Kiss Crush Collide (12 page)

“He asked me who I was.”

I smile, and she
slip clonks
away.

Troy blows his whistle long and loud, and the pool splits open with a spectacular cannonball. It’s always a cannonball. A ring of sharp waves marks the point of impact as the first kid in finally bobs to the surface, his smile and splash greeted by the whoops and cheers of a clump of skinny-legged third-grade boys. They high-five each other and line up to take turns at cannonballing themselves. One right after the other, knobby knees hugged to bony chests,
pa-wump, pa-wump, pa-wump
. Their splashes fly high, sprinkling down on my bare thighs as I settle into my shift under a troubled summer sky. The realization that I am now indebted to Valerie sinks in slowly as the cannonball water drools down my legs and pools into a warm puddle at my feet.

The clouds drop lower and lower until they almost brush against the top of my shoulders. I look around the pool. Parents are nervously glancing toward the sky, caught between a few more minutes of peace or dragging a crying kid out of the water. The official rule is sprinkles are safe, but thunder and lightning clear the pool immediately, no exceptions.

Troy is standing on the other side of the pool. He straddles the red 5FT marker, his toes curling over the edge as he watches the sky for lightning. I can practically see his fingers crossing and uncrossing from here. He is hoping, wishing, praying even for a lightning bolt or a clap of thunder. Then he can chill out, roll a fat one, and maybe watch some TV. All around him, even the hopeful are giving up, tying bikini strings, pulling on T-shirts, and packing up sunscreen. It is not going to happen today.

Somewhere behind me, in the quickly dimming light, Valerie is on a frayed Fingerhut beach towel, continuing her assault on anemia and our assigned summer reading list. I crank my head around to look at what she is straining to read, the book just inches from her face.
April Morning
. Right. Something about a boy and a war, maybe even some drums. I haven’t read it and have no plans to. Why would I? I have two older sisters. We live in a small town with a tiny school system. The same teachers have been teaching the same classes and assigning the same texts since the dawn of time. My copy, complete with Yorke’s faded yellow highlights and Freddie’s meticulous notes neatly written in the margins, is just waiting for me at home. I’m all set.

But Valerie is plowing through it, page by flipping page. This book and the entire summer reading list, too. She has a ritual. Each day she unpacks the books and stacks them up. The finished ones are placed to her left with a little pat. Then those about to be tackled are arranged, most likely in alphabetical order, to her right.

There’s no way I would schlep all those books around all summer, but Valerie does. I want to admire her spirit. I do, but I am finding it hard to look past her spine as it bumps and curves over that mountain of reading material.

Her bid for valedictorian, her hard work, it’s all there, printed and bound and stacked up for me to see. I can almost make out one of the titles from up here:
Guilt.
Now Available in Paperback!
I turn, twisting to face the water again.

At the first crack of thunder, I jump up, knees locking, and blow my whistle, joining the four other lifeguards shrilly clearing the pool. Moms panic and grab kids. It’s a little like
Jaws
, but without the screaming or the mechanical shark.

The place clears in about five minutes. Striped towels? Gone. Bicycle racks? Empty. Pool? Flat and still. It is amazing how fast people will move when they are about to be rained on, especially when most of them are already wet. Out of the corner of my eye I see Troy stretch his arms up toward the sky and clap his hands over his head. God, he’s such a burnout.

Of course Valerie is the last to leave. I am already outside the fence, sitting on the hill, shoes off, chin resting on my knees as I wait for my ride, while she dawdles, kneeling on the concrete pool deck, frantically cramming her many, many, many books into her striped canvas tote.

She is always the last one in the school hallways at the final bell, too, pissing off the janitor and the teacher who just wants to stop answering her questions and go home. Right now she is pissing off Troy.

I lower my forehead to rest on my crossed arms and curl up tight against the wind. Eons pass, and then I finally hear Troy’s keys jangling, the lock twisting, and the clank of the gate. The pool is closed.

“Alas! Here we see her, our fair Leah. Left behind, yet waiting patiently, ever faithful, ever hopeful, for her knight in shining armor.”

