Rule of Thirds, The (8 page)

He shuts the door behind me, pressing me up against it. “It was too long. Too long to be away from a girl I like so much.”

“You’re so direct.”

“Isn’t it good to be direct? To be honest?”

I sneak a peek at the clock on the dresser. It’s nearly
11
. If Dylan wasn’t going to come, he should’ve said so.

Ben grabs my waist and turns me around so we’re facing the mirror on the back of the door. “We look good together,” he says. “Don’t you think?” But it’s clear he’s looking at himself. My reflected image goes red as he nuzzles my ear.

“I’m going to kiss you now.”

And before I can say anything, he’s spinning me back around and then his lips are on mine. Again. And I can’t help thinking what Dr. Judy would say.

“We should go back outside,” I say, taking a step back. He smells like beer.

“Or we could stay here,” Ben says.

He pulls me closer. “Come on . . .” he says, trying to lead me over to the bed. To second base. Oh no. I am staying firmly on first base. No more bases are going to be passed today. “I thought you were into me,” he says. It’s almost a whine.

“I am,” I say. Face it, Pippa. Dylan’s not coming. I try to think clearly: I’m in Dace’s room with a boy who’s totally into me. Who tells me he likes me. Who wants to kiss me. And I like him. Right? And Dr. Judy told me to do what I want this week, without worrying about the outcome.

I’m just not actually sure I can do that. Or if I want to.

“I’m not sure if I like you in that way,” I say, then instantly regret it. “I mean, yet.”

He looks annoyed, then his face softens. “You’re not sure, huh?”

“It’s just . . . It’s all happening a bit fast. Maybe if we just talked a bit. Tell me more about you. Or . . . Buffalo. Or what your favorite TV show is.”

“I think if I kiss you some more, you’ll know a lot quicker if you like me or not than if I tell you about my favorite TV show.”

He leans into me and we’re kissing, just like that. I try to concentrate on the kissing itself, and channeling his tongue inside my mouth rather than all over it. He kisses like Emma’s golden retriever. No, it’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with soft and slobbery kisses. They’re romantic, not rough. That’s nice! Of course it is. But how does Dylan kiss? I bet there’s the perfect amount of roughness, just like his hands.

Stop thinking about Dylan while kissing Ben!

“Maybe we should go back outside,” I say, peeling myself away.

“That bed looks pretty good. We could just lie here and talk,” he says.

“Nice try . . .” I open the door.

He sighs, but grabs his satchel and follows me out of Dace’s room and back down the stairs.

“Walk me out?” he says when we get to the bottom.

“You’re going?” I’m not really surprised. He mumbles something about a curfew.

“Oh,” I say, nodding. “Of course, you should go then.” He tells me he’ll text me later, but he doesn’t call me babe and he doesn’t kiss me again, not even on the cheek.

There’s no use in me staying any longer either. Dylan’s obviously not coming. I don’t know why I even let myself think for a minute he’d actually show up. Back upstairs in Dace’s room I take off my cover-up and pull my white T-shirt and stretchy skirt overtop of my bikini, throw my Tisch hoodie on, then pull my hair into a messy topknot. My flip-flops are at the back door. Dace is out by the pool, standing at the end of a lounge chair. Asher is either trying to undo her bathing suit ties or hang on to them to stay somewhat vertical-ish. Either way, he isn’t succeeding. She swats him away and then throws her arms around me. “Don’t gooooooo.”

“Be good,” I say.

I walk around to the side gate and pull it open. Dylan is standing on the other side. My breath catches in my throat.

“Philadelphia Greene,” he says.

But there’s movement behind him: Callie.

Callie?

“Are we too late?” she says.

Callie’s wearing a tiny white sundress, blue and white wedges and her hair is in a side-braid. She looks really good.

“Kind of,” I say, not completely able to hide my disappointment. “I’ve got to be home soon. But go on in—there’s still a bunch of people there.”

I go to brush past him, but Dylan grabs my arm. “Hey, wait a sec?” Dylan asks, then turns to Callie. “Thanks for the ride. You stay. I’ll just walk home.”

“You sure?” Callie asks, and Dylan nods.

“OK. I’m gonna go in for a bit,” she says. She kisses Dylan on the cheek, gives me a smile and then pushes open the gate to the backyard.

I start walking to the front of the house, and Dylan follows alongside me.

“Sorry I’m so late,” he says. “How was the party?”

“Fun, I guess,” I say.

