Zero (15 page)

“I mean, I’m going to Hole in the Wall to meet Mike,” I say.

Mom glances at me. “Well,” she goes, flipping a steak over. “That must’ve hurt.”

Wow. Low blow, Mom.

Mom turns the steak again. “I’m sorry,” she says suddenly. “That was rude of me, Amy. I shouldn’t be that way.”

My anger cools, almost as fast as it flared. “It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll be home later.”

“Oh.” Mom goes back to her cooking. “Well, there will be leftovers when you get home. If you want them.”

“Thanks.” I open the door but hesitate. “Dad gone?”

The steak sizzles as Mom pushes a spatula hard on it. “Yes,” she says, shortly.

I stand there for another few seconds, thinking about this. “I’ll be home by ten,” I decide.

Mom looks at me, maybe surprised. A minuscule grin struggles to make it to her lips, but she doesn’t say anything.

I try to smile back and fail just as badly. I go out to my car and head to the Hole, trying to not think too much about Mom or Dad. Too many angles.

I get to the Hole right as Mike is skating down the sidewalk. I watch, tingly, as he effortlessly launches the board into the air and sails over a bus-stop bench, like he’s surfing the wind. He lands flawlessly, alternates the nose of his board with the tail, back and forth, several times, and rolls to a stop beside my car.

“Okay, so,
that
was dead sexy,” I say.

Mike kisses me. It sears me, no kidding. The time is coming when kissing alone ain’t gonna cut it. Not sure yet what that means, exactly.

“Sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t trying to show off or anything.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” I say, and flick my foot up from the knee to smack his butt.

The Hole is maybe half full when we go inside. I sit across from him at a table and set my bag down.

“Okay, I brought the gear,” I say. “What’s up?”

Mike grins. “Well, we got a show on the Fourth at Liberty Spike’s, you been there?”

“Yeah. Not bad. A little more rough and tumble than I care for, but, yeah. And on the Fourth of July? It’ll be explosive! Ha! I should be punished!”

Mike rolls his eyes but smiles. “Agreed. On all fronts.
Anyway, we usually let Eddie make our flyers because—well, he’s Eddie and he figures he has Photoshop, so clearly the job should be his.”

“Not reason enough. I’ve
seen
those flyers. No offense.”

“Yeah, no argument there. What do you have to draw with?”

“What do
I
have to draw with?” I grab his hand and shake it. “Hi, I’m Zero, nice to meet you.” I pull out my sketch pad and a charcoal. “What would you like?”

“A flyer for the show. Would you make one?” His eyes twinkle at me, and he squeezes my hand.

Wow
. Color me flattered. I never would have presumed to ask. Another little splash for my portfolio, even. This is, like … being commissioned to do art.

“Yeah, that would be cool!” I tell him. “Is this a paid gig?” I kick his shoe playfully under the table.

“I do wish,” he says. “If we could, we would. And if you don’t want—”

“Totally kidding,” I say. I mean, it’d be cool, but seriously, it doesn’t bother me. I’m thrilled to be
asked
.

I give him a quick kiss. “What’re you looking for exactly?”

Mike rattles off a list: time, date, all that. Then we get into the design itself. I start with a quick charcoal sketch of Liberty Spike’s facade, then add three giant Dalí ants to it. Halfway through my fourth ant, my hand cramps and I lift it off the paper.

“Yeah, that looks—what’s wrong?” Mike says.

I stare at the drawing for a second. The style is mine, I recognize it, but there’s
a flourish
to it that my charcoals have
never had before. And then it hits me: this is exactly the gesture technique Dr. Salinger taught us that first day. The one I couldn’t make myself do at the time but that I’ve been practicing ever since, especially those days when she doesn’t show up.

“Um … nothing,” I say.

Mike gives me a look but lets my nonanswer slide. Thank you, Mike.

I flip to a fresh page and go back to work. Inspired, I gesture-draw a reasonable facsimile of Jackson Pollock’s
Greyed Rainbow
as a background, then use an eraser and white pastel stick to create the show information. All right, so it’s a stretch; no one is going to look at the swirls of black and white coils and say, “Oh, hey! Jackson Pollock!
Greyed Rainbow
! Hey, that’s like Gothic Rainbow but different! What a gifted artist!” But
I’ll
know, and right now, that’s enough.

