He opens the door and sticks his head out to say, “I’ll come out through the garage.”
“Okay,” I say, and he disappears back into the house. I go back to the driveway to wait, and a minute later the third garage door opens and Buffy and I slowly make our way inside.
The main part of the garage is empty, with only oil stains on the concrete to tell me that Jordan’s parents normally park there. But the space where a third car could go has been transformed into a kind of workout room. Treadmill, weight bench, one of those arm machines with the pulleys that I have no idea what it’s called. I guess that explains why Jordan’s Jeep is parked out on the curb. Wow. I know Jordan’s a good basketball player, but I’ve never thought about what it takes to stay that way. No wonder his arms are so impressive. Not that I’m noticing his arms anymore.
Jordan’s over by the back wall, flipping on light switches and turning on a little space heater. He glances back over his shoulder at me.
“What do you think?”
In spite of myself, I can’t stop looking around. I go over to the side wall, which is covered in pictures of Jordan and a blond girl I assume must be his older sister. Every single picture involves some kind of sport. Basketball, T-ball, football, cheerleading, tennis. The more recent pictures are mostly of Jordan playing for our middle school and high school basketball teams. There’s one of him laughing with Ethan Hawkins in the middle of a game from last year that makes me feel like a whole swarm of butterflies has taken over my stomach.
“It’s nice out here,” I say, forcing my gaze away from that last picture and focusing on the one below it. “Very homey.”
Jordan chuckles a little and I look back at him, confused. He gestures in front of him, and I notice for the first time that there’s a card table in front of the weight bench. His laptop is out and waiting, and he’s got a space heater set up under everything to fight the chill. “Thanks, but I meant this. Will it work?”
Heat rushes to my cheeks and I look at his chest as I say, “Yeah. This is good.”
“Cool. I was planning on being inside, but I figured with the dog we’d probably better stay out here.” My cheeks get even hotter at this, but Jordan grins. “What’s its name?”
“Her name is Buffy,” I say, looking him in the eye now. His grin widens.
“Nice. I love that show.” I raise an eyebrow and he adds, “My sister made me watch it last year when she was home for Christmas break.”
“Oh. Right.” I want to ask about his sister, who clearly has good taste in TV, but I don’t because that would be personal and I’m not here for personal reasons, I’m here for business. School. I look around the garage again, my gaze tripping over the empty spots where his parents’ cars presumably go. “Are your parents not here?”
The easiness of Jordan’s face flickers to uncertainty for a second, and he rocks back on his heels. “Um, no. They do this … thing on Thursday nights.”
“Thing?”
“This … bowling thing.”
I raise my eyebrows. He sighs and goes flat-footed again. “They’re part of a cosmic bowling league and the games are on Thursday nights. They just started last week and I forgot about it when we made these plans. I hope that’s okay. That they’re, uh, not here.” He reaches up like he’s going to run a hand through his hair, but drops it before he makes contact. “They know you’re here, and they said it’s fine, so I hope it is. Fine, I mean. Um.”
“Oh, it’s fine,” I say quickly, even though I really should not say that. But I need this conversation to be over, badly. “Totally fine.” I clear my throat. “Cosmic bowling, huh? Cool.”
“Something like that.” He shakes his head, grinning a little, and then looks from me to Buffy expectantly. “So. What’s Buffy gonna do while we work?”
In answer I bend down and unclip her leash. “She’ll hang out with us. Buffy, hang.”
Buffy looks at me and then goes over to sniff the weight bench. Then she turns in a circle three times and curls up on the floor, head resting on her paws. Her ears stay up and her eyes flick from Jordan to me and then back again. I look at him too.
“I thought ‘chill’ was your word for ‘stay,’” he says.
I’m surprised he remembered. “They mean different things. ‘Chill’ is for when we’re outside or in an open space and I need her to stay close. ‘Hang’ is for when we’re in a room I need her to stay in.”
