Forget You (8 page)

But no one was watching me.

Gently I scooped up Doug's head with my hand and slipped my sweatshirt underneath.

As I laid his head down, his eyes opened. Intense green stared up at me in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the van's back window.

And then he was gone again, head turned on the sweatshirt pillow.

I picked up sudoku and tapped it to turn it back on. But now I didn't feel comfortable holding something hard so close to Doug's face. U.S. 98 wasn't the most evenly paved highway, and I didn't want to bang his nose with my electronics in addition to whacking his leg with my Bug. I didn't feel comfortable touching him either. There was no place to put my hands. I tucked them under my thighs.

And stared down at Doug, drugged, sleeping hard. Black stubble barely shadowed his upper lip and chin and cheeks. His eyes were closed, his eyelashes long, his lips soft with sleep. He was a beautiful boy. It was hard to imagine him going to juvie in ninth grade, or getting suspended in tenth grade for fighting in the hall outside history class, or calling me a spoiled brat last night.

Even though he wore his own swim team sweatshirt, he was cold. His arms were folded tightly across his chest. His sweatshirt bunched around his ribs and stopped there, exposing a flat expanse of tanned stomach and a
V
of fine black hair that started around his inny belly button and pointed downward.

I wondered if blond hair dusted Brandon's belly, and whether he was an inny or outy. I'd seen him without his shirt plenty of times. In the hot afternoons behind the concessions counter at Slide with Clyde, sometimes he'd bare his chest. My dad let him do this because we sold a lot more ice cream that way. And I'd rubbed my hand across Brandon's bare chest not half an hour ago. But all I'd ever noticed was how big and muscular and tan he was. Little things like fine hair and his belly button hadn't occurred to me. Strange that I could share the ultimate intimate moment with a boy without any intimacy at all.

He hadn't even taken his shirt off when we'd done it last Monday. I had always thought my first time would be more of an event, with more leading up to it. Brandon had had enough sex with enough different girls that sex with me didn't reach event status.

But I knew we would get there. I never would have pictured us as a couple before, but now that we shared this bond, I could see us staying together through high school graduation and even into college if he got his football scholarship to FSU.

Doug had nobody. Other than that girl from Destin, I'd never heard of him asking someone out since--well, me, in ninth grade. I wondered if he'd ever had sex.

Despite myself, my eyes traveled back to his flat stomach dusted with fine black hair. From underneath his cargo shorts peeked the gray heathered waistband of his underwear. I wondered whether they were boxer briefs or maybe plaid flannel boxers, but I couldn't see farther than that waistband. His underwear disappeared into the dark.

Now it wasn't just my face burning and my arms tingling. I was tingling in places that Doug was nowhere near touching, so why did I feel guilty? This had nothing to do with Doug. The non sequitur tingling must be what happened when you had sex for the first time and then got a concussion and thought you'd had sex again when you didn't and then found out you wouldn't be alone with your boyfriend for at least a few more days. That is,
brain damage.

With a gasp I returned to the swim team van jerking across "repairs" in U.S. 98 that had done more harm than good. Doug snuggled his cheek deeper into the sweatshirt in my lap but didn't wake.

Then I looked up at Stephanie Wetzel staring at me over the back of the second seat. I wondered how long she'd watched me look down Doug's pants, and how quickly
this
would get back to Brandon.

Looking isn't cheating.
Brandon had said this to me a million times on our lunch break at Slide with Clyde. He would seem deeply absorbed in relating his troubles to me about the latest girl he really liked. Then his eyes would follow an entirely different girl's ass across the food court, and I would punch him playfully for being a hypocrite.
Looking isn't cheating,
he would say. The only difference was that those girls had looked back at Brandon and given him a knowing smile. Doug had no idea I was looking, and if he knew, he would just laugh and say something in that sugar-sweet sarcastic voice of his.
Zoey Commander thinks I'm hot. Hoo-ray.

Except he'd asked me out this morning.

In the end I stopped torturing myself and allowed myself to look at him. Stephanie couldn't tell what I was staring at. I could say I was staring into space. And Doug was a lot more interesting than sudoku's white landscape of numbers. The landscape of numbers made me feel more sane and the contours of Doug's body made me feel less sane. But in this controlled insanity maybe I could exorcise what was eating me. I let my eyes and my mind wander.

