The vat of condoms was suddenly just out of reach and strangely hard to grip. Doug’s warm hand burned through the skin of my lower back.
When I couldn’t draw it out any longer without being painfully obvious, I grabbed the big box and backed out of the hood. Very slowly. Doug’s hand smoothed up my back, under my shirt, all the way to my bra.
I turned to him.
He gazed down at me with absolutely no expression on his face while tracing his fingers down my back, out of my shirt. “What?” he asked innocently, daring me to mention Brandon again.
“I guess I should get all the stuff out of my car before it’s crushed into a metal cube and lost forever.” Dropping the box of condoms at his feet, I ducked away from him and ran to the driver’s door, which opened easily. On the floorboard and under the driver’s seat, there was nothing. I had trouble wedging my head into the space between the bashed-in passenger side dashboard and the seat, but once I did, I saw nothing. The glove compartment, permanently popped open with the force of the crash, was empty. None of this surprised me. I kept a very clean car, unlike Keke and Lila’s Datsun, which was knee-deep in candy wrappers. I folded the seat forward and slid into the back.
Doug pushed the driver’s seat into place and sat down, grunting a little as he hoisted his cast into the car. “Looking for something?”
“I was half hoping I’d find my diamond earrings in here,” I admitted, my voice muffled against the carpeted floor. I righted myself and brushed my hair out of my face. “I was wearing them the night of the wreck, and I haven’t seen them since.”
He reached in front of him and popped open the ashtray in the dash. Diamonds glittered inside.
“Eureka!” Leaning through the space between the front seats, I scooped the diamonds out. My fingers hit an unexpected bump, and I leaned forward to look. The ashtray had caved in with the dash. One of the earring posts was bent. The same force that bent a platinum earring post had also done a number on Doug’s leg over in Mike’s car. It was a wonder he still had a leg at all. But Doug didn’t need to be reminded of that, so I swallowed my nausea and smiled. “How’d you know my earrings would be in the ashtray?”
“In old cars with ashtrays, everyone puts everything in there.” He looked at the earrings rather than me and held out his hand for them. I placed them gently in his palm, my fingertips caressing his skin so briefly before coming away.
He cranked down the window and tossed the earrings outside.
“Doug! Move!” I shook his seat back so he’d let me out. “I may need to replace the settings, but I’m sure the stones are okay.”
“You mean they’re real ?” His voice cracked as he opened the door and half fell out.
“Of course they’re real.” I stepped over him and scanned the sandy ground. Luckily they hadn’t disappeared beneath the Porsche. I scooped them up from the sand and turned.
He sat in the driver’s seat again with the door open, foot and cast on the ground outside the car, looking pale and sick.
“You look like you just saw a ghost. Percocet treating you okay? Or—Here, I found them.” I held out the earrings for him to see, in case he envisioned paying me back for losing them. I would never make anyone do something like that.
He pressed his middle finger hard along his eyebrow like he was the one with the headache. “I just had an idea. You think you could get a couple thousand bucks for those? Because you could sell them and use the money toward a newer car your dad would approve of.”
“That’s a great idea,” I admitted. “I can’t do it, though. My parents gave me these earrings.” I dropped them into my pocket.
“They wouldn’t let you sell them? Even to get something you need more? I couldn’t make that kind of logical argument to my dad, but I’ll bet you could make it to yours.”
“I mean, they’re the last thing my mom and my dad gave me together, before they separated last summer.” I was pulling on both earlobes, which made me seasick. I put my hands down.
He frowned at me. “Why haven’t you been turning the world upside down looking for your real diamond earrings?”
I shrugged. “I figured they’d turn up. Like my virginity.”
He laughed. I laughed with him, but mostly I wanted to watch him laugh. He blushed like a real boy and wiped tears from the corners of his eyes like a real person. I couldn’t step closer because Brandon was my boyfriend. But I wanted to laugh with Doug, hug Doug. A little part of me wanted to be Doug.
Over his laughter I said, “Tell me about losing yours. Was it with that girl from Destin?”
The sun shone into his eyes so the green seemed transparent, like looking into the shallow water and watching the sand shift underneath. He stared over my shoulder at the Porsche, but I knew he saw the girl from Destin. He took her hand and they splashed into the ocean together. He put his arms around her and held her body loosely in the warm water as the tide came in. Late in the afternoon they dried off and walked into town, wandering the tourist trap gift shops and marveling at the wondrous sculptures of pirates that could be crafted out of coconut shells nowadays. He bought her a hamburger and they shared a milk shake at the Grilled Mermaid. Trying to act carefree and beachy, she’d been foolish enough to walk the hot sidewalks barefoot. She cut her toe on a shell in the pavement. He carried her piggyback to his Jeep in the dusk. They drove to the city beach park and made love. It was the first time for both of them, they were in love with each other, and it meant something.
He blinked and looked straight at me.
I swallowed and tried to say smoothly, “What happened to her?”
“Mike told her I’d been to juvie.”
I nodded. “That’s what I heard, but I never heard why he did that.”
He shrugged. “I guess he liked her or some shit like that. Can’t talk to a girl himself so he has to steal somebody else’s.”
