By 7.15 pm on Saturday, I still wasn’t sure. By 7.16 pm, I had my answer.
~ 26 ~
The last time I’d visited the Frozen Fun ice rink must have been when I was about seven or eight, before Mom’s condition really got its claws into her, but it still looked pretty much how I remembered it. The barriers around the ice were still the same battered blue plastic walls with dented steel kickplates running around the bottom. The old raked rows of bright-orange, molded-plastic chairs circled the rink, though more of them now had butt-pinching cracks in the seats and eye-boggling graffiti scrawled onto their backs. The chilly air was laced with a familiar mixture of sweat, mildew and teenage desperation — a single whiff transported me back a decade in a second.
The skate rental desk hadn’t changed either. You still had to hand over your shoes while standing on the puddled rubberized floor in your socks, and declare your shoe size before being issued with the plastic rental boots — stylish black for boys, hideous purple for girls. And I was willing to bet, maybe not eight hundred but ten bucks at least, that the shoe-exchange procedure hadn’t changed at all.
“Next.” The guy behind the counter had a thin blond ponytail, a wispy soul patch, and a bored expression.
Jay waved me ahead of him with a polite “Ladies, first.”
“Why don’t you go first?” I suggested, not wishing him to witness the conversation I knew was about to occur. “Then you can go ahead and change in the meantime. They sometimes have, er, delays with the girls’ boots.”
“That’s okay, I can wait.”
“Next!” said Soul Patch.
There was no help for it. I walked up to the counter and handed over my sneakers. Jay stood directly behind me.
“Size?”
“Thirteen,” I whispered, then remembered something else from the past. These skates pinched like the devil’s own imps. I’d always had to take a half-size bigger than usual. “Wait, make that thirteen and a half.”
“Wa’s that?” Soul Patch cupped a hand behind his ear.
If Jay was going to reject me when he discovered I was Bigfoot’s size-matched mate, I might as well know it sooner rather than later.
“Thirteen and a half,” I said, staring the clerk straight in the eye. “But —”
“Thirteen and a half?” he exclaimed, loud enough for everyone in the greater Baltimore metropolitan area to hear.
Ah yes, this was following the usual pattern. The next thing he would say was …
“I don’t even think they make boots that big, man.”
“They do,” I said, painfully aware of the heat rising up my neck. “But only in men’s b—”
“Jethro, Jethro!” the guy called over his shoulder down the aisles of shelves. “What’s the biggest boot we have for girls?”
“Ten,” came an answering shout.
“You can give me —”
“We don’t have boots that big, man,” Soul Patch said, shaking his head and looking at me with an expression somewhere between disbelief and alarm. Maybe he was scared I’d deck him. Or kick him with my giant feet.
“Dayum,” he said, looking me up and down and seeming to register my size for the first time. “You’re really tall, you know that?”
God give me patience, I thought. If you give me strength I will only punch him in the face.
“You do have size thirteen and halfs,” I said. “In black.”
“Those are boys’ boots.”
“Last I heard, we don’t have sex-specific feet.”
He stared back at me blankly.
“Do you keep your junk in your socks?” I demanded angrily.
Soul Patch went pale. “How did you know, man? Are you a narc, like an undercover cop? Are you even a lady?”
“What?” Now I was the one confused.
Jay stepped to stand beside me. “Get the lady a pair of size thirteen-and-a-half black skates.” His voice was low and threatening — nothing like his usual laid-back tones — and the words were spoken in a perfect Russian accent. He sounded like a Soviet mobster.
Soul Patch’s eyes widened. “Um, Jethro,” he called, his voice cracking into a higher octave. “Can I give black boots to a lady?”
Jay leaned forward, his face twisted into a thin-lipped snarl. “Do it. And do it now,” he said, in a deep, rough voice which evoked echoes of snow and blood and vodka.
“Yes, sir, right away.” Soul Patch scampered off with my sneakers and was back in less than a minute with a new-looking pair of black skates. “And for you, Mr. … Sir?”
“Size sixteen,” Jay growled.
Yes! His feet were bigger than mine. Another fantasy ticked off on my bucket list of experiences to have with a tall boy.
“Thanks,” I said as we walked off with our skates.
“Yeah, you should thank me.”
Taken aback, I shot him a quick glance.
“It’s not everyone who gets a free performance of Vladimir, the Russian bodyguard.”
“Oh, were you a bodyguard? I had you pegged as a gangster.”
“I am wounded, deeply.” The rasping voice and strong accent were back. It was kind of sexy. “Did I not bring tubular protection to guard for your body?” He patted the pockets of his jacket.
“You brought … protection?”
