***
While Troy Gibson stood in the dark hallway of Upton High School making up with his Kristy, and the rest of our class danced in the stifling heat of the over-decorated gymnasium, I sat outdoors, in a city park and waited. Across the freshly mown field, Darren was chasing a painfully, artificially blonde girl. He was throwing handfuls of cut grass at her while she screamed and swore and dodged out of his way. It was our first night out with his new girlfriend Shelley – and it was turning out to be a loud one.
“She needs to tone it down before one of the grannies in those old houses over there calls the cops,” Crystal drawled from where she lay on her back on the park lawn beside me.
I snickered. “Let her keep screaming, then. Maybe the police will come and take her away.”
Perpendicular to Crystal, Bert rolled over onto his front in the grass. “You guys are jealous.”
We both scoffed with loud, short laughs. “Hardly,” Crystal said.
“But seriously, have you ever seen Darren look so happy?” I mused.
Crystal made the scoffing sound again. “It can’t be thanks to Shelley. It must be because of his promotion at work.”
Wayne had been right about what would happen at TacoTime when he quit and went to work at the mall. Sandy had given Darren his old supervisor job. Obviously, no one had told Sandy about our food fight.
I leaned back on my elbows, sinking into the dry grass. “The promotion – maybe that’s it, Crys. A guy would have to already be deliriously happy not to notice those dark roots of hers.”
“See? Jealous,” Bert sang lazily. “I love it.”
I gathered up a handful of cut grass and stuffed it into the collar of his shirt. Bert yelled and pounced at me.
“Get away,” I complained. “Crystal, help me!” I did not want to play rodeo with Bert.
She clamped her arm around Bert’s neck – just like she was a real wrestler – and fell backward, dragging him away from me. In an instant, he had easily broken her hold and they were on their feet, chasing each other through the field.
Both of them ran much faster than I could so I didn’t even try to follow them. I was now alone and unmatched. I stood up, half-heartedly tried to brush the grass from my clothes, and scanned the empty streets around the park one more time. Like many parks in the city, the trees here were small, sparse, and starved for water. It meant I had a clear view of everything around us. But there was nothing to see.
It was getting late. Maybe Wayne wasn’t coming to meet us after all. It seemed he had succeeded in not being a jerk to his new co-workers and had made friends at his mall job already. Maybe his new friends were too sophisticated to run around playing Capture the Flag in a park after dark. Or, I reminded myself, it could be that I’d scared Wayne away. If only he hadn’t looked up at precisely the wrong moment that time I touched the scar on his upper lip. Even though he’d said he understood it was an accident when I touched his mouth, everything had been a little strange between us since then.
I’d considered asking Crystal if her twin seemed to have taken a different attitude toward me lately. But when the moment came to ask, I’d been too scared. I thought I could talk to her about anything, but this was different. This threatened to morph into a terrible mess if I disturbed it – so I left it alone.
There was a low, stout fence dividing the gravel parking lot from the grassy area of the park. I hopped up on top of it and began to walk along it, as if it was a balance beam. With small feet like mine, it wasn’t much of a challenge. But it was a good diversion from the rest of the ironic exuberance enjoyed by the people around me. I concentrated on my balance and the surface of the rough timber. I didn’t even look up from my feet when I heard the sound of gravel grinding against the wheels of a car. I kept focused on my steady, careful pace until I’d reached the end of the rail where I jumped down, back onto the ground.
When I did look up, I saw Wayne, sitting in his car across the lot. He was watching me through the side window with an expression I recognized even though I’d never seen it directed at myself before. It was earnest and a little bit sad and very much like – longing.
“Here he is – finally.” Darren heralded Wayne as the rest of the group came to stand beside me at the edge of the grassy field.
Wayne had brought a passenger in his car. He was a boy about our age who panned a languid gaze over us in that vaguely bored, vaguely greedy way boys have of looking at girls – any girls. The new guy nodded and waved at Bert and Darren in an easy, familiar way as they muttered their hellos. He must have met them both before.
“Ladies, this is Barry,” Wayne said to the rest of us, “from my job at the mall.”
We all nodded and waved.
Barry narrowed his eyes as he studied the three girls in the crowd. “You look just like pretty-boy here so you must be Crystal,” Barry leered at Wayne’s twin. He squinted his eyes even further as he pointed his finger and wagged it between me and Shelley. “And which one of you blondes is –”
“This is Shelley. And that’s Mack,” Wayne interrupted, waving at me but looking back toward his car, as if he’d forgotten something.
Barry hummed and cocked his head. “Interesting. Not what I expected.”
Bert seemed to understand. “It’ll grow on you.”
Darren forced a cough that sounded more like a gag.
“You didn’t have to wait for us,” Wayne said, rushing to redirect the baffling turn the conversation had taken.
“It’s all right,” Darren smirked. “We kept ourselves busy.” He reached down and drew a withered blade of grass out of Shelley’s hair. She punched him hard in the arm and swore at him.
Wayne glanced at me – no eye contact, and not a trace of the look I thought I’d seen earlier through his car window. There, I told myself, I must have imagined the whole thing after all.
Darren stopped rubbing the tender spot on his punched-up arm and pulled two squares of beat-up cloth out of his pockets. “Okay, time for Capture the Flag,” he began.
We split into two teams and disappeared to hide our flags. I kicked a pile of bark mulch over ours and we all scattered around the park. Ducking under a low spruce tree, I moved to where I could keep watch over the hidden flag, unseen. I stayed crouched in my sentry position until I heard Crystal call out.
“No! No! No!” she was laughing.
I jolted to my feet and stuck my head out of the spiky green boughs to look for Crystal. She was on the same team as me, for once. There she was, bent over Bert’s shoulder while he hefted her in a rescue carry away from where his team’s flag must have been hidden. It was clearly revenge for the wrestling hold she’d got him into earlier. With Bert occupied, it was a good chance for me to move in on his team’s territory and look for their flag. But I had barely struck out from underneath the tree when a hand closed over my mouth and pulled me backward. I screamed inside my throat.
“Don’t spaz out, Mack. It’s just me.”
There was an arm clamped across the front of my shoulders, dragging me further into the greenery. The arms held me against something behind me. It was warm and it smelled really good. When the hand came off my mouth and I turned my head, I saw that it was Wayne.
“What the heck?” I demanded.
“Just – hold still for a second.” His arm stayed across my collar bones and his face stayed where I couldn’t see it without twisting my neck. I glanced back at him for just and instant and there it was again – the same look as before. It was real. My hair moved as he spoke over my shoulder. “I need to talk to you.”
My throat felt hot. I couldn’t risk turning around to look at him again. I moved to step out of the sticky, spiny branches but Wayne’s arm tightened, holding me back.
“You need to let me go,” I said.
“Do you want me to?”
“They’re all going to see us here. Darren and Crystal–”
&nbs
p; “So what? I hope they do.”
“Wayne–”
His arm dropped away from me and I folded my arms in front of myself, like a barrier.
“Promise you’ll meet me – by yourself – so we can work some stuff out. Come on, Macke. Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean. Please.” His voice was firm even when he was gentle. How could this be happening? I had to swallow a lump in my throat before I could answer him.
“Fine. When?”
“Friday – a week from today,” he said, almost in a whisper. He was stepping around me, walking backwards, moving into the open space outside the boughs of the tree where I still hid. “I’ll come to Upton after I finish up at work and then – I’ll see you then.”