The Ordinary Life of Emily P. Bates (23 page)

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. His breath tickled my ear when he spoke. We were both breathing very hard now, which was a good excuse for me to say nothing at all. I couldn’t have formed a coherent thought just then even if I’d wanted to. I was so confused. Everything I’d ever known about my best friend had just gotten turned upside down. The world was reeling on its side. It didn’t help anything that my whole body was on fire just then. I just plain could not think straight.

              “I’m so sorry,” he said again. He stepped away from me and my fingers unwound themselves from the front of his shirt. He truly looked sincere, almost disgusted with himself. “It’s just, that may have been my only chance to do that. I couldn’t miss my chance.”

              I opened my mouth to reply, but no words came out. What was I supposed to say to that? Oh, that’s all right, Finn. No worries. Forgive and forget.

Yeah right.

He misinterpreted my silence and his face went suddenly rigid. It was as if I’d just confirmed his worst fears.

              “I didn’t
--
nothing has to change,” he stammered. “I gotta–”

He couldn’t finish his sentence. He bent to scoop up his scattered belongings and was gone before I could say or do anything.

I leaned my back against the lockers and my head clanged against them, willing my heart to calm down. The fire that Finn had lit within me was leaking out through my fingertips now. My mind began to clear, but I don’t think I could have said anything to him if he had stuck around. He was not the same Finnegan anymore. He wasn’t my friend anymore. Now he was a guy. A very good looking guy that I’d never noticed before and that had just jammed his tongue down my throat in the middle of our high school hallway.

My stomach rolled and I slid down the lockers until I was sitting on the floor.

              He’d felt this way for years.
Years!
And I hadn’t noticed anything at all! Shannon knew. Margo knew. I wondered vaguely if Ethan knew. Maybe. He could have noticed the way Finn looked at me. Did Finn look at me? I’d never seen him do it in a strange way.

              But there definitely were other things that I had missed. Every morning he got my breakfast without fail. Most of the quotes on my cast had been his. More than half. I saw again his face as he carried me down the stairs with a broken arm. “Are you really going to date Cavanaugh?” he’d asked me that day in class when I was still interested in Ethan.

I heard his terrified voice when I told Shannon that Mom was in the hospital. He’d thought it was me again. That night at the party, too. He’d hovered nearby, just waiting for Ethan to cross a line so that Finn would have an excuse to take him outside. He’d been there for me that whole night, but I’d hardly noticed him.

“All you have to do is say my name,” he’d promised me.

              I slid even further down until I was lying curled up on the cold linoleum. I wrapped my head in my arms. Waves of nausea hit me as I saw myself trying to convince him to go out with Margo. In the end he had given in
,
probably just because I’d told him to.

              Oh, and poor Margo! I wondered how long she’d known about Finn’s feelings for me. How long had she pretended not to notice? How long did she just put up with it? And yet, after all that had happened, she had still tried to protect my feelings by not telling me. Just as Finn had done.

              And worst of all, not ten minutes ago, I’d let him leave me. I’d let him think the worst and walk away. I could still feel his hands on me, his lips on mine, and I couldn’t shove out the image of his hurt face when I refused to answer him.

              Had he been right? Had that moment been our only chance? If so, then it was all my fault.

Nineteen

              After a good twenty minutes of feeling sorry for myself on the floor, I finally got up. I could hear the janitors laughing down the hall. It wouldn’t take them very long to find me curled up in the fetal position on the floor that they were trying to sweep. I had to get up.

              I gathered up the rest of the papers that Finn had left lying on the floor and stacked them as neatly as I could in his locker. I didn’t want him to lose a homework assignment just because I had been a jerk and had driven him off. After that I stopped off at my own locker to trade my Lit book for my Calculus one.

              I couldn’t stop thinking about kissing Finn. I kept replaying it over and over in my head, how his hand felt under my hair, how his mouth…

              Ugh. My own mouth was tingly numb, now. I hadn’t known I was capable of such a thing. I had no idea. I mean, I knew kissing was supposed to be amazing. I knew that. But now--now I
knew
that.

              And now that I
knew
, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, about him. About Finn with his hair in his eyes, with his long fingers on my back.

              Here I was, rummaging in my locker as if it were any other day, but it wasn’t. Today everything was different. Even without considering Finn and what this meant for our friendship, I felt different. I was the same, the world kept spinning, but I felt different.

It was like I was in on this big secret, now. I was sure I couldn’t keep this from Shannon, much less everyone else, forever. But that moment with Finn in the hallway, that was mine, and it was huge.

