by Adi Alsaid
“Six to go,” Dave said, tossing his backpack into her car.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling invincible.”
“What did Marroney say about the cupcakes?”
“Oh, we had a sub today,” Julia said. She lowered the top on her car and slid into the driver’s seat, plugging in her phone to play some music. “Turns out he’s in Arizona for some sort of conference. It might send some mixed signals when he returns home to a plate of rotting, ant-infested cupcakes, but nothing’s getting me down today.”
“That man is going to get nightmares because of you.”
“Sexy nightmares, maybe.” Julia looked at her phone. “Ooh, perfect celebration music.” She hit play and the opening chords of “Blister in the Sun” came on. Julia started dancing in her seat. “Harbor?” she asked between lyrics.
“Just for a bit. I’ve got an AP Chem group-study thing,” Dave said. Then, feeling guilty about his word choice, he added, “That girl Gretchen is coming over at seven.”
“Plenty of time,” Julia said, taking the admission without a hint of suspicion. She turned up the music and shifted the car into drive, taking them down Highway 1 toward the coast, shouting the lyrics out at the top of her lungs. Instead of going to the harbor, though, Julia kept driving north along the Pacific Ocean, the mood too celebratory to stop the car. It was a beautiful drive, and Dave would never tire of it. That highway made you feel like no matter how much time you spent with it, it was not enough. An hour passed by without Dave really noticing. The fog reached across the highway like arms looking for an embrace, then it would slowly pull away and reveal the glimmer of the ocean, the brown-green facade of the cliffs. Just as the air was turning colder, Julia turned down the music, looking over at Dave with a raised eyebrow.
“What do you say about crossing another Never off the list?” She looked ahead at the curving highway.
She was talking about number nine, the epic road trip. He pictured them skipping class the rest of the week, going up as far as Seattle, returning down the coastline slowly, sleeping on the beach, hiking through Big Sur, roaming the streets of San Francisco and Portland, enjoying the many aesthetic beauties of their part of the world while everyone else was stuck at school. He thought about Gretchen ringing the doorbell at his house and his dad telling her that Dave wasn’t home.
“Not yet,” he said. “This chemistry project is pretty important and it’s not the best week for a life-changing road trip.”
“I like how you said, ‘yet.’ But I wasn’t thinking road trip. I was thinking I’ll host a ‘BEER’ party in celebration of your prom king campaign success. The dads are out of town next weekend and I feel like being irresponsible. What do you say?”
Dave stuck his hand out the window, making waves in the air, pretending to think it over. “I don’t know, maybe. I am a prom king candidate now; I’ve got a lot on my plate. Press junkets, galas, charity balls.”
Julia reached over and poked him in the stomach. “Goof.”
They drove on for another half hour before turning back around. Julia turned down the music for their return journey as they planned out the party, most of it jokingly, lots of talk of explosions and celebrity DJs. The closer they got to San Luis Obispo, the more butterflies Dave was feeling in his stomach. He kept looking at his cell phone for the time, calculating how long it would take them to get back.
Julia dropped him off at home at a quarter to seven. Dave thought he might take a shower, then worried Gretchen would show up as he was in the bathroom, or that it would seem too obvious that he showered just for her arrival. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, showering specifically for her. It pointed to a certain thoughtfulness. Or maybe it showed he was trying too hard. Or maybe it would just point to him being insecure about his body odor, which wasn’t attractive. Or maybe it implied he thought she would get close enough to smell him, and what if she didn’t actually want to get close to him at all? In the end, Dave stood by his bathroom door, lost in thought, vacillating between lines of reasoning until the moment the doorbell put an end to the debate in his head.
He yelled out, “I’ve got it!” then ran down the stairs, taking a deep breath at the foot of the stairs to settle his breathing, simultaneously realizing that he’d just lived out the girl-coming-over-to-study cliché he’d seen in countless sitcoms. He laughed, caught his breath again, then opened the door.