"G
O
, L
YNN!" I CALLED
. I
F SHE
could find an iota more power inside her, she could win the women's 100 fly. On second thought, I screamed, "Go, Stephanie!" She was part of this heat too, and I didn't want anyone to think I was dissing her because she was giving my boyfriend rides.

But before Stephanie or Lynn touched the wall, I sank to the front row bleacher. I'd felt disoriented since I'd followed Doug limping into this fancy natatorium. I'd thought the problem might be that for the first time since I'd joined the varsity team, I was in the stands with screaming friends and parents from five schools rather than in the locker room, getting ready to swim. Or that instead of focusing on the pool in front of me, my mind was on Doug lying on the bleacher behind me, still half asleep. Now that I was getting really dizzy, I decided to cheer from a sitting position for the rest of the heats.

My muscles tensed. My body ached to stretch out and swim. I watched my teammates so closely that I was down in the water with them. I could feel their muscles work, then burn and tire, and the cool water swirling past their bodies. I could tell how fast their times would be before I saw them. I didn't take notes on my clipboard because the host school would give Coach a computer printout of the times for the whole meet, but I was so keyed into times that I guesstimated them automatically.

Even when I wasn't watching the clock, I knew which runs would be personal records. And not because of some internal clock I'd constructed from attending so many practices, but because I knew my teammates' bodies, the ways they moved when they were on, or tired, or distracted. That included Doug. Before the boys touched the wall at the end of the 200 free, I knew they were slower than Doug's personal best, which he'd bettered every meet this season before we came to a screeching halt in the wreck.

I bet Doug never watched anyone this way.

At the end of the meet, my headache came back. It was kind of funny actually. Watching Connor and Ian in the final heat, I felt a twinge at their first turn. By their second turn I knew the culprit was the headache and not the fact that I'd stared at the pulsing water too long with my eyebrows in knots. By their third turn the golf ball was back, banging against the inside of my skull. By their fourth turn I was looking at my watch to see whether the recommended four hours had elapsed since the last dose of painkillers I'd swallowed during the meet. I stared at my watch dial for a long time. People with concussions needed digital.

The heat ended. Everyone knew what the finish meant toward the point count. Fans of the home team sprang from the bleachers, cheering that they'd won the meet. We came in third out of five. Normally I would have gone with my teammates into the locker room and bitched with them about the officiating, and that one chick from Apalachicola who was like a Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the fact that we would have won or at least come in second if we'd had Doug.

The headache anchored me to my seat. I couldn't have withstood the escalating pitch of the excited girl-squeals in the locker room. And if Mike sang the boy-band falsetto on the van, I would kill him.

Four tall boys from other schools called to Doug. He brushed past me, maneuvering down the bleachers to the floor to talk to them. They pointed to his splint. He held it out to show them, nodding and then laughing. They'd come to the meet expecting to lose to Doug. They couldn't believe their luck. They wanted to know how long he'd be out--that is, how long their luck would run. I knew this though I couldn't hear them. Their voices mixed with the echoes of the crowd in the natatorium. Every word sounded five times.

Suddenly Doug's finger was under my chin, tilting my face up so he could look into my eyes. I had no idea how long he'd been crouching in front of me, propped on his crutches. "This is why I came," he said. "I figured you were running on adrenaline this morning but you'd crash tonight. And I knew you'd come to the meet, because you're such a dork."

"I love it when you talk dirty." This was not the thing to say. Doug was telling me he cared about me. He'd come to the meet to watch over me. I should say the right thing and then we would have a little conversation. He would feel comforted because he'd connected with another human in the very small way that was the only way Doug ever connected with anybody. He'd limp back to the van and fall asleep to sweet dreams. I couldn't think of the right thing to say.

"Go take some Tylenol," he told me.

"I can't," I whispered. "It won't be four hours for another hour."

"Go--take--some--Tylenol," he said in the stern voice of my mom when I talked back.

I found the bottle in my backpack and swallowed three pills at the water fountain. Relaxed against the painted cement block wall (ah, nice and cool) and stared into space for a while. Followed my teammates to the van. Leaned heavily on each seat as I passed. Thank God the backseat was empty. I would still need to argue over it with Doug, but at least I could argue lying down. He was welcome to share the seat with me. Lying down in more cramped quarters shouldn't bother him. With Percocet on his side, he could fall asleep in a mosh pit.

