by Adi Alsaid
“Oh man, puppy love is hard to get ahold of these days,” Gretchen said, again unable to hide a smile. She handed Dave the purse she’d brought with her and then slowly sank onto the bench. It was curious how much he wanted her to find the bench comfortable, as if her not seeing the beauty of this spot might diminish the bench’s value, or hers.
But then she smiled and said, “I think I feel a golden retriever,” and stayed where she was, even lying back into the position that Dave had imagined for himself, her hands folded across her stomach, her feet out and crossed at the ankles. She looked out at the harbor slightly nodding to herself, looking perfectly content.
“What do you want from the coffee shop? I’ll go get us a drink.”
“I’ll come with,” Gretchen said, starting to rise.
“You sure? You look too comfortable,” Dave said. “You’ll save us our spot; I’ll come back in a sec.”
The sun peeked through from a break in the clouds, causing Gretchen to squint up at him, her hair turning completely golden in the light. “There aren’t a lot of people around,” she said, getting up completely and grabbing her purse from Dave. “I’ll come with. We just barely said hi; I don’t wanna say good-bye already.”
Dave laughed and they headed in the direction of the coffee shop. “It wouldn’t have been a good-bye, just a ‘be right back.’”
“Well, yeah,” Gretchen said, and already Dave could hear that little warble in her tone that meant she was about to make a joke. “But I have huge abandonment issues.”
“Have you ever in your life successfully lied?”
“God, am I really that bad?”
“There are worse things to be bad at,” Dave said.
“Like what?” Gretchen responded, faking disbelief.
“What if you were really bad at eating?” Dave opened the coffee shop door and let Gretchen pass through. “Say you had really bad aim with forks. You would be hungry all the time, plus imagine all the scarring.”
“But, Dave, I have so many jokes that I’ve missed out on delivering well. Do you know how much emotional scarring that’s left behind? I may seem normal to you, but my soul is completely wrecked.”
As they talked, they kept doing the eye-contact dance. Their eyes flitted around the room, at each other’s foreheads or lips or feet. How did anyone maintain eye contact throughout a conversation?
They ordered hot chocolates and took them back to the bench. On the walk there, Dave discovered that she had a tattoo on the back of her neck. He caught a glimpse of it when she swept her hair over one shoulder right before they sat down.
“What’s your tattoo say?”
Gretchen took a sip from her hot chocolate and self-consciously brushed her hair back to cover her neck. “It’s from a book. It says, ‘a little better than you found it.’”
“What’s it mean?”
“Well, it’s part of a longer quote, this really beautiful passage about how the best you can ever do is to leave the world a little better than you found it. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Invent a new toaster or reach out a helping hand; just, you know, leave it a little better than you found it.”
Dave noticed that their knees were touching. Amazing what kind of warmth could come from such slight contact. “What book is it?”
“Timbuktu by Paul Auster,” she said. “I know it’s weird to say or even think this, but that book has made me who I am. Not entirely, obviously. It didn’t help me at soccer, or make me so good at telling jokes with a straight face. But certain lines felt like they were thoughts I’d had my whole life that just hadn’t taken shape yet until I read them. ‘A little better than you found it’ is how I see everything now. Not just the world, but everything. People, too. I want people I know to be a little better off than when I found them. God, that sounds pretentious, doesn’t it?”
“It sounds like kindness to me,” Dave said.
“Well, thanks. My ex always thought it was stupid. He hated the tattoo.” She popped the lid off her hot chocolate and scooped a fingerful of whipped cream. “Want some?”
“Sure,” Dave said. He hesitated. “It’s okay if I dip my finger in?”
“I insist.” Gretchen smiled, holding out the cup toward him.
“Why’d your ex hate the tattoo?”
“If I had to guess, it’s because he doesn’t care about other people.” She popped the lid back on. “That’s not true. He cares about some people. I’m just bitter—legitimately this time.”
“Can I ask why?”
“He cheated on me,” she said, not really sounding all that bitter, as if the statement had lost its heartbreak. Dave wasn’t sure if he should ask more, but a couple of the homeless guys walked by the bench just then, saying hi to Dave and asking for change. Dave gave them the two singles that he had loose in his pocket.
“Those guys knew your name,” Gretchen said, following their slow retreat back to the other side of the harbor.
“Like I said, I come here often.” He put his finished drink on the ground, trying to ignore how it felt to have her look at him. Their knees were still touching.
“I’ve only really been here a couple of times,” Gretchen said, looking out at the boats docked in the harbor. “My family wanted to check out the aquarium when we first moved here but never got around to it.”
“You’ve never been to the famed Morro Bay Aquarium? That’s a travesty.” He stood up, grabbing their empty cups and tossing them in a nearby trash can. “Come on, you’re missing out on easily the thirty-second best aquarium in the western hemisphere...or at least the thirty-second best aquarium of the West Coast.”
“What about the bench? What if it loves you back and misses you terribly when you’re gone?”
“It’ll have plenty of warm, fuzzy memories of your butt to hold it over until I come back,” he said without really thinking about what he was saying. He held his hand out for her so she could lift herself up.
