Forget You (3 page)

"Thanks, but it's okay," I whispered back. I was sure he needed solace about his latest conquest gone sour--and if I could help him, at least I had helped
someone
tonight.

I waded out of the ocean with my arms out for him. "Sure," I told him as I hugged him in greeting. "We can talk alone. Let's go to . . ."

I glanced toward the water. I felt better just touching it. Keke, Lila, and the rest of the swim team had headed up the beach, toward the beer. Brandon and I could talk in the water now and have the ocean to ourselves.

His muscled arm curved around my waist.

I looked up at him. He gazed down at me earnestly, his too-handsome comic-book hero features softened by the starlight.

His hand stroked my back. I did not think he was touching me in a flirtatious way. I thought he was having a balance problem and teetering a bit.

But I
wanted
him to flirt with me. He was a muscle-bound football player and a playboy, but I knew him to be a softie, and in that dark moment I wanted more. This was crazy. I felt tingles of attraction for Brandon all the time. Who wouldn't? But I never acted on them. This time the thoughts of my mother and the pressure from Doug seemed to push me out of the surf and against Brandon's broad chest. I had come to this party desperately needing something I couldn't name. Now I knew what it was.

I stroked my hand across his. "Could we go to your Buick?"

I
HAD DATED A LOT OF
nice boys in the past few years. I'd never gotten serious with anyone, and that had been okay with me. I was only seventeen. I was willing to wait for the good stuff.

But something happened to me in June when my dad told my mom about Ashley. I couldn't stop thinking about sex, my dad having sex, Ashley having sex, everyone at Slide with Clyde having sex, everyone having sex except my mom and me.

You might think my job as a lifeguard was sexy. But I spent most of my time on a platform with sunglasses on and a whistle in my mouth, poised to prevent tragedy. The tourists accepted me as part of the scenery, like the cement mountains spewing waterfalls piped in from hoses, or the stacked crates with labels I'd stenciled another summer:
BANANAS BY THE BUNCH
and
DANGER: ANACONDA!

The tourists didn't notice me, so I observed them unabashedly. While the little kids splashed in the fountains and peed in the pools, their parents eyed each other and spread each other with oil. No question what they did in the hotel room after Junior went to sleep.

The teenage tourists didn't have a place to do it. Unlike the locals, they didn't know about the city beach for parking. But it was clear what they wanted. The dance clubs in Panama City looked like Sunday school compared to what Slide with Clyde brought out in people. A few pina coladas bought by college kids and slipped to underage teenagers for fun. Cool rushing water. Hot bare skin and lots of it. Whether you got any or not, Slide with Clyde sold sex.

The employees felt it. And to hear them talk, most of them got it at their beach parties every weekend, the ones I missed because I stayed home with my mom. I was concerned for my friends. Or feeling left out. Or very angry at my dad for impregnating the human resources manager while my mom slept longer and longer every day and slowly ground to a halt. The next time my dad sent me to the wholesale club for paper towels and soda straws for Slide with Clyde, I also bought the world's largest box of condoms. My dad never checked the receipt anyway. He just wanted me to show up with the toilet paper and the pickle relish. I gave condoms out to anyone who asked. I also gave condoms to people who didn't ask. If I heard rumors about them, I slipped condoms through the vents in their lockers in the break room.

Brandon found me poking a packet into his locker one afternoon. I was mortified. We were friends at school and I'd gotten him the job, but I didn't know him well enough to stuff his locker with condoms. He was really nice about it, though. He asked me for advice about the chick he was doing. I wanted to help him. And that's how we became buddies.

For the rest of the summer, chicks winked at me and said, "
Yeah,
you and Brandon are just
friends,
" meaning,
How could you be just friends with a piece of meat like that?
But we honestly were. He came to me for advice about a new girlfriend every week.

Girls fell all over Brandon. Threw themselves at him. It rained girls through the sunroof of his Buick. A lot of his complaints had to do with girls he went out with getting mad at him about the other girls he went out with. I didn't want a boyfriend like that. And he didn't want a girlfriend like me. All the boys at school knew I was just Zoey, everybody's friend, and I didn't put out.

