The Here and Now

by Brashares, Ann

  Ethan throws the duffel bag on the couch and unzips it. In the closet is a safe. I hear him fiddling with it, and then he puts the money and papers in. He comes back and hands me a bunch of fifties and twenties. He tells me the combination to remember.

  “We need to get a change of clothes,” he announces. “You stink.”

  He takes in my look of horror.

  “Penny, I’m kidding.” He laughs. “You don’t stink at all. Or hardly at all, anyway.”

  I glance down at the sweatpants and tank top I wore to go to bed two nights ago. “Your hygiene isn’t that impressive either.” I try to rally. It was easier to be lighthearted when the most serious business between us was hangman.

  “Come on. There are stores along the boardwalk.”

  I consider. This could be uncomfortable. I don’t know how to think about him. He can’t be my boyfriend, but I can’t pretend there’s not a potent attraction. I can’t look at his eyes or his mouth or his hands with any neutrality, but I can’t lead him on either. I can’t help but begin to notice certain ways he looks at me, especially when he doesn’t know I’m looking.

  “Okay,” I finally say. I wash my face and wish I could brush my teeth, and we strike out for the town.

  I get some toiletries at a blindingly bright drugstore. Ethan tags along as I pick out a toothbrush, toothpaste and a pink plastic hairbrush. In a distant way I think the old thoughts: Am I doing this right? Would a normal person buy this? Am I giving anything away?

  He knows! I shout at myself. He’s known from the very beginning!

  Ethan disappears down an aisle and I take the opportunity to buy a three-pack of cotton underwear and a razor to shave my legs. What a lark to think of shaving my legs at such a time, but I do. He meets me again at the counter, somewhat triumphantly holding a pair of bright orange flip-flops, a phone to replace the one I broke, and a pack of cards.

  Our next stop is a boutique selling a million pairs of sunglasses and piles of cheap beachwear. I look around uncertainly. I can barely shop with myself, let alone with an eighteen-year-old boy.

  Ethan breaks the ice by trying on an absurd fringed shirt with a huge sunburst on the back.

  I laugh.

  “No?” he says, acting surprised.

  I pick out an orange sarong, a pair of denim shorts, a white tank top, a gray sweatshirt, a wide-brimmed straw hat and a bathing suit. We’re loaded, right?

  Ethan is trying on oversized white plastic sunglasses as I toss my pile on the counter.

  “Done,” I say.

  “Aren’t you going to try anything on?” Ethan looks disappointed.

  “I don’t need to,” I say quickly.

  Ethan picks up the sarong and stretches it out in puzzlement. “What do you do with this thing?”

  “You tie it around yourself.”

  “Show me?”

  I tie it around his hips as a skirt.

  “I meant you,” he says.

  The sun-beaten, fifty-something-year-old saleslady plucks the bathing suit from the pile. “This is nonreturnable, hon. And the sizes run big. You ought to try it on.”

  I look suspiciously at Ethan’s pleased face. It’s as though he and the saleslady are in cahoots. He shrugs innocently.

  I grab the bathing suit and trudge toward the fitting room in the back.

  What’s the big deal? He’ll see me in a bathing suit soon enough. But my cheeks are warm as I try to make the curtain cover the door without the big gaps on the sides. Why do dressing rooms always have such terrible-fitting curtains?

  I shed my clothes hurriedly and pull on the stretchy bottoms. They’ve got the papery sticker over the crotch that makes a crinkling noise as I move around. The top is a halter held together by a brown tortoiseshell ring in the middle. Of course there is no mirror. I have to slump out to the long mirror between the two changing rooms.

  Do I really need to see how it looks? I think of Ethan standing out there. Nah, it’s fine.

  “How’s the fit?” calls the saleslady’s loud voice from about a foot away.

  “Uh. It’s fine.”

  “Well, don’t hide in there!” she says boomingly. “You can’t even see yourself!”

  I look down at my skin, which looks bluish and mottled. Lovely.

