Held A New Adult Romance(12)

"You know. You know what happens if you throw a newborn baby into a swimming pool?"

She gives a puzzled look. "What? Somebody calls Child Protective Services?" She makes no attempt to hide the laugh in her voice.

"Well yeah, you'd hope."

"I would, definitely."

"It's a thing," I say, determined to explain. I have no chance with this girl but that doesn't mean I have to be okay with her thinking I'm the kind of weirdo who goes around throwing babies into swimming pools. "My brother probably knows all about it. Swimming is supposed to be a thing we're born knowing how to do, but if you don't get in the water early enough you learn to be afraid of it."

Amber blows smoke into the wind. It comes back and makes her blink fast. "I don't think that's true," she says. "You hear of little children drowning all the time. Sometimes in like three inches of water. They were going to drain the pool one time and I remember thinking that if you really want to drown yourself, you can easily do it in your own bathtub."

I feel like I shouldn't be hearing this but I don't know what to say. She curls her feet up on the seat and leans back against the mosaic.

"Doesn't have to be the Death of Marat," she says. "Just takes a pill. Maybe a drink. Doze off in the water and it's Goodnight Vienna. Wasn't that was how Whitney Houston died?"

"I think so. I don't really think much about things like that."

"I know," she says. "I shouldn't either. But then I am crazy. You probably know all about that, right?"

I can't stop thinking about that picture. The inside of her thigh was white as bone and gave me the same ugly shock as it does when you click on something and find yourself looking at crime-scene photos or gore. Like something hardwired inside your head makes you look away. Wrong. Bad. You don't want to look at that girl like that; her goddamn guts are hanging out.

"I wouldn't know anything about that," I say.

She pulls the ribbon out of her hair and gathers it back to retie it. Her neck is pure white, but then I see a patch of red at the back, like a fresh scar or scorch mark - I can't tell. When she looks back up at me her gaze is cool, almost cold. I can see her old man in her eyes - the Hollywood hard man. "Don't be ridiculous," she said. "Everyone knows. It's all over the internet."

I shake my head. "I don't pay attention to that kind of thing," I tell her.

Amber grinds out her cigarette on the wall. She doesn't smile. "Maybe you should," she says. Her eyes are dry but there's this final note in the way she says it. When she walks away I see the scar at the base of her neck, the size of a rose and nearly as red.

Shit. Gone again.

That night I beard Jo in his den. He lurks most times in the cubbyhole beneath the stairs, watching magic videos on YouTube and grunting at passers by. Lately he's been on a ghost kick - lots and lots of those dumb shows where people switch on the night-vision cameras and run around old buildings deliberately scaring the crap out of each other.

He pulls off his headphones and hits pause. There's a girl on screen - green-gray from the cameras, her mouth frozen in mid-scream, her eyes with that spooky, reflective glow. "I don't know how you can sit there in the dark and watch all this shit," I say. "Doesn't it freak you out?"

Jo shrugs. "If ghosts were real, I guess."

"What happened to the ghosts of the Manson family or who-the-fuck-ever up at Wonderland?"

"Collapsed under the weight of evidence," says Jo. "It was more 'I want to believe' than anything else. Do you know they've made fourteen seasons of this show and have yet to turn up a single piece of evidence that can't be explained away by perfectly mundane causes? Either ghosts are super, super shy or it's all bullshit."

"What about the holy ghost? Is that bullshit?"

"Sure it is," he says. "You honestly believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and came back to life? Cause I don't."

"Shh. Don't let Pops hear you say that. You'll break his heart."

"What? He's going to be shocked to discover I don't still believe in Santa too? I'm a grown-up, Jaime. I'm too fucking old for this shit." He says this like he was forty-five and not seventeen. Everyone says my little brother is an 'old-soul' but in some respects I guess he still has a lot of growing up to do.

"Okay," I say. "Hypothetical, right?"

"Right."

"Say you met this girl."

"Uh huh."

"And you like her. Not like-like. Maybe not yet. But you could see it going that way."

He leans back in his computer chair and folds his arms. "With you so far."

"So she says she's got a complicated past, right? And then she says you should look it up on the internet if you really want to know."