My First Love

The night Rick Finnegan kissed me changed my life—but not in the way I’d expected.

He had given me a ride home from my best friend Blythe Carlson’s house, where we’d all been drilling one another on vocabulary for the PSATs. There we were, sitting in his dad’s Buick outside the Palms bungalow apartments, where my mom and I live, when out of nowhere Rick slipped his arm around me.

I don’t know what got into him, but one minute he’d been defining the word
alacrity
, and the next thing I knew
he was demonstrating it. He moved across the seat so fast that I didn’t have time to react. Suddenly, his mouth was on mine. Instinctively, I closed my eyes—and he kissed me.

“Amy, I … I think I’m starting to like you,” Rick whispered.

My eyes flew open in surprise. But instead of seeing Rick, I saw Chris Shepherd, who’s on my swim team, the Dolphins, and in my physics class, too. He’s also the guy I’ve been daydreaming about for weeks. “I’m the one you really want,” Chris-in-my-mind said. I gasped and jumped away from Rick, leaving him to kiss air where my face had been.

“Rick!” I shrieked, staring at him.

“Amy?” Rick said, looking sheepish. “Are you mad? What’s wrong?”

“N-n-nothing,” I stuttered, trying to collect my thoughts. I couldn’t believe that Rick Finnegan—my buddy since kindergarten—had just kissed me!

I put my hand on his shoulder. “Look, Rick,” I said gently, “I’m very flattered. You’re a great guy. But we’re friends—and I’d like to keep it at that. I’ve got so much going on right now, I don’t have time for romance.”

But Rick didn’t look convinced. “Amy,” he said, twisting a lock of my straight brown hair around his finger, “you know what they say about all work and no play.…”

“Maybe,” I said, stepping out of the car, “but all play and no work gets you a career dipping cones at the Dairy Queen.”

Actually, I didn’t say that. I didn’t even think up this perfect comeback until the next day. What came out instead were my mother’s words, words often meant for me.

“Your passion is misguided,” I informed him, closing the car door behind me.

“My
what
?” I saw Rick’s lips form the question behind the window glass right before I waved and turned away.

I couldn’t believe I had said that. Mom uses
passion
in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with kissing. It has to do with enthusiasm and ambition.

According to my mom, passion, like money, runs out. So you have to be careful not to spend it carelessly. My father, for example, turned out to be a bad investment. He wasn’t around long enough to see me turn two. I don’t really remember him, but Mom said that once she’d loved him so much her heart hurt. After he took off, she poured what was left of her passion into me.

“Don’t throw away your talents the way I did,” my mom was always warning me. Believe me, I wasn’t planning to, not when my whole future, starting with a swimming scholarship to college, was at stake.

I felt kind of bad saying what I did to Rick, but I guess the kiss really caught me off guard. I turned again to go back and apologize, but he was already driving away.

I stood for a minute outside our apartment, looking up at the stars and thinking about the fact that one of my oldest and best friends just kissed me. When did Rick’s feelings
for me change, and why hadn’t I realized it? I had felt nothing when Rick’s lips were on mine. But for some unknown reason just the thought of Chris Shepherd’s lips sent my heart racing. It was true what I’d said to Rick. I never
had
had time for guys. Until now.

Chris and I had known each other for a couple of years from the swim team, but he had never treated me any differently from the way he had treated any other girl on the Dolphins. He was always friendly, and he kidded around, but that was it.

I had always liked Chris, but over the last few months I had been noticing different things about him—admiring his long, lean body, his thick, glossy brown hair, his quick sense of humor …

I shook my head to get rid of the thoughts. I had feelings for Chris I’d never had before for a guy, but I was still too shy to do anything about it. He had been a fantasy tonight, and he’d probably always be a fantasy, I thought dejectedly as I headed inside our apartment.

“You’re just in time for the latest episode of
The Young and the Restless
,” Mom said as I walked into our combination living/dining room. Mom worked two jobs. She worked from nine to three at the Arizona Bank, and evenings at El Rancho supermarket. Every day she taped her favorite soaps, and when she got home from the El Rancho, she’d curl up on the couch and watch them.

“Thanks, but I’ve been studying vocabulary for hours,”
I told her. “I’m afraid I’ll erase what I’ve learned if I zone out on TV.”

