“I knew he could do it. I told him he’d get his moment, eventually,” Rudy said later that night, as we’d made our way through the parking lot toward her car.
“You knew who could do what?”
“Rusty. I told him he’d get the chance to have a big moment like that.”
I stared at her, smiling to herself.
“Since when are you friends with Rusty Phelps?”
She shrugged. “We talk sometimes, at school. He’s a really nice guy.”
We were quiet for a second, the sound of muted celebration still audible from across the parking lot.
“So,” Rudy said when we’d reached her car. “Do you want to stop for burgers or something? I’m starving.”
“Want one?” Rudy tipped her open bag of chips in my direction and just as I reached across my lap, the bus driver hit a bump on the highway and half a dozen chips fell out onto the speckled brown seat between us.
“Man,” Rudy murmured. She swept them off the seat with the back of her hand. “Guess I won’t be eating those.”
We were on our way to the Class 3 Championship basketball game and because it was held more than two hours away, Ogden had commissioned school buses to drive any willing student-spectators to the game (the basketball team would be riding in style, in their own coach bus, complete with TV). Because it was easy, because it meant you could ride in the same vehicle as the person you secretly liked and sneak glances at them for a whole two hours and then maybe, if you got lucky and Ogden won, you would summon up enough bravado to ask them to share a seat with you in the dark on the bus ride home - almost everyone who was going to the game was riding one of the three Ogden buses. Shared successes like this created a situation where there was just enough general camaraderie that anything was possible.
I pulled three chips out of the bag and stuck them in my mouth one at a time.
“Do you guys want any?” Rudy turned around in her seat and offered the bag to Deena, from our lunch table, and Celine, who were sharing a seat behind us.
“No, thanks. I’m trying not to eat carbs,” Deena frowned.
Celine stuck two chips in her mouth and reached down to wipe the orange BBQ dust on the bottoms of her jeans.
“What, are you doing Atkins?” Rudy asked. “That’s what it’s called, right?”
Deena nodded. “For prom.”
“My mom tried that one time,” I added. “Don’t you have to eat only green vegetables for the first two weeks or something? And no soda or coffee?”
Deena nodded again, the corners of her mouth turning down. “It really sucks. But they only had a size 4 left in the dress I bought.”
“My mom lost, like, ten pounds. I guess it works,” I shrugged.
“I hope so,” Deena sighed. “I need to lose five pounds. I just want a freaking chocolate bar.”
Rudy and I laughed, and up toward the front of the bus came a series of unidentified girly squeals. Our chaperone, the swim coach, turned to survey the bus with a grumpy stare.
They had tried to filter the busses by grade level – one for freshman and sophomores, one for juniors and one for seniors – but we had snuck onto the juniors’ bus, along with a group of other sophomores, without any problems. Between snippets of conversation, I was letting my eyes drift toward the back of the bus where Drew, a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, straight-white-teethed junior was sitting.
Drew was handsome. Preppy-handsome. When I laid eyes on him for the first time during the district basketball game, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed him in the hallways before (later that night, after I was at home in my bedroom, I had pulled out my freshman yearbook and flipped through page after page until I found him smiling up from that year’s sophomore class photos). On the bus he was sitting with a group of boys, all of them wearing white t-shirts beneath old Ogden basketball jerseys. He leaned over, laughing, and his long bangs fell into his eyes. He flicked them out of his face with a quick shake of his head, and my stomach flipped.
“You bought your dress already?” Rudy was saying.
“I ordered it last week.”
She lowered her voice the slightest bit. “Do you have a date yet?”
Deena blushed and shook her head. “No. But Stephen and I just broke up, so I’m not really surprised. I’m not worried about it yet.”
“Oh, right.” Rudy looked relieved. “Has anyone been asked yet? Besides the obvious couples?”
“I know Isaiah Staples asked Marissa Johnson already.” Deena chewed her bottom lip. “But that was a giveaway, too.”
Rudy nodded and I turned my head toward the window, but there was nothing outside but billboards and tall, dead grass.
“Jillian, when is Zach coming for the summer?”
“What?”
Celine had looked up from the magazine on her lap and she was staring at me over the back of the bus seat.
“When is Zach coming for the summer?” She repeated.
“Um, I’m not sure yet if he is.” I stole a quick glance at Rudy but she turned away quickly, avoiding my eyes.
“Do you think he’d go with me if I asked him to prom?” At Ogden, all four classes were allowed tickets to the prom. It was very diplomatic.
“Yeah, maybe,” I blurted.
Rudy pressed the tip of her shoe against my toes and I looked down. She had left a faint, dusty mark on my suede boot.
