Angel's Choice

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  There was a time, maybe about a year ago, during one of the few times when I was really mad at Danny, that I thought I might like Tim O’Mara, like him enough to date him. He was cute enough, with curly blond hair and puppy-dog brown eyes, and he was certainly nice enough. Maybe that was it: Maybe he always seemed too nice. Whatever it was, I just couldn’t pull the trigger. It was like it took too much energy to be around someone who was always trying too hard. Still, we always said hi if we saw each other in the halls, sometimes sat at the same table in the lunchroom, even had some fun together when we were partners in physics class.

  Now, feeling as though I have lost Danny Stanton—at least for the night—to Ricky D’Amico, I find myself being warmer to Tim than I have been in a long time.

  “Yeah,” I shout back at him, nearly as loud as he has just shouted at me, taking a long sip off my beer, wiping the foam mustache from my upper lip. “It’s great! Seniors!”

  Before long we are shouting enthusiastically back and forth at each other about how great it’s all going to be. Before long I am drinking more and more beer. Even though I know that, being so small, I shouldn’t drink so much so quickly, I keep drinking with Tim O’Mara, the two of us getting louder and louder. We are like our own symphony of two, only with all false notes, every single one off-key.

  At one point I look back toward the garage to where Danny Stanton was seated. He is not used to me paying so much attention to someone else , I think. Even if he may not want me all the time himself, he is not used to having me seem to favor someone over him. But when I look over, I see him rising from the chair, see Ricky D’Amico tugging him toward the house, see him trailing behind her, see the back door close behind them.

  “Hey,” Tim O’Mara leans in to whisper in my ear, except it comes out more like a bit of a shout anyway, “why don’t we get out of here?”

  9:00 p.m.

  Tim apologizes for his car, a ten-year-old Volvo.

  “It’s my father’s,” he says, left hand on the wheel. He turns on the radio, and a second later I feel his other hand on my knee, then it inches up my thigh a bit. “He says there’s no point in buying new before the old’s totally worn out.”

  “Where are we going?” I think to ask, my mind hazy from all the beer, my tongue thick in my mouth.

  I look over at him, see him smile in the glow of the dashboard light.

  “Back to school,” he says.

  Five minutes later he is pulling into the parking lot of the middle school we both went to, so many years ago. He parks the car, clicks off the engine. Then he reaches over into the backseat and, after some fumbling around, turns back to me with the necks of two bottles of beer clasped in his hands. “Want one?” he asks. Not waiting for my answer, he flips the top of one, hands it to me. “Here,” he says.

  I think, I should not be doing this. I think of the D’Amicos’ rule and how Tim should have gotten himself a designated driver tonight. I think of how I never should have gotten in the car with him like this. But then I think of Danny Stanton with Ricky D’Amico—they are probably kissing, or more, right now—and I take the bottle.

  I take a long swig, and all of a sudden I am a lot drunker than I was a half hour ago, the car around me starting to swim: not a nauseating swim, just a gentle swim like I’m being sailed away on something.

  Tim reaches for a knob on the radio, cranks the tunes louder. The swim intensifies as Tim leans in to kiss me.

  It is not bad; it is not great. It is just Tim: a guy I’ve known for years, a guy I’ve never felt much for one way or the other, at most a guy I feel vaguely pleasant around.

  He starts to kiss me harder, his hand resting on the place beneath the hem of my shirt and my stomach. Then he leans across me, opens my door.

  “Come on,” he says, opening his own door.

  “What?” I say dumbly.

  “Let’s make ourselves more comfortable,” he says, coming around to my side of the car, taking hold of my hand, leading me out.

  Tim gets a beach blanket from the trunk, leads me to the gently sloping lawn on the side of the school. I have a dim memory of being much younger here, of teachers taking us outside for class on the first warm days of spring. It feels weird to be lying on a beach blanket with Tim O’Mara on the same spot where Ms. Welch used to talk to us about how to use topic sentences in essays, Ms. Welch talking loud over the sound of the lawn-mower as the landscaper trimmed the grass, bouncing up and down in the seat of his old John Deere.

  “It’s such a hot night,” Tim says between kisses. “Are you sure you need this shirt? And what about these pants?”

  It seems like a bad idea even while I’m doing it, but the beer in me is so strong now, and anyway it doesn’t feel like it’s me doing it, it feels like it’s just Tim doing it, and I keep seeing Danny Stanton and Ricky D’Amico, when I still see anything at all, together in my head.

  Tim does more than kiss me, but I feel less and less aware of what he is doing as I lie with my back against the ground, vaguely registering the bite of mosquitoes on my legs. I don’t know if it’s so much that I don’t feel like myself as it is that I don’t feel like anything at all.

  When he starts to take off his own pants, I rouse myself enough to object. I know that I do not want this, not like this.

  “Oh, come on,” he says, and smiles, the night behind him as he climbs on top of me. “I’ll just lie here for a minute while you think about it.”

  But I can barely think of anything. Later on I will remember suggesting there were other things we could do than the thing he obviously had in mind. I will remember saying I didn’t want to get AIDS. I will remember saying I didn’t want to get pregnant. I will remember saying I’d never done this before.

