“Hey, I gave you those,” Jake teased, and the other guys laughed. I could tell from their laughter that they were uncomfortable. While the girls gazed admiringly at the bouquet, the guys glanced at one another—except Josh. He was watching me, his face expressionless, even more unreadable than his cool “coach” face.
“They’re incredible,” Noelle said. “They’re like velvet. Quick, put them in my water cup. You don’t want them to die.”
“Is there any significance to their being eight of them?” Caitlin asked.
Andrew liked her question. “Yes, there is one for each day I’ve known Jamie. Yesterday was our one-week anniversary.”
A one-week anniversary?
“That’s so romantic!” Caitlin gushed, her cheeks pink.
“Lucky girl!” murmured Noelle.
The guys just looked at one another—except Josh, of course. They thought it was dumb. They thought it was especially dumb that the girls thought it was so wonderful.
“Excuse us, please,” I said, leading Andrew away from the table. He draped his arm over my shoulder and I wanted to remove it, but I didn’t want to embarrass him or me in front of the others, so I just kept walking, waiting till we got outside to ease away from him.
“Andrew, that was very thoughtful. I—I just don’t know what to say.”
He laughed and touched my cheek. “I’ve never seen you so surprised. Your face said it all!”
If surprise was the only thing he saw, then he didn’t read my entire face. “It’s just a little overwhelming. And I’m at work.”
“That’s what made it so much fun.”
“Let’s talk later, okay?”
He caught my face in both hands. “Looking forward to it,” he said, and kissed me on the mouth.
When I got back to the dining hall, I found my roses carefully arranged in a vase the girls had borrowed from the kitchen. “We should take them to our locker room where they’ll be safe,” suggested Caitlin.
We looked like a group of vestal virgins or something, bearing the flowers to our locker-room sanctuary.
Mona had not said anything since that first exclamation about how romantic the gift was. Perhaps she knew that, for me, it wasn’t. After setting the flowers on the bench, the four of us hurried to the driveway where the two buses full of kids would pull up.
“Pretty roses,” Sam said to me as I stood next to him.
“Let’s not talk about them, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” he replied.
The kids arrived, and our third graders turned out to be enthusiastic and rambunctious. After two of them repeatedly bonked each other on the head with plastic baseball bats, and another painted the girl next to him instead of the paper in front of him, Sam observed, “God’s paying me back for when I was eight.”
The schedule worked well, assigning the second and third graders to sports and outside games during the first hour, the theory being to run the energy out of them before bringing them indoors. Josh and Noelle worked with their second graders on a field adjacent to ours, but the kids kept us all too busy to notice what the others were doing. Later, our groups passed twice in the hall between the lower school’s art room and library. Josh and Noelle had their group walking neatly two by two, holding hands, while Sam and I looked like shepherds of a wayward flock.
“Second grade, ha! They’re a piece of cake,” Sam whispered to me with a wink.
By four fifteen, we were tired, the eight of us laughing and almost slapstick as we tried to get the kids on the correct buses. There were some last-minute exchanges of riders, but finally everybody seemed to be in the right place, and the yellow buses bounced over the speed bumps and headed off.
Each of us had been assigned cleanup duties and mine was to make sure the athletic equipment was back in the right closets. I had just finished and was exiting the guys’ gym when Josh entered. We faced each other in a narrow doorway.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“How did it go?” I asked.
“Fine. How did it go for you and Sam?” he asked.
“Fine.”
Josh looked like he was going to say something more, then changed his mind. He moved to his right and I moved to his left, which meant we both moved to the same side. Then he moved to his left and I to my right, blocking each other again.
“Which way?” he asked.
We have to get past this, I thought. We have to break down this wall we’re building before it gets too high to do anything about. I stood in the middle of the doorway and said, in an effort to make conversation, “What kind of sports are you going to do with the second graders?”
“The usual.”
“Like what?” I asked, trying to be patient.
“T-ball.”
