Kiss Crush Collide (18 page)

Watching the clock over the office doorway, I swing myself into my chair. It is the exact same clock that hangs next to the flag in each and every classroom in my school.

I sit and stare at it ticking for a few seconds, enjoying the irony that this same clock is the one we stare at desperately for three seasons of the year. All day from eight to three, we will it to tick faster and run down the school day as quickly as possible. Here it silently steals summer away in splashes and seconds.

It clicks to one o’clock.

Then Troy blows the whistle, long and hard, and unleashes the frenzy. Valerie walks in, three minutes later, with her blanket and overworked tote bag, and settles in next to me. I watch her spread out, and my equilibrium, temporarily shaken last night with her unexpected absence, returns to normal.

“You know Mr. Ridley?” Valerie asks out of the blue sometime that afternoon. She stops reading and props open the encyclopedia she is skimming.

Her sunglasses—not the cat-eye ones from before, these are rounder—perch on the end of her nose. She looks over the top of them to see if she has my attention.

“The one with the Porsche?” she prompts.

Oh, yes, I know that Porsche.

“Yeah?” I ask, my eyes on the clock again, wondering where this is going.

“Well, it seems that Mr. Ridley was working out at the gym at the club, your club, you know, lifting weights, doing lifts or dead squats or whatever they’re called.”

Dead lifts. Shane does them for football.

“What are you talking about?” is right there, rudely on the tip of my tongue, but I stop myself.

“Well,” she pauses dramatically. “The whole front of that gym is glass, a huge window, you know.” She looks at me, and I nod. “So, Mr. Ridley is lifting,” she pantomimes lifting a heavy bar over her head, her arms actually straining under the imaginary weight, “when all of a sudden, right in front of him, you know how it is,” she pauses again, “his Porsche goes squealing by. And he’s not in it.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. It just drives off. Racing toward the lake. Good-bye,” she says, squinting and waving into the distance.

She leans back against the fence, and I wait for her to adjust herself. When she’s sure she’s comfortable, obviously enjoying my frustrated interest, she continues.

“And the whole time the Porsche is driving away, it’s supposed to be in the back lot at the club getting washed and detailed, but somehow it’s absolutely roaring down the lake road.” She scoots herself forward. “Or so I heard.”

I imagine the Porsche, the spoiler lifting as it gains speed, popping over the little hills that dot the golf course.

“So what happened?”

“Oh,” she says, her voice muffled as she tucks her head under her arm and reaches over to grab the book she was reading when she started the story, “he dropped the weights.” Looking down, she continues. “Heard he broke his toe.” She drops the heavy book into her bag with a thick thud. “Threatened to sue the club.”

Troy taps at his watch, looking over his shoulder to be sure the clock on the wall is right. It’s 4:59. He looks around at every chair, catching the attention of each lifeguard with a small lift of his chin, and I stand, distractedly, wanting Valerie to finish the story before the commotion of closing time begins. I know that she is toying with me, that she knows what I want to know.

“And?” I ask urgently.

“Oh, and Jon Duffy got busted,” she says, stopping her book packing long enough to make annoying air quotes around the word “busted.”

Troy blasts his whistle and catches me completely by surprise. I try to exhale, but all my air is gone, my lungs empty as my head fills with the tinny shrill of the pool at closing time. My whistle drops from my lips.

Valerie walks over to me and slings her bag at the base of my chair. It knocks up against the metal leg with a clunk. I look at her, my eyes glazed, unable to focus.

I know in my heart that Valerie is trying to redeem herself. It’s in the way she leans forward, looking up at me beseechingly, talking urgently and as privately as possible in this public place as the crowd mills around us, shouting and waving to one another, making plans and saying good-byes.

“So,” she continues, resting her elbow on the platform near my ankles, “Big Duff worked a deal. Jon Duffy can still park cars at the club, but he can drive them no farther than the painted lines at the edge of the lot.”

She rises up onto her tippy toes, motioning me to come closer.

She whispers into my ear, “I’m sure he doesn’t like to talk about it.” She settles back on her heels and says, “But he’s probably grounded for the rest of his life.”

