As soon as I got home, I gathered up a huge basket of laundry, with underwear and everything else that I might need for tonight, and hauled it down to the washer in the basement. Returning to the kitchen, I found a coded note from my mother:
Jamie,
I’ll be back by 4:45.
There’s plenty of Kashi.
Look by your bed—I found a box of
your old books.
I ate a yogurt then dove into the Kashi box, which was filled with cookies. When my wash was done, I flipped it over to the dryer and headed up to my room. Taking Mona’s advice, I shut the door and clicked the AC on high. Ahh! The headache was already disappearing. Next to my daybed sat a dusty-looking carton. I pulled books from it, picture books with covers and pages that had been turned over and over, and occasionally colored on: The Berenstain Bears Go Out for the Team, The Berenstain Bears and the Female Fullback, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty—my favorite old books. The illustrations for the fairy tales were beautiful. Making myself comfortable on the leopard spread, I began to read. I didn’t realize how tired I was.
At four twenty I discovered I had fallen under the spell of the bad fairy, and one look in the bathroom mirror told me it wasn’t Sleeping Beauty who had just awakened. I peeled off my sweat-encrusted clothes and took a shower, using one of my mother’s fancy shampoos. I came out smelling like jasmine, and by the time I smoothed on some of the loveliest lotion I’d ever felt, I was a virtual flower garden. I pulled out a drawer in the vanity and searched through her bottles of nail polish. There were a zillion pinks, lavenders, and peaches. I chose peach because it seemed summery and looked good with the tan I was starting to get. I had just finished my toes and one hand when the doorbell rang. I glanced at the small clock Mom kept in the bathroom. Four forty-five. Mom will get it, I thought.
I waved my left hand around, trying to get it to dry, and the doorbell rang again. She must have locked herself out, I thought. My robe was down in the dryer, so I grabbed Mom’s from the bathroom hook, giggling a little as I ran downstairs. It was that slinky red thing with a plunging neckline and a ridiculous ruffle that, because of our difference in heights, ran short around my thighs.
“Coming,” I called to her, then pulled open the door.
For a moment, he and I stood there just staring at each other. I squinted into the sunlight, thinking I was seeing things; he peered into the darkness of the house, obviously thinking the same thing.
“Josh! What are you doing here?”
“Jamie?” He sounded incredulous.
Well, who else? I thought, then I remembered what I was wearing. Oh, my God!
His eyes moved slowly from my loose, damp hair to my shoulders, took a meandering trip down to my legs, then made a daylong journey to my painted toes. It was my imagination, it had to be my imagination, but I felt heat under my skin every inch of the way.
“What are you doing here?” I repeated.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he said.
“I live here.”
“With Carolyn Velli?” He reached into his pocket. “Maybe I have the wrong address.”
That’s when I noticed the books in his hands.
“She’s my mother, which is who I thought you were when the doorbell rang. Carolyn Velli…Car-velli? Get it? Her real name is Rita.”
“O-oh.”
There was a moment of silence, as if we both needed time to recover our breath from the shock we had just sustained.
“Somehow, I didn’t think you’d be the type to read her books,” I said at last.
At that he smiled. “My grandmother is a huge fan, and I was supposed to get these books signed for her at HonFest, but I forgot. So I went to your mother’s website and e-mailed her. She said I could bring them by today at four forty-five.”
I nodded. It was all starting to make sense. “Well then, you may as well come in.”
He stepped inside and surveyed the room with undisguised curiosity, taking in the artificial flowers that draped the windows, the piles of purple and pink pillows, and the fringed lilac shades, his eyes finally coming to rest on my heart-framed face resting among the zillion candles on our fake fireplace.
“Just for the record,” I said, “my clothes are in the dryer, so I grabbed my mother’s robe to answer the door.”
He turned to me, smiled, and said nothing, which sent the blood rushing to my cheeks.
“Sit down,” I ordered. “She’ll be here soon. I’m getting my clothes.”
