Crush Control

by Jennifer Jabaley

  As I walked over and reached into his bag, I couldn’t help but notice the contents: an iPod, two spiral-bound notebooks, a bottle of Germ-X, a PowerBar, and two bags of M&M’s. I looked down at my T-shirt and smiled. Of course he was gorgeous; that was obvious. But how could I not be further enamored of a guy who had the forethought to pack tissues and Germ-X as well as chocolate? Preparation was a priority for me so to see a boy—a hot boy—who obviously valued this as well? Swoon.

  I walked toward him. He raised his shirt higher and bent slightly forward. I used the tissue to dab at his cut, trying hard not to burst into a fit of giggles because oh my God, I’m like two inches from his butt! And who knew a back could be so sexy? In all my seventeen years I’d never seen such a beautiful back.

  “Thanks,” Hot Guy said as I continued to clean up the blood.

  From a few feet away, Oompa let out a low growl. He watched my adoration with a snarl on his face; then he cocked his head, pinned his ears back, and smiled. He pushed off his hind legs and raced toward Hot Guy. He sprang through the air like a grasshopper and fastened himself onto Hot Guy’s leg. AGAIN! Then he started to hump the poor guy, even faster this time.

  I cannot believe this.

  “Oompa!” I scolded. “Get down!” I dropped the tissue and wrapped my hands around Oompa’s fat belly and tried to pry him off. “I’m so sorry,” I apologized again. “He’s all confused and upset by the move.” I attempted to loosen the viselike grip of his paws and kept talking, nervously. “When he got out of the car and didn’t see his usual fire hydrant, he, like, freaked out. He ran in circles and refused to pee. I need to find a vet—get him a dose of Prozac or something. He’s not like some sex-crazed dog or anything. He’s just mad at me.” I did not just say sex-crazed to this hot guy!

  So much for first impressions. I had to get out of there.

  Hot Guy looked down at Oompa humping his calf. “I’m not sure I believe you,” he said, smiling uncomfortably as he shook his leg again. “Are you sure you don’t have a small stash of dog-Prozac on you?” He looked a little desperate.

  But Prozac was not what Oompa wanted. I knew that.

  “Oompa!” I scolded, wanting to die. Oompa gave me a toothy snarl and kept right on going. And I knew I had no other choice. I knew there was only one way to get the dog to cooperate. And it wouldn’t be pretty. It was even more humiliating than the M&M T-shirt—worse than a humping dog or wiping blood inches from a perfectly sculpted butt. But I had no other choice.

  “Fine!” I growled back at the dog. I squatted down closer to him—and hopefully out of Hot Guy’s earshot. I adopted my best throaty Cher voice and whisper-sang, “Do you be-lieve in life after love?”

  Oompa stopped humping but remained attached to Hot Guy’s leg. He cocked his head as if to say, Louder, please.

  I should have never even ventured into this park, I thought miserably. I should have let the dog roam the streets by himself. I raised my voice an octave. “I can feel something inside me say I really don’t think you’re strong enough, now.”

  And just like that, Oompa hopped down from Hot Guy’s leg, walked over to the grass, and plopped down.

  Hot Guy’s forehead crinkled in confusion. He looked down at his leg then back and forth from me to Oompa in the grass, his head bobbing like he was watching a tennis match. “What just happened?”

  Now I’m not, by nature, a liar. And technically, the words that came out next weren’t entirely untrue. It was more like I concocted an imaginary bridge to steer the conversation. Because I knew that Hot Guy was either going to remember me as the dorky girl in an M&M T-shirt with a Cher-obsessed humping dog, or I could make a more worthy impression. I decided for the latter. So, rather than admit the truth—that Oompa was simply homesick for our Vegas apartment where our eccentric neighbor played a constant sound track of Cher—I chose a slightly more exciting version of reality.

  “Oh,” I said, shooing my hand toward Oompa. “Back in Vegas, whenever Cher came to do a show, her dressing room was always next to mine.” I rolled my eyes as if to say, The dog just loved to listen to her sing. I casually shrugged and waited for his follow-up question. It came quickly.

