Finding Mr. Brightside (13 page)

He shakes his head, undeterred. “It’s just like riding a bike.”

“I hate bikers.”

“Ah, that’s right—bad example. Just do a loop around here. You don’t have to go on the main road.” He gestures toward the sea of empty parking spaces. (Behind us, hungry patrons form a desperate horseshoe of cars around the twenty-four-hour drive-thru lane.)

“You should’ve asked me before that happened,” I say, pointing to the bag full of empty Doritos Locos Supreme wrappers.

“Tacos can only help matters. Look at me, I eat a lot of them, and I’m a pretty good driver, no?”

He’s a great driver, actually, but that has nothing to do with me getting out of this. Or here’s a crazy thought: I could just do it, say yes, try something new again. What’s so hard about trading Abram spots, taking the wheel, and parking right next to the space we’re in?

I unlock the door and step out into a small swarm of no-see-ums, which really are worse than mosquitoes, it’s not just some boring thing people say to hear themselves sounding fascinated about nature. Anyway, bad omen. I slam the door and run around toward Abram’s side. I tell him to get back in through his side, and he does, sliding over into the passenger seat as I shut the door behind me. In full teammate mode, Abram makes a fist-bump request with his balled hand outstretched, and for some reason I bump it. It makes me feel dumber, but better.

It’s actually not overwhelming in the driver’s seat, especially in park, in Abram’s tank of an SUV. I like that I’m up high, that if I accidentally accelerated directly into a car like that Hyundai Elantra over there it wouldn’t result in my vehicle losing control and plummeting down a steep ravine. Because, wouldn’t you know, there’s always a steep ravine nearby when I get into hypothetical car accidents.

I adjust the rearview mirror, then check it to see if I’ve grown at all as a person. Not yet. Abram wisely buckles up and points to the widget that I’m supposed to shift from
P
to
D
. It’s not responding. Something’s off.

Abram reminds me, without judgment, that I may want to push down on the brake first. I laugh and try reversing again. Watch out, America. I circle the parking lot over and over again, Abram saying “Maybe you don’t want to get
that
close” after I graze the edge of a bush, and “You’re speeding up when someone pulls into the drive-thru as a joke, right?” he asks, as I fail to realize that’s what I’m doing. He’s the only kind of teacher I can learn from. I’m still a danger to myself and anything in my path—e.g., the empty soda cup I just ran over—but I feel my world expanding by just the slightest of margins.

30

ABRAM

J
ULIETTE AWAKENS THE NEXT MORNING
to an unlikely role reversal: me, fully dressed, staring down at her with two Starbucks cups in my hands. She thanks me and accepts the drink before vowing never to let me “beat her up again.” I assure her I’m a lover, not a fighter.

She takes a couple of sips, then sits up straighter. “Did you see Janette there?”

“Who?”

“Janette. The barista I was hating the other day.”

“Oh,
that
Janette.” I shake my head nope; I can barely remember driving there and back. Juliette’s follow-up descriptions of Janette’s “Kerri Strugg voice” and “suspicious leprechaun eyes” don’t ring any bells for me, either. I must be too excited about today.…

“I have another surprise for you,” I say, watching as the announcement hits her like a ton of bricks.

“Does it involve other people?”

“Technically, no. We depart in an hour.”

An hour and a half, actually, but I don’t want to leave her too much time to cancel back and forth with. The way I’ve set this up seems to be working … she’s intrigued. If I’m not careful, I might turn into an accidental love genius.

*   *   *

Fifty-five minutes later, I’m showered and as ready as I’ll ever be. Juliette? Showered, but she “might never be ready, sorry.” Her words, and they’ll come true if she keeps getting into fights with her hair. Every time she passes a reflective surface, she picks up where she left off, and then she’s grabbing at the tie holding her bun in place and attempting to ramrod it smooth again. The southern humidity has other ideas—for instance,
How ’bout some curls instead, y’all?
It also has a southern accent.

“Isn’t the beachy look popular with you girls these days?” I say, testing out my wavering grandpa voice.

Juliette smirks into the mirror and says, “You mean with those crusty girls who put gel in their hair, Grandpa?”

I take a gulp of my iced coffee, smack my lips, and say, as creepily as possible, “Grampy likes ’em a little crusty, heh-heh-heh.”