We go through an iced coffee and one bathroom visit apiece, and half a sketchbook to get the design just right, and probably spend more time than Eddie would have sitting at his computer.

But it’s great. I’m talking to Mike about art, and I’m creating it
for
him. It doesn’t get much better.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s cool,” Mike says, pointing to another Dalí-esque sketch of Spike’s.

“Okay. Not a problem. You want it in black and white? Like this?”

“Up to you. You’re the artist.”

“You’re the
client
.”

He smirks at me. “Charcoal, then. Sure.” He gives me a quick kiss on the cheek, which you wouldn’t think would be
cause for my body to erupt, volcanolike, into totally useless sexual desire, but it does.

“Could you … um … do that one more time, please?”

Mike puts his lips to my cheek. My eyes close. He lingers there this time, like he’s individually triggering every nerve on my face.

“Okay,” I say, a little breathless. “I think I have a
boner
.”

“Really.”

“Oh, gosh, did I upset your delicate sensibilities?”

“No. My sensibilities aren’t that delicate.”

I laugh and kiss his cheek in return. Then on my periphery, I catch a glance of copper-colored curly hair and pull away from Mike.

“Jenn?”

Jenn hesitates at the entrance to the room, looking uncertain. “Hi,” she says cautiously. She’s carrying several catalogs of some kind in her arms. “I didn’t know you were going to be here, then I saw your car, and I thought I’d say hi, maybe, but I can go someplace else….”

Man. I’ve never seen Jenn spin out like this.

“No, no, come here,” I say, waving her over.

Jenn gives me a tentative smile, and joins us at the table.

“Jenn, this is Mike,” I say, gesturing to him in case she doesn’t know which guy I’m referring to. My stomach starts churning my iced coffee into slush. Fact is, I have no idea how this is going to go. It could be weird for her. Under the circumstances.

“How’s it going?” Mike says, tucking his bangs behind his ears and reaching across the table for a handshake.

Jenn shakes it, a limp-wristed little girlie thing. “I guess I
could ask you the same question,” she says, and drops the catalogs on the table. They’re from a bunch of different colleges.

“Pretty good,” Mike says. “So how do you know each other?”

“Oh, we go way back,” Jenn says.

“We met on a field trip to the Phoenix Art Museum freshman year,” I say.

“No surprise, right?” Jenn asks Mike, gesturing to my sketch pad. “Her paintings are going to hang there someday, right, Z?”

“Yeah, well …”

Mike bails me out of having to flatter myself. “Starting school?” he asks Jenn.

“Hm? Oh yeah. Maybe.” She turns to me. “I was thinking maybe culinary school?”

“Totally!” I say. It’s the first time she’s mentioned anything resembling a future. “That would be perfect. Where at?” I sort through the catalogs.

Jenn shrugs. “Anyplace that’ll have me.” She assumes Mr. Haight’s blustery business voice: “And money is no object, princess!” She rolls her eyes.

“That’s really cool,” I tell her, meaning it.

Jenn, for the first time ever, looks shy. “Thanks. It’s just a thought.”

Mike cocks his head at me. “Do you cook, too?”

“I
toast
,” I say. “And occasionally reheat. Jenn’s really good, though.”

Jenn smiles and nudges me with her elbow. “Shut up!”

We all laugh briefly. And then: silence. Awkward, but not quite uncomfortable.

Jenn clears her throat. “So!” she says, and hesitates, like she has no idea what to say next. That makes two of us. Jenn looks at me. “Do I get to—you know. Interrogate?”

I raise an eyebrow, about to stop her. But her gaze is sort of pleading. In all of a heartbeat, she asks me telepathically:
You said we could just move on and be friends again, so we can talk about your boyfriend and my boyfriends and all that and just forget that night ever happened, remember?

And the truth is … I did say that.

So I poke her in the ribs. Jenn screeches and angles out of the way. And just like that, it’s cool. Mike watches all this with an amused grin.

“Only if you’re nice,” I tell her.

Jenn surreptitiously exhales, looking relieved. “Of course,” she says. She turns to Mike. “So, Mike. What’s it like to kiss the inimitable Amanda Walsh?”

“Jenn!”

She throws me a startled glance. Again I debate steering the conversation somewhere else, but then I understand: if this was a couple of months ago, it’s exactly the kind of thing she would have asked. She’s defaulting to how we were before graduation.

