Chapter 13

13

The first part of this story begins with the petrichor candle. The second starts with the Midnight Rose lipstick. My two cylinders of doom.

Both were associated with Akilah Jones, but she was innocent in all ways. The candle wasn't her fault, and what happened at Morning House on Ralston Island had nothing whatsoever to do with her except that I was there, and I owned a tube of Midnight Rose lipstick she had given me because she thought it would look nice on me and my weaselly thin lips. It's like when they were making me in the workshop, they were about to ship me when they realized they hadn't given me a mouth and someone said, Just draw a straight line. We gotta send this one. Her mom is fully in the hospital with her feet in the stirrups.

I know this is not how babies are made. Or mouths. But hopefully you understand. I like my thin lips. (I know I just called them weaselly. It's just that if I ever try to put on lipstick or anything like that, my margins for error are literally very small, and if I get it wrong there's lipstick everywhere and I become Big Marlowe Clownface.)

The lipstick had stood on the crooked dresser in my room for that first week, a tiny monument to my pain, a reminder of all that was lost and all that could have been. Every day, when I applied the scant amount of makeup I wear, I considered picking that lipstick, but I couldn't face it. But that late June morning was juicy. You know how some summer mornings are just so ripe, so full of warmth and scent and sunlight that it stirs a deep evolutionary impulse to live out loud, as the inspirational signs say? Or just say rosé?

That day, I decided, I was going to try harder to be perkier. I would do my best with my regulation cargo shorts and maroon polo shirt. My hair is about as long as April's so I tried putting it up in bunches, but it ended up looking like a lopsided pair of Mickey Mouse ears. When I took it down, I'd accidentally given it a little bump in the middle, a beachy wave. I was getting some sun on my face and a smatter of freckles over my nose. I didn't hate what I was seeing. Without thinking too hard about it, I snatched up the Midnight Rose, pulled off the cap, and nailed it . I flipped my wrist in the right way and there it was—the ideal Marlowe mouth. I spent five minutes trying to take a good picture, five more picking out and editing the picture, and then probably ten convincing myself it was a good idea to text Akilah, before deleting the text at the last second.

The lips were so good, I was determined not to waste them. I even skipped breakfast so I wouldn't mess them up.

I should not be trusted with good lips. They gave me swagger .

I walked outside, into the cheery June day, the light soft, buttery yellow with a pleasing hint of gray. Liani sat in one of the big green wooden chairs by the lagoon, dressed in her red suit, reading. I decided I should go and talk to her, make an effort to be more friendly. I came around the side, looking out over the water like I had just come to admire the view.

"What are you reading?" I asked.

" The Fire Next Time ," she said, tapping her tablet to the next page. "James Baldwin."

That was one of those books that I knew everyone really had to read, but I never had. I would. I mentally put it on the list.

Liani, not a fool, knew I had come over to make conversation. She set her tablet down on her lap and looked at me. Why had I come? Just to talk. But about what? What could I do to reach out to her?

She was a bold and strong person, a smart person. I would be direct. I sat down on the ground by her and picked at the grass.

"I'm sorry about all the stuff you've been going through," I said.

"It's not your fault. You had nothing to do with it."

It was kind, but she was making it clear that I shouldn't insert myself into this. It was truly not about me. But she accepted the effort.

"You really can't swim?" she said.

"I can," I explained, "just not properly. I don't do laps right. But I can be in the water and I'm fine. I just kind of..."

I modeled my strokes, which involved tiny dinosaur paddling arms followed by windmills. Liani cracked a hint of a smile.

"But I wish I did," I said. "You swim every morning and night, right?"

She squinted and looked into the distance.

"I do," she replied. "I swim more now than I did before. It helps with the anxiety. When you get in the water, everything else goes away for a while, and it's so much work, you get out tired, clearer."

I suddenly thought, looking at her in her red swimsuit, of the red dress she had been wearing that night when she jumped into the water to pull Chris Nelson's body to the shore. No matter how you felt about your ex—jumping into a river, pulling them out, trying to revive them—that had to be brutal. Liani was traumatized, and she stayed by the water, always ready to pull someone out.

"Is it easier to be here on the island this summer?" I asked. "Away from town?"

She regarded me curiously.

"Yeah," she said. "It is. I'd rather deal with strangers in the lagoon than see everyone from town."

