IN ENGLISH THE NEXT MORNING, HE hobbled in on the bell, avoiding my eyes. This surprised me. After last night I'd thought I had the upper hand and he would come early to class to suck up to me. I needed him to suck up to me. I hadn't gotten any new information from him about the wreck. I had to try again. I would visit the Bug in the junkyard and take him with me. If that didn't prompt him to talk, nothing would.
I stole a glance up the rows of assigned seats, checking for spies watching me. Keke and Lila were way across the room. Stephanie was a junior so she wasn't in this class. And Brandon in AP English would be a disaster, a deer in the road. Still, I scribbled the note on a full sheet of paper and passed it to Doug unfolded so it would look to the people around us like I had nothing to hide. Swim team business.
I need you again today after practice.
I considered adding a please or a smiley face but decided against either. This would be admitting I'd had second thoughts about overreacting when he'd turned on me. Especially after he'd spilled his story about his family like a marlin gutted on the wharf.
He passed the paper back with a note scrawled under mine.
No
My face burned as if he'd called me a spoiled brat in public. But people around us weren't tittering behind their hands. There was only Ms. Northam droning about E. M. Forster.
In front of me, Doug moved. The black curls inched up his neck, and I caught a sliver more of his tanned cheek. My adrenaline spiked. He was turning around to whisper that he wanted to go with me, but he couldn't go right after practice because he had an octopus to wrangle. Maybe we could go later?
He didn't turn. He tilted his head until his neck popped, then hunched his shoulders. He put his elbow on his desk and his chin in his hand, listening to Ms. Northam's lecture.
Not so fast. I scribbled across the sheet and passed it back to him. This time he didn't grab it when it grazed his shoulder, so I gave it a little toss and hoped it ended up on his desk rather than the floor.
That is not the correct answer.
He raised his hand. Without waiting for Ms. Northam to acknowledge him, he interrupted her. "Ms. Northam, Zoey is disturbing me."
The room exploded in laughter. I calculated just how this incident would be distorted by the time it got back to Brandon.
"Zoey," Ms. Northam called, "whatever the problem is, maybe you'd be more comfortable in another seat. I'd make Doug move but he'd take an hour."
"Ooooh," said some of the boys. I didn't think this was a particularly good line on Ms. Northam's part, but boys would say ooooh to anything.
As I stood, I snatched the paper back from Doug, lest it fall into the wrong hands, and tried to calm down before anyone noticed my panting. People probably thought Doug and I were having yet another disagreement about the swim team. No one would suspect the girlfriend of the star of the football team was falling for the boy who went to juvie. And the boy who went to juvie wasn't returning the favor.
*** AS I WALKED FROM THE WOMEN'S locker room onto the pool deck for practice, Doug stood and limped toward me on his crutches. "Let me do that for you."
I looked down at my clipboard. "Why?" Every night I checked over the carefully penciled race times, traced them in pen, entered them into my computer at home, and finally emailed them to Coach with instructions on how to download them, because he forgot every time.
"I'm a team player," Doug deadpanned. "You have a meet tomorrow that you need to train for, and I'm just sitting here. Don't you trust me?"
No, I thought, handing the clipboard over.
He stuffed it down his pants.
Okay, take two. With the crutches still shoved firmly into his armpits, he held out the waistband of his cargo shorts with one hand. I got a good look at his underwear, not just a heathered gray waistband but heathered gray boxer briefs that disappeared as the clipboard slid over them.
When he half turned and crutched back toward the bleachers, I saw how carrying the clipboard in his pants this way made sense. His backpack wasn't around. He needed both hands for his crutches. And to move, he swung his good leg forward without shifting his pelvis, so the clipboard stayed in place.
I was surrounded by boys in bathing suits. There were nine of them out here, and I wore a bathing suit myself. And I got this hot and bothered when Doug Fox flashed me his undies? This was a testament to how sad my sex life was with Brandon.
I hadn't seen Doug give my mostly naked body a glance--but then, I'd had my eyes down his pants. On the off chance the clipboard stunt was more flirting with me, I followed him to the bleachers and sat down beside him.
"No," he said, pretending to be absorbed in the numbers on the clipboard sheets.
"I want to go to the junkyard to give the Bug last rites, but I don't know where the junkyard is."
"Look it up in the phone book." He lifted a sheet to check the second page of times. "Doesn't the Mercedes have GPS?"
I glanced toward the pool. Everyone was here now including Stephanie, who appeared to be deep in conversation with another junior girl, but you
, never knew I couldn't take a chance on touching Doug's knee. I'd touched him to get him on my side at the game Friday night, but that was before I
. felt guilty about my fantasies.
I studied the side of his face, the shadow of a beard just beginning to show through his tanned skin, the ends of his black locks curling around his ears.
"Please," I said.
He turned and looked down at me. His green eyes took me in. They seemed friendly. I wanted to fall into them, even though I knew the next thing he said wouldn't sound like we were friends.
"You hardly spoke to me when you dropped me off last night," he reminded me.
"I slept on it," I said. This was not quite true, but it was in the ballpark. I had lost sleep over it. "Talk about a change of heart. You were all apologetic last night, and now you'll hardly speak to me. And stony silence is not your modus operandi. What happened?"
Coach emerged from the building then, blowing one chirp on his whistle. Reluctantly I stood and headed for the pool. "I slept on it," Doug called after me.
Practice was long. I had to come up with a way to get Doug to go with me to the junkyard. At the same time, I was determined to swim better today than my disaster yesterday. As long as I took the recommended dose of Tylenol, my head didn't even hurt now so that was no excuse.
,
In the middle of a 400 individual medley, as Stephanie pulled ahead of me, I needed extra power from somewhere. So I reached inside myself and grabbed what I'd been tamping down for a week and a day. I grabbed that anger at my mom and swam right over the sensation of drowning. I held on tight and let it propel me forward through the fly. I was madder at my dad than I was at my mom, and that got me through the backstroke.