Me You Us

by Aaron Karo

  “What? What do you mean, Rebecca joined you?”

  “I mean Rebecca Larabie was at the pizza place, too. She saw us, Marisol asked her to join us, and she did. I spent the rest of the night with the two of them, and they mostly talked to each other about student government. Except when Rebecca negotiated a discount on her meal with the owner because there wasn’t enough pepperoni on her pizza. She really drove a hard bargain.”

  “Damn,” I say. “They probably planned it.”

  “Planned what?”

  “If a girl isn’t totally sure she likes a guy yet, she’ll sometimes have her friend ‘randomly’ show up on the date so that she’s not stuck with him.”

  “Oh.” Reed is crestfallen. “Noted.” He scribbles forlornly in his notebook. Then he perks up. “Or,” he says, “maybe Marisol just wanted Rebecca to meet me. You know, feel me out a little bit because she’s totally into me.”

  Reed looks at me expectantly.

  “Or that,” I say. “It could definitely be that.” Who knows? Maybe it could. “I like where your head’s at, Reed. You’re staying positive. I’m proud of you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But next time something like that happens, text me! Don’t make me wait a whole day to find out! What happened at the end of the night?”

  “Rebecca went home on her own, I dropped Marisol off, she pecked me on the cheek, and that was it.”

  “Wait, she kissed you on the cheek?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Reed, way to bury the lead under a ton of blackheads. That’s awesome!”

  “Really? A cheek kiss is that big a deal? I dunno. I wasn’t sure.”

  “First of all, an unsolicited cheek kiss. And second of all, a month ago you were wearing dumpy jeans your mom bought you, so let’s keep things in perspective. I’m not a miracle worker.”

  Reed nods. “Fair enough.”

  I admire the cloudless sky for a moment.

  Then all of a sudden I’m forced to scream: “LOOK OUT!”

  Reed and I duck for our lives as a baseball flies over us, narrowly missing our heads and smashing violently into the bleachers about ten rows behind us with a THWACK!

  At first I think it’s a foul ball from batting practice. But then I spot Harrison marching toward the bleachers. I’m pretty sure he threw that ball.

  “Uh oh,” Reed murmurs.

  Harrison’s short fuse is well documented. His adrenaline is always pumping, and he never forgets a slight. That’s ­probably what makes him a star athlete—and the last guy you’d want to have it out for you since seventh grade. He glares at us menacingly as he starts to climb the bleacher steps. His practice uniform has been hastily thrown on like he just learned of our presence and bolted from the locker room. In retrospect, the baseball field was probably a poor choice of locations for my powwow with Reed.

  “I’ve been looking for you two,” he says when he reaches us.

  “Did you throw that at us?” I ask. “Are you crazy?”

  “Calm down, Chambliss,” he huffs. “I would have hit you if I wanted to.”

  “Congratulations,” I say. “What’s the problem?”

  “You,” Harrison says, pointing a finger in Reed’s face. I have to admit, for a split second I’m actually kinda glad I’m not the problem for once.

  “Me? What did I do?” Reed says.

  “Were you out with Rebecca Larabie last night?”

  “Uh . . . I mean, technically, but—”

  “I’m with her.”

  It’s a little scary how angry he is.

  “I thought that was supposed to be a secret,” I venture.

  “And you!” Harrison repeats, now pointing his grubby finger at me. “Don’t think I forgot about the college fair. What the hell were you doing with Rebecca? Were you hitting on her?”

  “Oh, he was just running a wedge,” Reed interjects.

  “Shut up!” Harrison shouts.

  Reed puts his hands up in surrender.

  “If I see or hear of either of you talking to Rebecca again . . .” He cracks his knuckles. His message is loud and clear.

  “All right,” I say. “We’re sorry.”

  Reed looks at me like I did something wrong. Hey, sometimes it’s okay to apologize.

  Harrison thankfully turns to leave . . . but then suddenly turns back and glares at me again.

  “What now?” I say.

  “Make sure you throw that in the trash.”

  “Huh?”

