After that I wanted to leave. The ceremony was going on. Stacey was up there with the other princesses. Then they had the Royal Court Dance. Stacey ditched her sophomore prince and danced with Casey. His eyes were closed and her eyes were closed. I guess it was their last dance. Guns N’ Roses were playing.
I went outside to have a cigarette. Adam was out there smoking. He was drunk. He told me to follow him, and we went to the pool. We walked to the place in the fence behind the diving boards where the barbed wire is fucked up. He climbed the fence and jumped over.
He told me to climb over. I threw my purse to him and I climbed, but it was harder than I thought. My heels kept getting caught. I should have taken them off. When I got over I was tired.
He wanted to get into the pool and I said no. He took his clothes off. He had a swimmer’s body. He was very good-looking. Like an Israeli hero. Freshman year he was too pretty; he looked like a girl. Then he became a man.
He jumped in the pool and he was in the pool, swimming around naked.
“Get in the pool, Emily.”
“No.”
“Get in the fucking pool.”
“No.”
Another night I would have, but it didn’t seem fun that night. It was old and familiar. Adam was mad because he could tell I was changing.
“You can be a real cunt, you know that?”
He was swimming toward the side of the pool like a shark. I started backing away. He got out, naked; I knew he was going to throw me in, and I had my dress on. I ran but I was in my heels. At the fence, I looked back and he was coming, his dick was flapping. I tried to climb, but he grabbed me off the fence. I screamed. He carried me over his shoulder. I scratched his back and bit his shoulder. He kept walking, and then threw me in.
Once I was in, he started putting his clothes back on. I was yelling at him and trying to splash him so that his clothes would be wet too, but I didn’t get him. My dress came up around me like a silver-pink jellyfish.
When he was dressed, he climbed the fence and left. I floated for a while in the black water and then I climbed out. My purse was by the fence. I picked it up and took out a cigarette and sat at the edge of the pool and let my legs dangle in the water with my heels on.
There was a moon and it was on the water. A miniature moon rocking on the little waves. I always see nice images like that but I don’t know what to do with them. I guess you share them with someone. Or you write them down in a poem. I had so many of those little images, but I never shared them or wrote any of them down.
I smoked the whole cigarette and then flicked it into the pool. I lit another one and stood up in my wet dress and walked to the fence. I took a drink of apricot schnapps. I took my heels off and threw them over the fence. I climbed and this time the fence hurt my toes and feet. I picked up my shoes and went back to the dance, dripping water as I went.
The two mothers at the door gave me a funny look, but I walked past before they could say anything. Inside, everyone was dancing to Dr. Dre. I saw Adam on the other side of the gym with Byron and Roberto. Adam’s hair was still wet and slicked back. They were laughing. I walked around and walked up behind Adam and I poured my apricot schnapps over his head.
Roberto made a noise like “Ooooooooo.” All the schnapps hadn’t come out before Adam turned around, so I started flinging it in his face. He tried to grab my arms. He grabbed the left one, the one without the bottle. I kept splashing it in his face and he couldn’t get my right arm to make me stop. Roberto was laughing a lot in the background, and everyone around made a circle because I was yelling and calling Adam a Jew motherfucker. Finally he slapped me across the face. I swung the bottle and it hit him above his eye. Then I dropped the bottle and it broke on the floor.
That was when Mr. Forest, the dean, tried to break it up, but Adam had already grabbed me. He threw me on the gym floor. There was a squeaking sound, like basketball shoes during a game.
They sat us in the medic’s room, where the athletes usually go, and called our parents, but my mom didn’t answer. They kept me there until she answered. One hour later she answered and then she came and they told her what happened. We drove home and my mom wasn’t very mad at me.
Later at home, my mom and I were smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table. All the lights were out except for the one in our little kitchen nook. The place was filled with smoke. Then the phone rang. For a second I thought about Ryan, but my mom said it was Adam. I walked over and hung it up.
“You don’t want to talk to him?”
“He’s an asshole, they all are.”
“Are you going to break up?”
“He’s not my boyfriend!”
We sat and smoked. It was dark except for the overhead light, which was brown-yellow. Everything seemed yellow: the fridge, the kitchen table. The living room rug was a dirty yellow. My mom’s face, and the camel on the box. I saw me and my mom from outside my head. Two yellow-haired women sitting across a yellow table in a yellow kitchen full of smoke.
My mom went to bed and I smoked some more cigarettes.
A while later there was a tapping at the door. At first I didn’t think about it because it was really soft, but it was constant and regular so I became aware of it.
I knew it was Adam. I sat at the table and it kept going, soft and steady. The door was in the darkness outside the circle of light in the kitchen. God, I didn’t want to open it.
It felt like I could sit there forever, and the tapping would never stop.
Camp
We all went to the camp.
We were twelve and thirteen years old. Me and Ivan and Howard and Ute and Ed. Jewish, Russian, Jewish, Italian, and half Korean/half white. I had turned thirteen in April.
It was a YMCA water-ski camp. There was a husband and wife who ran everything, but the husband was the head counselor. The husband had well-manicured dark hair and a clipped beard that fit his face; the wife had blond hair to her shoulders. He was in his forties and she looked younger. A pleasant, Christian-looking mom and dad .
He wore a tan explorer’s hat with a floppy brim and a string that hung down under his chin. His wife did the roll call and made sure everybody was where they should be. They both led the songs around the campfire at night, but she led more of them. Sometimes he would play his guitar. We sang many different songs, and sometimes the husband told ghost stories. It sounded like he had told the stories a million times, but that he was trying to make them exciting each time. I think he was very proud of them and thought they were good just because he had told them so many times. At the end we always sang “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
It was so dirty around the fire and I’d always get smoke in my mouth.
We were too old for the camp.
Jane was our counselor even though we were all boys. She was the daughter of the head counselor and his wife. Jane had blond hair like her mom. Later she told us that she was the black sheep of her family.
Another counselor was Hulk.
Hulk was very tall and big, like a bulky potato shape, fat but really strong. He had huge calves that were red from the sun because he wore shorts all the time. His shorts hung to his fat knees and he had them in all ugly colors, like pink, and they were dirty and worn from the woods. Or fluorescent orange with swirl designs, or cut-off denim. He wore big brown Timberland boots without tying the laces. He had a curly mullet and a goatee and he wore Vuarnet sunglasses. The Vuarnets were a single lens that went across both eyes and reflected rainbows in the sunlight.