The Lifeboat Clique (13 page)

“Okay, that's enough,” Rob said. “Now go home.” He turned to the people still milling around. “Everyone go home.”

Abigail and I limped toward the parking lot, where
my dad was waiting for us.

“Good fight,” I said.

“I want her,” Abigail said.

“Who?”

“Sienna. I want that crazy bitch to be my coach.”

“You're insane, Abigail.”

“She's the best, and I want the best.”

“And exactly how are you going to get her to coach you?”

“I'll pay her.”

“Sienna's dad is pretty well-off. She doesn't need your money. And she doesn't seem to like you.”

“Well, we'll see about that,” Abigail said.

I stopped walking. “Wait a second,” I said. “I might have a little present for you, Abigail.” I pressed the reverse button on my video recorder and looked into the monitor. “I forgot to show you this. I was doing a little innocent filming after the game a couple weeks ago, and I caught Sienna behind the stadium, smoking a cigarette.”

“So?”

“Well, during halftime I was going over some old footage, and I watched that scene again.”

I found what I was looking for, and zoomed in and pressed Play. Abigail and I watched silently as Sienna leaned against a wall and lit up.

“Does that look like a cigarette to you, Abigail?” I asked.

“Nope. Looks a lot more like the locoweed.”

“Exactly.”

Abigail glanced at me.

“Are you suggesting blackmail, Denver?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “I like the way you think, cowgirl.”

ABIGAIL SHOULD HAVE
been careful what she wished for. True, thanks to me and my tabloid cinematic skills, Sienna had no choice but to become Abigail's reluctant tutor. But she made Abigail pay. The taunts of Maxwell were nothing compared to what Coach Sienna put her through every Saturday morning: yelling at her, calling her stupid, and making her do endless and punishing drills.

“Why do you put up with her?” I asked.

“I'm getting better, that's how come,” Abigail answered. “Can't argue with that.”

“It's kind of like
The Miracle Worker
,” I said. “Except you're not blind and deaf, and your teacher's a bitch.”

OVER CHRISTMAS VACATION
Abigail and I, and both sets of parents, went to Playa del Carmen. (Much to Abigail's delight, her little brother stayed in town with a friend's
family.) Of course, I brought my video recorder along so we wouldn't miss a single memory of our dream vacation.

We sat together on the plane and looked out into the clear sky and ordered Cokes and put the seats back. Our fathers were decked out in Tommy Bahama shirts. Abigail's mother had on a sleek halter dress thing, and my mother wore a simple skirt with a sleeveless blouse, and brought along her favorite straw hat.

We flew in to the Cancun airport, and our parents rented a van to drive to Playa del Carmen as I filmed out the window. Finally we arrived at the little villa my parents had found, featuring huts with ceiling fans and wooden floors. Abigail and I got our own hut with twin beds, and we wasted no time bursting in with our suitcases.

“Look,” Abigail breathed. “They folded the guest towels into the shapes of swans.” She lovingly stroked the towel swan's head.

“This is going to be the best vacation ever!” I told her.

And it was, at least at first.

Abigail practiced her soccer moves on the beach while I filmed everything I saw. Birds in the sky. Children selling beads. The waiters bringing our parents their mai tais. The sun setting. The sun rising. Palm trees waving. Someone's pet goat running down a stone-lined street. Our parents taking a sailboat cruise at dusk without us, the
sailboat getting smaller and smaller and then disappearing altogether.

On the fourth day of our vacation, Abigail came down with an affliction called Hot Red Face with Freckles from being in the sun too long and was hiding out in our hut. I was outside, filming a woman setting up a display of pottery on her stand. Then I felt sorry for her because no one was buying her pottery and so I bought a pretty cup that could be used for just about anything.

I walked around, shooting, as the sun started sinking in the sky. I passed by the pier and saw my parents out there alone, facing each other, talking. The lowering sun and the birds circling over their conversation made for a promising cinematic moment, so I stealthily walked down the pier with my video recorder, the wooden slats warm under my bare feet and the seabirds shrieking.

