lakeside
“Come on,” said David, like the little devil he was. As if he’d been working toward this moment his whole life. “You can’t do it.”
He was rocking back and forth, the river dancing around his waist. Momentarily, the clouds parted and the sunlight bore harshly into my eyesight. I frowned and heard Jenny giggling at the shore, asking us when we’d start playing Marco Polo.
“You can’t,” he said, ignoring Jenny. “You’re not even interesting enough to come up with a different game.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yeah?” he said. “Then come up with one. Come up with one right now.”
I could feel the kids’ eyes on my back. I was facing the river in which David stood, waist-deep into the water. Even in this moment of hatred I couldn’t deny how picturesque he looked, a lean and lightly tanned teen posing for a Target summer photoshoot. His most definitely evil grin could be interpreted as an overzealous smile of a sporty youth enjoying nature, and the his blond hair caught the sunlight in a natural halo. Above us, the sky was a clear blue. Around us, it smelled wonderfully of water and rocks and grass and soft dirt. I could hear the rush of the river. As I took all of this in, contemptuously, my mind went blank. I stared, defenseless.
“Yeah. You can’t. All you do is play videogames. It’s not like you have much of a life anyway.”
I couldn’t believe his audacity. His blinding arrogance; his controlling attitude. That he’d gotten away with so many things, that he was so beloved -- how could the adults not see him for the devil he was? How could they misconstrue tyranny for charisma, hubris for confidence, and deceit for charm? How could they leave me to the side like a forgotten hand-me-down while he flourished in the attention and sunlight? And it had all gotten to his head, had become the fibre of his being. These summers were always under his reign, under his self-appointed dictatorship misunderstood by everyone else as natural-born charisma.
“Maybe I do.” I took a step closer, trembling with clenched fists.
He laughed. “Oh?”
“You’re a fucking asshole, do you know that? You think you’re all that. You’re not even the oldest.”
“Who cares about oldest? You never do anything. And at least I’m an asshole with a life. You’re so uptight you’ve probably clenched yours into nothingness.”
My eyesight began to blur from anger. Purple spots appeared in my vision and my throat began to constrict. I heard something snap. Suddenly I found myself lurching forward to make contact with something. There was a stumble, then deeper water. A splash, a gasp of air. I imagined him flailing pathetically. I'd won.
Or maybe not-- my jaw clicked from a sharp blow, and I staggered backwards onto the rocks at the shore. I tripped over something, perhaps a rock, though it felt like a seaweed (and then I wondered, are there seaweeds in the river?). But despite the intense pain that felt like I was being dismembered at the synapses, I felt an exhilarating catharsis wash over me just as my mind faded out.
But of course, all of this didn’t actually happen:
What happened was that we were playing in the water and I’d tripped, clumsy me, and hit my head. Gotten myself a fracture and concussion. The adults were alarmed; they vowed never to return to this vacation house again. It was a hazard for the kids -- imagine if David had gotten hurt! Or Jenny, or any of the other kids. They spoke behind my back about how of course it was me, the weak one, who had fallen and hurt her head. I was in the hospital for a week and a half. Surgery on a part of my head, a mildly fractured skull. I couldn’t walk for a bit. I recovered. Thank goodness she doesn’t play sports, they said, at least studying doesn’t require physical movement.
David, the sweet soul. His words formed the incontestable truth (thank goodness he was there): we were playing Marco Polo, I’d gotten too excited about trying to catch him. It’d been my idea to play it in the river, silly me, he’d tried to warn me about the dangers of playing blinded games near such sharp rocks. But what could he do? I’d been adamant.
I have to say, though -- it was true. I had been quite adamant.
“Let’s play cards inside,” David chirped after our game of hide and seek had ended. The younger kids agreed; they’d been tired running for a couple hours. The shade sounded nice.
“Why don’t we play something else?” I asked. I didn’t really like card games because they were boring and David and I always ended up getting dragged away to help the adults.
“Oh, what else could we play?”
“Maybe Marco Polo?”
The kids whined behind me. David offered the suggestion of playing it after a game of cards, since it seemed like the kids were all tired.
“But the sun will go down,” I said.
He didn’t have much to say to that. I explained the game of Marco Polo to the younger kids and a couple of them were now on board. He shrugged.
“Can’t argue with the sun, I guess,” he said. “Maybe we can play for half an hour?”
I agreed. Then, it happened: I was It, tried to catch someone, and then fell onto the rocks.
“She’s usually very docile,” my mother explained to the doctors as I finally came to. I was very cold. I was in the hospital, a blanket on me, an IV in several places. David was standing in the corner of the hospital room, looking very stressed.
