by Dani Irons
Even though I know he didn’t mean love love, I blush anyway. He stares at me long and hard again. I stand on the skateboard, hoping that my natural look isn’t what’s interesting him. Maybe I should have put on makeup. “Now what?” I ask.
He stands. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Just...go?”
He nods. “The body’s weird. Even if you don’t remember how to skateboard, your body might. There’s this thing called muscle memory. If you do something often enough, your body will automatically do it.”
I’d heard that somewhere. “Do I need a helmet or something?” I’m thinking about my accident and how I don’t exactly want to end up in the hospital again.
“I wouldn’t let you do anything to hurt yourself on my watch.”
I peer down the road. It’s straight, no traffic. I rack my brain for whatever I can remember about how to skateboard. But there’s nothing.
I decide to let my body have a go. After I step onto the board with my left foot, I push off with my right. I wobble, topple and stop. “Ha-ha, that was really athletic,” I say. “I’ll be doing ollies in no time. That’s a thing, right? Ollies?”
He laughs at me. “You’re doing fine. Try again.”
I do, this time harder, and end up riding a few feet.
“If your mom happens to look out the window right now, I’m so dead,” he says, jogging over to me. “Maybe I should block her view.” He stands there, arms wide, like he’s about to shield me from a grenade.
“Oh, yeah. She totally can’t see what we’re up to now.” I laugh and it presses at the pain in my ribs. I wince and get down from the board.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah...just...don’t make me laugh.”
“Can’t promise that,” he says with a smile. He takes the camera from around his neck and slides it over my head. His fingers brush against the skin by my ear and it gives me goose bumps. I pull away reflexively. “Sorry,” he says. “Just thought taking pictures might be a little less taxing for you.”
“It might be just as difficult, seeing as I only have one usable arm.”
“At least your good arm is on the same side as the button. So you can hold it up and take a picture with one hand.”
“The button?” I laugh. “You mean the shutter release?”
“Hey, yeah! That’s what it’s called. You remember that?”
I shrug. “I guess. I think it’s general knowledge though, isn’t it? That stuff I can remember.”
“Maybe. But you’ve also taken photography classes and it’s kind of a hobby of yours. Can you tell the difference between something that’s general knowledge and a memory?”
“Well,” I said, stepping on the skateboard again. “At the hospital, I was able to name a lot of celebrities, more than the neurologist said was the norm. Somehow my interests seem to have an effect on how much general knowledge I retain.” I ignore, momentarily, how easily conversation comes to us and how comfortable I am around him. I push off on the skateboard again and make it about thirty feet.
“That’s...confusing,” he says, jogging over to catch up.
“It is. I’m still trying to figure it out. I don’t know if I ever will, but...” I stand on the board and take a picture of the sky. It feels weird, very awkward. The picture comes out blurry because I can’t balance on the board and take a steady picture at the same time. I don’t know what Wyatt sees in the whole skateboarding journalism thing.
I focus the camera instead on Wyatt’s face. He isn’t paying attention to me. He keeps looking back over his shoulder at my house, as if Cora will pop out any moment with a shotgun. His face is serene, though, calm, a mixture of all the personalities he’s shown me so far. Worry fills his eyes and a hesitant confidence shows in his smile. The dark blue sky is behind him, pocked with purple clouds, the dim light turning his features more manly. There’s even a little stubble on his face and I decide I love it.
After I press the shutter release, he turns to look at me. I don’t think he knows that I’ve taken his picture. “But what?” he asks.
It takes me a second to remember what I was talking about. “I was going to say that I hope my memory returns completely someday.”
His small smile drops at this. I don’t know if it’s because he’s being serious, or something else. “Me too,” he says. He looks sincere, but his words come out flat. Maybe he’s just sad.
The dream of him fixing my hair comes to mind and suddenly I realize that we are standing close together. He reaches a hand out for mine. I let him take it, but not sure why. Ever since I woke up from the coma thing, I haven’t liked to be touched. My gut is telling me pull away, my heart is saying give him a chance and the tension between the two makes me too muddled to do anything. He squeezes my hand but I don’t squeeze back. There could be some unknown meaning in a squeeze.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his eyes sad.
“For what?”
“For everything you’re going through. Someone needs to apologize. Might as well be me.”
“Actually, it sounds like I need to apologize to my old self. I was the one who’d drifted into traffic, thinking you were coming down the road. I did this, not you.” I feel every ounce of those words, like I’d gotten drunk and behind the wheel and ran Old Liv over myself.
His face is still. “I didn’t know you were looking for me,” he says. “Chloe told you that?”
I nod. “She told me I’d drifted into traffic because I thought my boyfriend was coming down the street.”
“Oh.” Shadows cross his eyes. “They didn’t tell me that part.” He shakes his head in disgust; his face grows dark, possibly angry. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. I wish I’d been there, outside with you.” He looks me in the eyes; there’s yearning there.
“Why weren’t you?”
He stares at me a minute and I see something in his expression that I can’t read. Guilt, maybe. “You were hanging out with your friends most of the night,” he says. “I was there with my friends, you with yours.”
