“That’s the deadliest looking chandelier I’ve ever seen.” Macie gazed at the shiny pieces dangling three stories above.
“It’s not a chandelier,” said Lenora. “Those are dinosaur bones.”
“Yep.” I said. “A swimmer. I think those are fins.”
“It’s got a zillion teeth,” said Macie.
Forty-nine years ago Macie, Lenora, and I began calling ourselves the Three Sneezes because the Three Stooges was already taken. Now we were in the rotunda of a new shopping mall, looking for a retirement present for my brother Emmett. Distracted from our task, as usual.
Macie sashayed to the middle of the round room, right smack under the bones, and arched her neck like a teapot spout. “If that thing fell, I’d be a goner!” She sounded gleeful. “Don’t the ribs look like scimitars?”
“Don’t know,” said Lenora pleasantly. “I’m not up on my cutlery.”
“I think it’s made of glass. I’m going to get a closer look.” I started up the moving escalator, mounting the stairs rather than merely allowing them to carry me upward.
Lenora followed, calling, “Terri, why do you always have to do that?”
“This way I can go twice as fast with the same effort.”
“You won’t be doing that when your knees start to go,” said Lenora.
“What else would you expect from an efficiency fanatic?” Macie hurried to join us. Like a cat studying a toy, she watched the escalator stairs unfolding, her head twitching at each emerging step. Finally she skittered onto one.
We have a similar conversation whenever we ride escalators. We like to keep the banter going, so sometimes things get repeated. If we had taken the elevator we would have talked about whether to jump up if the car breaks lose, and how they should pad elevator walls and ceilings with couch cushions, and install gel-lined, shock-absorbing floors.
On the third floor I examined the glass pieces, now suspended at eye level. The zillion teeth looked sharp but expertly made, of white glass cut through with ribbons of gold. The bones were also white, tinged with silver and scarlet. They couldn’t have been easy to make. I imagined Rosie the Riveter in her red polka dot bandana wrestling with a long pole that dripped molten glass.
“Definitely supposed to be a fossil,” I called as my two friends plodded over.
“Look at the chompers on that thing!” said Lenora.
“They’re ginormous,” said Macie. “What a grill.”
“I don’t think they say grill anymore,” I said.
“Implements of destruction,” offered Lenora with evil villain inflection.
“You should eat something,” I told the fossil. “Your ribs are sticking out.”
“Eat, eat,” pleaded Lenora, like a mother whose children needed plumping.
“There’s a plaque,” said Macie. “It says it was inspired by a plesiosaur, from the Mesozoic Era. They died out without any descendants. The artist hopes that the same thing doesn’t happen to the human race.”
“The artist is going to be sorely disappointed,” said Lenora.
“How?” asked Macie. “She won’t be around.”
“I wouldn’t have liked to live back then,” I said. “You couldn’t go swimming with all those nasty critters in the water. You’d ask your friends to go for a dip and they’d say, ‘Let’s wait a few million years.’”
“Let’s get a move on,” said Lenora. “Emmett’s present won’t buy itself.”
We strolled toward the sports shop, peering into display windows on the way.
“Why are mannequins always dressed better than I am?” asked Macie.
“Richer sugar daddies?” I suggested.
“Look!” Lenora pointed at a snooty mannequin wearing a pink silk dress. “Shoulder pads are back.”
“I remember shoulder pads,” I said with melodic fondness. “In my shirt, sweater, and coat. I had a permanent shrug.”
***
The next week we were resting on a concrete ledge at Alki Beach after a calf-strengthening walk in the sand. Macie was checking her email while Lenora rubbed her knees. A boat cruised by in the distance, sending feeble waves to the shore; a disdainful seagull watched the water lapping toward its feet but never quite reaching them.
The evergreen-covered islands across the water were misty; the Olympic Mountains veiled.
“Looks like rain on the way,” said Lenora. “Oh well. Keeps the plants happy.” She motioned to a planting strip bursting with lime-colored Mediterranean spurge, which looked like bouquets of toilet scrubbers.
“I don’t understand why anybody would plant green flowers in Seattle,” I said. “That’s like…what’s that like?”
“Like planting pink flowers in a place where everything is pink,” said Lenora.
“And the trees are everpinks,” I added.
“Pinking shears,” added Macie, still distracted by her phone.
Lenora looked back at the beach. “Is that blob a jellyfish? I didn’t think they were so big around here.”
I stepped over some stranded bull kelp and took a good look at said blob. “I do believe it’s a breast implant.”
