Beheld

by Alex Flinn

  I tried not to think about how that meant fat. I was getting fat, as my father constantly reminded me.

  But Amanda and I were still best friends.

  “What’s her deal?” one of the guys, Kamal, said in the locker room after baseball practice one day in eighth grade. “Like, why do you hang out with her?”

  I shrugged. “We’re friends. I’ve known her since kindergarten.”

  “She’s kind of fat,” my friend Eric said.

  “No, she’s not,” Kamal corrected. “She’s fine-looking.” He made a gesture I understood to mean big boobs.

  I was getting a little uncomfortable with the direction of this conversation. It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed Amanda’s boobs. They were kind of hard to miss. I just didn’t want to discuss them with other guys.

  “Who?” Darien said. He’d just come over from the shower and was wrapped in a towel.

  “That girl Amanda,” Eric said. “Kamal thinks she’s hot. I say she’s a chubbo.” He looked at Darien like he was going to break the tie.

  “She’s hot,” Darien said. “Baby got back.”

  “Guys, gross,” I said. “Quit it.”

  “What, are you in love with her?” Darien asked.

  We’d been friends over seven years, and someone asked that question at least ten times a year. Instinctively, I answered, “Of course not.”

  But the next time I saw her, I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her, off her chest, specifically. It’s funny how, when you spend a lot of time with someone, you don’t really notice how they look. My mom would get mad at my dad for not commenting if she got a new haircut, but honestly, she could have developed a third eye, and it probably would take me a few days to see it. Same with Amanda. I never saw her as hot or not, pretty or ugly. She was just Amanda.

  Probably that was why the ugly duckling’s friends didn’t notice right off that he was a swan. Maybe they’d gotten so used to seeing him as ugly that they didn’t notice he was beautiful, even when he was.

  But that day, I noticed. The middle school was closer to Amanda’s house, and Fridays, when neither of us had practice or a game, we walked to her house together after school. That day, I was waiting in our usual spot, under an oak tree at the side of the school. She was a little late, so when she showed up, she was running. Her face and chest were flushed. She had on a bright-green T-shirt, and when she ran, her backpack bouncing against her back made it pull tight in the chest.

  Darien was right. She was fine-looking.

  “Um, what are you looking at?” she said.

  “What?” I realized I’d been staring right at her boobs, so I pretended I’d been spaced out, gazing ahead. “What? Oh, sorry. You’re late.”

  She shrugged, and her T-shirt pulled tight again. “Yeah, sorry. I was talking to a teacher.”

  “Sure.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Whatever.” I wanted to talk to Tim about football tryouts for high school, which were coming up. Tim was friends with the coach, so I hoped maybe he could give me some pointers, even put in a word. But I didn’t want to say that. Amanda and I didn’t get much time together, between her two softball teams and volleyball and me playing football and baseball, plus advanced classes that counted for high school. I didn’t want it to seem like I was only interested in her dad. Besides, I wasn’t.

  I said, “I don’t know. Go to the library?”

  “On a Friday afternoon?”

  “Watch a movie and get pizza?”

  “That’s less type A.”

  “I’m not type A. I just like to get homework over with early so I don’t have it hanging over my head all weekend.”

  She tapped up the brim of my baseball cap. “That’s the definition of a type A personality.”

  “No it’s not.” I adjusted my cap.

  “Yeah it is.” She pulled out her phone and did a search. “Rigidly organized, anxious, and concerned with time management.”

  “What personality type is it that whips out their phone and looks something up on Wikipedia to win a conversation?”

  “I didn’t do that.” She took my cap off and hid it behind her back.

  Instead of trying to get it back, I grabbed her phone and read, “A competitive drive which causes stress and—”

  “I’m not that competitive.”

  “What’s your batting average?”

  “Point four seven one. But that’s not really accurate, because they have moms scoring the games, and sometimes they call it an error when it’s really—”

  “You’re making my argument for me.” But I didn’t want to argue with her, so I pointed toward the neighbor’s house. “Hey, look. How many are there?”

  It was a mother duck with ducklings. They must have come from the canal.

  “One, two, three, four, five.” Amanda shook her head. “They keep moving around.”

  “They do that.” I counted fast. “Maybe eight, maybe nine. Yeah, nine. Four with spots on their sides, two with brown heads, and three completely yellow ones.”

  “Which are the pretty ones?” Amanda said.

  “All of them.” I grabbed back my baseball cap when her guard was down.

  We approached Amanda’s house. There was a car in the driveway I didn’t recognize, a blue Toyota with a dent on the back.

  “Oh shit.” Amanda started to walk away. “My mom’s here.”

  “She sees you.”

  Sure enough, Jackie was getting out of the car, yelling, “Mandy! Mandy, it’s me!”

  “Don’t call me that,” Amanda said.

  “Fine, A-man-duh.” Jackie enunciated each syllable in an annoying way. “I’m so glad I found her highness at home.”

  I hadn’t seen Jackie in a few years, but I knew sometimes, she randomly showed up at Amanda’s softball games. “Trying to act like a mom,” Amanda said. Or Amanda would see her when she visited her grandmother.

  Now she said, “What do you want, Jackie?”