  “Come on,” he says again, more softly now, reaching for his jeans. I hear a crinkling sound, see in his hand what I realize must be a foil-wrapped condom. “See?” he says. “You won’t get pregnant. You won’t get AIDS. And, hey, everyone has to have a first time.”

  Later on I will remember nothing of the act itself: not pain, not pleasure. All I will remember is the sensation of things slipping away from me and the exact way the stars looked, winking overhead.

  10:00 p.m.

  I do not even remember putting my clothes back on, the drive home to my parents’ house.

  It is as though I come to as we pull into the driveway and Tim kills the engine.

  He reaches to kiss me again, but it is different from his earlier kisses. Those were like he was saying a different form of hello, like he was trying to reach for something; this kiss feels more like he is doing the last thing before pulling away, like he is shutting a door, saying good-bye. I notice he doesn’t ask for my phone number, ask to see me again. This is okay: I would not want him to call, would not want to see him again, not like this. It will be bad enough passing him in the hallways at school when school starts up again.

  “Hey.” He smiles, mussing my hair. “It was great, right? You had a good time, right?”

  I don’t say anything to that. I am too busy feeling sick to my stomach, nauseous. But he doesn’t let me go yet. Instead he laughs at what a “hard time”—as he puts it—I gave him earlier, the objections I raised before doing what we did.

  “No one could call you easy, Angel,” he says, and laughs.

  Then he does an odd thing. He reaches over to the glove compartment, opens it, pulls out a small notebook and pen, writes something, tears off the sheet, hands it to me.

  “Here,” he says.

  I look down at the scrap of paper, squint at the letters and numbers on it: “Tim O’Mara” and a phone number.

  He reaches across me one last time, pulls the handle for me one last time, pushes the door open for me one last time, laughs one last time.

  “Call me if you’re pregnant,” he says.

  After I get out of the car, he pulls the door shut behind me as I walk toward my parents’ house.

  In four hours my life has totally changed:
I have had sex for the first time, an act I do not even remember.

  In exactly two and a half months I will use that phone number and I will call Tim O’Mara.

  September

  Week of September 3/Week 1

  IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE THAT AFTER SO MANY YEARS OF schooling together, we are seniors now, this will be our last year in high school. From the day school starts, right after Labor Day, it is like we are all on a collision course with the future, riding high on a wave of energy, and living loud.

  “Seniors!” someone shouts nearly every day, pounding the lockers as whoever is doing the shouting runs down the hallway. “Seniors!”

  Sometimes it seems as though Tim O’Mara is shouting louder than anybody. Sometimes it seems as though every time I walk down a hall, there’s Tim O’Mara, shouting, “SENIORS!”

  We have not said a word to each other since the night of Ricky D’Amico’s party. At the time I didn’t expect him to call me—after all, he never even asked for my number. But as the days have piled up, I’ve been surprised that no call has come. I guess a part of me thought that Tim O’Mara, who has never been known to have a regular girlfriend, might take our one night together as an excuse to try to turn it into something more. Weird. Even though I have no interest in him in that way whatsoever, that part of me that half-expected a call, that part that had rehearsed in my mind how to let him down gently, is kind of hurt that the call never came.

  More puzzling is that he hasn’t spoken to me since then, even though we share some classes, even though we see each other in the lunchroom every day, pass each other in the halls all the time. He used to say hi to me a lot before, used to say it before I even had the chance to, as if he were worried that if he didn’t say something to people each time he saw them, they wouldn’t even bother to acknowledge him. But now he says nothing.

  I try to tell myself it doesn’t mean anything when he walks by me with a group of his friends and doesn’t say anything as he stares at me, his friends staring too while they pound him on the back and give him high-fives. I try to tell myself it doesn’t mean anything when I am sitting in the front row of our Law in Society class and I hear what sounds like my name—Angel Hansen —being whispered from the back of the room, and I turn in my seat, only to see Tim and his friends laughing.

  I ignore everything because I just need to get through this one last year of high school. I need to get through Creative Writing and Law in Society and French IV and Calculus II and Oil Painting and Physics II and European History and even gym class. I need to buckle down and keep my grades up and study for the SATs, which I will be taking in five weeks, those all-important tests that serve as pearly gates, those tests that will decide whether I will be able to go where I want to go next year, rather than having to settle for whoever will take me.

  So I cannot worry about Tim O’Mara and whatever he is saying; I can’t worry about his stupid friends.

  I am in the lunchroom, eating at a table by myself and wondering why no one seems to sit with me anymore, why there suddenly seems to be this no-fly zone around me now, when Karin practically throws her tray on the table and plops down onto the bench across from me.

  “So,” she says in a tone I don’t remember her ever using with me before, “when were you planning on telling me, huh?”

  “What?” Glad for the interruption even if her tone worries me, I put my cheeseburger down. On good days the cheeseburgers taste like something you wouldn’t really want to eat, not unless you were in prison or high school, but lately they have started to … smell awful to me. At least now that Karin is here, I will not have to try to force myself to eat something that is making me feel so gross. “What are you talking about?” I ask again.