7

"Zoey! Doug!"

"What," I grumbled into the seat. I could tell from the way my face resisted movement that the fabric texture had imprinted itself on my skin.

"Captain Anderson's!" Keke sang. Captain Anderson's in Panama City was my favorite tourist trap seafood restaurant. And there was no way I was getting off this van. My headache had faded, but I was asleep. Gone. Checked out of the ocean-side resort.

"Fuck off," Doug said. His voice came from right beside me. I was lying on my stomach, so he must be lying on his side against the seat back.

The front doors slammed, and the side door rolled shut.

A stuffy silence settled. Even though night had fallen, the van was too warm with the air conditioner off. Welcome to Florida.

Doug slid along my body, backing out one end of the seat without disturbing me. Now that plenty of seats were available, he wanted his own. Fine. I spread out over the whole seat like an ice cube melting, liquifying faster as my fingers touched the upholstery still hot from his body. Dreams of him were better than the real thing.

A creak and a thump. He cranked open one window, then another.

His weight flattened the seat padding as he slid next to me again. It made sense for him to return. He'd have to lie with me when the team got on the van anyway. And if he felt as bad as I did, he wanted to move as few times as possible.

Back to dreams of him. He probably couldn't help his knee touching my thigh.

"Zoey," he said, reaching into the Bug. He lifted me out and carried me across the grass. Behind us, the Bug exploded (the deer had wandered to the shoulder and was peering at us through the trees). Even as tall and solid as Doug was, the shock wave slammed him to the ground. He twisted in midair so he took the brunt of the landing and I was cushioned on top of him.

"Doug, I'm so sorry," I murmured.

"It's not your fault," he whispered. "Hush now." His knee pressed my thigh. His knee nudged my thighs open as his tongue opened my mouth. He kissed me hard in the soft rain. I shivered.

I
TOOK ONE MORE BREATH THROUGH
my nose as the van came to life around me. Without opening my eyes I knew exactly what had happened. I'd gotten cold when Coach turned the air conditioner on, and I'd snuggled close to Doug. I recognized his scent of sea and chlorine. Now we'd parked at our high school. The lights were on and the team gathered their bags and shuffled through the door. Every one of them probably peered into the backseat to see what Doug and I were up to.

But maybe Doug wouldn't know I'd snuggled up to him. Maybe he was still asleep and I had nothing to worry about. I opened my eyes.

He was staring down at me.

I jumped in surprise.

"Sorry," he said. "I wanted to make sure you had normal pupil reflexes."

I started to ease up into a sitting position, but something held me down. Doug's long fingers circled my arm. His thumb pressed my wrist.

"Checking your pulse." He let me go. "Now it's sped up."

Was he telling me he knew I'd dreamed about him? I asked casually, "What would my pulse tell you anyway?"

"Do I look like a doctor?" He bent down. I bent too, to grab his crutches for him, but he'd already snagged them from the floor.

He crutched up the aisle. At the sliding door he paused to say something to Keke. She nodded. Then he placed the tips of his crutches carefully on the pavement outside the van and heaved himself down. I couldn't see him fall but I heard him yell, "Fuck!"

"Zoey, girlfriend," Keke called back to me. "You're spending the night with Lila and me so we can keep an eye on you."

Gabriel said something about girl-on-girl-on-girl action. Lila vaulted over two seat backs to slap him. Everyone remaining on the bus gathered around them to watch. Everyone, that is, except Mike. Right in front of me, he bent to stuff his belongings into his bag, then turned for the door.

As he turned, he looked straight at me. Then he looked away just as quickly so I'd think his eyes were simply wandering as he exited the bus.

But I'd seen it. And he'd blushed. As if he'd witnessed everything I'd done to Doug in the grass beside the wreck, and he was embarrassed for me that I'd do such a thing while I had a relationship with Brandon.

Or as if he were angry Doug had asked him to lie to everyone, including Brandon, and pretend he hadn't seen what I'd done.

Or . . . like he wanted to get out of the van before I could ask him any questions about the wreck. Like he knew something I didn't.

"Come on, girl." Lila pulled me.

"I can't stay with you," I murmured. "My dad expects me home."

