CW 4: The Locks and the Ladders

I wrote this today as part of my commitment to the Clarion West Write-a-thon. A dedication means that person sponsored it by donating to CW, and then provided me a writing prompt that sparked the piece. If you would like something written especially for you, please consider sponsoring me.

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

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The Locks and the Ladders

for Ronnie Garvey. I love you, BFF.

Jet poked me hard in the shoulder. “That fucking hurts,” I said.

“No swearing on the bus,” the driver said automatically, without even looking in the mirror.

Jet said, “What’s wrong, Cassie? You look like your cat died.”

“I don’t have a cat.”

“I know, that’s why it’s okay to say it. If you really had a cat, it would be completely insensitive.”

I went back to staring out the school bus window.

“So what is it?” she said. “You look like your pony died.”

You know how someone can make you smile even when you don’t want to? And for a second you want to smack them on the nose for getting inside you like that? But you’ve been best friends since kindergarten, and so it would just be like smacking yourself. That’s Jet. She’s the only one who will tell me I have something nasty showing in my nose. I’m the only one who knows that her brother’s not at college, he’s in rehab in Salt Lake, and she is terrified that he will kill himself. And when I holed up in my room last month crying over Jamal Watson and playing Evanescence so loud it hurt my ears, she snuck to his house in the middle of the night and let the air out of his tires. All four of them. It took her an hour in the rain.

“Cass,” she said. No kidding this time.

The front wheel of the bus hit a pothole. We all went up and down in our seats. The back wheel hit. Up and down, while the world outside the bus stayed level. No one out there felt the jolt. No one raised their hand and said Can you give me a break with the thrill ride, I got motion sickness here! I cannot wait to be a part of that world.

“The Dickhead is moving us to Oklahoma City at the end of the school year,” I said.

“What the fuck?” she said. About a dozen kids responded, in perfection caricature of the driver, “No swearing on the bus,” before they went back to seeing who could complain loudest about a stupid field trip to look at stupid fish.

“They told me this morning.”

Jet opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. She looked like she did the day she told me about Tyler’s crack habit. Five years old again.

“I can’t start crying about this right now,” I said. “I can’t. Not…” Not here, is what I meant. Not in front of these people whose idea of special bonding is to make fun of the bus driver.

She swallowed. “Okay,” she said, and took a breath, and pushed it all back down.

The bus turned into the parking lot of the Ballard Locks. When we got off, Jet rubbed a smudge from under my eye, and then we linked arms and followed the teacher.

We didn’t talk. Jet kept her arm in mine. I thought about living someplace strange with only Dickhead and my mother to rely on. I must have made a noise, because Jet said in a low voice, “Breathe.” I took a deep breath. Pushed it down.

“This way to the fish ladders!” the teacher called to the group. “You want to see persistence in action, salmon are it!” Because we’re just kids and none of us have any fucking idea what it’s like to swim upstream.

“Breathe,” Jet said.

A tunnel sloped down to a room with windows into the underwater. Kids pushed by, snarking about the teacher and the bus driver, Jesus, give it a rest, I thought, and I didn’t want to see the little fish swimming out to the wide wild sea where things were waiting to eat them.

I shook my head. “Cool,” Jet said. “Let’s go watch the boats.”

We stood at the observation rail over the locks. Fishing boats, pleasure boats, crowding in together, waiting for the water to go up and down.

“Breathe,” Jet said. And then, “Look!” But I was thinking Oklahoma City thoughts, and I could only see the boats at the bottom of the nearly-empty lock, tied to bumpers between the narrow walls. I could imagine the fish climbing their ladders.

Jet poked me in the shoulder. “Look,” she said.

Two seagulls were flying above the canal. Just ordinary gulls. No one else paid any attention to them. But the birds rode the air currents as if it were easy, as if they were going nowhere in particular, as if it were enough to fly together in the sun.

I leaned against her shoulder. I breathed. In the lock, the water began to rise.