“No way.” Lenora trudged over and poked at it with a piece of driftwood. It had only a slight give to it. “Definitely not a jellyfish. Something plastic or silicone. Hard to say. Sure looks like a breast implant. Size triple D.”
We both gazed around the beach at the seaweed, rocks, and sand, probably thinking the same thing. Some pour woman was lopsided, unless the other implant was here too. The thought made me fidget, since I prefer symmetry. In hair, in décor, in refrigerator contents, in my cubicle at the office before I retired. It’s nice to have order in a disorderly world.
“Breast implants don’t just fall out,” mused Lenora, “unless you’re having a really bad day.”
“Maybe she had them removed,” I said. “They caused her back pain, and also she wanted to be able to sleep on her stomach once more. After healing from the surgery, she gathered her friends and they had one of those back-to-nature drumming ceremonies, and then and tossed them out to sea. One of them washed up here. The other beached at Point no Point.”
“Oh my god!” Macie looked up from her phone, her mouth twisted as if a dozen flies had just flown down her throat.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The plesiosaur sculpture fell. It killed a woman.” Macie rested her fingertips on her forehead. “A few days ago I stood in that spot.”
My heart jumped into my throat. It really felt like that. I had to swallow several times to push it back into my chest where it belonged. I imagined the scene. Bits of white, scarlet, and silver glass scattered in a supernova across the black tile floor. People crouched at the rotunda’s edges, arms up in defense against the scattering shards. The woman lying bleeding and motionless under a mound of sparkling debris. I was about to ask to see the video, when Macie shoved her phone into her bag, which was just as well. I didn’t want to see something I couldn’t unsee.
I was silent, thinking about the victim, and how it could have been Macie. Wrong place, wrong time.
“That could have been it,” said Macie. “My final bow. My last exit.”
“It wasn’t,” said Lenora. I don’t think she meant it as sternly as it sounded.
“You’re fine,” I soothed.
Macie made a gesture of futility that resembled playing a harp. “I still have things to do. Some people have a bucket list but mine is a—what’s bigger than a bucket? A sink, a bathtub…”
“A dumpster,” offered Lenora drily.
I shot Lenora a look. Couldn’t she see that Macie wasn’t joking?
Macie could have taken offense, but embraced the idea. “Yes! I have a dumpster list. I want to see the stone thingies in Petra. And ride a bucking bronco. And get another honorary doctorate.”
“Wait, what?” I asked. “Another? When did you…”
But Macie had already moved on. “I’ve never guest directed a symphony.”
Lenora jumped up, “Is that a seal?”
A lump was sticking out of the water. Then it wasn’t. Then it was.
“You mean that thing there?” asked Macie.
We watched it continue to appear then disappear regularly with the shallow waves.
“Just a log,” said Macie.
She was still frowning, not her usual state, and I feared she’d get back on the plesiosaur topic, so I asked, “Should we finally do the polar bear plunge this year?”
“Hell no,” said Lenora. “I’m cold just thinking about it.”
“We could wear wetsuits,” I said.
“That’s got to be against the rules,” said Macie.
“There are no rules,” we all said in unison.
“It would be fun to dress as lobsters,” said Macie.
“How do you make a lobster costume?” I asked.
Lenora squinted in thought. “Red onesies, red boxing gloves, red antennas.”
“Boxing gloves are expensive,” I said. “How about oven mitts?”
“Only if we don’t buy them at that new mall,” said Macie. “It’s too dangerous there.”
***
Four days later, Lenora and I returned to the dangerous mall to exchange the shirt I’d bought for Emmett. It had been in the extra large section, on an extra large-labeled hangar, but the tag revealed it as a medium.
When we reached the rotunda, I looked up, expecting to see a void where the glass art had been, but it wasn’t empty. The plesiosaurus was hanging there.
For the briefest of moments, I wondered if we’d been catapulted back through time, into the previous week, before the sculpture had fallen. No. Then, for the briefest of moments, I wondered if they’d had a handy backup plesiosaurus stashed in storage. No. My mind finally settled on the obvious truth, that it had never fallen in the first place.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “Macie said it fell.”
“Why are you so surprised?” asked Lenora.
“Because she only looks at legitimate news sites. Why are you not surprised?”
Lenora looked at me strangely. “Because…you know.”
“Know what?”
“Well, sometimes she…” Lenora searched for the right word. “Embellishes.”
“Either the plesiosaurus fell or it didn’t. There’s no embellishing that. Are you saying she lied to us?”