He was the first to notice I was awake. “She’s blinking!”
Everyone ran over to me and my mother began to cry.
“Quinn,” she sobbed. “Quinn.”
I wanted to articulate how cold I was, that I needed more blankets, that I could never forgive him (for what? I'm not sure). I glared at David. He was staring at me curiously, a mix of regret, perhaps resentment, perhaps pity. His eyes began to glisten with tears.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
I looked around the room and saw remnants of visitors -- balloons, jackets hung on chairs, open and empty takeout boxes, my mother’s purse wide open with several papers sticking out. David’s backpack. His homework on a table, a pencil atop a notebook. Soup. Get well cards. My eyes fleeted around and returned, finally, to David’s.
“Spencer?” I asked.
He looked alarmed. My mother began sobbing even louder.
After a long silence he asked, hoarsely, “Who’s Spencer?”
Let me try again:
When I was young, my family would go on vacations to a lake, several hours of a drive away from home. It was a yearly occasion that all of my cousins looked forward to -- five days with no school, beautiful weather, barbecue every night, stories around the campfire, tag and swimming with the tiny fish in the water. Spencer, the oldest and by far the strongest cousin of us all, loved it the most. He was always the head honcho among the kids. The adults would do their chatting, milling around talking about business, politics, gossip -- whatever they did during those vacations, I guess I never really found out -- while Spencer would essentially direct our playtime.
Adults would always forget that we were in the same grade -- “Quinn’s in sixth grade? Isn’t Spencer?” -- and I couldn’t blame them. By fourth or fifth grade his face was already forming into a handsome, blond-haired adolescent angel, his body formed like that of a young model from his soccer and basketball, while I felt like the runt of the family -- brown-haired, a snout-like nose, freckled, a little bit underweight and below the average height for kids my age, and the only ethnically ambiguous one of the family, due to my mother’s situation of being Asian and all. I didn’t have the same confidence with which he carried himself; I had a natural slump and a passive attitude that made me easily forgotten, often unnoticed.
The vacations always constituted the worst days of my year. I was stuck with relatives I saw only a couple times a year, people I barely knew with whom I couldn’t relate. The days leading up to our drive was always filled with performative remorse. I would pretend to lose my appetite, sulk around the house, make big sighs to make sure my mother heard my absolute hatred of the five days in upstate New York. It never worked.
Of course, Spencer thrived in this kind of environment. The rest of the cousins were at least four years younger than us and begged for our attention and approval. He had a natural confidence which gained the respect of the kids with little to no effort. I’d always envied him for that. Sometimes, I wonder if I had even resented him for it.
The vacations stopped immediately after an accident during my eighth grade summer. We’d been playing hide and seek, I think, and I’d fallen over into a ditch or something and hit my head on a rock. I was never a very agile person, and I guess this was the biggest confirmation of that. If Spencer hadn’t found me passed out near the woods, I probably would have died.
Jenny always tells the story, during drunken reunions in the city, about how she still remembers vividly the image of Spencer struggling to carry me in his arms, blood already drying on my face, sobbing loudly while running towards the house. That it had been the first time she had seen such a bloody injury. She couldn’t sleep for days afterwards. How Spencer couldn’t stop crying for hours, blaming himself for being so forceful about playing hide and seek when I had voiced a concern with the game.
The thing that still confuses me to this day, though, is my mysterious resentment towards him which suddenly appeared after the accident. It was a strange mix of hatred and indignance. We'd always been fine-- sure, I had my jealousies, but it was never that serious-- but that day, I woke up in the hospital with an unshakeable hatred for his face. Propped up, head wrapped in bandages and light-headed with a crippling headache, I listened contemptuously to his recalling of the events. I wondered why he had to be so excited about playing hide and seek with the younger kids, why such a trivial decision on his part had changed my life irrevocably. It took me weeks (perhaps months) to come to terms with the idea that it hadn’t been really anyone’s fault that I had gotten into this accident. Sure, I was incapacitated for a while. I couldn’t concentrate anymore. I forgot things easily. But at least I was alive. If anything, he had done me a favor by saving my life.
Sometimes I sit in bed wondering how crazy it was that he’d found me in that off chance; that if he hadn’t I wouldn’t have made it this far. It made me grow a newfound appreciation for everything, both good and bad. Quite honestly, all of this misdirected rage, frustration, and introspection made me into a better and more active person in my own life. And I can’t thank him enough for that -- for keeping me alive and shaping me into who I am.