ZEE
“No,” I say as I stand to face Abigail’s kid brother straight on. And he is a kid. I think a sophomore. But a young sophomore. His face is just so … pretty. Like he had never gotten a zit in his life, or a sunburn, or even a bad cold. You know what he looks like? Like he belongs in a boy band. My cousin Malinda used to have pictures of those bands all over her walls. She was twelve and I was probably six, but even then, I was like, “How can you be in love with them? They look and sound like girls.” And Malinda said, “They’re gorgeous like girls and that means they’ll be sensitive and good listeners like a girl but also they’re still boys and that makes them perfect.”
As we shake hands, this kid, this pretty boy, this Art, he pulls me in closer to him with this funny little smile and says, “And now your life will never be the same.”
“See?” Abigail says. “He’s in a mood. PLEASE ACT NORMAL, Art!” I’ve never heard Abigail yell like that. She was always so sweet and cute and harmless. (Harmless besides standing in the way between me and Cam.) But her brother got to her. Which was awesome.
“Sorry, sister, I’ll try to conform to standard human operating procedure for the rest of the evening.”
And I fucking laugh. I can’t even help it. I never laugh. (Well, except at my mom’s stupid death jokes. But besides her, never. I just don’t.)
“YOU’RE JUST GOING TO ENCOURAGE HIM, ZEE!”
“Yes, Zee,” Art says, “you’re only going to encourage me.” And then he winks right at me. No one has ever winked at me before. Not like that. Such a bizarrely confident wink. If he wasn’t so young, and if I wasn’t one hundred percent sure he was gay, I’d almost think he was hitting on me. But that’s impossible. He’s a pretty boy who likes boys, and I’m a tomboy who might not even know I like chicks. But who the hell cares why he winked, right? He made me laugh. So I wink back.
art
She winked back. BACK!
My whole body is tingling all over and I’m thinking I’ve just met my future girlfriend and probably the other half of my soul and we’re going to live in a castle in the sky of another dimension and be king and queen and rule over advanced beings who worship us even though we insist everyone is equal. Oh-my-god, my thoughts are fireflies on fast-forward in Crazy Town. Slow, slow, slooooooooooooow down.
BUT I JUST CAN’T!
“Zee, oh, my gosh, Zee, I have to ask you something,” I blurt out even though she, Cam, and Abigail are talking about something else.
“Yes, Art,” she says, and she smiles and I can tell she never smiles but she smiles at me, which I think means she loves me. I mean, she probably doesn’t know it yet, not like I know I love her, but she’ll know it eventually.
“Do you believe in love at first sight?” I ask, because, let’s face it, that is happening right this second.
Zee laughs. I just love her laugh. Seriously, it is the best laugh ever. Not fake or tired or like it laughs at just anything, but a unique laugh, a special laugh. Yes, a special laugh that has to be earned by someone special like me.
“Art, dude,” Cam says, “you’re acting like you’re on drugs.”
“He’s like this all the time at home. It’s such a nightmare,” Abigail says.
Do you know what my future girlfriend says? This is what: “I think Art’s super cool.” Super cool. She basically just told me she loves me as much as I love her, right? Yes, duh! I need her number. I need to be able to talk to her and text her and see her every second of every day. That’s insane. Don’t be insane, Art.
“Can I have your phone number?” Sorry. I had to. I can’t be stopped.
She laughs AGAIN, and then she asks with this really knowing glint in her infinite brown eyes, “Why do you want my phone number, Art?”
And because she is acting so bold and mesmerizing, I decide to just say it: “So I can make you fall in love with me.”
“Art! STOP MAKING EVERYTHING A JOKE!” Abigail yells because she doesn’t really know how to handle me any other way. But Zee would, wouldn’t she? She would. She doesn’t laugh this time. Maybe because she knows I am serious.
“Art,” Cam starts, “for real now, buddy, let’s just settle down and be chill for the rest of dinner.”
“But, Cam, buddy”—I love messing with him—“it’s hard to contain myself when I’ve just met the greatest love of my life.”
“All right, cool, but now we’re going to talk like normal people.” Cam is normal. Abigail is normal.
“But Zee and I aren’t normal. We are special and cannot be bothered with your boring normal-people talk.”
“SERIOUSLY, Art!” It’s Cam that yells this time. He has never yelled at me. “Zee is my best friend, and you’re making this weird for her.”
“He isn’t making this weird for me,” Zee says. See? Special.
“Zee,” Cam says, “I know you try to be accepting of everyone, but he’s making fun of you.”
“How’s he making fun of me?”
“Yes,” I say, “how am I making fun of her?”
Abigail butts in. She likes to butt in. Stupid buttface butter-inner. “Because you know you two are like polar opposites. So you’re making a joke out of it.”
“We are not polar opposites,” I start, in almost a serious voice because I am starting to realize they really can’t see how perfect Zee and I are for each other. “We are the opposite of opposites.” Zee laughs again. She can’t help finding me hilarious.
