know as well as I do that Kayla and Brett are disgustingly in love with each other. Those girls don’t want me. And even if they did, I don’t want them. I don’t want anybody!”
Uh, oh.
“You don’t want anybody? Not even me?” she squeaks out in a tiny, pained voice.
“I don’t know anymore!” I tug at my hair and start to pace.
The sound of a sharp intake of breath lets me know that was not the answer Lony expected. She stands frozen, the dim moonlight reflecting off of a tear rolling down her cheek. After a moment she asks, “What are you saying?”
I place my hands on her shoulders so I can meet her gaze. She needs to see that what I’m about to tell her is serious.
“I’m done, Lony. This isn’t fun anymore.”
“Not fun?”she hisses in a tone laced with venom. “I’m not fun anymore?”
I already regretted my word choice, but I need her to understand. “Relationships are not supposed to be this stressful, Lony. Look at Kayla and Brett. Do you ever see them arguing? Or Kayla going ape-shit when Brett speaks to someone of the opposite sex? No, because she trusts him. She doesn’t have him kissing her ass all the time in fear of setting her off. All we ever do is fight. I don’t have the energy for it anymore. I’m out.”
I set off down the trail again, thankful the break in the trees lets in enough moonlight now so I don’t need the flashlight left in Lony’s trembling hands.
She trips after me, yelling between heaving sobs. I walk too fast for her, trying to put some distance between us so I can think. I hadn’t planned on breaking up with her tonight. Not at all. But if I’m being honest with myself, I knew it was coming.
“Cane! Don’t leave me here. I’m scared!”
There isn’t much in an Iowan forest to be afraid of, but I pause to wait for her anyway. Whether I want to date her or not, I won’t abandon her in the woods. I’m not that big of a dick.
The trees open up to a clearing. We’re close to the river, and I spot Cady, Matt and Amy walking along the train tracks snaked along the river bank.
Cady.
My chest constricts. What will she think of me now? I’ve gotten used to her indifference. Will her loyalty to her sister make her hate me now? Only at that thought does my heart start to break.
After the animal shelter, I didn’t see Cady again for over a year. But that didn’t mean I’d forgotten her. Lying in bed at night listening to my stepdad scream at my mother about how her son (me) was a worthless waste of life, I would remember the girl who saw past my brother’s weird shell to the person he was inside, and imagine that she had seen the inside of me.
On the first day of high school, I walked into the auditorium for freshman orientation with a few of my buddies. There was a swagger to my strut now, which came from my newly acquired seven inches of height and thirty pounds of muscle. The boys and I had spent the last month of summer in football camp where my strong throwing arm earned me the starting quarterback position on the freshman team. In short, I thought I was The Shit.
While scanning the room for a place for me and my entourage to sit, my gaze caught on a familiar girl sitting in the front row. My stomach dropped into my shoes. It was Cady, the girl from the shelter, the girl I’d continued to picture in my mind on those nights when restlessness prevented sleep. My memory couldn’t hold a candle to the real girl sitting only a dozen feet from me, laughing with her friends. There was nothing flashy about her, and she was truly nothing like the girls who hung around in my circle. Her face was clean, and her wavy hair looked like she didn’t do much more than brush it once in a while. She wore faded jeans, a t-shirt and a pair of sneakers with pen-inked doodles all over them.
Of course, since she was in the front row and this was high school, the long line of seats beside her and her friends was empty. As I headed toward them, my friend Brett caught my arm.
“Where you going, man? Let’s go to the back. Michelle said she’d save us some seats.”
Without answering, I continued toward the front row, sitting down on Cady’s right. My friends followed as I knew they would, grumbling about being up front under the watchful eyes of the teachers. Cady didn’t look at me, but continued to talk to a freckley girl and a skinny boy with over-gelled hair.
I wanted to speak to her, but I had no words. Instead, my palms broke out in a sweat and my knee bounced nervously. Brett rattled on to me about the no-hitter Twins game the night before. How could I think about baseball when my Cady was mere inches from me, our knees almost touching?