Lenora scrunched her face, looking pained. “Okay. Sure.”
“But she wouldn’t do that. Not to Three Sneezers.”
“Of course she would. She does it all the time.”
I stared at her in disbelief.
She stared back in disbelief. “Are you telling me you really think she played checkers with the Dalai Lama, had a crisis when she realized she shouldn’t beat him, but also couldn’t let him win, and finally knocked the board over ‘accidentally’ so that she wouldn’t have to choose?”
“Well…”
“Come on. One crazy thing like that, maybe. But how could Macie have been born in a downtown intersection in a raging snowstorm, and be stuck in a freight elevator with four members of the British royalty for three rousing, song-filled hours that included One-hundred Bottles of Beer and Sargent Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, and go backpacking in the Cascade Mountains with a future leader of Canada who she saved from being bitten by a venomous snake by throwing pine cones?”
“But why would she lie to us? We’re her best friends.”
“It’s an illness. We love her anyway.”
“But those things could be true. She traveled a lot. She put herself out there.”
“Think about it. She came up with that story about being born in a downtown intersection after we’d been talking about my name being the same as a Seattle street. Princess Di was always in the news when she came up with the British royalty story. Plus she’s never shown us a speck of proof about anything.”
“If you thought she’d been lying all these years, why didn’t you tell me?”
“The No Behind the Back Pact.”
The three of us had made a vow never to talk about one another behind each others’ backs. A three-person friendship had the potential of being lopsided (asymmetry, ugh). We’d each been the odd person out somewhere along the way, and we needed our friendship to be equal.
“This doesn’t fall under the pact,” I said, though if pressed, I couldn’t have explained why.
“Whether it does or not, I didn’t think I needed to point it out. It was obvious.”
“Not to me,” I sputtered.
Macie had told us the royalty-in-the-elevator story when we’d all first met. If Lenora was right, that made it a forty-nine year lie. And there were other forty-nine year lies. And forty-eight year lies, forty-seven year lies, and so on. This plesiosaur lie would be just a four-day lie, but hurt the worst, being so fresh.
***
An hour later I was in my condo, obsessing over the question of Macie’s deception. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Lenora was right. The list was too long. Macie had too many stories, too many spectacular events. And she’d recently added another one, saying she wanted another honorary doctorate, which implied she already had one. Not only was the lie itself improbable, it was even less probable that she would have kept quiet about it. Having an honorary doctorate is something you share with your best friends.
The knowledge upended my view of the woman I thought I knew so well. It turned her from a fascinating bon vivant who consorted with noteworthy people into a sad, needy soul who bamboozled everybody into thinking she was interesting.
Which of course changed my definition of myself from the friend of a bon vivant to a sad, needy soul who was so desperate for friendship that she would ignore the obvious.
Gullible. Stupid. Naïve. A thesaurus of adjectives circulated in my thoughts, in different font styles, because I used to be an assistant at an ad agency. Times New Roman, the font of certainty, for I was certainly a fool. Porcelain Sans Serif, the personal touch font, because it felt like a direct stab. And finally, Melany Lane font, representing embellishments in both lies and curlicues.
When I got to be sixty-seven, I thought I knew a few things, some of them exceedingly well. I had a basis of understanding about my life and about those I hold dear. And now a leg of that understanding had been kicked away, leaving me teetering.
I was disoriented, but also angry. I’d been deceived before, and all those other lies came rushing back like nails to a magnet—clunk, click, clack, cleaving onto this new lie to add weight to it. “Your dad’s going to visit one day.” “It was a wrong number.” “You’ll be making the same amount as your coworkers.”
I felt stuck, as if rolled into a rug. What could I do? What would make me feel better? I’d always run to the two other Three Sneezes with my problems. Who would I run to now?
A complete stranger, of course.
I didn’t plan it that way. I thought getting air might help, so I went to the pocket park around the corner. An eighty-something-year-old woman on a bench was wearing the kind of floppy rimmed hat for older women that had been popping up in my social media feeds, guaranteed to block UV rays from the face and ears. She wore a blouse with yellow pears so big there was room for only five of them. The orange of her capri pants matched the shading of the pears. Beside her was an import store straw bag.
She turned to me as I sat on the other end of the bench, clearly ready for a conversation, so I found myself telling her my story. She listened carefully, hat brim flopping with each nod. When I finished, she spoke knowingly. “Let me give you some advice.”
“Please.” I was relieved. I could use a fresh perspective.