Cam says, “I don’t even know how this started, Art, but Zee would never be into you and you know you’d never truly be into her or any other ‘her.’”
* * *
Cam just said I was gay. Out loud. In front of my future girlfriend and my sister. Everyone’s pretending he didn’t say it, but he did.
And, I mean, let’s be serious, I dress well, I don’t really like sports, I like almost all creative endeavors, and my best friend Bryan is gay. And I think most gay people are so much more interesting than most straight people! So, okay, I get it. No denial of how the world perceives this soul.
And even though I love Cam for saving Abigail after biggest creep ever Will Safire left her in a thousand, tearful pieces, I honestly don’t care that Cam thinks it. I don’t care that anyone thinks it, really. I mean, aren’t we all a little gay? Cam sweats and showers with guys, Abigail cuddles and confesses with girls, and I don’t put labels on them. But the problem is, I don’t want Zee to think that I thought I was gay.
But see … see, see, see … I thought that was the problem. I thought that was going to be my biggest obstacle now between my and Zee’s great love affair. Afraid not. Because after I spent not even a full single second stressing over what she might think of me after Cam’s statement, I notice this brokenhearted little girl inside Zee’s eyes.
ZEE
Cam thinks I’m a lesbian, doesn’t he?
He didn’t exactly say it, but like I mentioned, I know a lot of people at The Bend think it. But they’re all idiots, right? So what the hell do I care what they think? But if Cam thinks it … if the one person who knows me better than anyone besides my mom thinks I do like girls, or should like girls, or will like girls …
I mean, my brain just can’t operate right now. Just one big block of fuck-me.
“Zee? Dude? What’s wrong?” Cam says. “I didn’t mean…”
“Nothing,” I say. Nothing except the one dude I could ever really like thinks I like chicks.
art
Zee is in love with Cam.
She is. She is in love with her best friend and my sister’s boyfriend. In love with a boy who used to bully Bryan and me in grade school. In love with a boy who truly is my polar opposite.
* * *
I guess that makes me wrong about everything. I know who I am and know who I like. If Zee could “like” someone like Cam, then she isn’t the girl I dreamed her to be. She’s not special like me. She’s just not as good at being normal as people like Cam and Abigail.
So I
turn my magic off. No reason to annoy normal people with it if it isn’t going to amaze my mythical creature at the same time.
“Okay, I apologize,” I say.
“Cool?” Cam says.
“Cool, dude,” I say, mocking him a little because I can’t help myself. But he doesn’t notice.
“It’s a trick,” Abigail says.
“No trick,” I say, “let’s discuss the Riverbend Renegades baseball season with its star and captain, Cam Callahan. Or maybe we should preview the upcoming football season with its star and captain—what’s his name?—Cam Callahan.”
“Don’t push it, punk,” Cam says, ruffling my hair like I’m five years old. I was planning on pretending Zee barely existed for the rest of the dinner, only I can’t help but notice her gazing down at her lap, either too ashamed about not defending me or too wrecked over her dream-man Cam not realizing she is in love with him.
But then—
—oh, goodness, but then—
She lifts her head and with it the phone from her lap. She slides it across the table toward me and winks—winks!—as she says, “My number.”
ZEE
Listen, I don’t know why I gave the kid my number. Maybe to piss Abigail off? Make Cam jealous? Why the hell that would make Cam jealous, I don’t know. I probably did it because the kid was just out there—you know, different—and I’m sure enough people have ignored him or made fun of him and I didn’t want to be another one of those people. Or maybe I hoped he’d make me laugh again. Who knows?
art
Okay, okay, okay. I see … don’t you seeeeeeeeee? Zee’s not bad at being normal. No, no, no. That’s not it at all. No, see, Zee truly is a mythical creature, but she doesn’t know she’s a mythical creature.
That would be like the only unicorn on earth walking to every corner of the planet, seeing every other living being and not seeing any other unicorns, and still not understanding they were special.
So, yes, Zee and Art’s love affair will happen and it will be fabulous. But it will have to wait for now. First, see, I was going to have to find my unicorn a mirror so she could see how magical she was.
ZEE
The rest of dinner isn’t nearly as eventful as the first bit. Art does calm down a little, though he keeps looking my way even if Abigail or Cam is speaking. It feels like he’s studying me. Like he wants to draw me or some crap like that. I don’t even …
After we eat, Cam says, “Zee, you mind sitting here with Art for a while so I can talk to Abigail in my car?”
He doesn’t want to talk to her; he wants a blow job. From the first time Abigail did it, he couldn’t stop talking about how great she was at it. (I swear their relationship is based on those fucking blow jobs.) After the fifth time hearing too many details, I told him I’d rather shove a pencil through my eye than hear about her “oral talents” again. And right now, the last thing I want to do is sit in a restaurant while the boy I love is getting it on with his girlfriend out in the parking lot. But I can’t say no. So I say, “Yeah, cool.” Fuck me.
After they leave, Art gets this little grin on his face as he says, “They’re not going to talk.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Does he know?”
