Geography Club (7 page)

We all started laughing, and I honestly couldn’t think of another time when I’d felt so close to a group of people. (Did I mention that Kevin had his arms wrapped tightly around me?)

Just then, someone knocked on the door to our classroom.

“Oops,” Terese said, her eyes widening in mock horror. “Too loud.”

We all stifled our smiles as best we could (and Kevin pulled away from me at last), and Min went to answer the door.

“Yeah?” she said.

It was a large black girl in a bright orange sweater with a matching orange headband in her hair. She was a junior, and a member of the orchestra, which put her somewhere between the Computer Geeks and the Lefty Radicals in terms of popularity (closer to the Computer Geeks).

“Is this the Geography Club?” she said.

“Yeah,” Min said. “Sorry if we were a little loud.”

“It’s not that,” said the girl.

“Then what?”

“Well, I wanted to know how I would go about joining.”

“Join
what?
” Min said to the fat girl with the orange headband in her hair. It was just seconds after she’d interrupted our game of classroom baseball.

The girl in the doorway tilted her head. “Well, the Geography Club. Didn’t you say that’s what this was?”

“You want to join the Geography Club?” Ike said.

She nodded.

No one said anything, and I felt my stomach plunging like a brakeless elevator. A nongay student wanted to join the Geography Club? If we turned her away, we couldn’t stay an after-school club and could no longer use Kephart’s classroom, which basically meant the end of the Geography Club. But if we let her join, we could no longer talk about the things we wanted to talk about—we’d have to talk about actual
geography!
—and that meant the end of the Geography Club too.

“Why?” Terese said to the girl. It was the same thing we were all thinking.

“Why what?” said the girl.

“Why the Geography Club?”

The girl shrugged, and I noticed she was wearing yellow smiley-face earrings. “I figured it’d help me on my college tests,” she said. “I’m Belinda Sherman, by the way.”

“There is no geography on the SAT,” Min said.

“There isn’t?” Belinda said. “Well, it can’t hurt, right?”

“But geography’s
boring
,” Kevin said, almost indignant.

“Well, isn’t that the point of the club? To make it less boring?” Belinda Sherman wasn’t just not gay—she was bubbly. I hated bubbly. I hated bubbly even more than I hated bitchy à la Kimberly Peterson.

“How’d you find out about us?” I asked.

“Oh, I saw your application. I do work-study in the school office.”

“There’s a fifty-dollar equipment fee!” Terese said. “You know, for maps and atlases and stuff?”

“Oh,” Belinda said. She thought for a second. “I bet my uncle’ll pay. He’s a carto-whatever? He makes maps. Actually, he’s just a surveyor, but it’s kind of the same thing. Maybe he can come in and talk to us sometime, huh?”

We were speechless. What was there to say? Belinda, a bubbly high school junior with an orange headband and smiley-face earrings, had come, she’d seen, and she’d conquered.

The next day, I joined the baseball team.

I wish I could say I joined because I wanted to play baseball and that I’d been thinking about it for a long time. But I can’t say that, because I didn’t and I hadn’t. The truth was, I thought baseball was kind of boring. And I dreaded the thought of spending even more time every day in a locker room full of boneheaded, swaggering jocks.

No, the bottom line was I joined the baseball team because Kevin asked me to. That and the fact that the addition of Belinda Sherman to the Geography Club basically meant the
end
of the Geography Club. I thought, If I don’t join the baseball team, I’ll never see Kevin again. It was an exaggeration, but it made sense at the time. (What can I say? I was a fool in love.)

So the minute the school bell rang at the end of classes, before I could talk myself out of it, I aimed myself for the gym and its all-purpose locker rooms. I beat all of the baseball players and other athletes who used the locker room that time of year. The baseball coach was also a P.E. teacher, and I knew I’d find him in the little coach’s office just off the locker room.

I knocked on the door, and he answered. He was bald and fat, which I thought was kind of ironic for a gym teacher.

“I want to join the baseball team,” I said.

“Yeah?” he said, perking up. “Where you play before?”

I told him I hadn’t really played baseball since the seventh grade, and he got noticeably less excited after that. But I
had
played baseball in the seventh grade, and I hadn’t completely sucked. (Remember, this means I was actually pretty good.) And I’d been pretty good in that game of classroom baseball too.

“What position you play?” the coach said.

Position? I thought. I didn’t know I needed to play a particular position. In the seventh grade, we’d all kind of rotated.

