The Lifeboat Clique Read Free

together. And those wily verbs and nouns that changed for no reason and pissed me off and made me swear to never go to Acapulco and ride one of their cheap barge cruises and drink their cheap tequila and throw up into their salty waters were suddenly golden in his mouth. He spoke like a native. A godlike native. And every girl in class, all of them—the geeks and the snobby bitches and the crop-top skanks and the quiet, shy girls—imagined him naked in the sand, washed up on the beach and asking for lemonade in a language we vaguely understood but suddenly loved.
    Ah, the trills of his rrrrrrr ’s .
    I could stroke them.
    Croix sat at the end of the cool-person table in the cafeteria. On that fateful day, as I was navigating my way to the various uncollected bits of humanity table, balancing a tray on which sat the horrors dreamed up by the cafeteria cooks, Croix turned around and smiled at me.
    It wasn’t a polite smile. It was THAT smile, the one a lonely girl waits for.
    I froze.
    The sell-by date of the chicken on my plate retreatedfarther into the rearview mirror as the seconds passed. It couldn’t be true. He was Croix and I was me. I looked behind me, back at Croix. He was still smiling. I went to my table, set down my tray, and didn’t eat. My face was flushed red. My heart beating fast.
    And somewhere out off the shores of LA, down deep where the crabs skitter, deeper still to where the plates rumble and move, something shifted. Something started the mechanism that would later erupt into the undersea earthquake and cause the great wave that wiped out some of these very princes and pawns.
    But right then, of course, I didn’t know it. In the blink of an eye, my goal in life had flip-flopped. No longer did I want to just survive high school. Maybe I could actually make something of these miserable circumstances. Be invited to all the cool parties. Be respected, noticed. Bounce off Croix’s perfect ass into a stratosphere where I could never have hoped to go before.
    I know, I know. All from a look.
    But things got better. Way way better. Or way way worse. To put it algebraically: way (squared) worse.

TRES
    THE FIRST EARTHQUAKE MADE ITS APPEARANCE DURING Spanish class.
    For everyone but me, a minor California earthquake was like a shot of dopamine. It was like seeing a celebrity on the street or eating a handful of M&Ms at once or noticing that ten people just liked your Instagram selfie. It was a mild, welcome respite from a day that, since California has no seasons, would pretty much be like any other day.
    But I was from solid, unmoving Wisconsin, and I was terrified of earthquakes, and four years of LA had not dispelled my fears one bit. When I first felt the tremor, I was staring at the back of Croix’s head, desperate to find out ifhis meaningful look in the cafeteria had been some kind of cruel accident, that he had been staring into the middle distance and I was some kind of fixed point to orient him and he was smiling, actually, at a daydream or a girl whose breasts were bigger than the first two letters of a love note in Braille.
    Our Spanish teacher, Mrs. Paltos, was mentioning that la mano was a combination of a feminine determiner with a masculine subject and wasn’t that special? Then the floor beneath our feet started to rumble. A shudder ran through our desks, and the big window that looked out on palm trees and jacaranda rattled, and the lights swung ever so slightly. The class went Ohhhhhh . Mrs. Paltos stopped the motion of her marker against the Smart Board and waited for Earth’s outer crust to stop hogging the spotlight.
    But I was speechless with terror, my hands gripping the sides of my desk, my heart pumping madly.
    â€œEarthquake!” I managed to sputter, before springing to life and ducking underneath my desk, where all I saw were skinny-jean legs and overpriced shoes.
    I heard laughter. The trembling had stopped, but the laughter went on. I was