Page 44 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
She grinned victoriously down at me. “Glug glug, Guppy!”
—
“DON’T SWEAT IT,” MANUEL SAIDas we toweled off back up on the rocks by Sunny Sunday. “It’s only the first two events. We can still win.”
“Right,” I said dryly. “Things are really looking up.”
He nudged my side. “A little positivity wouldn’t kill you.”
That one touch—it did something to me. Something unexpected. Something dangerous. Ever sincethat night, I’d done everything I could to repress sexual impulses within myself—even the ones I didn’t see as problematic. Warm pelvis, tight belly, flutters in the stomach…I shut it off.Allof it. I had to, because letting it inrisked letting in everything else, everything that goes along with arousal. Better to tamp it down. Better to feel nothing at all. And it worked.
Until then.
Until that very moment, when one elbow against one side sent a thousand volts of electricity dancing through my body. Switching on lights. Dusting off corners. Pulling levers that should never be pulled. Awakening every part of me that I tried so desperately to put to sleep.
No.
No, no, no.
My breath became very shallow. I cast about for something to do, a distraction, a roadblock to grind whatever was happening within me to a halt. I wished I could reach for my phone. Check Instagram or TikTok, even though there was only one person whose updates I actually cared to stalk, and he was standing right beside me. At least holding my phone in my hand would provide me with a repository for my attention. But there’s no Wi-Fi and hardly any signal on Cradle Island. Most summers, I just leave my phone in my cabin and let it die.
Thankfully, my mother chose that moment to yell down at us from the porch: “Manny! Eliot!” We craned our necks to find her waving a bottle of Neutrogena at us. “Don’t forget to reapply!”
I exhaled sharply. “Mom, it’s been a half hour since we put sunscreen on,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice light. “We’re fine.”
“Nonsense.” She clopped down the stairs, flip-flops slapping the smooth wooden boards, to head for where we were seated. “Didn’t you hear what your brother said about melanoma? I won’t have either of you catching cancer on my watch.”
“I wasn’t aware that cancer was something you caught,” I said flatly.
My mother set the bottle of sunscreen in my hand. “You never know with these things.” She straightened up and turned around to flip-flop away. Before making it all the way back to the porch, she paused and looked over her shoulder. “Oh, and Manuel, dear—do help Eliot with her back and shoulders. She’s too modest to ask for it herself and always ends up with splotchy burns.” Then, with a pleased nod, Wendy Beck turned around and marched up the steps.
The bottoms of my feet broke out in a cold sweat.
Slowly, as slowly as possible without staying frozen in place, I pivoted my head to look at Manuel. To my surprise, when my eyes finally landed on him, he appeared to be holding back laughter.
It was a reflex; seeing his smile, I couldn’t quite hold back my own. “What?” I asked.
His lips twitched. “She could be a little less obvious about it, couldn’t she?”
I smirked back. “You know as well as anyone that Wendy has been plotting to marry me off to you since the first moment you set foot in our house.”
His mouth stretched into a full-on grin. “Do I ever.”
We stayed like that for a small eternity, best friend grinning at best friend. And for those few seconds, I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to be enjoying myself. I forgot that I wasn’t allowed to fall back into him. That we weren’t allowed to just be Eliot and Manny anymore. I lost that privilege three years ago on the night before he left for Harvard.
We kept staring for far too long.
I don’t know who looked away first.
—
NEXT CAME THE DIVING CONTEST.I knew we’d fail that event spectacularly. Manuel stands a full head taller than most of mybrothers. Watching him try to swan dive is like watching a tree trunk fall off a cliff.
By the time Greased Pig rolled around, the heady, electrifying buzz of competition had taken hold of me. We’d lost the first three, but there were four more events to go. Taken together, they were worth more points than all of the previous ones combined.
I might have been the youngest, but I was still determined to win.
We switched up the teams from Tug-of-War, Clarence and Caleb joining Manuel and me, then put heads together to discuss strategy. On our side, Manuel and Clarence dominated the conversation, speaking in hushed, scheming tones. I watched their connection with mild confusion.