Dace is able to play it cool better than me. She could be the angriest person alive but you wouldn’t know it unless she wanted you to. In the last three months I’ve probably talked about my feelings more than I ever had in the previous
16
years, and they still remain a mystery to me. I don’t have any control over them. When I know I should be full of emotion, and letting it show, I can’t even muster up a tear, but then when I’d rather just be cool and fun, all I can do is over-obsess.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Dylan asks.

“Nothing!” I say, and I force a smile. “You know, you didn’t have to come if you already had plans tonight with Callie.”

“Plans, yes, I guess—I . . . I was playing a show.”

He invited Callie to a show I didn’t know he had?

“How was it?” I steal a look at him to see him running a hand through his hair.

“I’m really messing this up, aren’t I?” He shoves his hands in his pockets and shrugs. “I didn’t invite you because I figured you were busy with the party. And Callie was already coming to see me play . . .”

“Oh,” I say.

“Anyway, I’m glad you invited me,” he says.

“You are?”

We just look at each other.

“I have an idea,” he says. “How much time do you have? What’s your curfew?”

My watch gives me less than half an hour until I have to be home. “Midnight.”

“We can do it,” Dylan says. “But we have to run.” He starts down the driveway.

“You’re serious?” His goofy half-run is kind of hilarious. I start jogging behind him. He tells me it’s worth it and I speed up.

“Flip-flops. Not. Really. Appropriate. Footwear,” I say, panting. He laughs and grabs my hand as we run down the middle of the deserted street. A minute later he slows to a walk, leading me from the lit road down a darkened dirt path between two houses.

We’re headed toward the ravine, but using an entrance I’ve never taken. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. As though sensing my apprehension, Dylan squeezes my hand tighter. But it’s not the walk that’s making me nervous. The path narrows through the trees so that we have to go single file. “You have to duck a bit,” he says, dropping my hand, and I do, the bottom branches just brushing the top of my head as I follow him down a hill. Eventually the path comes out at a wooden bridge over a creek I never knew existed. I put my hands on the railing and Dylan comes up and stands behind me, placing his arms on the railing beside mine, so that he’s sort of hugging me from behind, without actually wrapping his arms around me.

“Wait a second, then you’ll see.”

As though someone flipped a switch, the sky lights up with tiny stars. Only they’re not stars.

I gasp, wishing I had my camera. “It’s beautiful. What is it?”

“Fireflies,” Dylan says, his breath warm on my neck. It sends chills up and down, in the best possible way.

“But aren’t they usually out in the summer?”

“It’s because it’s so warm. They’ll only live a few days. The energy to light up zaps all their life from them. Sad but beautiful.” Neither of us says anything for a few moments, the only sound the hum of the fireflies’ vibration in the night air.

“I should get you home,” he says, his breath warm. “Even though I could stand here all night with you. I really like you, Philadelphia Greene.”

“I like you too,” I whisper, not wanting to break the spell.

He puts his hands on my waist and turns me around so I’m facing him. Oh, his eyes, the stubble, his dimple . . . On my face I can feel the warmth of his breath. Wrigley’s Spearmint? He brushes a strand of hair away from my face and those beautiful green eyes are getting closer, closer, closer . . .

“WHO LET THE DOGS OUT?” blasts my phone.

Oh my god, seriously?

No, really,
seriously?

Dylan kind of shakes himself. Our eyes meet. Yes, his gaze says, the worst-timed phone call in the history of the world was
not
a figment of my imagination.

“WHO? WHO? WHO?” asks my phone, as I walk up the hill to answer it. It’s like my phone is taunting me, asking me if I know. I haven’t even kissed Dylan, but I know the answer to which boy. It couldn’t be any clearer.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 29
7 DAYS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT

It takes us forever—or at least the entirety of
Breakfast Club
—to clean up. Dace makes a rule that we can’t talk about the guys until we’re done. Which is pure torture but mostly I think she just doesn’t want to talk, period, because she’s so hungover. A million years later, we put the last garbage bag in the garage, and then set ourselves up with another round of Advil, coffees and bacon and sit on the stools at the breakfast bar.

“OK now, where to start?” Dace says, and I give her a look. “Yeah, you win. Funeral Boy first.” All Dace knows is that Dylan showed up at the party with Callie but didn’t come in. I recap the
34
glorious minutes we were together.

“But no kiss?” Dace says.

“No, no kiss. And then I ran home and that was it. But it was super romantic. Seriously though, in hindsight, why was I so adamant about making curfew?”

“No clue. But you’re cute,” Dace says. “So . . . Funeral Boy, then?”

“Hands down. It was perfection.” I sigh. “OK, tell me what happened with you. I witnessed rounds
1
and
2
, but am I missing any others?”