Gretchen laughed; God, she had so many different kinds of cute laughs. “Wow, I wasn’t even sure this was a date, but now that you’ve complimented my butt I think it might be.” She took his hand and lifted herself up.
Dave felt himself blush. Her hand was still cupped in his as they walked across the harbor toward the aquarium. He could feel her turquoise ring pressing against his fingers, the cool touch of metal standing out against the warmth of their palms. It was hard to think of anything to say, and Dave worried that he might just stare at their hands the rest of the walk, so he unclasped his fingers from hers and pointed out the bubble tea stand. “If you go there, never get the blackberry flavor. It tastes like licorice that’s been sitting in dirty laundry for a week.”
“You’ve tasted laundry-marinated licorice?”
“My dad likes to experiment in the kitchen,” Dave said, his eyes still on the bubble tea stand. Even as the feel of Gretchen’s hand lingered on his, Julia was in the back of his mind, all those times he’d shared bubble tea with her, the ease with which they reached for each other’s drinks, so comfortable in each other’s presence that they didn’t even have to acknowledge it was happening. He wondered if he’d ever reach that level of comfort with Gretchen, or with anyone else at all.
The aquarium was nearly empty. There was a young dad showing his daughter around, lifting her in his arms so she could press her nose against the glass and watch the sharks swim in their elegant way. A couple in their sixties sat on a bench eating sandwiches by the jellyfish. The bare lighting inside the aquarium made it seem like it was much later in the evening than it was, and in most of the rooms it was just Dave and Gretchen on their own, free to talk.
They talked about things that Dave imagined people on first (maybe?) dates always talked about, favorite this or that, a story here or there, following the conversations down their natural tangents. As they watched
the fish and the sea otters, making jokes and interviewing each other, Dave learned the following: that she volunteered at a hospice one weekend a month solely because she wanted to live by the words she’d tattooed on her neck. That she always had to joke about death for weeks after she left or she wouldn’t have the heart to return. That she had an eight-year-old brother with Asperger’s. That she smelled like honey. That she had no idea what she wanted to study at school, and hadn’t even made a decision on where she was going yet. That she didn’t like apples, and didn’t understand why she’d never met anyone else that shared her distaste for them in all their varieties. That she made soft little moans of appreciation when faced with brightly colored fish, and that her eyes would never stray from one she found particularly appealing, not until the fish disappeared into a little cove in the coral or until Dave put a hand on her back and gently moved them along to the next room. That she loved driving, and sometimes when she couldn’t sleep, she’d drive around neighborhoods late at night, counting how many lights were left on, how many TVs still flashed bright and blue, how many other cars were on the road. That sometimes she did this without even listening to music, because she liked how the silence calmed her thoughts.
When Dave told her that he’d never learned to drive, she decided that it was the end of their aquarium tour. She grabbed his hand, effortlessly, as if it was the easiest thing in the world, and led him toward the exit.
They got into her car and drove to the mall’s parking lot, which was the largest one around. The stores were all closing by then, the last of the shoppers straggling to their cars holding their bags wearily, keys in hand reflecting the orange glow of parking-lot lights. Gretchen parked the car at the edge of the lot and they switched spots.
“Are you sure about this? I don’t want to wreck your car.”
In the passenger seat, Gretchen buckled her seat belt. “That should answer your question.”
“I’m not good at this.”
“I happen to be a pretty good teacher. Just don’t kill us.”
Dave tensed his fingers against the steering wheel. “Okay, aiming for no deaths. Got it. What do I do now?”
“Shift into drive.”
“You’re losing me.”
“The stick on your right,” Gretchen said, “move it next to the letter D.”
“Which one is D? Did I mention I’m illiterate?”
Gretchen laughed and shifted for him, causing the car to lurch forward. “You have to hit the brake!” she squealed.
Dave hit the brake the only way he knew how, by slamming both feet down on the pedal. The sudden stop caused his seat belt to lock up tight against his chest. “Gretchen, your car is trying to kill me.” He yanked at the fabric, which only made it pull back tighter, as if he and the car were involved in some sort of tug-of-war.
“This is going to be the funniest day of my life,” Gretchen said.
For an hour, Gretchen talked him calmly through, giving him little pointers until the car’s movement felt natural. Every now and then she’d touch his shoulder or his forearm when offering her advice, and in those moments he was glad he’d waited until now to learn how to drive, glad that Julia had always been around to drive for him.
When they both decided he’d had enough practice for his first time, they switched back so that Gretchen could drive. But instead of putting the car in drive they sat quietly for a moment, and in the silence Dave could spot a mutual desire to stretch out their night, to not go home. Gretchen pulled a GPS out of the glove compartment and smiled at him. “Wanna do something cool?”
“Almost always.”
“Check this out,” she said, and she started driving the car around in strange patterns, stopping to turn the GPS on or off, hiding the screen so he couldn’t see what was happening.
