Every Little Thing in the World (24 page)

“That's cool,” said Cody. “I never thought of it that way.” We emerged from the trail onto a beautiful beach. Our groups should have camped here. The great expanse of sand, two fire pits, and the opening of trees made way for a steady stream of moonlight.

“Wow,” I said. “Did you know this place was here?”

“I did a little scouting earlier,” Cody said. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and let it drop to the sand. Then he took off his shorts. It felt too personal, too intrusive, to look at him, so I busied myself taking off my own clothes. By the time I'd undressed, Cody was already treading water, waiting for me.

I felt very conscious of the moonlight as I walked, naked, down to the water. Cody had left the extra beers with his clothes. I took the last swig of mine and carried the extra bottles down to the water with me, to chill while we swam. I
wondered if what Natalia said was true, that my breasts had gotten bigger. My hair felt wild on my shoulders. My muscles felt taut and strong. It felt unbearably sexy, sauntering naked through this wilderness, the hiss of cicadas and the coo of the loons pulsing all around us.

I dove in headfirst and swam underwater—like a fish—in Cody's direction. When I came up for air I realized I had gone in the wrong direction. He had to swim to catch up with me. We were both sputtering and laughing by the time his hands found my naked hips.

I could tell as his fingers straddled my waist that everything there was slim—if not slimmer than it had been before. We faced each other in the moonlight, chilling ourselves in the same lake water we'd used for a refrigerator. I let some of it lap into my mouth, trying to clear my suddenly fuzzy head. And then we fell on each other. His hands moved from my waist to my bare butt, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. We kissed and kissed, drinking each other like we'd been lost in the desert these past three weeks, Cody kicking his legs to keep us afloat. The physics of the water kept our activity to just that—kissing, kissing, beneath the insistent and all-encompassing moon.

By the time we paddled ashore, we were practically paralyzed by the cold water and the delicious, tingling frustration that might be satisfied at any moment. There was no question of continuing our makeout session on the sand—it was much too cold. Instead we shivered into our clothes, nowhere
near what we needed to stay warm, retrieved our beer from the water, and headed back to camp.

The party still raged, now mostly centered around the fire. I could hear Silas's and Brendan's guitars, and drunken choruses of “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Peering through the smoke, I saw that Roger sat next to Brendan, leaning into him slightly as he played. Meredith was on the other side of Brendan, singing away in a sweet contralto, and I realized that even she was drunk. I took a quick inventory of the crowd and felt relieved that Mick was nowhere nearby.

Cody and I separated to go to our tents and bundle into warm clothes. “Get your sleeping bag,” he whispered, squeezing my hand and planting a kiss somewhere between my lips and nose. I squeezed back. Five minutes later I met him by the lake, bundled into my fleece jacket and wool cap, and of course carrying my sleeping bag—ever obedient. We grabbed a few more beers from the lake and headed back down our path.

The perfect beach waited for us under the perfect moon. Cody zipped our sleeping bags together, and for a while we sat on top of them, talking and drinking. The noise from the party mixed seamlessly with the buzz from the forest. We swatted mosquitoes and linked elbows, talking about swimming, school, and hometowns. Close as I felt to him, I didn't say a word about any of the things that had been most pressing on my mind. Not Natalia and Mick. Of course not my pregnancy. After a while we crawled into the sleeping bags. Cody's hand, still chilly, found its way under my shirt. His tongue
traveled into my mouth. His hand warmed up, squeezing one breast, then the other. My head fogged and buzzed deliciously, with the beer and the blueberries and the night. The woods and the boy.

It all felt so good, so good. Nothing like Tommy, or even Greg. I could see that full moon over his shoulder. I couldn't care less about the bugs. His hips pressed into mine. That I could reveal everything to him—my body, my desire—and not let on what I carried inside me made it all the more unreal. Cody pushed up my coat and let his tongue wind around my nipple. I closed my hands into his hair and moaned.

Cody moaned too. He slid one hand into my jeans, and then unzipped them. I realized he wasn't wearing any pants. When had he taken off his pants? I realized that through all of this night, I hadn't made a single move to stop him from doing anything. Shouldn't I have at least pretended to protest? I remembered Mick's words, which must, no matter how much he liked me, be echoing in Cody's mind:
She's a goer
.

