“I’m serious. You were worried about my safety. That’s why you’re here.”
His dark brows shot up. For the briefest moment, I wondered if that really was why he was here.
But of course it was. He shrugged. “Like you said, this is probably the safest place in Atlanta. And I look mean, don’t I?”
He didn’t look mean. His face was open and sweet, like the friendliest person I’d ever met. But he was at least six feet tall, which was probably what he meant.
If I admitted how daunting he’d look to a would-be attacker, I would sound like I liked him. I didn’t want to insult him, though. So I asked, “Are we back on the serial killer thing again?”
He threw back his head and laughed. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. “See you next Friday night, Gemma.”
And then, before I could react, he reached past me and opened the passenger door of my mom’s car. I climbed in, dragging my baton bag after me. He closed the door with a thick thud.
As my mom drove away from the curb, I watched Max in the side mirror. He stood staring after us for a moment, looking straighter and thinner and taller now that I could see all of him, not just his expressive face. He shook his head as he slung his bag over his shoulder and walked up the sidewalk toward the parking deck.
“And who was that?” my mother asked expectantly. She stopped at the next intersection, by the mall and restaurants and high-rise hotels. Smiling couples held hands as they crossed the street in front of us.
Willing the tingle in my shoulder where he’d touched me to fade away, I sighed, “Max. Addison’s date.”
6
“Addison’s date!” my mom exclaimed.
“Yep.” I barreled through an explanation so she wouldn’t ask me twenty questions. “He’s a junior too, and he’s a kicker for the football team at East. We met him today at Tech. His dad is a professor there. Max was in football camp while we were in majorette camp. Addison’s going out with him next Friday, and I’m going out with his friend Carter, if that’s okay with you, to a concert. Max is picking me up because he lives around here. He was just waiting with me until you came.”
“That was nice of him,” my mom said. She peered into the rearview mirror as if to give him another once-over, even though he was long gone. She looked out the windshield again. “He has such good manners.”
“Yep,” I said.
“He’s very handsome,” she said.
“Yep,” I said.
I felt her watching me across the dark car. I’d never been on a date, but I’d assumed I would go on one now that I was a majorette and looked the part, except for my hair. Maybe my mom had been waiting for this too. She would have laughed if I’d explained to her how badly I wanted Max to be my date, and how far that was from happening.
She gave a little gasp. “What happened to your nose?”
I’d forgotten all about my injury after my nose had stopped throbbing. I touched it tenderly. It was sore. That’s probably what Max had been staring at the whole time I thought he was looking right through me to my soul.
“Addison hit me with her baton,” I said.
My mom raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. I had suffered many injuries at Addison’s hands. Most of them had not been accidents, but I’d always claimed they were so I wouldn’t lose my only friend.
I was having second thoughts about that policy.
“So, you ate at the Varsity?” my mom asked. “What’d you eat? Not what you ordered, but what you ate.”
“A grilled chicken sandwich,” I said. “I ordered it and I ate it.”
“Is that all?” she exclaimed. “Are you still hungry? I made lasagna and kept it warm for you.”
“That sounds so good,” I said truthfully. “Maybe I’ll have some tomorrow.” But I knew tomorrow she would cook something else and press me to eat that. I couldn’t eat everything. Not anymore.
“How about some fresh peach cobbler with vanilla bean ice cream?”
Now she had me. Sweets had always been my weakness. I mean, food in general had been my weakness, but dessert was the worst. My mouth watered at the thought of cold ice cream melting over the flaky brown crust, sugar sparkling in the light from the kitchen chandelier, and all those sweet peaches. Georgia was the Peach State, and peaches were in season. My mom and I would sit at the table together and eat and say mmmmmm and feel like a family.
But I couldn’t do it. As I’d told Max, in the past nine months, I’d learned the difference between wanting food and being hungry. I was not hungry.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I repeated.
My mom was quiet, probably thinking about whatever charity ball she was planning at the moment. My thoughts drifted to our over–air-conditioned mansion ahead.
After the day I’d had with Addison, it was ridiculous of me to miss her. Yet I felt a horrible dread as my mom turned onto our street, passed the Campbells’ house and the Browns’ and the Khans’, and pulled into our brick driveway. If Addison were driving me home, she would be blasting the sickly sweet pop station specifically because she knew I hated it. But when she parked in my driveway, I never wanted to get out of her car. Addison was rude, selfish, and spiteful. She was also full of life, and she made noise.
My mom parked in the spotless garage with three of the four spaces empty, and sighed. “I have a lot of work to do tonight, honey. A lot. But when I get through, I want to hear all about majorette camp and these boys.”
“Okey-doke.” I unlocked the door into the kitchen and galloped upstairs. My mom promised all the time that we’d chat, then got absorbed in what she was doing. She’d be working until I fell asleep. She would not ask me about camp. Neither of us would say anything for the rest of the night.
I closed the door of my room and waited for her to get her cobbler and ice cream and shut herself in her office, so I wouldn’t be tempted. When the coast was clear, I unzipped my bag, took out my batons, and ran back downstairs, through the kitchen where the scent of peaches and sugar still hung in the air. I let myself out the French door, into the hot, humid night, a relief after the supercooled air inside the house. I crossed the marble patio to the big back lawn.