I lift my chin to find Valerie standing before me, orating like the Greek chorus. Thing is, I don’t really need the recap. I can feel the cold, scratchy grass beneath my ass right now, so I get it. I am living it.

Maybe Valerie’s been speed-reading too much Shakespeare. Ignoring her as she walks to her car, I search every set of headlights in the distance for the one that is coming for me.

With an overly dramatic flourish of her free hand and a less than graceful curtsy that is hampered by her heavy book bag, Valerie stops next to her German rust bucket and calls, “Do you need a ride?”

Nice, but yeah, right. I can just see us together, Valerie behind the wheel and me riding shotgun.

“Umm . . . thanks, but I’m sure Shane will show.”

“Shane?” she says with a humph as she props her door open with her skinny hip and throws her book bag across the seat with both hands, granny style. A spring squeaks loudly when it lands. After climbing into the driver’s seat, she pulls the creaky door shut and leans out the open window with a sly smile.

“You sure that’s who you’re hoping for?” she asks before she backs up in a series of rolling jerks, momentarily blinding me when she flips on her headlights during jerk number two. She waves and drives off into the gathering storm. My feet are cold, my butt is sore, and the sky is as dark as night, practically. Turning away, I don’t wave back at her. I just see spots.

The air today is even more oppressive than my mood. I can feel it all around me as I give up and start to walk home through the park. The tall green grass at the edge of the road dips, lies flat, and then snaps back to attention. The trees swaying in the strengthening wind seem too fragile; they bend toward me at an impossible angle, and the headlights that suddenly pop over the crest of the hill are too bright and piercing against the greenish gray horizon. I step up my pace. A short, muffled yell in the distance stops my heart and slows my feet for a second. I’m sure it was just someone calling for a dog or a kid or, you know, warning me that the end is near. I lean into the wind, heart flying, cursing my parents, my sisters, Shane, even Porter a little bit, for leaving me out here. Adrift.

I am winding my way through the flower garden, lush and tall and muggy, when the wind suddenly shifts, lifting my hair and swirling it into my face. I stumble, losing my step and my place. I trip over a slab of uneven sidewalk and land with a short skid on the concrete path, backpack jilted to one side, the skin rubbed raw on the heel of my right hand, my hair still in my face. I reach up, instinctively, looking for a hand to hold, someone to pull me up, to pull me along and show me which way to go. There’s no hand, only the sharp sting of my raw skin in the cooling air.

Flowers tower over me, bobbing and weaving. Leaning back, I watch them, delicate and bright against the dark sky, and discover that I am sheltered under a canopy of blue and yellow and pink blooms. They dance above me, filling this calm little enclave I have landed in with the smell of summertime. I breathe in, long, steady breaths that fill my lungs with the perfume of picnics and parks and pools, of bike rides and T-ball practice, bouquets of dandelions, of sunshine and my sisters. Pressing down on my scraped hand to kill the last of the sting there, I collect myself, and my stuff, and set out again for home. I know the way by heart.

At the top of our driveway, lined up in a neat row, safe and dry, I see them—
RGR
DGR
,
LHS
BUG
,
SHN
ROX
. How annoying. No wonder people hate us. I trail my finger along the waxed and shiny and professionally detailed trunks, taunting the threatening skies to open up and do their worst.

A few feet away, our kitchen window is a big glowing square. I stop, watching the scene play out on the other side of the thick glass. Like an actress on a TV with the sound turned off, Yorke talks with her mouth big and wide, her hands animated. Whatever she has to say is always the most important thing at that moment.

My mother and Freddie are at the table in the nook, lost in a landslide of
RSVP
cards and sample place settings. Freddie’s got a clipboard and a pen. She lifts a thick, engraved card from the pile, makes a check mark, and then puts the card into another pile. Repeat. My mother seems to be doing nothing more than arranging the large, sliding pile into smaller, neater piles, probably so the cards won’t knock over the etched champagne flutes. And Yorke just keeps talking.

There’s an empty chair next to Freddie, waiting for me. I’m sure I could help Freddie with that list. I could check off the names while she reads them off the cards, or the other way around. Either way we always make a good team.

