Beheld

by Alex Flinn

  But I’d always been good enough. Better, because I’d been good enough for Amanda, and she was the best there was.

  Now I wasn’t good enough for her anymore.

  How could I get to be good enough for her again?

  16

  When Tim came home from the hospital the following week, I made sure Amanda had practice before I called.

  Then I went over and told him everything. Everything.

  “Wow,” he said when I got to the part about kissing Amanda. “Yeah, son, you don’t touch my daughter when she doesn’t want to be touched. That Darien kid found that out the hard way.”

  I laughed, more than a little relieved to find out that Amanda had broken up with Darien. Tim crunched a carrot stick from a bowl by his chair. “Can you see if there’s any ranch dressing for these? My daughter—I mean, my doctor—has me on a pretty strict diet.”

  “Sure.” I walked over to the refrigerator, trying not to remember the last time I stood there. I opened it and searched the shelves for salad dressing. When I finally found it, I saw someone had written Not for Dad and a dead smiley face in Sharpie on the ranch. Next to it was a bottle of low-fat sesame ginger. That one was labeled Okay for Dad. I noticed the beer was gone too. I poured the sesame ginger into a bowl and brought it back to Tim.

  “Looks like you’re out of ranch. I brought this one.”

  “Shit. She got to it.” He dipped his carrot into the dressing. “It’s actually pretty good. Have one.”

  To be polite, I took one. Tim was right. It was pretty good. I took another. When I reached for the third, he said, “Hey, hey, slow down there, son. That’s supposed to last me until dinner.”

  “How do I get . . . ?” I stopped. I’d been planning to ask how to get Amanda to stop hating me, but instead, I said, “How do I get to be good enough for Amanda?”

  Tim smiled. “Well, no one’s really good enough for my daughter, but maybe . . . I’ve got this football team I’m coaching, kids without dads to help out.” I nodded. It sounded familiar. “I can’t run around as much as I used to, apparently. Maybe you’d want to coach?”

  “That sounds great.” Then I remembered football practice. I was almost ready to quit the team. I mean, I hadn’t made it fairly anyway.

  But Tim said, “We can schedule around your football practices. I’ll call Coach Tejada and ask him.”

  “That’d be great.”

  So, two days a week, in addition to school and practice, I helped Tim with his team. Amanda wasn’t there. I didn’t expect her to be. I wasn’t doing it to show off. But I wouldn’t have minded if she’d noticed.

  A few weeks later, she did. She showed up to watch a game. Tim introduced her to the team. “This is my daughter, Amanda. She plays high school softball, and she’s gonna play college.”

  The boys acted politely impressed.

  Amanda looked at me and raised an eyebrow. I hadn’t seen her since that day, not even at school. It was like she’d dropped out or found an invisibility cloak or something.

  Tim said, “Chris has been helping me out.”

  Amanda said, “Cool,” in a tone that indicated it wasn’t.

  I picked up my clipboard. I’d wanted to type the lists on my phone, but Tim insisted that football was traditional.

  “Okay, so here’s the starting lineup. DeMarco is offensive guard, Sebastian’s offensive tackle. . . .”

  “I’ll see you later,” Amanda told Tim.

  But, as she walked away, I noticed she looked back.

  “Zephyr is, um, quarterback,” I said, trying to pretend I didn’t see her.

  The team won but, more important, this kid Davis, who’d never caught anything, caught a pass. I’d spent most of the last two practices working with him.

  I really wished I could tell Amanda about it. I wished she would care.

  Tim did, at least. “Hey, good job with Davis,” he said as we put away the equipment.

  “I know, right? It’s weird how proud I was about it. You’d think I was his dad.”

  “Nah.” Tim shouldered a bag of pads, gesturing for me to take the cooler. “That’s how I felt when you got your first hit.”

  I remembered the hours he’d spent, standing behind me, telling me to follow through, and I smiled.

  We walked to his truck. I wanted to ask him if he thought Amanda would ever forgive me, but that would be too selfish. Also too bare. So I said, “How’re you feeling?”

  “Hungry. My daughter’s been feeding me tilapia. Apparently, it’s a fish.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I said, opening the tailgate.

  “It didn’t exist when I was a kid. I think they created it in a lab.”

  I laughed. “You should come over our house. My mom makes a no-calorie, no-carb, soylent green casserole.” It was a reference to a science fiction movie I’d watched at his house once, where the food supply was all this weird green compound.

  “Soylent green is people!” Tim said, throwing everything into the back. “Seriously, whatever you’re eating, it’s working.”

  “Practice Tuesday?” I said.

  “Same as usual.”

  On Tuesday, Amanda showed up to help too.

  She didn’t really pay attention to me. Tim explained that she was helping because one of the other coaches couldn’t come. Then he divided the kids up, and Amanda worked with the better kids while I helped the ones who were struggling. But she didn’t elaborately not pay attention to me either.

  When she showed up Thursday, we had an actual conversation about which one of us should make the kids run sprints and whether certain kids were shirking their cleanup responsibilities, but still, I considered the dim possibility that she might, sometime in the not-too-distant future, unblock my phone. But I didn’t ask. Too soon.