Halfway down the pier, staring through the lens and keeping my mother and father in the center of the frame, I began to realize something. This wasn't a conversation. It was an argument. It was something hostile and ugly, and I was filming it.

“Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about. I hate when you say that,” my mom was saying.

I froze, not sure what to do.

“I've had about enough of this crazy talk,” my father
snapped. “I wasn't flirting with her. She may have been flirting with me, but I was just being friendly.”

“I'm not stupid,” my mom said.

She glanced my way and noticed me standing there, no doubt looking shocked, my video camera still propped on my shoulder. She touched my father's arm. He turned, his face red, and shouted at me.

“Turn that thing off!”

I WAS NEVER
told why we left Playa del Carmen early. My parents packed up and gave Abigail's family the rental car, and we took a taxi to the airport.

“What's going on?” Abigail asked me as I packed my suitcase.

“Hell if I know. They had an argument, and
boom!
”

“Well, what about?”

“She was accusing him of flirting with someone.”

“Who?”

“Well, the only thing I could think of was that waitress at the Lazy Lagoon. With the giant boobs. She kept laughing and putting her hand on his arm. But I think my mom's overreacting. My dad's just not the horn-dog type.”

“I don't think so, either,” Abigail said. “But one thing I know for sure. This vacation just went to shit.”

I DON'T KNOW
how to explain it. Only to say that I had a strange feeling after we came back from Mexico, like things weren't so perfect and I couldn't exactly figure out why. My parents and Abigail's parents didn't seem to be spending much time together anymore. My father joined an advisory board that guided master's degree candidates at UCLA, so he was tied up a lot more than he used to be. When he did come home, he seemed tense, distracted.

In March, my mother went to the hair salon, and when she came back, she had a distinctly different look. Her mousy brown hair had been cut into a bob and bleached blond.

I was speechless. She looked about as different from my mom as a mom could be.

“What do you think?” she asked me.

“It's . . .” I struggled for complimentary words, then finally gave up. “Mom, why did you do that?”

“I just thought I needed a change. I looked too old-fashioned.”

She also started working out at the gym. She'd come home and rub her legs. “I don't think I'm doing these lunges right,” she'd say.

“My mother's acting weird,” I told Abigail. “Changing herself and stuff.”

Abigail pondered this. “How old is your mother?”

“Forty.”

“Ah, women freak out at forty. Known fact. Like birds flying south.”

THE WEEK BEFORE
tenth grade started, Abigail again made her appearance on the field. Again she wore the yellow scrimmage pinny.

Yellow. Color of domination. Of revenge. Of badassery.

Abigail ran up and down the field, keeping the ball away from her unworthy opponents. She passed, she juggled, she scored. She was everywhere at once. Her blackmailed bitch of an instructor had taught her well. And I kept the film rolling when her name was called as a new member of the Avondale junior varsity soccer team.

To say that we were jubilant was an understatement. But Abigail's parents were strangely silent on the car ride home. When they reached our house, I turned to Abigail.

“I can't wait to tell my parents!” I said. “I'll call you in a little bit.”

“Great!” Abigail said.

“Good-bye, Mr. and Mrs. Kenner,” I said, still puzzled by her parents' gloom.

“Good-bye,” Mrs. Kenner said, but Mr. Kenner didn't speak.

My parents were waiting for me on the couch in the living room.

“So guess who made the team?” I said in greeting. I noticed their expressions and knew that no one was about to celebrate anything in this house.

“Sit down,” my dad said.

“Is Grandma sick or something?” I asked. Boring though she was, she was my last living grandparent, and I felt tears coming to my eyes, certain this was it.

My father glanced at my mother, but she stared straight ahead. Her new blond hair was showing brown at the roots. Her toenail polish was growing out. She had a balled-up Kleenex in one hand.

“Your mother and I are getting a divorce,” my father said.