  Then I realize he’s referring to the straw wrapper in my hand.

  “It’s not cool to litter,” he says.

  Before I can even respond, he turns around again and exits down the bleachers.

  Reed and I don’t say anything for a full minute.

  “What the hell just happened?” I finally mutter when we catch our breath.

  “I have no idea,” he says. “But you better throw that thing out.”

  14

  TRISTEN HAS AN EXTREMELY busy social calendar, and it’s been proving more difficult than I expected to lock down a night for our next date. So when she casually mentioned that she was going to the mall this afternoon, I offered to drive and take her to lunch. This is certainly not the romantic venue I envisioned for our second date and first solo affair, but I’ll have to make the most of it.

  First we check out the department stores, where Tristen has every cologne dealer douse me with a sample so that she can smell it. As per my advice to Reed, I like to spritz cologne into the air and then mosey through the cloud, but these salespeople are aggro and hitting me with direct shots. Once I get sprayed with the same cologne that Mr. K. bought, and I swear I almost puke. Still, it’s a good time. And I must admit, Tristen sniffing my wrists and my neck is kind of a turn-on.

  After that, I tag along with Tristen to a few random stores. It’s a fascinating experience. One moment she’s asking a bewildered salesclerk if a piece of jewelry is made with conflict-free minerals, and the next moment she’s using her iPhone to calculate what 10 percent off is. Did I mention she’s wearing really short jean shorts? The front pockets are sticking out below the shorts and onto her thighs. Occasionally I forget my own name.

  Next we walk to the food court for lunch, and I try to steer the conversation toward anything physical. If you’re talking to a girl and the act of hooking up is mentioned, and she wrinkles her nose and says, “Gross,” then you’re probably never gonna hook up with her. But if she’s comfortable talking about those things with you, then maybe, just maybe, one day she might be open to actually doing them with you. In the Galgorithm, this is known as laying groundwork for future physicality. It’s one of my most advanced moves.

  “What’s that ChapStick you were using?” I ask.

  “It’s cherry,” Tristen replies. “It’s my favorite.”

  “But don’t your lips taste like cherry after that?”

  “Yes! That’s the whole point. I can just smack my lips and it’s like getting a little snack.”

  She smacks her lips. Oof. I’m sweating a bit.

  “Which one do you use?” she asks.

  “The blue one with the moisturizer.”

  “That’s so boring!”

  “How can my choice of ChapStick possibly be boring?”

  “Like, let’s say you kiss someone. Then they’re just getting boring blue ChapStick flavor.”

  Aha! She brought up kissing!

  “So what you’re saying is, when you kiss someone, they get the cherry flavor.”

  “Exactly!” she says.

  Now I’m gonna very subtly bring this around to me.

  “Well, what if I don’t like cherry?” I ask.

  “Everyone likes cherry,” she says with a smirk.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  She smiles and touches my elbow.

  For a second I think that this conversation has gone too well. We’ve stopped walking. Tristen is staring at me. I stare back
at her. She smacks her lips again. Is this really about to happen?

  “What do you want to eat?”

  “Huh?”

  “What do you want to eat?” she repeats.

  She motions to all the restaurants in the food court, which we’ve just reached. Which is why we stopped. Which is why she’s just standing there, waiting for me.

  I snap out of it.

  “Oh,” I manage.

  Shane, you think Tristen wants to kiss you next to a dirty KFC? Use your head. Your other head!

  “I’m good to eat whatever you want,” I say, recovering.

  “Hey,” Tristen says, “isn’t that your friend Jak?”

  I look up and see that Jak is indeed walking our way. I realize I never told her I was coming to the mall with Tristen. It was kinda last minute.

  “Yeah,” I say to Tristen, “it is.”

  When Jak gets closer, she notices me, then Tristen. Her face flashes briefly from surprise to confusion to Oh, crap. But it would be weird if she didn’t say hello now. And I’m excited to see her anyway.

  “Hey, buddy,” Jak says as she reaches us. We exchange our typical high five.

  “Hey,” I say. “Do you know Tristen? Tristen, Jak. Jak, Tristen.”