Retreating to the basement, I pulled my wrinkled clothes from the dryer and changed into shorts and a T-shirt right there, unwilling to pass by Josh once more in that red silky thing. As I carried the laundry basket upstairs, I heard my mother unlocking the front door.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” I heard her gush. Her hair, which she had pinned up because of the heat, was coming down in curly gold strands, making her look flustered and pretty. She dropped a pile of grocery bags in the entrance hall.
Josh leaped to his feet. “Can I help you with those?”
“That would be wonderful,” she said.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, baby. I have more groceries in the car.”
“I’ll get them,” Josh told her.
My mother batted her eyes at him. “I’d be so appreciative.”
“No problem.”
Since they seemed to be determined to charm each other, I let him be chivalrous and simply picked up the bags in the hall and carried them into the kitchen.
“I wish all young men were so thoughtful,” my mother said, following me, her big blue alligator purse swinging from her shoulder. “I’m so glad you were here to let him in.”
“You could have warned me he was coming,” I replied.
We began pulling items out of the bag—more cookies, pasta, and bacon, food that had to be on Viktor’s sin list.
“There wasn’t any reason to. Signing books is business, not a social occasion, although it is a very pleasant part of my business,” she admitted.
“Mom, he’s Josh. You know, as in Josh, my coach.”
“Your coach?” Her mascara-thick eyelashes flicked with surprise. “You mean your lacrosse coach? Why, it never occurred to me! He was so delightful in his e-mail, it never crossed my mind he could be the Josh you said was—” She stopped, for Josh had come in with the second load of groceries.
He smiled at her. “Go on.”
“Too serious and authoritarian.”
You’d think that, being a writer, she could have found another way to put it.
Josh glanced at me and smirked a little. “Well, for the record,” he said, echoing my words from a few minutes before, “your daughter doesn’t come off quite the same as she does at practice.”
I blushed and my mother looked at me questioningly.
“Excuse me, while I put my laundry away,” I said.
As I folded, I listened to the sound from the dining room, the murmur of their voices, punctuated by laughter. It occurred to me that having spent nine hours of practice with Josh, I had never heard him laugh.
I finished putting away my laundry and could have painted the rest of my nails, but I felt jittery. For some reason, his presence in our house disturbed me—seeing this other part of his personality made me feel edgy. I thought she said this wasn’t supposed to be a social visit.
Finally I went downstairs. As soon as Josh saw me, he stood up.
“Ah,” sighed my mother, “it’s so rare nowadays for a man to stand when a woman enters a room.”
“I think he was leaving, Mom,” I replied.
“Leaving? Not yet. Perhaps you would like to stay for dinner,” she invited.
Dinner? Had she forgotten my date? She was the one who had suggested this morning that we eat early so I’d have time to “pretty up.”
“I’m sorry. My grandmother probably has something prepared,” Josh replied politely.
“Another night, then,” Mom s
aid, and turned to me. “I’ll get started on ours. Why don’t you two go play some hoop, bunny?”
I looked at her as if she had lost it.
“That’s what her father used to say,” my mother explained to Josh, then made her voice deep in imitation of him. “Hey, want to go play some hoop, bunny?”
Josh rubbed his hand over his mouth in a feeble attempt to hide his laughter, his eyes crinkling up.
“Our little baby—well, she wasn’t so little, not even when she was born—hopped around like a bunny since she was fourteen months.”
He laughed. “Do you have a basketball net here?” he asked me.
“There’s a hoop about three houses down, at the end of the alley, but that’s all it is, a rusty rim and a rickety backboard.”
His eyes were bright. “Want to?”
Maybe it was the light in his eyes, a playfulness I hadn’t seen before. Maybe it was that basketball was the one way I could count on getting back my dignity. I glanced at the clock. There was still plenty of time to “pretty up.” “All right.”