“Oh, you look nice,” were the first words out of his mouth. He hadn’t planned for that, not this time. They’d just kind of slipped out, like a liquid spilling out of a bottle.
Gretchen blushed and turned her eyes down, smiling. “Hi,” she said after a while.
“Sorry,” Dave said. “I just...sorry.” He opened the door and stepped aside to let her in. “Hi.”
She entered the house, her backpack slung over her shoulder, the smell of honey in her wake. “It’s okay,” she said. “I haven’t showered today, so the compliment feels especially good.” She took a quick look around, poking her head into the living room, where Dave’s dad was watching a basketball game. “Hi,” she called out. “I’m Gretchen.”
Dave’s dad looked away from the TV and then stood up quickly, surprised by Gretchen’s presence. Dave expected him to shake her hand and mumble a hello before returning to his spot on the couch, but instead he introduced himself warmly, lingering by the entrance to the living room, not looking like he wanted to escape back to the TV. He was polite and smiley, just like Dave remembered him being years ago. Dave had thought that part of his dad had disappeared. But maybe he was different when he wasn’t around Dave and Brett. Maybe at work, with friends, he’d gone back to being himself, able to escape the quiet grief he couldn’t seem to shake around his sons.
“Well, I’ll let you kids get to studying,” he said, and Dave’s head almost exploded when his dad winked at him slyly before turning away.
They took the stairs up to Dave’s room. When he pushed open the door, he wished he’d spent those fifteen minutes tidying up instead of wondering whether or not to shower. Gretchen plopped her backpack down by Dave’s desk, which was set against the wall by the door and mostly bare, save for his laptop and about six or seven pairs of tangled earphones. His bed was unmade, thanks to his dad’s very lax policy on bed making. His laundry was mostly contained to the hamper in the corner, though a few shirts and socks hung on the edge like prisoners making a break for it.
“Sorry for the mess,” Dave said, brushing the nest of headphones into his drawer, instead of into the trash can, like he should have done months ago.
“My room’s worse.” Gretchen looked around, her hands on her hips. “You don’t do the whole hot babe and sports posters on your wall,” she said. “That’s refreshing.”
One wall was blank, painted the same dull green it had been since Dave was a kid. Another two walls were technically blank, too, but one had the window that faced out at the big, pretty jacaranda tree in their yard, and the other was mounted with Dave’s TV, so they didn’t feel blank. The fourth wall had a whiteboard hanging above his desk, and it wasn’t until now that Dave remembered he’d written a little better than you found it on his whiteboard after their date at the harbor. Gretchen sat herself on the edge of Dave’s bed, her hands clasped between her thighs, staring at the board.
Dave wanted to smack himself for not erasing it. New to this whole pursuing-girls thing, he had no idea how to play it cool. He did know that writing a girl’s life motto down on your whiteboard after only one date was not playing it cool. On the spectrum of coolness, it was way too close to building a shrine in her honor, which was way too close to collecting a bag of her hair. How had Dave so quickly turned into a hair collector?
“That’s really cute,” Gretchen said, then she lay back on Dave’s bed, her hair and arms sprawled out beside her. Dave let out a sigh of relief. “I have a confession. I have very
little interest in studying AP Chem tonight.”
Was it weird to burp out of excitement? That was his first instinct, but he managed to suppress the burp, thankfully. Add that one to life’s long list of mysteries. “You don’t?”
“No. I’ve had very little interest in doing any studying at all, actually.”
“Ah, you have it, too. Senioritis.”
“Guilty,” Gretchen said. She sat up, and Dave caught a flash of cleavage that he felt simultaneously guilty and blessed for having seen. “I have an idea.”
“Is it a prank?”
“Not this time.” She propped herself up on his bed, her elbows locked, the plunging V-neck T-shirt making it impossible to not at least glance in her direction. “Could we maybe watch a movie instead? Will your academic life survive if we do that? I want to watch a movie with you, but I don’t want to be responsible for your downfall.”
