“All last night, I lay in bed thinking of you—”
“This is the side of a road, and I don’t want anything more than a kiss.”
“—I lay dreaming of you, longing for you, for your touch, for your scent, for your—”
I’d heard enough, and I had made what I wanted perfectly clear. I gave him a powerful shove. Maybe he forgot what kind of girl he was on top of. He landed on the ground next to me with a thump and a surprised look on his face. But he recovered quickly.
“I came on too fast,” he said. “You work such magic, Jamie. I couldn’t resist, I just couldn’t help myself. I hope I didn’t scare you.”
“No, you didn’t scare me.”
“I’ll move more slowly the next time,” he promised.
What next time? I thought.
He reached over to play with a strand of my hair. “You’re incredible. You’re like some kind of wild Atalanta,” he said, then smiled at me. “You’re familiar with mythology, I assume?”
Oh, great, here comes the lit lesson.
Oh, why, why, why couldn’t I get romantic? A romantic girl would have smiled encouragingly. She would have made him feel smart as he taught her mythology. She would have waited eagerly for him to explain the compliment he wanted to give her. I tried smiling, but I thought that Andrew had to see it was fake.
If he did, it didn’t stop him. “Atalanta was a beautiful huntress, who could shoot and wrestle with the best of men, and outrun them all. She had many suitors, and she held on to her freedom and wild forays in the forest by insisting that the only man she would marry was the one who could beat her in a footrace. For a time, she enjoyed countless races with handsome youths, winning them all. Then she met her match, a young man name Melanion. He appealed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who gave him three golden apples. As he raced Atalanta, he rolled the apples past her, one by one, each one a little farther off course. Because she stooped to pick them up, he won, and won her as his own. Eventually, he and she were turned into lions.”
Andrew stopped as if waiting for me to respond.
“She should have kept her eye on the finish line,” I said, “and then gone back for the apples.”
“Perhaps,” said Andrew, an edge in his voice, “she saw it as her one and only chance.”
“If she was that good an athlete,” I persisted, “she should have had the confidence and discipline to pull off both.”
Andrew’s blue eyes sparked, and I thought he was going to argue back, then his gaze mellowed into something like that of a parent smiling at a wayward but amusing child, which really annoyed me.
“I should get home,” I said. “My dad is probably pretty upset that I haven’t called him yet.”
“Your dad? I thought calling him was just an excuse.”
Exactly, I felt like replying, but I just smiled.
After helping Andrew fold up the blanket, I climbed into the Jeep and buckled my seat belt for a long ride back.
Chapter 17
Mona called that night.
“Jamie,” she said, “be honest. Should I apologize?”
“For what?” I asked.
“For…for moving in on your territory.”
I stretched out on my leopard-skin spread. “I don’t want to date Ted, I really don’t, Mona, though I think he’s one of the greatest guys around.”
“Still,” she said, “he’s your friend.”
“So are you,” I replied.
“Sometimes three’s a crowd. It changes things,” she added quietly.
“Change can be good. It just depends on what we make of it.”
It was as if Mona was saying all the “bad Jamie” thoughts and I was countering with the “good Jamie” thoughts.
“He is so damn gorgeous!” she said.
I reached for the rose my Baltimore Hon had given me, sticking it my hair. “He has a brain and a heart, too,” I said, “though I don’t know if the brain showed up before you went home today.” I lay on my back and put my bare feet up on the wall. “Did you guys start talking in actual sentences?”
She laughed. “It’s not just what a person says.”
“Tell that to the princes you dumped in the pond.”
She laughed loudly, then grew serious. “What about his parents?”
“What about them?”
“Are they liberal or conservative?” she asked.
I removed the rose from my hair, and ran its satin softness over my cheek. “I don’t know—who cares? Do you want to date them?”
“Jamie, get real,” she said firmly. “I am not Chinese. Or blonde.”
“So how about your grandmother?” I asked. “Is she liberal or conservative?”
