“Me neither.” He lay back on the seat again, then reached up with both hands and framed my bra with his fingers. “Zoey, if we do this, what does it mean?”
“We will do this, and it means you owe me this memory.”
He dropped his hands. “If it doesn’t mean more than that, I don’t want to do it.”
I leaned forward until I was on all fours, face-to-face with him, hovering over him. “You will do it.”
His eyes narrowed. I’d pushed him too far, telling him what to do. He shifted, feeling on the floor for his sweatshirt.
“Did I do this?” I asked quickly as I smoothed my hand inside his boxer briefs.
He said, “Mmmmmmmm,” and then reached up with both hands again and pressed my head down until our lips met. We kissed so deeply that I hardly noticed when he unhooked my bra after all and unlooped it from my shoulders.
Eventually he slid lower on the seat and took my breast into his mouth. Every move my hand made on him, his mouth echoed on me, until I was buzzing with tension and eager to offer him everything.
We stayed just this way for long minutes, poised on the edge. I wanted to do more. I was afraid if I stopped what we were doing, I would lose it all. But after his tongue on my breast made me cry out, my fingers found a condom packet tucked into the seat. I’d let the gargantuan box of condoms lie on the floor of the car with a few packets scattered around it since I threw it there Tuesday, for the viewing pleasure of anyone who peeked into the Benz. Even my mother could have seen this Wednesday night if she’d had her faculties.
I’d never opened a condom packet before in my life. I sat up on Doug’s hips and held the packet up to the light to tear it.
“Zoey.”
“What. Am I doing it wrong?”
Breathing hard, he reached up with one hand and took the packet from me. “It’s almost two thirty. You have an appointment to narrowly miss a deer and crash into Mike.”
Coaxing had worked before, so I coaxed him again. I lay down on him, my bare breasts to his warm bare chest, skin to skin, such a strange sensation. I brushed his stubbly cheek with the back of my hand and ran my thumb across his soft lips, echoing caresses he’d given me during the week, which he must have given me Friday night but I hadn’t understood until now. I whispered, “You owe me.”
“I don’t owe you, Zoey,” he said sadly. “I only agreed to do this because I thought there would be more after tonight. But this is really all you wanted. I can’t do it. I can’t make it worse than it already is. I know you need this one night, to reconstruct your memory, and I care about you. But I care about me too, and I can’t do this anymore.” He sat up, swung his leg and his cast around to the floor, and handed me my bra and my shirt without looking at me.
I wanted to say something to keep him there with me, even if we didn’t make love. More caressing, talking, anything. I knew I shouldn’t have stopped. But he was right. His lies had ruined whatever there had been between us. I didn’t want anything from him beyond tonight. And as badly as I wanted this one night, I wasn’t willing to lie to him to get it. I, for one, was through with lying.
He ducked into his sweatshirt, picked up his crutches, and paused with his hand on the door. “You have my cell phone number. I’ll keep the same one when I go to college.” He rolled his eyes. “If I go to college. I’ll keep it wherever I go.” He looked straight at me. “If you ever feel like doing what your mom did, call me.”
I shuddered. “I won’t.”
“Please.” It was the first time I’d ever heard Doug say this word. To anyone.
I shook my head. “I mean, I won’t feel like that.”
“If you do, call me. Promise.”
I tried to picture feeling that way, and wondered whether I could really bring myself to call Doug if I did. But I couldn’t imagine that feeling. Which was a good sign. I said, “I promise.”
He put his hand on my knee and stroked there with his thumb. “I understand I can’t have you. But I want to know you’re in the world with me.” Leaning forward on his crutches, he kissed me on the cheek. I got one last whiff of chlorine and the ocean. He made a slow, awkward exit from the car, during which he dropped his crutches twice and nearly fell off the causeway. I had plenty of time to call him back and stop him before he limped back to his house.
