99 lines
9.6 KiB
Plaintext
99 lines
9.6 KiB
Plaintext
{\rtf1\ansi\deff0{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil Helvetica;}}
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\f0\fs24 Lizzie had negotiated her outfit for twenty minutes, standing in front of her mirror in a way she almost never did, because she almost never cared and now she did, which was its own kind of betrayal. She'd settled on a white cover-up over her suit, which felt like a compromise between being at a pool party and being invisible, which was, in the end, what she wanted. To be invisible at a pool party. To perhaps find a corner where she could exist adjacently to the event without being fully absorbed by it.\par
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\par
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She had a book in her room. She knew exactly which page she was on.\par
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\par
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"Lizzie, you cannot bring a book," Emma had said, in the flat tone of someone who had already won this argument.\par
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\par
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So there was no book, and now there was this.\par
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\par
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Thirty-six people, her mother had said, though thirty-six felt conservative from where Lizzie stood on the pool deck, pressed against the low fence near the hibiscus, watching the yard fill with people who all seemed to know exactly what to do with themselves at a party. The music was coming from somewhere, competing with the water sounds, and the Hayes cousins \u8212? Travis and Corey were in the pool already, Derek had apparently never left \u8212? had established a physics of chaos in the deep end that sent regular concussive waves against the tile. Someone had already knocked over one of the tiki torches and Jorge had come around the side of the house at a near-jog to right it with the expression of a man managing infrastructure in a war zone.\par
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\par
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Lizzie stood and watched.\par
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\par
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Emma was at the center of it, as Emma always was, moving between clusters of arriving girls with the ease of someone who had been trained for exactly this. Which she had, in a way. Emma had been training for this her whole life. She had the gift of making each person feel briefly, convincingly, like the most important arrival. Lizzie had watched her do it from the time they were small, had catalogued it the way she catalogued things she found genuinely mysterious, like tides and long division and the way some people slept through thunderstorms.\par
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\par
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Mai Lin was with her, laughing at something, and then Susanna Barnes materialized out of nowhere in a red two-piece and headband and immediately began conducting some kind of census near the cooler. Hannah Eliot was behind her, tall and deliberate in a jeweled one-piece that caught the afternoon light in a way that suggested it had cost more than Lizzie's entire wardrobe. Hannah moved through the patio like she was accustomed to spaces making room for her, which, in Lizzie's experience, they did.\par
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\par
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At the pool, the boys were a separate civilization.\par
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\par
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This was normal, Lizzie knew. She'd read enough to understand the social anthropology of it, the initial segregation, the gradual permeation, the later entanglements. It was documented behavior. Knowing it was documented did not make it less loud.\par
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\par
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Travis had the football again and was threatening Corey with it and one of Emma's friends shrieked when the splash came and Derek rose from the water laughing and wiped his face and looked extremely pleased with himself, and there was Bobby Carpenter at the far edge of the pool deck, out of the splash radius, talking to someone.\par
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\par
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Lizzie looked at the someone.\par
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\par
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She looked at the someone for perhaps four seconds before she understood something had changed, some prior version of herself had been quietly retired, and here was the new one standing in the same white cover-up by the same hibiscus, and everything was slightly different now and it was completely disconcerting.\par
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\par
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He was blonde. Not the washed-out kind but the sun-saturated kind that looked like it had been bleached from the outside in over years. Compact and muscular in the way that was different from just big, the kind of build that suggested it was not accidental, that the whole structure was organized and intentional. He stood with his weight slightly forward, talking to Bobby, and he laughed at something Bobby said and looked briefly at the pool and then looked away, and he was tan and blue-eyed at a distance and Lizzie felt her face do something without her permission.\par
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\par
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She had not, not once, looked at a boy with anything resembling the feeling she was currently having.\par
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\par
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She found it extremely inconvenient.\par
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\par
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She looked away. She looked at the plumeria on the kitchen windowsill through the glass slider, which she could see from here. She looked at the tiki torch. She looked at Derek's abandoned towel crumpled near the steps. She looked, briefly, back at the boy.\par
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\par
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He was still there.\par
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Someone grabbed her arm.\par
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"Oh good, you're here," Hannah Eliot said, as though she'd been looking for Lizzie specifically, which seemed unlikely. Hannah had a drink in her free hand and a look of focused intention that Lizzie recognized, in retrospect, as the look of someone in the middle of executing something. "Come with me."\par
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\par
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"I'm\u8212?" Lizzie started.\par