Eventually she sits down on the chair across from me, accuses me of staring at her hair—which I don’t deny, because it looks good.

“Are you sure us going through with this is necessary?”

“No loopholes,” I say, removing the itinerary I folded too many times from my pocket and spreading it out onto the coffee table. I have to hold it in place with a coaster so that it lies flat. Now I kind of know how she feels about her hair.

She speed-reads the contents of the paper, looks up at me. “A whale-watching expedition?”

“I was thinking we should go visit our distant relatives,” I explain. She’s quiet for a minute, but in a contemplative way, not a grouchy one. I bet she’s thinking about that first night at my house, after CVS, how we talked about the whale versions of ourselves, the way things might’ve played out had we been born underwater.

“I tried to find a boat with Wi-Fi for you,” I say, “but it’s not really something they prioritize.”

“Doesn’t matter. This…” She rolls her eyes and looks away. For a second, I think she’s disappointed, and then her entire face breaks out into a smile. She’s never let it do that before. “This is one of my favorite things anyone’s ever done for me.”

“It is?”

“I have weird standards.”

“Or,” I say, “you have
whale
standards.” Juliette seems to like this explanation better. She stands up and walks over to me, and suddenly her face is front and center, and I can feel each of her shallow breaths on my skin as she tilts her chin downward, till her lips are aligned with mine. She gives me the lightest of kisses. “Thank you,” she says. I try not to behave myself, draw her back in with my animal magnetism, but she has to pack her purse. Don’t think we need the remote control she just threw inside it accidentally, but I keep quiet, just sit there and smile until she comes back over with a can of sunscreen in her hand and tells me to take off my shirt. I whistle at the familiar thought of my own bare chest and then do as she demands. I know what’s good for me. Her.

*   *   *

“Let me know if you see any ‘whales,’” Juliette says with fingers crooked into skeptical air quotations. Then she reaches into her purse and pulls out her phone in hopes that its cellular data signal has strengthened. In this case, I don’t blame her for trying to escape reality—would be doing the same if I hadn’t left my phone in some other shorts pocket back at the house. With all due respect to the whales, watching them remain underwater is kind of a snoozer. Not that I expect them to be all
Yeah, we’ll be right up, can’t wait to see you, too!
given how many harpoons they’ve historically taken to the forehead.

“Wonder why they call them right whales,” I say to Juliette.

“Because poachers deemed them the ‘right whale’ to hunt,” she answers, like a human Siri. That must be from one of the articles she downloaded before we left shore. Her web research skills are stronger than ever, and I think I figured out why she’s always honing them: because if she googles it, then she can separate herself from it; it becomes something “other” and turns into knowledge that can’t sneak up on her. Anyway, I want her back in the same boat as me.

“Wanna play rock-paper-scissors?” I ask.

This seems to work every time, distracting her with games, because she quickly puts away her phone, stretches her fingers for maximum dexterity, and then places her fist within the air between us. I do the same. She’s probably thinking I’ll pick rock, because that’s the obvious boy choice, so I go with scissors. I lose, she pounds the crap out of my scissors with her rock. Then I pick scissors again, same result.

“Juliette,” I say, grabbing her leg, pointing toward the large circles forming in the water to the left of the boat.

“Quit trying to throw off my rhythm with a fake whale-sighting,” she says, blowing the gun smoke off her fist.

I really do think I’m spotting a whale, so I reach around and place my hand behind her back, sliding her across the slippery canvas seat until she’s leaning into me and can see the water from my point of view.

“Oh my God,” she whispers, as our fellow watchers crowd against the side of the boat.

We stare for I don’t know how long, in awe, afraid to move, as if the whale is the equivalent of an easily spooked horse. She’s not. She’s much calmer than any of us.

“I need my phone,” Juliette says, after a calf surfaces beside its mother.

“Not yet,” I tell her—not pushily, just firmly, trying to convey that this is a moment to experience before gathering evidence of it. “Just watch with me for a few more seconds.” I take her hand. She doesn’t argue when I say a snapshot wouldn’t do the whales justice anyway. I’d post it on Facebook and my former teammates would leave comments like
Cool, dude, but where’s the face?
Or my aunt Jane would say,
You sure that’s not your shadow, Abram? Guess this means another six weeks of winter!
Not worth it. Plus that Hawaiian-shirted guy with the high-powered camera around his neck promised to e-mail his pictures to us.