“Rounds
1
and
2
of what?”

“Cole and Asher.”

“I didn’t hook up with Cole.” She makes a face. “Actually I barely saw him the whole night. Why—did you see him?”

I tell her how I saw her—at least I thought I did—with Cole in her mom’s room. It was definitely Cole.

“You were breaking the rule?” she asks, picking at a slice of bacon.

“Sorry.”

“So he was in Viv’s room with a girl?”

I nod. Dace’s face clouds over, and she takes another swig of coffee. I feel bad about swooning over Dylan; she probably didn’t have the best night with either guy. But she stands up again and shakes it off.

“Oh well, whatever,” she says, picking up her phone and studying it. “Asher and I did it last night,” she says, as though it’s every day that you have sex for the first time. My mouth literally drops open. Dace taps something into her phone, then puts it back—face down—on the table. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I know she’s not a virgin now and I still am, but somehow, despite being totally hungover, with ashen skin and matted hair, she looks even more glam than ever.

“And I thought my non-kissing moment was epic.”

“Don’t sweat it, Pip. It’ll happen for you too, eventually.”

“So . . . is Asher gonna get to be your boyfriend now?”

Dace rolls her eyes at me and goes around the breakfast bar to the main counter. “Sex does not equal lifelong commitment. It was no big deal.” She pours herself more coffee from the carafe.

“Really?”

“Well, I don’t want to spoil it for you,” she says, moving to fill up my cup but stopping when she realizes I haven’t touched it. “Anyway, it’s indescribable. You’ll need to find out for yourself.” She puts the carafe back on the warmer.

Fears officially realized: it does change things. This is why I didn’t want one of us to have sex before the other. She’s acting differently already. Like I can’t handle it. Maybe I can’t.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30
6 DAYS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT

Dylan: Food Alert! Cherry Blasters playing free outdoor concert tomorrow night at Hanlan’s Field. They’re kinda scruffy hipster. Want to go and test the theory — do ugly guys with food name make good music? 

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1
5 DAYS UNTIL VANTAGE POINT

Mom is not thrilled with the idea of me going to a concert on a school night. And she is even less thrilled with the idea of me going to a concert with a guy she’s never heard of. “Mom, don’t worry about it, he’s a nice guy, he got accepted to Harvard!” is my comeback to that one.

“It’s October, Pippa,” she says, and already I can see this comeback has backfired. “If he was accepted at Harvard, why isn’t he
at
Harvard?”

“Mom, just trust me, OK?”

She makes a couple more protests—she doesn’t like the sound of this, please be careful, she doesn’t want me making a habit of going out on school nights, don’t I have homework to do, blah blah blah. And then: permission granted. I don’t even care that I have to be home by
11
. The concert starts at eight and there’s only one opener and Cherry Blasters only have two albums so, yeah,
11
. Probably it’ll be over a bit after
10
, actually, but I want a bumper in there so that I have some time before I get that blast of “Who Let the Dogs Out?” With a few more Dylan-ward texts the plan’s established: we’re meeting at
6
, after my shift at St. Christopher’s.

Highlights of the day before the night of: lunch is a photo club meeting that sees us going around sharing our Threes photos. I almost think Ben’s not going to show up, but he eventually does, about fifteen minutes into the meeting. He sits at the end of the table, not making eye contact with any of us. When it’s his turn, he flicks through an iPad photo album, and it’s weird. I recognize a couple of the photos from our afternoon in the park—three trees, three logs, three flagpoles I somehow missed. But once again his photos are not quite right. The angles are all off. They lack any sense of composition. They’re nothing like the pictures he showed us last week. Maybe he’s just having an off week?

I go last, after Gemma. Then there’s a moment where you can feel the room’s tension. “About next week’s theme,” I say, and everybody flicks to everyone else’s gaze. “Any ideas?”

Nada. Zilch. Zip. Which is what I was kind of hoping. “So,” I say, “what if we just skip the theme this week?”

“Yeah,” Jeffrey agrees. “I’m pretty busy putting my entry together for Vantage Point.”

As are we all, Jeffrey. As. Are. We. All.

After school is fun with sick people. I’m back on flower delivery. I guess because I did such a good job last week? Every time I take an elevator I expect Dylan to get on. But no, it’s all uneventful until I pick up a skateboard-shaped cookie, decorated with every type of candy imaginable. The address tag lists a room on the fourth floor, back in the Rehabilitation Ward.