It’s weird, no doubt about it. But maybe she’s got the right idea. Forgive
and
forget.

Plus … I maybe sort of kinda want to know what Mike’ll say.

“You don’t have to answer that,” I tell Mike, because I gotta pretend like I
don’t
want to know.

But Mike nods slowly. “Pretty damn sweet,” he says.

“Well, sure,” Jenn goes, “but you can do better than that. Is it sexy, luscious, spicy,
caliente
 … what?”

Mike’s eyebrows twitch once, real fast. Still looking at Jenn—but talking to me, I think, I
hope
—he says, “It’s, uh … a work of art.”

Michael? I. Am. Yours. Pinwheels spin my vision kooky. I’m such a dork.

“Wow,” Jenn marvels. “You know how to make a girl squirm, don’t you?”

“Aaaaand we’re done,” I say, dropping my arm between them.

“I want to know what his intentions are,” Jenn says. “It’s my job as best friend to do that.”

“That’s fair,” Mike says. “But as much as I would like to discuss
and
pursue my intentions, I kinda need a break, so, be back in a sec.”

He gets up and heads for the bathroom. Jenn and I both watch him go.

Jenn sort of grins. “He really is your first, huh? You know … real thing. Like, boyfriend.”

“Well! … Yeah. So?”

“So … have you thought about it at all?”

“About what?”

“You know,” Jenn says tentatively. “Making love to him.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, we’ve only kissed!”

Then I look around, make sure no one’s in earshot.

“Okay, maybe a
little
,” I whisper. “But not for
real
real. It’s only been, like, a month or so.” Sure, it’s crossed my mind, but in a nebulous sort of way. I mean, I’d
like
to. Someday.

“That’s good,” Jenn says, touching my arm. “I think it’s
great if you don’t necessarily want to hook up right away. But—” She stops and presses her lips together.

“Woman, you
really
need to finish that thought!”

Jenn considers for a second. “Look, if he
is
your first love, it might be destined to end the same as most first loves do. That’s all. You should see your face when he’s in the room. God, Zero, you were
glowing
.”

I kick at the floor with the toe of one boot. I know exactly what Jenn means; it’s the best description for the feeling I get when I think of Mike.

“I just don’t want you to get your heart broken,” Jenn adds, and her expression tightens a little, like it hurts her to say it but she means it all the same.

“I see what you’re saying,” I admit, voice low. “But isn’t it a little early to be worried about that?”

“Not if you go off into one of your freaky artistic depressions, it isn’t.”

I give her my best glare. It doesn’t faze her. Jenn’s well-versed in my predilection toward locking myself in my room and not emerging for a week, a month, at a time.

“I’m just saying,” Jenn says. “You’re so—I don’t know, sensitive? Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes I wish I was more like that. But then other times, it messes with your head. What was that guy’s name sophomore year?”

Oh god, here we go. “Joel,” I mumble.

“Right, Joel. So Joel asks you out—”

“Jenn, I was there, I remember.”

“—and you say yes, and when he shows up at your house—”

“I just
said
I was there, Jenn.”

“—you make your dad tell him you have food poisoning and can’t go out!”

“It was septicemic plague,” I remind her.

“Okay,
gross
. But he was a nice guy, and he was really into you, and you dodged him. Then when he started going out with Kelly Tansy—”

“Who’s a bitch!”

“Fact, but irrelevant. When he started going out with her, you spent the rest of sophomore year dressing like … like
death
, for god’s sake. And Z, that was
without
a broken heart. I mean, like, the real deal, the kind that feels like your heart got ripped out of your body and kicked off a cliff. I just want you to be okay.” Jenn scratches her neck. “I hope that doesn’t sound weird coming from me….”

“That’s what friends do,” I mumble, thinking more about Mike than her. Maybe Jenn’s right. If anything goes wrong with Mike, how’m I going to handle it?

Wait. No. The one thing I can’t do is anticipate that. Because—

Jenn
is
right. Mike’s my first. Love, I mean. And that’s dangerous. I get that. But if I spend every minute we have together worrying about that, isn’t it just as likely that I’ll screw the whole thing up by
accident
? There’s still SAIC to consider, but that’s, like, at least a year away, probably two, and what are the chances I’ll get into SAIC anyway? I’ll probably just end up at Arizona State, like it or not, so we could still be together….