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The beer was warm and the water in the lake up on the Perkins’ farm was cold the night JJ first learned about real desire.
There were just three nights left before school started up after the long, torpid summer break. On Monday she’d wake up exactly three minutes before her 5am alarm sounded, reach for the clock and hit the switch to ensure it didn’t bellow unnecessarily in the cool stillness of the morning. By 5.45am she’d be on the field with the other early birds, bantering sleepily back and forth, stretching out their arms and legs, dreading the 50 laps with which their coach inevitably marked the start of the soccer season each year.
In some ways this season, her last before college, mattered more than all the others that had come before it. The scholarship to Penn State was in the bag. She’d mapped out her entire undergraduate academic schedule. Calculated her class load. Her trajectory was clear. She just needed to be extra cautious about avoiding injuries, and it wouldn’t hurt to add some more goals and assists to her stats, to reassure the college team bosses they’d invested wisely in the team’s future by buying a stake in hers.
But that was Monday’s problem. Tonight, sometime around 10pm on a Friday in late August, warm beer was their only difficulty. Robbie and Joel were working to fix the problem by carefully lining up tins in the shallows, using stones to weigh each one down.
“The water’s not moving fast so I don’t know why you’re anchoring them,” she said from her vantage point a little above them just off the path, where she stood with her thumbs hooked into the back pockets of her cut-off black denim shorts.
“Because we’re artists,” Robbie replied, affecting a tragically bad French accent. Joel spoke at exactly the same time: “Because it’s good to be careful.”
It was a perfect encapsulation of the twins’ very different personalities and JJ laughed, delighted to be up here with two of her closest friends – three, since Vee was here too. They were expecting at least five other people, maybe a couple more. A few of JJ’s teammates (the handful of those who were willing to leave the house at night for non-church reasons) and some of Robbie’s “theatre nerd herd”, as his brother called them drily.
“Jareau, stop flirting with those two and get in the water with me, you coward!”
She laughed and turned towards the voice. Vee was floating on her back in a deeper part of the river, long dark brown hair trailing behind her in the water. This was her element. Afloat, submerged, in the liminal, saturated spaces between those states: as long as there was water Vee was, ironically, grounded. During tests at school she kept a small spray bottle on her desk and misted herself with water every ten minutes. (“If I get too dry I forget equations and stuff.”) More than two decades before hydration became trendy and ‘influencer’ became a recognised career option, Vee was a thirst quenching trendsetter.
“There’s no way I’m swimming. It’s freezing. You’re an insane person – I am not.”
Vee splashed her. JJ shrieked.
“That isn’t going to change my mind!”
“Jay! It’s our last chance to swim up here before a new fall season starts. Ever! This time next year—“
Vee was weaponising her friend’s sentimentality. She knew how much JJ treasured ‘firsts’ and ‘lasts’. That she kept movie ticket stubs and pressed flowers and birthday cards, storing them in a box beneath her bed. That she remembered every milestone from every point in your friendship. That things mattered, deeply, to her.
It worked.
“I’d just like to place on record that I still think you’re an insane person and that I’m only going along with this because I’m too soft for my own good,” she said, kicking off her already unlaced sneakers, toeing off her socks and pulling her shirt over her head all in one smooth move. Then she unzipped and shed her shorts. Vee wolf whistled and JJ flipped her the bird before inhaling once, sharply, and then wading into the water. There were, JJ thought privately, two kinds of people: those who inched their way into cold water and those who ran in headlong. Sometimes she tried to guess which approach someone would take based purely on how they walked or spoke or took up space. She was right about 70% of the time. Not bad, could be better. She knew that she moved like somebody who wasted no time – one of life’s waders, striding with clarity and purpose towards a firm destination.
Shins. Knees. Upper thighs. Lower abs. Just below her breasts. Another sharp inhale; she ducked forward, submerging her whole body. Her mind emptied, burned clean by the cold.
*****
“Do you think that some part of you, like a tiny sliver at the very back of your brain, recognises the most important moments in your life as they happen? Grasps, right then, that something big is going on?”
Penelope frowns and pushes her glasses back up her nose for the third time in ten minutes. Morgan opens his mouth to speak. Blinks. Shuts it again. Elle, who fell asleep ages ago, snores, loudly, once. Is silent again.
“Wow, Jay. Uh. That’s…whoa. That’s a great deal of stuff. Of thinking,” Morgan attempts. “I mean it’s a clever way to interpret the topic…to take it from crackpot conspiracy theories to more, uh, more—“
“Existential!” Garcia declares, suddenly. “Philosophical!”
“Right, philosophical questions!”
Goddamnit, thinks JJ, I was accidentally too weird and intense again.
*****
She heard the new sounds as she popped back up out from under the water. Tyres on gravel, car doors opening and closing. Voices, when she shook her head from side to side once twice thrice, a few voices. She ran her hands through her streaming hair, swiped water from her eyes, peered out. Four figures emerging from the car, hands raised in greeting; one of the twins wiped a damp hand on his shirt and waved back. She caught sight of Mack’s distinctively lanky frame, his languid gait. The theatre nerd herd, then. Mack, Clem and Roo, it had to be them, they traveled as a trio. She wasn’t sure she recognised the fourth person.
“Vee,” she turned back towards her friend, who was still bobbing contentedly in the water. “Some of the others have arrived. Take a break and come say hi.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yeah, it’s a statute.”
“You’re not a lawyer, you don’t know that.”