  “Did you perform in Vegas?” Hot Guy asked, intrigued. “Like, in a show?” His eyebrows raised high in anticipation.

  “Yeah,” I said. “My mom and I had a hypnosis show—The Hip Hypnotist.” And this part wasn’t a lie. Maybe I’d never met Cher, but I had helped my mom entertain Vegas tourists with hypnosis for the last six years.

  “Wow,” Hot Guy said, sounding impressed. He smiled a relaxed, natural smile now that my dog was no longer accosting him. “That’s cool.”

  “Thanks,” I said, thinking that maybe this move could be my chance to finally stand out from the shadow of my beautiful mother—to finally have my own story to tell, not just be her sidekick.

  Plus, now that we were back in Georgia, I could be around Max again. “I used to live here,” I said to the hot guy. “Like a million years ago. I’m still really good friends with Max Montgomery?” Mom insisted that everyone knew everyone in this town, but that was hard for me to remember or even imagine after living in a place where people were as transient as the wind.

  But Hot Guy nodded with recognition. “I know Max,” he said. “He’s cool. A black belt in karate and a kick-ass drummer.”

  I smiled and nodded too. “Max and I have kept in touch since I moved eight years ago. It’ll be nice to hear the drums banging in person instead of over the phone. I haven’t even called him yet because”—I gestured to my two-straight-days-in-the-car outfit—“we just got here.”

  Hot Guy nodded. His golden hair fell over his eyes. He casually swept it to the side in one quick motion. “So, are you a senior, then? Will you be at Worthington High on Monday?”

  I nodded. “Yup. Mom’s grand plans to reinvent her life couldn’t wait one more year to let me graduate with my friends.” I tried to sound irritated, like I just left the best life. I couldn’t admit the reality—that I kind of embraced the opportunity to reinvent myself. Of course, my reinvention plan never included a first impression like this.

  Oompa waddled over and rubbed his head against my leg in an attempt to apologize. I bent down and picked him up. “It’s okay,” I said, kissing his head. “It’s a big change.”

  Hot Guy walked closer to me and stroked Oompa’s head. Then he looked up at my eyes. “Whoa,” he said, and I knew what would come next. “Your eyes—they’re wicked.”

  Hmmm. Wicked was new. Usually it was weird or strange or funky or, if it was an adult and they were trying to be polite, they’d say, Oh, how unique, but I hadn’t heard wicked. The color of my eyes is just plain hazel, but my pupils aren’t round like those of a normal person, they have a strange keyhole shape. I was born with them that way, and my mother always tries to say it’s special and distinctive, but if you look it up on the Internet it says it’s an abnormality, and, let’s face it, who wants to be unique if it’s abnormal? It’s so unfair.

  “My name is Quinton,” Hot Guy said, moving past my eyes.

  “Willow,” I said, and we stood there awkwardly for a minute. Should I shake his hand? I mean, it seems kind of past routine introductions—after all, my hand was just practically massaging his butt. But the awkwardness continued, so I extended my hand. “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  Quinton looked down at his right hand, but he was still holding a wad of bloodstained tissues.

  I glanced over at the tissue I had tossed to the ground when I pried Oompa off his leg. He’s going to think I litter—on top of everything else. Quickly I scampered over and snatched up the tissue, which now had soaked up some yellow Gatorade and was a sopping mess. “Let me just clean this up,” I said, desperately searching around for a garbage can. When I didn’t see one, I shoved the sticky, drenched tissue wad into the pocket of my cotton shorts, shuddering slightly. Exit now! “Well, I guess I better get going and take off this T-shirt before these M&M’s melt.” No
, I did NOT just say that! This day cannot get any worse.

  Quinton looked at me like I was a little deranged. “Okay,” he said tentatively. “See you on Monday.”

  “Not unless I see you first.” I pointed at him. What was wrong with me?

  Quinton smiled at me, but I couldn’t quite decipher if it was a smile of sweet Southern charm or if inside he was mocking me. I grabbed Oompa’s leash and darted back through the shrubs and down the winding dirt trail. I was disappointed that I’d made such a disaster of a first impression—something that had seemed so enticing to me as we drove cross-country just hours before. When I left Vegas, that was all I wanted—an opportunity to start over, to stand out in a crowd, to throw away the years of blending in and become someone special. Someone extraordinary.