While it wasn't the same for me—she'd dealt with death—I understood the feeling of wanting to be around strangers, away from the town where I was the one who burned down a house. We were both hiding away on Ralston Island.

"We're going to have a massive storm," she said. "You heard?"

I'd seen the headline, but I hadn't read the articles.

"This is going to be huge," she said. "Like a hurricane."

"Are we going to leave?"

"No reason," she said, shaking her head. "This is the most solid structure for miles, and it's higher. This place is a fortress. We have water and food, plenty of batteries. It's safer to be here for a day than a lower building on shore."

The first Uncle Jim boat was puttering up to the island. I got up and wiped the grass from my legs.

"You look nice," Liani added as I went to go. "Nice lipstick."

It was the talk we had, not the lipstick, that turned things that evening. But it was the lipstick that gave me the swagger, and the swagger took me to Liani, and it was Liani who proposed the group swim that evening, after dinner.

"Get one in before the storm," Liani said. "It turns out she can swim. You want to come?"

She nodded to me.

Swimming sounded cold, to be honest, but I was being invited.

"Definitely," I said.

We cleaned up and I went back to my room to put on my bathing suit. It was a black two-piece, with boy shorts and a tank that I'd scored on sale at Target for about ten bucks, and I loved it. I felt like a cat burglar in it, like I should be climbing over roofs and sneaking into windows to steal the prized diamond necklace. Sometimes outfits give you ideas . I considered reapplying the lipstick, but I wasn't going to chance it. The perfect lips that morning had been luck.

I trailed out of the playhouse with April, who I was sure was going to have a pink two-piece or something like that. She surprised me by wearing a blue one-piece that was all business. She caught me by the hook of the arm and half skipped down to the lagoon. I'll admit to a little heart flutter. Not that I liked April that way. Still, I was responding to the gesture. If a cute girl hooks your arm and wants to skip, you have to skip at least a little.

Liani and Tom were already down at the lagoon. Tom was looking at his phone while dangling his feet in the water. Liani was testing the sturdiness of one of the ladders.

"Pool noodles!" Van yelled. "We need pool noodles."

I didn't see him, but he emerged a moment later from the stone lagoon hut, arms full of noodles. He dumped them into the water, save one.

"Just put them back," Liani said. "I'm not dealing with your noodles."

"I love noodles!"

Van ran around in a circle for a moment, waving his noodle around. The pool noodle.

"We know," April said with a smile. She dropped her towel on the grass and took a running leap in, letting out a high-pitched yowl of temperature shock as she entered the water. Van went soaring in after her, in one long-legged leap. He immediately started swimming for the noodles. Tom slid in, and Liani dove into the back.

I stepped over to the shallow edge of the water. The surrounding walls of the lagoon were made of flat silver-gray stone, with some jagged, uneven edges. The water was a clear green, and I could see the silt and stone of the bottom, with its questionable black frondy things. I put in a toe and found that it was exactly as cold as I thought it would be. Didn't matter. I was going into this cold, frondy water.

I jumped, feetfirst, and had no time to scream from the icy sensation—I had been hit in the back of the head with a pool noodle.

"I fight you for control of this Queer Kingdom!" Van said. "Take up your weapon or forever be straight!"

I grabbed a nearby pool noodle and commenced battle with Van.

It was stupid. It was fun. Even with the wall, it felt like we were fully in the river. I'd been in the ocean before, but I always felt a bit guarded. This felt wild, so different that it seemed like I was being rebooted. Maybe even being restored to factory settings. Everyone was in the battle. Pool noodles everywhere. We were laughing, ridiculous tour guides playing games in the pulsing river, the wobbling line between the United States and Canada. After maybe twenty minutes or so, we all flopped on noodles and floated around in a loose circle.

"It's going to suck when they take this over," Liani said, adjusting her red swim cap. It had almost gone over her eyes.

"Who bought this place?" I asked.

"It's called something like the Liberty Pals," Van said. "Freedom Jags. Something something Freedom Liberty Superfriend Jamboree Emporium. Big money, so oil or tech or something like that. We get the place for one summer. After that it turns into Castle SuperPacula and they'll use this place to do their keto and racism. Oh, that's a first..."

Something had attracted his attention. We all turned. Riki was crossing the lawn, heading for us, wearing a pair of black tank shorts and a matching rash guard top that zippered up the front.

Goth girls swim too.