  This is a laid-back beach town. People here probably go out to dinner in bikinis half the size of this one. They probably go to church in less clothing than I am wearing. They are used to letting everything show, inside and out, and I am used to hiding everything.

  I walk out. I try not to slouch into a ball.

  “Very nice!” the saleslady exclaims. Nightmarishly, she turns me around to look at me from every angle. “You’ve got a gorgeous figure,” she shouts, which is a word that particularly makes me wince.

  I look at Ethan like, Would you get a load of this person? but his face has more color than usual too.

  We leave the store with a full bag, including the fringed shirt and the oversized white sunglasses.

  Ethan is jubilant, and I can’t help smiling as we bounce along. “That was by far the best time I’ve ever had shopping,” he says.

  We find a place to eat burgers and milk shakes right on the beach. After we finish, Ethan and I drift down to the water and kick off our shoes. I pull my sweatpants up to my knees, he rolls up his pants and we wade into the water.

  It is gentle and transparent, and the sunlight stabs right through. I dig my toes into the fine wet sand, trying to think of nothing other than the pleasure of the nerve endings in my feet.

  Ethan reaches for my hand. It’s the first time he’s done that when he wasn’t pulling me through a window or reaching to comfort me in some dire place. This time he holds my hand for no purpose, just for joy.

  I let the simple pleasure of my nerve endings extend to my hands, my fingers, to the places where my arm brushes against his. I pull us a little deeper into the water. I don’t care that my sweatpants are getting wet. It feels nice. And anyway, I am a girl with a change of clothes.

  We keep going like that until we are up to our waists, our clothes hanging heavy and my heart as light, I think, as it ever was or ever will be.

  The first good-sized wave comes at us. I scream and he laughs and we both dive under it. We come up snorting and laughing.

  We go farther out and just bob in the sunshine for a long time. I know there are scary things under the water, with chomping teeth and waving stinging arms, but I don’t fear them. The surface of the water is too calm and lovely for me to believe in them right now.

  Finally we drag our wet bodies back to the beach and lie down on the sand. We stay there for a long time, letting the warm air dry us slowly.

  He lifts himself up onto one elbow and leans over me. He lets his fingers drift up my arm. He lifts my damp, salty tank top to my ribs and stares at these new parts of my body. He runs his hand over my hips and my belly button.

  I try to keep breathing. “You are going to make it harder on us when we have to stop,” I say to him.

  “It’s already harder,” he says.

  He sits up, and I stare up at his strong back and the waistband of his patched army-green pants. I’ve wanted to ask him about those pants so many times but shied away. When you ask someone a question, it’s an invitation for them to ask you a question, and I could never afford that. It was one question of thousands I hadn’t let myself ask.

  I sit up too. “Where do those pants come from?” It’s such a forbidden delicacy, I can barely line up my words.

  I guess Ethan is surprised too. “What did you say?”

  “Those pants. You always wear them.”

  “Well …” He glances down at them. He’s never looked remotely self-conscious about them before, but he does a little right now. “My grandfather was a member of the Irish Defense Forces in the nineteen thirties and forties. These belonged to him.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. I have his cap badge too. His father, my great-grandfather, fought in th
e Irish War of Independence. He lost an arm. My dad’s got his medals in the house somewhere.”

  I nod. “And your father?”

  “He’s an accountant at Ernst and Young.” He makes a slightly sour face.

  “And your mom? She’s a designer, right?” I am getting the hang of this, spending my questions like a millionaire.

  “Exactly.” He shrugs. “Her family was pretty amazing too.”

  “In what way?”

  He turns his face up to the sun. “Her father was a Hungarian Jew. He and his wife were sent to the Nazi camps in 1944. My grandfather escaped early in 1945. He tried to save his wife, but she was already gone. He walked all the way across Europe, living in forests, wading across rivers, until he finally got to Paris. He worked for the resistance until the end of the war, and then he moved here.”

  “Sad,” I say.

  “But he made it. He remarried eventually—my grandmother—and started a business, had kids and grandkids.”