I ran upstairs to grab my shoes and ball, then led the way out back. Ted had just returned from his lab job and was sitting on the back porch, sipping some of his mint tea.
“Want to play?” I asked him.
“It’s ninety-four degrees,” he replied. “I’m going to hang out here and resuscitate you if you need it. Then he turned to Josh. “Hi.”
“Hi. It’s Ted, right? You were in my Chem lab last semester.”
“Yes.” Ted looked pleased that Josh remembered him.
“We had a terrible TA,” Josh explained to me. “Whenever we had a question, we asked Ted.”
My baseball buddy smiled self-consciously and seemed to be at a loss for words.
“He knows just as much about sports,” I said, then continued down the walk to the back alley, realizing Ted would be way too shy to play in front of Josh.
“The fences make it kind of a challenge,” I told Josh, “especially in that corner.” I pointed to where our alley met the other one. “Don’t impale yourself on a picket.”
“Darn. That’s just where I take my three-point shot. The one I always make.”
“Un-hunh.”
Actually, he was good at shooting, having the hand-eye coordination that is the gift of an excellent athlete.
“So let me see you jump, bunny,” he said after several minutes of quiet shooting.
I flashed him a look and he grinned back at me.
“No one calls me that but my parents.”
He laughed and tossed me the ball. “Can you dunk it, bunny?”
“No one calls me that!”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s see what you can do, rabbit.”
I pivoted on the exact spot where I was standing, twenty-five feet from the basket, and plunked it in. Which wasn’t easy, since I had made a point of shooting flat-footed.
“That’s great,” he said, “as long as there isn’t a defender in sight.” After scooping up the ball, he walked it back to me and stood face-to-face. “C’mon,” he urged, his voice low and persuasive.
I faked to the left and went right, faking him out but good, then stubbornly shot flat-footed again.
“Funny thing,” I said, smiling slyly, “there wasn’t a defender in sight.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that. One-on-one,” he proposed.
“It’s kind of hot for that.”
“Excuses,” he replied, then added, “We can even use a guy’s basketball.”
There is only one kind of basketball, of course, but I took the bait, as he knew I would. Monday’s one-on-one was his game; this one-on-one was mine.
We both played hard, driving, faking, spinning, shooting, crashing “the boards” for the rebound, slamming into each other. Every jump was a competition in timing as well as height. Our arms got tangled up, and our feet—once I sent him sprawling. Shoulder against shoulder, hip against hip. Lots of sweat. I was shooting through a screen of tumbling hair.
“Time out,” I said, catching hold of my wild hair, trying to smooth it and weave it into a braid.
Josh dribbled the ball, waiting for me. My fingers were halfway down the braid when I heard the bouncing stop. I finished the braid, twisted it around itself and pulled the end through in a kind of knot. When I glanced up, Josh was watching me.
A soft golden light shone in his hazel eyes. It’s the evening sun, I told myself. It’s the slant of the light when the sun is in the west. Still, it drew me, the way the warmth of the sun does.
I pulled my eyes away. “Ready.”
We started playing again. I drove, I faked, I leaped, I shot, just like before. I crashed the boards with him, just like before. I played my toughest defense and blocked a shot, just like before. But the game felt different. I was playing the exact same way I played the guys at home, but I was so…so aware of him—aware of the edge of his shoe against mine, aware of the slightest brush of his arm. In the last four years of pickup games, I had slammed against a lot of hard and heaving chests; why was I suddenly noticing his?
It’s the romances, I thought. It’s those stupid books! Romance writers were always talking about hard chests and tingling touches. I had to stop reading them.
We played on—me, getting way too serious about a back-alley game, because I was trying to keep my focus on the sport, and Josh just laughing. Every time he laughed, I felt as well as heard it, as if his laughter were rumbling inside me.
I played harder, if that were possible. When the ball caromed wide off the rim, I flew after it. One moment I saw the ball floating in the air, almost within reach, the next, I saw a row of sharp pickets coming at me. Just before I skewered myself on the fence, an arm reached around my waist and yanked me back. We spun together and slammed against the wooden boards.