He looks around, his gaze lingering on the open garage door. “This counts as a room?”
“Yup. Open doors don’t matter.” I go over to the weight bench, sit down, and pull Jordan’s laptop toward me. He slides in next to me, then leans back and looks behind me, where Buffy’s still happy on the floor.
“What about ‘stay’? What does that mean?”
“That’s for the basic tricks, when we want to impress people.”
“Basic tricks,” he repeats.
“Right.”
He looks at Buffy, then at me. “You’re kind of impressive all the time.” Then he turns forward and pulls the laptop a little closer to him. “Now, give me a sec and I’ll pull up the assignment I need you to look at.”
“Okay,” I say faintly. He was totally talking about Buffy and her tricks. Right?
Thankfully, things get back to business after that. We spend half an hour going over the outline for the next paper for English, this one on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Ms. Ulbrich was right, he does have really good ideas. But I can already tell why they asked me for help.
“Why is ‘incident’ capitalized?”
Jordan leans forward a little to peer at the screen. We’re close enough when he does this that I can feel how warm he is. It’s chilly out here, even with the space heater and my hoodie, and I want to lean closer. For survival reasons, definitely not anything else. Instead I lean back and take a deep breath. He finds the word I’ve pointed out and leans back so he’s in his own space. Shrugs. “I don’t know. I just get kind of excited when I type.”
“What?”
“Sometimes it seems like the next word should be capitalized to add extra oomph.”
I stare at him. I don’t know what to say. Especially since I find this enthusiasm for capitalization kind of cute. Very cute, actually. I give myself a little shake to snap myself out of it. Make myself think of rule number seven.
“Well,” I manage to get out, my voice only a little strangled. “I like that, but I don’t think Ms. Ulbrich will.”
He grins. “Noted.”
We get through the whole outline and then go over some of his old stuff that Ms. Ulbrich asked him to clean up, but we still have a few things left to do when Jordan pushes the laptop away and looks at me. “You wanna take a break?”
“Okay,” I say slowly. I guess a break can’t hurt. We’ve been working for a while, and I learned in psychology last year that people do better when they take a fifteen-minute break after working for an hour. Or something like that. “Sure.”
He gets up and goes over to one of the shelves on the other side of the garage, comes back with a basketball, and tosses it to me. “You ever play horse?”
The only person I ever really played horse with was my dad. He loved basketball. Taught me how to dribble and shoot when I was so little I can’t remember learning. “Not lately.”
“You want to?”
“Shooting around is your idea of a break?”
He shrugs. “It’s kind of ingrained.”
I hesitate, worried this is crossing the line from business into personal. But my butt is kinda sore from sitting on this weight bench for so long, and with my rusty shooting skills I doubt one game could last very long. “All right.”
“Awesome,” he says, flashing me a bright smile.
We go out to the driveway and the motion light clicks on. I didn’t notice that first night, but his driveway is almost totally flat. I wonder if they built it like that on purpose so it’d be easier for Jordan to play. This is the kind of neighborhood where
you can do things like that.
He passes me the ball and I catch it easily. I look at him, surprised. “You aren’t going to start?”
“No.” He looks kind of sheepish as he adds, “It’s not usually fair if I go first.”
I don’t argue. Based on the rumors I’ve heard at school, Jordan has gotten interest from tons of Division II and a few Division I colleges to play next year. I have a feeling I’m about to get my ass kicked.
“All right.” I’m standing about where the free-throw line would be. In fact, when I look down there’s a faint line drawn on the concrete. I put my toes on the line, take a deep breath, and run through the motions my dad taught me for free throws, the one thing he taught me to do really well before he left. The same ones I saw Jordan do that first night. Three dribbles, pause to take a breath. Let it out. Shoot.
Swish.
“Nice,” Jordan says. He was waiting by the basket and catches the ball easily as it falls to the ground. “You practice that?”