Maybe it was true. My jeans were around my ankles. My breath panted so close to Cody's ear, so loud and exposing, I thought I would die from wanting him inside me. I could sense him gearing up to make that plunge—his face so close to my own—and suddenly I couldn't breathe at all. My short, encouraging breaths had somehow morphed into long and shuddering ones.

“Get off me,” I heaved. “Please. I can't breathe.”

I started struggling against him, as if he and the sleeping
bag combined to make a straitjacket. Cody pulled back immediately. I clawed at the zipper. He calmly reached over and unzipped from the other side, then threw the top bag off of me. I jumped up, pulled my jeans back on, and ran toward the lake, hyperventilating.

It was not a windy night. Cold air settled gently around my bare legs. I realized that my shirt and jacket were still bunched up above my breasts, and I pulled them down with a desperate yank. I stared out across the water, wondering if my frantic, honking breaths could be heard back at the party.

I could hear Cody behind me, approaching cautiously. He stood next to me and placed a hand on each shoulder. “Here,” he said. “Sit down.”

I lowered myself to the ground. Cody moved his hand to the back of my head and slowly pressed it down between my knees. Then he rubbed the place between my shoulder blades in light, comforting circles. “Just take it in calm,” he said. “Out with the bad, in with the good. One breath at a time. Let it slow down. You're all right.”

Gradually my breathing went back to normal. One or two cycles of oxygen was all it took for mortification to set in. “Oh my God,” I said in a squeaky, despondent voice.

“It's okay,” said Cody, and I started to cry.

“I can't,” I sobbed. “I'm so sorry. I really, really want to, but I just can't.”

“You don't have to,” Cody whispered. “You don't have to.”

He put his arm around me and held me close. We stared
together out across the water. After a while I stopped crying, but we didn't say anything more. We just sat there, until there was nothing left to do but zip ourselves back into the sleeping bags and cling together until the moon melted into morning sunlight, and the cool night air transfigured into dew.

chapter thirteen

cliff diving

After Silas and Jane had rowed a canoe full of empties to leave on Backwater Jack's doorstep. After we had eaten the last can of baked beans for breakfast, and pulled down our tents, and made our bleary, hungover way to our canoes. After Cody and I had said a sheepish and awkward good-bye, letting our fingers part from each other slowly, and I had watched him row away with a pretty blond girl in the front of his canoe. After all that, we set out on our own way, back toward base camp, exactly five more days to spend on the water.

It was the hottest day yet, and I felt terrible. Physically wrecked, a hangover like I'd never experienced. My body trembled from someplace beneath my skin, a tremor that rocked my nerve endings. I tried to row from my shoulders, but my hand kept slipping off the butt of my oar. Poor Brendan, in only slightly better shape, had to propel the canoe almost entirely on his own. In the morning I had seen him and Roger come out of the same tent, with pale faces and messed-up hair. Clearly Brendan had used those condoms himself and was definitely the worse for wear.

But Brendan wasn't pregnant. And for the first time in six weeks, I had to completely, entirely admit that I was. The smell of Meredith's damn butterscotch ripped through my respiratory system like a chemical weapon. I couldn't get that glass of lemonade out of my head. My stomach heaved with the remains of the beer and the disgusting blueberry wine. I felt like I'd developed an allergy to my own body. I felt like dying.

We stopped for lunch after only a couple of slow hours on the water, at a flat stretch of sand girded by rocky cliffs. I guessed we'd rowed barely three miles from last night's party, but that may have just been my sudden and all-consuming pessimism warping my perception. Brendan and I dragged our canoe onto shore.

Mick and Natalia pulled up just behind us. Natalia jumped out of the canoe without looking at me and walked purposefully toward the fire. I could tell she was furious about my obvious hangover, and I braced myself for her lecture on fetal alcohol syndrome. As Mick came toward us, I also braced myself for his remarks about my behavior last night. But instead he walked over and thumped Brendan on the back.

“Dude,” he said. “Have an interesting night last night?”

