Work Text:
for you i am a child / believing
big thief, "certainty"
Ellie snorts. “Man, you are so full of shit.”
“’M bein’ serious.”
“There was no such a thing as a game called fucking water polo.”
Ellie kicks her dirty rubber sneaker heels off the side of the empty pool, sitting on the still smooth lip of the deep end. They’d crashed at a high-way motel last night, like the one outside Kansas City, and she’d been sleepless and twitchy on the slick double bed across from Joel for what felt like roughly thirty hours. As soon as the light had begun to pink up outside the window, the old man had heaved himself up and offered her an open palm: Wanna hit the pool?
The pool is a hollowed out hiccup in a landscape of dirty snow and cement, but she'd liked how he'd said it, all casual and ironic, like they were on vacation in an old movie. The ice in the bottom catches weird warm rays in the morning light. When it reflects them back, she can pretend it is moving, clean clear water.
“Sure there was.”
“You expect me to believe that? For real?”
“Now why would I make up somethin’ so godddamn stupid?” The offended cowboy twang in Joel’s consonants threatens to crack her up. She looks back over her shoulder to where he’s kicked back on a three-legged lounge chair with a screwy metal umbrella tilted above him in the wrong direction to catch the sun. Mulling the question, her eyes narrow.
On one hand, Joel is not particularly creative. His explanation for a siphon, a wind turbine, and a plane’s landing gear had all been to varying degrees insufficient when they weren’t just straight up boring. The telescope had been the sole exception. Not because it made a lot of sense, but because he had said he’d used one to watch a lunar eclipse at a neighbor’s backyard barbecue, once, and that had occupied her for days: the thought of the moon gone red as its long shadow swallowed the whole sun. She’d read about similar things in FEDRA library textbooks: comets, meteor showers, a black hole. Still. There was something about Joel having seen it that made it seem more real.
On the other: water polo sounds so unimaginably stupid that she literally cannot imagine it. But so does disco. And instant messaging. And raking piles of leaves just to jump in them after. And all-you-can-eat buffets. And prank calls. And frozen yogurt. And fucking surfing. And still, though she’d never admit it to Joel, she wants it to be real, all of it, desperately. Maybe because of how stupid it is. Maybe because of how seriously alive it must have felt, in a world where the moon ate up the sun and still no one thought it was too dark to throw a party.
She considers the deep crater belly of the pool. “Did people, like, drown and stuff?”
Joel’s quiet, and she turns around again. His eyes are closed. “I’m not saying it’s real,” she adds. “I’m just asking.”
He grunts. “Nah. They could swim. Unlike some people.”
“Asshole.” She swings her legs harder. The ice down below is far, but it doesn’t look hard per-se — in the middle it’s bunched and mostly fresh snow. Whooping, she throws herself off the edge and lands in a soft crunch that, for a moment, makes her believe in raking leaves.
“Ellie!” A grating sound, like the disabled chair is dying. Joel’s furious head pops over the lip of the pool, followed by mildly-aggrieved shoulders. He casts a long moon-shadow like this, blocking out the still new sun. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Playing water polo,” she says, scraping together a mean little snow ball and tossing it in his general direction. It sinks before it hits the lip of the pool. “Duh.”
Joel frowns down at her. “Oh, so it exists now, huh?”
“Only ‘cuz I’m playing it. I’m, like, inventing it.”
“Looks to me like you’re just plain playin’ in the snow.”
She darts her tongue out. “Yeah, well, whatever. Don’t try to tell me about snow angels. ‘Cuz I already know.” Two years ago, Riley, the hill at the top of the craggy park where for a miserable wonderful endless winter, no one had patrolled. The snow old from the ground and fresh from the sky, on her lips and tongue and eyelashes and Riley, all over. “And they’re stupid,” she clarifies, stomping on her little patch of snow. “And for babies.”
When she glances up to glare at Joel he’s looking at her in that weird way he has sometimes, eyebrows raised, like he’s surprised but not really, or like he forgot he was supposed to be scowling.
“What,” she says.
“You know all about snow days, too, I bet.”
“Obviously I know about fucking snow days.” She has no idea what a snow day is. She wonders if this is one of them.
“And about how spoons under the pillow supposedly brought ‘em on?”