  “Mom. And where’s Casey?”

  “She’s at school. At aftercare. Dad will pick her up after work like the other single parents.”

  “Okay, smarty pants. I came to see you, anyway. Thought we could pick out a dress for the eighth grade dance.”

  The eighth grade dance was this sort of mini-prom they had for, obviously, the eighth graders. It had a theme, ranging from Hawaiian to neon, and was held in the ballroom of a nearby office center, with the balcony doors locked so no one would “do anything foolish.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to that,” Amanda said.

  “You’re not?” Jackie and I both asked at the same time. Everyone went to the dance, even people who sat at home and played computer games every night. People didn’t usually have dates, so it wasn’t only for people who could get one.

  “No, I’m not.” Amanda glared at me. “I think it’s stupid. Besides, it has a theme, and they haven’t announced it yet, so I wouldn’t be able to buy a dress even if I was going, which I’m not.”

  Now I knew she was lying. They’d sent the invitations the week before, and the theme was “Back to the ’80s.” So Amanda was going. She just didn’t want to shop with Jackie.

  Jackie knew too. “I know there’s a theme. One of the other moms told me. Why do you have to be such a brat?”

  “Don’t say, ‘One of the other moms,’ like you’re one of the moms. You’re not. And I’m not going to some stupid dance if I have to go shopping with you. So just forget it.” She started running toward the house.

  Jackie ran after her, yelling, “Amanda! Amanda!”

  “Leave me alone!” Amanda fumbled with the house keys. She was so angry her hands were shaking, and I could hear the keys jingling. I didn’t know what to do, just sort of got between her and Jackie.

  “Why can’t it ever be nice with us?” Jackie said.

  “Because you’re not nice,” Amanda said. She finally got the door open and went inside. “Come on,” she said to me.

  “May
be I should go.”

  “Come on!”

  I followed her inside, which was no easy trick with Jackie trying to get past me. Sure, I had defensive experience, but I couldn’t exactly tackle her. Finally, I got past her and into the house. Jackie was screaming at Amanda that she was a brat, a bitch, a few other things. Amanda double locked the door, then went into the family room and turned on the TV loud. Ellen was on. She was dancing to some rap song. Amanda turned the volume up louder and threw herself onto the sofa.

  “No,” I said.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  I gestured for her to stand. “You gotta dance. Dance with Ellen.”

  I started to dance. I am not a good dancer. To say two left feet is not only a cliché; it grossly overstates my ability, because it would imply that at least one of my feet was competent. That was not the case. But I was a football player, so I’d seen my share of sideline dances. I’d also seen my football brethren excited about pizza, excited about chicken wings, excited about getting the required 2.0 average to stay on the team. With that in mind, I started pumping my fists like Jaden Sanders had when his prealgebra teacher forgot to give a Friday quiz, thrusting my hips like Andy Rodriguez on forty-nine-cent hamburger day, and jumping up and down like my brother when I got in trouble for something he did.

  “What are you doing?” Amanda yelled.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” I fanned myself. Like a rapper.

  “Having a seizure?”

  “I’m dancing.” I imitated Ellen, who was doing some kind of hip-hop move. “Come on!”

  “Stop it. I don’t feel like dancing.”

  I did the running man in front of her.

  “Oh my God, you look so stupid! You’re not even doing it right.” But she was laughing.

  “Then show me! Show me the light of your masterful choreography!” I started doing the Dougie.

  “Oh, God. Okay. If it will get you to stop.”

  She started dancing, locking and popping along with Ellen. When Ellen finished, we both collapsed on the sofa, laughing.

  “I wish Ellen could be my mom,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s kind of the dream,” I said. “At least you have Tim.”

  “I guess.”

  “You have to go to that dance. You need to show off your moves.”

  “Don’t you mean our moves?” she asked.

  “If you seriously want me to dance, I will.”

  “I just want to stay home.”

  “Everyone’s going,” I said.

  “Not me.”

  “How about this? If I make the football team, you’ll go.”

  “You’ll definitely make it.”

  “I’m glad you’re so confident. Just go.”

  In the end, it was my mother who talked Amanda into going to the dance. The following Friday, Dad was working late, Matt was doing whatever Matt did on Friday nights, so Amanda and I went to my house for “taco night.” When Amanda got there, my mother said, “I have something to show you.”

  We went into the living room, and Mom gave Amanda three hangers with dresses on them. “I heard it was an eighties theme. I used to wear these to sorority dances in college. I never throw anything away. Maybe one of these will work?”

  Amanda held the hangers apart. One of the dresses was black, made out of a kind of net material with a sparkly top. Another was pink with a big, poofy skirt like a bubble. The third was bright-aqua satin and strapless.

  “This one matches your eyes.” Mom pointed to the aqua.

  “They’re really short,” Amanda said.

  “Yes, and you’re taller than I was. But short is in style now. Why don’t you try?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going.”

  I was nodding, like, yes, you are, and I said, “Just try them. You don’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings, do you?”

  “It’s true,” Mom said. “I’d be really hurt.”

  “She’d cry,” I said.

  Finally, Amanda ducked into my bedroom, just to shut us up.