The wind swirls to a stop, and the air is suddenly still, so still and silent that the hair on my arms stands up. I pause, looking through the window at my life one year from now, two years from now, twenty-five years from now. It looks perfect from out here.

Yorke is planning the perfect wedding, and then she’ll move away with Roger. Freddie will parse some more French verbs, perfectly, be maid of honor, and go off to France for a year. But what about me? I think, What am I doing? Not Shane, that’s for sure.

He’s there, too, sunken into our creamy leather sofa, feet up on the ottoman, the two in his two-a-day obviously canceled because of the weather. Shane is part of the perfect supporting cast: dark-haired men, fit and tan, with white teeth and white shirts, watching a game that I can’t hear, the TV flickering silently.

I take a few steps back, away from the house, feeling obvious and out of place in the dead, dark quiet. All I have to do is open the door and step inside, but I’m confused. Why am I on the outside looking in?

I want to go in and take my place, safe and secure, at the end of the line, right next to Freddie, blue, then yellow, then pink. But I want to walk away, too. Right past this house, out of the yard, down the street, past the high school and homecoming queen and sweaty nights in Shane’s backseat. Past the valedictorian speech complete with Valerie’s condemning glare and my parents’ pride. Past my trip abroad, France most likely, and my college dorm room with a bright, cheery bedspread, my future sorority sisters, and the unknown boy, with dark hair and a bright future growing up somewhere right now, who will take me off my parents’ hands in, according to schedule, exactly three years.

Freddie reaches up and slides her long blond hair back behind one ear with a slight flick, a familiar motion. Unconsciously I reach up to do the same and stop myself, suddenly remembering a day like this, with the same eerie stillness, the air just as thick, when we were little and taking riding lessons.

Our lesson was cut short when the weather shifted, so we brushed the brown, shiny horses and locked them safely in their stalls. As the thunderclouds boiled outside the barn, the normally sedate horses grew skittish and uneasy. Their eyes got big. Their tails switched. Circling their stalls faster and faster, they bucked against the boards, desperate for a way to get out. I was scared. Yorke was indignant. Freddie was smart and had stayed home that day.

Feeling as restless and unsettled as those penned ponies, I watch the lightning scratching away at the edges of the dark sky and think, Batten down the hatches, some shit is about to go down. The first raindrops start to fall fast and thick, and before they can even hit the ground and be swallowed up by the parched dirt, before they can break the dull silence and splat, fat and wet on the driveway, making heads turn and look my way in anger or concern or surprise, I bolt.

I make my way back to the park, picking my way through puddles and the patches of darkness. It’s raining so hard that the ground can’t keep up. Rivers of sticks and leaves and grass turn and tumble on top of the dust before waterfalling over the curbs and rushing out into the street. Rain-filled gutters blubber and boil over like a summer soup. My feet fight against the current that snakes toward a storm sewer somewhere behind me as I walk along the edge of the road.

Please, please, please, I breathe, please, please, please. This patter fills my head between the rolls of thunder drumming like timpani. Squinting against the bolts of lightning, I flinch every single time a drop of rain smacks onto my face, sharp and cold. Step by step, I squint, I flinch, I pray. It’s worse than facing down a nasty crowd throwing nickels and quarters and assorted loose change from the stands during halftime. Ouch. At least out on the field you can hide behind a set of poms or an unlucky freshman. Out here I’m alone. It’s just me, jumpy, cold, and wet. And crying. God, I hope no one sees me.

The sound of tires on wet blacktop stops my forward march. Bright lights, white paint. My heart drops, sure that it’s Shane. I lower my head to wipe away my tears and realize that it’s pointless. It’s raining, right? Looking up between my dark, dripping lashes, I see him. My cheeks flush, and my heart does double time. Tossing my head back, I laugh and swallow my tears. My soggy little rain-soaked prayers have been answered. By a hot guy in a huge white truck. Bonus.

I cross the river of rainwater between us and tiptoe toward the truck. I swear that steam is rising off me when I step up to the driver’s window and cling onto the wet rubber ledge. Up on my toes, I lean in, lips pursed. Then I change my mind, switch gears, and decide to get it right this time.

“Duffy,” I say, and breathe out with a shy smile, almost embarrassed to be using his name for the first time.