Swim Back to Me Read Online Free Page B

“What do you mean?”
    “You get six bucks, what do we get?”
    “Yeah,” Eric said. “We need something too, here. You want to keep us company, maybe smoke a joint with us?”
    “Just you,” pink-face said. “I think your little friend is too young.”
    I felt my face grow warm. I turned to Sasha and said, “We’ve got the Walk tomorrow.”
    Eric laughed. “Whoa, don’t want to be too tired for that.”
    “Cut it out.” The guy with the vest had pushed away from the bike rack, and suddenly there was something different going on. The other guys all looked at him, and I saw that he was not a teenager after all but in his mid-twenties, maybe older: his hairline receding, the inlets of scalp it had abandoned shinier than his forehead. His mustache drooped over his mouth, and his eyes were hooded and dull, but he was clearly in charge. He sauntered over, his walk somehow telling me he was from somewhere else: he leaned back as he walked, hooked his thumbs in his belt loops.
    He stopped in front of Sasha and held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Cal. What’s your name?”
    She took his hand. “Sasha.”
    “That’s really beautiful. Beautiful name for a beautiful girl.”
    She smiled. She seemed about to speak but didn’t, which surprised me; she was not usually quiet or shy.
    “I’ll sponsor you,” he said. “What do I have to do?”
    She gave him her clipboard and showed him where to write his name and address, then the amount he was pledging. She said nothing about splitting the pledge between us, and I figured that with her trip to Redwood City it was too late, anyway.
    “Thirty cents, that it?” Cal finished writing and handed the clipboard back to her. He asked my name, and when I told him he said, “Well, Sasha and Richard, you’re welcome to join us for a smoke.”
    I’d been around pot before, had smelled it, had even seen a joint in an ashtray at a party my father had taken me to. But I’d never smoked it. Sasha hadn’t either, but she was on record with me as ready to try.
    “Want to?” she asked me, that same bright smile on her face.
    I thought of my father, his lecture notes spread out on the dining room table. After dinner he’d produced a small box of See’s Candies and told me we’d crack it open when I got home from the Walk tomorrow night. “Hand packed,” he’d said. “Heavy on the chocolate butters.”
    “I should go,” I told Sasha. She didn’t reply, and I said it again. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said at last, and she flicked a glance at me before turning back to Cal.
    “OK,” she said, and I didn’t know if she was talking to me or him.
    The next morning, Dan drove us to the starting point of the Walk, the playground of a Palo Alto elementary school. In the car I cast glances at Sasha, raised my eyebrows to show I was curious about the rest of her night, but she was slumped in her seat, her knees up in front of her, preoccupied. In the front, Dan talked idly to Peter, who’d come along for the ride.
    “Isn’t that funny, Richard Appleby?” Dan said over his shoulder to me.
    I’d been staring out the window, thinking I’d been chicken to leave SCRA. “What?”
    Dan maneuvered the rearview mirror until he caught my eye in it. “I said, isn’t it funny how Sasha, the queen of the Walk for Mankind, had to be reminded this morning why she needed to get up?”
    I looked at Sasha.
    “You’ll like this,” he went on. “I said to her, ‘It’s the Walk,’ and she said, ‘What walk?’ ” Dan laughed a short, mystified laugh, then turned around and looked right at me. “Funny, you have to admit.”
    I shrugged.
    He faced forward but caught my eye in the rearview again, and I saw that he was genuinely puzzled.
    “I was tired was all,” Sasha said. “I reread To the Lighthouse last night.”
    Dan chuckled. “ ‘And he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not.’ Well, you missed a great dinner—right, Peter? The