“Politically, she’s liberal. When it comes to family, she’s very conservative, but I can handle that.”
“And so can Ted,” I pointed out.
There was a long silence. “Of course, I don’t even know if he’s interested….”
“Mona, get real,” I said, as firmly as she had.
We signed off a few minutes later, promising to meet at seven forty-five the next morning outside the PE offices.
Then I called Dad and told him the news about coaching a basketball clinic. He got a huge kick out of it and wanted to hear all about the things I’d learned at lacrosse camp. (I left out the lesson about making bets.) Throughout the conversation he kept saying, “It’s good to talk to you, Jamie. It’s good to talk to you, Jamie,” so often I started feeling bad for waiting a week to call. After my first call from Baltimore, I had decided not to phone for a few days, figuring I’d never get independent if I called every time I missed him. Then a few days became a week. I missed him a lot, but I was anything but lonely or unhappy, and that was an amazing thing to discover.
While I was on the phone with Dad, I heard Mom and Viktor arguing downstairs. Their voices grew quiet just as I hung up, so I waited five minutes, then went downstairs to get some ice cream. Big mistake! Mom and Viktor were making up—and I don’t mean with a warm little hug. I tiptoed back up the stairs, my face on fire.
I felt surrounded—surrounded by lovers. Even my so-called bedroom wasn’t a retreat, with Mom’s Post-its stuck on the walls and furniture. Trapped in it, with nothing but a library of romances, I felt like tying bedsheets together and climbing out the window. I needed ESPN—or maybe Stephen King—sports or horror, either would do. If I’d had any guts, I’d have walked downstairs, right past them, and driven off to Barnes & Noble, which I had seen somewhere near the mall. But I stayed where I was, glowering at the collection of old fairy tale books stacked by my bed. Having nothing else to do, I paged through them.
Finally, I fell asleep and started dreaming. In the dream I was half-asleep, trapped in a castle surrounded by briars. I heard the buzz of an electric hedge trimmer. Someone was cutting his way toward me. At last, he leaped through the window—Andrew, wielding an orange trimmer with an incredibly long extension cord. On his back was a huge sack. He rushed to my bed and in a flash I saw what was written on the sack—MANURE. He was going to bury me in it! I rose from my bed and ran all the way to the end of the dream.
When I awoke Monday morning, I was still wearing my clothes from the day before. One of my fairy tale books was in bed with me, opened to the page of Sleeping Beauty being kissed by her prince. On my pillow, next to where I had laid my head, rested the pink satin rose I had received from my Baltimore Hon. Although I knew I must have put it there, I couldn’t remember doing it, and it felt as if it had been placed there for me as a sign. The rose held a kind of magic, a magic I almost believed in, left for me by a guy with no purpose but to be sweet and to remind me that he had tripped over a curb for me.
Having dawdled in bed, I hurried to the bathroom for a fast shower, raced down to the kitchen and gulped one of Viktor’s specials, then headed for Stonegate. Mona arrived in the parking lot at the same time as I did. We walked together toward the PE offices, me lugging my girl’s lacrosse stick, field shoes,
tennis racket, and a bag stuffed with a bathing suit, towel, and slides. Mona and I had a lot of plans for after work this week and the weeks following, and I really hoped that those plans would not disappear completely now that she had met Ted. I could just see me playing tennis with Ms. Mahler.
Crossing the fields that were on the way to the PE building, we saw two guys playing lacrosse. Even from a distance, and even though I had only seen him in action as an opposing player the first day, I knew immediately the attacker was Josh.
“We’re early,” Mona said, glancing at her big-faced watch, then veering toward the lacrosse field. As we got closer I saw the other player was the big blond guy named Sam Kowalski, the one with the easy smile, Josh’s teammate at Hopkins. Sam and Josh were heckling each other. I heard the same laughter and saw the same playfulness that had surprised me the day Josh showed up for Mom’s autograph.
“Sam’s great,” Mona told me as we watched. “Even though he’s a defender, he can shoot.”
