Kendall spotted something over my shoulder and made a cringe-y face. I turned to see, and there was Lukas coming down the hall, walking with his friend Brady.
“Ugh,” muttered Kendall, which really said it all for both of us.
Brady stopped and said, “Hi, guys.”
Lukas grabbed him by the shirt and yanked, shaking his head. It didn’t seem malicious. It was more like, I’m not prepared to do this right now.
Kendall asked, “What’s up?”
I stared at a suddenly riveting spot on the wall.
“Too much and not enough,” said Brady, grinning with newly braceless teeth. Kendall had always liked Brady. There had been talk of a double date, when Lukas and I were together. They both had last names as first names, so why not give it a try?
It still hurt, with Lukas. To not-quite-see each other this way. He was the third person I ever kissed, and the first who ever wanted to call me his girlfriend. His hands, which had been all over my body. His lower lip, which I’d held lightly between my teeth. How he made me sigh on the plaid couch in his basement, wanting more but not wanting more, desperate to lose control while gripping it as tightly as I could with white knuckles.
I didn’t want to think about that other part of him, which I could almost still feel on my fingertips.
“Hey, Lukas,” my mouth said without consulting my brain.
He looked straight at me now, and I was reminded of how much we resembled each other. It was one of the things the Mock Trial kids said from the beginning. They called us “the Siblings,” but Lukas took it as a sign we were supposed to be a couple. He had the same wavy, dirty blond hair and brown eyes I did. As prosecuting attorneys, we’d seemed united.
“Ari,” he said. Simply and flatly, like my name alone told the story of the cruel way I cut myself off from him. Lukas turned and walked away. Brady shrugged at us, then trailed after his friend.
I had made that, what had just happened.
“Do I get points for trying?” I asked Kendall, blinking the sting from my eyes.
“Sure, but I’d say you’ve got a big deficit to make up. You messed the guy up bad.”
“I never meant to do that.” I shook my head hard, shook that thought out. “I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
Kendall must have sensed how serious I was. “Would it have been so hard to simply, you know, break up with him?”
“I thought it would be easier to ignore and avoid him until he finally got the hint,” I replied. “Easier for me, I guess. For him, not so much.”
I winced at the memory of Lukas’s emails, the note he left in my locker.
Please, please tell me what I did. Is this about what happened after the party?
I’m sorry if I pushed you too far, but you never told me to stop. We can dial it back.
Talk to me, Ari.
I don’t deserve the silent treatment.
He was right. He didn’t. But my fear of confrontation beat out my sense of what was mature and, you know, kind.
Kendall put a hand on my shoulder. “He was your first boyfriend. How the hell were you supposed to know what to do? Now, at least, you know better.”
“I know a lot of things better,” I added.
“Then take that and do what you need to about Camden Armstrong. Otherwise, you are not allowed to pine for him from a distance and then talk about it all summer. Agreed?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay, then. Let’s go figure out what the hell Hester Prynne was thinking with that creepy Arthur Dimmesdale who was so not worth the hassle.”
I followed her down the hall, happy to have orders.
4
I was loading up the car after a morning at the lake with Dani, and suddenly there he was. Lashing his bike to a rack in the reservoir parking lot. Like a normal human being who, you know, exists. It had been a full week since the Bathroom Incident and I’d replayed the scene so much in my head, it was easy to forget he was three-dimensional and could move of his own accord.
I looked away and wasn’t going to glance again but of course I did it anyway, when I was reaching up to pull the hatchback down. Naturally, this was when Camden saw me. My arm caught in midair as if I were waving. He waved back.
My adrenaline level went from Zero to Holy Crap in a millisecond.
Now he was walking toward me. I unfocused my eyes so all I really saw was the bright white of a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, set against the brown skin of his arms and the dark blue of his jeans.
In the middle distance, two other people pulled into the parking lot on bikes. Eliza, and the other boy from last summer, so tall he made his bicycle look like a toy. And Eliza, well. All I noticed at first was that she still had lips. The ones Camden had kissed.
I closed the hatchback and leaned against it for support in case I’d have to see them do whatever they were going to do together, as a couple. Camden kept approaching, and in a moment of terror, I wondered if he was not actually coming over to me but headed somewhere else, and this was going to be even worse than the restroom.
“Hey,” he said, finally stopping a few yards away.
“Hi.” It somehow came out normal. Maybe this would be fine.
“That was you the other day, in the men’s room.”
“Yes.”
“It was funny.”
“It was?” Come on, Ari. Say a complex sentence. With clauses and stuff. “I thought it was a little bit devastating.”
“Eh. Men, women. Toilets are toilets.”
I laughed. He made me laugh. “At least nobody was changing in there.”
“True. You got lucky it was just me.” He paused. “You’re Ari, right?”
He knew my name. His voice saying it made me flush. I could only nod.
“I’m Camden.”
“Hi, Camden.” I made it sound as if I didn’t know, and that felt like a lie.
Now the other guy and Eliza were walking up behind Camden. I’d forgotten how the boy teetered as he moved, with all that height, and how nonchalantly stunning the girl was. Like she glowed and knew it and didn’t let it change anything.