  I can tell from the look on her face that Karin is really mad or maybe just very hurt. I have seen that anger directed at other people, I have seen her hurt when some guy she liked wasn’t as interested in her, but I have never seen those things directed at me. The last time we even fought was freshman year when we both tried out for the basketball team, both sucked, and each blamed the other for not making the cut.

  “If you had caught the ball when I threw it to you …,” I’d said.

  “If you even knew how to throw a ball in the first place …,” she’d said.

  We’d both wanted to be on the girls’ basketball team because Danny Stanton was on the boys’ team, and so was his best friend, Todd Ferris, whom Karin had a crush on. Neither of us were cheerleader material—we both lack the gene that enables a girl to scream at the top of her lungs and smile for three hours straight at a football game while freezing her ass off in a micromini—and so we’d figured the most efficient way to get close to Danny and Todd was if we shared a common interest: basketball.

  But I can see from the look on Karin’s face that whatever it is that’s bothering her, it is way more important than basketball.

  “When were you planning on telling me about you and Tim?” Karin demands.

  “Oh,” I say.

  “’Oh’? That’s all you have to say? ’Oh’?”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” I say.

  “Nothing to tell? I’m supposed to be your best friend, Angel. I thought we told each other everything.”

  “We do.”

  “Is that right? Then how come I’m the last to know? How come I only heard about you sleeping with Tim after I heard Ricky D’Amico and Dawn Peck talking about it in art class?”

  So people have been talking about me.

  “Look,” I say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything to you about it because I was too embarrassed.”

  “Why would you ever be embarrassed about anything around me?”

  “I was embarrassed because it was such a stupid thing to do. It was stupid of me to get so drunk, it was stupid of me to get in the car with Tim, and it was really stupid of me to do anything with him. God , I don’t even remember most of it!”

  “You had sex for the first time and you don’t remember it?”

  I shake my head.

  “I told you the first time I did it,” she says. “We promised each other we’d tell each other about the first time.”

  She’s right. We did promise.

  “I thought for sure you’d tell me,” she says.

  “And I would have,” I say, “if it mattered. But it was so … so … so … nothing. It was like the least important thing I’ve ever done. It wasn’t like I had something important to tell you. I mean, it was like less than nothing. Does it even count as a first time, if I don’t even remember it?”

  And Karin surprises me: She laughs. And suddenly it is like she is her old self and there is no longer anything wrong between us.

  “No,” she laughs. “I guess that doesn’t really count as any kind of first time at all.”

  “So,” I say when she is done laughing, “people are really talking about me?”

  She shrugs it off. “Of course,” she says. “But I think that’s just because everyone was so surprised. I mean, who would sleep with Tim O’Mara?”

  She must see from the look on my face that this bothers me, because she leans across the table and whispers, “But don’t worry about it. I’m sure people will get over it in about a week.”

  Week of September 10/Week 2

  But people do not get over it. Or, at least, Danny Stanton doesn’t get over it.

  At the ring of the bell I walk out of art class, only to find Danny Stanton making out with Ricky D’Amico, whose class follows mine, right outside the door. He has her leaned up against the wall, one hand resting on the narrow of her waist as he kisses her. From where I’m standing I prefer to think it’s her trying to pull him closer, rather than the other way around, but I know this may not be so.

  I start to head off to my next class. Then I stop, lean against the wall a few feet down from them, my back to them. It has been so long since I talked to Danny—usually he calls to say hey at least every few weeks, but lately he has barely nodded to me w
hen we pass in the halls—that I decide to wait her out.

  At last I hear the door to the art room get pulled shut by the teacher, hear Danny’s steps from behind. As I look around, I see the hall is almost deserted now, nearly everyone else has gone on to his or her next class.

  Danny has already walked past me when I say “Hey” softly.

  He spins around.

  “Oh,” he says. “Angel.”

  “Walk with me?” I say. It is something we have said to each other before. It is our own private signal that one of us wants to take a break from the idiocy that is high school all around us.

  His eyes narrow.

  “Don’t you have another class to go to?” he says.

  I shrug. “I was thinking of skipping.” I shrug again. “Walk with me?”

  “Sure,” he finally says. “I guess I could skip. I’ll walk with you.”

  We walk side by side through the deserted halls, not saying a thing.

  Even though I was the one to suggest this, I have no idea where I want us to go. Which is okay, since Danny has no problem leading. He leads us into and through the cafeteria and out again, into one of the outdoor areas that kids hang out in when they have study hall or just want to skip. If this were back in my mom’s day, kids would be smoking, because this outdoor area with the overhang, all concrete and brick, would be a designated smoking area. But this is not my mom’s day, so kids have to wait until they get off school grounds to light up. Even though Danny plays basketball, he’s been known to smoke from time to time, and I see him nervously pat at the pack in his shirt pocket before letting his hand drop when he remembers where he is.

  I look at him and I think there’s not another guy in the world that looks as good in a simple black T-shirt as Danny Stanton does.

  “So,” he says, and there’s a weird slice of anger I hear in his voice, “we walked.”