My brain is buzzing. Reeling. I sit back down stunned. God, do you know what this means? He didn’t disappear. I didn’t get dumped. He just drove off in the wrong car.

I look over at Valerie, realization dawning in my eyes.

She smiles up at me, then reaches down to grab her bag.

She pauses. Breathes in.

“Are you going to get him back?” she asks shyly, and I realize that she is not being petty or vindictive.

She is being genuine and true, and unlike everybody else in my life, the ones who think they know exactly what they are going to get, Valerie might actually expect something more from me. She’s raising the bar.

“I’m gonna try,” I say, and she smiles at me, bold and bright.

The fence shakes behind me, jarring me back to the present tense.

“You call this a job?” Yorke’s voice chides, and I jump, twisting in my chair, surprised to find both my sisters, overdressed for almost any occasion in short summer dresses and high-heeled sandals, standing on the worn grass under the smokers’ tree.

I scramble down from my chair to face them, and Valerie scurries out of the way, like a bug. She hovers about three feet away but doesn’t leave.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” I say to Yorke.

“Neither can I,” she replies coolly, lifting her sunglasses to stare at Valerie, giving her the look of death.

Valerie stammers without saying a word and stoops to pick up her stuff. She crosses between me and Yorke and Freddie with her eyes locked on mine. I stand stock-still and watch her go, silently trying to stop her.

I am torn, hating and loving Valerie, desperate to chase after her and dig for details, and dying to get away, to ditch my sisters and find Duffy. She can’t just drop a bombshell like that and then walk away. I can’t decide if I want to vomit or knock her teeth out.

“I had to get out of the house,” Yorke says, her eyes following Valerie. “Roger is driving me insane.” She looks over at me with a pained look on her face. “Literally insane.”

“Or figuratively,” Freddie adds. “What was that all about?”

“What is
she
all about?” Yorke sniffs with a flick of her long blond hair. Valerie’s shoulders crawl up around her ears protectively, and she stops, hunched, and gives the three of us one last look before disappearing into the girls’ dressing room.

I don’t answer.

I am ashamed that my sisters see only the worn swimsuit and the bony shoulders, the wrong color toenail polish and the less than perfect smile. They don’t notice that her slight overbite hides an awesome laugh and that Valerie’s brain might be even bigger than Freddie’s.

I start to unwind the heavy green hose from the fence.

Yorke rolls her wide eyes and asks impatiently, “Can we go?”

“You’re early,” I say, with a nod toward the clock hanging over the office. A little gurgle of warm water leaks from the tip of the hose. “I’ve still got work to do.”

Yorke cocks her hip and crosses her arms. Her toe taps up a little puff of dust. She is evidently displeased with the idea of waiting.

“Is that your boss?” Freddie asks, lifting her chin toward Troy and the office.

I nod, looking at the sign propped in the corner of the office window that says WE DON’T
SWIM
IN
YOUR
TOILET
. DON’T
PEE
IN
OUR
POOL
.

“Whoever he is, he’d better not make me late,” Yorke says, acting like she doesn’t even know Troy, like that one year of college she’s got under her belt somehow wiped her memory clean.

It’s tragic, since Troy and Yorke were in the same class. They probably napped next to each other in kindergarten or shared a knuckle-bending slow dance in the middle school gymnasium. Probably passed each other in the halls every day.

Yorke and Freddie do not acknowledge his presence in any way. My sisters stand shoulder to shoulder on the far side of the fence, watching him from a distance, their designer sunglasses not quite large enough or dark enough to hide their indifference.

“Just go,” I say, the heavy hose drooping in my hand, the weight of the words I wish I could say sitting like lead in my mouth.

Freddie backs away, her face surprised.

“Fine,” Yorke says, with a dramatic shove from the fence. “You can find your own way for once.”

“Fine,” I say, bolder than she is for the first time, breathing deep, full of myself, till they do turn and walk away. With a trailing wave from Freddie, I feel my shoulders start to shake.

“I got it. I got it.”

Troy’s bare feet are slapping toward me. He looks troubled, something I didn’t know he knew how to be.

“I got it,” he says again as he jogs up next to me and takes the hose from my hand.

