“Wanna swim with me, Dresden?”
“I think I might drown with you.” She said it softly, the way someone may speak of floating instead of sinking.
“I wouldn’t let you drown.”
“I don’t think you’d be able to help it, Fielding.”
I told myself she was wrong. That there was no reason for that sadness in her voice, because no one would ever drown with me. I would be enough to save them all, I said to myself, feeling confident in that great, big lie.
“And what if you swim with Sal?” I asked. “Would ya drown with him too?”
“Girls don’t drown with boys like Sal. They live eternity with them.”
I walked by her, didn’t brush her again, though. I returned to the diving board, not realizing I had said her name until she said mine.
“Yes, Fielding?”
The splashes of my cannonball reached her, but she didn’t shriek like other girls would’ve. She just stood there, a wetter girl than the one before.
I followed the cannonball with a few laps. By that time, Sal had come back, apologizing for taking so long. I climbed out of the pool, my jeans shorts hanging low from the water, the denim’s heavy fray splotched and matted against my legs.
“Why don’t you take your sweater off, Dresden?” Sal looked at the sweater as if he hated it.
“I’m not that hot.”
I could’ve laughed at her, at her sweaty forehead and hair plastered to the nape of her neck like an attack.
“You’re burning up.” Sal spoke like the soft spot of a hard truth. “And all because you’re trying to cover the bruises she gave you.”
“How do you know about the bruises?” She asked in a whisper.
Sal bit his lip with the fear all boys have of the girl they love. “I read your diary. One of them anyways. I didn’t have to use the bathroom. I found your room. I went to the shelf and picked a book at random. Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. A lot of beatings for you to circle in that.”
“God, don’t you know anything about girls? You should never read what is still their secret. You … you…” She attacked him with slaps. I tried to break it up but got slapped myself, the happening like getting blood drawn by a thorn.
“I want you to leave this instant. Both of you.” She stomped her good foot the way all girls are prone to do at least once in their lives.
He reached for her, but she backed away from him.
“Get away from me.” She took a deep breath as if building the courage to say, “I hate you.”
Hate, that all-too-willing pallbearer of love, that all-too-eager shovel piling the dirt over the lover’s head until the funeral is over only a second after it’s started. The boy can go nowhere near happiness when the girl he loves is not willing to go there with him. He may grow up, borrow a tuxedo, a sunrise, a tropical honeymoon, but they’ll never be his without her. She was his truth, his wisdom, and he was stupid without her. Just an idiot with a dumb life.
He stood there teetering, knowing full well that without her, it would be the cliff all the time. He tried once more to reach for her.
“I’m sorry, Dresden Delmar.”
“I don’t care if you are sorry. I want you to leave, and I never want to see you again.”
“All right,” he whispered.
I don’t even think he realized he was walking until we were almost around the corner of the house. It was her shouting for us to stop that made him jump as if being sparked back to life.
“I didn’t really want you to go. You just … surprised me, reading my diary like that.” She kept her eyes on the ground in front of her. “I wasn’t prepared to be revealed like that. I’m sorry I yelled at you. I don’t hate you. Not really.”
He smiled, and I think the whole world knew it. “Will you do something for me, Dresden Delmar? Take off your sweater.”
“Oh, please. If I take it off—”
“You won’t be able to pretend anymore,” he finished her sentence. “Pretend that your mother loves you.”
“She does love me. You just don’t understand.”
“Every bruise you’ve ever had, every sharp shade of purple, blue, black, I’ve had it too. We have had the same boss of pain, we have asked the same question, over and over again, What have I done to deserve this?
“There is no lack of understanding between the two of us. We’ve been part of the same crash this entire time. We just had yet to meet and pull each other from the wreckage. When you take your sweater off and reveal, it is not to reveal you alone, it is to reveal our shared selves. The purpling, black whorls something we can make fine together.”
She was quiet as she watched a small yellow butterfly flutter past. As it landed on a rose, she began to unbutton the cardigan as she said, “I’ve never shown anyone, not even her, and she’s the one who gave them to me.”
“Her who?” I asked.
“Mother.”
She slipped off the cardigan, revealing her strapless dress and her lay of freckles like a beautiful spray of mud. There with the freckles were the bruises. Flat as bruises are, yet piled upon her like things to weigh her, to make her buried beneath blues and violets and colors less terrible than the things they make.
She dropped the sweater to the ground. I walked around to see more bruises at the top of her back.
“Dresden?” I looked away because sometimes you see too much for just two eyes. “You said you haven’t even shown your mom, but if she gave them to you, wouldn’t she know about them already?”
“She only hits me when she’s had too much to drink. I don’t think she remembers when she’s sober. I always make sure to be covered up so she doesn’t have to remember. She wants me to wear long dresses anyways, because of the leg.”
“I think I should tell my dad. He’s a lawyer, ya know, and—”
“Don’t you dare, Fielding Bliss.” She sounded so mature saying my full name.
“All right, geez.” I looked up at the sky and the God who should’ve done better. “Why does she hit you, Dresden?”
“I guess because I’m not as perfect as her roses. Everything must be as perfect as those roses. You’ve seen Mother. Is there or has there ever been anyone more perfect than she? It must be a great pain to her. To have everything so beautiful but me.
“Sometimes, I’ll look at the bruises and see petals. I’ll see roses. And then I’m no longer sad. How can I be? When my mother has given me nothing but flowers.”
Dresden was a girl too in love with her mother ever to see the monster of her. She needed help, so I said as simply as I could, “Your mom’s a bitch.”
“She isn’t. And I’d like it if you never call her that again, Fielding.”
That whole time, Sal had been quietly staring at her bruises, like a boy too well depressed to be able to say something large enough. I knew the way he saw her then would be the way he would fight never to see her as again. From that moment on, she had the shield in him. She had the boy who would turn into a man for her and be the one her mother would never be strong enough to go against.
“I could turn your bruises into real roses.” He went to the patio table to pick up the pair of scissors and roll of tape left there from when Dresden was putting on her construction paper makeup. With a glance around the garden, he went toward the bush of roses so lavender they were almost certainly blue.
“What is the name of these?” He cupped one of the roses in his hand — so large, it eclipsed his palm. “Do you know?”
“I know all of my mother’s roses.” She stood so close by his side that the bottom of her dress blew across his calves. “This one is Blue Girl.”
He quickly cut the stem of the one he held.
“Mother will kill me,” she said in a hushed gasp.