“When I was five, I decided that I’d live to be a thousand years old. I would invent a potion to keep me healthy and strong and able to do more than twenty-six cartwheels in a row. By the time I was seven, I realized that a thousand years wasn’t likely, but modern medicine was always making breakthroughs, so three hundred years seemed plausible, provided I didn’t get hit by a bus or eaten by a tiger.”
She seemed to realize she had started slouching, and sat up straight, which spurred me to do so as well. “Go on,” I said.
“In my twenties, the year of my demise became one hundred and twenty. In my forties it dropped to one hundred. Now that I’m eighty-one, I’m looking at mid eighties. Or next week.”
I waited for the advice. Fix my woes.
She continued. “So you see, the longer I live, the shorter my life span is. It’s a conundrum. Paradox. Oxymoron. One of those.” She paused for a bit. “I guess that wasn’t so much advice as an observation.”
An observation that had nothing to do with my situation, but it had distracted me so that for two minutes my worries seemed less grave.
“Oh yes,” said the woman. “Here’s the moral of my story. Time is short. And much as I enjoy talking with you, what are you doing here when you could be sorting it out with your friend?”
I thanked her, leaving as if to take her advice, but I was disappointed. On the surface, that sounded reasonable, but it was dangerous. A confrontation could reveal our friendship with Macie to be a jellyfish-like breast implant on the beach, lifeless and fake, masquerading as something it had never been.
***
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t call Macie a liar and destroy what we all had together. I had to get used to the new normal, and view our friendship in that light. Macie wasn’t trying to pull one over on us; she was just being Macie: inventive, bold, exciting.
It wouldn’t be an easy transition; it was like meeting her for the first time. As if a matchmaker was introducing me to the last person in the world, and if we didn’t click I would be alone for life.
I invited Macie and Lenora over for dinner by sending a group text with a sneezing comedian gif and the words, “My place, 7pm, be hungry.” The gif meant just us, no tag-alongs (family members, stray humans encountered along the way). Lenora’s husband was going bowling tonight, so I knew she’d be available. Macie’s husband would be fine with it too, being the happy sort of guy who goes with the flow, which is a necessity since Macie is prone to sidetracks. They got married after only knowing each other a week, but that particular sidetrack was a whole other story, and anyway it worked out well for them.
My fireplace insert was emitting an unpleasantly stale smell of ash, like one of those time-release air fresheners. I couldn’t spray any scents to cover it, since they give Lenora a migraine, so I scooped out the soft ashes, thankful for a task to distract me from my thoughts. Although it didn’t. It made me think of our friendship as a blazing fire that will flare out and leave a time-release unpleasantly stale odor.
At the ad agency where I used to work they once debated whether the term “unpleasantly stale” was redundant or strengthened the point that air freshener was truly needed. Somebody suggested getting to the crux of the matter with, “My son’s socks smell like the local landfill.” In the end, the ads were mostly wordless, a series of people scrunching up their faces in disgust.
I made such a face now. This situation stunk like the local landfill.
I watered the basil and oregano plants on my window sill, even though they didn’t need it. I dusted the frame of a zebra and zinnia painting that had satisfying symmetry.
Lenora and Macie arrived just after the driver delivered our Thai food. We sat in the dining nook, from which we could see a laurel hedge and some rain clouds nearly upon us.
“This reminds me of the time when I was a kid and we were camping and there was a big storm,” said Macie. “We heard a loud crack and the next morning we found that a tree had fallen right over our tent, stopping only inches away from the top. It got caught up in the branches of another tree. If it hadn’t, we would have been squashed flat. I’d have been a Macie pancake.”
I oohed and aahed as enthusiastically—I hoped—as I usually did. It didn’t feel the same, but I hoped my excitement would return with time, once I got past my disappointment that her stories weren’t real. She was so good at telling them.
I watched Lenora. She was her typical unruffled self, in two senses of the word. Not wearing ruffles and not getting too excited about Macie’s newest tale. I now knew why. She didn’t believe it.
By the time we were done with dinner, the weather front had arrived, blowing rain sideways against the window. “Sounds like bubble wrap popping,” said Lenora.
“Remember the party?” asked Macie. A few decades back we’d held a bubble wrap fashion gala extraordinaire. Lenora came as bubble wrap Marie Antoinette. Macie was Madonna, with the Blonde Ambition pointy bra. I was an exquisitely symmetrical egg.
“All that plastic is in a landfill somewhere not degrading,” said Lenora.
“A testament to our youthful indiscretions,” I added.
