“Baptize me,” I say, when I’ve pulled her to face me, and I only give her time to nod before I fall backward into the deep end of the Whitmans’ pool.
The surface breaks and then the water is an open mouth that devours me whole, and Cherish is a wavy figure up above me. Raindrops are beating against the surface, just like they did in my dream, and then wavy Cherish walks around the edge of the pool, and I swim to meet her where she can stand.
My feet never touch the bottom of the pool. After I swim to the shallow end, I flip onto my back and float before Cherish, waiting for her hands to settle on my chest. When I surface, I don’t close my eyes against the rain. It’s warmer than the water that surrounds me, and I want Cherish to lie down with me, to float on her back the way I am and watch the clouds illuminate even though it’s the middle of the night. I want her to see it when the sky lights up; I want to squeeze her hand a little tighter when it catches me off guard. But I want to give her something, too, a reminder that we make each other powerful. That we let each other be. That we belong together, and whatever she is keeping tally of, there’s nothing more important than the two of us. Not even what Kelly said about Tariq. Not even if she knows. Not even if there’s something between them that I don’t know.
Cherish begins the ritual. The rain is falling onto my face, but she still lifts her hands from the pool and lets the water drip from her fingertips until it runs out. She still draws her finger down my forehead before crossing it, and then I put my arms over my chest and take in a long breath so that I am ready for what comes next.
But Cherish doesn’t push me down slow.
She doesn’t baptize me the way we always have—the way I last baptized her.
She puts both hands on mine, and with a burst of power that doesn’t match the girl who very recently was sound asleep, she shoves me back below the surface as hard as she can.
The thrust is too sudden, and it’s too unexpected, and my mouth pops open even though I don’t mean to breathe in. My eyes bulge and at first I don’t have a choice; I resist like a reflex. I struggle underneath her hands because I’ve inhaled the water, and I need to come up for air—and Cherish’s arms go slack.
She’s willing to let me up. Which means this is a test. This is Cherish’s way of asking me if I’ll resist, if she’s really allowed to be strong, if I trust her the way she always trusts me.
Control.
There’s no way to stop my body needing to breathe. I don’t know how to get control of myself without coming up first, but I refuse.
I grip Cherish’s hands so that she’ll hold me down, and I force myself to open my eyes, even though the rain is still disrupting the surface too much for me to see her face. She’s obscured just like the Cherish in my dream, but just like in my dream, I know it’s her. That has to be enough.
When there’s a fire raging through my sinuses like the water that flooded my nose has turned to lava, or like the blood vessels inside it are coursing with flames, it’s enough to know it’s Cherish.
It’s Cherish who shoved me into the water, so the pain that’s tearing through my head and up behind my eyes doesn’t change my mind.
My heartbeat is thundering inside my chest, but I can feel and hear it against my eardrums, and it hurts in a way I didn’t know a pulse could, but I hold Cherish’s hands so that I won’t come up.
My body is screaming, sending messages to every part of me that we are desperate to breathe, and I can’t inhale, so I force whatever air is left inside me out.
It’s a relief, and a lesson. Everything inside me was sure I needed to let something in, that there was no other way, that terrible things were imminent if I didn’t give in, but what I really needed was to expel even more.
There was something vital I was being told I could not live without, but I forced what little I had out, and still my body calmed. Still a tiny rest.
And all at once, I can feel the rain on my face again.
“RahRah!”
Cherish’s voice is sharp and loud, like I haven’t heard it in a long time. Like I haven’t heard anything.
There’s something sharp across my back, just below my shoulder blades, and it takes me a moment to recognize it as a step.
I’m not where I was a moment ago, in the center of the shallow end of the pool, with Cherish standing over me. She’s beside me, I’m propped up on the pool steps, and my nightshirt feels tight because she’s got some of it balled up in her fist.
“You have to breathe,” she says, and she’s patting my cheek.
I don’t know why but it finally makes me cough, like I should have when I first went under.
I buckle forward and clear my lungs, while Cherish wraps one arm around my back.
“You’re okay,” she whispers, and lays her wet cheek against my forehead while she rubs my arm. “You’re okay; just breathe.”
“I didn’t resist,” I say, and once I try to use my voice I realize how hoarse it is.
“You didn’t,” she confirms. “I pulled you out.”
When she pulls back and finds me smiling, she tries to bite hers back, but she shakes her head and lets it break.
“You’re awful,” she says, before pulling me into her chest, both of us sitting on the step, half in the pool and half in the rain. My body still feels limp and I let her hold me.
“Do you really think so?” I ask her.
“It wouldn’t matter if I did. You’d still be mine.”
I only smile in response.
“Nothing can change that,” she says. “Not ever.”
I hold her more tightly even though my arms feel like rubber, and the pain I felt in my sinuses is beginning to ache again. It’s throbbing itself back into my attention, reminding me that my body thinks something traumatic just happened even though I know better.
“Not ever,” I repeat, and then we’re quiet. There’s the pitter-patter of the rain on the surface of the pool and on our skin, and the low rumble of distant thunder. There’s the warmth radiating between the raindrops, and the way the clouds above us are holding light.
“I don’t remember the first time I saw you,” Cherish says.
“You don’t?”
“Mm-mm.” Her hand moves up and down my arm. “I remember the first time you smiled at me, but it wasn’t the first time I’d seen you. It was like the first time you saw me. It felt like the first time I realized I could be seen. Like you weren’t just a figment of my imagination.”
I could see a small Cherish, with perfectly diagonally parted ponytails, except her hair was twisted, and fastened at the top and the bottom by bobbles the color of the academy uniform. She was sitting with a gaggle of girlfriends, looking serene. Like no one had told her to feel out of place among them, even though her legs were the only ones that were brown, so that they would’ve looked dark no matter her complexion, and even though her lips were the only ones so full. She was so perfectly calm and confident where she was, and I felt every single set of eyes that landed on me like they all had edges.