My First Love (7 page)

“Who cares?” I said softly. “It’s magical.”

“Well, enjoy the magic,” Chris said. “The moon will only be in total eclipse for seven minutes.”

I stood up then like a surfer, half crouched, legs bent at the knees.

“Where are you going?” Chris asked.

“I just want to check something.” I waddled like that to the roof’s peak, and after securing my footing, made my way cautiously down the slight slope on the other side. The back end of our apartment overlooked the courtyard all the Palms tenants shared: a half circle of Bermuda grass and a medium-sized lima-bean-shaped pool.

“Chris, come over here,” I whispered. When I called him, he stood quickly, waving his arms in the air for balance. “Careful,” I warned him, hunkering down again into the surfer position. “You have to walk like this.”

Chris joined me at the roof’s edge, and I pointed to the pool. There, reflected in the surface of the still water, was the coppery orb of the moon.

“Wow,” we both said.

It was one of those perfect moments that you tuck away to look at later, like rose petals pressed between the pages of a book. I remember the joy in Chris’s expression and the warm breeze that carried the scent of pool chlorine. The moon looked so real floating there in the water that it
seemed you could dive in and retrieve it with your bare hands.

Then Chris put his arm around me and pulled me close to him. “Amy,” he whispered, “I’ve liked you for such a long time, ever since you first joined the—” But before he could finish his sentence, I linked my fingers around his neck and stopped him with a kiss.

His lips were firm, like in my daydream, and chocolate-brownie sweet. I could feel them humming against mine, as if they held some secret. Before, I’d always worried about the technicalities of kissing, like how to avoid bumping noses. Now I found that everything, even noses, fit together, without my even trying. Chris opened his mouth slightly, tasting my lips with tiny, gentle bites.

Around us, the night was alive with the late-night sound that my neighborhood makes, the pulse and hum of a hundred pool pumps. This solemn sound and the kiss made me restless, the way quiet hymns played in church sometimes make me want to shout. Or maybe I should blame the full moon for what happened next.

I broke away from Chris and blurted out—I can’t explain why—“I dare you to jump in the pool!”

Chris peeled his T-shirt off before I could say I was joking. He tossed it down into the courtyard and stood there peering over the roof’s edge, silently calculating the distance from there to the pool.

“Wait—are you sure you can make it?” I whispered.

“If I don’t,” he said theatrically, “at least the last thing I see will be you.” With that, he swung his arms out and leapt from the roof. Midair, he hugged his legs to his chest and cannonballed safely into the pool.

When he hit, the moon’s reflection exploded into pieces, then rippled back together. Water crashed on the deck, and the lounge chairs that surrounded it. I waited with my breath held, until finally Chris’s head popped up to the surface. “Come on in!” he stage-whispered, dog-paddling in place. “The water feels great!”

I imagined my mother’s voice warning me not to take chances even as I tossed my sneakers over and stood there, shivering, in my bare feet. Then I heard Blythe say that I was too cautious, that I’d never get anywhere if I lived my life stuck at a yellow light. I closed my eyes for a second and took a deep breath. “Now or never,” I said out loud.

I opened my eyes and dove into the darkness, aiming for the reflection of the moon. But instead of pulling a noisy cannonball, as Chris had, I sliced straight into the water and hardly made a splash.

“The water doesn’t feel great!” I complained. “It’s cold.” It was hard to keep quiet with my teeth chattering so hard.

Chris kept treading water and swimming in circles like a dog. “It helps if you keep moving,” he said.

Relieved that I had made it into the pool, I swam to the edge quickly and hoisted myself out onto the deck. “Let’s
get out of here before the manager sees us,” I whispered.
Or my mom hears us
, I added silently. “Follow me—there are plenty of other pools we can hop.”

If you’ve never heard of pool hopping, you should come to Phoenix, where it’s practically a varsity sport. If you grew up here, you’ve done it: climbed over backyard fences, tiptoed across evergreen Bermuda-grass lawns, and tried out other people’s pools. I, for one, could tell you the size and shape and water temperature of every pool on our block. But I hadn’t hopped a pool since eighth grade, hadn’t even thought of it until the moon made me crazy, until some wild, reckless urge got into me that night.