“You trying to kill yourself?” Josh asked.
“Just rebounding.”
With him standing behind me, holding me tightly against him, I was aware of how broad his shoulders were, how he could enfold me like a protective cape.
“Sometimes,” I said, “all I see is the ball.”
He laughed quietly, his mouth close to my ear. “I know how that is.”
Did he also know what weird things my senses were doing? His quick breath was making a strand of my hair dance against my cheek, and my whole body tingled.
Then someone had a coughing fit. Ted was coughing loud enough to scare off the most determined city pigeons. I suddenly saw the basketball again, lying among a row of tomato plants. At that moment, Josh let go. As he reached for the gate latch to enter the garden, I heard another gate squeak and I turned around.
“Hello, Jamie.”
“Andrew. Hi.”
“I wanted to let you know what time we should leave tonight.”
I looked at him, confused. I thought we had already settled the time.
“There’s going to be a crowd, so I think we ought to take off about seven fifteen.”
That’s what he had said last night.
Josh, ball tucked under one arm, sweating an ocean, stood several feet behind me, as if he didn’t want to interrupt.
“Okay?”
“Sure. I’m halfway ready,” I replied, holding up the hand with the painted nails. Three were chipped now, my hair was mess, and I needed another shower. “See you then.”
“I’d better go,” Josh said, as I turned to him. He waved to Ted, who waved back, and we walked silently to the house. Once inside he snatched up his books from the kitchen table. “Thanks, Mrs. Carvelli. Gran’s going to be really excited.”
“Rita. Call me Rita. Are you leaving?”
“Not without water,” I interjected.
He shook his head. “Thanks, I’m fine.”
“Drink water, drink water, drink water,” I reminded him, using the words he always used at the end of practice.
It was like breaking a spell.
“Right,” he replied in that crisp tone of voice he used at ca
mp, accepting the bottle I thrust in his hand.
“See you tomorrow,” I said.
“Nine o’clock,” my coach replied firmly, and left.
Chapter 11
Of course, the bristly pigs didn’t speak French. It was a group of medieval guys running around in The Hunt for the Wild Boar who created the need for subtitles. I was grateful for the dialogue printed at the bottom of the screen: It gave me something to read when “the pursuit of life in all its wondrous brutality,” which Andrew told me was the film’s theme, got gory. I really don’t like gore, but I would not have admitted that to Andrew any more than I would have to my guy friends at home, who loved blood—although they preferred it in English.
Just being at the Charles Theater, an arts cinema, and studying the people in the ticket line was a cultural experience. Andrew ran into several friends, one girl with a streak of Goth, another with some serious glasses and braininess that were awesome when coupled with her very short skirt and tight knit top. She had come with her British friend, Fiona, who was an art major and considered herself an important work. Earlier that evening, when I had met Andrew on the sidewalk between our houses, dressed in my camisole and capris, with my fingernails and toenails painted and hair falling just right for once, I felt incredibly good about the way I looked. After meeting the girls he considered friends, I felt as boring as a Sears ad.
The guys he knew were just as interesting—two with beards, one with long shining hair bound at the back of his neck with a piece of leather. He had great, rugged-looking features and could have worn a tutu without making people snicker. All of Andrew’s friends talked film, dropping names of movies and directors I had never heard of. I was relieved, but also a little disappointed, when Andrew turned down two different invitations to join them after the movie.
We went alone to a sushi place. Normally, a day of sports camp and some pickup basketball would have left me hungry for a hamburger topped with bacon and cheese, but after watching guys slaughter a boar, a restaurant that served orange, pink, and white platters of fish was a good choice. I was fascinated by the ease with which Andrew did everything, from talking artsy, to guiding the car through city traffic, to asking the waiter about new items on the menu in a way that suggested he had spent half his life in Japan.