The Lost Lagoon’s been open only a few weeks, yet somehow it manages to look like a park on the edge of collapse.
Part of it’s the whole Atlantis vibe. I follow the directions on the billboard on I-25, park in the half-full lot, and walk the path to the front entrance. It’s shaped like a tumbledown coliseum, fake crumbled columns and all. Inside, the ticket stand and turnstiles are bathed in dim blue light like an underwater cave. I flash my El Trampero High ID to get the student price—might as well make some use of my education post-graduation—and resurface in the park. It’s big. Not, like, Florida-theme-park big, but it’s New Mexico big. I count five waterslides soaring over the tourists, with plastic aquatic plants and vines twined around the tubes. Larger-than-life severed heads of faux-marble statues border an unnaturally blue wave pool. There’s an extra-depressing chipped figure of Venus in her seashell outside the portable bathrooms, a kid’s cherry ICEE upchucked on her toes.
Half the attractions are still fenced off with Under Construction and Coming Soon! signs on the chain-link fence, so I start my search for Lucas at Neptune’s Pool, shaped like a moat around a miniature ruined temple. The lifeguard stationed on the island points me to a sandwich shop near the front of the park, the Sunken Sub, where Lucas is apparently on his lunch break. It’s one of two eateries in the park; the other’s a seafood restaurant—the sort of place that spells all the crab on the menu with a K.
Sure enough, I duck inside the Sub—there’s no actual door, but a curtain of streamers like multicolored seaweed—and spot him and his bright red suit in a corner booth.
Turning my back, I stand in plain sight at the front of the café. I study the sandwich case as if I have a great interest in lunch meats, leaning across the glass on tiptoe for maximum length of leg and maximum firmness of ass beneath my cuffed denim shorts. My calves are starting to tremble a little by the time he finally shouts, “Savannah!” I spin around, and he waves me over.
Would it be too much to say that I sway toward him? I don’t not sway. I take my time strolling to the booth, anyway.
Lucas tips his familiar white visor. “How’s the Sub of the Day?”
How should I know? I was concentrating so hard on being looked at, I spared not a glance for anything. I lean against the wall beside the booth, painted with fishes and eels and anemones, and pop my hip to the side. “Looks fantastic. So glad I came all this way just for a sandwich.”
He grins, all white teeth. It’s going well so far—a little cliché, maybe—but then I’m distracted. Because across the booth from Lucas is a girl hunched over an overly toasted panini that Dad would’ve tossed in a bonfire before serving, crushing her french fries into mashed potatoes with her fork tines.
“Oh hey, someone I want you to meet,” Lucas says. “This is my little sister, Leigh.”
She slouches back against her seat and looks up at me, and it’s like staring at a smaller, skinnier Lucas. Leigh’s hair, ambiguously trapped between brown and blond like Lucas’s, is chopped even shorter than her brother’s—tufts of it brush her ears and ruffle across her forehead. Same strangely dark eyebrows and eyelashes and big eyes, though hers are a muddier kind of hazel. Even her clothes could be his. She crosses her arms over a baggy boy’s tank top, crisp white and high around her neck, huge around her tanned shoulders.
“Do you work here too?” I ask.
He laughs. “God forbid! We’re still hiring, but they have this policy. You gotta be eighteen, and Leigh-Bee’s only seventeen.”
“Don’t call me that.” She scowls, swatting her brother’s hand away as he digs for a surviving fry.
“We live out in Los Cerrillos, but she’ll be a senior at Santa Fe Prep,” he continues.
“She has ears.”
“You like Santa Fe Prep?” I ask Leigh.
“I don’t know yet,” she says grudgingly. “We’re new.”
“My condolences.”
Lucas looks up. “Why, is it that bad here?”
“No,” I lie, biting my cheek. I was aiming for salty, but landed on sad. “There’s lots of stuff to do if you know where to look.” I grasp for an example. “Have you been to the Mine Shaft Tavern in Madrid?”
He shakes his head.
“It’s a lot of locals—bikers and tourists, but it’s pretty cool. I could show you sometime.” I tug on my necklace where it falls just above the V in my V-neck.
The noise Leigh makes is like the moan of a dying animal in pain.
Lucas winces. He slides his empty glass across the table toward her and points to the soda dispenser across the cafeteria. “Go get me a refill, Leigh-Bee.”
“Why?”
“You’re eating your lunch free, is why.”
“No, it’s costing me,” she says, and takes his glass and smiles through gritted teeth. It’s not Lucas’s smile. And her eyes, they’re sharper. I don’t know where the thought comes from, but if Lucas is soft-serve, she’s more like a snow cone.
And just a guess, but she doesn’t seem impressed by me, either.
When she’s gone, he laughs, looks at me pleadingly. “Don’t mind my sister. She’s shy.”
Shy isn’t the word I’d use. She’s Karen Goodstein, is what she is. Karen was a transplant from Connecticut in eighth grade. Strange enough on its own, since nobody really moves to La Trampa, the same way none of us leave. She sat in the back of every classroom, sighing mournfully. She sighed her way through school assemblies. She sighed while meandering back and forth across the basketball court in gym. Hers was an all-purpose sigh that said: I once had a rich, full, East Coast life, and now, I have this place.
Then again, I heard that even Karen Goodstein went to the party in the arroyo after graduation.
