Paula DeBoard - The Drowning Girls

I knew that Danielle wasn’t a typical fourteen-year-old, and that was part of my worry. Over the years, I’d counseled hundreds of teenage girls over breakups and arguments with their parents and spats with their best friends. I was the only female counselor on staff, and girls seemed to feel more comfortable sharing their troubles with me. It was a running joke that the bulk of the school’s tissue budget went to my office. So far, Danielle had avoided those messy entanglements of adolescence—the sole perk of being nerdy. Her weekends weren’t spent at parties; they were spent at the kitchen table, where she zipped through extra-credit assignments.

Only a month ago, amidst the craziness of our impending move to The Palms, she’d delivered the salutatorian address at her middle school graduation. I had barely recognized her behind the microphone; she’d been so witty and confident, her jokes delivered with the spot-on timing of a comic.

I hopped to my feet when she came in at a quarter to eleven, her hair slicked back postswim and drying stiffly on her shoulders. Upstairs, she changed into pajamas and gave me the play-by-play as we lounged on her bed, goose bumps forming on our arms beneath the whirr of the ceiling fan. She smelled faintly of chlorine, and her fingers retained the telltale orange residue of Cheetos.

“The Jorgensens have this massive pool. Olympic-sized,” she said.

“Really?”

“Well, huge, anyway. And you should see their pool house. Our old house could practically fit in there. It has this massive TV and all these couches.”

“Sounds nice. So what did you do—watch a movie?”

Danielle rolled her eyes. “It was kind of lame. The guys—Mac from across the street and then Alex and Eric Zhang—played video games the whole time. I guess they expected the rest of us to watch them, like that would be any fun.”

I smiled. “So you went swimming?”

“Yeah. Kelsey and Hannah and me.”

“What are the girls like?”

She yawned, pulling the comforter halfway over us. “Hannah was kind of clingy. She kept hanging on to my arm like we were best friends already. But, I don’t know—she’s okay. And Kelsey’s really pretty, like the kind of pretty you see on magazines. She’s nice, though. Oh—” She sat up halfway, propping her head on her hand. “Is it okay if she comes over tomorrow to swim?”

“Of course. Are you going to invite Hannah, too?”

She grimaced. “Do I have to? I don’t think they get along very well.”

“Kelsey and Hannah? Why not?”

Danielle shrugged.

I raked my fingers through her hair, separating clumps that had dried together. “Wouldn’t Hannah feel left out?”

Danielle groaned. “I guess.”

We were quiet for a while, listening to the sounds of Phil getting ready for bed—his feet plodding on the stairs, the water running in the bathroom.

“What about the boys?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? No way am I inviting the boys.”

I laughed. “No, I meant—what are they like?”

“Oh, um—besides their video game skills? Alex and Eric are really smart and kind of quiet. Kelsey told me they’re both going to be doctors, like their parents. They go to the school she used to go to, Ass Bury.”

“Ashbury.”

“And then Mac...he’s kind of an idiot. But he’s funny, I guess.”

“Thank goodness for that,” I said, smiling. Maybe this would be the beginning of something—of friends in and out of our house, breathing life into our empty spaces. “So it was fun overall?”

But Danielle had closed her eyes and was already drifting off to sleep.

* * *

In the morning, I made a trip into Livermore for groceries, lingering for a long time in front of the aisle of chips. What did teenage girls eat? Flavored chips, diet soda? Was it possible to make a wrong choice and completely blow my daughter’s chance at a social life?

I put Danielle to work straightening the house, which mostly consisted of hauling unpacked boxes from the living room to the garage. It was junk, all of it, but junk I couldn’t bear to throw away—an old spaghetti pot with the enamel worn thin, binders and outdated college textbooks.

Hannah arrived twenty minutes early—shy, answering my questions with polite monosyllables. Unlike her mother, she was plump, fat puddling at her armpits. She was awkward in her racerback tank suit, and I decided I liked her.

Kelsey was twenty minutes late, her face dwarfed by an oversize pair of sunglasses. Danielle was right. In her black bikini, with a sarong tied casually across her hips, Kelsey might have been a model for an advertisement in a men’s magazine. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said, holding out a confident hand, as if she were the adult, welcoming me to her home. “I hear that you work at Miles Landers.”

“Right, I’ve been there for seven years now. I think you’ll like it.”

She pushed the sunglasses to the top of her head, revealing eyes that were the same pale blue as her mother’s, but somehow colder and flatter. “Anything would be better than Ass Bury.”

All together, they were an odd trio, thrown together by circumstance rather than similarity. Throughout the afternoon I caught odd snatches of their conversation and glimpses of them from various windows of the house. Danielle blew up the beach ball I’d bought at the Dollar Store and the three of them smacked it back and forth across the surface of the water, sometimes viciously, sometimes idly, until it popped.

At one point Danielle came inside to use the bathroom and I intercepted her with a kiss on the forehead. At my insistence, she’d slathered herself with sunscreen, and her skin gleamed pink and raw from the previous week’s burn. “I’m glad you’re making friends.”

“Well, we haven’t taken a blood oath or anything yet, so don’t get too excited,” she said, hurrying past.

When Phil came home, he found me browning beef for enchiladas and wrapped his arms around my waist, swaying gently with me cheek to cheek.

“You’re in a good mood,” he observed.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“So how did it go? The great swim party of 2014?”

“Still going.” I jerked my head in the direction of the backyard, where the girls had been taking turns on the diving board. Hannah was there now, pumping her legs, her large breasts jiggling with the vertical motion. She took a clumsy leap and hit the water with a splash. I saw Kelsey and Danielle exchange smirks and felt suddenly, inexpressively sad. “I invited the girls to stay for dinner.”

Phil straightened, releasing me. We stood next to each other, watching out the window as the three of them bobbed in the pool.

“It seems to be working out,” I said. “And here Danielle didn’t think she had anything in common with them.”

And then Kelsey emerged from the water, one long leg following the other. Oh, to be so young, I thought. To be so lovely. She made her way to the diving board, water droplets glistening on her body, blond hair slicked back.

We watched transfixed as she hooked her thumbs into her bikini top, carefully adjusting her breasts within the two black triangles. She called something that sounded like “Geronimo!” and did a perfect swan dive into the water below. When she surfaced, her bikini top was twisted, revealing a perfectly round nipple.

“I bet the Jorgensens could afford a little more fabric,” I commented lightly.

Phil only said, “Shit,” and turned away.

PHIL

A question: What’s the difference between a pedophile and an innocent person accused of pedophilia? What about a rapist and a person accused of rape? Practically speaking—nothing. They’re the same. One might as well be the other. It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent, because the accusation plants the suggestion, and from there the guilt grows. The innocent are the most vulnerable, really. They’ve got the most to lose—those with wives and kids who aren’t looking for something on the side.