  My first chance at reinvention was not at all how I had planned it, but it was memorable nonetheless.

  2

  By the time I walked the half mile down the road to our new house, long trails of sweat trickled down my back and my hair was damp at the nape of my neck. We’d left 106-degree heat in the desert, but here, though it was a full fourteen degrees cooler, I felt like I had just walked into a steam room. The air hung on me like a stifling, soggy sweater.

  Our house was one story and white, with black shutters and a wraparound porch that seemed to beg for rocking chairs and potted flowers. A Mayflower movers’ truck was parked by the curb, nestled between our mailbox and the huge cherry tree that shaded half of our front yard. The back metal doors of the truck were propped open, revealing an array of boxes and furniture stuffed inside. At the house next door, a woman wearing a straw sun hat was bent down pruning the drying periwinkle blossoms off a large hydrangea bush. She looked up and waved a gloved hand in my direction. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said warmly.

  I smiled and waved back. Oompa and I climbed the porch steps and walked into the house, where I saw my mom standing barefoot in her aqua blue halter top and white shorts, directing the moving men to put the kitchen table next to a bank of oversize windows. It’s a wonder they didn’t crash into the wall since clearly neither of them opted to look where they were walking for fear of breaking eye contact with my mother. She was entrancing that way. I guess that’s what made her such a good hypnotist. She wasn’t just beautiful, although that was undeniable; she was alluring in an indefinable way that just made people, both men and women, gravitate toward her energy. I noticed the men didn’t even glance in my direction once.

  That right there summed up how my life had been in Vegas. I had been invisible. Not just when I was with Mom, but at school, too. Everyone knew my Mom was the Hip Hypnotist. It’s not like I could conceal it—there were twenty-foot billboards broadcasting her face across town. But I was partly to blame for my invisibility, too. Because the more Mom’s show and notoriety blossomed, the more I shrunk back into myself—never even trying to compete for attention. Somewhere along the way I lost the courage to be adventurous. I fell into the role of the responsible one—keeping things organized and running smoothly, while Mom was the star.

  You’d think that even if I’d become less adventurous, at least I could still be flirtatious. After all, I lived with the perfect teacher. But the truth was, I never liked to risk the possibility of humiliation. Who would notice me in her shadow? It might have been easy to resent her had she not been so lovable. But that was the thing—for all the reasons everyone was drawn to her—her adorable charm, her contagious laughter, her romantic ideology—I was drawn to her, too.

  But now that we had moved across the country, we were both ready to try on new lives. She wanted to leave the eccentric lifestyle behind, and I secretly wanted to inject a little spice into my own.

  “A little to the left,” Mom said now, jostling her hand in that direction, and the moving men set the rectangular table down with a thud against the wooden floor.

  I looked at the table and thought of all the late nights back in Vegas where I’d sat at one end with my textbooks open, doing homework while I watched Mom and her cluster of friends drinking coffee and eating leftover fried chicken from the casino buffet. They would talk about life and love and movies. Maybe, I thought, this time the table would be surrounded with my new friends instead of Mom’s. Maybe instead of sitting around watching Glee like Becca, Lauren, and I used to do in Vegas, here in Georgia I’d rent a karaoke machine and all my new friends and I would sing along to the Glee sound track. Maybe they’d tell me I could be a star. Mom would be next door talking with the new neighbor about gardening and pruning shrubs instead of drinking coffee with the sequined-leotard-wearing, Cher-loving neighbor from Vegas.

  The moving men walked back outside and I pulled one of the kitchen chairs over to the table and sat down. Mom brought two bottles of Aquafina water over from the fridge and slid one across the kitchen table toward me like she was a casino bartender. I wondered if she realized that even though she was two thousand miles away, the lifestyle was still embedded in her simplest actions.

  I looked out the window at the lush green landscape—the clusters of leaves grouping together to enclose and canopy the yard. “I don’t remember it being this hot.”

  She nodded. “Ah, the sticky, Southern summer air. It feels like someone hosed you down with hot honey.”

  I laughed. “Exactly.”