Until now. "Just a sec," I said as we passed my Bug on our stroll through the parking lot. "Let me get something out of my car." While he finished another cigarette, I unlocked my trunk and leaned into it for the king-size box of condoms. I pulled one out and poked it into my pocket, hoping Brandon wouldn't notice. Not yet. I turned around.

He stared at my pocket. Then he looked straight at me with blue eyes I would have sworn were innocent as a baby's if I hadn't known him so well. He seemed to see me with perfect clarity.

He didn't say a word about it, though. He just turned toward his Buick again and asked as we walked, "You know that girl Phoebe who does the airbrush tattoos at Slide with Clyde?" He unlocked the passenger door of the Buick and pushed it open a little for me. We couldn't open it wide because it was huge and would ding the car in the next space. Carefully I squeezed inside and closed the door behind me.

Brandon sat in the driver's side, still talking. I suspected he'd been talking outside the car too, and hadn't noticed I wasn't there to listen. "--down at the beach right now with her cousin from Destin who is
hot,
Zoey, and somehow I have to find a way into that without scaring both of them off." He put his elbow on the steering wheel and his chin in his hand, staring into space with his brow down, perplexed.

When I'd first discussed such matters with Brandon, I'd thought he was kidding. No real person could take problems like this seriously. But Brandon did, and once you realized this about him, it was easy to like him. He had no malice. He just loved girls, and sex.

I leaned back against the door and pointed my knees toward him. "Can I ask you something?"

"I know, I know," he said. "Why can't I hit on Phoebe and be satisfied with that, instead of chasing her cousin? Why do I always want the one I can't have? I don't know, Zoey. If I knew, I wouldn't need you."

"You wouldn't?" I slid my hand onto his bare thigh--the hand without the chip in the fingernail polish.

A lot of boys would have asked me what I thought I was doing. Brandon did not. Either he knew exactly what I was doing, or he was easy. That's why he got as many girls as he did. I wanted to be easy for once.

"That's not what I was going to ask you." I smoothed my hand down the crisp blond hairs on his tanned leg. "Why haven't we hooked up?"

He laughed. "Because I want to keep my job?"

"My dad doesn't care." It hurt to say this. I kept smiling.

Brandon shrugged. "I only see you at work. You've hardly come out with us a single time all summer."

"I'm here now," I said.

His brow furrowed. I was busted. He knew there was something wrong with me, and he would refuse to help me make it worse, some line like that.

But no. Rising from the steering wheel and scooting closer across the wide seat, he reached behind my head and pulled his fingers along the length of a lock of my hair. "I don't know, Zoey. I guess I figured you'd say no. You're such a nice girl." He leaned in and kissed me.

My body was there in the car with him, making out with him. My mind raced through a lifetime of warnings about sex. Before this night I'd assumed I wouldn't be doing it for a while. I had too much to look forward to--graduation, college, a job, travel. I couldn't risk losing it all to satisfy my raging hormones.

But as he pulled my shorts down, these lessons didn't make sense to me anymore. Where was the risk? We were only doing it. It was amazingly easy. His fingers found the condom in my pocket and pulled it out. I kept kissing his neck as plastic crinkled, and then he scooted me down until I lay on the long seat.

He paused at the edge of me, not pushing in but maintaining pressure there, threatening. I was putting up barriers, even now, that were hard for him to get past. I tried to relax for him. I visualized opening for him, letting him into me.

Something inside me screamed
Noooooo, this is crazy.
Something else inside me reached up with one hand to cover my mouth. It held me down so I couldn't escape until the damage was done. Brandon slid himself all the way inside me, the point of no return, so swiftly and so deep that I gasped. I felt a little sick to my stomach, and my arms had gone tingly and cold, like I had some strange disease.

"That's it," he whispered, pushing farther in.

