Starstruck (10 page)

W
HEN SCHOOL ENDS
, I expect Wish to show up at my locker, wielding the keys to his truck and nipping at my heels like a puppy. Since I’ve acted totally outside my comfort zone all day, I can’t wait to get home. I spend a few minutes straightening my locker, but he doesn’t come. I peer down the hallway and finally see him trudging toward me, head down. “Hi,” I say to him, as brightly as possible.

Maybe it’s just that the rain has been falling and the hallway is dark, but his eyes look black-rimmed, troubled. “Hey.”

Okay, wait. When I wanted to run in the other direction, he was practically all over me. Now that I’m being all friendly, he’s the one running away? Guys can bite. And by the time they do, you’re the one wearing the dog collar. “Everything okay?” I ask, trying to sound nonchalant, even though my palms are sweating.

He nods. “Yeah. Ready?” he says, as if there’s an appointment he’s late for. He doesn’t bother to look at me, just continues cruising down the hallway. I follow at his heels, like his butt boil again.

Well, I think as we head off toward the parking lot, I knew this was bound to happen eventually. Even a wardrobe designed by Marc What’s-his-face couldn’t postpone the inevitable. If I’m lucky, he’ll break things off before the party tonight, and I can spend my Friday in bed with Ben & Jerry instead of stressing over whether anyone can see the mongo zit I felt blossoming on my chin last period.

When we get outside, the storm has dissolved to a drizzle. Wish bites his tongue and stares at the clouds. “You said clear skies tonight?”

I nod, wondering why the intense interest in the weather. It’s not like Terra’s party is outside or anything.

Still the gentleman, he pulls me to his side and tents his big nylon jacket over us. I try not to pay attention to the spicy smell of his aftershave or the hard curve of his ribs brushing against my fleshy arm … but of course, trying not to pay attention means that that’s all I pay attention to, so I nearly trip on the curb when we get to his truck. And then, on the ride home, he’s quiet. I keep waiting for him to open up his mouth and for “It’s just not working …” to break the silence. Instead, he just sits there, rubbing his shoulder blade every once in a while.

When we pull up to the bakery, he turns to me, still rubbing his shoulder, and I think, This is it. But he says, “So, is nine okay?”

I sit there, speechless, perched on the edge of his leather seat, which I’d heretofore been expecting my backside never to come in contact with again. Nine. Nine what? Nine is a perfectly okay number, I guess.

He must see my brain working overtime. “To pick you up? For the party?”

I exhale so deeply I bet he can smell on my breath the one Dorito I allowed myself to eat at lunch today. “Uh, yeah.”

He looks at the ground. “Hey, listen, I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“I know,” I say. The moment I’ve been waiting for. “I know what it is.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he says. “Okay?”

I squint at him. “Do what?”

“Act like those girls, or whatever. Just be Gwen. Be you. All right?”

My face burns when I realize what he’s talking about. Someone must have let him in on the sex conversation. Or maybe he’s talking about the disastrous Operation Butt Grab. “Uh. Okay,” I say. I scramble out of his truck in a daze, barely feeling the raindrops as they fall on me. I can’t help thinking that Wish must have been too much of a wuss to call it quits. Because that’s obviously what he wanted, right? I’m so busy replaying the whole scene in my mind that I almost slam the screen door on Wish, who has followed me. He catches the door with his foot and hands me my vocab book. “You left this in the truck,” he says.

“Oh, uh, thanks,” I say, wondering if that’s wuss code for “we need to break up.”

“Hey, man.” Wish nods toward the bread rack, and that’s when I notice Christian.

I do not want to introduce them, but Wish is standing there expectantly. “Wish, Christian, Christian, Wish,” I mumble, waving my hand in the appropriate directions.

“Hey, man,” Wish repeats, and stops rubbing his shoulder to extend his hand. They shake. Christian mutters some pleasantries that don’t sound very pleasant the way he says them. There’s a moment of silence while they just stand there, sizing each other up as if they’re about to do battle, like all guys do when they meet. It’s completely awkward.

“See you tonight,” Wish says to me, breaking the silence. Then he jogs off to his truck.

The first thing I catch when I turn away from the display window is Christian’s smug expression, big enough to fill the store. He starts to sing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from
The Lion King
in this horrible falsetto, using a hoagie roll as a microphone.