  “We’ve seen each other in the halls,” Jak says.

  “Yeah. It’s nice to, like, officially meet you, though,” ­Tristen says. “Shane talks about you a lot.”

  “What? No I don’t.”

  Jak smiles at my discomfort.

  “Well you talk about her a little,” Tristen says.

  I shrug. That’s fair. “What are you doing here?” I ask Jak.

  “I had to get a present.”

  “Oh?” I say. “For whom?”

  “Ah, nice call!” Jak says. “For my mom. Birthday coming up. I was—” Jak stops to sniff the air. “What’s that horrible smell?”

  I look around. “I think that’s me,” I say. “We might have gone a little overboard on the cologne shopping.”

  Jak covers her nose. “It smells like sandalwood and sorrow.”

  I snicker. She always has a way with words.

  “I think he smells nice,” Tristen says.

  Jak doesn’t agree, but she lets it go.

  “Jak,” I say, “did you know that there actually are endangered dolphins in the Congo?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It’s true. Tristen was just telling me about it.”

  “Atlantic humpback dolphins,” Tristen explains. “They live off the west coast of Congo and Gabon, but they’re being hunted to extinction. I’ve been trying to raise money for an organization that supports them.”

  “You learn something new every day, I guess,” Jak says.

  “I like your sneakers, by the way,” Tristen adds. “Are they vintage?”

  We all look at Jak’s beat-up white Chucks.

  “No,” Jak says, a bit offended. “Just dirty.”

  I grimace. Then I try to get this show on the road. “So, we were just gonna get some food . . .”

  “You should join us!” Tristen says to Jak.

  Jak looks at me and we communicate through best friend telepathy. She gets my message: No.

  “That’s okay, I already ate,” she says.

  “Are you sure?” I ask, although I’m just being polite.

  “Yeah, I’m good. You guys have fun.”

  “Okay,” Tristen says. “It was super to finally meet you.”

  “You too,” Jak says. “Shane, text me later. Have a sweat-tastic day.”

  I grin. “Will do.”

  “Bye!” adds Tristen.

  Jak exits.

  That was a nice, albeit slightly awkward surprise.

  Tristen turns to me. “What’s a sweat-tastic day?”

  “Just some stupid joke.”

  I appreciate the fact that Tristen doesn’t ask for further explanation, and we continue to the food court. Stinking of sandalwood and sorrow, I begin to plan how to convert this second date into a third one.

  15

  TACO TUESDAY IN THE CHAMBLISS household is an intense experience. For much of the week everyone eats on a different schedule, but on Tuesdays my family has an unspoken agreement to be at the kitchen table by seven o’clock. Since I’m an only child, sometimes having this spotlight feels like being on stage, and other times it feels like being on trial.

  I can already smell dinner when I get home at six forty-five. I’ve lived here since I was born, though the house seems to be in a constant state of remodeling. It’s an open secret that my bedroom is next. I just know my parents are biding their time until my first day of college, when they can send me off into the world to become my own man and promptly turn my room into a walk-in shoe closet.

  My dad has always done the bulk of the cooking, and when I enter the kitchen, he is preparing ground beef on the stove with his shirt off. It gets hot in here, and he claims that cooking shirtless is the most efficient way to cool down. My dad is an engineer and makes even the most outlandish statements seem true and logical. People say we look alike and share the same hazel eyes, but I’m taller and can’t match his grisly beard.

  Fixins are my mom’s responsibility. She’s chopping onions and tomatoes, humming as she goes. She was a singer before becoming a music lawyer. Jak thinks her short blond hair makes her look like Ivan Drago’s wife from Rocky IV.

  “Meat’s up!” Dad announces. He pours the ground beef into a bowl and my mom arranges the fixins as I complete my one and only duty, setting the circular kitchen table with plates, place mats, and utensils. We don’t stand on ceremony after that: We all go to town and start making our own tacos.

  “Dad, you think maybe you could put your shirt back on now?” I ask.

  “Why? This is natural.”