I nodded, but my eyes were on Josh. I remembered Andrew’s description of the basketball game between Josh and me as a kind of ballet. Josh had the strength and grace of an incredible dancer, seeming to negate gravity as he extended himself straight out or suddenly leaped up to snag a ball, being able to pivot and shift directions, his balance always perfect, sometimes defying what seemed physically possible.
“Josh is awesome,” I breathed.
Mona turned to me. “Praise God! I thought you would never see it.”
I quickly glanced at her. “I mean as a player.”
She studied my face for a moment, then said, “You ought to see him in a real game.”
“Yeah, I know. Ted said he was great.”
Mona’s eyes lit up. “What else did Ted say?”
Oh, no, I thought. Here we go. I had mentioned Ted as a way of covering what might have sounded like a girl’s lust for a jock. Now I had awakened Mona’s hunger for details about Ted.
“Well, I think he said that Josh is a real team player.”
“Yes,” said Mona.
“And that they were in Chem lab together.”
“Really,” Mona replied.
“Josh said they had a lousy instructor, so everybody went to Ted for help.”
“Wow.”
Apparently Mona was restricted to single words again, and impressed by almost anything to do with Ted. “He’s really smart, as well as really nice,” I added.
“Yes.”
“Monalisa, you’ve gone right off the edge.”
“I know,” she said with a frown.
At that moment, Sam and Josh spotted us.
“Hey,” said Sam, waving his stick at us. “Two against two?”
Josh said something to his buddy, which made him look at his watch and give a little shrug.
“My stick’s in my locker,” Mona called back.
“Later, then,” said Sam.
“I don’t think Josh wants to play with me,” I told Mona as we continued on to the PE offices.
“You’re too sensitive, girl,” she replied.
Todd and Jake were already in the outer office of the PE building, reviewing their plans for the middle school boys’ basketball camp. A petite redhead wearing funky earrings and an odd mix of bracelets introduced herself as Caitlin. “I’ll be doing a group in the afternoon,” she said. “Noelle and I are going to help Ms. Mahler organize things this morning while everybody else coaches.”
“Caitlin is our school’s best artist,” Mona said, which made Caitlin blush. “She’s also the girl who turns the pinkest the fastest.”
“Keep it up, braids,” Caitlin replied, which shocked me a little.
Mona pinched Caitlin’s cheek, and Caitlin yanked one of Mona’s loose braids, then they both laughed.
“We’ve been going to Stonegate together since kindergarten,” Mona said. “Can you tell?”
Another girl arrived.
“Noelle! How were the old folks?” Mona asked.
“Noelle has the misfortune of having two sets of grandparents in Hawaii,” Caitlin explained to me.
The girl looked Hawaiian, with shimmering black hair and a face that should have been wreathed in white flowers.
“This is Jamie. She’s new to Baltimore, and,” Mona said, pausing to create drama, “she’s a Lady Terp. Got a basketball scholarship.”
Noelle smiled a stunning smile. “I’m at Maryland, just finished my freshman year.”
Josh and Sam arrived, grinning, sweaty, with towels around their necks, looking very cute. Jocks—guy jocks, that is—often have that talent for looking sweaty and cute. The big M emerged from her office.
“Let’s begin,” she said, without any other kind of greeting. It was precisely eight o’clock and she had her clipboard in hand.
We took seats on the long sofas against the walls and, interestingly, divided up into guys on one side, girls on the other. Some things you never outgrow. Ms. Mahler handed out our coaching rosters, then the rosters for the afternoon camp. We began to review the schedule, which rotated the second, third, fourth, and fifth grades through three basic kinds of activities: sports, arts, and library. We were paired up, a boy and girl counselor for each grade, with twenty kids between us.
Sam raised his hand. “I think you have me with the wrong group,” he said. “At our first meeting, you assigned me to second grade.”
“That’s right,” Noelle added, when Ms. Mahler didn’t respond right away. “Sam and I are supposed to do second grade. Josh was supposed to do third with Hannah, and he’s with Jamie now.”
