World Gone Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

contender, kept in only by her will—who is unable to understand Jenny the way I did.
    She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me but doesn’t know that I still love her, more than anyone in the world, and I see the light in the living room go out, the house dark for a moment, Jenny sitting on the edge of the bed, Jenny smiling when Ben walks in and closes their bedroom door and kisses her on the forehead before he draws the blinds.
    I imagine me at their wedding (even though I wasn’t invited): The redbrick church appears to be receding into the pale summer sky, purely an optical illusion brought on by the sun and the whiskey sours I drank earlier, and I wonder if anyone in the church can see me, down the street, hidden behind the drooping oleanders.
    I unbutton the vest of my suit and check my hair in the mirror on the visor. The last invited guest arrived ten minutes ago, and I am debating how I will make my entrance: before or after the ceremony? I can imagine the look on Jenny’s face, everyone staring at me, bewildered. I fondle the dozen red roses I’ve been keeping cool in my refrigerator. The street is empty and I stare hard at a lone palm tree swaying back and forth, obscuring part of the church steeple, fanning the heat back toward the shimmering yellow sun.
    The doors of the church swing wide and Jenny’s uncle appears, walking hurriedly to his van, not fifty feet from where I am. The van door groans deeply, echoing in my head, and he lifts out his camera bag. I slide down in my seat, and as Jenny’s uncle slams the van door, he recognizes my car. A sweat breaks out on my forehead while he stares, trying to see past the window tint, and he takes a step toward me. I reach down for the gear shift, my hand quivering, and slowly press in the clutch. He sets his camera bag on the neatly manicured lawn, looks both ways, and crosses the street toward me, shaking his head. I feel my body convulse as I pop the car in gear, lurching forward, spilling the roses around my feet, barreling down the street, crying.

    Junior year, when my focus should’ve been on my new classmates at Randolph Prep, I met and fell in love with Jenny, a freshman saxophone player at a public school on the west side of Phoenix. Mr. Chandler had given me a saxophone abandoned by one of his foster kids, suggesting that I join band at Randolph as a means of making friends quickly. I knew firsthand that transfer students were easily made pariahs and followed his advice; Jason knew too, which is why he signed up for theater the first day of classes.
    The randomness of Jenny and me sitting together on the bus ferrying selected students to the statewide marching competition was not random at all: The months of Saturday practices on the empty fields of Scottsdale Community College had provided hours of close infantry training. The trip to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, the competition venue, was merely the culmination. Jenny and I sat together on the two-hour trip, flirting. As we neared Flagstaff, I nervously popped my saxophone reed into my mouth, claiming to have to moisten it before the competition. “Try to bite it,” I said playfully, sticking the small reed out like a tiny wooden tongue. I pulled back as Jenny shyly inched forward and snapped at the reed like a guppy. “Try again,” I said. This time I didn’t pull back, watching as she zoomed toward me, her green eyes sparkling. She bit the reed and held it, finally releasing it. “Again,” I said softly, this time dropping the reed in my lap as she leaned in, kissing her, the spark of our long-suffering flirting a danger to the pine trees that whisked past us as the bus entered the Flagstaff city limits.
    â€œShe’s a Mormon, dude,” someone said when I confirmed my interest.
    I shrugged, unsure of what that meant.
    From that time forward, Jenny and I were inseparable. I quickly