              By the time I made it to my car, the entire parking lot was empty. The sky was still a deep gray color, and though it wasn’t raining now, the ground was wet from a recent shower. Everything smelled wet. Everything looked wet. Even the air was wet. My hideous lime green Taurus stood alone in the vast sea of black asphalt. It looked like one of those weird artsy photographs where the entire picture was in black and white except for one brightly colored object
--
Oscar in this case.

              On instinct I dug my new camera out of my bag. I stared at Oscar through the viewfinder for several seconds before finally taking the picture. I don’t know why I did it. Every time I looked at this picture I would remember the events that preceded it. 

              I shoved my camera back into my bag and walked numbly to my car. I got in just as it started misting again. The engine roared to life with an angry whine and the windshield wipers squeaked across the glass. The dank smell of mold hit my nose. There must be a leak somewhere in the trunk letting the rain in.

I didn’t even have the energy to groan in despair at my car’s poor condition. I felt drained, empty.

              I drove home in the miserable drizzle, trying my best not to over-analyze my six year friendship with Finn. I was looking for any other clue that I had missed that would have warned me. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so freaking blind?

              Karma, I think, is the best way to describe what happened next. Good old fashioned fate. I pulled up to the intersection of Fourth and Pine, still mulling over what I thought had been a steadfast and purely platonic relationship, when Oscar’s engine sputtered and died.

              “No,” I said, jolted out of my own personal Hell. “No, no, no!” I turned the key in the ignition three times, but the engine just would not catch. “No! No! No!” I moaned at my steering wheel. “Don’t do this to me!”

              The light turned green, but I still couldn’t get the engine to start. Someone behind me honked their horn. I glanced up in the rear view mirror and froze solid. There, unmistakably clear in my rear view mirror, sat a red Chevy truck.

What did I say? Karma? Oscar had only stalled out twice in all the time I’d had it, and both times I’d caught Ethan Cavanaugh behind me.

              Ethan got out of his truck and jogged through the drizzle to see if I needed help. His dark skin against the gray day only further reminded me of those black and white photographs.

              “Did it stall out again?” he asked as I rolled down the creaking window.

              I nodded miserably. Any other day I would have been screaming mad, but today I was just numb.

              “Here, let me try.” He opened my door for me. I didn’t get out, but scooted over to the passenger’s seat. He climbed in and tried the ignition a few times, pressing gently on the gas. I watched him work in silence. He really was gorgeous
--
the stereotypical tall, dark, and handsome man that came to the aid of the damsel in distress. How could a guy like this ever have noticed a girl like me?

              I shook my head miserably. I could have asked the same thing of a guy like Finn.

              “It’s no good,” he said. He looked around, thinking hard. “Look, there.” He pointed to our right at a mostly empty parking lot in front of Terry’s Bar-B-Q. “We’ll push it there then you can have it towed.”

              “Great,” I said. “You think you and I can push this stupid thing?”

              He grinned at me. “Probably not, but they can always help us.” I looked around us to find that three or four guys and a couple of women were standing around watching us. They were all stuck behind me.

              “Oh.”

              Ethan was right. With the assistance of the other onlookers
,
who gladly offered to help us pus
h,
we were able to roll Oscar right into Terry’s parking lot with no problems. My car squeaked and groaned into an empty parking spot, making everyone laugh and joke about its horrid state.

              “What did you do to this poor thing?” a blond woman asked, laughing. “I’ve never seen a car so
green
.”

              I had to force myself to laugh with her. How sad is that?

              Once Oscar was out of the road, our curious bystanders and helpers cleared off pretty quickly. I stood with my arms crossed in the frigid rain while Ethan moved his truck out of the road to park next to my car.

              “Now what?” I asked when he cut the engine.

              “Now we find a phone,” he said. “Which mechanic do you use?”

              “Auto Stop.”

              “Okay. You wait here. I’ll run in and call a tow truck.”

              “No, I’ll come too. I need to call my Dad first.” We asked at the hostess desk of Terry’s Bar-B-Q for a phone, and she let us use hers right there by the door.

              “Just
let me know if you need something else
,” she said with an inviting smile.

              “Thanks,” Ethan said, flashing all thirty-two of his teeth at her. The pretty hostess, who had to have been in her early twenties, blushed scarlet and I shook my head in disbelief. Had I been that charmed in the beginning too?

              Dad wasn’t terribly surprised when I told him what had happened. “Just call the tow truck like Ethan said,” he said. “Call Marty’s. He’s pretty cheap. I’ll come by and pick you up. Don’t go anywhere.”

              “I won’t,” I said. “Thanks.”

              “See you in a bit.”