"Doug said your dad is gone and your mom is out of town and we need to keep an eye on you," Keke informed me.

Your mom is out of town.
I laughed at this euphemism. At least Doug wasn't spilling the beans about her. As long as nobody knew about it, I could keep pretending it hadn't happened.

"My dad expects me home," I insisted. "He has ways of checking on me."

"Call him," Lila said. "Or we'll get our mother to call him if he doesn't believe you."

I waved this idea away with both hands. Their mother would find out my dad was gone and my mom was way gone. Their mother would report me to Child Protective Services.

"Then just email him and tell him what you're doing and why," Lila said. "Here's my phone. Type him an email message and we'll take a picture of you looking . . ."

"Used," Keke said.

I took Lila's phone, typed my dad's email address and the message,
I am fucked,
and handed it back to her.

"Zoey!" she shrieked.

Keke snatched the phone from Lila and looked at the screen. "You're going to get yourself grounded. No parking with Brandon for you, ever." She pressed a key over and over with her thumb, backspacing.

"Speaking of," I moaned. "Do you think anyone got the wrong idea about Doug and me back here?"

They stared at me blankly. Lila prompted, "Like . . . ?"

"Like Stephanie Wetzel would tell Brandon."

Keke prompted, "That . . . ?"

"That Doug and I were making out or something."

"You
were
?" Lila shrieked.

"No!" I wailed, slapping my hands over my ears.

Lila laughed hysterically. "You and Doug? That's so random!"

Keke patted my knee in sympathy. "No, nobody suspected you were making out with Doug Fox. You hit your head harder than we thought."

I'
D ALWAYS LIVED ON THE OCEAN
. I mean,
right
on the ocean, with the noise of the surf drowning out the TV when I opened the windows. But I never, ever took the ocean for granted, because most people in our town lived inland. Including Keke and Lila.

I woke on their den sofa at my normal time in the morning, which was pretty early. A lot earlier than other teenagers who told me they slept until the afternoon on weekends. I didn't understand this. I had homework to do and books to read and data to enter. Keke and Lila's younger siblings weren't even up watching cartoons yet.

Now the headache was bad enough for painkillers, but not so bad that I was careful about moving my head too quickly. I was getting back to normal. So I approximated my normal routine. Routine was important. Since my mom tried to kill herself, routine reassured me that my life was still perfectly normal. First thing in the morning at my dad's house, I always stepped out on my balcony to watch the ocean and breathe the air. Here, after picking off the Lego pieces stuck to my face, I stepped out the den door into their backyard.

I'd been here a lot. I should have known which direction their house faced. But it was in a labyrinth of a neighborhood like Brandon's with even less structure, winding curves rather than right angles in the roads. I always got confused coming here. And this morning, low gray clouds blanketed the sky, almost as if it were winter. Where was the glowing patch indicating east and the sun? I had no idea which way was south and the ocean.

Whirling from back door to swing set to garden gnome, I choked out a cry and slapped my hands over my mouth. There
was
no direction. I held my breath to keep from panicking. My heart thumped in my chest. Tears stung my eyes.

Finally I turned back toward the house. One of Keke and Lila's little brothers stood in the open doorway in his Superman diaper, pink elephant under his arm, watching me. Oh, I knew what he was feeling, watching a Big Person go crazy.

I sniffled and made a quick pass under my eyes with my fingertips to dry up. "Good morning!" I called. "I just realized I lost something. But no worries. I'll find it."

Superman eyed me warily.

"Do you want to help me make breakfast?" I asked, imitating Keke's enthusiasm.

That
got his mind off my erratic behavior. Soon Princess Diaper joined us in the kitchen. I ended up making breakfast for what seemed like fifteen or sixteen children. I liked kids. I ran the birthday parties at Slide with Clyde, and of course as a lifeguard I watched kids all day long. But at Slide with Clyde I blew a chirp on a whistle when I needed their attention. I gave them a command with a nod of my head, and they followed orders because I was scary with my face stern and my eyes hidden behind my sunglasses.

In contrast, these kids didn't understand the meaning of, "Don't do that." I cleaned up a lot of flour from the kitchen floor and inadvertently thought really hard about the new half sibling I would have soon. Ashley's baby was due on Valentine's Day.