I hadn't realized how far in he could go, but it was best to trust him since he'd done this before. I let him push into me, pull out, push in again, until he found a rhythm, and the sex turned into every pornographic snippet I'd ever walked in on boys viewing on the computer in the break room at Slide with Clyde. This was familiar. It wasn't comfortable, but at least I recognized it. I was doing what everybody else had already done, which made me normal. My arms still tingled, but my whole body flashed from cold to hot now, and I understood the animal nature of it, doing it to reproduce. Brandon was the biggest, best example of my species, and I felt an animal pride in having caught him.

* * *

L
ATER, HOLDING HANDS, WE CROSSED THE
bridge over the sand dunes and sat on the wooden stairs, looking out over the party. This was perfect. We were part of the party but apart from it, above it, because of what we'd just shared.

Then he asked, "You want a beer?"

The question struck me as funny. I never drank. I was afraid of losing control that way. All my friends knew this about me, except the one I'd just lost my virginity to.

"Why're you laughing?" he slurred. "I take that as a yes?"

"No thanks. Not while I'm in training." I put my hand on my belly and phrased my refusal in terms Brandon would accept. As an athlete, he would understand abstaining for the sake of training, even if it would never occur to him to abstain himself.

"Mind if I get one?" he asked, already pushing up to standing, steadying himself with one hand on my shoulder. If he'd been sober, he would have known he was putting enough weight on me to hurt me.

I didn't mind. I grinned through it. "I'll be waiting." I watched him walk across the sand, into the shadows toward the beer stash against the sand dunes, staggering only a little.

A few seconds later a silhouette moved back toward me. That was fast. But the silhouette was too small to be Brandon, and as it moved closer I recognized the outline of girly curls. Lila. I felt like I hadn't seen her in a year. She dashed up the stairs and scattered sand over me as she plunked down next to me. Over the noise of crashing waves, she stage-whispered, "I just heard you hooked up with Brandon Moore!"

"We did," I said.

"No, I mean I heard you
did it
with Brandon Moore."

I suppressed the urge to glance suspiciously at the parking lot behind me, beyond the bridge. I'd noticed fogged-up windows in cars when I first arrived. People could have seen Brandon and me too. I asked carefully, "Where did you hear that?"

"From Brandon Moore!"

"Oh." I wasn't sure what to make of this. I hadn't counted on Brandon kissing and telling. But he was drunk, and I forgave him. He must be happy about what we'd done, or he wouldn't announce it. "We did," I said again.

Lila persisted, "Wasn't that your first time? Ever?"

"Yes. He was really sweet."

Lila frowned at me and bit her lip. I was beginning to get a little annoyed with her. I felt good about what Brandon and I had done, but Lila's response gave me second thoughts. I did not want second thoughts. I reminded her, "Brandon and I are good friends."

"Yeah," she said.

"Everybody at Slide with Clyde told me all summer we should hook up."

"Yeah." She nodded slowly. "That is great, Zoey."

"I'm happy." I wrapped my arms around my knees and hugged myself. The breeze off the ocean remained steady, but suddenly it seemed colder. "Where's Keke?"

"Embarrassing me," Lila said bitterly. "I will never get laid at this rate."

I unwrapped one arm from my knees and fingered her springy red curls. "Give it time. It will happen."

"Oh, like you're the expert on this suddenly in the last five minutes."

My hand stopped in her hair. Not that it mattered in the dark, but I could feel the blood rushing to my face with anger at what she'd said to me, and embarrassment at what I'd said to her. I
did
sound like a sex ed film from middle school PE class.

"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "That was ugly. I didn't mean it that way."

"I know what you meant." I tugged at her curls for a few more strokes, even though I didn't want to, to show her everything was okay. We were quiet at first, but eventually we talked about the swim meet next Saturday and pretended nothing had happened. I yawned, terribly tired now, done with this party. I could probably sleep, even after the day I'd had, even at my dad's house. I wished Brandon would come back with his beer. I would offer to take him home, and we would have a sweet parting of ways at the end of our first night together.

He did not come back. After a few minutes I would go looking for him, worried. My brief search would begin to feel hysterical, thinking something had happened to him, only at the very end. Then my friends would tell me Brandon had pitched over in the sand, and the guys had helped him across the next bridge down the beach, to the parking lot. Stephanie Wetzel lived in his neighborhood, and she had taken him home.