I flex my fingers, my wrists, and savor the loose feeling I have from going through those motions. Maybe this was a good idea after all. “Not in a long time.”
“Well, you’ve got good form.”
I feel myself blush and hope he can’t see it. “Thanks.”
We’re somewhere in the middle of the game when I call Buffy to come chill in the yard. She’s been good tonight and I’m sure she wants to sniff around. Jordan watches as she trots out of the garage and goes to sniff in the grass. He just made a shot from the very end of the driveway, so I go over to where he’s standing to mark his place. But instead of moving away to give me plenty of space for my turn, he stays close behind me. His proximity is distracting and I miss, but he doesn’t even notice. He’s still watching Buffy, who’s now settled at the top of the driveway and biting an itch on one of her paws.
“That’s S for me,” I say, running to catch the ball before it rolls into the street. Jordan’s still there at the end of the driveway, so I go back over to him and hold out the ball. I get this sense of déjà vu as he takes it, especially when he looks back at me and tips his head ever so slightly to the side.
“How’d you teach her to do all those tricks?”
Usually when people ask me this I explain about all the Dog Whisperer marathons I did when I first got Buffy, and how I read all the books I could find on animal behavior and stuff like that. But again, I don’t want to get into something so personal. So I say, “I don’t know. She’s smart. It was pretty easy.”
Jordan palms the ball with one hand and shakes his head. “I can tell she’s smart, but she learned the meaning of the word ‘chill’ from you.”
“How’d you get so good at basketball?”
He pulls his head back and slaps his other hand to the ball so he’s holding it with both hands in front of his chest, elbows out like chicken wings. “I practiced.”
“Us too.” I reach out and tap the ball. “It’s your turn.”
“Right.” He goes to the top corner of the driveway now, the equivalent of a three, and makes it easily. I catch the ball and jog up to him, take my turn, and miss.
“E. You win.”
“You did good, though,” he says, turning to grin at me. “Better than most people. You got me up to HOR.” He says it like whore, which startles a laugh out of me.
“A story to tell all my friends.” One I’m sure Hannah in particular will love. If I tell her.
“Cammie would be jealous. She’s only ever gotten me to HO.”
I can tell he wants me to laugh again, but I can only manage a weak chuckle. The mention of Cammie is like a dousing of ice water that immediately snaps me back to reality. I clear my throat and head back into the garage. “We should probably get back to work. It’s getting late.”
“Oh. Right.” He sounds disappointed, but he follows me in anyway. “What about Buffy?”
She’s followed us in and I know she’ll be fine, but I say, “You try telling her what to do.”
“Really?” His eyes light up at the prospect. I nod, and he tells her to hang. She goes over to stand by Jordan, then lays down by his feet. He looks up at me, his expression full of wonder.
“That’s more than practice. That’s like magic.” I try not to show how much that gets to me, but I don’t think I do a very good job.
A little while later, when we’re done and I’m clipping Buffy’s leash back to her collar for the walk home, Jordan says, “Same time next week?”
I look up. He’s still sitting at the weight bench, fiddling with this place on the seat where the fabric’s ripped and part of it sticks up. He reaches out to scratch behind Buffy’s ears while he waits for me to answer, not quite meeting my eyes, and I have the same thought I did in Ms. Ulbrich’s classroom on Monday.
He really wants me to say yes.
“Yeah,” I say.
Jordan smiles. “Good.”
One week down, I tell myself as Buffy and I head back down his driveway. And only five more to go.
ten
“So,” Hannah says to me the next morning, as we’re walking laps around the hallways to kill time before the first bell. “How’d it go? Did the Buffy thing work?”
I shrug my purse higher on my shoulder and readjust my books in my arms. “Yeah, we stayed outside. Thanks for that, by the way. You’re a genius. And it was fine. We got a lot of work done.” Hannah hums in disappointment and I look over at her. “What?”
