We Are Pirates: A Novel (5 page)

Gwen wasn’t interested. This happened all the time, someone who was here, no matter where here was. “Who?”

Naomi grabbed Gwen’s arm and they dragged together toward the pool. Naomi hadn’t taken any of her clothes off. “I’ll show you.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“I’ll tell Coach I have my period. I want to sit and watch him. I saw him yesterday at practice.”

“We had practice yesterday? I thought it was a holiday.”

“Optional. He’s so hot.”

“Coach is not going to believe you. You just had it.”

“Ew, are you keeping track?”

Gwen had the sense to laugh, and Naomi gave her a little shove as they rounded the corner to the pool. It was a hard shove, on purpose maybe, and Gwen had to shuffle her legs a little to keep from falling to the concrete, and slap her hand against the tile to balance as Naomi rolled her eyes and went to the bleachers. Gwen didn’t mind. Gwen had fallen in love with Nathan Glasserman.

Cody Glasserman had a brother. Gwen watched him muss Cody’s hair as he strode toward the pool, a tiny loop of black cord around his ankle. His hair was long and shivery blond, and his little smile was crooked. Gwen kept her hand on the tiles. What was he doing here? A new Shark midseason? Cody slapped him back on the leg. It would be damp, with tiny, tiny hairs that fluttered their way up under the leg of his wrinkled suit. His arms gripped the curve of the ladder that rose out of the deep end of the pool and he casually lifted himself off the ground, his legs out straight like a pier, as he laughed at something Cody said. A shiver ran down Gwen like a drop on a windowpane, stopping between her legs with a sudden, breathy
snap!
She got for the first time why the girls in
Schoolgirls
opened themselves like that. If he walked right toward her now, took her hands to vanish around the corner to some private place, she would say yes before he even asked.

“I want you in the water!” Coach said. “Marionettes, lane four! Sharks, one through three! Freestyle, twenty laps, twenty-five for Division Three!”

The girls and boys moved. Gwen found herself in a herd of Marionettes of different ages, all skinny, not one with a burn on her leg. The boys and a handful of girls who would never be popular took lanes one through three, along with a few desperado dads like her own father, who looked for her in the hurry. She ducked his gaze, and Cody’s, and tossed her towel on the bleachers nobody sat in, because of a
wet paint
sign that had been up all year but still made people nervous. On the opposite bleachers Naomi was watching her, until Coach strolled between them.

“What’s with you, Wise?” he asked her. Naomi looked down at her jeans and then back up at Coach in an imitation of shyness.

“My period.”

“You just had your period.”

“
Coach.
”

“Don’t
Coach
me, Wise. You think I was born yesterday?”

Gwen looked down and put her swim cap on. Coach’s sweatpants were bunched up here and there like haystacks in a field. She would guess that, no, he had been born a long time ago. She stepped closer to the water and waited for her turn. Nathan was gone into the froth and the lapping. She could not hear what Naomi was saying, but Gwen knew that she would stay at the bleachers just like she wanted. She saw Coach flick his hands at her,
I give up,
and blow his whistle at the rest of them to show he wasn’t being a good sport, a little shriek in the splashy echo, and then she was up.

Desire propelled her through the warm-up. She was fast. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She was in love for the first time. The world tilted through this boy, as if through a prism, blue and foamy and full of possible dates. She was grounded but would see him every morning at the pool, and by the time she could go out again maybe he’d ask her out. She’d have to plan how to talk to him, get dressed quickly maybe and hang out outside until her dad was done with his stupid comb. She could picture him smiling at something she said, his hair still wet from the shower, where he had been naked. She thought for the first time in a year about Allan, this guy who worked for her father. The reception girl had walked in on him touching himself. Her dad had told her this, for some reason, and even used a hand gesture that she’d never seen before and tried for weeks to get out of her mind after she saw it, this tubular movement up and down on an invisible penis. She knew all about it now. Boys did it every day. The trick, Naomi said once on the phone, was to make them do it about you.

She breathed and kicked and thought about a dating guide she and Naomi had read in a magazine. She imagined him pondering the questions boys were supposed to ask before asking a girl out: Will she feel safe? Will she feel comfortable? Will she be interested in the date activity?

Coach blew the whistle. Backstroke. Gwen got a glimpse of him two lanes over when she flipped over and then had to stare high at the ceiling. One of the lights was burnt out, the sunlight smoggy through the skylights dirty with leaves. She counted tiles like always, he loves me, he loves me not, arching her back so her chest looked okay if he happened to glance over. She turned around and pretended not to see her dad giving her a goggled thumbs-up under a sign with a shark on it.

The Sharks raced, split into age groups at statewide meets. Marionettes were different. Coach warmed them up, but when laps were over the Marionettes moved to the smaller pool with Tammy King, the choreographer, because the Marionettes were part of the National Alliance of Synchronized Swimming Youth Division. They performed their routines competitively, but they never won the competitions. They were low in Technical Merit. Gwen didn’t care. She had joined the Marionettes because it was a place to hide. She was a good swimmer, she knew she was, but once you were old enough, you couldn’t be a girl and race. It meant you were a lesbian. Any girl who swam joined Marionettes when she was old enough, Gwen learned several years after she was old enough. Naomi had told her. She went too fast into the turnaround, and so did the boy in lane three, and they ran into each other, hard, their bones knocking a gong in her ears. She grabbed the side and sputtered, blinking wildly to see if Nathan Glasserman had seen her.

“You okay?”

It was Nathan Glasserman.

Gwen made her gasp sound, like a choking breath. The boy two lanes down, some other boy, turned around and Gwen saw that he had ugly legs. “I’m okay,” she said. “Just, uh, surprised.”

“Me too,” he said. He shook a droplet halo from his hair and gave her the grin she’d seen before. “I’m Nathan.”

