I loved swimming it, Ruby knew. We liked to think of them, the city people who assumed they had lives so much better than ours even though they lived stacked up tight in their gray city, locked in their boxes, breathing their canned air, taking their baths in the pool we just swam in.
It was illegal to swim in the reservoir, but I did it anyway—we all did, and more. It was the water we puked into, when we were too drunk to keep standing; water we pissed in, secretly, in darkness; water in which some girls gave it up, thinking they didn’t need a condom; water where stupid girls did stupid things.
I’d been coming here since I was a baby. Besides, I knew I wouldn’t drown if I tried to cross—Ruby said.
So there I was, standing up, and clawing out of my shirt, and then I lost my shorts, and then I was wading into the water past my knees.
I knew what she wanted: a show, for the rest of them. Ruby said I could do an impossible thing and all I had to do was act like I was about to do it, make them wonder enough to think it real. Her friends sure weren’t sober; they’d remember it however she wanted them to tomorrow.
I pushed forward, plunging in up to my waist. She wound them up for me, saying, “Chloe’ll make it across, no problem. Chloe’ll bring us back something from Olive, just watch. Right, Chlo?” And some boys yelled, “Yeah, Chloe, think you can do it?” And other boys yelled, “No way!” and “Let’s see her try!” Flashlights dancing circles around me. My name on their lips, coasting across the water. My name.
Everyone was watching, it felt like. The night was mine now, as if my sister had handed it over to me, simply curious to see what could happen.
It had all started because Ruby had invited some boys to the reservoir, and then word had gotten out, as it always did, news of a party passed along from car to car at the Village Green, phones buzzing, messages flying, girls and boys we didn’t even bother talking to in daylight saying, “Ruby wants to go swimming. Did you hear?”
I was only aware of how many kids had come when I looked back to shore. Then my eyes went to him, the one boy on the rocks who wasn’t yelling. I could see him up on the tallest rock, a shaggy silhouette showing how his mohawk had grown out, the hard angle of his chin turned away. A pulse of light as he sucked in on one of his brother’s smokes, then dark, when he ground it out, then no light. He was the one not watching. His brother was up there, and so was some girl in a white shirt, so white it was the brightest thing I could see from out in the water, and they were watching. Their heads were turned my way. Only his wasn’t.
I stopped looking. I’d play along, since that’s what Ruby wanted.
“Sure I could do it,” I called out to the boys gathered by the water. “Totally I could.”
Ruby didn’t seem worried, not one bit. It was like I never had that Rolling Rock one of her friends slipped me, hadn’t chugged from her bottle of wine when she wasn’t looking. As if I were an Olympic-class swimmer and had done this before, diving down to ransack swollen dressers, as if any story she told about me or about the drowned towns at the bottom of the reservoir was true.
“So are you going to or not?” one of Ruby’s friends called.
“Yeah,” I said. “For twenty bucks.” And Ruby smiled the slight smile that showed she approved, then held out a hand to collect the cash.