First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [73]
That a portion of the community—so tight-knit, it was incestuous—reviled Barkley only endeared him to Alli. He was a misfit just like her; she could relate to his being marginalized. After dinner, they took walks in the long cobalt twilight, hanging at the edge of the softball field or on the sloping muddy shoulder of the lake. Often they stared as one at the raft moored in the center of the lake. They sat close together, but they never brushed shoulders, let alone held hands. And yet a certain magnetism, plucked out of the droning summer air, drew them, caused them perhaps to feel the same longing, an ache deep down in a place they could not identify. Once, they spoke about the raft in an argot they understood better than anyone else at camp—as Oz, Neverland, the other end of the White Rabbit's hole, heavily romanticized worlds that were home to Others, the people so special or different, they didn't belong in Kansas or London or the English countryside.
That night they spoke while the last smears of color faded under the onslaught of darkness. The air grew chill and damp, and still they did not move. Their talking had come to an end; there seemed nothing left to say. It was difficult for Alli to remember who began to strip first. In any event, there came a time when they stood in their underwear side by side, feet in the cool, still water. They heard a bullfrog out on the lake, saw water spiders skimming the surface. All the lights were behind them, up the hill where the buildings were situated. Here their own world began, and Alli, with a shiver of intent, pushed aside her anxiety about her nude body as she slipped out of undershorts and bra.
Wading into the water, arms held high, they lay down in the deliciously cool water, as if it were a bed. Alli did an excellent crawl out to the raft, arrived there seconds before Barkley. She hauled herself, dripping, from the water; he was right behind her.
At first they lay on their stomachs, out of modesty perhaps or because this was the way most children slept. They were still more children than adults, knew it, clung to its safety.
As a certain fear flooded her mind, Alli said, "I don't want to do anything. You know that."
Barkley, head on folded forearms, smiled slowly. "Neither do I. We're just here, right? Just us. We've left all the knuckleheads behind."
Alli laughed softly at how sweetly he used words that were so, well, dorky. It occurred to her that his very unhipness was another reason she liked him. Preening boys, showing off their cool in the most obvious and ostentatious manner, had a tendency to buzz around her because they wanted something from her father, if only to bask in the penumbra of his celebrity. Proximity to power was a potent aphrodisiac for boys of that age, and would be, until they had gathered their own. Later in life, it would be the women who'd be buzzing around these boys' moneyed hives.
They lay side by side on their softly rocking island, silent, listening to the slap of rope against the raft's pontoons, the lap of water, and in the humming night the occasional bellow of the bullfrog, the call of a skimming loon on its way to nest for the night, the eerie hoot of an owl high overhead. Who turned first? Alli couldn't recall, but all at once they were lying on their backs, their eyes focused on the spangled blackness of the sky, not on the pale flesh beside them, a blobby blur in the corners of their eyes.
"I wish we were up there," Barkley said, "on a spaceship heading for another planet."
He was a sci-fi nut, reading Heinlein, Asimov, Pohl. Alli had read them also, saw through them. They were men from the dying pulp-magazine world—men with amazing ideas, granted, but they weren't