The Delta was different from everything else.
Stockton proper was asphalt and strip malls and the particular geometry of a grid- planned city that had been built in a hurry and never quite recovered its composure.
But the Delta — the web of waterways and levee roads and willow-lined banks that ran through the edges of the city and out into the agricultural floodplain beyond — the Delta was something older.
Something that had been there before Stockton and would be there after.
You could feel the difference the moment Rick turned The Bean off the main road and onto the levee. The asphalt narrowed. The city noise fell away. The air changed — cooler,heavier, smelling of water and mud and the particular green smell of things growing in wet soil.
The sky opened up because suddenly there were no buildings to hold it in, just the levee road
running along the top of the earthen bank and the river below on one side and the farmland
stretching flat and golden on the other and everything lit with the particular Delta light that was
not quite the same as the light anywhere else.
We had been coming here all summer. Since May, since the first warm weekend, since
Jimmy had declared the Last Great Summer into being and we had needed a place worthy of the
declaration. The turnout behind the weeping willows had become ours in the way that places
become yours when you return to them often enough — not by ownership but by familiarity, by
the specific knowledge of its moods and seasons and the way the light fell on the water at
different times of day.
The water was that perfect Delta temperature — cool enough to make you gasp when you
first hit it, but warm enough that you could float for hours without the world catching up to you.
The willows hung over the turnout like curtains, trailing their long silver-green fingers in the
current along the bank, creating a specific shade that was cooler than any shade I have found
since. The flat river rock that jutted out from the bank had been there long enough that its
upstream edge was smooth, and on a hot day you could sit on it and dangle your feet in the
current and feel the day slow down to something manageable.
We spent the first hour the way we always did: trying to out-splash each other, holding
breath contests in the murky water, conducting the kind of elaborate aquatic nonsense that is only
available to people who have nowhere else to be. Dougie was keeping his bandaged arm thrust
above the surface like a drowning sailor holding a flare, desperate to keep the alleged 'antiseptic
properties' of the river from stinging the wound, which Rick had pointed out was not how
antiseptic worked, and which Dougie had acknowledged philosophically before returning to his
original position.
I was floating on my back, watching the dragonflies dart through the heat haze above the
surface, when the Delta interrupted us.
A crunch of dry willow leaves. The sharp snap of a branch. Then a silence that had a
specific quality — not empty, attended.
Rick froze mid-splash. Jimmy went dead still, his cool-guy facade dropping so fast I
could almost hear it land.
We all turned toward the bank.
Emerging from the silver-green curtain of the weeping willows was Stephanie Stewart.
She walked out of those willows like she had been there for years and had simply been
waiting for the right moment to make herself visible. Not a dramatic entrance — a composed
one. The entrance of someone who had decided the moment was right and was proceeding
accordingly.
'I thought I smelled corn dogs and desperation,' she said.
She was perched casually on a fallen log at the edge of the bank, a sketchbook balanced
on her knees like it had always been there, like the log had been placed specifically for this
purpose. She wore cut-off shorts and an oversized white T-shirt that hung off one shoulder,
paint-stained fingers wrapped around a pencil she wasn't quite using yet. Her hair was down,
dark, falling past her shoulders in a way that looked accidental and almost certainly wasn't.
She lived three houses down from me, and while the rest of the neighborhood called her
Stephanie, everyone who actually knew the girl called her Teppie — a nickname whose origins
were lost to the specific oral history of elementary school playgrounds and which had stuck with
the tenacity of all good nicknames. She was a year ahead of us at school, eighteen to our
seventeen, and she carried those twelve months the way some people carry ten years. Not
arrogantly. Just — settled. Like she had arrived at a conclusion about herself and wasn't
revisiting it.
She was the only girl I knew who actually understood why a B-side was sometimes better
than the hit. She had strong opinions about that. She had strong opinions about a lot of things,
which she expressed with the calm certainty of someone who had thought them through rather
than the aggression of someone who hadn't.
'Teppie!' I said, treading water with what I hoped was dignity. 'What are you doing here?
This is our secret spot.'