After the whales are gone, we settle into a did-that-just-happen? window of time. Juliette is completely free of thought. I can tell because she’s really looking at me, not through me or around me, trying to find the answer to something without having to ask me for it. In this moment, in these surroundings, I’m more than enough for her, and I don’t even have to convince her no one’s looking as I lean in close.

“It feels like home out here,” I say, a millimeter farther from her face than I’d like to be. She smiles at me with her eyes before my lips press against hers.

31

ABRAM

J
ULIETTE AND
I are in our couch bed underneath the same fourteen blankets, pillows propped, my arm wrapped around her. I really wish she wouldn’t insist on making this happen, especially after we’ve just eaten so much sweet-and-sour kitty from the Chinese takeout place. The act just seems hasty, at least by her methodical standards—like something she might regret for the rest of her senior year.

I can’t deny that a very large part of me wants her to go through with it, nor can I emerge from my rice coma long enough to stop her from polishing up my dashboard with a wad of napkins. Now she’s stretching her wrists, cracking her neck back and forth, preparing to take action regardless of what anyone else thinks. Her face is getting paler, her breathing more ragged, and she looks like I do right before I release food back into the universe involuntarily.

“You don’t have to do this,” I tell her.

“I know.”

Juliette

I
’M NERVOUS,
half-tempted to pray for the best—does God accept sarcastic texts from people he’s never heard from? Never mind, it’s just that I haven’t done this in
so long
. Is it really so impossible to show Abram he exists to me, in a meaningful way, by cheapening our relationship on Facebook?
Yes
. Posting imagery that proves we hang out together in our spare time is the ultimate sacrifice, right up there with the awkward sex we won’t be having tonight.

I log in to my account and wince at the Jerseylicious profile picture staring back: me, sophomore year, wearing too much bronzer and a noticeably fatter face.

“Hey, you look hot in that pic,” Abram says. I’ll delete it later, after I complete what I came here to do: upload a picture of Abram and me from earlier today. Sans whales, unfortunately, because Abram was right—as far as whale-watching goes, you have to be there. Case in point, my best snapshot looks like I threw my gray cable-knit scarf into the ocean trying to pass it off as a whale, which isn’t above me. Glad I didn’t, though, because otherwise said scarf wouldn’t be keeping my neck toasty right now.

It should be noted what I’m about to post isn’t just any pic. It’s an f’ing selfie! A few minutes ago, Abram and I held a competition over who could think of the best name for a couple’s selfie. His: couplet, twosie, double-header. Mine: cheesie, stankjob, lamepeg. He deserved to win. Unfortunately, he didn’t—I disqualified him.

If I look too closely at the pixels, like I am now, I can barely recognize myself as the wavy-haired, semi-tanned, de-stressed damsel who’s lucky to be there, watching whales with Abram’s arm around her, especially after lodging as many complaints as I did about the surprise. No wonder I want so badly to share this with seven hundred people I never talk to.
Look how functional I suddenly am again, everyone!
No one’s going to Like it.

ABRAM

T
HAT’S A PRETTY GOOD-LOOKING COUPLET
, if I do say so myself. Juliette’s all worried about the inherent selfie-ness of the image, but my long arm got us a pretty sweet angle, and you can’t even tell. Now she’s trying to maneuver the thumbnail around the upload box so that the image displays as little of her body as possible. She calls it “being considerate of others,” but I call it a “thirty percent loss of a nice, tight body.” I agree to disagree; she doesn’t.

Click.

The picture goes live.

She turns to me, placing her fingers to her lips. “What have I done?”

I sit up and try to kiss her frown upside down through her fingers. I’m not successful.

Juliette

I
STARE AT OUR POSTED PICTURE,
willing someone to Like us. No one does, which is what I get for not being likable. Social media is all about reciprocity—I’ll Like your newborn baby with the misshapen head if you Like this depressing picture I just scanned of my unsmiling great-great-grandparents, etc.—and that’s not a back-and-forth I felt capable of participating in until about twenty-four hours ago, when Abram first kissed away some of the grouchy fug from my face.