“No problem,” I tell Lucas, sliding into the booth across from him. Meanwhile, Leigh’s already abandoned her brother’s cup by the dispenser and wandered away. Probably for the best.
“But I’m glad you came by,” Lucas says, regaining my attention. “I’m driving out to Santa Cruz Lake this weekend. There’s supposed to be a meteor shower Saturday night, and maybe you want to come up? It should be something.”
My smile slips a little. The stockroom at Silvia’s is one thing, or the back seat of a rusted gold El Camino in a school parking lot, or the semi-sheltered patch of desert behind the football field. But a trip up into the mountains with a guy I just met? It’s not like I’m Susie Safe Choices, but even for me, that’s out there.
Maybe he sees this in my face, because he hurries to add, “Leigh and I are both going. We always watched showers up there, best place in town. Or outside of it.”
“I thought you guys were new?”
“New-ish. We moved from here to Boston with our mom when I was thirteen. Leigh was eleven. Dad stayed in the area, and we just moved back to live with him when our school years ended. But I came out a few weeks beforehand, applying for jobs and visiting the college and stuff. That’s how I walked into the Lost Lagoon.”
“You were in college in Boston?”
He nods. “I started at UMass last fall, but we . . . I wanted a change, and Leigh came too. So I’ll be at UNM in September, and Leigh will be at Santa Fe. You’ll like her when she settles in. We just, uh . . .” He rubs the deeply suntanned back of his neck and glances over at Leigh, now inspecting an armless plaster statue of a mermaid by the dessert stand. We watch as she scuffs her chewed-up brown Vans, shoves her hands into the pockets of her striped red board shorts, and brings her face close to its ample shell bra.
“Neither of us know many people around here anymore,” he finishes. “We could use some friends.”
I’m not sure whether to feel relieved or disappointed by our third wheel. I am definitely not relieved by his use of the word friend instead of maximally sexy soon-to-be lover.
“Maybe,” I say. Then I shrug demurely, remembering my mission now that Leigh’s not here to salt my game. “I might be busy. I’m hunting for a part-time job and I hear that can take a while, though I also heard there’s a water park hiring.”
He catches on with a lazy grin. “I guess I heard that too.”
“I have extra time, since I’m on summer vacation.” Though is it really a vacation, if it’s just your life? “I work shifts at my parents’ restaurant, but other than that, I’m not doing much. Plus I could use the paycheck.”
That part, at least, is 100 percent honest. A new cash flow would help. For a while now money has been tighter than tight, with Dad’s hospital bills and therapy bills and occasional home aide bills. I know the restaurant isn’t making as much, especially with half days, and we’ve had to hire an assistant manager to help Mom, and a new head cook to take over for Dad. Martin was his assistant, and though Dad would never say so, he must hate that the chef’s hat is outside the family for the first time. But it’s not as if I and my half-blackened grilled cheese and Campbell’s could put it on.
Martin’s good, he’s just not Dad. Martin doesn’t have Dad’s sixth sense for picking exactly the perfect jicama and avocados at the market. Martin can’t make an amazing menudo out of frozen onions and sheep’s feet. Martin can’t spin straw into gold. It sounds stupid, but to watch Dad cook was like watching a wizard in potions class at Hogwarts. The way he’d toss an unmeasured-yet-precise amount of spices onto strips of meat, the way he’d pulp soaked chilies in mere seconds, the way he’d juice lime wedges and lemon slices with one hand while stirring a simmering pot with the other. He’d tried to pass it all down to me, but honestly, he wasn’t a good teacher. He couldn’t explain how to spoon just enough filling into cornhusks, wrap them loosely and seal them just-tight-enough-but-not-too-tight with kitchen yarn to steam perfect tamales. Not when it came so intuitively to him. How would you teach somebody to sneeze? Instead, I’d watch him as he stood at the kitchen counter browning and chopping and stuffing. He probably hoped I’d absorb some skills just by being near him. But I never did.
Sometimes that makes me feel strangely hopeful.
Anyway, a little extra income definitely wouldn’t hurt my parents. If the rest of the staff at Silvia’s has second jobs, why can’t I? Besides, I like to keep busy. I like to keep moving. And anything that puts me and my swimsuit in Lucas’s path is a real bonus.
“You’re looking for something in the water?” he asks.
“Always.”
Across the booth, he pretends to size me up; at least, I think he’s pretending. “They’re full on lifeguards, but one of the attractions is hiring. They’re casting for the pool personnel next Tuesday.”
“What do you mean, casting?”
“You’ll have to show up to solve that mystery.”
Right, because wrangling foam noodles in a wave pool or packing children one at a time down a waterslide for four hours sounds delightfully mysterious.
He pops another fry. “But I think you’d be perfect. I’ll tell them about you, if you want, so you won’t have to apply for the first round.”
I don’t hear Leigh’s catlike approach until she stands beside the table, eyeing me in her seat. “A-hem.” She clears her throat. So original.
I take my cue to go. “Okay, I guess I’ll see you Tuesday.”
“Tuesday, or Saturday night?”
“Hmm.” I drum my fingertips against my mouth, pretending to deliberate whilst calling attention to my lips, like Marilee once taught me. “Let’s say Saturday night.”
“Yeah?” There’s real happiness in his gravelly voice, which pleases me, so I type my number into Lucas’s cell—deliberately not looking over at Leigh—and walk away with an extra sway in my step, just for him.
And maybe just a little bit to spite his sister.