I glare at him.

“Well, at least you ditched the stay-at-home-mom look,” he says.

“Shut up.”

“It’s an improvement.”

“Could you please drop dead?”

“And leave you alone to take care of all this?”

I’m fishing for some witty retort, but nothing comes to mind.

“Scumbling screwfinger?” he offers.

I gnash my teeth so hard they hurt. “Whatever.”

“Hey, where did you say he was from?” he asks.

I am not in the mood to discuss Wish with Christian. “What does it matter where a person is from,” I say, putting on my best Christian bad-boy hiss, “when they’re never going back?”

He shrugs. “No. Seriously.”

“I am being serious.” But he’s still staring at me, so I give up. I need to get upstairs, anyway, and start prepping for tonight, which will likely take me every minute of the six hours I have left. “L.A.”

He nods slowly. “Thought so.”

I wait for him to say more. He doesn’t. “Well, aren’t you Mr. All-Knowing?”

He grins. “Tell me. Does he make you feel warm and kind of all hot and bothered whenever you see him? Do you feel a little delirious whenever he’s around?”

I scowl at him. As if I would dignify that with a response. And anyway, it’s not delirious so much as wanting to pee my pants.

“You do, don’t you?” His grin widens. “Thought so.”

Now I feel myself blushing. I need to run upstairs, stat, but for some reason I can’t. I’m just dying to prove him wrong, to wipe that smug expression off his face. “And what else do you know about him?” I ask.

He scratches his chin. “He used to live here a few years ago, right? Well, I bet before he left, he wasn’t all that, was he? He was just a regular old Joe, right?”

I don’t say anything.

“And almost overnight, he’s this gorgeous god, right? Everyone wants him. Am I right?”

I roll my eyes. “Wow, you have it all figured out, don’t you? You should invest in a tent on the boardwalk and a deck of tarot cards.”

He shakes his head. “Joke about it all you want. But the bottom line is, your boyfriend is trouble.”

I’m reaching for a jelly donut and suddenly stop. “What do you mean?”

“It means that your boyfriend might have picked up a little more than a tan when he was out west. That he might be exerting a little influence upon you.”

I squint at him. “Influence?”

“He’s playing with powers he can’t control,” he says.

I squint even more. Does he know how goofy he sounds? “Um, like Lex Luthor?”

He waves a hand in my direction. “Fine, don’t believe me. But these things never end well.”

“Alrighty,” I say, backing away carefully. Powers he can’t control? We’re talking about Philip Wishman, a guy who had an imaginary dog friend named Ruffy as a kid and could eat his weight in pinwheel cookies, not some diabolical evil genius. Wish couldn’t harm a fly. And as this week has shown, he’s so mild-mannered he couldn’t even break the local fat girl’s heart by calling it quits with her.

When I get upstairs, I’m not even in my bedroom before I’m tearing off my designer ensemble. My mom is in the kitchen, staring down the sink drain, but she whips her head up as I come barreling through the apartment like Tornado Gwendolyn. “Oh! You look wonderful. What a lovely out—” she begins, but I have the blouse half over my head and am struggling like a headless chicken to get it off, because I forgot to undo one of the buttons.

“I’ve got to take a shower,” I mumble through the silky fabric, bumping into the wall before pulling aside the curtain to my bedroom.

“Oh. Actually. You can’t.” By now I’ve freed myself from the blouse and am staring at her. She points to the sink. “No water pressure. I’ve called the repairman.”

“What?” I shriek. Sure, things go wrong on a daily basis in an apartment that’s as old as George Washington, but not the water! Water is one of those things I’ve come to take for granted, like death and bad caf food. So for this to happen today, the single most important day I’ve known thus far, is just … another chapter in the story of my screwy life.

She shrugs. “Since when do you need to take a shower on a Friday? Ohhhh,” she says, raising her eyebrows a couple of times. “Hot date with Wish?”

“Mom. Ew.” She still hasn’t given up on her mission to help me get it on with Wish, but I’m too panicked to correct her. I start to do a mental inventory of everything I would use water for, besides showering off the crud I’ve accumulated from a particularly boring game of flag football in gym. Though I pretty much imitated a tree the entire time, it was hot outside, and well … as I mentioned, I’m a sweat machine. Great, I’ll have to hope that my antiperspirant can perform miracles. Other than that … no teeth brushing. No flushing the toilets. Oh, hell, this is a disaster! And suddenly, I’m thirsty. “How long until the repair guy gets here?”

