A House at the Bottom of a Lake

5

“What did you do on some of your other first dates?” James called over his shoulder.

“What?”

“What were some of your other first dates like?”

“Nothing like this,” she called. “Movies. Dinner.”

Good, James thought.

“The movies is a bad first date,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Even if the movie is good.”

“Yeah.”

Amelia considered saying something clever like, You can learn a lot about somebody by sitting in the dark with them for two hours. But she didn’t say it because she didn’t really believe it.

“I had one date,” she said, paddling, steering, “where this guy took me to his parents’ ranch in Obega.”

“That sounds all right.”

“His parents were there.”

“Wow. You met his parents on the first date?”

“Yep. I did.”

James laughed. Amelia laughed. They were free about their laughter but there was something anxious about it, too.

“You see that tangle of brush just below the concrete?” she asked.

“I do, yeah.”

“What is it hiding?”

They were close enough now to see there was a tunnel under the concrete. The colors red and neon green, black and orange popped out at them.

Graffiti. A lot of it. Strange phrases that read like nonsense to them but must have meant something to someone else.

“Punks,” Amelia said and then wished she hadn’t. That was something her mom would’ve said. Why did it sound funny before it came out? Didn’t she know what funny was?

“What?”

She wasn’t going to repeat it.

“Closer,” she said instead. “Let’s get closer.”

“Yep.”

The water was darker along the shoreline, shadowed by the trees. Amelia wondered if it was deeper here, if the water that ran through the tunnel went really deep.

“I had the worst first date ever,” James said, still paddling.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I asked a girl to go bowling and she said yes and my plan was to invite some friends, make a night of it. But nobody could go, nobody said yes, and so I ended up going bowling with a girl I really didn’t know at all.”

“You’re pretty good at that.”

James looked over his shoulder. Amelia smiled.

“Well, I don’t ask a lot of girls out, if that’s what you mean.”

“I just meant that you’re pretty good at hanging out with somebody you don’t know.”

“Am I?”

“Yeah.”

Amelia smiled. James wanted to kiss her.

“Thanks,” he said. And he meant it. “So we went bowling and the girl was nice but also really shy and so I had a hard time talking to her. I asked her about things, but it wasn’t easy. Then it was her turn to bowl and she was walking up the lane and she slipped and fell and broke her arm.”

“Whoa!”

“At the elbow.”

“Oh man.”

“Yeah. It was terrible.”

They were close enough to the tunnel to see someone had painted a bloated, veined penis with googly eyes.

“Punks,” James said, and Amelia wished she had repeated it.

They were as close as they could go without entering the tunnel. So they stopped rowing. They drifted. They stared into the tunnel.

“Hey,” James said. “That might be another lake on the other side there.”

Amelia saw what he meant.

“And you’ve never been over there?”

“No. I don’t think the canoe would even fit through there.”

Amelia had a vision of the two of them stuck inside the tunnel. A bloated, veiny penis with googly eyes rising from the water.

“I bet we’ll fit,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“All right,” James said. “Let’s try it.”