“Good for you,” Mom said. “You go ahead and get a good night’s sleep.”

“I think I will.” I hesitated for a moment. “Mom? Something pretty weird just happened,” I said.

“What?”

“Well … Rick drove me home from Blythe’s. And … he … well, he, um … told me he liked me,” I explained, blushing. I didn’t think I needed to tell her about the kiss. It was kind of embarrassing.

Mom sat up straight. “What did you say?”

“I told him I didn’t like him that way. That we were just friends.” I watched as Mom breathed an almost undetectable sigh of relief.

“Good answer, honey. With your schedule, a boyfriend is the last thing you need,” she said.

“Yeah. I guess,” I said, shrugging.

I kissed her on the cheek and went to my room. There’s no way I could have sat through the soap. I was having a hard enough time already putting Chris out of my mind and concentrating on my work. The last thing I needed was to fill my aching brain with stories about star-crossed lovers and abandoned dreams.

The PSAT, it turned out, was a nightmare of words I’d never used and math I’d understood for about an hour in
ninth grade. It was bad enough that my brain was fried from choosing among A, B, C, or none of the above and that my hand was numb from filling in those tiny circles with a sweat-slick number-two pencil. But the worst part was the reel-to-reel reruns of that kiss that played in my head all day.

And it wasn’t Rick’s kiss that I kept seeing—that was something we both would’ve liked to forget, I was sure. It was Chris’s. I couldn’t stop picturing what it would be like to kiss him. In my mind his lips were soft and warm and firm. Then, when his lips found mine, I had that roller-coaster feeling—my heart plunged into my stomach and then began the slow, suspenseful crawl right back up to my chest.

The next thing I knew, I was sighing so loudly that people on both sides of me turned and stared. At the same time the proctor announced, “Fifteen minutes left.” What was I
doing
? How could I blow this? Embarrassed and frantic, I raced through the rest of the test.

I was relieved when the PSATs were over, though considering my state of mind when I’d taken it, I was worried about my score. As we left the room, everyone seemed to be talking at once.

“Did you finish the analogy section?”

“How do you find the least common denominator in fractions?”

“Does anyone know what
apposite
means?”

For the rest of the day my honors classes were a chorus
of collective anxiety. When my last class was over, at three o’clock, I fled to the gym, where I hoped to somehow rinse myself of it all by putting on my racing suit and plunging into the pool before practice.

The rest of the team wasn’t due to help put in the lanes for another half hour, so I had the open pool to myself. I love swimming more than anything else in the world. As I stood on the deck and looked at the tranquil water, I began to feel calm. For the next two hours, all I’d have to do was concentrate on picking up another win in the 100 freestyle this weekend.

I took a few running steps and blasted the water’s smooth surface with a cannonball. As always, the water was chilly, so I started swimming warm-ups, steaming back and forth from end to end. Believe me, after two seasons on the swim team, I knew that pool so well that I could swim it in my sleep.

By the fourth lap I was cruising—when suddenly I crashed into someone and swallowed a mouthful of water.

“Amy, are you all right?” asked a soft male voice as I surfaced, coughing. It was Chris. He grabbed my hand to steady me, which to my embarrassment landed smack in the middle of his chest.

“I’m fine,” I said, coughing again. I wiped the water dribbling from my mouth off my chin. “I didn’t see you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I saw you swimming laps when I got into the water. I should have gotten out of your way. I know
it sounds stupid, but I was just floating on my back and thinking.” He looked at me with real concern. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I said shyly. “It’s just that I thought I had the pool to myself.” I wanted to duck my whole face underwater or at least hide my eyes. Could he tell by looking, I wondered, that my mind was spinning constant reruns about kissing him?

Chris returned to floating on his back. His brown hair fanned out like a paintbrush behind him. “If you close your eyes,” he said, “you can pretend it’s a lake, it’s so calm and quiet.”

I watched him as he lazily kicked his legs and drifted, eyes closed, toward the middle of the pool. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m watching myself break the regional record for the breaststroke,” he explained.

Great
, I thought.
While I’m picturing kisses, he’s imagining fame
. Nervously, I asked, “Do you really think imagining something can make it come true?”