“That you were.” He took another picture, still framing the shot. “Are you?”
I laughed, but it sounded bitter even to my own ears.
“For the most part,” I said. My heart was racing, my brain doing silly things, trying to picture exactly how Ezra had looked when he asked, if his forehead had creased when he heard that I was out with Mal, texting with Renata, living a whole life without him.
“He’s jealous, you know,” Mal said. He was giving me a strange look from the base of the carousel, one part amused, one part suspicious. “Clearly wants to launch me into the sun.”
“He’s like that with everyone I get close to. Took him like six months to get used to my roommate,” I confessed. “It doesn’t mean anything. Promise.”
Mal hummed, unconvinced, then scrolled through his photos.
“Okay, this looks good,” he said, changing the subject. Then, brightly: “You ready for the real thing?”
I tossed my braids over my shoulder, praying my body language conveyed more ease than I felt. It was just like Ezra to get under my skin, even when he was nowhere in sight.
“Of course,” I said.
When we were nineteen, Ezra taught me how to swim.
We were fresh off the tragedy of his near demise, though the time we’d spent fused at the hip afterward had felt condensed, alifetime squashed into one hundred and thirty-seven days. I rolled awake to Ezra’s texts telling me good morning, fell asleep to his scratchy voice proclaiming his hatred of Cheever or his father’s questionable politics over my speakerphone, and so when he invited me on his family’s annual trip to the Maldives, I wasn’t surprised. By that time I had already recognized that such gestures came not out of generosity but out of avarice, that Ezra wanted nothing more than to swallow me whole, absorb me into his side like an anglerfish. And I was fine with that, elated with it, really, prepped and marinated myself to make me more palatable for him. We had faced death together. Facing life seemed so easy in comparison.
But then he started talking about what we would be doing. Snorkeling. Deep-sea dives. The crevasse between us that I could normally ignore widened to a canyon. Being able to swim was a given for students at Elion University, who’d had private tutors, where I’d had an underfunded library, backyard pools with a deep end, where mine had been inflatable. It had seemed just another way to demonstrate our incompatibility.
“I just want to stay on the beach,” I said. Then: “I don’t want to get my hair wet.” It had taken hours of needling for me to admit the truth. “Ez, I can’t swim.”
Soon after that, we were at Elion’s Olympic-size pool, Ezra’s hands gripping my hips to hoist them higher in aqua blue water eerily close to the color of his eyes. I savored our closeness then, the slickness of his bicep when I grabbed hold of it for purchase, how easily the greed I sensed in his voice extended to his hands in this place.
But a few weeks into our lessons, someone posted a video of usto the Facebook group Overseen at Elion:Ezra Adelman Catches Jungle Fever. Hundreds of comments and reactions amassed, most of them detailing all the reasons why I wasn’t hot enough to breathe his air.
I didn’t mind them. I was used to rhetoric on how worthless I was, and I knew how to deflect. Ezra did not. Anything short of adulation terrified him. I wasn’t surprised when, a few days after the post went live, he hooked up with a stunning sophomore named Amanda Alkins to ward off allegations.
Iwassurprised when he invited her to the Maldives. A few weeks later, all of us hopped on a plane—the Adelmans, Amanda, and me, the family pet. Their room was next to mine, and even before my years reading up on sexual health, I’d known her squealing was more porn star approximation than true pleasure. On the day of the snorkeling expedition, I feigned a stomach bug. Ezra hadn’t come looking for me.
Years later, he apologized.I was such an ass back then, he said.It would be an honor to be thought of as yours.Which was why whenever we hit a red carpet together, he made sure to tell every interviewer who shoved a mic into his face that we were “just friends.”
“You good?” Mal asked, his voice snapping me back to the present.
I shook my head, watching the image of Ezra’s wet, focused face fade from my mind’s eye. Mal looked up at me sheepishly from the tiles at the base of the carousel, his expression one part amusement, one part concern, and zero parts irritation.
“I’m good,” I said. I scooted up higher in a saddle made for toddler-size butts and loosened my hold on the pole. “Sorry. I promise I’m usually better at this.”
“Yes, yes, on account of regularly hanging out with an international supermodel, I know,” Mal said, offering me a sly smile. “But seriously, let me know if you want to take a break.”
“We don’t have time for a break,” I said. “They’re closing soon, and besides, if any kids show up, we’ll have to set up again.” I waved to the carousel attendant, who gave us a thumbs-up. “Come on. Let’s try again.”
Mal circled me slowly for a few more minutes, and I forced myself to laugh, kicking my legs to send my sheer pink skirts into the air. Then he straightened, lowering his camera.
“It’s bad,” I said.
“It’s not bad,” Mal said unconvincingly.
“No. I can tell from your face that it’s bad.” I rubbed my temples. “I’m sorry. I don’t normally get in my head like this.”
“I get it,” Mal said. “You don’t have to turn into Tyra Banks, you know. You just have to look happy. Well, not just happy.” He waggled his brows. “Orgasmic.”
Laughter burst out of my chest.
“Orgasmic? You sure you want that?” I contorted my face into a grimace, rolling my eyes backward, and Mal laughed with me. It wasn’t all that funny, but it gave me a good jumping-off point for the joy I was supposed to be portraying. I hooked into the sound of his laughter and prolonged it, let my body loosen naturally and my head tilt back ever so slightly. Made myself fluid.