“That was a preliminary schedule,” Ms. Mahler replied. “This is the final one.”
The Big M was smooth, but that didn’t keep Noelle and Sam from looking puzzled, then looking at Josh, who kept his eyes on the paper before him. He had asked her to change the schedule—I knew it immediately. Everyone looked from him to me, and I felt my cheeks getting pink—pinker than Caitlin’s. I think my ears were blushing, too.
Ms. Mahler marched on through her clipboard notes. As soon as the meeting was over, Mona started talking basketball to me, providing a kind of escort out of the room. She was thoughtful enough not to make a comment about the situation, or worse, try to give it a positive spin.
By the time I saw my collection of kids assembled on the gym bleachers—tall, short, skinny, fat, some nervous, one overly confident, several gigglers, and one who looked like she was going to cry—I forgot about feeling hurt. For three hours I was in my own world, already doing what I had always hoped I would do after college. And they call this work? I thought, even though I knew from Dad that coaching was work when it came down to doing it day after day. But it was such a blast!
Some girls were good shooters, others couldn’t have hit the side of a barn. All of them needed to work on ball-handling skills, except one Energizer Bunny, who wanted to hog the ball and play straight through my stop-play whistles. Athletically talented, driven to succeed, and determined to finish whatever she started, she was cocky enough to be labeled as “trouble”—and as I walked to lunch with Mona, I wondered if that was how Josh saw me.
At lunch, I sat between Mona and Noelle. The four guys sat across from the four girls, with Sam directly across from me and Josh grabbing the chair at the far end of the table. Sam kept us entertained with jokes and funny stories, and although he was teasing and laughing with all of us, I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes kept drifting back to Noelle. When he stood up to get a second ice cream, I got up with him.
“Want me to bring you one?” he asked.
“I’m not sure what I want yet,” I replied, and when we were finally out of earshot of the others, I added, “Actually, I just want to say I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For messing up the schedule. I’m sorry you got stuck with me.”
“I’m not sorry,” he said, but I didn’t believe him.
He glanced back toward the table. “I’m pretty obvious, aren’t I?” h
e added in a quieter voice. “Maybe I should sit on the same side as Noelle from now on, so I don’t keep looking across at her. She had a boyfriend last year, but I heard she broke up with him.”
“I’m sorry I took away your golden opportunity.”
“It might be better this way,” Sam reasoned. “I mean, that would have been just more opportunity for me to screw up, right? You and I, we’re going to have a great time together. And besides, Jamie, you’re not responsible for the schedule.”
“I’m responsible for Josh asking for a change in it. I’m sure he did.”
Sam looked as if he were going to deny it, then decided otherwise. “The problem with Josh is that lacrosse—all sports, really—come way too easy to him. And school is the same way. But there are a few things that don’t. When someone is as successful as he is, we expect him to handle everything well, but he doesn’t. I recommend the Eskimo cones.”
I bought one and returned to the table with him. For the first time that day, Josh glanced at me.
Noelle suddenly decided she would get an Eskimo cone. Uh-oh, I thought, I hope she doesn’t think I’m going after Sam. And then I thought, Maybe I just did him a favor! It wouldn’t hurt for her to think another girl wanted him.
Mona was in the middle of a great story about one of her basketball players, when our table fell silent. I felt Noelle slip back into the chair next to me. “Wow,” she whispered in my ear. I turned to see what everyone was staring at. A bouquet of long-stemmed red roses was being offered to me.
Chapter 18
“Andrew!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
He laughed. “Surprised?”
Of course not, I thought sarcastically, guys always show up with armloads of flowers for me! “Kind of.”
“You didn’t think I’d remember your schedule, did you?” he said, smiling. “You didn’t think I was listening to you when you told me about your job.”
That was what why he brought the flowers—to make a point?
“This is so romantic!” said Mona.
“The only time I got flowers from a guy, they were ugly blue carnations in a stupid-looking corsage,” moaned Caitlin.