“Zach’s your cousin, right?” Deena piped up. “Celine, you have a thing with him? Doesn’t he live in Boston?”
“We’ve been talking a lot, lately. He’s supposed to come visit this summer.”
Celine wasn’t even whispering. She was practically yelling, professing her love on a bus crowded with kids just waiting to judge her!
“So, you haven’t met him yet?”
“No,” Celine said. “But we’ve talked on the phone a couple times.”
On the phone? I elbowed Rudy covertly, behind the shield of our seat back, and she raised her eyebrows. That was a lie. A flat out lie. And we hadn’t messaged her for weeks. I could hardly open my mouth to speak.
“Actually, I forgot, I don’t think he was thinking about coming until July,” I managed. “If he comes, I mean.”
“Bummer,” Celine frowned. “I guess I’ll be going to the dance solo, then.”
“So, you really like him then?” Deena – oblivious Deena – pressed.
“I do. I think he really likes me, too. We have a lot in common.”
“That’s awesome.” Deena didn’t look entirely certain of that awesomeness. “Well, if I don’t find a date, we can go together. Two single ladies, out on the town.”
We were saved from further conversation when the bus pulled into the parking lot at the University of Missouri basketball complex. We gathered our purses and filed down the steps and out of the bus behind a group of boys whose stomachs were painted navy and white and who were hooting and chanting already, though we hadn’t even made it into the gymnasium yet.
The place was enormous. Rudy and I hurried through the curved concrete hallway along with the group. A section of seats had been cordoned off for the Ogden student body and across the court was the opposing team’s crowd, all of the students dressed in matching red t-shirts and some of them holding hand-drawn posters.
“Let’s go this way.” I was watching Drew as he followed his friends to their seats, and I pulled Rudy by the wrist in the same direction.
We pushed into the row directly behind him; he was only three seats to my left and if I had really stretched, I could have touched his shoulder.
“Why’d you want to sit over here?” Rudy was situating herself in the hard plastic seat and she didn’t look up to see my cheeks flush.
For two weeks I had been obsessed with the idea of going to prom with Drew, but I had yet to mention my interest in him to Rudy and I didn’t really know why. Or, more accurately, I knew why – Rudy was direct and forward and sometimes very pushy – but I didn’t want to admit that I was indirect and timi
d and terrified of approaching boys I found attractive. I would learn their routine and carefully place myself within their grasp – I would eat at their lunch table in the cafeteria or dance directly across the room from them at a party or sit right behind them at a basketball game – and I would wait. I thought putting myself in their general vicinity was enough; surely they could sense my longing for them. Surely, if the feelings were reciprocated, they would talk to me; they would initiate the conversation. If I told Rudy she’d force my hand, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that just yet.
“It’s a good spot. I didn’t want to get stuck behind someone tall,” I said and she nodded.
Both basketball teams were warming up on the court below us and I watched as Houston Jones shot the basketball. It hit the rim of the basket and bounced away. We were too far away to hear, but I could see him mouth the word ‘fuck.’ I glanced at Rudy and she was watching him too.
“Can’t they get ejected for cussing?”
“Only during the game, I think,” Rudy said, eyes still on the court.
“Oh.” I picked at the fingernail polish on my thumb.
When the game began we all stood, and I watched Drew pull a blue whistle from his back pocket and put it in his mouth, hanging off his bottom lip. When the referee blew his shiny silver whistle, so did Drew.
The game was tense from the beginning; a nail-biter, hair-raiser, whatever you want to call it. Only four or five points separated the two teams during the first three quarters. I had finger marks on my forearm from where Rudy had been squeezing.
In the fourth quarter, things just got ugly. The other team was from a public school, also in St. Louis, and after one of their players was fouled, they started chanting. At first you couldn’t really tell what they were saying, but soon it picked up in volume and was impossible to ignore.
“Trust funds can’t play basketball, take your ass back to the mall!”
They were holding their hands up, rubbing their thumbs against their fingers. Pantomiming “money.”
They shouted it over and over, until finally one of their administrators caught on and shushed them, but the fire had been lit. The parents in the crowd were shaking their heads silently, but the students were murmuring.
“That’s fucked up,” I heard a boy behind me say.