I think maybe this is the only thing he can think of to say, that maybe his brain is stuck on
repeat
, that he is stunned senseless by the sight of me tearing up.

We both stop and stare at Yorke’s car rolling off down the road. He must have seen the whole thing.

I walk over to my chair to collect my stuff, shaking my head because I don’t know what he thinks of me. Well, actually I do. He thinks I am just like them.

“Thanks, Troy,” I finally stumble and say.

He smiles, and I feel slightly forgiven as the cool spray from his hose dances across my toes as I go.

“Will you help me?”

The car door is already swinging shut when I catch up with her. I stand, alone in the grass, knowing that the girl who has spent the summer trying to trump me is the only one I can trust.

She turns and asks, “Help you try?”

I nod.

Her eyes light up, and I open the passenger door open and slide into a worn bucket seat.

“What exactly did you have in mind?” Valerie asks as she rattles the engine to life.

“Find Duffy,” I say, staring straight ahead as we rumble out onto the street. It’s that simple.

“A quest,” Valerie says excitedly, grinding the gears.

I can live with that.

“I have things to say,” I explain.

“You will not just be noble in thought but in action.” Valerie lays it on thick as we leave the park.

Sure, I think, trying to see past the petrified bug remains on the windshield. But she’s right.

We try the minimart first, then the Gas n Go, followed by Fosdal’s bakery on Main Street, basically any place that sparkles with sugar, spots that Duffy frequents for sweet fixes and gallons of juice. At the corner I consider trying the auto parts store, knowing it is a stretch, but my knowledge of his life outside the confines of a car is pretty limited.

“What are we looking for?” Valerie asks, her eyes scanning the street.

The light changes. I realize we have it all wrong. There is only one place he can be.

“Head for the club,” I say, certain, as Valerie floors it and we head for the highway.

Valerie’s VW shakes and shimmies at anything over sixty. You can’t hear the radio or the road or the books dancing on the backseat, only squeaks and metal and the engine bearing down.

“Is this top speed?” I ask, watching the gearshift wiggle between us.

“It is the people’s car,” Valerie answers haughtily as she turns onto the lake road.

“Well, tell the people to step on it,” I say, ignoring the buzz of my phone for the five hundredth time. My sisters have obviously made it to the church, and my mother is in panic mode.

The parking lot at the club is pretty empty. A few cars sit in the sun, but it’s too late for a good tee time and too early yet for dinner.

When we shudder to a stop on the parking pad, a black-haired valet, an older man I think I recognize, pauses, his tan hand outstretched, unsure if he should open the door or send us around to the back.

He leans down and looks in the open window.

“Is Jon Duffy here?” I ask, and he smiles, happy to see someone blond and parkable.

“No, no, Miss Johnson, not yet.”

I flop back, and his smile falters.

“I think he’s here later,” he says, “parking for dinner.”

Somehow I am too late and too soon all at the same time. Valerie looks over at me, and I shrug.

“Thanks.” Valerie waves to the valet, and she circles back through the parking lot.

“Where to?” she asks, scooping her sarong between her knees to shift into second.

“I have no idea,” I say.

“We can’t stop now,” Valerie says, chugging back down the driveway, away from the club. “We just got started.”

I admire her spirit. Not in a glee club kind of way, but in a damn, you’re going to get up and go again kind of way. I don’t know where that comes from. I want to crawl under a rock and die.

“Give me a break,” I say, slumping into my seat, watching the countryside speeding by, at least as fast as this car allows it, and sigh. “I’m just a beginner.”

“What about his house?” Valerie asks optimis-tically.

“Sure.” I nod, ready for the next turn.

She slows. “Do you know where it is?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

“But you know everything,” I say.

Valerie rolls her eyes at me.

“You really don’t know where he lives?” she asks.

She’s assuming that Duffy and I had some kind of normal relationship, with dinner dates and long phone calls and good-night kisses at the front door.

I sigh, mentally scolding myself for using the past tense.

“He lives at Big Duff’s house.”

“Which is where?”

I shrug, my shoulders heavy. I was hoping and hoping, and now I am hopeless. No matter how much I want to keep going, to change what has already happened, to say what should have been said, my mother is waiting. There is always that.