“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.
Even accounting for my coughing fit, it was baffling that I hadn’t heard the crunch of dry leaves underfoot as she’d snuck up on me and I wondered how lost in thought I’d been. When my heart slowed and I could focus on something other than my breathing, I gave her a once over, liking her vibe, but trying to figure out where she could’ve come from. With her fluffy undercut and crisp, v neck t-shirt layered beneath a worn looking letterman’s jacket, she didn’t look like anyone else in good ole Huntington and, unless she went to one of the religious high schools, I would’ve had to have seen her in the hallways at least a few times.
“Do you go to Huntington High?” I asked, before feeling like a dope for blurting that out without even so much as a what’s-your-name to ease into a conversation.
“I will,” she said, reaching over and plucking the cigarette from between my finger before taking a long drag and passing it back. Fuck, she was cool. If I tried to reach over and take someone else’s smoke, I’d look like a theater kid trying to catch a football, all fumbles, but she was pure swagger. “I just moved here from Columbus.”
While my knowledge of Columbus was, admittedly, limited to the zoo and COSI, I knew enough about it to know she had traded down with her move. Don’t get me wrong, Huntington wasn’t the worst place you could live. There was enough of a population that there were festivals and shows to see, decent restaurants, a Starbucks. Compared to Columbus, though, it was tiny and quiet and not necessarily in a good way and this girl, this lanky, female James Dean, definitely belonged somewhere with a city backdrop.
“Oh,” I answered. “Why?”
Again, I internally kicked myself for my blunt response and seeming inability to follow the guidelines of a normal conversation. Again, the girl answered me like I wasn’t a circus freak, gliding by my awkward mannerisms and nosey questions like they were nothing.
“My dad just got a position teaching chemistry at Marshall. Apparently, someone abandoned their position mid-year and it was a pretty urgent move, which was nice because he’s been adjunct faculty at community colleges for a while and that really sucks.” She smiled at me and I noticed that one side of her mouth curved up a little higher than the other and that curve led into a deep dimple. “I’m Lennox.”
Do not say anything weird I ordered myself. It worked, I guess, because my response was the totally predictable: “I’m Hannah. Hannah Justice.”
She ignored my addition of a last name, or at least didn’t offer up her own. With agility I couldn’t even begin to imagine possessing, she hoisted herself up onto the rail beside me and surveyed the woods around us. There was a spot on the bridge next to her finger where the paint was chipped and she absently flicked the edges, widening the hole so that more of the metal underneath was exposed. Gray steel in a sea of gray paint.
“I was supposed to start school today. We moved in over the weekend. Then my parents thought it would be awkward for me to start, go for three days, then leave for break and let everyone forget me.”
“I don’t think anyone would forget you,” I blurted. Immediately I felt the heat rising into my face. I considered flinging myself from the bridge just to avoid having to make eye contact again. “I mean, that’s such a great hairstyle,” I added, trying in vain to seem less horrible at communication.
She started to smile again, that same crooked, dimpled smile, but out of mercy, suppressed it. “It really is,” she deadpanned, and relief flooded my face.
Ariana Grande suddenly cut through the air with her vocal brilliance as the song “God is a Woman” alerted me to the time. It was getting late and I knew from experience that without that timer, I would lose track of time, and end up getting a lecture for disappearing for too long. I pulled out my phone and silenced my alarm as quickly as possible, my sudden jerkiness almost causing me to slip off the rail. Lennox’s arm wrapped around my waist before I lurched down into the muck beneath me.
Our eyes met as I caught my breath. “You saved me,” I said in the stating-the-obvious way that was becoming my trademark communication style.
This time she was the one to blush. Red tinted her edges; the blush crept up her neck but stopped just below her chin. It tinted the bottom of her ears but stopped before it found her cheeks until she suddenly realized she’d kept her arm around my waist a little longer than normal. With a jerky movement of her own, she pulled away, and the red found its way up to her eyelids.
“I guess I did,” she replied.
That night, after I had said goodbye to Lennox and fumbled an invitation to hang out again sometime, after dinner with my mom and little sister, the three of us lined up in a straight row at our island counter, after homework was over, I sat at my computer with one goal in mind: find the solution to my inner doldrums. Make something happen.
I knew it was cheesy even as I did it, but I couldn’t think of another way to word my dilemma: I typed “things teens can do to improve their lives” into Google. I knew that was a bust from the moment a list starting with “do well in school” popped up, especially since my 4.5 GPA hadn’t done much to improve my fulfillment level so far, but I kept looking, figuring if I scrolled long enough, there would be something different. After an hour of scouring the internet, I was pretty dejected. Suggestions like “make a drastic change to your hairstyle” and “make a fucking scrapbook” (okay, maybe the fucking part was my own addition) were not what I was looking for; they were exactly the kinds of shallow, mundane crap I was running from. I stared at the chalkboard wall behind my bed and read the lyrics of people who could make me feel. Lyrics I had scrawled when I was so desperate to taste something, touch something that was more. Underneath the Paramore lyrics I’d read a million times, I listed my next moves in loopy letters with a broken piece of lavender chalk. Three choices from the hour of searching that, if nothing else, had some potential.
1) Do one thing you’re afraid of.
I liked this one because the one thing that I would do was so obvious, if not exactly a pleasant thought in December weather: I’d cliff dive at Grayson Lake. After my failure the first time we’d gone to the lake, I hadn’t even tried to jump on the second trip. While my friends made made the trek to the top of the mountain, I’d stayed behind, my toes submerged in two inches of sand. After freezing up so spectacularly the first time, I’d tried to make an excuse not to go along at all, but when Marley kept hassling me about it, I tried a different tactic. I knew I couldn’t even stand on the rocks and look down after last time, so I’d used my pasty, lack of tan as an excuse to stay put below, slathered myself in baby oil, and spent the next two weeks with peeling skin.
Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off Marley and Jake as they flung their bodies off the edge of a cliff and even after they admitted that they’d been scared in the seconds before they’d stepped off the edge and into air, they wore matching looks of exhilaration when they made it back to dry land. I couldn’t help but interrogate them after they submerged from the water below.
Did it hurt when you hit the water? I had asked, even though that wasn’t the part that made me chicken out. In truth, I think maybe it was that movie, the one with the girl from Gossip Girl that made me so scared: The Dive from Clausen’s Pier. In the movie, a guy is paralyzed after he dives off a pier into shallow water. I was so afraid of that concept; the idea that I could just follow behind my friends, see them leap to safety, but I could hit some danger that was lurking there, unseen beneath the murky waves. One thing I was afraid of that I would do: I was going to cliff dive at Grayson Lake.