High and Dry (16 page)

“Oh God, is this the night you teach Jonathan how to impress the ladies?” Ellie teased.

“If this is our last date, it's my last chance to show him what to do.”

“In that case, I graciously accept.” She curtsied. “Thank you for the hideous cactus.”

“Hideous? It's a desert flower.”

“He got you this?” said Jonathan, reaching out to touch it. “Cool.”

Ellie tried to stop him. “Don't, you'll—”

“Ow. Frogger!” He shook his hand out and sucked on his finger.

“You'll find that boys can't resist what they're not supposed to have,” I remarked to Ellie as an aside, like I was live-narrating a documentary about a strange and wondrous species.

“Please, tell me more about these ‘boys.' Like why they have to make everything so difficult.”

I shrugged. “They just want to keep life interesting.” I remembered Ms. Gerard, the guidance counselor, saying the same thing about me, that I made things difficult. Did all women use the same quote book?

“Tick-tock,” said Jonathan, looking pointedly at his phone, braces catching the light. He was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. He'd been waiting to see this film since the previous one came out, a year ago. One night when Ellie and I had nothing else planned (she'd dismissed my suggestions of mini-golf and bumper cars—admittedly conventional—as “Organized fun? Really, Charlie?”), he made us watch it on DVD. The acting was wooden, but the premise was pretty good. I'd promised to take him to the sequel, never in a million years thinking Ellie and I would be kaput by then. This should've been a regular evening, a given, one in a series of regular evenings, blurring together to form a relationship; instead, tonight stood outside of our relationship, looking in, face pressed up against the glass with longing.

“Should I try to make it all the way there without braking?” I asked Jonathan.

“Yeah!” Jonathan yelled from the backseat.

Last year it was a thing everyone was doing—going nowhere slowly. The rules were simple: You're never allowed to come to a complete stop, so if you see a yellow or red light ahead, you have to glide toward it infinitesimally, enraging everyone behind you. That's the real test, sustaining your resolve in the face of fury. Sometimes you're going an inch a minute, but as long as you're still moving, you're in the game. Before I got good at it, I'd end up almost a third of the way through an intersection before it mercifully turned green, Ellie laughing and slapping at my arm the whole time. The cops couldn't understand why every high schooler was suddenly rolling stop signs.

“Great,” said Ellie, beside me. “Tell me again why I relinquished the right to drive my own car?”

“J-Dawg, this might be the most important lesson of dating. The guy should always drive.”

“Oh, shut up,” Ellie said.

“Why?” asked Jonathan.

“He thinks women are bad drivers,” Ellie explained, and snorted.

“That's horrible. I would never think that. I think
Asians
are bad drivers,” I said, and she swatted the back of my head. “Ow.”

“So if I'm dating a white girl, does she drive or do I drive?” said Jonathan, perplexed.

“Go with your gut instinct,” said Ellie. “If she says, ‘Should I try to make it all the way there without braking?'
you
should drive.”

“I've mastered no braking,” I assured them both. “I'm better at it now.”

And I was. It was beautiful. We coasted all the way to Palm Valley Mall without slowing; every traffic light rooted me on and smiled down at me. I gauged exactly when the lights were about to turn green, timed it to perfection, and coasted through each intersection at the right moment, sliding by the cars on either side of us without pause. Each time, raucous cheering from my passengers rewarded me. I knew it was dumb, but I felt like a god.

If I were allowed to freeze parts of an evening, thaw them out, and relive them later, the drive to the cinema on that Wednesday night in January would be on the list.

Ellie patted my shoulder. “Your finest ride by a long shot.” I glanced at her and she smiled at me. My chest expanded, filling me with helium and lifting me to the roof.

“Perfect ten?” I asked.
Rate me. Love me again
.

“Hmm … 9.9999. And here we are,” Ellie responded.

I pulled in front of the cinema and handed Jonathan the tickets. “I'll park, you guys get in line.”

Blood of Mars
wasn't on the same popularity level as
Star Wars
or
Matrix
, but the crowd for the sneak preview was substantial enough that we needed a strategy to secure good seats together.

When I met up with them in line, Ellie took the reins.

“J-Dawg, play up your vulnerability. Say ‘Excuse me' to people
and run like hell to the front. I'll take the left side, and babe”—she caught herself—“Charlie, you take the right.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.” I saluted.

She unzipped the inside pocket of her fleece and discreetly handed Jonathan his Nerds. “Your contraband-slash-fuel. When the time is right. Godspeed.”

Jonathan didn't need fuel, but he tore open the package and chugged.

“He's been really stressed about next year,” Ellie murmured to me.

“About starting eighth? Why?”

“Because he's probably starting ninth instead, remember? He likes the idea of skipping ahead, but he's terrified he won't find a group to run with. That's why I was talking to Fred the night of the party; I need him to help get Jonathan into Debate. In fact, they're hanging out tomorrow morning at school so Jonathan can meet some lincoln-douglases before next year.”

I swallowed, aware again how insane I must have looked that night, accusing her of dating Fred when she was just trying to look out for her brother.

“They'd be stupid not to take him,” I said.

Jonathan stared at us. Ellie pulled me aside and said in a lower voice, “Jonathan thinks no one will want a thirteen-year-old in their group. He thinks he'll be stuck without anyone to protect him.”

Her smile was sad. It was useless for her to ask me to help the
kid; he wasn't built for sports. We slipped into silence. The line behind us snaked around the side of the building. Five minutes until liftoff.