“Come on,” I whispered to Chris as we made our way, dripping and shivering, into our front yard. Chris hopped on one foot behind me, grabbing his other, soggy-sneakered foot with both hands. I noticed then that he’d jumped into the Palms pool without taking his shoes off. “Hold on a minute,” he said, pouring water out of a heel and onto the lawn.

“Let’s do Joey Favata’s,” I said, pointing to a ranch-style house at the far end of our street.

“Should be good,” Chris said, slinging his sneakers over his shoulder and holding on to them by their laces. “His dad’s a real hothead.” Chris knew as well as I did that only part of the point of hopping pools was getting wet. Most of the fun came from almost getting caught.

We started off down the street toward the Favatas’, moving slowly and cautiously at first, then sprinting boldly from lamppost to lamppost. Like burglars, we avoided the greenish light of the streetlamps, trying to keep to the safety of the darkness in between. There were lights on in a few houses—probably people who’d watched the eclipse—but at that hour of the morning, most of the neighborhood was already asleep.

At the Favatas’, the windows were dark, but four floodlights shone across the yard in green and blue and red. We darted through the circus colors and slipped around back to the six-foot stucco wall.

“Here’s a foothold,” I whispered, pulling back a tangle of crabgrass to reveal a palm tree stump. Chris put his bare foot there and reached for the top of the wall. “Any dogs?” he turned to ask me before he lifted himself up.

Yapping dogs were a challenge to pool hoppers—right up there with creaky gates and the crunching sound of walking across a desert lawn. “No dogs,” I reassured him. “And it’s grass on the other side, so you won’t cut your feet when you land.”

“Good to know,” Chris said. He boosted himself up to the top of the wall and sat there a moment, surveying the yard. “It’s a great pool,” he said admiringly. “They’ve got a water slide and a Jacuzzi and a plastic shark raft.”

“Move over,” I said. “Let me get up.”

Just as I pulled myself up to sit beside him, a light went
on in one of the windows, the one that I guessed was the bathroom. The sound of running water followed, and Chris and I waited nervously until the light went off again. “Hold on a sec,” Chris said, grabbing my arm as I made a move to jump into the yard. “We don’t know for sure yet that the person’s back in bed.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” I teased him.

Chris looked at me like I was nuts. “I must have left it back on your roof.”

Actually, I was bluffing. The reason I was in a hurry to get going was that I knew any Favata who happened to glance out a window had a perfect view of us balanced there on the wall. I didn’t want to alarm Chris, but the longer we sat there waiting, the more we were sitting ducks.

“Besides,” I said, my teeth starting to chatter, “I’ve got to keep moving, to keep from freezing in my tracks.”

Chris watched the window for a moment, tapping his heel on the stucco and biting his lower lip. Then he seemed to shrug off his worry. “I’ll race you to that shark,” he said.

With that, the two of us dropped, like overripe fruit, onto the soft grass. Chris took off in front of me, pausing only to spin a few cartwheels before he reached the pool. Watching him leap and flail across the lawn made me laugh, but I really lost it when he dove toward the plastic shark open-armed. I watched in disbelief as he landed on his belly on the pool toy, and began to wrestle with the sea creature’s giant dorsal fin.

By then, I was laughing so hard I could hardly walk. I managed to get to the pool’s edge and practically fell in, right beside the shark.

Just as quickly, we were out again, whooping as we skipped across the brick patio, both hoping and fearing that someone would hear. We cackled like ghouls as we crossed the lawn and hurried to boost ourselves back over the wall.

I got to the wall before Chris did. “Oh, no!” I said when I suddenly realized there was no foothold.

“Put your foot here,” Chris urged me, offering a step stool he’d made by joining his hands.

“But who will help you?” I asked him as I pulled myself up. I swung one leg over to straddle the wall and anxiously looked down at him.

“You will,” he said. He pushed a foot against the wall for leverage and then reached up to grab my hands. “Come on, you can do it,” he told me. “You’re the strongest girl I know.”

I could feel my calves scraping stucco as I gripped the wall tighter, one leg tensely anchored on each side. I tried not to panic, but I could see light after light going on inside the Favatas’ house.

“One, two, three,
pull
,” we said together.