“Howie?” I say as I knock on the door, guessing the patient’s name based on the icing inscription on the candy skateboard. I push open the door and find a boy, about
11
, lying on the bed. The cast that goes ankle to thigh has about a thousand signatures on it. His eyes widen when he sees the edible skateboard.

“Holy crap, bring that over here,” he says, and I carry it over to the bed. A real skateboard rests against the wall beside the head of his bed. He notices my camera around my neck. “Hey, you take pictures?”

I say yes, and he asks if that’s what I want to be when I grow up, which I think is funny to hear, but it’s true. He tells me he wants to be a pro skateboarder.

“Is that how you broke your leg?” I ask and he nods. “You must be pretty bummed out.”

He shrugs. “Nah. I almost landed an eight-step handrail. Now I know I can do it. Soon as I get this off. Will you take my pic? I want to remember this.”

The first shots are him with the candy skateboard, and then he gets me to grab his actual skateboard. “Here’s how I did it,” he says, lifting the skateboard up, then maneuvering it over the railing on the side of the bed. I snap a bunch of pics of Howie in action, first focusing in on the skateboard, letting Howie go out of focus behind, then vice versa.

“I’m probably not supposed to take your picture without your mom or dad’s approval,” I realize aloud, then I assure him I’ll send him the pics and won’t do anything else with them. I help him back into bed and tell him I have to go. By the time I leave Howie’s room I’m in a really good mood. Back downstairs, I grab a delivery for the third floor. It’s only once I’m off the elevator—actually, it’s only once I’m, like, right there at the door, about to knock—that I glance at the tag to make sure I have the right room. Room
334
, the tag says. And my legs nearly give out beneath me. Room
334
.

I lean up against the wall and close my eyes and try to take a deep breath but I can’t get enough air.

Room
334
.

There’s the supply closet, just down the hall from the waiting room where I’d hunch down in a chair and watch TV when everything in the room got to be too much, or when my parents had something adults-only to discuss. There’s the poster:
Washing Hands Saves Lives
. Which I always wondered about—prevents a few flu cases, maybe, but saves
lives
? It seemed a little overblown to me. And there’s the nurses’ station I’ve been avoiding. It’s a bit past
5
on a Tuesday afternoon—Rishna’s the nurse on duty unless the schedules have changed. She had the best stories. The one she told me right near the end, about how she woke up in the middle of the night to find a strange cat in her house. Her color-blind husband had let it in. He’d thought it was their cat.

I take a long slow breath. Everything’s going to be OK. Lots of patients have come and gone from this room. It’s just a room. It’s been cleaned. It’s been sanitized. There’s nothing left in that room that has any memories at all. There’s just someone else in there, a little earlier on the same journey that ends with a daughter no longer having her dad around.

Or whatever.

Three more deep breaths. My eyes focus on the numerals:
334
. My camera clacks against the door as I set the arrangement on the floor. Then, focus: the door number in the right third of the frame, the other two-thirds filled by the hallway I walked so many times. That’s right: concentrate on the rule of thirds, so you don’t concentrate on anything else.

• • •

Dylan’s carrying a blue blanket and I’m carrying the Cherry Blaster candies he gave me when he picked me up in front of the hospital in his dad’s
total
dad-mobile, a navy Cadillac, with a shiny wood dashboard and all the stations preset to easy listening. Not at all what I would’ve thought the lead singer of Rules for Breaking the Rules would be driving but, in its own way,
so
awesome.

He lays out the blanket at a spot about halfway between the stage and the concession stands, and we both look down at it. It’s a plush blanket—with an enormous Buffalo Sabres logo on it.

“Wow,” I say, blinking.

“Uh. Yeah,” he says.

“I didn’t realize you were a big hockey fan,” I say. “You know, you could probably see that thing from space.”

He laughs. And then I giggle, and then I can’t stop laughing, and neither can he. “Actually,” Dylan says, “my dad’s the fan. I guess I just kind of grabbed the first blanket I saw. Oh god, this is embarrassin. . . . Are you even gonna sit on this?”

“I’ll give it a shot,” I say, still laughing.

“Hey, you want a drink?”

“You think you’ll be able to find your way back?”

He grins. “I’ll just look for the only girl on a Buffalo Sabres blanket.”

Dylan heads off, picking his way among the blankets and the picnic baskets and as he goes I watch him, this boy, this easy boy, this boy who just made me laugh more than I’ve laughed in the whole of the previous year. He’s even cuter in the viewfinder as I snap a few pictures, out of reflex.

When he comes back he hands me a Diet Coke. He’s drinking water.

“Can I see?” he asks, nodding at my camera.