Everyone else got a bit still, except for Van, who back-kicked around on his throne of noodles. Riki walked up to the stone edge of the lagoon and dropped a towel, then pulled off her shoes.

"What are you doing?" Liani asked.

"I'm going to swim," Riki said plainly.

"You've never come down to swim before."

"Well, I'm coming down to swim now," Riki answered. "Is this a private lagoon?"

Liani waved a hand, indicating that Riki should do what she liked.

The mood had frosted over. I'd liked that feeling, of being in this group of people. I wanted it back. But I was also glad that Riki was in the water with us. I wanted it all—the juicy June warmth and my lipstick and my new friends and Riki in the water with us.

It was time to open up to them.

"I guess I should explain my fire," I said.

This had the desired effect. The attention was back on me. Van splashed closer. Riki took a few long strokes out, but was within earshot, I noticed.

I told them the whole story—about Akilah's yellow sweater and Guffy's and petrichor. I told them how many reviews I had read and about the thirty dollars. I explained that I'd worked for Juan and Carlita.

"I wasn't trespassing," I said. "I was allowed to be there."

"That doesn't sound like your fault at all," April said. "That sounds like, I don't know, a manufacturing error or something?"

"That's what the fire department said. But the house still burned down. Mostly."

"What happened with your girlfriend?" Van asked.

It was presumptuous to call Akilah my girlfriend, but I didn't correct him. I dug my nails into my palms.

"We just went back to work," I said. "We didn't talk about it. People said stuff to me about it."

"Dicks," Van said.

"And then Akilah got a job at the Cheesecake Factory. And I came here. That was it. We broke up."

Riki was pretending not to listen to all this, but barely.

"Some people would take that as a compliment," Van said. "If a guy burned a house down for me, I'd probably marry him. This is my problem."

"You really would," Liani said. "And it really is."

Dr. Henson passed by on the lawn above us, camera in hand. She looked down at us curiously, all swimming together, like we were exhibits in a museum.

"I respect the way she despises us," Van said. "When I get to be however old she is, I'm going to despise people like me too. It looks fun."

"She doesn't despise us," April said.

"Disagree. It must be good for her too, because look at her. All that yoga and history and resentment of the youth."

"Do you think she doesn't like you?" I asked.

"You should have seen her face the first time she came into our school to teach our seminar," Riki cut in, floating closer. "It was like she was a famous chef and someone was making her work at McDonald's."

"I thought she seemed fine," April said as she bounced gently off the bottom of the lagoon.

"Remember how we had to explain to you that Cruella de Vil wasn't a nice lady?" Riki said.

"I was seven. I thought she liked puppies."

This was as close as I'd seen to a normal interaction between any of them and Riki.

"She's coming," Tom said.

"Act natural!" Van tipped his head over his noodle throne, sticking his head into the water and his ass into the air. Dr. Henson glanced at this but didn't deign any other reaction.

"I have a research student from Yale coming tomorrow," Dr. Henson said. "When she arrives, bring her up to my room. She should be here on the first boat."

She looked over all of us again, making some mental calculation, and walked back up the lawn to the house.

Van had pulled his head out of the water and turned, water flying from his tangle of long curls.

"Bring her to me," he said in a deep voice. "Bring me the student! Bring her to my chamber!"

"She doesn't hate us," Liani said. "She's here to write and research. She just doesn't care what we're doing."

"Well," I said, "she kind of does."

Five faces turned to me.

"I mean, when I got here the first day, she told me to kind of keep an eye on everyone and tell her if anything was weird."

"Like a spy?" Liani repeated. "She said that? Dr. Henson?"

"I thought she meant it as a joke," I said. "But I don't know. It was strange, how she said it."

"Aw," Van said. "So that's why she brought you here. She wanted a mole."

"No," Tom said. "She doesn't give a shit about what we do as long as we do our jobs and no one drowns. She just wants to work on her book."

Riki suddenly swam to the edge and climbed out of the water. She grabbed her shoes and towel and, not bothering to use or put on either, walked back toward the house. Liani noted my look of uncertainty as I watched Riki go. Van kicked water at April, and she laughed. Tom broke into some laps. Liani came up beside me.

"Word of advice," she said. "Be careful there."

I didn't have to be Sherlock Actual Holmes to figure out she had noticed me looking over and that "there" meant "with Riki."