“Oh, nothing. Just, when you say work, I know you mean actual schoolwork. Not, you know, a more fun kind.” She grins at me, eyes twinkling. “Tell me you don’t want to do that kind of work with Jordan Baugh.”
“Hannah!” I hiss, shooting her a look before I glance around to see if anyone near us is listening. No one is, but still. “God.”
Her grin widens. “You didn’t say no.”
“That’s because the no was implied,” I tell her. “Rule number seven. Remember?”
I glare at her until she holds up her hands in surrender. “All right, fine, I’ll quit.”
We walk in silence for a few seconds and then she brightens and looks back at me. “Hey, so I was thinking. What if we do movie night at your house this weekend? I’ve missed your mom’s baking, and I really wanna check out your new room.”
I shake my head. I’ve been looking forward to having another escape from me and Mom’s cold war this weekend, and anyway, inviting Hannah over would be breaking rule number nine. In the past when Mom’s boyfriends were in our house, it didn’t matter as much if Hannah came over because those spaces were ours first and Mom’s boyfriends were just glorified guests. Now that we live with Kevin, though, it’s the other way around, and I don’t feel comfortable fudging the rule this way just because Hannah misses my mom’s baked goods. “I already told Mom we’d do your house.”
“So?” Hannah says, nodding her head to the left to tell me that we should turn down the next hallway so we can stop at her locker. “Tell her we changed our minds. I’m sure she won’t care, and I really think—”
“I said no,” I snap. My voice carries down the hall, loudly enough that quite a few people stop to stare at me.
“Okay,” Hannah says after a beat, her voice quiet. “My house it is. You’ll bring the popcorn?”
I clear my throat. “I’ll bring some of Mom’s cookies too. She found a new chocolate-chip recipe the other day and she needs taste testers, so. It should be good.”
She found the new recipe when she was stress baking because of our fight on Monday, but I don’t tell Hannah this.
“Happy to be a guinea pig,” Hannah says, smiling at me over her shoulder as she spins the dial on her locker to put in the combination. But there is still an edge of hurt in her expression—a tightness in the corners of her mouth and a guarded look in her eyes—that makes me look away.
Once Hannah has her books, we head toward the commons to meet up with Ryan before first period, our conversation thankfully back to normal. As we round t
he corner back to the main hallway, Hannah stops.
“What?” I ask, wondering if she’s changed her mind and is going to start bugging me about movie night again. But she doesn’t do that. She just grins and looks pointedly in front of us. I follow her gaze and there’s Jordan, walking this way with a whole group of his friends. He’s holding up one hand in a sort of acknowledgment, a sheepish, shy smile on his face. I glance at Hannah and she gives me a look. So I wave back, because I know if I don’t I’ll never hear the end of it.
And then we’re past him and as promised Hannah doesn’t say a word about it. Like me waving to Jordan Baugh is a normal part of the day, even though it’s not.
* * *
On Tuesday night I find myself at the table with Mom and Kevin and Cammie for yet another “family” dinner. Buffy has been banished to my room as usual.
Though the food has improved since our first attempt at this, the atmosphere still leaves a lot to be desired. Cammie is sullen and quiet and picks at her food. Mom chatters endlessly about her day at work and some confrontation she had with a crazy mother of the bride. And Kevin has to leave the table halfway through the meal to answer a call from his business partner about some sort of plumbing emergency at their office, which is so gross. Why would you call someone about that over dinner? Why not send a text so the rest of us didn’t have to hear Kevin gasp, “The toilet overflowed into the lobby?” while we were halfway through eating our bowls of French onion soup?
I try to keep eating my soup after Kevin leaves to deal with the shit-cident, I really do. But when he calls out, “Claire! What’s the name of that plumber you like?” I give up and shove my bowl into the center of the table. Mom closes her eyes for a brief second and then shoves her own bowl away too.
“It’s Tom’s Johns,” she calls back, getting to her feet and hurrying out of the dining room. “I have the number in my phone, hang on.”
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