Seely, Part 1

A serialized short story by W. McCrae.

Guest posts by W. McCrae continue this week while I’m on summer break. This is one of her original short stories, published here for the first time. Enjoy.

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Since sundown, all the heat had leached from the desert to stir up a chill eastern wind. The atmosphere was thrown with scraps of cloud and a broken-saucer moon, bright enough to cast the black sky blue. Charles’s shoes were damp, his posture stiff with his hands tucked into his armpits.

“Come on!” Reggie barked from behind, his voice ragged from twenty minutes of boisterous yelling on the way down to the quarry. “Do it, Aquaman!”

The silver-edged pond pulled gently at the toes of Charles’s sneakers, keen to rise again and soak through the mesh to his socks. “I’m not…” He turned back in search of his nerve. Three boys from school clustered on the bank, whispering between themselves in visible puffs, their silhouettes banded by the moon. Charles swallowed.

“It’s just—the sign says no swimming—”

“Come onnnn, Charlie!” Nate’s tone was a simper, and Charles’s skin crawled at the diminutive. “Tradition means everyone’s gotta do it once. I did it and Reggie did, too. Your daddy probably did it!” 

In some invocation of family legacy, he harshly shook the arm of Charles’s five-year-old brother Howie, who stood wide-eyed aside the rest with a tight grip on Charles’s backpack. When Reggie and the boys had first approached the two of them in the school parking lot—offering Charles their friendship, conditional on his completion of this simple hazing—Howie had been concerned. Now he was fully bought into the hype, half-crouched and tense with excitement. 

His voice was small, hoarse from the chill: “Yeah, Charlie! You can swim across the lake! I love you!”

That got a hearty laugh from Reggie and company. Tyler laid a hand on Howie’s head, gave his hair a hard tousle. “See! It’ll make your brother respect you!”

This had all sounded so easy before it got dark, and before Charles actually felt the water. “It’s just—the sign says there are currents. I think I-I actually have to get Howie home, you know, before…”

The boys’ hisses turned sharp and cold: “It’s a fuckin’ dare! Just do it!” “Pussy!” “Faggot!” A bird fled the grass at the commotion. Howie’s arm was forcefully dropped, and he clutched the former point of contact like an injury.

Charles turned away again, weak from the weight of their attention. He’d told Howie they could stop at the deli on their way home. He’d promised him a Blow-Pop for being so well-behaved during the chess club pizza party. He made lots of promises.

The far edge of the quarry pond was lost to the cliff-shadow. Sure, this was going to hurt. Still not as much as having nowhere to sit in the cafeteria tomorrow.

The jeers from the bank turned to hoots and snickers as he finally sloughed in. The cold cut like glass at Charles’s toes, then shins, then knees; although he bit back a gasp, violent tremors shook his stomach and erupted into body-wide shivers. With his face contorted he kept a giddy, clockwork pace, one foot in front of the other. The boys loved it. He was doing great, they said.

“Charlie boyyyy!”

“That’s what we’re talkin’ about!”

“Yeah! Charlie, you can do it! I love you!”

Water soaked the weave of his sweater. The key-ring on his belt loop floated up to pad his side. The pond’s bottom was silty and infirm, and with each step, Charles thrust himself chest-first through the clotted leaves on the surface, further and further, until steps became jumps and then swirling, weightless pedaling. The pond broke wildly against his clumsy swimming; his lips fell slack.

How far out was he now? Only halfway, and making much slower progress than he should have been. An unmistakable draw moved under the surface of the water, seeming to pull toward its center like a drain. “I’m in the middle now!” he screamed, splashing to rotate. “I made it t-to the, the…” 

His voice came out thinner than it should have. And he couldn’t see Reggie or anyone else on the shore behind him—had he turned far enough? Sloppily he spun in the water, scanning the bank in choppy sweeps. Every few seconds, his focus broke on the concerted effort to stay afloat.

“Guys! Guys, I—”

Mineral pondwater flooded his mouth. Charles thrashed, coughed, and dipped under for an instant, and when he resurfaced he could no longer tell which direction he was facing at all. Further he twisted in search of help, but the shining surface left blinding afterimages on his retinas. He yelled again, but his voice came out a weak complaint. It occurred to him that he could still sense the flux his kicks were creating, but he could not actually feel his legs. Charles tried to thrust up out of the water, to expand his lungs and float like he’d learned as a child, but the air in his chest cut sharp and hard and mean.

And then he spied it: a small shape on the bank, fifty feet away, trundling clumsily along the waterline. Howie was trying to follow him around to the far shore, and he was all alone.