  And Saturday, when the Bluejays pulled off a surprise victory against the much stronger Cardinals, she actually high-fived me.

  But then, she also high-fived Tim and Craig, the coach who hadn’t shown up all week.

  So, whatever that meant.

  “Hey, what happened to your little girlfriend?” Matt asked me one day.

  I hadn’t seen much of Matt lately. He’d started college locally, but he’d joined a frat. So he pretty much only showed up at home to sleep, eat, and tell me how easy I had it.

  I pretended not to hear him.

  He paused the football game I was watching on TV. “Yeah, your friend, whatserface. The girl who whipped your ass in baseball. I haven’t seen her in, like, a month.”

  It had been closer to five months. I tried to get the remote back from him. “I don’t know who whatserface is.”

  “Sure you do. Whatserface. The annoying one. Amanda!” He held the remote up away from me, and since I was too lazy to get up, that worked. “What, did you have a fight with her?”

  “Something like that. Can I watch the game now?”

  “Spoiler alert: The Gators lose.” He still held up the remote. “Really? I was right? You had a fight with her?”

  “Yeah, why do you care?”

  “I dunno. I just got used to seeing her around here, I guess. What, did she get jealous of Sydnieeee?” He made his voice high-pitched and annoying when he said Sydnie’s name.

  I stood and walked around, looking for the other remote. “Why would she be jealous of Sydnie?”

  He looked at me like I was brain-damaged. “I don’t know. Because she’s totally in love with you.”

  “She is not.”

  “Yeah, she is. I always thought it was weird that she’d be into a toady-looking kid like you, but she was.”

  “Right.”

  “Yeah. She was always sticking up for you, telling me how much better you were than me.”

  “That’s just her having eyes.” I found the remote, but now I didn’t use it.

  “Yeah, but one time, after Dad left, she actually called me.”

  “She called you?”

  “Right? I didn’t even know any ninth graders
had my phone number, but she got it, and she called, like with her voice. She sounded really nervous, but she said she hoped I’d be a little kinder to you. That was the word she used, kinder—because you were going through such a rough time.”

  I put down the remote. That was so weird.

  “I don’t have any friends I’d do that for,” Matt said. “I was so freaked out by it that I actually did try to be nicer—for about a week.”

  “I do vaguely remember a week when you didn’t throw my clothes into the shower.”

  “I’m the best.” He gave me a thumbs-up. “Anyway, that’s when I knew she was in love with you.”

  “Okay, so if she’s so in love with me, why’d she rip me a new asshole when I kissed her?” I unpaused the TV. The Gators’ quarterback was in the process of getting sacked. I fast-forwarded through it.

  Matt said, “You kissed her? Like out of the blue with no warning?”

  “Yeah.” Hearing him say it like that, I could see why it was a bad idea.

  “Dude, that only works in TV shows Mom likes, and not even always then.”

  I shook my head. “What do you mean?”

  “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my long and storied history with girls, it’s that they want to think you really care, like you put some thought into making a move on them.”

  “Okay.”

  “Like when I asked Brittney to prom, I knew she was going to go with me, but you can’t act like you know. So I bought a couple bunches of roses from one of those old guys who sells flowers on the street. I pulled all the petals off one and made a trail going to her car. Then I left the other bouquet on her car with a note that said, ‘Will you go to prom with me?’ It’s what they call a romantic gesture.”

  I paused the TV again and stared at him, stunned as the UF quarterback. I couldn’t imagine my goofy brother doing something like that.

  And then he Matt-ified it by saying, “It worked, if you know what I mean.”

  I did know. “You’re such a douche.”

  “I may be, but I know you want that girl, for some strange reason. And I know what you have to do to get her.”

  I unpaused the TV. He was right about me wanting Amanda, of course. I wondered if he was right about the other thing too.

  Problem was, if he was wrong and I left a trail of rose petals leading up to her car, she might break my nose.

  But maybe you had to be in it to win it.

  As the Gators definitely weren’t tonight.

  I watched the Gators flounder (figuratively) and fumble (literally) for another hour, and I knew I had to make a big gesture. But before that, I was going to make some smaller ones.

  The first was, I went to her volleyball game the next day. This might not seem like a big deal, but no one in our school went to girls’ volleyball, even if it was a choice between that and sitting home watching reruns of Say Yes to the Dress. The game wasn’t even listed on the school’s website. I had to ask around.

  I took Mom, and we sat there in a crowd that was basically everyone’s parents, and we cheered every time anyone did anything, but especially at anything Amanda did.

  After the game, Amanda came over, because she couldn’t ignore my mom waving and cheering. “Hey,” she said.

  My mom was all excited. “Hey, you were great.” They’d lost in straight sets.

  “I’m just tall. If you’re tall, you have to play volleyball.”

  “Tall and incredibly athletic,” I said.

  Amanda glanced at the scoreboard. “Well, volleyball’s not really my sport.”

  There was this silence where I figured if anyone wanted, they could have heard the small voice in the pit of my stomach screaming, “Help me! Help me!” and just as Amanda was about to excuse herself, my mom said, “So, how’s your dad?”