A screech of sound system feedback startled me out of my obsessive thoughts. An older guy with an ill-fitting suit stood at the microphone clearing his throat. Cady turned her attention to the stage, placing her arm on the wooden rest dividing us. Heat radiated off her skin. Her fingernails were bitten short, and she wore a thin silver ring around her thumb. My fingers itched to trace the fuzz of her forearm.
The guy on the stage introduced himself as one of the guidance counselors and started in on a memorized speech about how we were about to enter into the best days of our lives. Yeah, right. Like if high school was so great, why did people stop going after only four years? Just another myth adults liked to force on us along with Santa Claus, the danger of swimming after eating, and that sex is over-rated and we should wait until we’re old to get it on. Okay, so I had no firsthand knowledge on whether that last one was a myth, but if sex wasn’t fun, why did everyone who’d done it once want to do it again?
I swallowed a groan. I should definitely not be thinking about sex with Cady so close. I drew my notebook over my lap and tried to focus on last night’s baseball game.
When the assembly concluded, Cady and her friends were among the first on their feet and heading toward the door. I moved to follow, but Michelle cut me off. She flipped her hair in that annoying way girls do and gave me some passive aggressive bullshit about having to sit by herself. By the time I extricated myself from her, Cady was long gone.
I saw her again in sixth period Algebra. When I entered the room, she sat in a desk off to the left with the skinny boy from the assembly. I wondered if he was her boyfriend or something, but when his eyes met mine, he gave me an appreciative look that I’d gotten often, though usually from girls.
The desk behind Cady was open so I claimed it, hoping the teacher wouldn’t make us move to assigned seating. All through class, I watched her doodle spirals and 3D boxes along the edges of her notebook.
Just before class finished, the teacher handed out the syllabus to the students in the front row and asked them to pass the sheets back down the line. When Cady turned to pass the stack of photocopies, our eyes finally met. The brown pools were flecked with a gold that I hadn’t remembered and made my stomach do a summersault.
I held my breath waiting for The Look. You know, that look girls give good-looking guys the first time they make eye contact. The brightening of the pupils, the sharp inhalation of breath, the rosy flush to their cheeks when they realize he sees them just as clearly. But with Cady, that never happened. She gave a quick half-grin and turned right back toward the teacher, setting the tone for how she would treat me the rest of the year.
Yes, I know I was conceited. In my defense, I was fourteen and new to the whole girl thing. When puberty hit me, it hit with a vengeance. All at once, girls that I’d gone to school with my whole life began to see me in a new way. The guys too. Not that my friends were hot for me or anything, but they began to defer to me, to seek out my opinion and approval. It was a lot to deal with, and I’m afraid I let it go to my head for a while. (Early sophomore year, my older brother, Brandon, gave me a much needed kick in the pants, and I got over it.)
So while Cady was busy treating me like I didn’t exist, I hung out in my humongous group of friends watching her discretely like a lonely puppy. She fascinated me. The casual observer would probably only see a quiet girl blending into a sea of teenage faces. But I was no casual observer. We may have only had one class together, b
ut I sought out every opportunity to be around her. Okay, this is going to sound a bit stalkerish, and I apologize for that, but I altered the paths I took to my classes so I could pass by her locker. I sat in the same seat everyday at lunch because it gave me the best view of her and her friends. During the fall when I had football practice after school, Cady would run the track around the field with her cross country teammates. When football was over, I immediately signed up to workout with the track team whenever my baseball schedule would allow. I told my football and baseball coaches I did it to keep in shape and improve my speed, but really, I just wanted a chance to be near her.
But no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t bring myself to talk to her. True, I chatted up girls all the time, but those girls sought me out. Cady was different. While she was friendly and kind to even the strangest of misfit kids, she didn’t notice me at all. I remember one day standing in the lunch line behind her when she spotted a boy in a wheelchair having trouble reaching things on the salad bar. Cady left her place to help him fill his plate and get a soda from the fountain. It wasn’t that she helped the guy, but that she did it in such a way as to not show any pity or make him feel incapable. After getting him situated, she invited the boy to sit at the table with her friends. I