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In late June the sun saturated everything by midday and every surface was the same temperature. The cement around the pool was too hot to walk on unless you hopped like a bunny, and the bendy plastic slats of the cheap umbrella-shaded loungers lined up along the long edge of the fence felt close to melting. Normally, the pool would have been full of tenants; today it was as though the apartment complex had been deserted. There was only Vi, hauled halfway out of the pool on her elbows so she could squint at her phone; and Powder, floating on her back, scowling.
Every June Mylo and Claggor went off to scout camp for two weeks, and Powder and Vi had the place to themselves. No distractions, no one else to fight over the TV remote, no boy body spray making Powder cough in the bathroom every morning. It was her favorite part of the summer.
But this year Vi had been texting someone and wouldn't tell Powder who it was. She'd even changed the passcode on her phone; Powder had stopped trying to crack it after it locked her out for three hours. After that, she'd thought about "losing" the phone in the dumpster out back, but figured Vander might make her pay to replace it.
Vi had graduated, and Mylo and Claggor were going into senior year. This was the last year they would have together. Didn't Vi understand that?
"Who're you texting?" Powder demanded, paddling over.
Vi pushed the phone away from the edge of the pool and slipped back into the water. "I don't know how you're comfortable in that," she said instead. They treaded water facing each other. "Can't believe you like having a wedgie all day."
Powder plucked at the waistband of her suit. It was a set she'd picked out herself from separates: the top was patterned with blue and hot pink diamonds, and the bottoms were solid hot pink. The pinks were slightly different shades. But you had to look closely to notice, and she didn't think anyone would get that far. All she would have to do to disguise it was turn around, and whoever was trying to criticize her fashion sense would be distracted by the way the fabric narrowed and suddenly disappeared between the cheeks of her ass.
Vander hadn't said anything when he saw the suit; he never would have, he didn't care. Vi had tried insisting Powder exchange it for something with more coverage. Then Powder was forced to admit she had shoplifted it, and Vi had dropped the subject. Point to Powder.
"It makes my butt look cute," she said.
Vi flicked water at her. "Your ass bones, maybe. You have to have a butt before it can look cute."
Vi was wearing what looked like workout clothes: black top like a sports bra, black bottoms like tight shorts. "Maybe you should wear one," said Powder, splashing back. "So you can show off your big fat ass."
"Shut up!"
They had chased and splashed each other halfway around the pool by the time they heard Vander opening the gate. Powder shot up and out of the water and ran across the burning cement. "Silco!"
Vander's old roommate absorbed her tackle-hug. He smelled like sunscreen and cigarettes. He was wearing the sunglasses that were dark and wide enough to protect his bulbous damaged eye, ugly and discolored from the old injury that prevented him from driving and meant Vander had to go pick him up every time he came over. He was also, Powder observed after she'd managed to pull a few inches away from him, carrying a towel on his arm and wearing a pair of board shorts beneath his white T-shirt. "Are you swimming?" she exclaimed.
"I'll swim if someone lets go of me," said Silco, but he didn't mean it meanly. He never did. He'd been frowning when he walked through the gate, but now his face was calm. His arm slid down between her shoulder blades.
"I see you're both still alive," said Vander.
"Barely," said Vi from the pool. "What'd you get?"
Vander hefted the shopping bag. "Watermelon, chips…I'd better go put the ice cream inside."
"Rocky Road?" Vi called. Vander threw a thumbs-up over his shoulder as he went into the building. Vi pumped her fist.
The concrete was too hot again. Powder dashed back over to the pool, stomping into the ankle-deep water of the first step to cool her feet. She watched Silco lay his stuff out over one of the lounge chairs. His trunks were black with a red stripe down the outside of each leg. They barely came halfway down his pasty, hairy thighs. "Nice shorts," she said. "Very stylish. European?"
"You can call it that."
Powder giggled and submerged herself. "I think my suit is Brazilian," she said when she had resurfaced, calmer.
"Gross, Pow," muttered Vi. She had once teased Powder about having a crush on Silco. That had turned nasty quick, though the scratch marks had disappeared after a few weeks. They didn't talk about him anymore.
Powder decided then to duck under the water again. She was suddenly afraid to watch Silco get into the pool—because something would go wrong, and water would get in his fucked-up eye; or maybe because she didn't think she could bear Vi to notice her watching him take his shirt off. So she dived down, forcing her eyes open against the chlorine sting, and pressed her palm flat against the rough bottom of the pool. Two seconds. Five. How long was enough? Then Silco's feet kicked into view, trailing bubbles.
