The New Guy (6 page)

“I don’t know. And he’s not my boyfriend,” I say. “But we’re hanging out tomorrow. We’re walking dogs together.”

“After that, bring him by,” Mom says. “If you want.”

“No pressure!” Darcy says. “I won’t sing.”

“Are you friends with Matt Hale on Facebook?” Darcy asks Mom, and they start laughing about how he named all his kids after spices (with Basil being the oldest and Saffron the youngest), and I’m free to escape to my room with the dogs.

I know Peanut and Daisy don’t really understand English, but I can’t imagine they’re up for this Matt Hale conversation either.

I pick up Alex the next morning at seven forty-five. Darcy got up and brewed coffee for us, so I filled two travel mugs and brought along two bananas from the bowl on the counter.

At least I hope that was the intent of the coffee, and Mom and Darcy aren’t wondering what happened to it.

“Hey.” He gets into the car and grins at me. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“Thanks for going with me.”

We sip our coffees in silence for a bit as I navigate over to Highland Park. Alex stares out the window, as if he’s logging every tree, every shop, every street sign. This is Alex’s new home, and he must want to know it.

After waving to Tricia once we’re inside Stray Rescue, we head right back to find Santiago in the first row of kennels. He leashes up a bulldog for Alex, while I take a husky mix named Luna.

“You did a great job last week,” Santiago tells Alex. “So you
won’t be stuck with me this time. I’ll let your girlfriend supervise you.”

Oh my god, Santiago.

“Great” is all Alex says, though.

And luckily I don’t slam my face into any cages.

Outside I’m desperately rolling through my brain in the attempt to come up with anything to distract from the
girlfriend
talk.

“How’s the editor gig going?” Alex asks.

“It’s good, I guess. I submitted a list of the freshmen I think should be accepted to Mr. Wheeler, so that was really fun, getting to read all their ideas. I reread my old submission, since I save all my old papers, and you can tell I’ve definitely improved a lot in three years. It’s fun thinking where these freshman might be three years from now, ability-wise.”

Oh my god,
Jules
. Why do I say so much more than I’m aware a person needs to say?

“Cool,” Alex says anyway as we pause while our dogs pee. “Is it a big deal to you because you want to run a newspaper someday? Uh, like a real newspaper? Not to insult this one, but, y’know. Not a high school one.”

“Not a newspaper,” I say. “Maybe a political campaign? Or an organization? I like working with a bunch of people to get one goal achieved. And right now, the
Crest
is kind of the best option I have. And it has this whole history; it’s over a hundred years old. I like feeling part of that whole thing.”

“I wish I knew what I wanted to do,” he says. “I used to. Who knows now.”

I’m trying to think of the right thing to say to that when the bulldog turns around and bounds right at Alex. He laughs and leans over to pet it.

“Before,” he says, and pauses. “Before… no one I know would have done something like this if there wasn’t a camera crew nearby to capture it. And you do it twice a week, all the time.”

“A camera crew wouldn’t be very interested in me,” I say.

“You know what I mean,” he says. Suddenly, all his attention is off the bulldog and on me. “You’re not like anyone from that world.”

While walking a dachshund and a black lab, I ask what it was like signing autographs, and he says people mainly wanted selfies, but either way, it was weird.

While walking a pit bull and a yellow lab, he tells me that his last school had a statue of their town’s founder out front, and kids have rubbed the crotch of it so much as a joke that now the crotch is a different color than the rest of it.

And while walking a miniature pinscher and a shepherd mix, I tell him how last year we made a joke issue of the
Crest
with a photo we found of Mr. Wheeler in college performing
improv, and it almost accidentally got sent to the printer the week he went on vacation and the substitute advisor wasn’t paying attention.

Of course after our time is up with Stray Rescue we walk to Donut Friend. Alex dives right into his Bacon 182 (yes, it’s a doughnut with bacon on it—though it’s technically vegan bacon made from coconut) while I let my standard traditional with lemon glaze sit there while I figure out how to ask him to continue this day.

“Um,” I start, and then wish I could start over immediately.
Um
is such a dorky nervous sound to make with your mouth. “After this do you want to come over? You can meet my dogs. Also my moms. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Or if you’re busy. It’s not a big deal.”

“I want to meet your dogs and your moms,” he says. “And I’m not busy.”

“Okay,” I say.

“How do you think people figured out bacon’s good on doughnuts?” Alex asks.

“They’re both breakfast foods,” I say. “Maybe some bacon fell on a doughnut.”

He laughs. “Ah, so Jules has an answer for everything.”

“That’s an obvious answer! How do
you
think bacon got on doughnuts?”

“‘Maybe some bacon
fell
on a doughnut’?” Alex laughs even harder. “Fell from where?”

“Just another part of the plate. Don’t make fun of me.”

Alex mimes bacon falling sideways onto my doughnut, and I wave his hands away.

“Leave my doughnut out of this,” I say.

He does his eyebrow thing. I try not to be visibly affected.

“I’m just trying to prove your scientific hypothesis.”

“Alex, I never said it fell
sideways
.”

As we walk back to my car and I drive to my house, I keep thinking of ways I could kiss him. It’s not that I in any way feel qualified to make the first move, but my lips are actually tingling. Even my lips know that maybe it’s time.

Unfortunately I don’t know how to break it to my lips that even when we’re at a long stoplight on York, I can’t lean over and kiss Alex. A force field might as well be around me.

Peanut and Daisy leap all around Alex when we walk inside, and he takes a lot of time to pet each of them, which is impressive. Peanut’s so much more demanding, but Alex moves back and forth between them evenly.

“Hi,” I hear, and when I look up, Mom and Darcy are both standing right there.

“Hi,” I say. “This is Alex. Alex Powell. Alex, these are my moms. Mom and Darcy.”