“Our third graders were wild and really fun. I want to do some soccer with them and maybe some kind of pitch-and-run game.”
“Good.”
“You know, Josh,” I said angrily, “I’m not that bad to work with!” The moment I blurted it out, I wished I hadn’t.
The color in Josh’s cheeks deepened, which confirmed that he had requested the change in assignment.
“Sam is a great guy,” he said. “You’ll enjoy being teamed up with him.”
“Sam is interested in Noelle,” I replied. “He would have enjoyed being teamed up with her.”
“He is—in Noelle? He never mentioned that!” Josh muttered something under his breath. “Well,” he added in a philosophical tone, “maybe he’ll learn a few tricks from you and lover boy.”
“From who?”
“You know who,” Josh answered quickly. “I’m sorry, Jamie, but one lousy week makes an anniversary? Trial offers from AOL last longer than that!”
I agreed with him, but I’d die before letting him know that.
“The way all of you girls were looking at the roses and him—I couldn’t believe you were so suckered in!”
“Maybe all of you guys should have taken notes. Don’t criticize Andrew just because you don’t know how to romance a girl!”
I saw the hot yellow flash in Josh’s eyes, the same one I had seen when I checked his shot the first day of lacrosse camp. When his eyes got that amber gleam, whether it was in anger or in the heat of a game, I was fascinated by them, and couldn’t stop looking. They were hypnotic.
Josh pulled his eyes away from mine and rubbed his forehead, a gesture I was getting used to when I was around him.
“I don’t try to give you headaches,” I said.
He laughed a sharp, funny laugh. “No, you’re just a natural.”
“Sorry.”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry. Maybe the other guys and I should have taken notes. Maybe I’m just jealous at how well Andrew does it. In any case, it’s none of my business.”
“Look,” I said, “we got off to a really bad start last week, and then I made everything worse with that stupid bet. I take the blame for really messing up things between us. But can’t we put that behind us now? It’ll make camp more fun for everyone. Can’t we just be friends?”
Josh was rubbing his forehead again, which kept me from seeing his eyes.
“Please stop doing that,” I said.
He laughed that odd laugh again, then admitted, “It shouldn’t be that hard to be friends.”
“We have a lot in common,” I said.
“Yeah, we do.”
“But you’re still mad. You still don’t want to look me in the eye,” I observed.
His eyes flicked up to mine. “Okay, buddy, I’m looking. Now, which way are you going?”
“Let’s both go to our right, and there should be room enough.”
We managed to get past each other and, I hoped, beyond our past.
Mona and I walked together to Stonegate’s parking lot, sharing accounts of the kids we had met that day. When we reached our cars and opened the doors to let out a day’s worth of burning sun, she said, trying to
sound casual, “So, will you be stoop-sitting tonight?”
“The Os are off, but that’s no reason not to enjoy the stoop. Want to come over?”
“Oh, no, I don’t think so.”
“Ted will probably be around.”
“I don’t want him to think I’m chasing him.”
“You’re my friend, why wouldn’t he think you’d come over to see me?” I reasoned with her. The truth was, I wasn’t looking forward to an evening full of short, breathy sentences—full of, as my mother would say, “unspoken desire.”
“Maybe tomorrow night,” she said, “since I was just there Sunday.”
“Whatever.” I climbed in my car despite the fact that it still felt like an oven.
“Jamie,” she called after me, “your roses are in the locker room. You forgot them!”
“I didn’t forget,” I said and drove off.
Pulling up in front of the house, I found Ted at the other end of my commute. I was pretty sure he had been waiting for me, although he tried to look as if he just happened to be there reading the biochemistry newsletter he held up in front of his face, squinting into the western sun, sitting on the blazing hot stoop.
“Hey, Jamie,” he said.
“Hey, Ted, just get home?”
“A few minutes ago.” He stood up. “I’m glad I ran into you.”
