The Palmer Pool

12 | Walk Away

After three long days passed, I was pacing the boat launch dock at work, looking down through the cracks between the boards at the oily rainbows of gasoline shining in the stagnant water.  I was supposed to watch for people to come by to drop their boat in the water or take it out. I wrote down their information, collected a fee and gave them a hand.  There was a lot of down time.  The hours dragged.  I thought too much.

I mostly thought about Pete.

He was easy to talk to and seemed genuinely, almost bizarrely kind. I thought about that transforming smile that slayed my heart and his dark brown hair that I was dying to run my fingers through. I remembered breathing in the smell of him as he treated my cut.  That kiss on the cheek!  When I thought of all those things in quick succession, I could barely contain myself.  I wanted to sing and dance through the streets and twirl around lamp posts like my life was a musical.

I touched the spot where his lips had brushed my cheekbone, then my left index finger where there should have been a missing piece of flesh.  My new theory was that it actually had more time to heal than a few hours.  A cut probably would have healed pretty well in sixty years.  I'd been Googling the crap out of time travel related topics for days.  It made my brain hurt in kind of a good way, but was purely theoretical and therefore about as useful as searching for information on unicorns and fairies.  

One of my coworkers was coming over to interrupt my deep thoughts on love and the quantum mechanics of time travel. Madison was going to be a senior, too, but we didn't go to school together. She went to a private school somewhere in the suburbs of Detroit.  Madison was a chronic oversharer, which was usually entertaining, but made me feel like my life was really boring in comparison.

"Hey," she called out, her voice raspy, "take a load off for a few minutes.  It's going to get busy pretty soon."  She pointed up at a line of menacing dark grey clouds off to the west.  The air was heavy with the approaching storm and a rising breeze rippled the surface of the water.  The flag over our heads billowed and snapped, its metal clip clanging against the flagpole.

We sat down at the end of the dock, dangling our feet.  Madison leaned back, pushed her wavy, teal mermaid hair behind her shoulders and turned her face up to the fading sun.  She had stray flecks of glitter stuck to her smudgy grey eyelids and smelled like cotton candy vape juice.

"Ohhh my God, I'm so hung over," she groaned.

"It's four in the afternoon."

"Tequila.  So many shots," she explained. 

I knew there would be a story to follow. She was always telling me about the parties she went to, the people she hooked up with, what she drank and how much, and the drugs involved.  It was too bad Madison wasn't my mom's daughter, because then Mom wouldn't be wasting her time with the disco biscuits talk. Before she could launch into a detailed account of her wild night, Madison's jaw dropped.

"Damn," she drawled.

I understood her reaction when I saw Eric Anderson and his family come in on their boat.  Eric was standing near the bow, taking in the front sail.  Shirtless, naturally.  We could see the muscles in his arms and back flexing under his tanned skin even from where we were sitting.  Then he glanced up, caught us staring, and gave a little head nod of a greeting.

"Did you get with him yet or what?" Madison asked.

I snorted.  "Uh, no."

"Why not?"

"Um, the opportunity hasn't presented itself?  And actually now that I'm thinking about it, I can't think of a better way to lower my self-esteem."

"What do you mean?"