Macie and Lenora got up and did our popping the bubble wrap dance, which looks like stomping cockroaches on their way to the corner. I didn’t feel like it, but I joined them anyway.
Macie sometimes acts like she’s not paying attention, but she’s exceedingly observant. “Terri, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Now I was the liar.
“Bullshit,” said Macie. “You’ve been weird all evening. What is it? Are you pregnant?”
I patted my stomach. “Twins. Unless the baby has four legs.”
“Maybe it’s a unicorn,” said Macie.
“I hope not,” I said. “That would be a painful birth.”
“Oh Terri,” said Lenora. “You’ll be eighty-five when they graduate high school. Couldn’t you just get a dog?”
I should have continued the banter, but I just couldn’t do it. I sighed instead.
“Seriously, Terri,” said Macie. “What’s wrong? You seem, I don’t know. Broken.”
Her words brought it home. I was broken. There was no going back to the way things had been. I would never think of Macie the same way again. She’d hurt me and I realized that I needed her to know that.
I also needed to know the extent of her illness. Did she lie to everybody, and to the same extent? Did she know what she was doing, or was it self-deception? I’d been thinking only of myself up until then, but my friend was damaged and that was the most important problem. Could she be helped, even at this late age? Would she even consider counseling? Were there in-person treatment centers for compulsive liars?
I showed her a photo of the plesiosaur sculpture. “I took that today.”
“That’s crazy!” said Macie. “So it never fell? I’m shocked. The video I saw looked so real.”
It wasn’t surprising that she would carry on the charade even after being caught in the lie, but still it hurt.
“Show it to me,” I said.
Macie searched but couldn’t seem to call it up. I so badly wanted her to be right that I turned on my TV and searched YouTube. “What’s this?” I asked, and suddenly we were all watching the plesiosaur sculpture falling in super slow motion on my big screen.
“That’s the video!” said Macie. The sculpture wobbled and lost its shape as it descended. When it hit the ground, pieces scattered and there was a fake tinkling sound. Shoppers continued talking and strolling without noticing the calamity.
“You should have known it was bogus,” I said, smiling because Macie had been telling the truth, at least about this. “Nobody’s hurt. Nobody’s even reacting.”
“I couldn’t tell. I was watching it on my phone. Is that why you’ve been so weird tonight? Did you think I lied to you?”
“Well…” I hedged, looking at Lenora, who widened her eyes at me, meaning don’t say it. In other words, lie back to her by pretending you believe everything she says.
I couldn’t go along with it because my friend needed help. I looked directly into her eyes. “I’m not sure you really played checkers with the Dalai Lama.”
Macie looked at Lenora for support. Lenora sighed. “I was wondering about that too.”
Macie made a face like the time somebody (not us) slipped her some garlic toothpaste. Her tone was flat. “You pinheads. I showed you the article.”
“No you didn’t,” Lenora and I said in unison.
Macie spoke into her phone. “Seattle Times archives. Macie Talltower, Dalai Lama.”
She frowned at it. “Stupid phone. Not dolly llama. Dalai Lama.” She keyed in the correct spelling, then held out the resulting photo: a profile shot of a teenage girl and the Dalai Lama bent over a checkers board. The Dalai Lama was reaching for a checker. The girl, who had Macie’s big eyes and little chin, was eying him with a mischievous grin.
I thought about the park lady’s deep fake, wondering if this could be one too, but was under the Seattle Times URL, so I guessed it was legit.
The Seattle Times also had proof of her birth in a downtown intersection in a raging snowstorm. My friend was the bon vivant I had come to know. Not a pathological liar.
Now it was Lenora’s turn to have a crisis—the same crisis I’d had, but in the opposite direction, realizing her friend wasn’t a liar. I could see it building. She put her hands on the sides of her cheeks. Realized what she was doing and dropped them. Stared at Macie like she’d turned into a goat. Realized what she was doing and looked at the floor.
I fidgeted under Macie’s gaze, which felt like a heat beam on my face.
“I’m sorry,” said Lenora. “It’s just that you had such great stories. I mean, most people don’t…”
“Are you telling me that for nearly five decades you thought I was lying to you? That I was making shit up and you just nodded your heads and thought to yourselves, ‘Macie’s full of it?’”
“No,” I said, “Not all that time, not at all.”
“Oh,” said Macie, “you decided I’m a shit-faced liar all of a sudden. Well that’s okay then.”
Gathering her purse and coat, Macie burst out into the pouring rain. She stomped hard in the puddle we called Lake Washington; water splooshed off to the side. We called to her, but she didn’t turn around. I started after her; Lenora held me back. “She just needs a little time.”
