’s starting in the teaching program at UNM in September. Diana’s sticking around to work at her parents’ two-man accounting firm; the only accountants in the county, they do everybody’s taxes and know everybody’s dirty business, which pleases Mrs. Reyes endlessly. Diana will sit with them every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening in the pews of the Shrine of Our Lady Parish, the church on our side of town—La Trampa has three Catholic churches, almost one per square mile—and probably marry one of the acolytes within a year or two.
In a next-door dimension, I would’ve dragged her out of town with me by her frizzy brown hair. Instead, I wave them off. “Maybe I’ll show up later.”
“Okay, well, say hi to your mom.” Diana smiles sweetly. Marilee speeds away, hair billowing behind her, the cloud of dust from her tires settling over my sweaty robes.
Probably I deserved that. When I stopped talking to them last year, stopped answering their texts, switched cafeteria tables and class partners, Marilee took it hard. It wasn’t a cakewalk for me, either.
But I had my reasons. When the Plan became a nonstarter, the last people I wanted around were the ones who’d helped form the Plan in the first place. And who could blame me for that?
I step carefully around a patch of sidewalk glittering with broken glass, keeping my eyes on the ground.
As I push through the door at Silvia’s, Jake immediately busies himself brushing imaginary dust off the little podium—today he’s playing host. Chalking the specials on the blackboard beside him, Mom turns and blinks at me in the bright doorway. “Vanni? What are you doing here?” Her dark hair beats against her shoulder in a careless braid as she walks toward me. Over the other shoulder, an ancient dish towel with faded flowers. She looks the way she always looks: beautiful and tired and determined. “I told you to go celebrate with your girlfriends!”
“It’s Saturday.” I shrug. “I close on Saturdays.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! I had you off the schedule weeks ago. Go enjoy yourself. Have some fun. And maybe you can stop at home and say hello to your father?” She pats her palm against my flushed cheek and smiles into my face. “We’re so proud of you. This is your big day.”
“Not that big,” I say, discreetly brushing chalk off my face.
Mom tilts her head. “It’s the start of the rest of your life, mija.”
“What life?”
It’s supposed to be a joke to slow the Vanni Pride Parade a little, but her forehead puckers, and I know right away I’ve stepped perilously close to the land mine always buried in the ground between us.
I back away from it slowly, so as not to set it off. “Just, because I’m staying here. I’m happy I’m staying, but nothing’s really . . . changing.”
Mom’s forehead smooths over; her smile returns. “Maybe not tomorrow. So? We’re glad to keep you for a little while longer. I took a couple of months after high school to figure things out too.”
Look how that worked out, I would never, ever say to her.
“Can I take your car?” I ask quickly. “To get to the party?”
“Of course.” She fishes for the keys in her skirt pocket and drops them in my palm. “Jake will drive me home later, won’t you, cariño?”
He dials the wattage on his smile up to Full Charm. “Happy to, Mrs. Espinoza!”
“Thanks,” I say. And when Mom turns away, I lean across the podium boobs-first and murmur below the hum of the swamp cooler, “Hope you washed that hand, cariño.”
He goes red to the tips of his ears, lets his blue-black hair flop across his forehead as he stoops to inspect a scratch on the podium. Jake talks big shit in stockrooms and hidden behind trees, but put him around my painfully cheerful, five-feet-nothing mother, and he’s a little boy. I laugh and head back into the killer heat, stopping on the way to the parking lot to bundle my graduation robe into the Dumpster.
In the sunbaked front seat of my mom’s old Malibu, I weigh my options. I could go to the house, change, kiss my dad on the cheek, and then head to the arroyo. Party with all twenty-six kids in my class, most of whom I’ve said maybe a handful of words to since junior year. Wish a couple of them well on their way out of town and commiserate with the kids staying behind.
I choose option two. Let it be known, I don’t enjoy lying to Mom. I always feel shitty about it, even when she does half the work for me by lying to herself.
La Trampa sits just off the Turquoise Trail, a fifty-something-mile-long road that runs down from Santa Fe, through Los Cerrillos and Madrid and so on, south toward the Cibola National Forest. You can drive it all the way to Albuquerque. It isn’t as fast as the highway, but all the tourist brochures say it’s one of the most beautiful drives in the Southwest.
