Tumble & Fall by Alexandra Coutts Page B

to see it.
    No. It was nothing. Zan pours more iced tea. A never-ending drum solo rattles her bones and she looks for her mother. As soon as Miranda comes back, Zan will sneak outside for a break, where she can take a full breath and maybe even hear herself think.
    *   *   *
    “What are you doing out here?”
    Zan jumps to her feet, wiping the dirt from the back of her white mini-shorts. A dark silhouette shuffles toward her, across the spotlit green of the tennis courts. She doesn’t recognize Nick until he’s only a few feet from where she stands, frozen at the end of the net.
    “I thought you were on refreshment duty,” Nick says with a toothy smile, leaning into the sturdy post with one hand. His short blond hair looks wet and sticks to his forehead in choppy triangles.
    “Hey,” Zan says, looking down at the tops of her worn suede sandals. “I didn’t see you inside.”
    Nick shrugs. “I got antsy, went to the beach.” He tosses his head back in the direction of the path to the ocean. Zan remembers their Community Center Camp days, when Nick and Leo would talk her into skipping out on whatever bizarre homemade craft project Daniel had prepared. They would start running on the other side of the courts, snaking through the tall grass, across the dirt road, and all the way to the beach. They wouldn’t stop until they were underwater.
    “How are you doing?” Nick asks. He’s using the voice , the “I really sincerely mean it” voice. But from Nick, it’s okay. Usually she wants to shrivel up and vanish when people look at her that way, like she’d ever in a million years say anything other than “Fine” or “Hanging in there,” her two automatic replies.
    But Nick deserves to ask, mostly because he already knows. He knows she’s just as lost as she was ten months before, when they sat together on Leo’s mom’s couch. Besides, with Nick, it isn’t a voice . Nick really sincerely means everything that he says, which is one of the reasons Zan has always had a hard time understanding how he and Leo could be so close.
    “I’m okay.” Zan shrugs. “Basically just trying to ignore all of the obnoxious comments Leo would be making if he were here.”
    Nick smiles, pulls in some air between his teeth. “Yeah, he wasn’t really into the jam-band thing, huh?”
    “No.” Zan laughs. “He wasn’t.”
    There was a period of about a month after the funeral when Zan and Nick hung out all the time. It was the height of hurricane season, and without ever saying anything about why, they started meeting up at the beach, watching the diehards get tossed around the angry surf; not talking, not crying, not pretending to be anything but the empty human shells they’d suddenly become.
    And then, as abruptly as the quiet comfort of their routine began, it ended. School started. Zan spent all of her free time reading Leo’s books, and Nick went back to work, fishing with his dad. They’d barely run into each other since.
    “I’ve been thinking about you,” Nick says now, his big blue eyes looking into hers. Leo used to say that as far as Nick was concerned, you could never have too much eye contact. At first, Zan thought it was creepy. Even now that she knows it’s just the way he is, ever-present and alert, it makes her borderline uncomfortable, like it’s a test that she’s destined to fail.
    “Yeah,” Zan says, scuffing her sandal against the asphalt. “It’s weird, all this…”
    She trails off, not exactly sure what she’s saying. All this what? The fact that even though people are freaking out, stockpiling like they’re headed into a war, nobody has any idea what’s going on? Or the fact that whatever happens, Leo is still dead, and always will be? The fact that maybe the rest of them will soon be, too?
    “Totally,” Nick agrees. “My dad is still committed to the full-time denial route. We’re out on the boat every morning at four-fifteen, like nothing’s changed.”
    “Maybe he