“You know,” Dave said, getting up from his desk chair, “since it seems like tonight’s one of those nights where I can’t stop certain things from spilling out of my mouth”—he walked around to the far side of the bed, grabbing his remote off the nightstand, not entirely believing that he was allowing himself to say what he was saying, that he even had the ability to speak like this—“I don’t think I’d mind if you were my downfall. Not one bit. A movie with you sounds perfect.”
Gretchen smiled and kicked her shoes off and adjusted one of Dave’s pillows so she could lie back comfortably. Dave had had daydreams a lot like this. Since when did real life act this way? “You get to choose the movie,” Gretchen said, “but it has to fall within one of two categories: cute, or ridiculously bad.”
“You don’t happen to know of any that fall in the ‘both’ category, do you?”
“Too many, actually.”
They chose a B-list horror movie about sharks in the woods and turned off the lights. Gretchen’s foot laid against his before the opening credits had even finished.
“Who do you think is going to die first?” Dave asked, leaning just a little bit in her direction.
“The smartest character,” Gretchen said with no hesitation.
“Really? Why?”
“You can’t have smart people lingering around for too long in horror movies. Otherwise they come up with solutions and not enough people die.”
“Good point,” Dave said. The movie’s run time was ninety-four minutes, and he felt a rush of gratitude knowing that he would spend every single one of those with Gretchen nearby. “I can’t wait for all the shark puns.”
“Ooh, you think there’ll be shark puns?” Gretchen smiled. The stud in her ear glinted green, reflecting the light from the TV.
“I would be willing to bet five hundred points on my SAT score that someone is going to say, ‘We’re fin-ished.’”
Gretchen snorted, smacking him slightly across the ribs. “I can’t believe how quickly you came up with one.”
Dave shrugged, folding his hands over his stomach and maybe sticking his elbows out a little more than was comfortable so that they would brush against Gretchen’s side.
As the movie ran on, Dave noticed that he and Gretchen talked almost as much as the characters on the screen did. With every comment or joke, they scooched closer to each other, Dave pretending not to notice the diminishing space between them, wondering if Gretchen was pretending, too. He laughed at the movie, and at Gretchen’s jokes, and in their laughter he found little excuses to touch, to lean into her.
When Gretchen would lean into him, Dave could smell her breath (honey, too). He would think about kissing her but laugh instead, or he would shift so that his leg was touching more of hers. The closer he got to her, the more he wanted to kiss her, the more insane it felt that he wasn’t already kissing her.
On the screen, a shark swam in the creek near where the characters had set up camp. The ditzy redhead and the bro-y one who kept saying he knew kung fu were making out in a tent.
“Do you think it’s a good way to go or a bad way to go?” Gretchen asked, her knee bent and resting on Dave’s thigh.
“Eaten by a shark in a forest? Pretty bad.”
“No,” Gretchen said, “while making out.”
Dave thought about it for a while. Or, rather, he tried to actually come up with an answer, rather than picture kissing Gretchen. “There are worse ways to go,” he said finally.
“I agree. If you’re going to die via shark, it may as well come as a surprise, in the middle of doing something that feels as nice as kissing does.”
Now, every fiber of his being screamed. Now. But Dave kept his eyes on the screen. The fingers on his left hand, out of sight from Gretchen, tensed into a fist. “Yeah,” he said simply, still thinking, Now now now. Still thinking, despite it all, about Julia.
For five perfect minutes as the credits rolled, Dave’s and Gretchen’s hands clasped together. Dave didn’t know how it had happened, if he had initiated the contact or if it had been her. He only knew their fingers were interlocked. They cracked a joke or two about how awful and great the movie had been, neither of them acknowledging the moist warmth of each other’s skin, the lack of a kiss.
