“Ready?”
I nod before I answer. “Ready.”
She pushes and I leap, and between the force of both of us, I go careening into the water, howling. It breaks to let me in, and I descend into the bright light, the sound of Cherish’s whoop abruptly muffled because I’ve been swallowed up.
It’s cool—much chillier than I’m used to, because we always regulated the temperature—and it feels so good seeping into my scalp, through my underwear, soaking into my skin. It’s so refreshing that I stay under until Cherish is there, too, and then I open my eyes to greet her. When she and I rejoin hands and turn over at the same time to float on our backs, the fronts of our bodies are exposed not just to the night sky, but also to the occasional breeze we couldn’t feel before we came in. It sets goose bumps on our skin and makes our teeth chatter, but we stay in the pool.
We’re not whooping or hollering now; we aren’t laughing, either. The only sound is the water lapping against the edge of the pool and the popping sound our feet make when they slowly slip beneath the surface and then crest again.
After a while I can’t feel Cherish’s hand in mine anymore, but I know it’s there, under the water.
That’s what happens when you hold anything long enough; you stop feeling it, no matter how much you want to. No matter how much you try to treasure it, you can’t—and maybe that’s as far as most people ever know. That if you hold on, you lose the feeling. But I know there’s always a way to get the feeling back.
You have to disrupt the calm. You have to tighten your grip, crush it a little, to remember you’ve got a hold on something.
“RahRah?” Cherish’s voice is somehow both booming and muffled. It comes to me through the water and through the air, like it won’t take any chances of not finding my ear.
“Yeah?”
“What do you love most about me?”
Water sloshes against the side of my face, refilling one of my ears so that if I wanted to, I could tell Cherish I didn’t hear her question. It’d be half-true, except that I know what she said. It isn’t the first time she’s interrogated me this way.
Maybe it’s perfectly natural, something anyone would do. Maybe people often wear their neediness on their sleeves and it isn’t unique to Cherish. Maybe it’s not her void that makes her want an itemized recollection of the lovable things about her—but it’s the void I love most, and I will never tell her that.
“That’s too easy,” I say, as though to the night sky, and then I turn my head in the water and look at her. She bobs, or I do, both our bodies swaying with the water. “What do you love about you?”
Cherish smiles and looks back toward the stars. A lifetime as Brianne Whitman’s daughter, subject to incessant encouragement about self-love and validation, has prepared her to field my redirection.
“I’m kind,” she says, calm, as though she’s done the corresponding breathing exercises, too. “And I have a dimple.”
“Oh my God.”
Her laughter peels out of her and she has to press her head farther back into the water to keep from capsizing. I smile.
“RahRah?” she asks when she’s recovered. Her voice is smaller somehow and I know what she’s going to say this time, too.
“Yeah, Che.”
“I don’t want you to move away.”
I watch the stars, and what must be a satellite slowly crossing between them.
“I know, Che.”
“You can’t let them separate us,” she says. “I need you.”
Tears that probably look very much like pool water returning to its source slip down the sides of my face. It’s not because I didn’t know; it’s just because I love that, too.
I know it’s where you’d rather be . . .
. . . even if you can’t say you decided it.
So, I decide.
I choose the Whitmans’ house. I choose Cherish for my home, the way I should’ve done from the start. She’s the only person I still love when I hate her.
I pull my feet deeper into the pool and stand upright.
“I’ll stay,” I promise her, and water rushes from the crown of my head and splits into a million streams and rivers as it escapes my thick hair and runs down my chest and back.
Cherish is still on her back beside me, and when I turn to look down at her floating body, she closes her eyes against the pellets raining down from mine, but she doesn’t stand up to escape. I raise my hand above her so that thick droplets rush down the length of my fingers and fall across her torso. Eventually the water begins to run low, accumulating at the tips of my fingers torturously slow, like it doesn’t want to part with me. There are several beats between the pearls of water I send crashing onto her forehead, and Cherish squeezes her eyes shut until there’s nothing left.
After that, I trace my damp finger down her face slowly, from hairline to the space between her brows, and then again, horizontally, to cross it.
In response, she closes her arms over her chest, and when I can tell she’s holding her breath, I lay my hands on my best friend’s chest and stomach, then I press all the way down.
There’s something so peaceful about the way she sinks below the surface. She’s calm, only tensing when her body tries to turn or rotate from beneath my grasp. She forces herself to stay under my hands, and I wait.
I need to witness her resolve.
Underwater, glowing in the pool’s light, her eyes bat open after a moment and she watches me, but Cherish doesn’t fight.
Staring back at her, I start to smile as I take deep, antagonizing breaths, because she can’t.
Because the truth is, if we were going to get hurt when we were younger—sneaking into the pool under cover of darkness, after my parents were long asleep—there wouldn’t have been any blood. It wouldn’t have been the brick or the boulders or a freak accident.
It would’ve been one of our baptisms gone wrong. It would’ve been that one of us trusted the other too long, that we didn’t know we’d held our breaths past the point of good sense. That we’d cared too much about proving ourselves to each other in the secret way we somehow devised without ever putting it into words.
Tonight, I’m satisfied.
I’m ready to relent.
I’m about to take Cherish by the bra straps and heave her out of the water toward me, when a light bounces across my face, and a man’s voice booms through my backyard.
“Who’s there?!”
I can’t see him with the flashlight beaming directly into my face, but I know he’s one of the community security guards, called no doubt by a concerned neighbor.