And then he was gone.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY life, I was late for school. I dragged myself into the main office on four hours’ of sleep with no parental excuse. I hoped the assistant principal didn’t turn me in to Child Protective Services.
But by the time I interrupted Ms. Northam’s lecture and stumbled down the aisle between the rows of desks in English, I’d forgotten all about that, and I didn’t even notice whether everybody was staring at me. I focused on Doug. He might or might not be hungover. He’d had a long time to recover from his early night of drinking. But I knew he’d missed a pain pill.
Sure enough, his head was down, his face pressed into the open leaves of a battered hardback copy of A Passage to India on his desk (the rest of us had the school’s pristine paperbacks). I’d intended to hand him his glasses, which he’d left on my dashboard last night, and use that as an excuse to talk to him and make sure he was okay.
But Keke had taken my seat behind him. Usually she sat across the room with Lila. It must be too hot for her over there today, with Lila so angry at her.
I dropped his glasses beside the book on his desk, then slipped into the desk across the aisle, behind Connor. Now I could see that Keke’s hand was on Doug’s back.
I resented how Keke had treated me yesterday, but jealousy and fear overrode that. I leaned across the aisle and whispered to her, “Is he okay?”
“Doug?” Ms. Northam prompted. She’d asked a question I hadn’t heard. And she wasn’t very good at identifying who caused disturbances at the back of the room.
Keke whispered to him, “Flat characters,” as if she were the friend assigned to protect him and keep him out of trouble today. Which suddenly made me very, very angry.
“Round characters in Aspects of the Novel.” He said it loudly enough for Ms. Northam to hear, but he said it to his desk without lifting his head from the book.
“That’s correct,” Ms. Northam said. She stepped to one side until she could see Doug. “Is your leg bothering you?”
“Yes ma’am,” he told his desk. “My pill will kick in any second now.”
“Well, go lie down in the nurse’s office while you’re waiting,” Ms. Northam said.
Without being asked, Keke slipped his glasses and his books into his backpack and handed it to him. He picked up his crutches and slowly stood to his full height, towering over the class.
I whispered up at him, “Do you want me to go with you?”
He turned and gave me the most evil look with watery eyes. Keke turned from him to me and back to him.
“Aw, have woo been cwying?” Connor asked him. “Do woo need a tissue?”
Doug took a sudden step toward Connor. Connor fell backward out of his desk. An uneasy titter rose from the boys in the room.
Doug turned and limped up the aisle and out the door. Immediately there was a metallic crash like he’d fallen against the lockers. Keke half rose. Ms. Northam nodded at her. Before I could do anything to stop Keke or explain that I was the one who was supposed to help Doug, Keke disappeared after him.
He didn’t need me.
16
Amid jabs of, “Skeered?” from other boys, Connor picked himself up off the floor and sat in his desk. I waited until Ms. Northam’s lecture had absorbed the attention of the room again before I whispered over his shoulder, “Remember in tenth grade when Doug got suspended for starting a fight with Aaron Spears, I think, outside history class?”
Connor in front of me and Nate beside me both nodded.
“What set Doug off?”
“Aaron made a kung fu joke,” Connor said. “Wait, that’s not even Japanese. A karate joke.”
&nb
sp; Nate shook his head. “That was a completely different fight, last year with Jimmy Gillespie in back of Jamaica Joe’s. When Doug got suspended, Aaron did his eyes like this.” Nate placed his fingers at the corners of his eyes and slanted them up.
“That’s right,” Connor said. “On a positive note, if you ever want to get Doug suspended from school, just make a joke about Asians and stand there until he hits you.”
“I feel heady with power,” Nate said. He and Connor both said, “Bwa-ha-ha!” and rubbed their hands together like evildoers.
“Zoey!” Ms. Northam called with her hands on her hips. “Please move across the room where you won’t disturb your classmates. I do hope we’re not making this a daily occurrence.”