One of the instructors at camp had advised us first-time majorettes that the biggest hazard of our halftime show would be the bright stadium lights. If we weren’t careful, we would toss up a baton, lose it in the glare of the lights, and drop it. In the band formation I would be in front of the student section. I could not drop a baton. Facing the spotlight on the corner of the roof, I threw baton after baton into the glare and practiced catching them by feel instead of by sight, until my hands were sore. And then kept going.
I didn’t see Addison for the rest of the weekend. She was doing charity work for her debutante ball, which was coming up in October. Most people understood the debutante ball as a place where rich girls made a lot of affected movements and got “presented” to the rich boys who went to the same country club. All of that was true, but the girls needed community service hours too. It was kind of like training to become my mother, so when they turned forty-five, they too could be single mothers, live alone in a mansion, and plan charity balls for other people. That’s what I called living.
I guess it was kind of strange that Addison was a debutante and I wasn’t. Addison’s mom was stretching to scrape up the money. They lived in what was jokingly referred to as the “slum” of this part of Atlanta, which meant the houses were made of brick, not marble, and had four bedrooms instead of fourteen. But Addison’s mom was still trying to make up to society for her embezzling husband.
And me, I’d never wanted to be a debutante. I’d been overweight when I had to decide. I didn’t want that kind of attention. I probably would have had to dye over the streaks in my hair. It just wasn’t who I was. Astonishingly, my mom had brought up the idea only once. And unlike Addison bullying me into things, when I said no, my mom had let it go.
So a lot of weekends without Addison stretched before me. I felt a
mix of relief that I wouldn’t have to put up with her, and stir-craziness that there wouldn’t be any driving around town looking for Hot Male Action (by which Addison meant whistling to boys shooting hoops at the park). The silence in my house was broken only by the sound of my mom tapping on the computer keyboard in her office, which echoed down the hall and around the marble stairwell. I could only stay so long outside in the ninety-five-degree heat, practicing baton.
Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I asked my mom to drop me off at the library while she ran some errands. This branch sat between Max and Carter’s high school and mine. I figured it would have their high school yearbook from last May.
I was right. I snagged it from the shelves. I told myself I was only making sure that Max and Carter were who they said they were, and that they had not in fact been attending serial killer camp at Georgia Tech. I could have looked them up online, but social pages were easy to fake. I was smarter than that. I had to protect Addison, because she was too trusting to say no to any handsome stranger who asked her out. Or too horny.
The thought of Addison being horny for Max made me so tense that I accidentally ripped a page as I turned it. I took a deep breath to calm down, and looked around to make sure a librarian wasn’t about to kick me out for destroying the collection.
I thumbed through to the football team pages and found Max and Carter in the junior varsity group photo. They were also in the varsity photo. Lots of varsity teams dressed out their junior varsity players in case the juniors and seniors got hurt, and to make the team look bigger and more menacing. The boys’ faces were so small in both photos that I wouldn’t have recognized them except for their names in the fine print. To make sure they hadn’t looked up a couple of real students and given Addison and me false names in an elaborate serial killer ploy, I paged through to the individual pictures of last year’s sophomore class.
Kichirou Maximilian Hirayama. That was Max all right, with an expression of utter joy on his face, like the photographer had told him history’s funniest joke. I smiled just looking at him.
I flipped several more pages. Carter Nelson. He frowned. I’d seen similar expressions of the faces of starting football players in high school game programs, but usually not in their yearbook pictures. Their girlfriends would complain. Nobody wanted to look at that.
Another photo caught my eye as I thumbed through last year’s sophomores. Max was seated at what appeared to be a lunchroom table, surrounded by other students, with an open box in front of him. It must have been his birthday. Ribbon and paper were scattered across the table. He had that same look on his face, that deep-down happiness. All the other kids in the picture were laughing too. Maybe one of these beautiful girls had been his girlfriend back then, and she felt so warm inside because she’d bought him the perfect gift.
Wow, I was imagining way too much. I would need to be careful when I saw Max next Friday so I didn’t let it slip that I’d seen this picture and wondered about his life outside the Varsity and the MARTA system. I would seem like a stalker.
For that reason, I didn’t thumb through the yearbook anymore, even to search for his picture in club photos to find out what his hobbies were. Any knowledge like that would give away my crush. I had made a mistake like that when Robert left his schedule on the lunchroom table where I could see it at the beginning of school last year. I had memorized it, and later I had made a point of walking very slowly by his classes. My crush was so painfully obvious that he had cornered me on a band trip and stressed to me that he wanted to be just friends, as if he was afraid the other trumpets would find out I liked him and make fun of him for it. Mortifying!
It was better that I didn’t know too much about Max. The less I knew, the less I needed to forget. I closed the book and considered running the hem of my T-shirt along it to wipe off my fingerprints. I reshelved it without any crime scene cover-up and went outside to meet my mom.
A few minutes before Max was supposed to pick me up on Friday, I sat on the front porch to wait for him. My house was imposing. Grandiose. Embarrassing. I thought hanging out on the steps in my rock band T-shirt and shorts might lessen the impact of the thick polished marble columns and the fourteen-foot-tall windows.
