Waking Beauty by Elyse Friedman Page A

night.
    “Yeah,” he said. “I will just make a piss.” He moved to the edge of the embankment, where minutes earlier he had been spinning acrobatically on his shoulder blades. I heard the zipper come down, I heard the arc of urine hitting soil, I heard Servan groan with relief. Then I heard twigs snapping, a strangulated cry, and a distant splash.
    I moved quickly but cautiously to the edge—I was pretty tipsy myself—and, hanging on to a sapling, peered down into the blackness that had swallowed Carp.
    “Hey,” I said. “Are you—”
    “I’m okay,” he whispered, from deep in the darkness.
    To be honest, that far-off and diminutive “I’m okay”struck me as patently hilarious after the cartoonlike sound effects of his ill-fated pee ’n’ plummet, but I realized that I was stoned, and unable to accurately judge the severity of the situation. I suppressed a powerful urge to laugh and listened for sounds of movement down below. There were none.
    “Should I get help?” I said.
    “No!” he hiss-whispered.
“Please
. I’m okay. Go away.”
    He was obviously embarrassed. And who wouldn’t be after tumbling dick-first through one’s own piss into a ravine? I listened for a few more seconds. Nothing. No sounds of getting up or dusting one’s self off. This suggested seriousness. I decided to spare Servan the indignity of immediately calling on Leon or Steve for assistance. Instead, I sat my ass on the ground and inched/slid my way down the slope to the river—which was more like a stream actually, about three feet wide and maybe eight inches deep in the middle. Still, I figured even in his pre-plunge condition he could’ve easily passed out, and if he passed out facedown in the water…The headline CARP DROWNS flashed in my head.
    “Hey, Carp, where are you?”
    No response.
    I saw his white Nikes first, sticking up like rocks in the river, the toxic water eddying around them. Luckily only his lower legs had gone in. He was stretched out diagonally on the damp bank. He had his arms folded over his chest like a corpse. As I got closer I could see that he had put his penis away and zipped up his muddy jeans. I could also see that his jersey—the one he wore to school almost every day—was irreparably torn, and that his face was scratched and bleeding.
    “Carp,” I said, kneeling beside him and nudging his shoulder.
    He opened his eyes and smiled up at me. “I’m okay,” he whispered. “I’ll see you in there.”
    “Sit up. Come on…” I tried to help him, but he waved me off, then sat up abruptly.
    “Yo,” he said. “You want to smoke a fattie?” He patted his chest as if there were fattie-containing pockets there, but he had stripped off his jacket earlier in the evening. “Let’s smoke a fattie.”
    “I don’t think so. Get your feet out of there.”
    He looked at his feet as if he had just become aware of their existence. He pulled them out of the river and struggled to stand up. “Fuck,” he said, staring at his sodden Nikes. “Fuck!” Though he had gone in only past the ankles, his voluminous pant legs had absorbed water to above the knee, and the weight of it was pulling his pants even farther down than usual, exposing most of his underwear. He stood there trickling. Skinny and pale. White Fruit Of The Looms glowing eerily in the moonlight.
    “Are you all right?” I said.
    He touched the scratch on his forehead and surveyed the warm blood in his palm. He examined his torn jersey. Then—with his shoes making squishy sucking sounds—he walked unsteadily to a large flat rock, hoisted up his jailin’ trousers, and sat down. He covered his face with his hands and hunched over. I could see his shoulders begin to heave. At first I thought he was vomiting up the palinka, but he wasn’t vomiting, he was crying. Silently. I sat next to him on the rock and put my hand on his back. The heaving increased. I rubbed softly in a circular motion on his upper back. Bony. Narrow. The