Waiting on your steps a few feet from my steps isn’t exactly running into me, I thought, but okay. “What’s up?”
“A prof at the lab gave me four tickets for tomorrow’s night game. Upper deck, but behind home plate. Want to go?”
“To see the Orioles play Boston—are you kidding?” I replied enthusiastically.
“I thought, uh, maybe your friend Mona would like to come with us.”
Of course. It shouldn’t have surprised me; it wasn’t the first time I was a means to an end in dating. “She probably would,” I said.
Perhaps my face showed too many of my thoughts, for he added quickly, “If there had only been two tickets, I would have asked just you, Jamie. But since there are four, I thought, well, maybe, you would enjoy bringing your friend—and Josh.”
“Josh?”
“Aren’t she and Josh friends?”
“Yeah, but—”
“I thought it would make it seem more casual, like a bunch of friends going out. I really like her, Jamie. I mean I really, really like her.”
“I never would have guessed,” I said dryly.
“Great,” he replied. “I don’t want to come on too strong and scare her away.”
“Listen, Ted, maybe instead of Josh, I could ask—”
“Not Andrew!” he interjected.
“—someone else from camp,” I finished. “And why not Andrew?”
Ted shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and seemed to be debating what to say. “I just don’t think it would be a good idea.”
Was he worried that Andrew would be competition for Mona’s attention? Loyalty to Mona, as well as a strong desire not to be their messenger of love, kept me from telling him he had absolutely nothing to worry about.
“I’ve got Mona’s phone number inside, if you want to come in for a minute while I look for it.”
“Actually, I thought you could ask her,” he said.
“But you’re the one inviting her.”
“Do you have her e-mail address?” he asked.
“Ted, are you afraid to talk to her on the phone?”
“Yes,” he answered bluntly. “I’ve never been good on the phone.”
“Okay, I’ll ask her, but just this once. Next time, you’re on your own.”
“And you’ll call Josh, too,” he said.
“Well, I’ll find someone from camp.”
“I think Josh would be the best choice,” he called after me.
“Maybe.”
I called Mona almost immediately, because if I had been in her shoes, I’d have wanted her to call me right away. Over the phone, we sorted through her entire closet, selected three outfits, narrowed it down to one, then settled on something completely different.
When I hung up, I imagined wearing a T-shirt that said “Sports Buddy” on one side, and “Chaperone” on the other. But I got over my flu of self-pity by the next morning.
Chapter 19
Mona and I met early on Tuesday to transfer her clothes for the game to my car and to squeeze in a jog. On our second mile, we came across Sam, who fell into step with us.
“Listen, Sam,” I said, “my next-door neighbor, Ted, has four free tickets to the Os game tonight. He asked Mona and me, and thought maybe I could ask someone else from camp. I don’t want to mess things up for you and Noelle, but if it doesn’t, would you like to go?”
Sam sighed. “There’s nothing to mess up,” he said. “And anyway, it wouldn’t hurt if she thought girls like you and Mona liked to hang out with me. But my brother and his wife are visiting with their kids—I can’t duck out. Why don’t you ask Josh?”
“Do you know if anyone else here likes baseball?”
“Why don’t you ask Josh?” Mona repeated Sam’s question.
“Because I’m not in the mood to have him say no,” I replied honestly.
“I thought you two were supposed to be friends now,” Sam remarked.
I turned to look at him.
“Watch the hole,” he warned, and I just missed stepping in it.
“Did you talk to Josh after camp yesterday?”
Sam nodded. “He said you guys apologized to each other. So maybe it would be nice to ask him to the game.”
“Except now he might feel like he can’t say no,” I argued. “I just don’t think it would be comfortable.”
“To the top of the hill?” Sam asked.
“I’m game,” said Mona, and the three of us sprinted up the steep incline to the next level of fields.
“Whew!” I said.
“I’m done,” Sam answered.
“I’m not. I feel like I’ve got so much energy!” Mona told us, running in place, popping the air with her fists.