Brendan and I froze. I reached out and grabbed his hand, as if the pose of us as couple could still protect him. Mick laughed. “Give it up, you two,” he said. “The cat's out.” He smiled and rumpled Brendan's perfect hair with what could almost be called fondness. Brendan and I looked at each other, then back at Mick.

“We thought it might bother you,” I said to Mick. I tossed the words out softly, like a hand grenade, not sure how strongly they would be lobbed back at me.

But Mick just shrugged. “I'm cool with it,” he said. “My brother's a fag.”

And then he walked up toward the fire, his bare shoulders looking less red, less freckled. Natalia must be putting sunscreen on him in the morning, I thought. Brendan and I stood for a second, still holding hands, watching him go. And I would have bet that Brendan also replayed that vision in his head, Mick killing the guy in the tunnel to save his brother. His brother the fag.

“Did you ever notice,” Brendan said, “that whenever Mick talks about home it's always his family? My brother, my sister, my mother, my aunt. It's cute. Sweet. It all sounds so cozy.”

“Yes,” I said. And then, “He surprises me.”

“You and me both, honey,” Brendan said. “You and me both.”

At the fire pit, Jane dug through our food bag and empty cooler. All we had left were canned pineapple, a bag of flour, some severely dented cans of tuna, and a sack of brown rice. Natalia suggested using the flour to make tortillas. She held up the little Camp Bell cookbook, a battered and stapled pamphlet stuffed in with the food supplies.

“It will make such a terrible mess.” Jane sighed. “Maybe we can do it later in the week, if it comes to that.” She sent us
down to the water to search for freshwater clams. “We can just boil them,” Jane said, “and then dump out the water.” I'd seen the clams all along the trip, clinging to rocks and roots, but never imagined they were edible.

“Do you think these are safe?” Natalia asked. We stood thigh-deep in water, collecting the clams in our T-shirts. They were small and smooth, about half the size of the steamers my mother sometimes ordered at seafood restaurants. They made a musical noise, clanging together like muffled bells as I plopped them in, one after another.

“It doesn't matter to me,” I said. “I'm not eating these. I can't eat anything. I feel like hell.”

Natalia knelt to pick up another clam. She looked cool and perfect, not shaky at all, and I wondered if she'd had anything to drink last night. Without looking at me, she dropped a clam into her T-shirt and said, “Morning sickness?”

“No,” I said sharply. “Not morning sickness. Hungover. I have a hangover.”

“Oh,” said Natalia. She faced me now, her eyes flatly sarcastic. “Right. It couldn't be morning sickness. You're not pregnant, right?”

I felt a surge of fury, along with a desperate need to change the subject. “What about you, Natalia? Has Mick inseminated you yet?” I almost added something crueler, about Margit becoming a grandmother, or her parents inheriting a new child. But the meanness of that one remark already made my head hurt. And anyway, Natalia looked completely steeled to anything I might have to say.

“A lot you'd care,” she said. “You haven't asked once about me and Mick.”

“That's because I really don't want to hear about it,” I said. “If you must know, it makes me sick how fast you turned on Steve.”

“I'd think you'd be overjoyed,” Natalia said. “We'll be home soon enough, and then Steve will be all yours.”

My already shaky insides went pale: that she would see something so faint within me when I hadn't admitted even in my own mind that it was true. “You don't know what you're talking about,” I whispered.

“Don't I?” she said. She shook one hand dry, and I noticed for the first time that she'd stopped wearing the tinny Irish wedding ring Steve had given her. She walked out of the water, cradling the clams in her shirt. As she brushed by me she whispered, “Little slut.”

I stood there in the bright sun, the water all around me, watching her walk up to the fire pit. Steam rose from the pot of boiling water, and Natalia dumped the clams straight in from her T-shirt. I followed after her and did the same. She refused to return my glance, which—she might have been surprised to know—was more wounded than angry.

Is that really what you think?
I wanted to say.
Little slut
. Little slut.

I pictured Cody rowing along, not far away, on this hot and sparkling lake. And I prayed that whatever he was thinking, it did not include that pair of words, their rhythm (little slut, little slut) guiding his oar through his own foggy, hungover mind.