'It's the river, Kevin,' she said, hopping down the bank with a grace that made our earlier
cannonballs look like structural failures. 'Nobody owns the mud.'
She sat on the flat rock — our rock, the rock — and looked directly at my sneakers where
the Walkman was tucked away.
'Did you get the new Police tape?'
'How did you know?'
She looked at me for a moment like the answer was self-evident. 'Because you've been
wearing those orange headphones since breakfast. I saw you from my porch.' A smile at the
corner of her mouth. 'Is it any good?'
'It's perfect,' I said, and started swimming toward the shore.
Jimmy splashed closer, attempting to reassert some territorial authority. 'It's okay, I
guess. A bit mainstream. I'm more into the heavy stuff now,' he said, and his voice cracked just
enough on the last word to reveal the lie.
Teppie didn't look at him. She was looking at me — or rather at the plastic brick of music
in my hand.
'Play it for me?'
I pulled myself up onto the rock beside her, dripping river water, feeling the sudden,
intense heat of the sun against my skin after the cool of the water. I reached into my shoe, pulled
out the Walkman with the careful reverence of someone handling something important, and
unwound the cord.
The guys stayed in the water, treading in a loose semi-circle like a confused jury that
hadn't been dismissed yet.
'Here,' I said, handing her one of the orange foam earpieces.
Teppie took it with the same matter-of-fact gravity she brought to everything, tucked it
under her hair, and pressed it to her ear. I kept the other one on mine and hit Play.
The opening of 'Every Breath You Take' started again. But on the rock, beside the water,
with the sound of the river lapping at our feet and the heat radiating up from the sun-warmed
stone and the dragonflies still doing their particular business in the air above us — the song felt
different. It felt like something being said directly rather than broadcast. Like a secret being
shared in the middle of a loud, hot world.
I watched her face.
She closed her eyes. Her head tilted slightly, just a fraction, the way it tilted when she
was listening with more than just her ears. A small, sharp smile touched her lips — not happiness
exactly, more recognition. The expression of someone who hears something they've already
understood put into sound for the first time.
'It's haunting,' she whispered. 'It sounds like someone who's afraid to look away.'
I looked at her. The water moved below us. The cotton clouds moved above us. Jimmy
was still in the river, watching us from behind the mask of his casual face, and I could feel the
weight of his attention even though I wasn't looking at him.
'You think it's a love song?' I asked.
Teppie opened her eyes and looked at me with a depth that made Stockton feel very small
and very far away at the same time.
'I think it's a song about how hard it is to let go of something you love,' she said. 'Which
is basically what every seventeen-year-old in Stockton is feeling right now, isn't it?'
I didn't have an answer for that. I was still finding the words when a loud, wet THWACK
landed on the rock between us.
Dougie, from the water, had managed to throw a handful of river mud with surprisingly
accurate aim. A feat that, in any other context, would have earned genuine respect.
'Hey, baloney! Stop flirting and get back in here! We're building a dam!'
The spell fractured. Not broke — fractured. A hairline crack in something that had, for
two and a half minutes, been whole.
Teppie laughed — a short, genuine sound, the laugh of someone who hadn't planned to
laugh and was pleasantly surprised by it — and pulled the headphone away.
'Go help them with their dam, Kevin,' she said. 'I have some sketching to do.'
She turned to the blank page in her sketchbook. The pencil found it immediately, as if it
had been waiting.
I slid off the rock, back into the river. The water was cooler now than it had felt before.
Everything was the same. Everything had shifted slightly.
Jimmy splashed past me without speaking. His eyes stayed on the bank. On the rock,
Teppie drew.
I have tried, many times over the years, to describe what it felt like to share a set of
headphones with someone for the first time. Not someone you're dating, not someone in the
comfortable intimacy of a relationship — just someone you've handed half of something private
to, someone who is listening to the same thing you're listening to at exactly the same moment.
There is an intimacy in it that is hard to name. The music becomes a conversation you're both having without speaking.
And whoever she is, whatever she is to you, for exactly three minutes and fifty-one seconds, you are inside the same thing. I did not know that afternoon how long I would carry that moment. I did not know that moments that short could be that heavy.