  “Doesn’t erase what he went through, though.”

  “No. It doesn’t. He’s got the numbers on his arm to remind him.”

  I hear myself sigh. I listen to the waves, probably my favorite sound in the world. “Thanks,” I say.

  He rolls onto his side. “For what?”

  “For letting me ask you questions. I’ve been wanting to for so long.”

  “Anytime,” he says.

  I put my hand out and Ethan takes it. He rolls onto his back and rests both our hands on top of his chest. For a long time I lose all my other thoughts in the up and down of his breathing.

  Lying here like this, I can imagine happiness. Not a kicky, bright kind, but a full, almost aching kind, both dark and light. I can see the whole world in this way. I can imagine extending the feeling to other places and parts of the day. I can imagine holding it in my pocket like a lens, and bringing it out so that I can look through it and remember again and again the world that has this feeling in it.

  FIFTEEN

  In the hotel room after lunch we begin to put our strategy in place. Ethan calls the home number we found for Mona Ghali. He poses as a freelance IT guy, Jack Bonning, who works for her company. We’d sketched out the script in advance, during our drive down the coast.

  “Ms. Ghali?” Ethan says. He lifts his eyebrows to tell me she’s picked up. He pitches his voice low so she won’t recognize him, and if I hadn’t been nervous I might have laughed.

  He gives her his fake name and identity with impressive matter-of-factness. I nod at him encouragingly.

  “We’ve had some reports of hacking into the company server,” he explains, “so we’re asking each of our employees to back up all files and temporarily move sensitive files to an alternate server.”

  Ethan is a cool customer. I can’t hear her part of the conversation, but he doesn’t look troubled or stymied by any of what she says.

  Ethan gives her the information for the alternate server. We’d figured on her uploading to a web server operated by her graduate department at MIT so she’d feel comfortable with it. It isn’t actually an MIT server. Ethan is a decent programmer and a respectable hacker, but not like that. It has the markers of an MIT server, whereas it actually goes to an account set up by Ethan.

  Ethan glances at me, which seems to mean it’s working.

  “And please do the same with all work files on your computer at home,” he adds before he hangs up.

  I call Mona Ghali from our second phone forty-five minutes later, posing as a secretary from Human Resources. “You might have heard we’ve been having some security issues,” I say. “You’ve spoken to Mr. Bonning in IT?”

  She replies that she has. I have the feeling she doesn’t want to talk to me for any longer than necessary, and I get that. I try not to think too much, not to spook myself with the knowledge of what tomorrow has in store for her and for us.

  “Well, it appears there have been a few files—physical files—that have gone missing from our offices here in Braintree, and we’re concerned the same thing could be happening in the New Jersey office.”

  “That’s disturbing. I hadn’t heard about that,” Mona Ghali says.

  I go through the protocol Ethan and I invented, which involves locking her filing cabinets. I wait anxiously for her response.

  “Yes, my files do have locks. I am not in the habit of using them, but I will start today,” she says.

  For several minutes after I hang up my heart is still thumping. For a stretch there, I was really enjoying not lying.

  That afternoon Ethan and I buy a cheap beach umbrella, change into proper bathing suits—or shorts in his case, which he had the forethought to pack in his duffel bag—steal a couple of towels from the hotel and sit under the umbrella, just a few yards up from the surf (and actually in the surf, at one point, when high tide catches us unawares).

  We play cards. We play for a couple of hours, refining our next day’s strategy along the way. The procedure goes like this: Ethan teaches me a new game and then we play it until I beat him, at which point he figures I am good enough and we go on to the next one. He doesn’t like to get beaten, so we pass through Crazy Eights, Old Maid and Go Fish pretty quickly. It takes me five rounds to beat him at Spit, but it is extra sweet when I do. Bloody Knuckles involves several rounds of suffering, but when I finally win, he picks a queen, so I get to whack him on the knuckles with the deck of cards twelve times, and I do not hold back.