Still with his ears underwater, Charles jutted his chin upward at the gibbous moon in its bed of clouds. He extended fingers through the deep dark thrum around him, searching for the pond shelf but only finding the quick edges of leaves pulled under by his movement. On the nearest shore, a slight human form parted the reeds. The sky danced with light refracted through his lashes, purple and white-gold. 

He just needed a second to collect his bearings. He needed to catch his breath. His paddling slowed, and burning-cold water slipped in to cover his face and flood his nose, just before someone grabbed him by the wrist.

When Charles opened his eyes again, waves were lapping at his ankles. In the silty mud of the bank, two small warm hands clutched one of his. Howie’s face floated inches away from his own, with eyes as round as the moon.

“You’re alive!” Howie crowed. Charles usually responded rudely when his brother said obvious things, but only a wet cough came out when he opened his mouth. Wooden-limbed, he dragged himself further up onto the bank. He could not feel his feet.

“The girl saved you! The girl with the beautiful hair,” Howie informed him excitedly, stepping backward as Charles rolled over on the slopping shore. “She got you on the water, I saw how she did. She ran—” Charles waved a clublike hand for silence. He knew what he was asking his body to do, but it seemed unwilling to comply, and he needed to concentrate. He tried to rise again, slipped, and foundered on the cold sand like a newt. “But she said you had to get the rest of the way out of the water yourself because you were, um, a dumbass.”

Charles’s head snapped up. “D-don’t say words like—” He was prepared to deliver the admonition in the manner of their father, but the words died in his throat. There was a girl with them, sitting on large boulder ten feet past his brother’s shoulder. Her hair was not very beautiful, but long and colorless in the pale moonlight. When he gaped, she narrowed angry eyes at him.

“Who are y-you?” he asked, numb in the tongue.

She opened her mouth, but Howie interjected first. “She saved you!” He pulled hard on two handful of Charles’s soaking sweater. “She saved—” Charles pushed him out of his face and went back to coughing.

The girl finally spoke to say, “You’re welcome.” She didn’t sound especially sympathetic.

Charles stuttered again, “Wh-who are you?” because he was too cold to come up with a better question. She shot a look of extravagant irritation at the nearest embankment and unfolded long legs from their criss-cross. She marched forward to grab Charles’s muddy hand and pull him ungently forward, ignoring his shouts of pain until he stumbled and finally got his feet beneath him again. There she left him shivering and with clothes slogging heavy off his hunched body. Howie wrapped reassuring arms around his brother’s dripping leg.

The girl stepped back to appraise him, wiping her hands on her jeans. She was tall, skinny, maybe sixteen. She regarded Charles with a familiar disdain, the same as most of the girls he knew. Her overalls were a few inches too short for her legs. She didn’t have a coat.

“You know, they ditched you,” she said bluntly.

In a plausible affect of dignity, Charles resisted the urge to turn and search for Reggie and his gang on the pond’s eastern bank. Saliva sat thick in his mouth, protective of his water-burned throat. “Aren’t y-you c-c-cold?” he slurred.

“N-n-n-no.” Her tone was scornful. “Why, are you?” Charles’s body betrayed him with an encompassing shudder from teeth to toes. She cast her eyes away.

“God,” she muttered. “Kids are so stupid.”

Charles’s face was touched by the first heat he’d felt since entering the water. She wasn’t so much older than him, and it should have been easy to put her in her place, but his brain felt as though it were floating in a cooler. He glowered mutely. She smirked.

Howie asked, “Do you want my jacket?” and Charles and the girl both answered, “No.” Charles shook his brother off his leg and started slumping along the footpath worn into the bank. Behind him, the girl let out a noise of disgust. 

“I’ll be here when you want to thank me!” she called at his back.

“Let me d-drown next time,” Charles mumbled, maybe loud enough for her to hear. He grabbed Howie’s hand more roughly than necessary. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that there was still no one waiting for him on the far end of the pond. Howie dug in his heels to turn back. Charles gave him a sharp tug, like a puppy.

“Bye!” Howie cried. “Goodbye! I love you!” Charles jerked him forward again.

The broken switchbacks on the quarry walls were gilt in silver, and the wind’s touch left Charles so cold that all he could do was squeeze his eyes shut and try not to cry. His socks were wet, so every time his foot slipped forward into the toe of his shoe he felt that much angrier.

“I like her, she’s my friend.” Howie tripped along roughly to match his brother’s pace. “I’ll tell Miss Jacoby tomorrow.” 

“Don’t tell you teacher we were here.”

“Okay. I’ll tell Mo—”

“J-j-just shut up, Howie.” Charles shoulders collapsed around him. A fallen branch cast its mangled shadow along the path ahead, and he stopped to kick at it; missed; kicked again. It skidded three feet to the left and dropped into the pond. Ripples broke the surface, mercury-white strands gliding across the water to meet in an image of the moon.