“Thanks for totally ditching us at the traffic light,” she said to Camden.
Camden halfway turned to them. “I told you. I can’t ride slower than that, it’s physically impossible for me. Sorry.”
He didn’t go to Eliza.
Instead, he looked at me. “This is Ari. Ari, this is Eliza and Max.”
“Hello,” I said, with a wave in their direction. Okay, then. So now we’d officially met. It was like characters from a book I’d read over and over, suddenly stepping off the page.
Max said, “Hey,” but Eliza simply scanned me from the top down. She stopped dead when she saw my purple boots.
“Satina Galt,” she said, pointing with her chin at my feet.
“Totally,” said Max, taking off his bike helmet. The previous summer, his hair had had streaks of blue and purple in it, but he’d cut the colors off and now his head was covered in brown duckling fuzz.
Camden rolled his eyes. “I apologize for them. They’re a little obsessed.”
But there I was, feeling suddenly, thrillingly, seen.
“No apologies necessary,” I said, sticking out one foot sideways to better display the boot. “They’re comfortable and practical and surprisingly stylish, regardless of where in time or space your hypership lands you.”
Camden and Eliza and Max exchanged the same deeply impressed look.
“Season Four? When she had those shiny pants, too?” asked Eliza. It was like we’d all lapsed into our native language. The only other person I’d ever spoken it with before was my mom, multiple lifetimes ago.
“Actually, Season Three,” I said. “They changed her boots first, before they sexied up the rest of her uniform.”
“Ah, right,” said Eliza. “Wherever did you find these beauties? I figured spray paint was the only way I’d make a full Satina uniform happen.”
“I got lucky at the thrift store in town.”
More impressed looks. The whole story was more complicated than that, but I wasn’t going to get into it.
“A perfect thrift store find is the universe wanting you to have something,” said Camden, making those scandalous dimples for me.
“I like to think so,” I said, willing my voice not to shake. Keeping myself together while having this conversation took an amount of strength I could only attribute to the boots. The boots made me able. The boots made things Possible.
Camden was about to say something else when Danielle came running into the parking lot.
“Freeze!” I yelled on instinct.
She froze, but snapped back, “You told me to hurry up, so I’m hurrying!” Then she noticed Camden, Max, and Eliza, and her eyes widened. “I remember you guys . . . ,” she said.
“We’ve got to go,” I said quickly, cutting her off. I could already hear Dani’s next comment. You were Ari’s summer crush last year! Or maybe: I’m pretty sure Ari dreams about having babies with you. What’s your name again?
I grabbed Dani’s hand and pulled her close to me. Camden regarded us. I couldn’t read his expression. Amused, maybe, fringed with sadness. Wistful. Everyone was silent for a few moments, not sure what was supposed to happen now. A white parking space line divided me from them, and the boundary suddenly seemed important. If Dani hadn’t been there, would I have stepped over it to more Satina, more Silver Arrow, more everything?
Finally, it was Eliza who ended the awkwardness and said, “Well, hopefully we’ll see you around, Specialist Galt.” She moved toward the entrance gate, gesturing for Camden and Max to follow.
In the car on the way home, my right foot solid on the gas pedal, I wiggled my toes in the boot.
“That was him, right?” asked Dani from the backseat.
Him. That X on Camden’s baseball cap last summer, and how it was like he’d been marked for me. This is The Boy.
“Yes,” I said.
Already, it hurt extra hard to be driving away from the lake, knowing they were there and I was not.
“Why did that girl call you Something Galt?”
Most of the time, Dani already knew the answers to the questions she asked, but she liked to hear them come from someone else.
“Satina Galt. From Silver Arrow.”
“And that’s your favorite show, right?”
She knew it was, but I still said, “Yes,” then added, “It was Mom’s favorite show, too. When she was a teenager.”
I wasn’t sure if Dani knew that, but had a feeling she didn’t. Judging from Dani’s surprised expression in the rearview mirror, I was right.
Thing was, “favorite show” did not even scratch the surface of it.
And another thing, a terrible thing was, I felt glad Danielle would never know that.
It was me who watched Silver Arrow with Mom going as far back as I could remember, in our basement apartment with the once-green-but-now-yellow carpet, where it always smelled of hot dogs even though we never ate them. She’d come home from her job at the bank, change into sweats, make two cups of tea with lots of sugar, then pull out her DVDs of all five seasons that first aired in the 1980s. I’d watch her select a disk and handle it so delicately, with two fingers, that I was afraid to ever touch these glimmering things myself. I believed you could stare into them, like a mirror, and see a different reality staring back.
My mother needed an episode every day. She especially needed Satina Galt, the sole human woman among men and aliens and androids in an interplanetary crew.
As for me? I was five years old. I could recite the alphabet, the Pledge of Allegiance, and this speech from the opening credits of the show (and I could do it in a slow, deep voice that sounded eerily like the one on TV):
Behold the Arrow One, a twenty-third-century hypership designed for long-range space travel! The shining beacon of an ever-unfolding future!
