Read Online Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw - Free Book Online

mostly curious as hell. I’d never known anyone like her. She was only eighteen, but she seemed to have already thought herself through, and then remade herself up entirely. I guess I got crushed out on her arrogance.”
    What Jesse can’t find a way to say is this was the first time she’d ever fallen in love, that she hadn’t been at all prepared for it, and certainly wouldn’t have expected it to happen with her arch rival. But of course, looking back, it wasn’t the least bit surprising really. Her whole adolescence had been measured out in laps—by stopwatches and pulse rates and protein grams. She had been compressed for so long inside such a tight little shell of discipline, like a grenade. Marty just pulled the pin.
    “‘Don’t you want to be bad?’ she’d say.”
    “By bad ...?” Alice says.
    “I didn’t know,” Jesse says, and laughs. “I sure wanted to find out, though. We began sneaking off. To town. To the roof at night.”
    Down to the showers after everyone else was asleep, is what she doesn’t add.
    “Once, we went out of the city, to visit this Mexican girl Marty knew. Serafina Somebody. She’d trained in Brisbane for a time under Marty’s coach. Her swimming days were behind her by that time. Her parents had this huge white-white house on this green-green lawn. In the back, they’d put in a pool. For Serafina, I guess.
    “Before lunch, Marty and I fooled around in the water. No room to race and so we just splashed, dunked each other. Fish-swished along the bottom. Playing tag, kind of.” Jesse pauses, trying to make a depth check on the safety of this conversation. “And then Marty came all the way from the bottom of the diving end, sliding up under me. Our faces were about an inch apart, our bodies just not quite touching. You know.”
    Neither she nor Alice says anything for a stretched moment. The crickets, which run on high, day and night, in the overgrowth around the quarry, fill in the silence with their white noise, at the same time deafening and beneath notice.
    It’s Alice who speaks first. “Bet you had trouble eating that lunch.”
    Jesse feels herself flushing, the universal curse of redheads. “On the way back to town,” she says, now in a hurry to finish, “in this rattletrap old taxi, kicking up giant pillows of dust, we made fun of how Serafina talked to Marty: ‘I think of you constantly all these years,’ was what she’d said. We figured it must be a bad translation. Still, we started saying ‘I think of you constantly’ instead of‘hi.’ Afterwards, it was how I began the letters I sent down to Australia.”
    “Which went unanswered,” Alice says.
    “How could you know?” Jesse says, turning suddenly inside her inner tube, making the rubber screech.
    Alice shakes her head. “I don’t know. I could smell treachery coming, I guess. It’s easy now, now that it’s a story. When you were going through it, it was life. Always much harder to get the plot line on.”
    “And of course,” Jesse says in her own defense, “everything was moving so fast. Plus I wanted to take everything as a good sign, a lucky charm.”
    The scene in her imagination comes up white, and she’s back down in the showers, late at night. She and Marty lying next to each other on a bed made of layers and layers of towels.
    “Marty would get all confessional,” she tells Alice, “which I tried to take as a sign of something. But there was something off, even about the confessions. Like everything else about her, they were a little too easy. She hated to swim, she told me. It was just her ticket. Out of Pemby, this desperate place on the edge of the bush.
    “I was impressed that someone only a year older than I was already had a plan. Me, I’d done almost no thinking about my future. I got into swimming because I’d been good at it right off, and because it was something my parents didn’t understand. It got me a little away from them. I was a big star here in New