Only If You’re Lucky

We were in the water the first time we saw him, his slow approach down the dock thieving our attention.

“Who’s that?” I had asked, my legs kicking beneath the calm of the current like a hidden panic, concealed from the surface.

Eliza’s dock was long and lean, over one hundred yards of salt-stained wood spooling into the ocean like a red cedar carpet. It was the summer going into our senior year and we had spent every day out there, flip-flopping down to the floating dock in the mornings, marinating ourselves in tanning oil until our skin started to crisp. That day, we had been out there for hours already, our towels wet and rumpled and smelling of musty coconut, before deciding to dive in to cool off—but suddenly, we could just barely make out the outline of a person walking our way.

“I think it’s my neighbor,” she said, her lips just above the waterline. The house next to Eliza’s had been vacant for years; like lots of homes in the Outer Banks, it spent most of its life as a vacation rental until the owners simply decided to stop renting it. They must have been pretty wealthy to let it sit like that, unoccupied, but when they did finally decide to let go of it, it was barely a week before the “For Sale” sign was replaced with “Sold.” By then, though, Eliza and I had gotten used to the dock being solely ours. We didn’t want to share it with anyone—despite the fact that it straddled the property line and, technically, was just as much theirs as it was ours.

Or, rather, hers. The Jeffersons’. My home away from home.

I always thought of Eliza’s family as flawless, and I guess that’s why I spent so much time there. It was like I hoped proximity alone could get some of whatever they had to rub off on me like a barbed hitchhiker sticking to my clothes, traveling back with me before planting itself in our home. Their love like an invasive species that could take over us all. I felt bad sometimes, resenting my parents like that, wishing they were different, but the reality was that while my parents tried to be perfect, Eliza’s seemed like they actually were. My mother was a stay-at-home socialite, bleached blond and impossibly chatty, the textbook complement to my dad, who spent most evenings stoically silent, fingers clutching a whiskey highball and eyes perusing the room in a way that made you wonder what was wrong. We lived in a house on the same street as Eliza’s, but other than that, they couldn’t be more different. My dad was in finance, the kind of industry you enter into with the explicit purpose of getting rich, whereas Eliza’s used to play guitar in a band, a trust-fund child who spent his youth roaming around before eventually deciding to settle down on the coast. He was passionate and peculiar and completely unfazed by the things they had, almost as if he didn’t even notice them. Didn’t even care. Their waterfront oasis was kept cluttered up and lived-in whereas ours was always perfectly pristine, cold like a museum and just as impersonal.

And they always ate dinner together, just the three of them, except when I was invited and they set the table for four.

I’ll never forget those little moments I got to witness: Mr. Jefferson scooping up Eliza’s mom on the dock, olive skin and dark hair glistening like tar melting in the sun. Those massive hands all over her bare bikini legs before he cannonballed the two of them into the water together, Mrs. Jefferson emerging with a slicked-back ponytail and mascara tears dripping down pale, freckled cheeks. Head thrown back, maniacally laughing.

My mother would have been livid, I remember thinking as we watched them splash each other like smitten teenagers. My dad wasn’t even allowed to kiss my mom when she was wearing lipstick, not that he ever really tried.

I turned to look at Eliza, the memories evaporating and replaced by this unknown person walking into our space. New neighbors could change everything. They could alter the very air itself, making it lighter or heavier with their presence alone. The figure was getting closer now, both of us treading water as his lanky outline grew larger in the distance, and we could tell it was a boy. A teenage boy. A tall, tan boy with moppy brown hair and board shorts and a bare, hairless chest. He wasn’t looking at us—not yet, at least, still a few too many yards away to catch sight of our bodies in the water below—and it gave us mere seconds of interrupted time to scrutinize him before he could scrutinize us.

“Come on,” Eliza said at last, taking a deep breath before slipping beneath the surface like a water moccasin, silent and slick. I watched her silhouette disappear below the floating dock and I plugged my nose and followed her under, reemerging in the gap between the top of the water and the underside of the wood. It was one of our secret spaces, a private little corner of the world that we had discovered as kids and claimed as our own. I could still remember the day we found it, years ago, doing somersaults in the water and our fingers digging into the pluffy bottom. I had been afraid of it at first, getting that claustrophobic feeling like being trapped inside a submerging car, the pocket of air above me growing smaller as we sank. But Eliza had explained that as the tide rose and fell, the dock did, too. The air would never run out.

She had convinced me it was safe, that we were safe. That we always would be.

“Do you think he saw us?” I whispered. There was something so intimate about that space: that little bubble of shared air and the wet wood smell and the way the algae-flecked water seemed to tint our skin, too, turning our faces a glowing emerald green. We were covered from all sides, the floating buoys that held up the dock encompassing us completely. Unless you were standing directly above us and happened to look down, you’d never even know we were there.

“I don’t know,” she said at last, water dripping off the tip of her nose. “I don’t think so.”

We listened in silence as his squeaking footsteps ambled closer until, eventually, the sound of wood turned to metal and we knew he was retreating down the ramp that led to the floating dock itself. The platform bobbed above us as his bare feet made contact and we both held our breath, watching. Waiting. The presence of him on top of us suffocating and strong. We felt him move to the edge of the dock next and that’s when I caught a glimpse of him from between the gaps: one hand pushed into his bathing suit pocket and the other holding a cigarette, the bare skin of his back a burnt-almond brown. He could clearly see our stuff up there—our damp towels and flip-flops and matching burlap beach bags; our phones folded into our jean shorts, an attempt to keep them cool and dry—but still, he didn’t seem to sense us. He didn’t look down.

Instead, he just stood there, staring straight into nothing. Claiming that spot like he would soon claim everything. Welcoming himself right into my life.