  “Oh, he’s a lot better,” Amanda said. “He’s taking blood pressure meds and watching his diet. Not too happy about it, but I threatened not to let him go to any of my games if he wasn’t careful. Wouldn’t want to excite him too much.” She was gesturing animatedly as she said all this. I hadn’t seen her happy in a while.

  “Oh, look, here he is.” My mother pointed out Tim, who was walking toward us with Casey, engrossed in her phone. “I was just about to tell Amanda you three should come over for dinner one night. I have a great recipe for ginger salmon with brown rice—very healthy.”

  “My mom’s on a health kick lately,” I said. “You should be thankful she doesn’t want you to eat the quinoa.”

  “Oh, I love that stuff,” Amanda said, “but my father hates it. He calls it dirt.”

  Tim and I exchanged a glance at that.

  Mom asked what would be a good day for them, and Tim suggested Friday night after practice. “Then we could go over Saturday’s roster.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  “Don’t you have a date with Sydnie?” Amanda asked.

  I glanced at her. I figured she had to have heard that Sydnie and I broke up. News like that didn’t go unmarked at our school, especially with Sydnie’s mouth. But maybe she wanted details. “No, I broke up with Sydnie a few weeks ago.” When she didn’t ask why, I added, “I decided she wasn’t really the person I wanted to hang with.”

  She nodded.

  “And what about you?” I asked. “No date with Darien?”

  She looked down. “Same.”

  “Okay.” Tim clapped his hands together. “Sounds like we’re all dateless and free Friday at, um, seven?” He looked at Mom.

  “Sounds good,” she agreed.

  17

  Over salmon, we mostly talked about the food. And college admissions. Because that had become my life.

  After dinner, Mom suggested a board game.

  “Monopoly, maybe?” I said, because I wanted to keep them there as long as possible.

  “I don’t have six hours,” Matt said. “How about Cards against Humanity?”

  “With a little kid and our parents?” Amanda said. “No thanks.”

  “Who’s a little kid?” Casey said.

  “Me,” I said. “I’m super immature. How about Taboo? Me, Tim, and Amanda against the two of you?”

  I chose the game because Amanda and I always won as a team. The object, if you haven’t played, was to get your team members to guess a word written on the card. Trick was, the person giving clues couldn’t use any of five “taboo” words on the card—the most obvious clues. So, if the card word was lifeguard, you had to get your team to guess it without being able to use words like “pool” or “save.”

  It was hard—unless you had such a long history with your team members that you could practically read one another’s minds.

  Our team’s first word was “seagull.” I looked right at Amanda and said, “Mrs. Wynne at the Seaquarium.”

  “Seagull!” Amanda screamed, laughing because we both remembered the birthday party at the Seaquarium, the one where Tori Wynne’s mom got pooped on by a seagull.

  Next was, “Nolan put them up his nose.”

  “French fries!”

  “Right. Made me want to . . .”

  “Puke! No? Barf!”

  “Right.” Next card. “That short substitute always smelled like it.”

  “Garlic!” Amanda yelled.

  “Shelby Ladis was obsessed with them.”

  “Vampires.”

  “The thing I hated to do at camp every summer.”

  “Hiking.” Amanda turned to my mother. “He used to write to me, complaining.”

  “I never knew,” she said.

  “We’re on the clock.” I tapped the next card. “If I threatened to tell everyone about your ninth grade crush on Paolo, the exchange student, it would be this.”

  “Blackmail.”

  “Good! My mom once totally humiliated me by walking into one at Hot Topic.”

  “Dressing room,” Amanda yelled just as the timer ran out.

  “Yes! Yes!” Amanda did a victory dance but came just short of taunting
my mom. “How many points was that?”

  “Eight,” Tim said, “and I’m feeling kind of invisible.”

  My mother’s team went next, and it took them a full three minutes to get the words octopus and brunch.

  We let Tim be the clue giver the next time, and we still got five points.

  “We had these in the rice last year,” Tim said.

  “Moths,” Amanda said. “Don’t tell people that. It’s gross.”

  “Since when is he people?” Tim gestured at me.

  “I knew about it anyway.” I was happy she thought of me as people. She wouldn’t have cared what I thought a week ago.

  When it was Amanda’s turn, she said, “They made us do this in PE.”

  I winced. “Square dancing.”

  For her last one, she said, “You acted like one.”

  I knew it because I’d seen the card before. “A jerk. I’m sorry.”

  We won, twenty to eleven.

  When Amanda was on her way out the door, I said, “Is there any way you’d consider maybe unblocking my number? I have some things I’ve been wondering about.”

  She laughed and pointed to my phone. “Try it.”

  I texted her:

  Do you think anyone understood the irony of naming the Miami airport MIA?

  I heard her phone vibrate.

  “I unblocked it a week ago.”

  Five minutes after she left, she texted me:

  People in Miami don’t understand irony

  Don’t get me started

  We texted all night.

  And, after that, we were friends again.

  But I knew, now, I didn’t want to be friends with Amanda. I loved her. I wanted that big gesture.

  18