No, the daily occurrence was thinking about anything in English except English. After flopping my book closed and schlepping across the room to the back corner desk, I renewed my effort to be a good girl and pay attention to the lecture. I truly did. All the same, my eyes kept drifting from Ms. Northam to the door, impatient for Keke to reappear.
She didn’t come back to class until halfway through history. As she tiptoed to her desk across the room from me, she mouthed in my direction, I have to talk to you. I actually looked behind me to see who she was talking to, but I was sitting in a desk against the wall.
Well, that totally blew my concentration on the Boston Tea Party. She’d just spent the last half hour with Doug. Whatever she had to say must be about Doug, and about me. And whatever it was, good or bad, I was dying to hear it. I glanced at my watch five hundred times before the bell finally rang for break.
Lugging our backpacks, we walked toward calculus with our heads together conspiratorially. Which was very strange, because usually I walked fast to calculus to make sure I got across campus in time, and Keke ran toward calculus to get some energy out, checking the status of practical jokes she’d slipped into lockers along the way.
“I talked to Doug for a long time,” she said.
I nodded, fighting down the butterflies in my stomach and suppressing the urge to shake her to get the information out faster.
“I told him about that big fight we had yesterday. He got really mad at me. With that on top of his leg hurting, I swear I thought he was going to blow a gasket.”
I laughed. “He doesn’t know anything about cars,” I said nonsensically.
“He said you always listen to me and put up with me,” Keke said, “and the one time you really needed me, I turned on you. He made me feel like shit. So, I’m sorry.” She stopped and held out her arms.
I stared at her for three full seconds before I realized she wanted to hug me. Then I stepped into her embrace. “It’s okay.”
“I just thought we were really good friends,” she said in my ear. She pulled back to look at me. “I couldn’t believe I had no idea something that big happened to you. People kept coming up to me asking how I could possibly not have known about your mother, like there was something wrong with me. It was embarrassing. But you went out of your way to hide it from me.” She looked straight into my eyes, which she didn’t do often either, waiting for an answer.
Slowly I said, “I’ve been kind of screwed up. Keke, I’m really sorry.” I felt the butterflies rising with the tears as I said this. By the time I coughed out sorry, I was crying there in the hall with sophomores streaming around us, in and out of the driver’s ed room. Keke’s arms tightened around me, which made me cry harder. “See,” I sobbed, “this is why I don’t tell people.”
“It’s okay,” Keke said, rubbing my back. And strangely, it was. Just as I’d seen myself retching over the public toilet in the swimming pool bathroom, I could see myself crying in the hall. I could hear what the sophomores would whisper to their friends later: “Zoey Commander lost it outside driver’s ed. You know, that senior whose mom tried to kill herself and went ape shit at the last swim meet.” But that was okay, because I was also that senior with friends. At least I had Keke.
Calculus was still a long distance away. We jogged through the halls as I wiped at my eyes with the backs of my hands, and I started to tell her everything that had happened with my mom. I told her more in snippets as we walked from calculus to biology, and at lunch we settled across from each other at the swimmers’ table. I’d wanted to snag the end of the table away from the others so we could have a little privacy, but someone else had beaten us to it. Leaning across the table toward each other with their heads close together were Doug, looking like himself again (hot), and Lila.
Keke’s eyes slid over to them, then back to me. She spoke softly (Keke was full of surprises today) so the junior girls sitting around us couldn’t hear. “When I talked to Doug this morning, he also told me y’all had a huge fight last night. Your goal for the night was having a fight with everybody on the swim team?”
I cringed. “The one with Doug was special.” I took a bite of salad.
“That’s what he said. Are you going to try to get him back?”
I glanced over at him and swallowed. “Doug is hot.”
Grinning, she nodded at me.
I said, “Doug is also manipulative and controlling.”
She frowned. “He asked me to watch out for you today. I guess you could say that’s manipulative and controlling. But you could also say he was worried about you and he cared about you. Any girl would kill to have a boy like that.” I could hear the wistfulness in her voice. She and Lila must still be arguing about Lila going out with Mike. “A week ago, if you’d told me you were going to hook up with this criminal—”
“He’s not.” I sighed.