“But we hung out long enough to take that drunken picture of me?”
“Just long enough,” he says, head down low enough that is seems he’s talking to his shoes instead of me. “I should have gone out with you, though.”
I let go of his hand and touch his arm. “There’s no way you could have known I would have drunkenly stumbled in the street.”
“True, but it was obvious that you were drunk. I should have stayed with you, in case something did happen.”
I shake my head. “That’s kind of silly. Plus, I might’ve gotten annoyed with you.”
His expression hardens. “But at least you wouldn’t have a broken brain right now. At least you’d remember me.” His lips press together tightly and he grabs for my hand again. His warm palm mingles with mine.
I feel for Wyatt. I do. He’s in love with Old Liv; I can see that. He feels responsible for her, protective of her. The problem is that I’m still uncertain if I’m her anymore. I don’t know if I feel the same for Wyatt as he does for me. I also don’t want to jump into a decision just because I think I should or because several other people have said it’s what I should do. If anything, I’m hurting this nice guy with my indecision. What I want is to be around him so I can figure things out, but distant enough so I don’t lead him on. So, I pull my hand from his. “Listen.”
His hand falls to his side, but it stays open, as if I might reach out for him again.
“I don’t know what I want yet,” I continue, not looking at him. “I think, for the person I used to be, I need to remember what I wanted then first. Does that make sense?”
His words come out heavy and slow. “Sort of.”
“I’m not sure if I should try to recapture my past or move forward. I know that I ha
ve to give my family a chance. Obviously I can’t give them up.”
“But you’re giving me up?” His words sound heavy.
I blink a few times, thinking of the right words. “I think I need to be single right now. I don’t want to be confused and you’re confusing me.”
He takes a step forward. “I want to help you.” He’s officially in my personal space. The warmth of him creeps into my warmth. It reminds me of a Venn diagram. His personal space is a circle. Mine’s a circle. But we’re pushed close enough together that they overlap.
“You are helping me,” I insist, pushing the skateboard up with my foot and gesturing to it. “This is helping.” After I pull off the camera strap from my neck, I hand it out to him. I don’t want to risk touching his neck by putting it on myself. “I don’t mind more of it. But I...” He takes the camera from me, careful not to touch his fingertips to mine. He’s hurt now. His deflated body makes my heart ache. “I need to figure things out first. If we’re meant to be together, it will happen organically, right?”
“What if all this time you’re using to figure things out pushes us farther apart?”
What I don’t tell him is how far away from him I really am feeling. How I don’t know if that will change. Instead, I say, “I’m numb inside right now. I don’t feel anything. For anybody. I hope that will change soon, but until then...friends?”
His eyes light up a little. “You mean you aren’t going to bar me from seeing you?”
I hesitate. Try to put myself in his shoes again. I would hate if he made me stay away completely. I think of his note. He does seem to really care about me. I shake my head. “No...”
“So we can still spend time together? Skateboard? Take pictures?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Watch movies? Eat burgers?”
I nod. “Just...no dates. Nothing romantic. Just friends.”
He smiles. “So we can hang out together? Say on a Wednesday?”
My eyes narrow at him. “That sounds like a date.”
“Nope. It isn’t.”
“I’d have to say maybe, then.” I brush the hair that the light breeze has pushed into my eyes off my face.
“What can I do to get you to say yes?”
My guts twist with a mixture of excitement and anger. This boy won’t stop. “There have to be some rules.”
“Rules?”
I nod. “There will be no kissing.”
He blinks.
“No unnecessary touching. No flirting. You can’t call me your girlfriend or honey or anything like that. You can’t hold my hand—”
“Wouldn’t that go under ‘no unnecessary touching’?”
“You get the point.”
“Are those all your rules?” He smirks and I try not to return it.
“For now.”
“Fine,” he says, crossing his arms in front of him. “Challenge accepted.” His mouth twists into a mischievous smile, a wave of confidence flooding his expression. It looks good on him—until he opens his mouth again. “But do you think you can follow your own rules?”
I open my mouth to answer him when Cora barks from the door. “Olivia Achilla Christakos.”
Wyatt’s eyes widen. “Oh, no. She used your middle name. You better get in there.”
I smile, quite embarrassed that I’m again being treated like a child, and now in front of Wyatt. “Achilla?”
“Greek,” he says. “Feminine form of Achilles. Like, Achilles’ heel?”
I stare at him. “Exactly how Greek am I?”
“Very Greek.”
“Are you Greek, too?”
He shakes his head. “Non-practicing Jew.”
“What in the hell are you doing out here?” Cora shouts from the front door. “You’ll be back in the hospital with pneumonia! You’re supposed to rest until your ribs feel better!”
Despite the fact that it’s more than warm outside and I am sweating my boobs off and there is no way I’ll catch pneumonia, I don’t argue. “She does know that I’m twenty, right? Twenty.”
“Her daughter has just been through a horrific accident,” he says with a smile. “I bet if she could swaddle you up and put you in her bed for the rest of her life, she would.”
He’s probably right, but still. “It’s just...” I sigh. “Grating on my nerves.”
“Maybe you could deal with it for a few more days? And then talk to her about it? She does care about you. A lot.”