“Shortstop,” I said, because it was the first thing that popped into my head.

Then he gave me a list of the equipment I’d need, including some embarrassing jock things that I wasn’t looking forward to buying again. And he gave me a form I’d need filled out by my doctor and parents, and sent me on my way.

I hadn’t even left the locker room when all my doubts about joining the team crashed down on top of me. I’d almost certainly make a fool of myself. Besides, it was so stupid to be doing all this just for Kevin’s sake. Didn’t I have any pride?

But on my way out of that locker room, I ran into Kevin himself on his way to practice.

“Hey,” I said, trying not to sound too excited. “I just joined the team.”

“Team?” he said.

“Baseball.”

Kevin gaped at me for a second. Then he said, “Docious! Hey, we sure can use the help!” The longer he spoke, the wider his grin became. I could almost see myself in the white enamel of his teeth.

And suddenly, I didn’t care that I didn’t know my baseball “position,” or that deep down I knew that joining a team just to be close to a guy was basically a really bad idea.

Kevin Land was happy I’d joined the baseball team, and that was all that mattered!

Was I pathetic or what?

That weekend, I had my second date with Trish Baskin.

Gunnar drove me and him to Kimberly’s house, where Trish was once again spending the night. At least this time, we didn’t have to outrun Kimberly’s parents. This time, Gunnar had arranged to meet the girls on the corner at the end of the block. For the first time in my life, I was the kind of guy a girl snuck out of her house at night to meet (except I wasn’t really).

We went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and Kimberly wanted everything deep-fried, so everything that could be deep-fried was deep-fried.

Halfway through the meal, she said, “There’s a fucking
hair
in the hot-and-sour soup!”

“I think that’s
your hair
,” I said to her. I sure didn’t see anyone working in the restaurant with long blond hair.

“Shut the fuck up!” Kimberly said. “You wanna get this meal for free or not?”

In other words, Kimberly was her usual charming self.

When we were through eating, Gunnar and I paid the bill. (Not only didn’t I want the meal for free, I left a big tip, to make up for Kimberly being so loud and annoying all through dinner.)

Afterward, we headed for the teen dance club downtown. I’d never been before, and the raccoon in me was impressed by the mirrors and the flashing lights. The music was blasting, which made it impossible to talk, but given that I was with Trish and Kimberly, this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Gunnar and Kimberly went off to get drinks, and I leaned over to Trish. “This place is something else,” I said, almost a shout.

She nodded and said something in response, but I had no idea what it was, because she was still talking in that soft, whispery voice of hers.

“You want to dance?” I said, and Trish nodded.

After five or six songs, Trish leaned toward my ear, and this time I did hear her, if only barely. “Wanna go for a drive?” she said. “Just the two of us.”

A drive? I thought. We’d just gotten there, and I’d just dropped twenty bucks getting us both inside. Why did she want to go for a drive?

“How?” I said. “We don’t have a car.”

“You can borrow Gunnar’s.”

I shrugged. “I’ll go ask him.”

When I found Gunnar and told him why I wanted to borrow his keys, he looked confused.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said, quickly palming me the keys before scooting off to find Kimberly, who’d somehow evaded him. He seemed tweaked about something.

Trish and I got our hands stamped, then left the club. It had started raining while we were inside. It wasn’t quite a downpour, but by the time we reached the car, I was pretty wet. It was cold out too, but I was still sweaty from dancing, so I barely felt it.

Once inside the car, I said, “Where’d you wanna go?”

“Oh, I didn’t have any place in mind,” she said.

So I drove to this long stretch of park along the water just north of downtown.

“Hey,” Trish said. “Let’s stop the car.” From where we were, there’s usually a pretty good view of the islands across the bay. But it was dark, and the falling rain looked like gray sheets blowing in the wind, so you could just barely make out the black outlines of the land across the water.

I pulled over, and we sat in silence for a minute or two. Except for the rain tapping on the roof and sliding down the windshield, everything was completely still. With the commotion of the dance still ringing in my ears, the quiet seemed unnerving. By now, we’d also cooled down a bit. The heater hadn’t been on long enough to warm up the car, and it was chilly.

“That club is something else,” Trish said.

“Yeah,” I said, thinking, Hadn’t I said the same thing to her just an hour earlier?

We sat side by side in that seat for a long time. Finally, Trish shivered and pulled her jacket tighter around her.