              “Okay.” I hung up the phone and turned to Ethan. “He said to call Marty’s.”

He frowned. “I don’t know that number.”

              “What, did you know the number of another tow company in town?”

              “Very funny.”

              “Hold on,” the hostess said eagerly. “I’ll find a phone book.”

              Ethan turned his dazzling smile to her again. “Thanks.”

              He called the tow company for me when the hostess returned with the directory, and before long we had stepped back out into the wet parking lot to wait. I pulled my jacket tighter around my body and shivered.

              “Dad’s going to be a while longer,” I said. “You don’t have to stick around. I’ll be fine.”

              “No, I’ll wait with you. Get in my truck. It’ll be much warmer than yours.”

              I hesitated in the parking lot, but in the end the cold got the better of me. “Yeah. Thanks.”

              I climbed into his passenger seat and stared out of the windshield at the gray day. Ethan started the ignition and a blast of hot air washed over my face. It felt so good that I couldn’t help but relax a little.

              “So how was your first day back?” Ethan asked, leaning casually back in his seat. “Boring as usual?”

              “Sure,” I said, but my body had tensed up again. “Crazy how you got stuck behind me again when Oscar stalled out.”

              “Karma, I think.”

              I smirked. “Yeah, that’s the word I had in mind.”

              “You know, I’m starting to think your car is divine intervention materialized,” he said.

              “What?”

              “Well think about it. The first time it stalled, I got stuck behind you. If that hadn’t happened, we never would have started hanging out. We wouldn’t have gone out. And now, the second time it dies for real and who’s stuck behind you? The one person who can help you deal with it. It is why we finally get to talk again. Hell it was why we met in the first place. Divine intervention.”

              “I think I liked karma better. Besides, it wasn’t because of my car, it was my mom’s reproductive cycle.”

              “What?” He looked rather alarmed.

              “Because that was the day Mom told us she was pregnant, which is why I was late meeting Shannon, which is why I was in front of you at that stop light.”

              “You’re ridiculous.” He smiled at me and I felt that old familiar flutter in my heart. I shook my head to force that ghost of a memory away.

              “What do you think the fall would have been like if you and I didn’t become friends?” I asked.

              He shrugged. “I don’t know. Kind of boring, I guess.”

              “Really?”

              “Yeah.” He looked at me, all traces of his usual smile gone. “I’m not mad at you, you know.”

              “I know.” That was a lie. I still thought he was furious. I turned to stare out of my window so he wouldn’t see the guilt splayed across my face.

              “I was at first, but I thought about it and it made sense to break it off. You could have done it a little better, I think, but I’ll overlook it this time.”

              I glanced up at him. He was smiling again. “I’m socially awkward.”

              “No you’re not. That’s what attracted me to you in the first place.”

              I blushed, but couldn’t say anything.

              “I mean it,” he said. He wasn’t smiling now. “In fact, I think the whole mess was mostly my fault.” There was a short pause as he collected his words in preparation for what I suspected would be a pretty major discussion. I watched him warily. “Do you remember when you asked me why my family moved to Arkansas? And I answered that I ran out of pretty girls to charm?”

              Oh no. Here it comes. “Yeah.”

              “Well, I wasn’t joking.”

              “Huh?”

              “Well, it wasn’t the reason for moving, but I really did date most of the girls in my area.”

              “What?” My voice was pitched far higher than I’d meant, but there was no taking it back now.

              “Don’t worry! I wasn’t the male equivalent of a hooker or anything. I didn’t sleep around.”

I sank down into my seat, drawing my knees up to my chest and covering my face with my hands. This was ridiculous! This was just too much for one day!

Ethan kept right on talking at top speed. “Still don’t, in fact. But I did do a lot of dating. Mostly superficial social stuff. Usually people just referred to me as ‘The Charmer.
’
”

Yes. He even used air quotes.

              “What are you getting at?”

              “My point is that the moment I met you that all changed,” he said. “Talking with you wasn’t like talking with any of my other girlfriends. It didn’t feel like dating to me. It felt, God, I don’t know. Sincere, I guess.”

              “Oh no,” I moaned. “Not again.”

              But Ethan didn’t hear me. “I was content just to be around you. To hang out with you. I hate to say it, but with you I was always so entertained that I generally just didn’t bother with dating you.”

              “Oh my
God
.”

              “No! No! That’s not what I meant!” he exclaimed when he saw my reaction. “I meant that I knew that it wouldn’t last! It never lasts with me. I didn’t want to drive you away because I actually genuinely enjoyed spending time with you.”

              “So why did you actually date me!” It came out more as an accusation than a question.