What Dave could acknowledge, though, was this: Julia. Julia in the back of his mind the whole time, restraining his movements. Every way he touched Gretchen, every place he touched Gretchen, he thought of how he’d failed to touch Julia. The movie made them both laugh, and Dave thought about all the Friday night movies he’d watched with Julia. He thought about how long he’d loved Julia, how recently he’d become interested in Gretchen. How Julia didn’t even know that he loved her, after all this time. And so even after those five finger-clasped minutes, even after they looked at each other with smiles still plastered on their faces, smiles practically lingering all over the room, smiles clinging off his hamper, smiles perched on the corner of the TV and the whiteboard, even after Dave walked Gretchen downstairs with his hand against her lower back, even after he opened her car door for her, Dave felt too much like he was cheating on Julia to kiss Gretchen. He knew it was crazy. It was ridiculous. It was dumb. Everything told him he should be kissing her, everything except Julia in his head (even though Julia, if she were actually present, would probably tell him he was an idiot for not kissing Gretchen). In the end he could only touch Gretchen in just the way he’d been touching Julia for years: He hugged her, warm and friendly but nothing more, and said good night.
NEVERTHELESS BELONG
“WHAT THE HELL is going on with you guys?” Brett said as he delivered the three kegs to Julia’s house. “Now you’re hosting parties? And Dave’s on the ballot for prom king?”
“Thanks to your video,” Julia offered.
“Of course it was thanks to my video. But I’m still confused about your whole new we-actually-hang-out-with-other-people thing. It’s not like you. What happened to thinking you’re better than everybody else?”
“We never thought we were better than anyone,” Julia said with a sigh, like she’d tried to explain this to him dozens of times before. “Like you said, we’re just coming out of our shells a little bit. Just because we did different things than other people didn’t mean we thought we were better than anyone.”
“Sure,” Brett said. “Now you’re just slummin’ it with us common folk for a while to see what it’s like.”
Julia blushed. “Don’t go back to being mean.”
“You mean calling you on your shit?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Julia said, smiling.
They were in Julia’s backyard, the three kegs set strategically in three different corners to spread out the crowd. Dave was lounging in the grass, trying to get a nap in before the party started. He hadn’t been sleeping all week. Every time he was about to nod off, the thought of not kissing Gretchen popped in his head, as insistent as a mosquito buzzing past hi
s ear. He’d texted Gretchen the next morning about what a great time he’d had, and they still sat together in Chem when they could, and walked in the halls together whenever he wasn’t walking with Julia. But he hadn’t touched her since Tuesday night, hadn’t even brushed her knee with his. The lack of a kiss lingered like a sore muscle.
It was a hot day. Dave looked up at the clouds and watched the smallest white wisps evaporate before his eyes, little by little. His lower back was sweaty, his T-shirt sticking to him and making the grass beneath him itchy. His cell phone was resting on his stomach. He felt like a failure, like someone who would never experience love because he couldn’t bring himself to do anything about it. A mopey thought, sure, but it felt true.
“Dave, come help me get stuff ready inside. I need to hide all the dads’ valuables.”
“But I’m sleepy,” Dave said, trying to sink further into the grass. “I’ll need all my energy to schmooze with the crowd tonight.”
“You’ve been a zombie all week,” Julia said, handing Brett the money for the kegs. “Fine, sleep. But I’m waking you up an hour before the party so we can have you fitted for your prom king sash and tiara.”
“You know so little about prom,” Brett said, taking a seat on the patio furniture and pulling a cigarette from his shirt pocket.
“You know so little about humor,” Julia said grabbing his cigarette and tossing it in the bushes. “And that’s gross.”
“You’re gonna have so much more gross than that to clean up.”
Julia sighed and called Brett a jerk, then the two of them disappeared into the house, teasing each other. Dave still had the urge to watch her leave. He checked his cell phone, as if a message might show up at any moment that could change everything for him, Gretchen telling him she was going to take matters into her own hands. Or maybe something from his dad, some little nugget of wisdom he’d kept to himself until now, knowing Dave needed it. But his phone showed nothing but the time, and Dave set it back down on his stomach, not surprised.
