Trouble was, I was nuts. I was beginning to see that now. Because every time Doug complained about me dating Brandon instead of him, I wanted to agree. And that hurt.
In the car, we sat in silence until I turned from the highway onto the main road through town. Doug muttered, "Things were going so well."
I ignored him and kept driving. During the summer I would have navigated through the backstreets built on bridges between inlets, reminding myself just how tenuous our town's hold was on the shifting ocean and earth. I would have swerved left and right through a maze of low beach houses overgrown with hotly scented flowering vines, just to avoid the strip. The main road through town ground to a halt at this time of night when the tourists were in town, eating at Tahiti Cuisine, browsing the books at Beach Reads, taking advantage of the half-off sunset admission to Slide with Clyde. The tourists were gone now, store hours shortened, Slide with Clyde closed, sidewalks empty, roads clear. The faster to drive Doug away.
"I don't know how this happened," Doug said.
"What you mean is, `I'm sorry, Zoey.'"
"I'm sorry, Zoey," he said immediately.
I turned in at the road to the wharf, then realized I might be driving to the wrong place. "Do you want me to take you to your house, or--"
"The wharf's fine. I have some paperwork to finish for the business. My dad can't do math."
"But you can't do math either." Calculus was the one class I didn't share with Doug. He was in a lower-level class and still didn't make the grade for National Honor Society, which was probably why he was so desperate for an athletic scholarship.
"I come by it honest," he said as I pulled the Benz to a stop at the docks.
I waited.
He waited.
The motor was running. Did he want me to get out and open the door for him? I stared straight ahead at a streetlight until my eyes watered.
And then he was hugging me. Half hugging me, really, because I didn't hug him back. His cheek rested against my shoulder and his arm reached across my chest to my far side. "Okay then. I had a great time," he said, syrupy and sarcastic. He squeezed me hard and let me go, sliding out of the seat and slamming the door.
Soon I realized I should drive home or he would come back and ask me why I was still sitting there. But for a few moments I enjoyed the residual tingles rippling along my skin like the fireflies leftover from summer, zooming and firing in the dusk. I watched him crutching into the streetlight. He disappeared under the brightness. A boy who was such a threat to my mental health and happiness should not be so tall.
IN ENGLISH THE NEXT MORNING, HE hobbled in on the bell, avoiding my eyes. This surprised me. After last night I'd thought I had the upper hand and he would come early to class to suck up to me. I needed him to suck up to me. I hadn't gotten any new information from him about the wreck. I had to try again. I would visit the Bug in the junkyard and take him with me. If that didn't prompt him to talk, nothing would.
I stole a glance up the rows of assigned seats, checking for spies watching me. Keke and Lila were way across the room. Stephanie was a junior so she wasn't in this class. And Brandon in AP English would be a disaster, a deer in the road. Still, I scribbled the note on a full sheet of paper and passed it to Doug unfolded so it would look to the people around us like I had nothing to hide. Swim team business.
I need you again today after practice.
I considered adding a please or a smiley face but decided against either. This would be admitting I'd had second thoughts about overreacting when he'd turned on me. Especially after he'd spilled his story about his family like a marlin gutted on the wharf.
He passed the paper back with a note scrawled under mine.
No
My face burned as if he'd called me a spoiled brat in public. But people around us weren't tittering behind their hands. There was only Ms. Northam droning about E. M. Forster.
In front of me, Doug moved. The black curls inched up his neck, and I caught a sliver more of his tanned cheek. My adrenaline spiked. He was turning around to whisper that he wanted to go with me, but he couldn't go right after practice because he had an octopus to wrangle. Maybe we could go later?
He didn't turn. He tilted his head until his neck popped, then hunched his shoulders. He put his elbow on his desk and his chin in his hand, listening to Ms. Northam's lecture.
Not so fast. I scribbled across the sheet and passed it back to him. This time he didn't grab it when it grazed his shoulder, so I gave it a little toss and hoped it ended up on his desk rather than the floor.
That is not the correct answer.