I stared at him, completely stunned.

“What?” I whispered.

I looked at my mother. She said nothing, but pressed the tissue against each eye.

“You guys are happy, aren't you?” I demanded.

“I was,” my mother said tearfully.

“But what happened?”

“Apparently,” she said, her voice evening out and turning less shaky but harder, like she was just now learning to ride a bike of hatred without the training wheels, “your
father is in love with Abigail's mother.”

“WHAT?!” I shouted. “You're kidding me! Of all the mothers in the universe, you pick my best friend's mother?”

“It just happened,” my father said miserably.

“You can't do this, Dad,” I said. “You can go to counseling. It worked for Jason Seeger's parents. They were going to split up but—”

He held up a hand to stop me. “I don't care about Jason Seeger's parents. This is about true love, and being happy.”

“It's about
you
being happy,” I said. “You don't care about our happiness.”

My father looked tormented, but I didn't feel sorry for him one bit. “Things happen,” he said helplessly.

“Yeah, bullshit.”

“Honey . . .” My mother dabbed at her eyes. “Don't swear.”

I WASTED NO
time storming from the room and calling Abigail.

“Holy shit,” she said when she answered the phone. “My dad is packing.” She sounded all stuffy, like she'd been crying. Which made me tear up a little bit.

“My dad is packing, too.”

“Well,” Abigail said after a series of sniffs, “your dad's the
one who should be packing. He's the dog in this situation.”

“Don't call my dad that,” I said. “Even though it's true.”

A short silence. “I'm guessing you're thinking my mom's a dog, too.”

“No, I'm not thinking that,” I said, although I kind of was. “I'm just trying to figure out how to fix this.”

“I don't think we can. I mean, I begged and pleaded with my mom to give it one more chance, but it's like talking to a wall.”

“My dad is equally stubborn or in love or whatever,” I said.

We both fell silent.

“You okay, pal?” she asked at last.

“I just feel like I should have figured this out earlier.”

“What good would it have done, though?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe I could have stopped all that horse talk between my dad and your mom that was bringing them together.”

Abigail allowed herself a small snort of laughter.

“I'm pretty sure, cowgirl, there was more than horse talk going on.”

THAT NIGHT MY
mom and I had a dinner meant for three people. If we'd had a dog, we'd have shoveled him the
leftovers in the hopes that he'd destroy the evidence that we had been abandoned. But no such luck.

We sat side by side, watching old movies on TV. We turned off a love story and switched to a documentary on oil production in the Arctic, which was a topic we found sufficiently far enough away from this house to be tolerable. Occasionally my mother would burst into tears, and I'd put my hand on her arm.

We forgot to feed Sonny Boy, and he reminded us with a series of loud wails that made my mother jump and had me scrambling for the kitchen. I thought at least one member of the household should be happy on this night and so I gave him a treat of tuna fish and watched him wolf it down, his appetite unaffected by the fact that his daddy had left the building.

“I just feel so stupid,” my mother said before I kissed her good night.

“That makes two of us,” I said.

I couldn't sleep. My anger at my father wouldn't let me. We'd been a happy family. No major problems. How could he throw that all away?

I felt even sorrier for Abigail. After the most triumphant moment of her life, a moment for which she had sacrificed so much and practiced so hard and endured the bitchery of Sienna Martin, she'd been hit with this news.
And her glorious acceptance to the junior varsity soccer team was forgotten.

Our own teams were beat up, separated, destroyed.

I looked at the clock and decided to see if Abigail had left her phone on. She picked up right away.

“I can't sleep, either,” she said.

“I'm so pissed off.”

“At least you're stuck with the good parent. I'm over here with my harlot of a mother. Maybe I should run away.”

“Don't do that,” I said. “That will only make things worse.”

“Did you see any signs?” Abigail asked me. “I mean, I had no frigging idea this was going on.”

“I've been thinking about that. Remember that time we went to the Blue Oyster?”