Ellie screws up her face. Her eyes are gritty from lack of sleep, and she doesn’t appreciate Joel standing way up there at the mouth of the pool with his hands on his hips feeding her this endless bullshit like she’s some stupid kid. “Stop fucking with me,” she says. It sounds petulant, playground pissed off. Not that she’s ever been on a real playground.
“I’m not sayin’ it worked, I’m sayin’ people did it.” Joel rubs his face. “Kids, anyway. Puttin' spoons under a pillow, sleeping with your pajamas inside out — it was like a ritual, a superstitious thing. Spoon under the pillow at night, pancakes and no school in the morning. Don’t make any sense, but it felt like it did sometimes. You understand?”
Sometimes, in her skinny springed metal dorm bed, she would stick her comic-books under the pillow and imagine that she might wake up in one of Dr. Daniela’s deep space dreams. Only she always woke up in fucking military school.
“Yeah,” she spits. She starts to pick her way over to Joel’s side of the pool. To his left, a rusty little ladder clings to the wall like a barnacle. “I understand kids from before were freakin’ dumb. I mean, spoons? Snow days? Or like, Santa? Suckers’d believe anything.” The ladder is so cold when she takes hold of it, she almost doesn’t feel it. And then she does, and she tries to wince through her teeth so it might seem like smiling. Half of Joel’s beard twitches. He reaches down to offer her a hand for the second time today.
“Maybe,” he agrees once he’s hauled her up the ledge. “At least they knew aquatic contact sports existed. And that’s dumber than spoons under the pillow, if you ask me.”
Joel swipes at her shoulders, dusting her free of powder. She watches him carefully. He’s never cleaned her up like this before. For a moment, she wonders how he knows about the spoons and the days full of snow, the dream lure of sugar on a sleep-empty stomach. Imagining Joel with a kid is like water polo: unimaginable until it isn’t. She doesn’t want to think about it. And she wants it to be real. Cold metal under soft flannel, an alchemy that magicked pancakes into existence. Joel dusting her off like it was nothing, like he takes care of her. Wanna hit the pool? Santa Claus. Water polo, with everything stupid and no one drowning.
“Okay,” she mumbles.
“What’s that now?”
Even with only his one good ear, she knows he can hear her.
“I said okay,” she repeats, still gravelly.
“Okay what?”
“You're so annoying.” She heaves a sigh that brings her shoulders up to her ears and talks as fast as her cold dry lips will allow. “I said, okayfinewaterpoloexists.”
“Alright,” says Joel.
She waits for a punchline, but he’s stoic in his regular Joel style, squinting his eyes at the horizon. She should know better by now. With Joel there is almost never a punchline. It's why she likes him less than Will Livingston, she thinks. And maybe loves him more. “We should get going. C’mon. I’ll tell you about Marco Polo when we hit Wyoming.”
Wary again, just for a second. “Who the hell is Marco Polo?”
“Not who, what.” Joel gestures vaguely. “It’s a game. For the pool. Different from water polo.” He looks perplexed verging on pain. “And also a who, I guess. I, uh, I’ll tell you about the pool game.”
She has to skip a little to keep up with him. The snow from the pool is melting into her shoes but the prickling numbness in her toes is kind of nice, like walking on clouds big with lightning. “Why was everyone obsessed with the word ‘polo’? Did the guy naming this shit forget how to spell pool or somethin’?”
“That I can’t tell ya.”
They pass the little chain link fence around the pool deck, and she doesn’t look back at the motel. She looks ahead, at Joel’s broad back, and she thinks about eclipses.
“But you promise they’re a real thing? All the pool polos? Joel?”
He stops, turns around. Looks like he might get on her level if it weren’t for his knees. “Girl, for the last time, why would I lie to you?”
In Kansas City, he’d asked: Do you trust me? And she’d said yes — but that was when it was about living or dying. She trusts Joel to kill whatever needs to be killed to make sure it doesn't kill her first. She trusts him to wake up at the right time if he’s sleeping on his right side and to cook their Chef Boyardee until it’s hot enough to eat but not too hot and to drive a car and to steal gas and to pilfer comics when they’re meant to be looking for food and to tell her she should go to sleep and to be there when she wakes up.
And just like that, she can picture water polo.
“I dunno,” she says. Her chapped bottom lip splits right open down the middle as she smiles. “‘Cuz you’re lame and think you’re funny?”
She tastes metal, but she keeps grinning. Believing him surprises her. It is so sudden and entire, she thinks she's willing to bleed for it a little.