As I look, Gina says something, and they both look up at the bleachers. They look right up at me.
I force myself to look away. I dig my phone out of my pocket and pretend to be taking a picture of Roya and Iris, down by the pool. They’re both wrapped in towels, their goggles hanging around their necks. Iris still has her cap on. She looks so pale without her freckles that it takes me a moment to realize it’s her—but then she looks up at me, standing there in the bleachers, and she sends a single gossamer thread of magic up to me. I feel it brush against my ear, cool as a drop of water, and I lift my hand to wave at her. I take the picture and put my phone away.
When I look over, Gina is gone, but the gray-haired cop is staring at me. She’s looking from me to Iris and back. She starts lifting a hand to wave me over, and I pretend I don’t see. I busy myself grabbing my bag and extricating myself from the bleachers, and then I take the long way down to tell my friends how proud I am of them.
Before we all leave, I look back at where the cop was standing. She’s still there, watching me. Watching us.
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t unfold her arms from across her chest.
She just watches.
And I have no idea what it is that she sees.
17.
WE TAKE ROYA AND IRIS out for lunch at the Crispy Chicken. True to their word, they fill Marcelina in on the meet, with stroke-by-stroke recaps of each of their events. They devour two Crispy Chandwiches each and share a huge carton of Crispy Fries. Roya actually growls at me when I reach for one. Marcelina takes her lunch break with us, her paper hat sitting in the middle of the chipped Formica table. Maryam asks her how she got her matte black lipstick not to crack even after a full morning of running the drive-thru window, and they do a deep-dive into a sponge technique that sounds to me like some kind of advanced alien technology.
“So what’d you think?” Roya asks, sorting through the Crispy Fries to find the perfectly balanced soggy/crispy fry of legend.
“Of what?”
“Of my ’fly,” she says, a smile curling the corners of her lips up like burning paper. “Did I kick ass?”
“You destroyed it,” I say, finishing the last of my strawberry shake. “You absolutely demolished it. The water looked scared by the time you were finished.”
She cackles and throws a fry at me. “Hell yeah it did,” she says, then turns to Iris. “Can you believe that was it? That was the last meet we’re gonna do.” She sounds giddy.
“I’m never gonna be this hungry again,” Iris says around a mouthful of Chandwich. “Or this tired. Or this chlorine-y.”
“Okay, kids, I gotta go finish the shift,” Marcelina says. She pats each of us on the head like we’re her wayward ducklings, then pins her paper hat back over her shining black topknot. “Are my seams straight?” She turns around, flashing us the back of her red uniform pants, which are embroidered with a large rooster tail.
“You look like a supermodel, mama.” Iris toasts Marcelina with her shake, and Marcelina gives her feathers a wiggle. Before she leaves, she turns and points at me.
“By the way, my house, tomorrow afternoon? I gotta do the thing.”
I spin my empty shake cup between my hands. “Sure,” I say, heat climbing my neck. I’m trying hard not to look like I feel bad about the thing I feel bad about. “I’ll be there.”
She gives my head one more pat, then goes back to work. I look at Maryam to see if I did a good job of not being guilty and terrible, but she’s already busy experimenting with Iris’s new contouring possibilities. I watch her fingers trace the lines of Iris’s face, leaving behind different shades of pink and brown. “I don’t know,” she says. “You’ve got such fine bone structure already. I think adding anything at all might be overkill, to be honest.”
“Well, feel free to keep trying,” Iris says. “I’ve never used that stuff before, so I’m a whole new canvas for you to play with. You win at long last. Go nuts.”
“I’ve gotta do the thing too, soon,” Roya says to me. “Monday? After school?”
“Yeah,” I say, still spinning my empty shake cup, watching Iris and Maryam so I don’t have to look at Roya and think about the elephant that Maryam was talking about. “Sure.”
“Great,” Roya says, and I can see her watching me out of the corner of my eye. “Perfect.”
* * *
Maryam drops me off at home after lunch and I walk inside feeling slightly sun-dazzled. It takes my entire body a minute to adjust to the transition from the bright, hot afternoon to the cool darkness of the house. I feel instantly sleepy and hyperaware of the sweat drying on my arms and back. I head to my bedroom, torn between taking a nap or taking a shower.
Thoughts of either leave my head the second I open the door.
“What the hell are you doing?!” I shout. Nico scrambles out from under my bed, one hand clutching a file folder, the other holding a bag.
The bag with the heart in it.
“Why are you in my room?!” I demand as I storm in, reaching for the bag in his hand. A corner of the duct tape on the front is peeling back, and I can see the corner of the letter J peeking out.
He jerks it out of my reach. “Chill, okay, I was just—”
“Don’t tell me to chill! What are you doing in here? Why were you under my bed?” My fingers are burning and my palms are prickling and I clench my hands into fists to stop myself from doing something I’ll regret. Something I can’t control. I can’t keep the quaver out of my voice, though.
“I’m trying to tell you, I was—”
“You have no right to be—”
“Oh my god just let me explain, you don’t have to be such a—”
“Don’t you dare call me—”
“WHAT IS GOING ON IN HERE?”
We both turn to see Pop standing in the door, hands braced on the frame. His entire face is red, all the way up to the top of his scalp, and his eyebrows are a long, low furrow of what-the-hell. He’s wearing his worn-out college sweater and a pair of cargo shorts, which is his sitting-in-the-office-all-day-reviewing-depositions outfit. If he could hear us all the way back in his office, with the door closed and his white noise machine going—we were shouting at each other at top volume. I’m out of breath. Shit. Shit. This is really bad.
Pop looks between me and Nico and the file folder in Nico’s hand and the bag in Nico’s other hand, which I’m still reaching for.
“Um,” we both say, and Pop crosses his arms.
“Nico was in my room,” I say.
“Alexis was being a total—” Nico starts, then catches the look on Pop’s face and stops midsentence. He doesn’t finish what he was about to say.
“Why were you in her room, Nico?” Pop asks, his voice strained with the extreme patience of a parent mediating between his kids. Nico’s ears flush and he mumbles something unintelligible. “I beg your pardon?”
“I was looking for something,” Nico says, just loudly enough to hear this time.
“What were you looking for?” I demand. “And why didn’t you just ask me for it?”