He raised his hand. Without waiting for Ms. Northam to acknowledge him, he interrupted her. "Ms. Northam, Zoey is disturbing me."
The room exploded in laughter. I calculated just how this incident would be distorted by the time it got back to Brandon.
"Zoey," Ms. Northam called, "whatever the problem is, maybe you'd be more comfortable in another seat. I'd make Doug move but he'd take an hour."
"Ooooh," said some of the boys. I didn't think this was a particularly good line on Ms. Northam's part, but boys would say ooooh to anything.
As I stood, I snatched the paper back from Doug, lest it fall into the wrong hands, and tried to calm down before anyone noticed my panting. People probably thought Doug and I were having yet another disagreement about the swim team. No one would suspect the girlfriend of the star of the football team was falling for the boy who went to juvie. And the boy who went to juvie wasn't returning the favor.
*** AS I WALKED FROM THE WOMEN'S locker room onto the pool deck for practice, Doug stood and limped toward me on his crutches. "Let me do that for you."
I looked down at my clipboard. "Why?" Every night I checked over the carefully penciled race times, traced them in pen, entered them into my computer at home, and finally emailed them to Coach with instructions on how to download them, because he forgot every time.
"I'm a team player," Doug deadpanned. "You have a meet tomorrow that you need to train for, and I'm just sitting here. Don't you trust me?"
No, I thought, handing the clipboard over.
He stuffed it down his pants.
Okay, take two. With the crutches still shoved firmly into his armpits, he held out the waistband of his cargo shorts with one hand. I got a good look at his underwear, not just a heathered gray waistband but heathered gray boxer briefs that disappeared as the clipboard slid over them.
When he half turned and crutched back toward the bleachers, I saw how carrying the clipboard in his pants this way made sense. His backpack wasn't around. He needed both hands for his crutches. And to move, he swung his good leg forward without shifting his pelvis, so the clipboard stayed in place.
I was surrounded by boys in bathing suits. There were nine of them out here, and I wore a bathing suit myself. And I got this hot and bothered when Doug Fox flashed me his undies? This was a testament to how sad my sex life was with Brandon.
I hadn't seen Doug give my mostly na**d body a glance--but then, I'd had my eyes down his pants. On the off chance the clipboard stunt was more flirting with me, I followed him to the bleachers and sat down beside him.
"No," he said, pretending to be absorbed in the numbers on the clipboard sheets.
"I want to go to the junkyard to give the Bug last rites, but I don't know where the junkyard is."
"Look it up in the phone book." He lifted a sheet to check the second page of times. "Doesn't the Mercedes have GPS?"
I glanced toward the pool. Everyone was here now including Stephanie, who appeared to be deep in conversation with another junior girl, but you
, never knew I couldn't take a chance on touching Doug's knee. I'd touched him to get him on my side at the game Friday night, but that was before I
. felt guilty about my fantasies.
I studied the side of his face, the shadow of a beard just beginning to show through his tanned skin, the ends of his black locks curling around his ears.
"Please," I said.
He turned and looked down at me. His green eyes took me in. They seemed friendly. I wanted to fall into them, even though I knew the next thing he said wouldn't sound like we were friends.
"You hardly spoke to me when you dropped me off last night," he reminded me.
"I slept on it," I said. This was not quite true, but it was in the ballpark. I had lost sleep over it. "Talk about a change of heart. You were all apologetic last night, and now you'll hardly speak to me. And stony silence is not your modus operandi. What happened?"
Coach emerged from the building then, blowing one chirp on his whistle. Reluctantly I stood and headed for the pool. "I slept on it," Doug called after me.
Practice was long. I had to come up with a way to get Doug to go with me to the junkyard. At the same time, I was determined to swim better today than my disaster yesterday. As long as I took the recommended dose of Tylenol, my head didn't even hurt now so that was no excuse.
,
In the middle of a 400 individual medley, as Stephanie pulled ahead of me, I needed extra power from somewhere. So I reached inside myself and grabbed what I'd been tamping down for a week and a day. I grabbed that anger at my mom and swam right over the sensation of drowning. I held on tight and let it propel me forward through the fly. I was madder at my dad than I was at my mom, and that got me through the backstroke.