He rises to his feet in a split second and shakes their hands. “It’s really nice to meet you both.”

They give me a simultaneous look, like,
Good job selecting a boy who is polite to adults
. Even though it’s probably not possible, I feel as if Daisy and Peanut are giving me that look too.

“How did you decide which one of you got to be called
Mom?” Alex looks back and forth between them. “If that’s okay to ask.”

“Of course it’s okay.” Darcy waves off the other possibility with her whole arm.

“We tried to think of all the mother options,” Mom says. “Mom, Mother, Maman—as if we were French? I don’t know. Right before Jules was born, I think we’d finally settled on Mom and Mama, except that neither one of us wanted to be Mama.”

“We kept thinking,
Who’ll want to say
mama
when they’re an adult?
” Darcy says. “We could barely say it to each other, and we were solidly in the throes of new parenthood. So I decided if everyone else in my life who mattered just called me Darcy, why not my daughter? It felt fine.”

“And then I got to be Mom!” Mom says. “Which was a huge relief by then.”

“That’s nice,” Alex says, which from someone else might be a dismissal, but I can tell from the warmth of his voice and how he’s smiling that he really thinks it is nice, as nice as I know that it is.

“Can we take the dogs into the backyard?” I ask. I don’t need permission to go with my own dogs to my own backyard, but I do think they’ll take the hint.

“Of course,” Darcy says. “We bought a new Frisbee, if you’d like to try it out.”

“Yeah,” Alex says with a surge of enthusiasm. So we get the new Frisbee and an old tennis ball, and we head to the
backyard. Mom and Darcy have stayed inside, and I try not to just stare at Alex. This must be it, though, the moment things really
happen
. I might be inexperienced, but I feel how my nerves seem to rise up through my skin in Alex’s direction.

“We’re alone,” Alex says, and I stare at him, and he bursts into laughter. “I don’t know why I said that like a creep.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “I know you’re not a creep.”

It’s as if now neither one of us knows what to do with this moment. I decide to make the moment mine. I turn a little, and even though we’re not standing exactly facing each other, it seems close enough. I gently rest my hand on his side, even though I’ve never just reached out and touched a boy before. He feels solid and warm and so real beneath my hand. Something in his expression shifts, and while Alex is always smiling, this smile is different. This smile is new, and it’s somehow focused right on me.

Peanut barks, and I manage not to yell at him. Alex grabs the Frisbee and races down the length of the backyard before throwing it in my direction. I have no idea where he’s gotten the idea that I’m athletically inclined, but I do manage to catch it. The dogs leap around in glee, so I fling the plastic disc toward Alex, but not
really
, so that Peanut’s able to leap up and catch it in his mouth. Alex thinks he can just take the Frisbee back from Peanut, but I don’t say anything so I can watch a fifteen-pound dog and a full-grown boy battle it out.

Peanut wins, of course.

We keep playing until the dogs are lying, panting, on the
grass. I’m not sure if I can just pick up again where we were, but then Alex is right next to me.

Then we move at the same time, and though this is only my second kiss since Pete Jablowski, it doesn’t matter—every cell in me knows what to do. Everything’s in sync, how I have to rise up on my toes just a little, and Alex leans over the tiniest amount. My hands suddenly aren’t at my sides but meeting each other around his neck. Alex’s have slid around my waist, skimming lines that feel drawn onto me permanently.

And the kissing. The kissing! Our lips have parted, finding new and newer ways to overlap. He’s still sugary and salty from the Bacon 182. I’m convinced we’re breathing through each other, that we’re all the oxygen we could possibly need.

“That was so good,” I say once the kissing’s ended. And then I try to figure out how to reverse time and pull those words back inside of me. “Oh my god. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry why?” Alex grins down at me. His hands are still on the small of my back, and as long as he keeps making tiny little movements with his fingertips, I’m probably going to release stupider and stupider things from the depths of my brain.

“That was the dorkiest thing I could say.”

“You know what I hate?” He leans down and kisses the corner of my mouth. “People who calculate everything that comes out. Who think they’re supposed to be a certain way or like a certain thing, and it’s all some act. I’ve had enough of that.”

I’m afraid of what other words I might blurt out, so I lean into him and find his mouth with mine. I’m aware it’s my third kiss with Alex, fourth overall, but then, so quickly, I lose count. Some of the kisses are brief, like a spark in the darkness, while some go on slow and deep and dizzying.

“Should we go in?” Alex leans his forehead against mine, so we’re still close like we’re kissing. My lips actually ache. “I don’t want your moms to be angry.”

The dogs seem to be over their temporary Frisbee-based exhaustion, so we distract ourselves by throwing the tennis ball for them before heading inside. Mom and Darcy are working on a recipe at the kitchen counter, but they pause to share a knowing look.

“We’re making biscotti,” Mom says.

“You two should go out for lunch,” Darcy says. “We have nothing in the house.”

I know for a fact that it’s not true. We freeze leftovers, and we have sauces and jams preserved in the cabinet, and there is always fresh produce from the farmers’ market. My parents are just encouraging me to be alone with a boy.

My parents are amazing.

Even though we could walk to lunch, if I really wanted that, now that we’ve kissed, I want car time with Alex. We act as we did before, but after our lunch at Taco Spot we pile back into the car and kind of right into each other. Normally, I’d be completely against public displays of affection, but I parked farther away than I needed to for this exact reason.

“You taste like nachos,” I tell him, and he cracks up. We’re still as close as we were when we were kissing, so I feel his laughter warm into my neck. Once, a few months ago, I was walking a dog around my normal Stray Rescue route and saw a couple kissing in their parked car. I tried imagining wanting to kiss someone so much that the public didn’t matter.

And now I don’t have to try.