“He gave me a window of between noon and eight today.”

“Window? That’s like a giant black hole!” I moan. Okay, time to reassess the situation. Water. Where can I get fresh water? Of course! Melinda’s, next door. “Do you think Melinda would mind if I used one of her—”

“The whole block is out.”

“Oh.” I open the fridge and look for a container of water, anything I might use to work up a little lather with. Nothing. This is desperate. A car door slams. I run to the window and see a flash of red speeding away and Evie bounding up the stairs and smiling like she’s in her own maxi-pad commercial, completely unaware of the horrors that await her once she enters the apartment. Beyond her, down the block, I see the dunes, and the boardwalk, where the beach entrance is. And right there …

A fountain!

A glimmer of hope ignites. Okay, it’s been forever since I’ve been to the beach, and even when I was a kid making sand castles, that fountain was only powerful enough to dribble pathetically, like a drooling baby. Still, it’s more than I have going for me here. If Mr. Repairman hasn’t crawled out of his black hole to fix our water situation by eight o’clock, that’s the master plan.

Meanwhile, Evie’s face has just run the gamut from confusion to horror to denial, and now she is turning the knobs on the bathroom sink and moaning. As if she wouldn’t look perfectly scrumptious after spending two months fighting for life in the Australian outback. I decide not to tell her about Operation Fountain and let her fend for herself.

At seven-forty-five, Mr. Repairman is still somewhere in a galaxy far, far away. I’m still in my cutoff sweat shorts and sticky bun–stained T-shirt, and Wish is going to pick me up in just over an hour. All I’ve done to prepare for the night is pop the pimple on my chin and eat another two jelly donuts. I feel drops of sweat dampening my forehead from the pressure. Still, I load up a plastic bag with my toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, and razor, and slip out the door. I don’t think I’ll have the nerve to shave my legs at the fountain, but who knows? I could get brave. Luckily, it has stopped raining, and the stars are popping out everywhere, bright in the sky. I hurry down the street, past Melinda’s, and am just about to climb the ramp to the boardwalk when I see it.

Wish’s truck.

It’s parked right outside the entrance to the beach and it’s covered in raindrops. What is he doing here? Shouldn’t he be at home, getting ready for the party? Maybe he decided to catch a few waves with his board beforehand. That’s the good thing about being a guy: you don’t have to launch yourself off the cliff of madness, spending hours upon hours preparing for a party. Still, he is interfering with Operation Fountain. Like I’d be able to shave my legs there now?

My first instinct is to run in the other direction. Not only do I look like a goober in my ratty shorts and T-shirt, but I’m carrying my toiletries like a bag lady. But then I see his longboard peeking out of the back of his truck. So what is he doing out there? I can’t help it: I find myself creeping toward the steps to the beach, toward the black horizon, where the gray storm clouds are moving out to sea. The wind whips through the dunes, whistling as it blows through the grass, and as the wet sand crunches under my bare feet, I see him. Not in his wet suit, on the waves, but on a dark blanket stretched out on the shore. He’s lying there motionless, as if sunbathing, or worshipping, beneath the quiet black sky. The moon and the stars shine on his bare chest, making it glow yellow, like a lone dim bulb. I swallow, and the wind feels cool on the new sweat that’s just sprung up on my hairline. Something about this scene is wrong. Not just that he’s sunbathing where there is no sun, but that his chest doesn’t seem to move … not at all. Not even to rise and fall with every breath.

It reminds me that I am forgetting to breathe. I take in the salty sea air and exhale slowly as a seagull screeches. Wish’s body stirs and he springs upright, looking around. His back is to me, so I don’t think he notices me, but he runs his hands through his hair, visibly shaking and tense, more agitated than I’ve ever seen him. He grabs handfuls of sand and throws it everywhere as a string of curses, horrible, vicious words I’ve never heard sweet Wish use before, spew from his mouth. He breathes once or twice, then settles back down again. Silent. Dead.

My only thought is That’s not him. That’s not Wish. I quickly make my way down the ramp, shivering all the while, wishing I could purge my memory of the last few moments. But I know that just wanting that means it will be etched there forever.