“Are you cold?” I said, reaching for the ignition. “I can turn—”

“No,” Trish said. “I’m okay. I just…” Without warning, she slid over in the seat until she was pressed against me. Then she slipped her arms around me and buried her face against my chest. I raised my arm to get it out of the way, and Trish looked up, took hold of it, and placed it around her shoulders.

“There,” she said contentedly. “That’s
much
better.”

We sat like that for a couple of minutes, a human tangle. I felt stiff and awkward, but I didn’t dare move for fear of bumping or jostling Trish.

“I can hear your heartbeat,” Trish said, her voice muffled.

“Oh,” I said. I could hear my heartbeat too. It was pounding in my ears.

There was another silence. I was sweating again, despite the cold inside the car. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew the final destination of this little “drive” of hers. But I couldn’t just shove her off me, now, could I?

“Russel?” Trish said.

“Yeah?” She was looking up at me, but I didn’t look down at her.

“Do you like me?” she said.

What were you supposed to say to a question like this? I lied and said, “Yeah.”

“Cause I like
you
.”

“Great.”

“Russel?”

When she didn’t say any more, I peeked down at her at last. Her eyes were closed and her lips were kind of puckered, and I knew she wanted me to kiss her.

Gunnar, I thought, I am going to kill you! But the only way out of this horrible evening was through it. Despite the fact that her breath reeked, I leaned down and kissed her.

The second my lips touched hers, Trish’s mouth slid open like a garage door on rollers, and I felt her tongue poking up between my lips. It felt like a raw oyster with a mind of its own. In my surprise, I lifted my mouth away.

Trish’s eyes popped open. “What’s wrong?” she said.

I clawed limply at the car door. “I don’t know. Nothing. I just don’t think we should…”

“What?”

“You know.”

“Why not?”

“Well, we don’t have any condoms.”

Trish pulled back and sat upright next to me on the seat.

“Well, I didn’t say I wanted to have
sex
with you, now, did I? I thought we were just kissing!”

“Oh.” I felt like a fool. But at least I’d managed to stop the kissing.

Trish hesitated. Then she whispered, even quieter than usual: “But if you
did
want to, I’ve got some in my purse.”

I stared out at the rain, which was really beginning to come down. So even Trish the Mouse had sex. And now she wanted it with me. How the hell had I ended up in this mess? More important, was there any way out?

“You haven’t done it before,” Trish said. “Have you?”

“What?” I said, shocked and appalled. “Yes! I’ve done it!”

“When? With who?” Suddenly, Trish wasn’t talking in a whisper anymore. It was strange to hear what her real voice sounded like at last.

“You sound like I’m on trial,” I said. “This girl on my block.” This was a complete lie. There was no girl. There never would be any girl, not if I could help it.

“It’s okay if you haven’t. It’s no big deal.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What?” Trish said. “Are you gay or something?”

“No! Of course not!” Obviously, another lie.

We sat there for a minute more, both of us looking at the rain swirling down the windshield. Ordinarily, when you heard raindrops on the roof above you, you were supposed to say how you were glad you weren’t out in that. But I would much rather have been out in that rain than inside that car with Trish.

“So,” Trish said. “You want to or what?”

“What?” I said, even though I knew damn well what.

She turned to me and smiled. “You know.”

“Oh,” I said.

Trish kept staring at me, and I still couldn’t think of any way out. If I turned her down, Trish would tell everyone all about it. And there was only one kind of guy who turned a girl down. People could do the math.

“Just relax,” she said, scooting closer again. “Okay?” I felt her hands on me, and she started kissing me again. Her tongue slipped back inside my mouth, and I immediately thought of that creature in the
Alien
movies, the one that attaches itself to your face and crams itself down your throat so it can implant an embryo in your stomach.

No, I thought. This was too much. If I went through with this, then I really wouldn’t have any dignity. Suddenly, I didn’t care what Trish told people about me. I pushed her away. Kind of hard, I guess.

“Huh?” she said, jerking upright. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I just think we should get back to the dance.”

Trish sighed, as if in defeat, and fell back against the back of the seat.

“It’s not you!” I said quickly. “It’s just…you were right. I’m, like, you know, a virgin. And I always thought my first time would be different. Special, I guess. Not in the front seat of a car. I really like you, but if we ever do this, I think it should be special.” Even I, a pretty accomplished liar, was surprised at how easily this latest lie came to me, and how convincing it sounded. But I’d needed a good lie to keep Trish from knowing the real reason I was pushing her away.