“Soaring on the wings of love,” I replied. “You go, girl.”
She took off across the field. Sam and I turned toward the girls’ and guys’ gyms and the PE offices. “In case you didn’t notice that glow, Mona’s in love,” I told him.
“Yeah? With who?”
“Ted, the guy with the tickets. That’s what the baseball invitation is all about. Ted is trying to make the date seem like a group get-together, so he won’t scare her away. The thing is, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that he’ll scare her away.”
Sam shook his head. “Some guys got all the moves, like that guy who brought you the roses yesterday. The rest of us, me and your friend, Ted, act like boobs and back our way in.”
I laughed.
Sam cupped his hands to his mouth. “Yo! Hotshot!” he called.
Josh, who was about to enter the guys’ gym, turned around and Sam beckoned to him. He dropped his athletic bag at the door and trotted toward us. As Josh got closer, I saw the wary look in his eyes, and I knew I had made the right call in not inviting him.
“Morning,” he said. “Did you go for a run?”
“A very short one,” Sam replied, “though Mona’s still going. Josh, do you have any plans that can’t be changed tonight?”
“I do if you’re trying to con me into helping you with your nieces and nephews,” Josh said.
“I planned to, but Jamie beat me with a better offer—the Oriole game with her and Mona and someone named Ted.”
“They’re playing Boston,” I said, and heard myself sounding nervous. “Schilling is pitching.”
“Just so you know, hotshot, Jamie asked me first.”
“Because I didn’t want to put you on the spot, Josh,” I explained.
“Don’t tell him that,” Sam said. “He’s cocky enough as is.” To Josh, he said, “She’s willing to take second best.”
“For Mona’s sake,” I
added quickly. “I mean, we’re doing it for Mona’s sake, not that you’re second best.”
“Mona’s in love,” Sam filled in.
“With Ted—Ted Wu?” Josh asked.
I nodded. “She met him Sunday. Ted took one look at her and wham! Then she looked back, and suddenly it was like the Mona we all know had left the premises. It was amazing. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but I swear, I expected to see the fat little guy with the bow and arrow hovering around.”
“And did you?” Josh asked, smiling a little.
“No. Anyway, now they’re both panting shyly—”
Josh raised a questioning eyebrow and Sam laughed.
“You know what I mean, panting for each other, but acting shy, and so Ted wants to go out with her in a casual-friends kind of situation, though I don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling. He’s gone straight off the deep end—I find it totally unbelievable.”
“Apparently you haven’t read enough of your mother’s books,” Josh said.
“So it’s settled,” Sam declared. “I’ll leave you guys to figure out the details.” He headed toward the gym and, being suddenly alone with Josh, I felt awkward.
“Listen, if you don’t want to go, it’s okay,” I assured him.
“I’d like to go,” he said. “It’s Schilling versus Lopez, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I replied, relieved, “and Lopez has been fabulous lately.”
We walked together to where the path split between the two gyms, talking about baseball. It seemed as if I really had gotten myself a new guy-friend and sports buddy.
That morning I had a blast with my basketball players. Mona and I paced our girls through drills and let them do half-court four-v-fours, then had a full-court scrimmage between our two teams. I watched the beginning of a player’s true understanding of how she should position herself, and realized why my father found this work so satisfying; I also saw the beginning of friendships and, inevitably, the start of a clique. I think a lasso would have helped me handle my Energizer Bunny. I had to bench Camille for a little talk, but when I put her back in for the last ten minutes, she played brilliantly.
At twelve fifteen, we gathered at the same table as yesterday, though we were no longer divided up as girls on one side, guys on the other. Just as we sat down with our food, Ms. Mahler arrived and told us that the storyteller we had promised to our second and third graders wasn’t showing up. The big M was obviously annoyed. “People think, because it’s a free summer camp, that they aren’t required to keep their commitments. We need to keep our commitments to these children more than any.”