“Forget Leonard, Meredith.”
“He’s the one who got Mack started on the coke.”
The oars are poised above the water and I’m frozen. She says it like I’m supposed to know, but it’s the first I’ve heard. It fits, though, and that chills me.
“I shouldn’t have told you. I’ve ruined everything.”
“It doesn’t bother me at all. If he’s letting cokeheads come to his party, he’s not who I thought he was. Forget it.” What I’m really thinking is how I’m going to blast Mack tomorrow morning. What the hell is he thinking about? All the stuff he’s heard from me about my dad and he thinks he can screw around with that garbage and not get into trouble?
About this time the oars are getting heavy. And I’m thinking maybe I should’ve rowed around the houseboat instead of coming all the way up here. It’ll be twice as hard rowing back against the current. If my arms give out and I can’t row, it’ll so wreck everything. Can you see any girl—even a nice, considerate girl like Meredith—liking a guy who made her row them home? Jeez, I am such an idiot.
What would Holden do? He’d let the boat float and put his arm around her. Duh.
But I can’t because the current’s headed the wrong way, and my mind is spinning about Mack. I’m not that far gone to forget we’re in a boat. When you grow up around water, you learn to be respectful. Although I keep on rowing, I’m slowly turning the boat so Meredith can see upstream while I battle the current. She’s quiet, her face still turned away.
“Hey, you okay? Here’s the bridge I was telling you about. See how the creek just keeps on going?” I wait for her to say something, anything. “Can you see? Is it too dark?”
Of course it’s too effing dark. “Never mind. Stupid idea anyway.” I know I’m mumbling, but the whole situation is…I’m a total failure. Who would take a girl in wet clothes in a rowboat to see a bridge when it’s dark? Only yours truly.
Once she sees the running lights on the deck of the houseboat, she perks up. Only sniffles every once in a while. She’s probably embarrassed. What can you say after you’ve cried over something like that, the stupid things guys do? I’m giving her time to get over it. I concentrate on rowing, even whistle a little, though it sounds lame out here in the blackness, only the ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum of car wheels running over the bridge stress seams. Even that fades into the creek’s quiet lapping. Mack using cocaine? That means I’ve really been out of it, a frigging ostrich.
Right now, though, Meredith’s here, waiting to be charmed. I’ll deal with Mack tomorrow. I’m damned if he and Yowell are going to spoil my night with Meredith.
“Here we are. Home sweet home.” I dock the rowboat as gently as I can next to the houseboat. After I twist the line around the cleat in the neatest figure eight I can make, one-handed no less, I swing my leg up over the side. Kneeling on the deck, I offer my hands to help her up. The doppelgänger sheet is bunched up in the bow of the rowboat as if the other half had decided to nap there rather than butt into her sister’s private time. All of a sudden I wonder if that special communication between twins means that Juliann knows when I kiss her sister. Can Juliann feel what Meredith feels? Does sixth sense mean that a twin can share her twin’s experience? What pops into my head is that movie where the alien girl zips out of her skin to make love just by touching. You know, the movie where the nursing-home folks swim in the neighbors’ pool without realizing they’re stealing the life force of the aliens. That kind of nonphysical sharing.
It’s not like Meredith’s a regular girl who can go home to her own room and undress by herself. She has Juliann, waiting, curious, fully able to look at her twin sister and see through any deceptions. Oh God, this is over-the-top complicated.
“Hey, Daniel.” Meredith shivers a little where we stand together on the deck. “Were you going to give me a tour?”
I shake my head to clear it. My hair, still wet from the Yowells’ pool, feels like a bowl of ice wrapped around my head. Hers, long as it is, must be like a polar ice cap.
“Oh, sure. You’ve never been here before.”
“Ah… no.”
She smiles at me, at my ridiculous self for making such an inane comment. Like I don’t know she’s never been here before. Jeez.
“Welcome to our houseboat, Nirvana. This is the deck.”
She laughs again. Mom always says I can be charming when I want to be.
I unlatch the main cabin door and push it open. “The Landon living room. As it appears on a regular basis.”
There are newspapers on every surface. The sink is piled with dishes. Three bird feeders are on the table, little houses with their roofs raised, begging to be filled, the bag of bird food propped against one leg of the table. The middle of the bag pudges out like a glutton who slid from his chair without enough energy to move completely away from the scene of his excess.
“Wow.” She’s being really polite. “Your family reads a lot, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I’d never thought much about what other families did.
I scrounge for two towels from the drawer under the bench seat while she’s taking it all in, spinning slowly to see the room in its entirety. When I drape a towel around her shoulders like a coat, she flips it onto her head and starts rubbing.
“But you gotta understand. This is standard operating procedure for the Landons. My parents are a little spacey. Their priorities are different from most parents. They define neat as ‘without interests.’”
“It’s kind of neat. In a way. I mean, you can see the things the driver would need are all here.” She points to the dials on the instrument panel.
“Oh, yeah. Compass. Depth finder. Wheel. They’re nailed down.”
She laughs. With a fair amount of interest she looks into the flat space beyond the wheel where Dad keeps his nautical maps. The wide windows don’t open, but form the windshield for the pilot at one end of the living space.
“There’s another wheel on the roof. For fair weather.”
She examines all the gadgets and the books on the shelves. Everyone always loves the compact efficiency of boats.
“The galley.” I point at a section of the shelves behind the wheel and before the bunk room.
“Cool,” she says as I open cupboards to show her the system of hooks and movable trays to keep things from sliding in rough weather.
She lets me lead her back to the deck. Her hand is cold and I pull it close and blow on her fingers.
“Foredeck, to port.” I motion, but walk backward and she follows without letting go of my hand. Her fingers are curled from the cold. When she bends to peer into the back of the cabin where Nick and I bunk, I tug her away.
“Tut-tut. In a minute. Aft cabin, first. For parents, currently elsewhere.” I don’t open the door. No point in scaring her with the state of their cabin. She already has the idea.
As we both step under the passageway that separates the two cabins, she stays with me. I wonder if she feels that little pocket of warmth out of the wind. When I start to step out on the other side, she tugs back.
“So there’s no one else here?” she asks.
“Nope.”
You would have to be stupid not to hear the invitation in her voice. I may be geeky and antisocial, but I’m not stupid. I spin on one foot and face her.
Her grin practically glows in the dark. I kiss her. More than once and it’s incredible how great it is. She puts her arms around my neck. It’s getting warmer by the second. Her lips graze my cheek, my ear. I can’t even think how to describe the way the feeling in your lips moves into your body and makes you warm all over. And how much better it is when you really like the person you’re kissing.