Stealing Parker

“Damn,” I whisper to him.

“Just keep walking,” he whispers.

I hustle down the hallway and up the stairs to the sanctuary, but by the time I get there, Brian’s not behind me anymore. He just…left?

I play zombie all through the service, acting like I’m in the sanctuary, but really I’m in that janitor’s closet. Our arms touching. Sharing the same Clorox-infused air. My mind wanders when we sing my favorite hymn, “I’ll Fly Away,” because the words are beautiful, but when the organ goes silent I’m thinking of his chapped lips again.

After Big Church, everyone shakes hands and chats for a while before leaving. I avoid Aaron and Laura, who are looking at each other like they’re getting married in an hour, but Tate asks where I disappeared to during Sunday school.

“The doughnut was way staler than usual,” I lie.

Outside in the parking lot, I lean up against the Durango and wait for Dad. Will Brian want to talk later today? Is this it for us? Should I stop talking to him altogether? Should I settle for being friends? Can my heart handle only being friends? Could I bring up April fifth again to see if we could hang out after that? Could I bring up hanging out after graduation?

“I want you to meet my daughter.”

I look up to find Dad standing there with Mystery Woman, smiling like someone just handed him a winning lottery ticket. I gasp and cross my arms and look around. I blush. She studies me like I’m a difficult calc problem.

Dad beams. “Parker, meet Veena. Veena, meet Parker.”

When I was little, I looked up to Ryan. He was my hero: so good at baseball, so smart at school, so funny and cool with his friends. I felt like a twerp by comparison.

Opryland was Nashville’s theme park, but it went out of business a couple of years ago. It had this crazy 3-D rollercoaster called Chaos. It scared the bejesus out of me. I loved the bumper cars. I ate cup after cup of Dippin’ Dots ice cream. But my favorite attraction was the Tin Lizzie cars. Kids could drive horseless carriages from the early 1900s around a track. I did that over and over again. One time, when I was eight, I took off for the Tin Lizzies, thinking my family was right behind me.

They weren’t.

I ran around in circles, crying. My parents told me never to talk to strangers, so I wouldn’t let anyone who was trying to help me come near. I was lost for ten minutes before Ryan found me. I’ll never forget how he came sprinting up and lifted me into his arms and twirled me in a circle. My running off scared him bad.

Now, I wish I had a Tin Lizzie that I could drive to find the real Ryan. The one I love and miss. Where did he run off to? And God, will you bring him back?

Written on February 21 on a napkin. Wadded up and burned.

I have never ever sat by the phone before. Never. Ever.

But that’s how I’m spending Sunday afternoon, instead of my usual: doing homework. Ring, phone, ring! He has my number—I gave it to him over Skype. Hell, he can talk to me on Skype if he wants to. But he hasn’t been online all day. The only thing in my inbox is a draft article Drew wrote that he wants an opinion on.

I compose a short email to Brian:

Hey, where did you disappear to today? Loved talking to you in the janitor’s closet. It’s my new favorite place. Let’s do it again sometime. Next Sunday during Big Church?

Egads, what am I thinking? I delete the email immediately and pray that no hacker saw that and plans to post it all over the Internet announcing it as the lamest thing anybody’s ever seen.

Maybe Brian’s online but invisible. Maybe he’s staring at my name and thinking, Wow, she has no life and she’s sitting there waiting for me to message her. I’m gonna go running with Brandy the dog and then go drink a beer and live my real adult life and do adult things.

I click the Go Invisible button. Now he’ll think I have a life. He’ll think I’m out doing cool things, like hanging at Jiffy Burger with Drew, Corndog, and Sam, pretending to be Elaine and yelling “Get out!”

What if he’s with Coach Vixen? What if they’re doing it right now?

This goes on for two more hours. I download that movie Never Been Kissed starring Drew Barrymore from iTunes. As if anyone would actually believe a twenty-five-year-old woman who looks like her—hideous makeup or not—has never been kissed. Her teacher, who thinks she’s a teenager when she’s really twenty-five, is into her, but he doesn’t go after it until he discovers she’s really an adult.

I consider telling Brian that I’m not really a teenager. Really, I’m a twenty-five-year-old reporter for the Tennessean and I’m researching the athletics department at Hundred Oaks High because the football team gets all the money.

My phone buzzes. I pick it up faster than a jet at Mach 5. Aw, it’s just a text from Corndog that reads Look outside ur window.

I move my laptop and go push the curtains aside to find Corndog sitting out front on his lawnmower. Without bothering to check my hair or makeup, I head to the front door. He gives me a big smile when I let him inside. He’s wearing a polo layered on top of long-sleeved T-shirts with a pair of jeans, sneakers, and a cap.

Ryan’s listening to some god-awful trance music in his room, and Dad is passed out on the couch with the Sunday comics draped across his face, so they don’t even notice a boy coming in. That’s what I should tell Brian. I’m the real adult in my house, you know.

Corndog follows me to my room without a word. As soon as the door’s shut, I yell-whisper, “What are you doing here?”