  “Yeah, but one of your chest hairs is in the onions.”

  “Peter,” Mom says.

  Dad, on cue, reluctantly puts his shirt on.

  “Shane, I’ve barely seen you the past few days,” Mom says. “I need to hear some updates, please.”

  The last time I talked to my parents about girls in any real way was in the rubble of my breakup with Voldemort. They tried their best to console me. To be fair, Mom never really liked Voldemort. She caught one glimpse of the bar code tattoo on the back of her neck and decided she was no good for me. To be fair again, Voldemort usually kept it covered up pretty well, and I thought it was really hot. I guess the moral of the story is this: Listen to your mother, not a sixteen-year-old girl you met at a high school football game who has a tattoo she got illegally when she was underage.

  I shrug and try to avoid my mom’s request for news, but I know I won’t be able to stall for long.

  “I have an update,” Dad chimes in. “I spent a hundred and twenty dollars on lottery tickets yesterday.”

  “No you didn’t,” Mom says.

  “I did.”

  Mom doesn’t look my dad in the eye, which is her way of telling him she’s peeved. Dad’s occasional reckless spending on lotto tickets and renovating the house is a sticky issue. I’m pretty sure my mom outearns my dad, which might chafe my dad, who fancies himself old school.

  “What?” Dad says, in response to Mom’s silent treatment. “It was Powerball. Three-hundred-million-dollar jackpot!”

  “Well, did we win?” Mom asks.

  “Yes, Kathryn, we won three hundred million dollars and I didn’t tell you. I’d be halfway to Belize by now with my second family.”

  I laugh at this but Mom doesn’t. She’ll come around.

  My parents met at a “cocktail party” in New York City in the early nineties. “Cocktail party” in quotation marks because I’m pretty sure it was a rave. One day I plan on getting the real story out of them.

  “What about you, Shane?” Mom asks. “Anything to report?”

  “Yeah,” Dad adds. “Any gals at school we should know about?”

  My dad, in his infinite wisdom, occasionally refers to women as “gals.”
I don’t know if it’s an old-school throwback or just something to tease my mom with, but it’s become a running joke in the family. Which was why, when I needed a snappy name for a formula about girls, I knew right away what to call it: the Galgorithm.

  My parents, of course, have no idea that I moonlight as a dating coach. Keeping that secret requires a delicate balance of meeting my clients when my parents aren’t around and taking advantage of their lenient curfew when I have to, say, run to the freakin’ beach on a weeknight. But even outside of my consulting duties, when there’s a gal, er, girl, I’m interested in—Tristen, presently—I no longer tell my parents about her. I’m too afraid that if I tell them about a girl I like, the next conversation we have will be me explaining to them that we broke up. It was hard enough with Voldemort—­especially since she never gave me a reason—and I never want to go through that ordeal again.

  “So?” Dad repeats. “Any gals? Anything?”

  “Uh . . . ,” I begin to stammer.

  “Oh no!” Mom exclaims suddenly. “I forgot Yvonne’s birthday yesterday!”

  “No. That’s your best friend,” Dad says.

  “Yes. I know. Oh my God, I have to call her right now. February twentieth!”

  I feel bad she forgot Jak’s mom’s birthday. But I’ll take anything to get out from under my parents’ microscope for the night, even though I don’t really mind all their questions. At least I know they care.

  Strangely, it’s moments like these that raise my anxiety level about graduation. Even though Taco Tuesday inevitably veers off into some kind of minor drama, at least it’s consistent. It’s my house. It’s tacos. It’s Tuesday. Once I go off to college, it’s gonna be a free-for-all. Tacos any night of the week. But more importantly: life without the support system I’ve always had here in Kingsview.

  16

  I CONVINCED JAK TO PLAY hooky from English today so that we could go get lunch together on my free period. There’s a bagel place as well as a Baja Fresh and a few other restaurants close enough to school to drive to. It didn’t take much convincing to get Jak to cut. She claims that her proper usage of whom puts her in the 99th percentile of all English students nationally, and therefore learning any more would just be showing off.