I nodded again, as if I was a good listener. Not as if I was a highly interested listener pumping him for information. “Up until then you and Mike had been close friends, right?”
“Right,” Doug said carefully. He knew I was up to something.
“And since then, you’ve hardly spoken to each other?”
“Until after the wreck, yeah.”
Depending on what had happened Friday night, asking my next question might expose that I had amnesia. I was running out of options for finding out the truth. I chose to trust him. “Then why were you riding in Mike’s car?”
He stared at me. Not a mean stare burning a hole in my head or a vacant stare over my shoulder, but a big-eyed stare in surprise. With his eyes so deep green and his black lashes so long, he’d never looked more hot. And I’d never felt further from him, because he’d just figured me out.
Or not. “When we wrecked?” he asked, like he’d been momentarily confused rather than bowled over.
I stamped my foot. A cloud of fine sand rose around my flip-flop. “Yes, when we wrecked.”
He rubbed his hands on his thighs and looked around the junkyard, suddenly uncomfortable. “You know how Gabriel always says he’s not going to get drunk, so he drives to a party, and then he gets drunk?”
I nodded.
“I left my Jeep at school and rode to the party with Gabriel so I could drive his Honda to his house afterward. Then I could walk over to the school for my Jeep.”
That made perfect sense. Doug never drank while he was training. He served as designated driver for people all the time. “But?” I prodded him.
“But somebody else took Gabriel home early, and Mike was the only person left to drive me back to school to get my Jeep.”
“So you and Mike were driving north,” I mused. “Which means when we hit each other, I was driving south, toward the beach. Toward home. Brandon says I wasn’t with him. Where could I have been?”
“It’s a mystery.”
I glared at Doug. The constant snark was one thing. I’d put up with it because I felt like I’d done him wrong times a hundre
d, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. But for him to make fun of me about this . . . It was too much to take.
Scooping up my megabox of condoms and wrapping both arms around it, I stalked across the junkyard toward the Benz.
Behind me I heard the door of the Bug slam. I could tell from the screech of metal and the thud that the door had fallen off its hinges, but I didn’t turn around.
“Zoey,” he called.
I stopped between a tower of TVs and a pile of wheelchairs. The tricky thing about trusting Doug was that I had to stay on his good side so he didn’t tell everyone in my school about my mother despite his promise not to. I didn’t walk back to him, but I did turn with the condom box in front of me like a shield. I waited for him to maneuver down the narrow path winding through the trash.
The afternoon wasn’t hot as Florida went, but when he crutched to a stop in front of me, two drops of sweat loosed themselves from his hairline and raced down his cheek. “I didn’t realize how much memory you lost, Zoey. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because losing your memory sounds crazy! Like my mom.”
He tilted his head way over to one side, as if looking at me from a different angle would help. “This is nothing like your mom.”
“It feels the same.” I transferred the box to one hip and chewed on my thumbnail—normally something I did not do because it ruined my manicure and projected weakness, said my mom.
I was finally talking about this with someone.
Even if it was Doug Fox.
“My dad told me it was the same. He threatened to lock me up with her if I ruined his trip to Hawaii.”
Doug closed his eyes, looking pained. He shook his head. Then he leaned on a crutch and spun the other on its rubber tip in the dust, one of the many tricks he’d invented over the past few days. Gazing at the spinning crutch rather than me, he told me, “You said you didn’t remember the wreck. But you did remember me pulling you out of the car. And you remembered me calling you a brat at the game.”
I laughed. “I remember all the good stuff.”
He stopped spinning the crutch and looked up at me.
“That’s why I was so confused when you came over Saturday morning and acted like we were together,” I explained. “I don’t remember what happened in the emergency room.”
He stared at me.
“So . . . ?” I prompted him.
He didn’t say a word.
“So, what did happen?” I insisted.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said gruffly, elbowing me just a little as he crutched past me, toward the Benz.
I watched him go, my face and chest burning with anger in the hot sun, not believing he had just blown me off.
He rounded the Benz and executed the five-step process of entering a car with crutches.
That’s when I ran toward him. I ran at full force like I was swimming the fly, powered by fury. I jerked open the driver’s side door and threw the box hard over the headrest into the backseat. The box hit the rear window, and a few condom packets slipped out as the box tumbled to the seat, then the floor. “Don’t worry about it!” I yelled. “What the fuck, Doug?”
His arms were crossed, head against the window, eyes closed. “Right—” he started.
I slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the door as hard as I could. “I’ve already told you—”
“Okay—” he said without opening his eyes.
“—this is really important to me—”
“Yes—”
“—and it’s not fair for you to withhold information!”
“What happened was, I told you I loved you.” Without moving his body or his head, he opened his eyes and gave me a look that said so there.
I cranked the car and backed it carefully out of the junkyard parking lot. Or, I backed it carefully out from between the junk cars where I’d parked it. I couldn’t tell whether the other cars parked near the office were working or not, but the Benz certainly looked out of place between them.
Doug shifted his shoulders away from me and gazed out the window.
It took me until we’d passed the high school and maneuvered through the courthouse square to say, “I’m having a hard time believing you.”