“Does who know what?”
“Does Cam know you’re in love with him?”
My first instinct is to say, What the fuck are you talking about, kid? But I have told no one except my mom and my mom’s awesome but she’s an idiot when it comes to guys so I think what the hell and say, “No, he doesn’t, and if you tell your sister I’ll end you.”
“I want to be your best friend, so of course I’ll tell no one.”
“You like saying stuff like that, don’t you?”
“Like I want to be your best friend and make you fall in love with me?”
“Yes,” I say.
“It’s just so boring to say boring things. I like to not be boring.”
“You’re definitely not boring, Art.”
The kid inhales a deep breath, catches it, and then blurts out, “You’re special.”
“Thanks?”
“So why would you fall in love with someone so not special like Cam?”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“I’m just saying…” Art starts.
“He’s my best friend, so don’t be an asshole and tell me he’s not special, because he is.”
I swear the kid almost cries. I feel bad even though he was the one who said the stupid thing.
“Listen, kid—I know you were trying…”
“Kid?” he says, and now, yeah, there is definitely water in the corners of his eyes. Crap. Before I can apologize, he says, “I have to use the bathroom.” And he leaves. He’s still in there when Abigail and Cam walk back inside with their faces flushed and her lips puffed out from, well, from whatever. I am exhausted from Art. From Cam. From my stupid “feelings.” So I pay the bill, and as soon as they’re back at the table, I stand up and say,
“Art’s in the bathroom and I’ve got to go.” They sort of say, “Cool,” but I’m not really listening anymore.
art
Once composure is regained, tears dried, and my face again impossible not to love (ha), I exit the pizzeria bathroom to find Zee gone. Tears threaten to return before I remember: I have her phone number! Then all I want to do is text Zee every fifteen seconds until she realizes that our encounter is the most important meeting in the history of the universe.
Knowing that this is a brilliant idea but also, possibly, a horrible one, I distract myself by texting Bryan while Abigail and Cam bicker in the front seat on the drive home:
ME
I’m in love
BRYAN
You fall in love every week, Art!
ME
Those were schoolboy crushes.
This is my first grown-up love.
BRYAN
You fell in love with the girl in the
Old Navy commercial last Thursday
True. That Old Navy girl was perfection. Like fantasy perfection you don’t touch, only admire from afar. Zee is perfection meant to be held. Zee is so real it makes me fly.
But Bryan isn’t going to understand for a million reasons but mostly because he’s in love with me. We’ve had the conversation so many times. He tells me he loves me. I tell him I love him too. He tells me he loves me like that. I tell him I like girls. He tells me I’m not being honest with myself. I tell him he’s not being honest with himself that I simply don’t like him like that back. He cries, runs off, doesn’t talk to me for two days, and then texts me that he can’t even remember why we’re fighting. I pretend I don’t either and we go back to being best friends.
* * *
Back at home, and still fighting the urge to stalk-text Zee, I instead text my sorta, kinda new BFF Carolina Fisher. She hunted me down at the end of our freshman year, basically begging to be my friend because her brother had just come out of the closet and she thought I was gay and, even though I told her I wasn’t, I could tell she didn’t believe me. But then she had a big, epic breakup with Trevor Santos and we were watching a movie and she’s like, “Are you really not gay?” and I could tell she was lonely and she looked pretty and I needed practice kissing, so I kissed her. And it was … like making out with my twin sister without the scandalous excitement. Such a disaster. I didn’t tell her that because that would be mean. We did go to homecoming together and it was fun but also a little awkward because I could tell she thought I was gay again but really we just had zero chemistry. (Which I couldn’t say unless I was a jerk and I’m the nicest person ever!) So the reason she’s only kinda, sorta my new best friend is because we don’t really hang out in person anymore but we do text each other really intimate stuff like who we think about when we masturbate. So that’s why all I had to text is:
ME
Zee Kendrick
And I know she’ll know what that means.
CAROLINA
REALLY?
Yes REALLY
CAROLINA
She’s so … brooding
ME
I KNOW! It turns me on
CAROLINA
I liked when Trevor brooded
Oh, boy, she is having a “Trevor is my soul mate” pity party. Boring. So I tell Carolina she should just get back together with him already and then say I have to go even though I don’t.
Because all I want to do, maybe ever again, is think about Zee. But the perfect text to win her heart for eternity has not yet formed! Maybe I should just go to sleep and send her one tomorrow after I’ve had more time to think about it.
Ha. Sleep. Not a chance.
ZEE
I fall asleep on the couch watching SportsCenter. Only wake up when I get this text:
UNKNOWN NUMBER
You’re right, Cam’s special and
everyone in the world is special but
you’re so special it hurts my body
It’s Art. The kid. I want to find what he wrote creepy. Or freaky. Or maybe just stupid. But no one’s ever texted me stuff like that. I have really only dated two people ever. Two dudes from my CrossFit gym. Neither of them texted me anything besides Want to come over and watch a movie? Which meant come over and hook up.
The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy Page 2
