Stranger Danger

It was raining that morning, but Kay insisted on going outside to smoke after breakfast. She never smoked in high school, but her first semester of college had changed her. Would college change me, too, when I went the following autumn? Of course, but I couldn’t have known that then.

“Hold on, I’ll get my jacket.”

“You don’t have to come, baby.” We had broken up over the phone two weeks ago, but she still called me baby. That was Kay. She didn’t believe anything was supposed to really end.

“No, I want to.”

We carried our mugs of coffee to the backyard. Kay and I had been drinking coffee since we were old enough to drive, and at the time I thought that this set us apart from our peers at school in terms of maturity and sophistication. It was actually our parents’ affluence that made the difference, but when you’re young you take your place in the economic hierarchy for granted.

There wasn’t much wind, so I cranked open the patio’s table’s umbrella, and we sheltered under it. Kay performed her smoker’s ritual while I watched silver needles make circles in the pool.

“I had a nice Christmas,” she said.

“That’s good.”

“I love your mom and dad.”

“Gimme one of those.”

“Nuh-uh, really?” Kay tapped out a long white Benson & Hedges cigarette. “Bitches and Hoes,” she called them, a term she had no doubt picked up from some near stranger, like a venereal disease.

I took the cigarette from her and tossed it in the pool.

“Another, please.” I held out my hand.

“You fucking asshole,” she said in a bland and almost pleasant tone. It was the same way my mother cursed.

“Smoking is bad for you,” I said, all my spite and malice out in the open.

“You’ve been so nice up until now. I don’t get you.”

The cigarette I had thrown bobbed on the slate blue water like a little boat in a storm.

“When are you leaving?” I said.

“Pretty soon.”

I got up and fished the soggy cigarette out of the water. I took it inside the house and dropped it in the trash can under the sink. I didn’t stuff it down or try to cover it up. If my mother found it, she would not ask me about it. She respected my private life. She didn’t officially know that Kay and I had broken up, though I was sure she sensed that something of its kind had happened. Kay and I had been the happiest couple in the summer, and then she went away to school like we both knew that she would, and I had tried to keep the relationship working by driving the hundred miles to her college town every weekend, but Kay insisted that I stop. She said it wasn’t healthy. We continued to talk on the phone, but until the day before Christmas Eve we had not seen each other in person for months. She looked different. Her hair was longer, and she was wearing make-up, which she never really had before.

I waited for Kay to come inside, but when she didn’t I went out to look for her. She was where I had left her. The rain was coming down hard now. The pool was a sheet of bouncing pebbles. I ran to the patio table and ducked under the umbrella. I had to wipe the rain out of my eyes to see her clearly. She smiled at me.

“Remember how much time we spent in your pool last summer?” she said.

“Yeah, what about it?”

“It was one long pool party.”

“Okay.” I was still not done being pissed about Kay fucking other guys. Essentially, that was what our break-up amounted to.

“Let’s jump in. You wanna?”

“No.”

“You’re right. That’s stupid.” A few seconds passed silently. “Are your parents home?”

“No, they’re out shopping.”

Kay got up. She striped down to her bra and panties. Then she unclasped her bra and slid down her panties. We’d had a lot of sex during the summer, so it was nothing I hadn’t seen before. Still, I gawked because all was not the same. There was a tattoo of a calla lily covering an entire flank of her back.

She dove into the pool. I got up and watched her swim around. She pleaded with me to join her, but I just stood there, getting soaked by the rain. There was a stranger in my pool, and I didn’t know what else to do.