The Water Girls

         It was a wet spring when we decided to flood the neighborhood. It would be months until Utah’s summer heat baked the earth dry as a bone. On the day we chose, rain fell in buckets from the sky.
         Our logic went like this: if the streets couldn’t drain, the school buses couldn’t run, and the kids couldn’t get to school. No kids, no classes. We could stay home. Think of a snow day, but for rain.
         More importantly to me, Sarah wanted to do it. In those days, I would have done anything she’d asked. Had she wanted me to strike a match on dry grass in the baking heat of July, I would have complied. I was 13 years old, but my life only began when I met her three years before. She saw me and I saw her and nobody else saw either of us. Or so we thought. We would wear the same bright, unmatched, baggy clothing and whisper in the same high-pitched voice as we skipped down school hallways, arm in arm. We shared a name. We believed we could read each other's minds. I still think that, just maybe, we really could.
         Thick droplets of rain embedded themselves in my T-shirt and shorts as I lugged mid-sized rocks to the storm drain. I was sure I looked like a drowned rat with my already-thin hair plastered to my head. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t so cold out and the slosh of water felt wonderful between my bare toes.
         “Make sure the rocks block the holes completely,” Sarah instructed. She was carrying rocks too, more than me, and her pink hoodie was soaked through and stained with mud. But she seemed to carry her burden with much greater ease. Her small frame belied the strength of her thin arms. Heaven forbid you crossed her and took a sharp elbow to the gut. She called her elbows “knives” and “pain,” always while grinning and flexing a bicep. They were a constant threat, but not to me. Never to me.
         My boyfriend at the time—the boy I was texting and stealing kisses from in school hallways because his parents didn’t like us going on dates—claimed he was a pyromaniac. “It means I like to set things on fire, for fun,” he explained to me. Later, he would grow up and become a firefighter.
         Standing in the rain with my rocks, picturing the soft swell of water as it overtook the road, I wondered if flooding the road would make Sarah and I hydromaniacs. I hoped so. It sounded sexy. Romantic. A pyromaniac falling deeply in love with a hydromaniac and committing incompatible crimes together.
         Sarah and I did love water. Utah was too dry for us. We were both born on the East Coast where we grew up puddle jumping and reading inside to the soft pitter-patter of rain on the window. That’s how we remembered it anyway. We both wanted to go back. We used to replace “sun” with “rain” in love songs. “Ain’t no rain clouds when she’s gone,” and “when I needed rain, I got sunshine,” and the like. I missed Lake Champlain; Sarah missed the ocean. She began life in Massachusetts with seafood and sailboats. She loved boats.
         Over a decade later, I moved to Boston, without her. My apartment had an extra bedroom: sometimes an office, sometimes a guest room. It was never truly filled. The extra bedroom might have felt more luxurious than lonely had I not imagined a life where Sarah inhabited it.     
         When I was 25, a psychic at a work party told me that Sarah’s ghost was unhappy and I should talk to her. He got a far away look in his eyes and told me that when he sensed her presence, he sensed something about boats. “She had a poem about a boat lost at sea tattooed on her back,” I breathed. At that moment, I believed him. I was already talking to her ghost.
         Sarah’s sister dismissed this—she said boats were pretty relevant to anyone in Boston. And she was right. I wasn’t in Utah anymore.
         On that spring day, Sarah and I covered the storm drain, but water kept seeping through the cracks between the rocks and the metal grate. No swell of water built up to deliver us from school. “It isn’t working.” I glared down at the grate. Sarah crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. She looked put out, but not surprised.
         “I guess it isn’t,” she said. “I guess we have school tomorrow.”
         I shrugged and bounced on my toes, waiting for her to tell me what was next. She looked up at the sky. Rain splashed her already fogged-up glasses. “Lunch?” I nodded. Our commitment to that plan, to most of our plans, was wanting. We were fickle in those days about many things, but never each other.
         Leaving our rocks behind, we turned and ran to her house. She grabbed my hand, hers cold, both wet, and we giggled and shrieked together, the failed flood forgotten, cheesy omelets in our future. The rain would stop, the street would dry, but in that moment, water fell on us in abundance as we ran home together.