  Ethan claims he is some kind of supergenius expert at Gin, so when I beat him in our second game, he is so beset by rage and disbelief that he makes us play three more times, and writhes in psychological pain as I beat him every time.

  “I think I’m better at the skill games than the luck games,” I say.

  “Oh, shut up,” he says. He shakes his head. “I’ve created a monster.”

  Ethan says his ego isn’t up to teaching me Hearts quite yet, so we go swimming instead. The waves are getting big and I am not much of a swimmer. There was no voluntary swimming where I came from. For a million reasons, there just wasn’t. I swam for the first time in a pool in a neighbor’s backyard when I was twelve. But I don’t want to be a chicken, so I follow Ethan out deep.

  One wave takes me by surprise and almost steals my bathing suit bottoms. I turn away from Ethan, find the sand under my feet and walk a few steps toward the shore, trying to rearrange myself so the crucial parts of my body are covered.

  I guess I should realize that the dramatic sucking of water behind me is going toward the assembly of an absolutely giant wave. I turn my head and see what is coming, but it is too late to go over or under it.

  It hits me full in the back, tossing me forward and spinning me around like a sock in the washing machine. The spin cycle goes on for a long time.

  I feel sand scratching along my back one moment and my cheek the next. I am so disoriented I can’t figure out which direction the air is in. I am thinking what a stupid and embarrassing way this is to go—in about four feet of water—when I feel a hand reaching around my upper arm and pulling me in some direction, hopefully airward.

  I turn my head toward the hand, get one of my feet under my body and at last suck in a lungful of oxygen. I cough and choke and stagger as Ethan leads me toward the shore.

  He is shaking his head at me, but not completely without sympathy.

  I push my hair out of my face and try to catch my breath.

  As we stand in water ankle deep, Ethan puts both hands on my waist. When I look up at him, he leans his head down and kisses my salty lips.

  That’s all it is. He drops his hands and we walk out of the water and up to our beach umbrella.

  Thankfully, my bathing suit is mostly in the right vicinity. I straighten it. I touch the scratches on my cheek and rub the stinging backs of my hands. I still feel the kiss. I don’t know what to do.

  “What’s the matter?” he asks, looking me over for injuries, challenging me to deny him that kiss. I can’t do it.

  “M
y knuckles hurt,” I say.

  Early that evening in our hotel room I lie on the rubbery bedspread, tapping various searches into the laptop Ethan brought along and watching the pink late-sunset light creep across the floor. This is the day I don’t want to end. Ethan is lying a foot or so away, looking through near-future newspapers.

  I’ve spent a long time on Mona Ghali’s social networking pages, taking notes and memorizing details for tomorrow. Ethan was already her friend on Facebook, which makes things simpler.

  Because Ethan’s computer is logged on to his Facebook page, I can’t help but notice all the hundreds of friends he has and the constant posts from happy, carefree teenagers. And I can’t help thinking, What does he want with me? Why would he leave that to go on this mind-warping odyssey?

  I rest my chin on my hand and look at him. “What are you missing to be here?”

  He looks up from the papers. He lifts his eyebrows. “What am I missing? Nothing.”

  I tip my head toward him. “You know. You’ve got a whole life. You’re a normal person. What would you be doing if you weren’t here?”

  “Well, let’s see.” I can tell by his face he’s humoring me. “Tonight is my mom’s book group. I am missing eight middle-aged ladies and a lot of chardonnay.”

  “Really?” I laugh.

  “I am missing some moping from my dad, who doesn’t enjoy ladies’ book group night, and greasy Chinese takeout. He’d try to get me to go see a violent and manly movie with him.”

  “And would you?”

  “Maybe. Jamie Webb invited me to a Yankees game. Veronique Lasser is having a party, I think.”

  I can’t help but feel wistful. “That sounds nice.”

  He shrugs. “I’m a Mets fan, and Veronique’s parties are never fun.” He reaches out and takes my bare foot in his hand. “You know where I want to be tonight?”

  I’m like a starving person at a banquet. “Where?”

  “Here.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nowhere else.”