He shrugs and rubs his palms together. “Bored. I don’t have any homework or practice or chores so I thought I’d see what you’re doing.”

“Me?” We’ve never really hung out alone before, considering (1) he was my nemesis for valedictorian, and (2) he’s never tried to hang out alone with me before. At least not since those science projects we did together in eighth grade.

His mouth slides into a smile. “Yes, you.”

“Don’t you need to do something on the farm?”

“Cows are milked. Eggs are collected. I got the afternoon off.”

“How’s Bo? Did he get booboos on his knees and hands?”

“Yeah. But he’ll be okay.”

Corndog starts looking around my room and beelines straight for my bookshelves. He drags a finger over my shelf o’ vampire novels, then moves on to the travel guides I grab at yard sales and used bookstores. I love collecting random travel books for places like the Galapagos and Australia and Tanzania and South Africa.

Then he moves on to my nonfiction shelf, which has all sorts of randomness…books on zookeeping, books on the horrors of animal smuggling, books about the Serengeti. I’m praying he doesn’t pull any of those books down, because I hide my Harlequin romances behind them.

Corndog starts looking at my bulletin boards, which are covered with pictures of me and Drew and me and my family. I took down the pictures of me, Laura, and Allie and buried them in a box under my bed. There’s only one picture of me and Mom. It was taken when I was five, out in front of Forrest Sanctuary on Easter. Mom looked gorgeous that day in a trim blue dress and matching hat.

“What were you doing before I got here?” he asks, coughing into a fist.

Stalking your baseball coach online. “I was watching a movie.”

“What movie?”

“This chick flick thing.”

“My favorite!” he laughs.

“Corndog, why are you here?”

“I told you. I’m bored and wanted to hang out. Can’t George hang out with Elaine once in a while?”

“I guess so.”

He pulls his sneakers off, then lies down on my side of the bed—the side I sleep on!—and situates the laptop on his thighs. He yanks his cap off and tosses it on top of his sneakers. I hesitate for a sec, then lie down on the other side of the bed while he restarts the movie.

“I’ve never seen this,” he murmurs.

We watch the movie in a nice silence until he exclaims, “This is unbelievable. How can they make Drew Barrymore look that bad? Well, I mean, she’s still hot—I’d do her, but geez!”

I’m cracking up. “I know! And the teacher still wants her even though she’s wearing that hideous sombrero.”

“What a perv that guy is. What kind of teacher goes after his student?”

I clutch my pillow. “He probably has some sixth sense and knew that she wasn’t really seventeen.”

“A sixth sense.”

“Yes.”

“You think that perv guy has a sixth sense?”

“Yes. He has the ability to tell if women are really older than they say they are. He can tell when forty-year-olds are pretending to be thirty-five too.”

He hoists himself up on an elbow and throws me a withering look. “Are you really our valedictorian?”

“Uh, yeah. I beat you by a tenth of a point, remember?” I chuckle. “Besides, we can’t have someone named Corndog giving the valedictory speech. Everyone would spend the whole time salivating instead of listening. Everyone would just get up and leave to go get a corndog!”

He laughs, but then his face goes soft and pensive. “It’s Will. You can call me that, you know.”

“But no one would have any idea who I’m talking about.”

A pause. “I kinda like that.”

“You’re talking over the movie,” I say, gesturing at Drew Barrymore making an ass of herself singing with a band at a bar. She was stupid enough to eat a brownie full of roofies or something.

I snuggle up with Patrick the stuffed koala and Corndog? Will? slides a hand behind his head and we watch the movie together.

I guess at some point I passed out, because I wake up to find a black screen. I also find my mouth pressing against Corndog/Will/Person/Guy’s shoulder. I left a big drool spot on his polo. Holy mortifying! I’m pawing at it, trying to make my spit bleed into the shirt, when he opens his eyes and looks over at me with a lazy smile.

“Sorry, I drooled on you,” I say.

“It’s fine.” He ruffles his hair. A cowlick sticks straight up. One eye opens wider than the other.

Oh. My. God. I fell asleep with a boy in my bed.

The sun is setting outside the window, leaving my room in shadow. It’s nice lying here with him in a warm silence. It’s pretty weird that he just dropped by and hasn’t tried to make out with me or do any other funny business. I don’t think this has happened before, well, at least not with anyone other than Drew. And he doesn’t count.

So what’s this about?

Will folds the laptop lid down and sets it on the floor, then shuts his eyes, pulls Patrick the koala to his chest, and curls up. I stare at the ceiling. How weird is this? The captain of the baseball team is cuddling with my stuffed animal? I shrug and shut my eyes and wonder if Brian’s spending a quiet afternoon reading. I let myself doze back off.

Next thing I know, Dad has barged into my room. “I’ve been knocking for over a minute. What’s going on in here?” he exclaims.

I sit up straight and smooth my tangles. Will quickly pulls himself to a sitting position, grabs his sneakers, and fumbles with the laces.