When she surfaced with a gasp, Silco was even closer than she'd realized. "Hey, you," she greeted him, spitting out a mouthful of water. Then she shrieked in laughter. "What are those?"
Silco was wearing a pair of large, dorky swim goggles with tinted lenses curved like a fish's eye. "These are how I can swim," he said.
He wasn't confident in the water, Powder noticed: he hung off the side of the pool with one hand. His hair was slicked to his skull, shiny in the sunlight. "You're like an Olympian," she said, paddling back and forth in front of him.
"Neat," said Vi. She had finally put her phone down again. "Maybe we can finally get some games going with four people."
"What, like water polo?" said Powder. "We need a ball for that."
"No, pea-brain. Like Marco Polo."
"That's what I said!"
Silco never smiled much. That was what made it so rewarding whenever the corner of his thin lips curved up at one of Powder's jokes.
She wanted to go underwater again, to get an eyeful of what he looked like. It had been a while since she'd seen him shirtless. But he was right there, watching her, the water lapping at his shoulders. She darted around him—like a little minnow, she thought, before changing it to something better: a circling shark. Then she had an even better idea.
"They're good," she declared, meaning the goggles. "You can keep an eye out for stuff in the water. Like pool sharks."
"I know what that term means," said Silco. "Do you?"
"Yeah, we had a bad infestation last summer."
When you weren't here. The nasty thoughts rushed out, one after another like a chain reaction. You only came over once! You left me practically all of July!
Powder smothered them as hard as she could. Because he had made up for it in August, hadn't he? They had been closer than ever since then.
"Real bad," said Powder loudly. "They should be gone now. But if you feel anything nip at you…"
Silco hadn't noticed anything. He was smiling his tiny tight-lipped smile at her, looking at her face. He didn't notice her hand hovering closer. She pinched his forearm, as sharp a bite as she could muster. His face fell open in shock.
But before Powder could do anything else with her delight, there was a huge splash from the deep end. Vander was back. For such a big man, he had an uncanny ability to reappear when you least expected it.
The wave he made carried Powder, bumping her into Silco. Vander came back up and shouted, "This pool's too quiet! Where are my girls?"
Vi kicked over to him. "Chicken!" she declared. "Let's play chicken!"
Powder's heart leapt into her throat. When their brothers were here, Mylo sat on Claggor and Vi carried Powder. That was always how they played. But Vi was across the pool—and Silco's hand was already snaking under Powder. "Up you go," he said, and then her legs were sliding over his shoulders, his fingers digging into her thighs to seat her.
Vi had always been a wobbly ride. Silco suddenly felt steady and relentless as he advanced toward their opponents. It didn't matter that Vi, on Vander, towered over her; Powder had never felt taller. Her bare thighs pressed into Silco's bare shoulders. He shifted her forward, and his neck filled her crotch. If it hadn't been for the water, their skin might have melted together everywhere it touched. She wanted to run her fingers through his hair. It was a shame she had other priorities.
"You're dead!" laughed Vander.
Vi and Powder's hands clasped. It had been years since they'd played chicken against each other, and Vi had only gotten taller and more muscular. It wasn't like grappling with Mylo, who fought dirty. Vi didn't have to fight dirty.
Powder's last thought, as she suddenly tumbled headfirst into the water, was that if she'd been fighting Silco, he would at least have let the game go on longer.
But when she came back up, she found she couldn't be mad about it. Vander's and Vi's booming laughs filled the air. Silco had his arm around her waist, keeping her upright and close. His breath was in her ear, stuttering as though he was laughing, too.
"You've got to be on my team if you want to win," teased Vi.
"Always!" said Powder. "You and me, sis!"
And then, just as they met each other's eyes, and Powder, grinning, was about to suggest playing the next game exactly like that, Vi's phone rang. And Vi's blue gaze slid deliberately away.
"Who is that?" Powder shrieked again. She brought her fist down on the water, not even caring that some of it splashed back into her own face. "Why didn't you just invite them if you don't even want to hang out with your own family?"
"You're such a sore loser, Powder!" Vi yelled. She snatched up her phone and went stomping inside.
Vander waded to the edge of the pool. "Are we hungry?" he asked. "I think I'll go cut up that watermelon." He was huge and unconvincing, streaming water as he dogged Vi's rapidly evaporating footprints. She had left an uneasy wake behind her, as though she had been the shark this time. Powder suddenly felt seven years old again, sobbing about games being unfair.
Silco's arm curled protectively around her. Powder hid her face against his chest and said, "I think I got water in my ear."