“Veronica, get out of the water for five minutes.”
“Fine, but I’m gonna complain the whole time…”
She was speaking to JJ’s back. The blonde was almost out of the water, only covered up to her knees now. Striding. Moving with a firm destination in mind.
*****
“The theatre kids hang out with the jock girls? That’s surprisingly progressive for a small town.”
Mack laughed.
“I know you would usually sooner sing the lead in Carmen at a sold-out La Scala than be in the presence of jock girls for even just a moment, but I promise you’ll like these ones.”
“That statement feels faintly homophobic.”
“Quite the opposite. Homo-confident. Homo…fearless.”
Clem, from the back seat: “You two are the least popular cousins at the family reunion, aren’t you?”
“They’re definitely the most annoying,” Roo said from beside her.
“What Mack is trying to say without using simple words is that this is a safely gay space. Gayly safe, if you prefer. These are the non-churchy jocks. They’re sensible, and at least one of them probably has a well-worn poster of Mia Hamm on her bedroom ceiling, if you catch my drift.”
“I am choosing not to catch your drift,” she said. “But I promise that I will give your Jesus-free, liberal-minded jock girls a chance. I won’t judge them harshly for a whole three minutes. Because I am a giver. A philanthropist. A true team player.”
Mack indicated to the right even though there were no cars behind his, looked both ways, twice, and carefully guided the car onto a rutted path.
“You two are wrong,” he said, eyes flicking to the overhead mirror and away again.
“Oh?” That was Roo.
“We’re among the most popular cousins at family reunions, at least within a certain age range, because Emily is a scarily adept alcohol thief. She always gets the good stuff. Em, tell them about the time you conned the barman into letting you make 14 Stoli cocktails, each of them a double, after convincing him your mom had given her permission.”
By the time they pulled into the parking spot up next to the river a couple of miles later, they were all roaring with laughter. They tumbled out of the car, sniggering and gesturing broadly with their hands. Emily was grateful for her cousin’s ability to make friends with interesting, like-minded people; it saved her the trouble. She’d met Roo once before when he came to D.C with Mack for Labour Day weekend; this was her first time meeting Clem and she, too, was delightful. And she’d spoken to Robbie, once, over the phone during a call with Mack; she’d never seen him before but guessed that he was one of the two young men walking over to greet them since they were clearly twins and she knew that he was one of a pair of identical twin brothers.
Robbie was, somewhat to her surprise, the more delicate of the two. His features were finer and his cheekbones a touch sharper. It was an academic’s face, would look perfectly at home in a library or a lecture hall. Joel, maybe half an inch taller than his brother, which put him over six feet, looked like an actor. She wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that but it made sense in her head. And yet Joel was the future civil or mechanical engineer, a computer savant who played chess as a hobby. It was Robbie who Mack insisted would one day be a globally famous actor.
“You’re in love with him, of course you think he’s going to be famous,” she’d said a few nights earlier, dropping her cigarette butt and crushing it beneath her sneaker before bending down to collect it from the ground so she could pocket it.
“I thought it the moment I saw him on stage for the first time. I wasn’t in love with him then. I didn’t know who he was. I just knew I’d never seen another actor like him.”
Something in his voice made her look over at him, eyes carefully scanning his striking, beaky profile.
“Can you describe it? Why he’s such a good actor?”
“You speak, what, five languages fluently?”
“Six and I’m working on a seventh.”
“So you must know…Jesus, like, one hundred times more words than most people. A thousand times, maybe.”
“Are you gesturing towards a point here, Mack?”
“He’s the kind of performer who could make you temporarily forget every single word in all six, nearly seven, languages. You’ll meet him and you’ll think I’ve lost my mind once and for all. But when you get to see him on stage…you’ll get it.”
Clem was being celebrated as a folk hero because she had thought to stash their beer in a cooler, straight from the fridge in her parents’ garage. Roo was cracking open one can, two, starting to hand drinks around. She headed down to join them, looked over towards the river, and
*****
“That’s too easy. It has to be Baywatch. What else could it be?”
“Oh my god Jennifer, Baywatch isn’t a movie. Also, they don’t wear bikinis. Don’t they wear those red—“
“What do you mean, ‘what else could it be?’ – it can be, and in fact it is, Ursula Andress in Dr. No,” Elle cut in.
“Excuse me, you obviously mean Halle Berry in Die Another Day,” Morgan said. He sat back and crossed his arms, looking smug.
“I have to say, I don’t get the whole bikini thing.”
They all turned to look at Reid, who paid precisely zero attention to their facial expressions and just kept talking.
“What makes it an especially sexy or appealing item…items…of clothing? Is it because there tends not to be much material involved?”
Elle patted him on the shoulder. “See, you are a genius.”
*****
“Hi,” the blonde said, scraping her sodden hair up into a messy bun. Her hands moved automatically. For the second time in minutes her mind emptied out completely.
This time it wasn’t the cold that took its place.
It was an inferno.
“Hi,” Emily said.
Huh, she thought. I wonder what language I’m speaking. English? I’m not sure—it’s too loud—I can’t hear myself over the noise of my nervous system being rewired in real time.
“I’m JJ.”
They shook hands.
Oh, JJ thought. Oh, the cliches are accurate.
“Emily. I’m Mack’s cousin.”
“I can see it, now you say that. You’ve got the same eyelashes.”
Goddamnit, JJ, stop being weird and intense.
Emily grinned. Out loud, she said: “I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
(I want to know everything about you. When can we start?)