“Maybe I will.” I hesitate and then lean in, giving Wyatt an awkward, one-arm hug. He returns it. He smells like soap and something like rain.
“I’ll see you soon,” he says, pulling away. “Maybe I’ll pick you up this week...say Wednesday...to um, hang out.”
I’m walking backward toward my house when I say, “Why Wednesday?”
He smiles, shrugs. “You’re going to have to say yes first.”
Hanging out with Wyatt would be a good idea. It would open more doors to who he really is. Who Old Liv was. “Yes, okay? So what’s Wednesday?”
His smile widens. He straps his camera around his neck and jumps onto his board.
“Let’s just say we’ll be...” he twists up his face in thought. “ Picking up groceries.”
Chapter Eighteen
Tenth Grade
I couldn’t hear my music over the banging on the roof. It had started yesterday afternoon after Wyatt and I got out of school, continued late into the night, and started up again right after dawn. It was just after lunchtime and I’d had enough of it.
After I stomped over to my dresser to turn up the volume for the fourth time, I went back to the mirror to check out my outfit. James, Tyler and Bo would be here any second to pick me up. Then we were going to meet Chloe and Amy Bradford at Stearn’s Wharf. I wanted to take my camera to take pictures of all of us, but Chloe said that would look nerdy. So I decided not to bring it.
I was wearing a blue sundress with a ruffled, low-cut collar and black heels, but I wanted to be a little more dressed up. From the massive pile of clothes on my bed, I plucked my “little white dress” from the middle. It was dressier and showed more leg, my best asset.
My hair was long and straight and I wore hoops in my ears and a silver anklet. The heels seemed too dressy now, so I swapped them with red ballet flats. They would work better for the wharf, anyway.
Just then a loud honk sounded outside. The banging on the roof paused just for a second and then started up again.
I sprayed some perfume in my hair and checked my makeup one last time.
Outside, Tyler’s Jeep was parked at the curb, James manning the wheel. His thick arm dangled out of the window, the bright sun cooking his skin into the color of freshly baked bread. I wanted to tear a chunk off with my teeth.
Dad, from the roof, said, “Don’t your friends want to come inside and meet the ‘rents?”
I glared up at him, horrified, and shook my head slowly. The sun blazed behind him and I had to bring a hand up to my eyes to shield it. Wyatt was up there with him, hammering in new shingles like they pissed him off. He didn’t look at me.
“Do you have your phone with you?”
“Um...yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll call you in an hour. If you don’t answer, you won’t be going anywhere ever again.”
Without answering, I stalked to the Jeep and climbed in the back. James raised his eyebrows at me through the review mirror. My stomach flopped.
* * *
We parked on State Street and walked down to the dolphin fountain, where we were supposed to meet Chloe and Amy. They were there, laughing and pointing at people. Chloe had been so jealous when she found out James and Tyler would be picking me up instead of her and Amy, but she didn’t seem put out or anything right then
. Plus, James and I were the ones who made the plans in English, so it wasn’t like we were trying to exclude anyone. We were including them, just in a different vehicle.
Palm trees and people lined the streets, mostly tourists, mostly much older people, and some even on motorized rides. We continued up the walkway, toward the ramp, where we could see out into the ocean. Boats dotted the water, which was glazed in orange by the sun. It would have been a perfect day except for the wind; I kept having to tug my hair back and I knew I wasn’t looking very graceful doing it.
Chloe pointed out fashion dos and don’ts on our walk. “Ooh...that lady has the most gorgeous wings tattooed on her back,” or “That lady’s hat is way too big and floppy,” and even, “I would kill to be able to walk around in a thong. She has the nicest ass. Oh, no! Haha. That’s a dude.”
“Still has a nice ass,” Amy pointed out. She’d started hanging out with Chloe and me last year when we joined volleyball. She was cool, but quiet.
“Have you been to this restaurant up here?” James asked, slowing down to so I would catch up to him. “The Harbor?”
I had, about a million times with my family, but I shook my head. I considered myself a confident girl, not shy, but super outspoken, but something about James unnerved me. In a good way. Butterflies exploded into my belly just looking at him. He was pure bulk with blond hair and ocean-blue eyes. I wanted to go skinny-dipping in them.
“I’d like to take you there one day,” he whispered and all of my nerve endings burned with excitement.
“Okay. I’d like that.” My voice was mousy and little.
We passed the restaurant then and I peeked in, spotting cool blue tiles on the floor, beckoning me like they never had, making me daydream of my first real date. I mean, I’d hung out with guys before, but not one-on-one in an intimate setting. I couldn’t wait.
We passed more people, some on bikes and some sporting cameras, making me itch for mine. I had taken plenty of pictures of the wharf before, but not with cute boys. Amy was talking to Tyler, Chloe was talking to Bo Harris, the football star, and James was walking so close to me that our arms touched. Then he grabbed my hand. Wrapping my fingers around his, I thought, this is the first time I’ve really held a boy’s hand. Except, you know, if you counted Red Rover and other games we played in elementary school. Which I totally wasn’t counting because this was the real thing.