My arms strained in their sockets, and for one scary moment, I felt myself tip toward the wrong side of the wall. I almost let go out of fear when I heard a door open. A second later, a man’s angry voice called out, “Hey!”

“What was that?” Chris said, as if we didn’t both know. I looked, and there was Mr. Favata in a plaid bathrobe, standing on the patio.

“It’s Mr. Favata—he’s coming over!” I shrieked. Chris’s feet scrambled frantically, like an insect’s, against the wall.

Just then adrenaline shot through me, like the zing I feel sometimes in the last lap of a race. All of a sudden, I couldn’t feel how much my arms ached and how my legs stung. I pulled, and I practically launched Chris right over that wall.

We tumbled down together, laughing, out of breath, still holding hands.

“You’re awesome,” Chris said.

“No problem,” I panted. “Now let’s get out of here.”

Back at the Palms we collapsed in the courtyard, still laughing and wheezing from running so hard. Then Chris climbed up to the roof and retrieved the blanket and the wicker basket. Once he was on the ground, he wrapped the blanket around us both. “Do you think he recognized us?” Chris asked when we had stopped shaking. I shook my head.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He was probably distracted, looking at the moon.”

By then, the eclipse was nearly over, and we sat quietly watching the coppery glow fade. In a few hours, the sun would rise as though the wild night of moon watching and pool hopping had never happened.

“I wish I could take a picture,” I said, meaning not just
the moon but the whole evening, everything I’d felt and done and seen. “To have something to remember this by.”

Chris turned to me then and put his damp hand on my cheek. “Here’s something,” he said, and he drew my face closer, until I could feel the warmth radiating from his skin. His lips brushed my cheek gently, before I turned my face toward him and kissed him.

Chris lingered in our front yard long after the eclipse was over, at least a half hour after he’d first said he had to leave. I didn’t exactly encourage him to go, either. Kissing had made us both lazy. We sat quietly on the grass, holding hands and talking, totally unaware of what time it was.

Finally, we retrieved Chris’s bike from the bushes and wheeled it slowly to the street. Together, we folded the damp blanket and stuffed it into the basket. We took our time tying the bundle to the handlebars. I knew that we both wanted to make this magical night last.

“Amy,” Chris whispered, placing his hands on the back of my neck, letting his fingers weave through my hair. “I wish I could stay here with you.” His lips met mine as surely as if he’d memorized a map of my face. And that last kiss, long and deep, told me everything: that he’d written my name in his notebook, that he’d been dreaming about this moment, as I had, for a very long time.

Reluctantly, we pulled away from each other, and Chris walked me to my window. Quietly, I slid up the screen and pulled myself over the sill.

“I wish…,” Chris began, but I shushed him. I didn’t want him to wake Mom. I leaned out the window and put my lips next to his ear. “See you in physics on Monday,” I whispered.

It was already three-thirty in the morning when I climbed back through my bedroom window and crawled into my bed. I was relieved to find the apartment dark and quiet, the air still perfumed with apple pie.

In my room, my books were lined up on the white pine shelf, along with the dolphins—plastic, ceramic, and crystal—I’d collected since I was a little girl. On my desk was a bag of M&M’S I’d been eating while studying, my physics book,
Matter and Motion
, the unopened books for our health project, and a multicolored bundle of ballpoint pens.

Everything was just the same as I’d left it, the same as it had always been. But as I changed into a long nightshirt, then climbed into bed, I felt like a different person. I felt as if I’d just returned from a trip around the world. I lay there with my heart racing, thinking,
This is what it feels like when you fall in love
.

Blythe got home early from Payson on Sunday. She was so eager to discuss the affairs of my heart that she rushed over to my house immediately. “What happened last night?” she burst out loudly when I opened the kitchen door.

“Shhh,” I said, pointing toward the living room, where my mom was reading the paper. I stifled a yawn.

“Hi,” Blythe called cheerfully to my mother. “Do you mind if Amy makes a quick trip to the mall with me? There’s something I need to pick up.”

I looked at Blythe in amazement. She had made that up
on the spot, just to get me out of the house so she could hear my story.

Mom looked up from her paper and smiled. “Sure. Have fun, girls.”