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Julie knows she’ll have the dream forever.
In the dream, it’s late. Late-late. The neighborhood’s all dark, or as dark as Los Angeles gets, and besides the hum of electricity in the air, it’s quiet. Julie never remembers how she got there—the dream begins right as she’s pushing open the sliding glass door and drifting into the yard toward the pool like the undulation of the water’s surface has a hold on her, some hypnotic drag that reels her to its edge, caught. She stares as it ripples, distorting the light, white mist rising from blue. Otherworldly. And Julie distantly thinks it’s a bit strange that the water’s moving but it isn’t making any sound at all against the sides of the pool. She’s not sure if the pool really has sides or if it just keeps going underground in all directions, the mouth to some vast hidden ocean. She isn’t sure how she feels about this. It should be frightening, or mysterious, or fucking magical, but it isn’t. She doesn’t feel much of anything. She is looking. She is looking. It is silent, and it is empty.
Or it starts off empty. Julie feels as if she stands, transfixed, just staring like an idiot at the water for hours. Until the next part of the dream. The part with Liz appearing from nowhere—maybe from the ocean around the pool—and cutting through the water in slow motion before cleanly breaking the surface, sixteen and painfully beautiful in her blue one-piece swimsuit, the one Marcie and Courtney had ridiculed her brutally about at the mall because the rest of them had chosen bikinis. She’d shrugged them off, saying lightly, “Well, it only has one strap. It still shows plenty of skin.” She glanced toward Julie and smiled. “And I happen to have phenomenal collarbones.”
The first time Julie saw the swimsuit in action, she privately agreed. And also couldn’t help but notice that it showed a lot more than just collarbones.
The second time Julie saw the swimsuit in action, it had been a lot like the dream.
It was late, mid-June, and hot. The drone of the overworked air conditioner hadn’t been loud enough to block out the splash of water against her bedroom window, and she’d awakened, startled but still muzzy with sleep. She tried peering out, but the glass was too distorted from the water, and Julie could only discern the vague shape of a figure in the pool, which might have easily been unsettling, but she thought she’d heard a faint, suppressed giggle, so she slipped her shoes on and shuffled outside to investigate.
It was Liz. She was treading water, skin shining, long hair slicked back from her face and looking as if she’d just been born into the world fully formed like a goddess, her eyes huge and glimmering with laughter. And something had hurt in Julie’s chest, and for a panicked, absurd second she’d recalled a news special about teen girls having heart attacks, but then she remembered that they were anorexic and she ate , just not in front of people. And she also remembered that she’d opted for comfy instead of cute with her choice of pajamas, and she felt a blush creep horribly into her face as she looked down with a not-insignificant amount of despair at her tee shirt from a grade school class trip to the La Brea Tar Pits.
But if Liz thought that Julie looked stupid, she kept it to herself. She just laughed and said “hey, Julie,” in that intoxicating murmur of hers, the one that could get anyone at Reagan High to do anything . Or more probably, anyone in general. It was fortunate that Liz was such a nice girl, and not even fake nice. Julie had seen her cry—actually shed tears —over a dead bird on the sidewalk once. She wasn’t the type to go around murmuring irresponsibly, and the world was a safer place for it.
“What the hell are you doing?” Julie hissed, noting with a wince that it was a thin, poisonous sound, and nothing like the other girl’s velveteen, breathless whisper.
“I’m swimming, duh . It’s hot.”
“You have your own pool! And it’s one in the morning!”
The other girl shrugged a wet shoulder, the one without the strap, and the full, arresting power of her exposed collarbone shone for a moment as she said, dead serious, “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
The real allure of Liz (besides her looks) was that she somehow managed to pull off being both a nice girl and fun. You couldn’t even say that about most of the great women of history, those poor creatures who had to settle for one or the other and usually got killed for it anyway. Who was the last nice, fun girl? Probably Princess Diana or something, someone else who couldn’t escape suffering despite being so nice and fun.
What bothered Julie about Liz—about all her friends, really—was that she knew who she was. Liz just had the most enviable personality. Courtney knew she was a bitch and owned it, Marcie knew that she’d do whatever Courtney wanted her to do, and Liz… well, Liz was always going to be good. Not buzzkill-good or tattletale-good, but good in the way that made Julie suspect that it never even crossed her mind to be unkind or spiteful toward another person. What kind of teenager was like that? Julie had to work at being kind, and sometimes the work was way too hard and she just let herself be a bitch. She wanted to have the kind of effortless personality that her friends seemed to, but instead she’d second-guess and mess up, ending up nice when she really shouldn’t be and harsh when the situation least called for it. She reasoned that her three friends were cliches, that she was just more complicated and therefore more interesting, but she knew she was bullshitting herself: being Liz Purr was just… correct, somehow.
“I’m going back to sleep,” said Julie, and turned back toward the house. If it had been Marcie or Courtney (really, Courtney or Marcie and Courtney, since Marcie wasn’t the type to do anything alone) in her pool at one AM, she’d have jumped in right away. But it was Liz, and Liz wouldn’t try to fuck up her life if she said no to her. And she felt like it was a bad idea to get in the pool with Liz, though she couldn’t quite pinpoint what the problem was.
“Wait! I came over here because I wanted to tell you something,” the other girl half-cried out, half-murmured (how did she do that?), and powerless, Julie turned to face her and found herself meeting terribly sincere blue eyes.
“Well, what is it?”
Liz’s brow knitted, the picture of apprehension. “It’s kind of a secret.”
“So? Nobody’s out here, because, as we’ve established, it is one in the morning. Tell me.”
“Come here,” she insisted, and as far as ruses went, it was a flimsy one. But maybe it was the unusually-visible stars, or the heat, or the absolutely caustic amount of chlorine her mother put in the pool that was probably killing their brain cells, but Julie was suddenly stricken with the suspicion that Liz might kiss her. Her stomach or liver or (god forbid) heart did something complicated in her chest, a dance with the numbered outlines of feet. That would be weird, right? It would be super weird if Liz kissed her. She wouldn’t. …Would she?
Well, if she did, it’s not like Julie would say anything to anyone, because she was trying to be as magnanimous as Liz. And she was probably only feeling weird because it would be weird to be kissed by another girl, even if that other girl was the most perfect person she’d ever met. So Julie resolved to martyr herself. Princess Di. Nice and fun.
So she knelt down on the concrete and leaned in to hear Liz’s secret, and then the obvious happened: Liz grabbed her and pulled her into the pool, laughing uproariously.
In the dream, Liz doesn’t promise a secret, doesn’t smile wickedly and drag her into the water, and Julie’s mother doesn’t come outside to see what’s the matter because she’s shrieking with mock-outrage, her stupid mammoth shirt clinging to her skin. In the dream, all that happens is that Liz swims under the water toward Julie and maybe she smiles when she surfaces to look into her eyes, but her expression’s hard to read, and no matter how many times Julie has the dream, nobody speaks, and she can’t quite figure out if the other girl is sad or happy or sick to death of meeting like this, mute and treading water.
The dream is different from the memory because that night, the pool didn’t stretch out beneath Los Angeles, beneath America, and as far as Julie knows, it still doesn’t. It’s just a spot in her yard where one time she thought she might kiss her best friend, but her best friend is dead now, and you can’t go swimming out past the concrete and under the grass to try and find her.
And in the dream, unlike in real life, in the past, at a time when it would’ve mattered, she knows right away that she’s in love with Elizabeth Purr. And Julie knows she’ll have the dream forever.