She let him help her out of the pool. He retrieved her towel and spread it over the lounge chair beside his. Powder lay down on her stomach and pressed her right ear against the scratchy cotton, wondering how she always managed to drive everyone else away so effortlessly.
Silco peeled off the dork-ass goggles and pulled out his sunglasses again, as well as his cigarettes. The goggles had left red marks around his mismatched eyes. The good eye was the same color as the pool, and it was fond of Powder. The bad one was streaked blood-red and death-black like a jawbreaker. You couldn't miss it.
Powder would always remember the story of how it had happened. She'd lapped it up when he told her, right here on these chairs last August, as he sipped from a plastic bottle of whiskey, because even Vander put his foot down at bringing glass poolside.
"You should be careful with a suit like that, Jinxie," he said suddenly. "You'll get burned."
Powder squirmed on the towel. So he had noticed her butt. "Vi says I don't have anything to show off," she deflected, pretending she wasn't pleased.
"That's because she's just your sister."
He pinched her, hard, right on her butt. Powder yelped in surprise, and he chuckled. "See? I bet those sharks could still make a meal out of you." He pinched her again. "A tiny little Jinx-meal."
She had been lying about the water in her ear, but something suddenly released inside her anyway, like a plug being yanked free. It didn't even matter that Vi was the only other person who still used that nickname. Silco stretched out again, and she watched his slightly saggy chest rise and fall as he worked at his cigarette.
Smoking technically wasn't allowed at the pool either. But the building manager had just gone inside. So who was even going to enforce that rule? Silco would never tell on her.
Because in August, after he'd finished telling her about his eye, he had let her scoot closer, take his face in her hands, and kiss him until she felt a little drunk, too.
Well, she had liked him practically as long as she'd known him, so it had been like turning on a hose. They'd kissed again whenever they got a moment alone all through the rest of that summer and into the fall, alone in her bedroom or in Vander's cramped kitchen. If either of them had been able to drive, it would have been easier; as it was, they were reckless. One evening after dinner he had volunteered to go with her to the corner store to get dessert and milk for tomorrow's breakfast. Instead, he'd walked her over to Zaunery Park, steered her into the hedges, and sucked hungrily at her mouth until her phone started buzzing with Vi's texts asking where the hell she was.
A car went down the street, its bass-thumping music rising and falling with its passage. From somewhere else, there was a distant shouting or clanging that might have been a movie in someone's apartment. The sun was powerful and endless and draining on Powder's backside. After the park, there had been the fight with Vi. Powder hadn't told Silco about that. But they had agreed wordlessly to let the affair cool anyway, into something slower and less anxious. Something Powder thought about when things were quiet or when she felt sad, instead of endlessly. Her favorite makeouts were the ones where Silco had to keep stopping to catch his breath, because every time he swallowed, he unconsciously hugged her tighter.
"Vi's pulling away," she said.
Silco sighed out a disapproving lungful of smoke. "You shouldn't let her upset you."
"She says she's gonna leave. She doesn't have a job lined up or anything," said Powder spitefully. "So I don't know where she thinks she's going, besides away from me."
"Well," said Silco, "if you ever need a place to stay, you can come over to mine."
"Really?" She tried to picture it. His apartment would surely be tidy, and probably had art hung on the walls. A nice block of knives in the kitchen and a red-and-white checked tea towel hanging from the stove. Carpet plush enough to squish with your toes. She pictured him walking shirtless around the place, then climbing into the shower. Powder made it roomy enough for two and smiled to herself at her own imagination.
"Sure," Silco was saying. "I can clean out the office, put an air mattress in there for you."
"I don't want an air mattress," Powder mumbled. She wished he would pinch her again.
Instead, startlingly, he smoothed a stray lock of hair off her forehead. "I used to be afraid of swimming," he said, fingertips lingering at her temple.
"Because you almost drowned. And you got your eye broken." His touch felt so good that Powder was sure she was blushing. "I know, I know."
"But I'm not afraid anymore," he said. "Someday you won't be scared of your sister being gone, either."
His sunglasses didn't quite hide his bad eye. Nothing could. Sometimes Powder wished all of the bad things that had happened to her could be marked on her physically, too, so that other people could see them and feel sorry for her and admire her strength. It would almost be worth them having happened then.
Instead, she thought about Silco. She would be able to drive soon. Then she could get a car, and then she could see him whenever she wanted. She could live with him. She could kiss him whenever she wanted. She wouldn't need anyone else.
"I'm not scared," she said. Silco still cradled her face. She knew he would keep his hand there until she told him to go away, or until Vi came back. "I'm not scared at all," she said again, and this time she believed it.