“—I would have laughed.”
“You did laugh!”
“But after hearing the way he talks about you . . .” She shook her head. “Wow.”
“I need to break up with Brandon first.” I felt a flash of guilt that this was the first thought I’d had of Brandon all day. Automatically I pulled my cell phone from my backpack and turned it on to check for a text from him—or better yet, a message from my mother. Nothing from her, and no text from Brandon. I hadn’t heard from him in two days, since I saw him Wednesday night at the meet.
Keke shifted closer across the table and talked even more quietly. “Funny you should say that. You know the swim team’s having a party after the football game tonight. At least, we’re supposed to be. I’m holding up my end. If Lila doesn’t bring the hot dogs, that’s not my problem. Anyway, Stephanie swears she’s bringing Brandon as her date.”
I sat up straight in surprise, then leaned over my salad again. “Does Brandon know he’s Stephanie’s date?”
“As his girlfriend,” Keke said, “you should definitely ask him.”
AT THE BEGINNING OF PRACTICE, I was standing in front of my locker and I’d just pulled off my shirt to change into my swimsuit when the door to the pool squeaked open a crack. “Ladies,” Doug called.
Six girls screamed at once. I didn’t. I only felt a little warm.
“The boy band has left the building,” he called when the squeals died down. “Coach said don’t change today because we’re putting the dome on the pool. Zoey.”
Six girls jerked their heads toward me.
I felt my face flush. As casually as I could manage, I called back, “Doug.”
“Coach has lost the dome instructions again.” The door to the pool squeaked shut.
I found the instructions in Coach’s office where I’d filed them last year under D for dome and duh. When I took them outside, I saw Doug had used the word we loosely when he’d said, “We’re putting the dome on the pool.” He sat on the pool deck with his cast extended and his back against the door to the bathroom, guarding it against girls going in there to faint. He read Howards End as the rest of us unfolded the enormous plastic tent across the water, hooking it around the edges of the pool deck and tossing heavy cables across it. The rest of the boys and Coach argued about the best way to install the plastic corridor between the dome and the locker rooms. Doug stayed put, nose
in his book. They installed it around him.
We’d been a little worried about the blower toward the end of last season. We came to school one day to find the dome sagging, half deflated. So I crouched inside the corner of the dome opposite Doug, making sure the loud engine worked. The dome hadn’t filled completely yet and the ceiling was waist high, so I wasn’t sure who was fighting her way through the plastic until Lila dropped beside me.
“I talked to Doug for a long time at lunch,” she said.
“I noticed,” I said, trying not to sound as jealous as I felt.
“I tried to convince him not to kill Mike so Mike will speak to me again. But Keke told Doug about that big fight we all had at the pool yesterday. He got really mad at me! You should have heard what he called Mike for throwing your clipboard in the pool!”
“Good!” I laughed. “Doug knows I was very attached to that clipboard.”
“Mike fished it out with the net after you left, if you still want it.”
“That’s okay,” I sighed. “I’ve moved on.”
“Then Doug said you always listen to me and put up with me, and the one time you really needed me, I wasn’t there for you. He made me feel like shit. So, Zoey, I’m sorry.” She scooted forward across the pool deck and hugged me.
“It’s okay.” As I hugged her back, I listened for titters above the drone of the blower. It must be a cruel joke, two twins apologizing to me, using almost the same words, after they found out my mother was insane. Kicking me when I was down. But the rest of the swim team paid us no attention. They held the plastic corridor in place above their heads. Below them on the floor, Doug read on. I pulled back and looked Lila in the eye. “Have you and Keke calibrated your watches today?”
“No, we’re not speaking. Dad says we have to make up with each other by tomorrow morning or we’re changing our brother’s diapers for a month. Why?”
“Just wondering.” Obviously I was doomed to live through everything twice, even now that I remembered both times.