Then I read to the kiddies until I was hoarse. But I could only stand so much of this. I wanted to go home. I had no toiletries except what I'd taken in my backpack to the swim meet, and I was too tall to wear Keke and Lila's clothes.

More than this, I wanted to find out what had happened to me. And that required a visit to the place where I'd wrecked.

"I
S YOUR MOM GOING TO SUE
Mike?" Keke asked. My friends lumped all lawyers into one category and made a lot of lawsuit jokes, forever asking whether my mom was going to sue people. My mom was a public defender. She'd never filed a lawsuit in her life (disappointing my dad, who said only a spoiled brat would go to school all those years and choose to make as little money as possible). I was glad Keke asked this, though. It meant she thought my mom was still working. News hadn't gotten out yet.

"No, the wreck wasn't Mike's fault," I said. "Or mine. My mom just wants me to take some measurements while the evidence is still here. She might be able to get me more insurance money." I hated lying to my friends, especially since they'd taken care of me last night and they were helping me now. I was getting desperate.

Seeing the tire marks crossing the road in the distance, I parked Keke and Lila's Datsun on the shoulder. They pulled out buckets and sheets of poster board that we'd bought at the drugstore and printed with
HIGH SCHOOL SWIM TEAM FUNDRAISER
. I didn't expect to make any money. The signs would slow cars down and keep them from creaming me while I did my research. We left Keke near the Datsun. Lila flounced a hundred yards down the road to stop traffic on that end.

I walked more slowly after her, careful not to jostle my still-fragile brain. It was strange to walk somewhere I'd driven past a million times. The smells were different, melted asphalt and warm hay. The sounds were different too: the whisper of my footsteps through the long grass, chirping birds, buzzing insects, the sweep of wind in the trees. And
crunch.
I looked down. My flip-flops ground pieces of my Bug's headlight into the sandy soil. Or pieces of Mike's Miata's headlight--that was the question. I'd reached the tire marks in the road.

I glanced up and down the road before venturing into it. Lila was in place with her sign. Keke had already stopped a sucker in a pickup. Satisfied I wouldn't get hit, I followed the tire marks to the spot where they intersected with a second set of marks and the cars had kissed. The marks weren't very long. Mike and I had been surprised. We couldn't see well in the dark and the hard rain, and the deer came from nowhere.

This is what must have happened. This is what I reconstructed in my mind. But my memory was just as blank as it had been yesterday when I woke up. It started and stopped with Doug.

A cool wind blew at my back just then, tossing my ponytail forward over my shoulder. The day was still overcast. Even though the air was warm as usual, this cool breeze kept creeping up on me. It tangled up the gray clouds in turbulence and filled the otherwise innocuous day in the countryside with foreboding. When the robes started billowing in movies about wizards, that always meant something ominous.

I was scaring myself again.

Taking Keke's dad's mini tape measure from my pocket, I set the end at the outer edge of one tire mark and walked along the metal tape, keeping it from drawing up on me, until I reached the outer edge of the other tire mark and set the measure down. Sixty and a half inches in width. This was the car that had come from the direction of Brandon's house. When I got home I'd look up on the internet whether sixty and a half inches was the width of a Bug or a Miata. Then at least I'd know which way I'd been driving. Simple.

To triangulate my data, I put the end of the tape measure at the outer edge of the tire mark for the second car and calculated that width the same way. This was the car that had come from the direction of the beach.

Sixty and a half inches. Both cars were the same width.

"Fuck." Panic welled up inside me and my heart knocked against my chest wall, trying to escape. I told myself to calm down, calm down. I couldn't wig out here in sight of Lila and Keke. I would find some other way to figure out what had happened to me, and then my life would be back in order. I told myself this, but my heart sped up instead of slowing down. I was on the verge of panic with the sky still overcast and the view south and north on the highway looking exactly the same, until luckily I was distracted by Keke yelling into the distant pickup. My heart slowed down.

At that distance I couldn't tell what she was saying to the people inside, but she shook her poster at them, then her bucket. She threw her poster and bucket into the payload and climbed in after them. I began to see that she and Lila shared something with all their siblings. It was hereditary and they couldn't help it. They were not good at following instructions, such as
do not throw flour
or
stand here in the road until I call you.
The truck must have contained hot boys.