Also, I did not want Max to ring the doorbell. My dad had a gag bell installed that sounded like a gong in a palace. It was a joke. I didn’t think it was funny. I’d complained about it to my mom, but she didn’t know how to change the sound, and she’d never bothered to hire someone to fix it.
When Max pulled into the brick driveway in the longest old clunker I had ever seen, I crossed the lawn to meet him. But I stopped short and did a double take when he unfolded his tall frame from the car. He’d grown a goatee. I thought he’d been cuter clean shaven. Fresh-faced and younger-looking.
But as I considered him, I decided maybe “cute” was not my favorite look for him anyway. “Cute” had gotten my attention in the first place, but mature and handsomely devilish-looking would definitely keep my attention. Of course, it didn’t matter whether he had my attention or not. He was dating Addison, so he would never know.
7
As I stood there in the hot evening sunshine, brushing away the gnats I’d stirred up in the grass, I felt the most profound sadness. Max’s goatee had surprised me because I hadn’t seen him in a week. I had missed six days of his classmates teasing him about the awkward, in-between, you-really-need-to-shave phase as his goatee grew in. It was just facial hair this time, but our lives had so little to do with each other, really. He could lose a leg and it would be a week before I found out.
Squinting against the sunlight, he backed against the car door to close it. “Hi. Do I look foreign in this?”
“Um,” I said, trying to puzzle out what he was talking about. The goatee didn’t make him look foreign. Just older. “What?”
“Sometimes people take one look at me and start speaking. Very. Slowwwwwwwly. Like I can’t understand English.”
I examined his gray plaid shorts, which might have looked nerdy on another boy but were part of Max’s effortless ultracool look, along with his tight red T-shirt and his long hair. Finally I said, “You don’t stand foreign.”
“Really? How do I stand?” He assumed a weight-lifter pose, flexing his biceps for me.
I laughed it off and tried not to ogle him. “You stand like an American high school football kicker.”
He relaxed and put his fists on his hips. “But do I look foreign? It must be the hair.”
Okay, his hair was a little too stylish to blend in around here, but that wasn’t what caught my attention now that I considered him in this new way. “Your T-shirt is written in Japanese.”
He pulled his T-shirt away from his chest with two fingers and examined it. “I hadn’t thought about that. We visit my grandparents in Japan every year. I buy a lot of T-shirts because they’re so different from what you can get in America.”
“So you do want people to notice you,” I pointed out.
He opened his mouth. Closed it again.
“I understand,” I assured him. “You want people to notice you, but on your own terms.”
He frowned at me.
To change the subject in case he was as sensitive about that as he seemed, I asked, “What does your T-shirt say, anyway?”
“Dunno. I always have to ask my mom. She tells me they all say, ‘Bullshit.’”
“Bullshit!” I sputtered laughter.
“Her English is good but not nuanced,” he explained. “Sometimes she changes it up with another word she’s learned, like ‘whackadoodle.’ She’ll do this.” He pointed at two characters in a line on his shirt and pronounced two syllables with each. “‘To-mo, da-chi.’” He underlined them with his finger. “‘Whackadoodle.’”
Carefully I wiped away the tears under my eyes so as not to smear my makeup. “She sounds funny.”
“She is funny. Just . . .” He rolled his eyes. “Foreign.”
“What does your dad say?”
<
br /> Max shrugged. “He thinks my struggles are amusing and futile.” I was pretty sure that was a direct quote from his dad. Max’s dark eyes got a faraway look, and he was quiet, which was rare for him.
“Well,” I forced myself to say. “Welcome to my humble house.”
He grinned as he walked toward me. “What house?” He pretended to do a double take and see the mansion for the first time, like I’d done for his goatee. “Oh! I didn’t even notice it until you mentioned it.”
If Addison were here, she would shove him playfully. I was afraid I might shove him off balance and kill him. And he wasn’t my date. He was hers. So I just smiled, which probably made him think I didn’t appreciate his sense of humor. I couldn’t win. Finally I managed, “I’m sorry, but my mom says she has to talk to you before she will let Addison and me in your car.”
“I figured she would.”
“You already impressed her when you opened the car door for me at the MARTA station, so the interrogation shouldn’t be too bad.”
“Good to know.” He gestured to the house, ladies first, and followed me inside.
My mom met us in the foyer, shook Max’s hand, and led him into the library. Surrounded by dark paneled wood and thousands of books shelved floor to ceiling with a rolling ladder to get them down, and facing my mom, Max probably considered this the most awkward moment of his life.
But he sat in one of the leather chairs like it was a metal folding chair at school and talked animatedly to my mom like she was Addison or Carter or me. Either he was the only person I’d ever met who was comfortable with anyone in any situation, or it didn’t occur to him to be embarrassed because the stakes for impressing my mom weren’t very high. After all, he wasn’t dating me.
He was only my ride to my first date ever.
“Nice wheels,” I said a few minutes later, slipping into Max’s car.
He closed my door, jogged around the hood, and sat on the driver’s side. As he turned the key in the ignition, he said, “Very funny.”