But an accident on its maiden voyage has torn a hole in the universal continuum. Now it hurtles randomly through time and space while its crew tries to get back home.
Where, and when, will the Arrow One hit next?
Wherever. Whenever. It was always Satina’s intelligence, her independence, her toughness, and her sense of humor that made all the difference. At least, that’s how Mom and I saw it.
She stopped watching around the time she met Richard. I didn’t.
The universe wanting you to have something, Camden had said about my thrift store find.
Some people were fans. Some people wove their fandom into the threadbare places in their lives, to make them stronger. I wondered if Camden Armstrong was one of these people, and where he wove, and why.
The next Monday afternoon, I stepped out of my AP French final and took a deep breath. It was almost worth it to get sick with stress about a test, to have this. One delicious moment of relief that it was over.
I found Kendall by her locker. She’d just come out of her chemistry exam and looked appropriately destroyed.
“A C at best,” she said, throwing a stack of study notes in a nearby garbage can. “I am so sick of this shit.”
“I’m sorry, Ken,” I said.
“Me, too.” She didn’t meet my glance. I knew from past experience that she was feeling a special combination of embarrassment and anger. Her parents, who were both college history professors, would have to put on their supportive-but-disappointed expressions that even I knew so well.
“What are you doing later?” I asked. “Wanna come over and cram for English?”
“I’m meeting up with Sasha, Caitlin, and those guys to do that,” she said, looking truly torn. Sasha, Caitlin, et al., were Kendall’s friends from the newspaper. I’d never clicked with them. Still, she asked, “Why don’t you join us?”
I hadn’t told her about the parking lot and Camden’s friends, and how a bona fide conversation had happened. I liked having the memory of it pressed against my palm, facedown, where it could only be felt and not examined to death.
“Sure,” I said.
Kendall smiled. I rarely said “Sure” to anything when it came to the newspaper masthead. Suddenly, my phone dinged with a text from my mother:
Coming to pick you up. Can you be at the loop in 5 min?
“My mom,” I said, worried.
“Everything okay?”
“I don’t know. She’s picking me up.”
“Call me later.” Kendall squeezed my shoulder before I rushed off to gather my stuff and head outside.
“What’s wrong?” I shouted when Mom drove up.
She had all the windows open, a news report blasting on the car radio. She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and frowned.
“Nothing’s wrong. I figured I’d drive you home so you had extra time to study.”
“God, Mom. I thought something had happened.” I went around to the passenger side and climbed in.
“What would have happened?” Mom asked after I slammed the door.
“You’re the nurse. Accidents? Fires? Death and dismemberment?”
“Is it that unusual for me to surprise you at school with a ride home?”
“Uh, yeah.”
Mom looked hurt. Oops, she must have wanted me to lie. “I’m trying to help, Ari. I know how important it is that you finish the year with a bang.” She clutched the steering wheel tighter and eyed some other students outside, like maybe if she threw one of them in the car for a ride home, she’d get the gratitude she was hoping for.
“It is important. Thank you.”
As we waited to make the right turn out of the school’s main driveway, I studied Mom’s face in profile. From this angle, you couldn’t really see the dark circles under her eyes. She looked more like the Mom I remembered from when I was little, sitting next to me in the evening light, watching TV.
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “I woke up early and have tonight off, so
I figured I’d go do stuff.” She paused. “Sometimes I forget what it’s like to be out in daylight.”
“You should be gardening, or taking a walk.”
“Shush. Will you please let me do this?” Her voice caught a little at the end. “I feel like I’m never around for you.”
Then just talk to me, I wanted to say. Ask me how my day was. Ask me if I had any good moments and I would tell you that, yes, I did. And I might even share them with you.
But I knew this simple car ride was all she had to give right now.
At home, Mom shooed me straight to my room to study. She said she’d bring me a snack, get Danielle off the school bus.
So I let her do that. It was all I really had to give back.
I heard Dani’s musical voice fill the house when she came home, Mom whispering for her to be quiet and that she couldn’t go see me right away. Dani protesting, then some kind of food being unwrapped and the TV turning on, and Dani not protesting anymore. I put on music and reintroduced myself to my history notebook.
Sometime later, I heard Richard come home. Voices, footsteps down the stairs, up the stairs. Raised voices.
Then, crying.
I leapt up, opened the door, and poked my head out of my room. My mom was at the kitchen table with her laptop, her head in her hands. Richard stood above her, holding Dani in his arms, her limbs pretzeled around him.
“You couldn’t hear it? Come on, Kate. I caught at least three F-bombs between the front door and the den!”
“I got involved with something online!”
Dani saw me, then scrambled out of Richard’s arms and came down the hall. Neither Richard nor Mom seemed to notice. They continued bickering.
I motioned for Dani that it was okay to come into the safe harbor of my room. After she stepped inside, I closed the door and turned to her.
“What was that about?”
“Uh. Nothing.”
“Dani.”
“I may have started watching an inappropriate movie. I didn’t mean to, I was trying to get to Nickelodeon. But I don’t know how to use the remote!”
“How inappropriate are we talking?”
“Boobs.”
“Fantastic.”
What Happens Now Page 4