His name was Nathan. “Gwen,” Gwen said, after biting her lip on
Octavia.
“You’re new, right?”

“Not new, just here with my brother to stay in shape. I’m on the school team, but the season’s out. What do you do?”

“For a living?”

Nathan laughed with his head back, all bright teeth and a neck she could encircle while slow dancing. “No, I mean what do you compete in?”

“Oh, I’m Marionettes.”

“That water ballet thing?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

“Some of those girls are hot,” Nathan said, and then tugged a piece of blond over his eye. Gwen saw he hadn’t meant to say that. “Are you on a school team too?”

He could not think for a second,
for a second
, that she was a lesbian. “No.”

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen,” she said.

He smiled again. “Maybe you’re too young for me to talk to.” His teasing her was so many things at once: Gwen’s desire for him, her shame at her desire, her embarrassment at her shame. They were jamming up traffic in the lanes, so Gwen had to move to the line of buoys that separated them. She was very close to him. She glanced over at Naomi, just a few feet away on the bleachers, and saw with some triumph that
now
she was watching.

“So what do you do?” she asked.

“Little of this, little of that,” he said. “Coach says I’m better at length. I might quit, though. Feel that?”

He held up his palm and she put her palm against it. She had no idea what he was talking about. Warm and wet. Out of the corner of her eye, Naomi’s hands moved.

“Not sure.”

“On my fingers. They get too wrinkly, it messes up my calluses. I play bass in a band.”

“What’re you called?”

He laughed again. “Satan’s Ass Cheeks,” he said. “Not my choice. We’re kind of, I don’t know, funky boom, the drummer says. You like Tortuga?”

“My dad’s in radio,” she said. “He’s getting me tickets.”

“Ticket
s
, like more than one?” Nathan said. “Take me.”

“Maybe,” Gwen said, instead of yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

Nathan reached out and found a little slip of hair that had escaped from her swim cap. He moved it around on her cheek. He hadn’t said how old he was, but he must have been a junior, not off to college in the fall but old enough to flirt like this. “Then I’d owe you a favor,” he said.

Now Tammy King blew the whistle. “Marionettes into the small pool,” she said. “Moonlight Dance.”

“My brother has your info on the roster,” Nathan said. “I’ll call you or something, okay?”

Gwen could not speak. She nodded like a diving board. He was the flower of the Jewish Community Center, slipping his smile under her suit, arousing selfish lusts and vanities in her breast. Bless the dirty sunshine, the four lanes, bless even her father and even on the days he blew water out of his nose. She pushed herself up with her elbows and dripped down joy and gratitude on the concrete while Nathan kept looking at her.

“Wait, you have something on your leg.”

Happiness is not whatever they tell you it is, a weightless bright light that lives private inside you. Everyone can see it. It is laid out for the world, stacked on shelves underneath the glare of everyone’s gaze. It belongs to somebody, each parcel of happiness, just one person at a time. Gwen had just realized what this meant. It meant, of course, that people could steal it.

“You just noticed that?” Naomi Wise had perfected a tone of casual disbelief that made stutterers out of heroes.

“Uh,” Nathan said.

“It’s freaky, isn’t it?” Naomi stretched her legs and rose off the bleachers so she was standing over Nathan, smiling in expectation. “We all call her
Spot.
”

“Spot.” Nathan couldn’t help it. “Good one. Good one.”

He let loose another laugh, and Gwen’s hope let loose too, landing somewhere in the water, ruffled and raging from stupid swimmers. Her bare hands clenched at her side, the hair he’d touched dripping down her face thicker than tears. She was a mistake, a burned and ugly mistake. Her head swiveled quickly, unattractively, to see who else was watching. A few Marionettes hurried by, pretending not to have heard, and Cody Glasserman, tiny skinny in his silly suit, stood just steps away with his hands on his hips, watching her with eyes wide and canine. The roar in her head, the thundering unfairness, the appalling malevolence of the whole wide world, her fury rising like some fish long thought extinct.
Good one.
So everyone knew, everyone a thief. She was a burnt bridge and she could never set foot in this place again.

Phil Needle, culprit and rascal, looked up from his list. There were several items crossed off, indicating deeds he had done, although to be fair, these were items he had just thought of, that he had already done, and then written down and then crossed off. Nevertheless his spirits were hoisted high. He was embodying the outlaw American spirit, clearly hopefully visible with Levine standing in the doorway. She didn’t knock. She wasn’t very good at that part of her job, or any other part. The reason Phil Needle had hired her was that there was no reason, really. Now she was here.

“You said staff meeting at nine thirty. It’s nine forty.”

Phil Needle looked at his computer in silent agreement. “Is everyone here?”

“Everyone except you. And you-know-who, I guess he’s late.”

“Dr. Croc.”

Levine cringed. He knew she hated to say his name. “Dr. Croc,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, and stood up to talk to his crew. Levine led the way. Her first morning he had asked her to proofread a letter he wrote to the Belly Jefferson people. Leonard Steed had suggested, if you notice yourself using one word over and over, the strategy of substituting the word “fruitcake” for the word you can’t stop using, and then going through the letter and reinventing the word differently each time. Phil Needle was having trouble with “inspiration,” and he thought he’d had it licked. Levine had found no typos, but as it turned out the letter contained six unchanged
fruitcakes.
After questioning, Levine had revealed that she thought the letter was somehow about fruitcake. She still worked here. Phil Needle was young once himself, and the Belly Jefferson people were so confused by the letter that they had called him, and after explaining what had happened, as well as two or three other stories about Levine that he invented on the spot, they had all laughed together on the phone, and now, just as he had planned, the first episode of his new show was almost complete.
Dear Renée, I bet your needs still aren’t being met, and Phil Needle Productions is veering closer to its destiny.