Brandon pushed me through the breaststroke. Whoever heard of a serious senior boyfriend who put obeying his parents and studying algebra over sex with his new girlfriend? This was a mature and responsible decision on his part, but let's get real.
And last but not least there was Doug, who had ruined my life. If it hadn't been for Doug confusing me about my loyalties and priorities, I wouldn't have been mad at Brandon in the first place. Doug made me dissatisfied with Brandon. Doug should pay. The force of that anger shot me through the free so quickly, I felt out of control, on a roller coaster gone wild. It was a great feeling. When I touched the wall for the final time, I was almost disappointed the heat was over.
"Way to blow it out, Commander!" Coach hollered, pumping the air with his fist. A few seconds later, when the other girls touched the wall, surfaced, and figured out what I'd done, they shouted, "Great time!" Even Doug on the bleachers gave me a thumbs-up before writing on the clipboard.
"You're so awesome," Lila said between heaving breaths in the lane beside me. "What's your secret?"
"If you told Lila, it wouldn't be a secret," Keke advised me from the other side. Keke and Lila had been fighting all day. I had no idea why. In my normal state I would have delved into their problem and solved it by now .
"If Keke shut up, she wouldn't be such a beyotch," Lila said.
Keke dove across my lane into Lila's to slap her. Coach blew his whistle and the boys moved toward the pool. Ian observed the twins throttling each other for a few moments, then called to no one in particular, "Cleanup in lane two."
Bracing myself against the wind--it wasn't as cold as it had been the past few days, but anything felt colder when I was wet--I stalked right over to Doug and said, "I want you to go with me to the junkyard. I've asked you nicely, and you have no reason not to."
He let me stand there dripping, waiting, while he penciled in a few more times. Long enough that I looked toward the girls on the other end of the bleachers giving Doug a wide berth. I felt self-conscious about talking to him alone.
Finally he said quietly, "I don't think we should spend any more time together unless I have a chance with you."
I shivered, a movement big enough that he saw it. His eyes met mine. Then he looked down at the clipboard again, paging through the times.
"I'm dating Brandon," I told his bowed head.
"Really?" he asked without looking up.
"Yes!"
"I'll print you a wallet card to whip out every time you need to say that, so you can save your voice."
"Could you laminate it?"
Finally he lifted his head and raised one eyebrow at me. "Don't push your luck."
Coach chirped on his whistle. Apparently the boys had disgusted him with their weak leg work (or with their poor showing last Saturday without Doug), so the whole team had to pile into the pool with kickboards. I stomped away from Doug, grabbed a float, and plunged into the water. I had plenty of anger to propel me. And I had a fact-finding plan to reevaluate.
Finally practice ended. Coach told us we would get killed at the meet tomorrow night because we had a bad attitude (translation: because Doug was out). Coach blew his whistle and disappeared inside the building.
Dragging my kickboard with me, I ducked under three floating dividers and reached Mike's lane before he escaped from the pool. I'd decided that if I couldn't take Doug to the junkyard, I would ask Mike what had happened that night.
When I surfaced, Mike saw me out of the corner of his eye and half turned, then realized it was just me. He assumed I was headed somewhere else. And then, when I said, "Hey, Mike," he actually jumped.
"Sorry," I said, laughing so he'd think it was perfectly normal for boys to jump when girls came near them. I had sneaked up on him from underwater. "We haven't gotten the chance to talk since the wreck. After we change clothes, would you visit the Bug in the junkyard with me? I wonder if it fused to the Miata in the wreck and the tow truck hauled them both away in once piece."
As I watched, Mike developed a severe sunburn. "I can't," he said.
I'd approached him as nonaggressively as I could, predicting he'd turn red like this. And I wasn't about to let him go. I put my back to the edge of the pool so he'd have to climb over me to get out, which he would not do. "Come on," I coaxed. "Doug and I went to dinner to talk about the wreck yesterday, and that was nothing." Lie.