When our principal, Dr. Foakley, had his head turned, we would throw up the finger in small sections at a time and though some teachers saw us, they didn’t say anything. There were too many of us to discipline. At least we weren’t yelling, they must have reasoned. And maybe we should have had a better comeback because our basketball team began to suck. All of the sudden, the other team had pulled away by eight points. We didn’t give up yet – the boys were sweating and sprinting down the court with the ball and they managed to get within four points before the opposition pulled ahead again. From the stands, we tried to pull them out of their funk. We screamed for whoever was carrying the ball, and we stomped our feet against the floor and cried out when they scored. My throat was raw by the end of the game. But in the last minute we were still 10 points down and you just knew it was over. I could feel it in the response of the crowd. Some of the girls were on the verge of tears and some of them were already crying, their arms around each other. The boys just shook their heads solemnly and kept yelling half-hearted encouragements to their friends on the court.
When the buzzer sounded, the opposite side of the gym erupted, their surge of energy carrying high over the slumped shoulders and bowed heads of our crowd, but I couldn’t turn away from the court where our players stood. Houston had his hands on his hips, staring down at his feet. One of the senior boys was actually crying, his mouth turned down, his hand shielding his eyes.
I looked at Rudy and her shoulders were low, her hands hanging limply at her sides. She was biting her bottom lip and staring at the court.
The teachers began to usher us out of our seats almost immediately, and we shuffled our feet and hung our heads climbing the steps out of the auditorium. Behind us, under the lights of the basketball court, the winners were still celebrating loudly, their cheers echoing through the rafters.
Outside, in the cold, late-February air, we found our voices again.
“That sucked,” Celine murmured beside me. “It was so close.”
I nodded and shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans.
“I can’t believe that chant they did,” Deena shook her head. “So racist.”
“It wasn’t racist,” I said. “They weren’t talking about us being white.”
“You know they meant that, though.” Deena lowered her voice to a whisper. “Half of their crowd was black.”
“Ogden’s not all white. Our team isn’t either,” Rudy said. It was true; there were three black boys on the basketball team, and there were kids from most ethnicities at our school, though they were definitely the minority.
“Whatever,” Deena rolled her eyes. “It was still rude.”
We were quiet as we reached the bus. It was locked, and we all stood outside shivering, huddling up against the side of the bus to shield us from the wind as we waited for the driver and our chaperones to return. Drew was nowhere to be seen. Finally, across the dark parking lot we saw the basketball team emerge from the side of the hulking building, their navy duffel bags hanging from their slumped shoulders. Drew and his friends were walking beside a group of players, their heads bent low and hands in their pockets with the exception of one boy who had his arm slung over one of the dejected player’s shoulders.
The chaperones were following, and our bus driver rushed to the front of the crowd to unlock the door to the bus. The girls pushed to the front of the line to board and, chivalrously, the boys stepped aside for us to go in front of them. I was climbing the steps when I turned and saw Rudy wasn’t behind me anymore.
“Where’d she go?”
Celine shrugged, and I stopped holding up the line and slid into one of the seats in the back half of the school bus.
I saw her out the window, her back turned to me. She was standing beside Houston; they were both standing apart from the rest of the basketball team and the rest of the students in general. Rudy reached up and touched the upper part of his arm, and he smiled a small, polite smile. Then she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek before she turned and hurried back to the bus, her arms folded over her chest. Houston watched until she was all the way inside before he went back to his teammates.
How did I miss that? I remember wondering how long Rudy had still liked him. I had had no idea. There were signs of course, once I thought back to them – she didn’t date anyone else that year, she still had pictures of him in her room, she still talked to him in the halls at school – but I was too wrapped up in my own concerns to notice them.
Rudy slid into the seat beside me.
“Do you care if I sleep on your lap?” she said. “I’m so tired.”
I wanted to ask her about Houston, but I felt too guilty. Instead I just nodded, and she bent her legs up in the seat and lay her head in my lap. She closed her eyes, and I leaned my forehead against the windowpane. The glass was cold against my skin.
I shut my eyes and made a silent promise.
I will be less selfish and more observant, I silently swore. I will be a better best friend.
7
Sophomore Spring
Rudy and Houston got back together, apparently to no one’s surprise but my own. “I knew it,” Deena said over lunch. “They’re so cute together, aren’t they?” And then, once again, it seemed, Rudy was with prom date and I was without. But I told her about Drew, and I pinky-swore her to secrecy.
“He’s so nice. I think he’s your type,” Rudy had agreed, standing in her kitchen as she stirred a bowl of boxed brownie mix. A fleck of the batter slopped out of the bowl, and she wiped it off the counter with her thumb, then ate it.
What did that mean? And how did she know he was so nice; did she talk to him?
“Do yo
u know him? Like, have you’ve talked to him?”
“No. Not really. I had that one art class with him last semester. He just seems like a good guy.”
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