***
She wouldn’t answer her phone. We went to her house the next day and the car and camper were gone, which meant she and her husband had taken a spontaneous trip. I thought at first that she would get over it sooner, but for weeks every time we checked they were still gone.
How could she do this to us? Not even give us the chance to explain, to apologize enough to make it okay.
Her silence made me wonder if she was hiding something. She’d given us proof for two of her stories. That didn’t mean the rest of her stories were true.
The Three Sneezes superpower was belief in each other. And now we had lost that.
But that wasn’t all. I had a fainting spell and ended up in the hospital. Lenora texted Macie that something was wrong with me and they didn’t know what. It turned out to be a problem with my medication that was easily fixed, but I didn’t find that out for a few days. In the meantime, Macie didn’t answer any of our calls or texts, nor did her husband.
The real forty-nine year lie was that we’d be there for each other through thick and thin. And so now I understood that the Macie I thought I’d known wasn’t the Macie I knew. As with everybody, there were hidden parts to her that I would never see.
At first I vowed never to talk to her again. That lasted a few days. Then I said to myself, the hell with that, the Three Sneezes need to get back together. I ordered red onesies, red oven mitts, and red antennae, and Lenora and I donned them. We made a fake Macie by painting a face on a Styrofoam wig stand and stuffing a onesie with pillows. We sent a selfie of the three of us to Macie.
No response.
***
It had been two months. Lenora and I were in my kitchen when our phones beeped at the same time, meaning a group text from Macie. We each scrambled to read it.
I’m going to tell you something. It might be a lie and it might not. You have to guess.
“Not a single emoji,” I said. “That’s a bad sign.”
“I don’t like this.”
“She still hasn’t forgiven us.”
“She’s punishing us.”
Macie’s next text was, We’re in Nova Scotia and we met my doppelganger, a horse wrangler. She taught me to hang on the side of a galloping horse. True or false?
“Should we answer?” I asked.
“If we don’t she’ll keep ghosting us.”
True, we each texted back.
There was no reply. After a few minutes I texted, “Well?”
A full twenty minutes later, she texted, Wouldn’t you like to know?!!!!?
“She’s gloating,” said Lenora. “That’s one of the seven steps of forgiveness. Right?”
“Right,” I said, although I wasn’t sure at all.
***
A half year later it was January first. Thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit at Alki Beach. Lenora and I were shivering in our thin red onesies, trying to adjust our bouncy antennae while wearing oven mitts, a futile effort that made us laugh, although not as hard as if Macie had been there.
We shifted and fidgeted on the sand along with hundreds of other people in costumes or bathing suits, all of whom should really know better than to jump into Puget Sound in the dead of winter.
The countdown began. Ten, nine, eight… Suddenly Macie was there, also dressed as a lobster in a red onesie, oven mitts, and antennae. Seven, six, five… Her presence seemed so natural that it took me a second to remember that she’d been out of our lives for months. Four, three, two…
One! Holding hands—rather, holding mitts—the three of us shouted, “Lobsters unite!” and raced into the surf. The freezing water turned our legs into cherry popsicles, but we pushed on, struggling forward against the weight of the water, even though icy shock of it made us yelp.
My body was telling me to turn around, and some people were doing just that, but others were plunging ahead, as were Macie and Lenora. I sucked it up, automatically holding my arms up out of the cold, plowing onward up to my neck.
“All in!” shouted Macie. “One, two, three!” We dunked ourselves, flash freezing our heads along with the rest of our bodies, then surfaced, mouths open and eyes wide, making guttural noises.
I thought to myself, this moment is real. This moment is true. And I kept thinking that as we screamed hoarsely, paddling the water with our sodden mitts on the way back to shore.
This moment. This air, full of happy screaming voices. This water, strewn with white Rorschach foam. This sand, clumping onto my bare feet. This wind, blowing through my onesie as if I wore a fishing net. These friends, hugging me and pretending to sneeze.
These friends. Because in the end, that’s what it’s all about.
“I’m never doing this again,” said Lenora, smiling so hard that I knew she didn’t mean it. It was a lie, but not a real one.
“Next time we’ll be mermaids,” said Macie, her voice shaking in time with her shivers.
I glanced back at the water. I could swear I saw plesiosaur bones glinting under the waves.
Maybe they were real, maybe they weren’t, but in that moment they were genuine enough for me.
Photo: Anh Danghihi