It was May, still chilly, no lifeguard on duty, the temperature in the mid-fifties. But the sun was high in the sky, and the air smelled sweet. As we trudged across the beach, we wondered aloud why sand was so hard to walk through. At the base of the empty lifeguard chair, we laid out our blankets, girls huddling together on one, boys just inches away on the other. We swayed to the music from somebody’s boom box, singing along to lyrics both real and imagined, rocking to the sounds of Space Oddity and the sus-sus-sus-urration of the waves, the warmth of the sun on our faces, susurration one of our weekly vocabulary words. Thank you, Mrs. Crowther. We were feeling relatively fine and mostly confident, sitting together on our blankets. But sitting apart, too, apart as girls and boys, apart as individual souls inside individual bodies that at ten and eleven years old were beginning to do strange things. The girls crossed their arms over their chests. The boys untucked their shirts to cover what at any moment might need to be covered. It wasn’t shame. Just discomfort. Shame we would know later.
Under our clothes, we were all wearing swimsuits, just in case. No one was planning on swimming per se but we came prepared nonetheless, because someone proposed the idea, and no one had come up with a better reason why not. At the end of fifth grade, that was how things happened. Most often we did the stuff we did because someone suggested it, and no one could come up with a better reason not to.
Most of us had known each other since kindergarten. But next year destiny would lead us all to the junior high. We knew life would be different. The junior high school was regional; there’d be other kids, kids we didn’t know, which would change everything. But for now, we remained together. Together on that beach, together on those blankets. Someone had packed snacks, little bags of potato chips and those cheese curls that stain your fingertips bright orange. We had cans of orange Fanta too.
“So, who’s going in?” Janine jumped up, shouting
There had been so much conversation bouncing around the blankets. Now suddenly there was silence except for the eerie tones of recorded stylophone and electric organ.
“So?” Janine demanded, glaring down at us, hands on her hips.
Most of us shivered. Not only because of the thought of such cold water but also because of Janine. Janine was liked and disliked equally by all. There was a goodness in her for sure but a considerable amount of evil too. These two poles are present in all of us, of course, but the majority of us learn to suppress the evil and bring out the good most of the time. But Janine presented as fifty percent evil and fifty percent good. Sometimes forty sixty. Even thirty seventy.
There was, for example, that time one of the first graders fell down the steps of the school bus one morning, her knee bleeding, imbedded with gravel, and Janine had run right over even before the grownups noticed, and picked up the sobbing girl and carried her to the nurse. On the way, Janine kept pretending to drop her, and the little girl screamed and burst into tears again. Smiling, Janine, pulled her right back into the safety of her arms, only to do it all again and again. By the time the two arrived at the nurse’s office, the first grader was a wreck but when Janine placed the girl on the nurse’s cot, the girl hugged Janine tight and kissed her on the cheek. We knew this because we had all followed them into the building and down the hall, not sure how the situation might end. It usually ended in goodness but not always. A few days later, when Janine saw the girl outside school waiting for the bus home, she walked over and crouched down to ask her how she was feeling. The girl showed Janine the Band-Aid on her knee and before we knew it, Janine had ripped the bandage right off with a flourish. The girl screamed bloody murder, but Janine gave her a pat on the head and said she’d be fine. The girl looked up and smiled. None of us had ever been over to Janine’s house. We weren’t quite sure what went on there.
“Well, I guess I’m going it alone,” Janine shouted as she pulled off her T-shirt and slipped off her socks and shoes and jeans and ran into the water. There was no question of the need to run in because if she had walked, her common sense, if the girl had any, would have kicked in and she’d have realized how cold the water was and how stupid the idea. Although we had all agreed to wear our suits, none of us imagined we’d really be getting wet. But there was Janine in the water now, head dunking under, spluttering and splashing and tossing.
“Come in, you wussies,” she roared, but we all just sat there watching. “Come on,” she screamed again, the anger clearly building up inside her. She looked like she was trying her best to appear to be having fun, waving her arms and whooping, and then we all began to wonder. The flailing and the splashing seemed a bit manic. A bit frantic. And then she was under and we couldn’t see her head or anything. Then not a splash, not a human ripple.
“Shit,” someone said. Shit shit shit.
Someone shut off the boom box and we hurried to the water’s edge, looking out at the waves which seemed to have grown bigger.
The girls had their arms crossed over their chests; the boys tugged on the bottoms of their shirts. We were all so self-conscious, we couldn’t move. We looked at each other, hoping that one of us would do something. Hoping that one of us could get out of our own way and jump in and save her, though none of us could really swim that well and certainly not in this cold water with those waves. We were no heroes, that became clear. And so, some of us began to cry and some to scream, and our world began to shatter. It was all senseless now, everything, and although Janine was never the most reliable nor the best kind of friend, she was our friend, and we were going to watch her drown. Though maybe not watch her since we couldn’t see her at all now. So not watch her drown, but let her drown, which might be worse.