After a few minutes she parked the car and turned the screen toward him. The parking lot was a blank white space in the GPS, while the streets surrounding the mall were yellow. A blue line showed the path the car had taken.
“You drew a smiley face.”
“I drew a smiley face.”
“With the car.”
“And a satellite,” she added.
“Gretchen,” Dave said, admiring the GPS screen, “you are so cool.”
It was another hour of GPS-drawing—a stick figure, a cat, the word fuzzy—before they left the parking lot and Gretchen took Dave home. It was nearly midnight, but he didn’t want to step away from Gretchen, didn’t want the night to end. But now that it was going to, he wondered how, exactly, it would. It was a first date, he knew, because how they would say good-bye mattered.
They were parked in his driveway, no lights on in his house save for the blue glow of the television in Brett’s room. Gretchen had put the car in park, but for almost thirty seconds neither one of them had moved or said a thing.
There was no doubt in his mind that he wanted to kiss her. He could feel the desire for it like a ball of energy high up in his chest, but there seemed no way to move it from there, as if a part of him was against the whole idea and would not allow it. He couldn’t help but think that Julia was somehow responsible.
Dave noticed her iPod sitting in the cup holder, a wire plugging it into the car. “Play me your favorite song,” he said, picking it up.
The screen lit at his touch, casting Gretchen’s face in a soft white light. She took it from him, her fingers touching his for what seemed like a deliberately long moment. “You won’t make fun of me?”
“I’ve never made fun of anyone in my entire life.”
She narrowed her eyes at him over the iPod, bringing it close to her as she scrolled through. “Seriously. Almost no one knows this song is my favorite, and if I choose to trust you and you think it’s cheesy or something, then for the rest of my life, any time I listen to the song, there’ll be a tinge of shame. You might forever ruin my favorite song.”
Dave stole a glance at her lips, like he’d been doing all day. “I swear on the bench at the harbor that I won’t laugh. If I do, I’ll never sit on it again.”
Then Gretchen hit play and Dave turned his attention to the music coming softly through the speakers. Just a few guitar notes rang out, clean and unaccompanied. The singer’s voice came on sounding like Kermit the Frog mixed with a typical indie singer-songwriter.
Don’t let hurricanes hold you back, raging rivers or shark attack, find love, and give it all away.
It was a simple song, and Dave could see Gretchen moving her lips along with the words. Brett had always made fun of his taste in music, so Dave knew what it was like to resist the urge to sing out your favorite lyrics. He wanted her to sing, but settled for the fact that she was sharing the song with him. When the song faded away, Gretchen reached to turn the volume down. “If you hated it, don’t say anything.”
“I loved it,” Dave said, wondering if this was it, the moment when the ball of energy finally made its way up and he would lean to kiss her. She was smiling at him and their eyes held each other for long enough that Dave thought there was no way a good-bye could happen without a kiss. But he had no idea how to accomplish such a thing. When the time came for a good-bye, he leaned across the shift stick and gave Gretchen a hug, which was quick, and warm, and stayed with him as he lay in bed awake all night.
NUTELLA & CUPCAKES
DAVE UNWRAPPED THE lunch his dad had packed for him: a chicken torta, the tomatoes, lettuce, and chipotle salsa on the side to keep the bread from getting soggy. He was in the tree house, looking out at the blacktop. There’d been a test in class and he’d finished early, so he was the first one out for lunch. It was April. AP tests, finals, and graduation were within reach.
The bell rang and within a few seconds the doors to the building broke out into a stream of people. Everyone headed for the cafeteria, or for their usual lunch spots. A table had b
een set up near the blacktop to collect votes for who would go on the prom ballot, and though Dave had avoided it, a steady flow of people came by, dropping their folded ballots into a wooden box with the world’s flimsiest lock on it.
He spotted Julia as soon as she was outside, her pink hair acting like a beacon, in case her attractiveness wasn’t enough. It’d be convenient if he could forget his best friend was so pretty, if the attraction just kind of melted away as soon as he’d decided to see her the way she saw him, as soon as Gretchen started taking up his thoughts. But, clearly, life wasn’t so convenient. Dave took a bite from his torta and chewed slowly, struggling with the fact that an attraction to Julia and a desire to keep her as a friend could coexist. It reminded him of how grief had made his dad both more quiet and more loving. The father he remembered before his mom died sometimes seemed like a whole other person, always laughing and teasing, encouraging roughhousing between his two sons. Now he was quieter, seemingly more distant, though his affection showed through more often. Things overlapping, contradictions; Dave knew these were common, that they were everywhere and he’d have to get used to them.
Julia joined him in the tree house, taking the stool next to him and jolting him out of his ruminations. “Hey, goof. Sorry I missed you in homeroom today. The dads are so hungover from the weekend that I think it spread to me. I’ll tell you all about it, but first, I’ve got the best story of all time.”
“Ugh, the hyperbole.”
Julia picked a tomato that had fallen onto Dave’s napkin and popped it into her mouth. “No hyperbole here, I promise. I was in Marroney’s class...”
“He still lets you attend class? You haven’t been served legal papers of some sort yet?”