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\par
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Hannah was already moving.\par
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\par
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Lizzie was dragged across the pool deck at a pace that left no time for objection, weaving through a cluster of girls she half-recognized from Emma's lunch table and past the cooler where Susanna was making notes in her phone and past the cousins who were now engaged in some kind of underwater wrestling that had attracted a small audience, and then they were on the far side of the pool and there was Bobby Carpenter and he turned and said "hey, Lizzie," because Bobby knew everyone in the Hayes household, and then there was the boy standing right there at close range and Lizzie's peripheral vision did something unhelpful.\par
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\par
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"Will," Hannah said, with the tone of someone completing a transaction. "This is Emma's sister Lizzie. Lizzie, this is Will Fontaine." She said the last name the French way, Fon-TEN, and it sounded like it had always been a name, like it had been a name since long before this afternoon.\par
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\par
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Will Fontaine looked at her.\par
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He had blue eyes. This was confirmed at close range.\par
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\par
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"Lizzie loves Lord of the Rings too," Hannah said, and there was something in the way she said it, satisfied and slightly amused, that suggested she had already considered and completed whatever calculus had led her here, and then Lizzie felt the hand release her arm and when she looked, Hannah was already three steps away and angling back toward Emma's orbit with the efficiency of someone who had done what she came to do.\par
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Bobby found somewhere else to be. He was tactful, Bobby. She'd give him that.\par
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And then it was just Lizzie and Will Fontaine and the noise of the party continuing around them like it didn't know or care, and her mind, which was usually reliable, had gone essentially blank.\par
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Will tilted his head slightly. "She just leave you standing there?"\par
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\par
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"She does that," Lizzie said.\par
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\par
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Something about that seemed to land correctly. He smiled \u8212? not the performative kind she'd been watching boys do all afternoon near Emma, but a real one, slightly asymmetric. "So you're Emma's sister."\par
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\par
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"Yeah."\par
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\par
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"She's like\u8212?" He gestured at the party generally, at Emma's orbit visible across the water. "A different person."\par
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\par
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"She is a different person," Lizzie said. "We both are."\par
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He laughed. It was a good laugh, unguarded. "Fair enough."\par
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There was a crash in the pool behind them and Derek's voice emerged from the water and several people yelled and the music shifted to something louder and Will glanced at the pool and then back at her and said, with apparent genuine curiosity, "Hannah said Lord of the Rings. Like the books or the\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"The books," Lizzie said, faster than she meant to. "The books are\u8212? the movies aren't out yet, so. The books."\par
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\par
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"Right." He nodded. He had the look, she realized, of someone who was actually going to continue this. "Okay, question then. Tom Bombadil. You think he should have gone to the Council of Elrond?"\par
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\par
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The question hit her so directly in the center of something she'd genuinely thought about that she lost, briefly, the thread of being nervous. "No," she said. "Because he wouldn't have taken the Ring seriously and they'd all have been standing around having an existential crisis while he was singing about the river." She paused. "But I think he should have sent a message. A message would have been appropriate."\par
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\par
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Will stared at her.\par
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"What?" she said.\par
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"Nobody says that," he said. "That's\u8212? nobody says the message thing."\par
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\par
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"It's the obvious gap," Lizzie said, because it was, it absolutely was, Tolkien leaves it completely unaddressed, Bombadil simply does not engage with the council at all, there's no indication he even knows it's happening\u8212?\par
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\par
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"Okay, but he pulls them out of Old Man Willow\u8212?" Will started.\par
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\par
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"Which he only does because they happened to be in his territory\u8212?"\par
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\par
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"But that's\u8212? wait, so you think he's purely reactive?"\par
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\par
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"I think he's the oldest thing in the world and he operates by completely different logic and I think Gandalf knew better than to invite him because the invitation itself would have required him to care\u8212?"\par
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\par
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The Hayes cousins crashed into the shallow end together and the wave came over the lip of the pool and ran cold across the deck and hit both their feet and Lizzie looked down at the water spreading over the sun-warmed concrete and Will laughed again and she looked up and the party was loud and bright around them and she thought, with one small, private part of her mind: she could close the book later.
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