A few of us clambered up the empty lifeguard stand. Still, we couldn’t see her, whether from the chair rungs or from the top. Not through our tears and our shouts and our reaching out for each other in our terror. We could not see her until suddenly we could. For there she was standing up in the water, pale as a ghost, shivering. But laughing. She was laughing and pumping her arms above her head as if she had won.
Then, two or three of us ran into the waves towards her. Now some of us ran into the water, not because we thought Janine was drowning, but now because we knew she was fine. A few of us ran into the cold waves and jumped on Janine and began to shake her. To shove her body hard, to push her head under the waves and then the few of us were on top of her, holding her down. We did not consider ourselves the kind of kids to do such things. We were not known to cause harm; we were not prone to anger. We were, for the most part, nice kids. Good kids. The kind of kids teachers were relieved to have in their class.
But the few of us in the water kept at it. Until too tired. Then stumbled out, wet and cold and confused, and fell down onto the blankets. And we pulled off our shirts to wrap around the few, for warmth, for comfort, to dry them off, and we all sat down together on the blankets again, shaking as one.
Then we realized that Janine had not come out of the water, Janine was not on the blankets, we were not wrapping Janine in our shirts to keep her warm. We shivered into ourselves more deeply. We pulled in, trying to cover every last bit of who we were. Janine was still in the water and we could not see her. We should do something. But we could not move.
Just then, by luck or providence, a man walked down to the beach. And he saw us shaking on our blankets and he saw a body in the water. We could not see Janine’s body from our angle, but the man could, and he ran into the water and he pulled her out. Janine was even paler now and seemed not to be moving. Without speaking or even looking at each other, as a group we stood up and offered the man our blankets and he wrapped Janine up and hugged her into his chest to give her warmth. Time passed somehow. Help was called, help came, and we watched as Janine was loaded into an ambulance. We stood in silence, and with our silence, agreed, because no one suggested otherwise, never to tell a soul.
Those last few weeks of schools were a blur. The principal arranged for counselors to be made available to anyone who needed support. But we never went. In class and in the hallways, the other kids looked away. Not because they thought we were guilty but because they didn’t know what to say. They couldn’t imagine what it would be like to watch a friend drown. Nearly drown. Over that last month of school, we were individually interviewed by the police, and we all gave separate and confused responses. Everyone seemed to understand that we had just experienced a traumatic event, an accident, and no one, at all, ever, suspected anything otherwise.
In the fall, Janine returned to school, our new school, the regional junior high, but we didn’t see her much. She was in special classes. She was learning to walk and to talk again. We didn’t even see each other that much anymore. We had all been separated into different houses. Some of us still attended class together, but soon even those relationships dissolved as we made new friends and found new interests.
The man had arrived at the beach too late to see what had happened. Certainly, not all of us were responsible for the violence. But none of us had stopped it. After Janine was carried off in the ambulance and the man left, we stood there in silence. Slowly we began to pack up. The blankets were now in the ambulance, but we gathered our stray clothing and the boom box. We cleaned up the empty orange soda cans scattered on the beach and the empty potato chip and cheese curl bags which had blown under the rungs of the lifeguard stand. And it was then, as we reached into the chair’s shadow, that we noticed the bright orange stains on our fingertips. And when we opened our mouths, we saw the orange there, too, on each other’s tongues. There were no stains on the fingers of those who had attacked Janine, for, of course, the orange had washed off in the waves, their hands cleansed unjustly. But their tongues showed the same shame. Our collective culpability. By the end of that day, the stains had faded some, but not the shame.
For some time after, we made great efforts to avoid the beach, the water, orange-colored foods. When we happened to run into one another, before and after became the code words we used to bracket our lives. Although we had learned that Janine eventually gained back much of her strength, both mental and physical, that she had been able to live a somewhat regular life, job, marriage, children, this knowledge gave us little peace.
One May years later, a few of us decided to meet at the beach. We lumbered across the unsteady sand and laid our blankets under the empty lifeguard chair. Together we felt the healing power of the spring sun on our faces. We had no music so listened instead to the call of gulls, the pull of waves on small stones. Susurration, someone whispered slowly. We gazed out at the horizon, the light hue of the solemn sky meeting the denser blue of sun dazzled water. Someone passed around a bag of cheese curls. We were too old for irony. Looking for absolution, this moment of return our honest attempt at grace, we as women and men now reached in and each took a handful. We ate slowly, with purpose. Then did our best to lick our fingers clean.
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Martha Morgan has published several pieces online through Flashquake and Contemporary Haibun Online and was also a finalist in a Glimmer Train Emerging Writer’s Contest.