Does he know what he’s asking? Does he know what’s in that camera? A.k.a., my life?

As well as the pictures of him I just shot. The way he smiles suggests that he gets it.

It takes a minute for him to figure out how to get it into view mode. He ticks through the ones I just shot of him without comment, then continues through the rest of the images on the data card.

“Wow,” he says after a while. “I love how you see the hospital through your lens.”

“Passing the time,” I say, but his words are comforting.

He gets to the room
334
photo and looks at me with a question.

“My dad’s room,” I say.

He studies the picture for a second. “I’m sorry.”

My hands are busy pulling out blades of grass. Find blade, pull. Find blade, pull.

I twist the blade between my fingers and look at Dylan. “It’s OK. Life goes on, right? I’m just trying to concentrate on other stuff. Vantage Point, this photography contest, for example. Top two go to a Tisch camp in New York next month. I’d learn so much. It’s two weeks of hardcore photography. But the best part is that I’d be there—right at the school. And it would look good on my college apps. Tisch is my dream school.”

“That’s awesome.”

“What about you?” I ask. “What happened with Harvard?”

He takes a sip of his water. Nods. Then explains that he deferred for a year. “I needed to get some things in order and decide if going to Harvard is what I really want to do.”

There’s now a patch of dirt where there used to be grass.

“I’ve got a few things on the go,” he says.

Like what? I’m dying to ask, but then the stage lights come up. There’s the unmistakable shag of the Cherry Blasters lead singer, and I say something about it to Dylan and he laughs.

“That would be a great name for a band,” he says. “Unmistakable Shag.”

Lots of questions occurred to me when Dylan first asked me to go to see Cherry Blasters. What would it be like, just the two of us? Even though I’ve had my massive crush forever, it’s not like we’ve spent much time together. What if we had totally different concert styles? What if he hated standing up—and got mad if others stood up in front of him? Would he dance? How did he dance? And what would he think of the way I danced? And also: what did
I
think of the way I danced? But from the moment Cherry Blasters come out I realize I have nothing to worry about. Dylan grabs my hand and pulls me up, and it starts with him bobbing his head, and then I’m bobbing my head, and then my hips start moving and his are too, and there we are on the Buffalo Sabres blanket, in full-on dance mode, a mode we stay in through the whole of the rest of the concert.

The Cherry Blasters never do encores. It’s kind of their thing. So when they announce the next song will be their last, I know it’s going to be their big hit, “Even if You Don’t,” and I touch Dylan’s arm and go on my tiptoes to shout into his ear, “I love this song so
much
,” and then I realize, I just touched Dylan’s arm. I just shouted into Dylan’s ear. And it was completely natural.

“The line about being in love with a girl who doesn’t love you back?” Dylan says once the lights have come up and he’s gathering his ridiculous blanket under his arm. Then he puts his other arm around me.

Also completely natural.

“Only that’s not it,” I say as we follow the crowd toward the exit. “It’s just that she has a secret and doesn’t want to hurt him. I wonder what the secret is.”

“It kinda doesn’t matter, right? It’s like trust, I guess. You either trust someone or you don’t.”

“I think it matters. If the secret is hurtful,” I say.

“What if she’s worried if he finds out, it’ll taint his view of her. And she just wants a fair shot with him?” We reach the car and Dylan opens the door for me.

“I don’t know,” I say once he’s beside me in the car. “It’s so deceitful. Like tricking the person into falling in love with them, without knowing everything up front.”

“So I should tell you I only have three toes on my left foot? Makes it hard to wear flip-flops but I get to park in handicapped spots.”

“Ha, ha,” I say, then actually laugh.

“Hey, so what time do you have to be home?” He pulls out of the parking space and follows the line of cars out of the lot. “Awesome,” he says after I say
11
. “You game for a little celebratory snack? I think the Cherry Blasters were sufficiently deserving, no?”

“Yes,” I say. And then I turn toward him. “I had such a good time tonight.” He just looks at me and grins. I can’t remember the last time I felt this way. It’s not happy, exactly. It’s more of an awareness of not being
un
happy. Buoyant. Light. Something. As we drive we talk and it’s not until he’s pulling into a parking lot that I register where we are.

Scoops.

Suddenly my mouth goes dry.

Dylan is saying something, but I don’t know what. I lean over, putting my head between my knees, the seatbelt cutting into the side of my neck.

“Are you OK?” Dylan asks, his hand on my leg.

“Take me home. Take me home. Take me home,” I say over and over. Am I saying it aloud? Can he hear me? Does he know where I live? What is he going to think of me?

Everything goes quiet.