  The movers came back in, one holding an armload of boxes and the other holding my black Panasonic stereo with the front piece broken off and dangling by a cluster of thin wires. “Looks like this got damaged.” The mover grimaced. “You got the moving insurance, right?”

  Mom sighed and shook her head.

  “Oh,” the mover said, looking down at the mangled equipment. “Maybe it’s fixable?”

  “Just leave it on the table,” I said. “I’ll take a look at it.”

  The mover looked startled. Was it because he didn’t think a girl could fix electronics or simply that he hadn’t noticed I was there? He placed the stereo down on the table in front of me.

  Mom instructed them to take the boxes to her bedroom and pointed down the hall. The men lingered for a second, listening to the soft jingle of her thick silver bangle bracelets. I thought back to Hot Guy Quinton from the park and wished he had watched me with that soft longing in his eyes. Instead, he’d just looked a little baffled by me.

  “So,” I said, after the movers finally walked away. “When are we going over to see Grandma and Grandpa?”

  Mom’s back stiffened and she pursed her lips ever so slightly. She looked around the house as if suddenly realizing that yes, we had moved back to Georgia, back to the small town she had escaped from eight years ago. “I don’t know,” she answered nonchalantly.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” When Mom decided to move us back to Georgia everything seemed so urgent. Grandpa had a stroke; time seemed of the essence. We needed to get back home and mend fences before it was too late. So now why the dispassion? “You said you were ready to reconcile with Grandma and Grandpa. Don’t back down, Mom,” I said encouragingly, selfishly, because I didn’t like having a family divided.

  Mom didn’t respond. She just looked over at Oompa. He had propped his ear against the wall in a desperate attempt to hear the soft reverberation of Cher’s throaty voice. When no lyrics sounded, Oompa moved away from the wall, climbed onto the couch, and burped like a human with indigestion.

  Mom got up and stared at the wall like she was mentally planning where to hang her Casablanca movie poster. “When we moved to Vegas it was, I don’t know, rebellion I guess. I was tired of Grandma trying to mold me into a mini-version of herself.” She sighed. “And Vegas is the exact opposite of their quiet, conventional life.” She turned and smiled at me. “But I’m thirty-three years old and it’s time to grow up, get a real job and live a more normal life.”

  I stared at her. We could live a more normal life anywhere. We came back to Worthington, Georgia because she wanted to reunite with her parents.

  Mom made a big pro
duction of looking at her watch. “We’ve been here for fifty-three minutes and I just drove for two days. Cut me some slack! I’ll call Grandma and Grandpa. Just let me rest a little.”

  I wanted to tell her not to be nervous. We’d be one big, happy family again.

  I put my arm around her and we continued to stare at the blank wall. “I never thought I’d say this, but I kind of miss Cher right now.”

  Oompa buried his nose under his paws and sighed.

  From the kitchen table my cell phone buzzed that I had a message. I picked it up and saw that Max had texted. U here yet? I smiled. Max.

  Technically, the first time I met Max, I was still in the womb. My mother had sat next to Max’s mom when they were both in Dr. Wendall’s waiting room, both nine months pregnant with bulging bellies and swollen ankles, both facing huge opposition from their families. My mother, the daughter of the Worthington, Georgia, town judge and his garden club president wife, was pregnant at sixteen—a scandalous shame for such a reputable family. Max’s mother, Maria, was ten years older and married, but her family was unhappy that she had chosen to marry outside their culture. Not Latino! Not Catholic! Didn’t speak a word of Spanish! Didn’t know the difference between a tortilla and a gorilla! Never mind the fact that Max’s father was a hardworking and honest man; Maria’s family was old school in their customs and very unforgiving. So Mom and Maria bonded in their parents’ judgment.

  When Max was born two weeks before I was, Mom said every time Max cried I kicked inside her like I was just dying to get out and meet my playmate. And when I did arrive, all squirmy and screaming, I was a colicky mess, crying nonstop until one day Maria came over and placed Max on the couch next to me and miraculously I stopped. Whether it was the warmth of his body or the comfort of his fast-ticking heartbeat so close to mine, we’ll never know, but anytime Max was around I was happy. And so was he.