I don’t care about that so much as that it takes me where I need to go. Half an hour later, I pull into the parking lot of the Bicentennial Pool, the nearest and only outdoor public pool in Santa Fe. It’s after five thirty, but jam-packed from the tot pond to the mushroom waterfalls to the big red slide, even when everyone should be toweling off their kids and taking them home for family dinner. Good thing they set up lanes for a lap swim at six. I take my time in the locker room showering off dust and sweat from my . . . extracurriculars with Jake. By the time I’m done, half the bright blue water is buoyed off, a few grown-ups in swim caps and goggles stroking back and forth. I slip into the cold pool with hardly a splash, maybe showing off a bit.
And why not? I earned this. Dad’s parents insisted he learn how to swim, even though they’d come from the ocean to the desert, so Dad insisted I learn. And though Mom could barely frog-paddle, and probably wasn’t thrilled to spend a couple afternoons a week driving me all the way out to Bicentennial, there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for Dad. There never was.
I freestyle to the deep end, fluttering my feet and reaching, reaching with long-but-not-too-long strokes, rolling my hips and shoulders at once, eyes on the bottom of the pool between breaths. I reach the far wall and flip-turn, swim lap after lap before I pause by the ladder in the deep end to catch my breath. Scrubbing my hair back, I blink up at the lifeguard chair a few feet from me, where a guard that Diana would’ve labeled an Unidentified Flying Hottie watches me.
He tugs down his little white visor and keeps half his attention on the water, half on me. “Nice technique.”
I’ve been told so. Casually, I paddle to the ledge in front of him. “You’re new here, right?”
He nods. “Lucas.”
“Savannah.”
“That’s pretty.”
I like the way his voice rumbles. Even from below, I can tell he’s not tall, but solid, with excellently proportioned biceps. Sandy-brown tufts of hair splay out above his visor; below, his eyes are green, surprisingly dark lashed. My own hair is a bedraggled mass of seaweed dripping down my back, I’m wearing my frumpiest two-piece—navy blue and high-cut—and though most of my makeup washed off in the shower, I suspect my resilient Colossal Chaotic mascara has smudged below my lids, like a football player’s eye black.
But fresh blood only comes around so often. I can try to work under these conditions.
“I’m here a lot. You’ll be around?” I flutter and twist one soggy curl around my finger.
He smiles, scanning the pool. “Just three days a week. They were only hiring part-time. Other days I’m at the Lost Lagoon. I lifeguard there, too.”
“That water park?” I heard one was opening in the desert just north of Albuquerque. There are a few small places in the city, like Cliff’s Water Mania, but the big park my parents sometimes took me to called the Beach closed when I was ten. I guess they shit the bucket (maybe literally) on a health inspection. Some other town in New Mexico bought the slides but never put them up, so now they sit in piles off the highway, all cracked plastic and bent ladders and tumbleweeds. “Is that place any good?”
Lucas looks down at me again, eyeing what might be my necklace, a tiny low-hanging pearl Mom let me borrow for the ceremony, but might be something else my mother gave me. “It’s pretty decent. You should check it out, you know?”
“I guess I should.”
In the parking lot a car honks once, twice, lingers on the third blast.
“My little sister.” He sighs. “My shift was up at six, but the cavalry’s late. . . .” Then he looks past me and waves, and I turn to see a blond lifeguard in her own fire-engine-red suit padding around the pool’s edge. “There she is. See you around, Savannah . . . ?”
“Espinoza.”
“Clemente.” Lucas pats his chest. Then he rises out of the chair and points a finger at me, like a promise, before striding to the locker room. He’s shorter than Jake after all, and slightly bowlegged.
It works for him.
I watch a few minutes later as he pops up beyond the pool gate, wearing a loose black-and-white baseball tee and carrying his duffel bag to an ugly green minivan parked right by the entrance. In the driver’s seat, his sister’s face is half shadowed by the sun visor, the other half streaked with light through the windshield, so all I can really see is her silhouette. Lucas slips into the passenger seat, and together, they crawl forward through the shrieking crowd.
I sink until my nose is submerged, eyes above the surface like a crocodile for as long as possible. Once I run out of breath, I kick off from the ledge and float backward, even though I’m in a lap lane. I’m weightless. I let my arms go, hands curling gently as they drift away from me.
My right thumb twitches.
I drop my legs so quickly I nearly sink, then paddle to the rough-bottomed shallows. Once I’m home free, I slog toward the stairs and out onto the hot concrete and then I plant my legs, flexing every muscle in them, and stand dripping and sizzling under the sun, simply because I can.