“So how was the choir showdown at the luxurious Pomona Hilton over New Year's?” I said.

“It was okay.”

“I heard
West Side Story
Maria almost wrested control from
Sound of Music
Maria,” I said. “What happened?”

“Besides our usual whipped-cream fights in the hotel room?”

“Don't tease,” I said, and grinned.

“Yeah, they had a falling out. Again. They've been competing for the spring solo, but I think it was more than just a résumé race. They've been at each other's throats about something, but no one really knows what. At least, I don't. I thought they made up at the party on Sunday, though. They seemed closer, or whatever.”

“How do you mean?”

She half shrugged. “If you'd been there later on, you'd know what I mean.”

I decided not to push. I didn't really want her thinking too much about my behavior at the party.

“Bridget didn't seem too torn up about the overdose. Like she thought
West Side Story
Maria deserved it or something,” I said.

“In case you hadn't noticed, Bridget's kind of a sociopath,” said Ellie.

“You are correct,” I said.

“I tell you one thing … of all the girls likely to overdose on
anything, let alone acid,
West Side Story
Maria was the last on the list. It wasn't like her at all.”

“Her parents and the sheriff's department think someone forced her.”

“Has to be. But when? We were within sight of each other all night. She started acting loopy when I left, but before that everyone was having fun, playing stupid party games. Why so many questions, detective?”

“I keep thinking—the last thing she saw before the hospital was the inside of my car. It was part of her night—it's this weird connection between us. I want to know what happened to her.”

Time was up.

We reached the ticket taker, secured our stubs, and split up, dashing in our respective directions.

Jonathan managed to grab three seats about two-thirds of the way down, a little closer than I would've liked, just off center, but still good, considering. He spread his arms crucifixion style to protect the seats on both sides of him, but that wouldn't do. I wanted to sit next to Ellie.

Ellie and I reached him from opposite directions at about the same time and exchanged high fives over his head.

Jonathan's gaze was locked, in increasing horror, on the tall man coming up the aisle in the row ahead of us. “No, no, no,” he whispered. There was no escape now; people had filled in all the spots surrounding us.

If this dude sat in front of Jonathan, he would block Jonathan's
view of the entire screen. Frack, he'd block
anyone's
view. I acted quickly, dipping down and pouring half my bottled water on the seat in front of Ellie.

“Charlie!” she cried.

The tall man reached the “ruined” seat. “Oh my gosh, watch out, don't sit there,” I said, dripping with concern for my fellow man. “Someone spilled soda on it.”

He looked at me, surprised by my generosity. “Wow, thanks.” He moved one more seat.

I pulled Jonathan behind the now-empty one. “Best seat in the house.”

Jonathan smiled. He was probably the only person in the theater with an unencumbered view.

“And I'll take this one,” I said, seating myself behind Tall Guy, and next to Ellie.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Because I don't care about the movie.”

“So why'd you come?”

She looked lost, and a bit upset. “I don't know. Let me pay you back for our tickets.”

“No, I wanted to treat you guys. I promised Jonathan a long time ago …”

“I'm not sure I can do this,” she said, fiddling with her hands.

I gently pulled them into mine. “Do what?”

“Be with you, and not be
with
you. If I have fun tonight, I'll want to get back together, and I don't know if that's the right thing for us.”

“Like, as individuals on some kind of path?” I said, rolling my eyes.

“I thought it would hurt less to break up now rather than later. I was wrong.”

“So you were going to break up with me at the end of the year no matter what?” I said, my voice rising. Did it always come back to graduation and college? Where the fuck had she applied that it would be impossible to stay together?

“No! No—that's not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“A lot of people drift apart after high school, Charlie. I'm not saying we would have for sure, but—it must have crossed your mind, too?”

Of course it had. It had crossed my mind since our
first date
. Before we'd even said good night, I was trying to figure out how I would possibly hold on to her.

“It's just one movie,” I said, monotone. “Your brother's with us.”

She insisted on giving me a twenty-dollar bill. I closed my hand around hers.

The first preview started. I couldn't see shit and I didn't care. I focused all my attention on Ellie's hand. The movie was only eighty-three minutes, and the one review I'd read said even that was too long.

“How come we almost never went to the movies when we were dating?” I whispered.

“Because you don't talk if you go to the movies. You just sit there, zoned out.”

TV bored Ellie, and most films annoyed her. She only liked weird films or foreign films. It didn't have to be good, it just had to be unpredictable. The rare times we'd watched TV at my house or her house, it was with the volume down so we could do all the character voices ourselves. “
What you say will be more interesting
,” she told me once.

She was always delighted when I found some obscure listing in the paper; she liked crashing meetings for documentary screenings, free art shows, or strange political party offshoots. It was a game, a challenge, to take her to things no one else our age would care about doing, like visiting the Exotic Feline Conservation Center in Rosamond.

Mom once found me in the kitchen at one in the morning in a panic, flipping through the newspaper's arts section, looking for something cool to do with Ellie on our date. Mom urged me to go to bed, said it “shouldn't be so hard,” and that if Ellie cared more about what we did than whom she was with, it wasn't fair to me. Over breakfast, having clearly been briefed by my mother on the situation, Dad chimed in, “When you're with the right person, you could go grocery shopping and it would still be fun.”

What they didn't understand was the rush I felt when I'd successfully surprised Ellie; the smile she wore just for me. (And seriously, when's the last time Mom and Dad frolicked through the frozen-food aisle together?)