  Then she didn’t come out for a really long time.

  “Come on,” I said. “I want to see them.”

  “Just your mom. I need help.”

  “Okay.” My mom went in too. Then they were gone forever.

  “Should I, like, find something else to do?” I asked through the door.

  “That would be a good idea,” Mom said.

  It was probably a good sign that they were taking this long. I went to watch a rerun of The Big Bang Theory. It was the one where Leonard was pretending to understand football. At the end of it, Amanda finally came out.

  She wasn’t wearing one of the dresses. She was wearing her hoodie, though I thought I noticed some makeup that hadn’t been there before. If I was the type who noticed stuff like that.

  “I was thinking I’d go if you made the team.” She swiped at her cheek to get off the makeup.

  “So I guess I’ll have to make the team.”

  “Guess you will.”

  8

  When I’m forty and have forgotten a lot of things, I’ll still remember the eighth grade dance, and who I went with.

  I made the team. NBD. And Amanda went to the dance. Also NBD. It wasn’t like a date or anything. We were going as friends. But, for a few minutes, when I first saw her, I forgot that.

  She chose the aqua dress, the one Mom had said would match her eyes. It probably did, but that wasn’t what I noticed.

  I noticed what Kamal noticed, what Darien noticed.

  And I noticed she was beautiful.

  She was. Beautiful.

  We were meeting friends there, but Tim drove Amanda and me to the dance, and Mom was going to pick us up. Tim brought Amanda inside so Mom could take pictures. I was wearing a white jacket of my dad’s with a bright-aqua T-shirt, which Mom said was the style in the 1980s. So we matched.

  “This is stupid, Mom,” I said. “It’s not prom.”

  But I was lying. I wanted the picture.

  At the dance, we sat with some girls from the softball team, Kendra and Lilly, and some football guys, Darien and Eric, plus this guy Brian and Brian’s girlfriend, Sarah, the same girl who’d had the Disney Princess party back in elementary school. We had a great time dancing to silly 1980s music. Dancing, in this case, mostly meant jumping around, but near the end of the evening, the DJ played the Boston song “Amanda.” Amanda and I were standing in this photo area they’d made, where you could try on hats and glasses and stuff to take pictures. When it started, I had on a fake mustache and a pirate hat. Amanda wore a tiara. I said, “You need to dance to this.”

  “It’s a slow song.”

  “It’s your song.”

  She switched her tiara for my pirate hat and plopped the tiara onto my head. “I’m not going to dance to it alone.”

  “Okay, then.” I held out my hand and walked her out, still wearing the tiara.

  I don’t know how to dance, not really. But slow dancing is just swaying. Some people, the ones who were dating, tried to make out, but I held Amanda’s right hand in my left and put my right hand on her back the way my mom (without my asking) had told me to. We swayed.

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Like, to tease her about the song.

  Turned out, though, that if you’re not making out, there’s not much to do during a slow song. And if you’re already a few inches shorter than the girl, and then she wears heels, you end up eye level with her chin.

  And you have to crane your neck up not to seem like you’re looking, um, down.

  Truth told, I wouldn’t have minded looking down, but I didn’t think Amanda would like it, particularly considering the context. The fact that the song was all about a guy telling a girl named Amanda that he loved her.

  Just to break the silence, I said, “I’m glad you came.”

  She gave me a weird look, which I had to crane my neck to see. “Really? Why?”

  I shrugged, a little embarra
ssed. “I don’t know. ’Cause you’re my best friend. ’Cause someday, we’ll look back on this, and we probably won’t even know most of the other people anymore. Because everyone else is sort of . . . temporary. But we’ll still be friends.”

  She nodded, then took her hand off my back. At first, I couldn’t figure out what she was doing. Then I realized she was kicking back her feet to remove her shoes, first one, then the other. They were the kind with straps, so she dangled them from her finger. “Better?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t step on my feet.”

  “Okay.”

  She said, “It’s weird. I’m not friends with anyone else from grade school. Like when I look at the pictures from the fifth grade lunch, I don’t even like any of those girls anymore.”

  “Sooner or later, everyone disappoints you,” I said, thinking of her mom, but also kind of my dad. When I told him I made the football team, he said he guessed they needed husky guys to play defense. And tonight, he hadn’t been home at all.

  “Everyone but my dad,” she said, “and you.”

  We kept swaying. The song was almost over, and for a minute, I wanted to pull her closer, like a real slow dance. But that would be all weird, something that couldn’t be undone. And I realized I couldn’t take a chance, couldn’t face the possibility of losing her.

  So I just swayed until the song ended, and when it did, Amanda said she had to go to the ladies’ room. She put her shoes back on. I watched her walk away. I went back to the table.

  Kendra was sitting there. I didn’t really know her enough to talk to her, and they were playing another slow song, so I couldn’t dance. So I started playing Candy Crush on my phone.

  These two girls walked by. One was this girl Sophie, who’d been Amanda’s best friend besides me in fifth grade. The other one I didn’t really know. As they passed, the girl I didn’t know said, “So did you see that girl Amanda?”

  Sophie stopped walking. “Yeah. What about her?”

  “Um, that dress she’s wearing. Slutty much?”