“Thanks,” he said flatly.
I drove down the country highway, toward the beach and the wharf, puzzling this out. I believed him. He had no reason to lie. I simply couldn’t picture it. We lay in the wet grass together and he said, “Zoey, I’m sorry for calling you a spoiled brat and I love you.” We held hands between stretchers in the emergency room. He kissed my fingers, whispering, “I should never have called you a spoiled brat, and by the way, I love you.”
As I turned onto the beach road I asked, “Did I say it back?”
“You said it first.”
He braced himself against the seat and the door as the car bumped over the curb. I jerked the wheel to steer back onto the road, eyes darting left and right, hoping Officer Fox wasn’t watching from his police car.
“Doug,” I finally exhaled. “I don’t know what to do. I hope you’ll give me a while to get my brain around this. I mean, I’m dating Brandon—”
He whacked his head against the window.
“Ouch, please don’t do that.” I put my hand out to touch his head. I even wiggled my fingers, but I couldn’t quite reach. I put my hand down. “I don’t want to lose you. I realize I don’t have you, but I don’t want to lose that chance. Like you said, I want a chance with you.”
“You do?”
“Yes,” I said, “but not right this second. Because I’m dating Brandon—”
“Jesus!”
“—and I don’t want to be a cheater.”
“You’re not married, Zoey!” Doug shouted. “Yet. Just wait. It’s this kind of fucked up thinking that will make you wind up married to Brandon Moore.”
I tried to laugh, but it came out more of a choked gasp. “I’m seventeen!”
“My point exactly.”
I felt him looking at me, but I didn’t dare turn my head for fear of running off the road again.
I parked at the wharf and asked as pleasantly as I could under the circumstances, “Is this okay? I could drop you off at your house instead. Do you have paperwork to do?”
“Yes.” He opened his door and pulled himself out, leaning on the car.
“Well, wait. It’s still early. We could grab a burger and talk some more. Do you have a lot of paperwork?”
“Stacks, and then I need to swab the deck and scrape barnacles off the bow.” He closed the front door and opened the back to slide his crutches out.
“I’m serious,” I called over my shoulder. “We need to talk this out or it’ll fester.”
“What do we have left to talk about?” he demanded. “Why don’t you say ‘I’m dating Brandon’ ten times fast to get it over with? When that changes, then you have my number.” He slammed the door.
I SHOULD HAVE DRIVEN HOME, HEATED up a frozen dinner, finished my homework, read ahead for English, and watched TV until I fell asleep.
The idea of this night at home with myself twisted my stomach. Over the past few days I’d had more and more trouble concentrating on homework or English or even TV. I was never alone. Doug and Brandon stood at the periphery of every room, scowling at me with their arms folded. And of course I really was being watched by my dad on candid camera.
Instead, I drove thirty minutes along the oceanfront road, to the mall in Destin. I bought dinner and ate it in the open-air food court while I worked on calculus. If I couldn’t be alone with myself, the next best thing was surrounding myself with a happy crowd who had serious concerns like what gifts to give and what clothes to wear. I stayed there, drinking refills of Diet Coke, doing extra calculus problems from the back of the book, until groups of shoppers passed me for the third time and whispered about me because I’d sat at the same table doing calculus so long.
I went shopping. I didn’t need anything. I never want
ed anything. My mom always had to convince me to buy new clothes to present an organized and confident appearance to the world. She would arrange her schedule so she wasn’t catching up with work on Saturday afternoon, bribe me with a promise of a Starbucks frappuccino, and bring me here.
So it’s more accurate to say that this time, rather than shopping, I walked through the stores, inhaling their familiar scents. My favorite anchor store smelled just a tad like mildew. The boutique next door reeked of dizzying perfume, a chemical brainwashing me into buying something more fashion forward than my usual comfort zone. Macramé leggings. I didn’t fall for it this time, but I might have fallen for it with my mom working on me too. The sales chick smiled with dollar signs in her eyes, said she recognized me from other shopping trips, and asked where my mother was.
She wasn’t being catty, I told myself over and over as I swam through the vast parking lot under the mile-high streetlights to the Benz, trying to reach that life raft before I drowned, struggling to stay on the surface. The sales chick didn’t know about my mom. Nobody knew but me, and my dad, and Officer Fox, and Doug.
Baby, r u still coming to swim meet tonight 6 pm?
I shouldn’t have sent the text before English. Then I wouldn’t have ached for class to end so I could turn my phone back on and see whether Brandon had answered. We turned our phones off during class or they were confiscated. A fishbowl on the counter in the school office swam with phones on vibrate.
And I wouldn’t have glared quite so hard at the back of Doug’s head. Somehow he knew I hadn’t heard from Brandon since Saturday. He knew I’d texted Brandon this morning out of desperation. Brandon did give a shit about me, I could have sworn.
When the bell rang I grabbed for my backpack and clicked on my phone. No message.
Doug didn’t turn around. He hadn’t met my eyes the whole class. But he glanced over his shoulder, looking while trying to look like he wasn’t looking. If I’d been half an actress I would have busied myself thumbing my phone, composing a fake response to Brandon’s fake answer. I didn’t think of this until history class.