I couldn’t help where my mind went. And it went there. Jay, bringing protection, for me. Tubular protection.
Jay stuck his hand into a pocket and whipped out … a pair of black socks, patterned with white Phantom Of The Opera masks.
“Okay. That was not what I was expecting to see.”
“Just what were you expecting, Peyton?”
The blush was back in an instant. “Did you really bring those for me?”
“Of course, these boots can be brutal on tender feet. Wearing two pairs of socks helps protect against blisters.”
I didn’t know what touched me more — that he had stood up for me at the counter, that he seemed unfazed by the size of my flippers, or that he’d brought socks to protect my feet, like they were tender, sensitive little things. But the combination of kindnesses made me want to kiss him. If we’d been rehearsing the love scene at that moment, I could’ve infused it with sweet, gentle schmexiness, no problem.
I sat on the bench, pulled Jay’s socks over my own and wrestled my feet into the skates. They were ugly — even bigger, clunkier and heavier than I remembered — and I would be the only girl on the ice wearing boys’ skates, wearing my freak on my feet.
Jay sat down beside me and pulled off the socks he was wearing. He said something about wanting the dry pair against his skin, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I was fixated by the sight of his bare feet. They were enormous, clearly both longer and broader than my own, but they were also beautiful, with long toes and high arches. And the tops were freckled, just like his hands. I stared at those feet until they disappeared into his socks, mentally checking off yet another bucket list item.
Then a thought struck me. “Won’t skating be hard on your Achilles tendon?”
“My Achilles?”
“Yeah, don’t you have an injury there?”
“How do you know about that?”
I cursed myself. I almost never said what I was thinking, I’d perfected the art of biting back comebacks and thinking carefully before I spoke or answered questions, but with Jay, I couldn’t seem to prevent myself blurting out the first thing that popped into my head. I didn’t want to lie to him, so I went with an edited version of the truth.
“I think I heard it from Tim Anderson.” It was the truth, but not the whole truth — maybe that’s why it didn’t come out sounding as casually offhand as I’d intended.
“Right,” said Jay.
“So it’ll be okay? Your ankle, I mean?”
“I’m sure it’ll be just fine — let’s go!”
~ 27 ~
The ice seemed way more slippery than I remembered. In less than a minute, I was on my butt in the middle of a puddl
e. Jay tried to pull me to my feet, but a second later, he was beside me in the wet, both of us laughing. He got to his knees, dragged himself up by clinging to the side wall, and then hauled me up beside him with a combination of brute strength and total determination.
He hung onto my hand, even once I was up and (more or less) steady on my blades, and after that we just kept holding hands. I wasn’t sure if this was just to support me, or if we were holding hands because it was a date.
Jay, I was relieved to see, was not a more skilled skater than me, but there was a grace and confidence to his movements that I lacked. He trusted his body, expected it to do what he told it.
My mind went back to the exquisite torture of that night of trust exercises with him, and the things he’d said about me being self-conscious and not comfortable in my own skin. Unlike me, Jay was at ease inside his skin. He wasn’t at war with his body. He wasn’t constantly trying to minimize or disguise it. Jay was at home in himself.
How the heck could I get myself to that place?
Carefully, and very slowly at first, we made our way around the rink, being lapped by kids a third of our age who could do amazing things at terrifying speeds on their tiny skates. We got better as the old muscle-memory kicked in, but there was still a whole lot of bumping, tripping, falling down, pulling up, and hanging on to each other. I laughed so hard that I soon forgot to feel anxious — either about my body, or about being in contact with his.
But as Jay rescued me from another fall, a rogue thought snuck into my mind. Had he invited me skating because he wanted to spend time hanging out with me, or was this just another trust-building exercise aimed at getting me to deliver a better version of Juliet? After all, his own sister had said there was nothing he wouldn’t do to get the perfect performance.
I was still considering this when the last song of the session — a slow romantic number which made me hyper-aware of how I was out of breath, hot (and probably red-cheeked), and wet all over — came to an end, and we cleared the ice along with all the other skaters.
Jay and I bought a couple of milkshakes from the concession stand, and then slumped into a pair of the orange seats to rest while the Zamboni machine wove its way across the rutted ice, leaving cleaned and resurfaced trails in its wake.
I puffed hair out of my eyes and checked the time. It was 7.13 pm — I’d have to head home soon, else my mother would start worrying and texting. But first, I wanted to clarify something.
“Jay?”
“Yeah?”
He’d taken off his boots and was rubbing the toes of one foot. How good would it feel to have him massage my feet just like that?
“Can I just ask … Us, here tonight, skating,” I said, haltingly. “Is this another exercise for the play, or is this, like, a date?”
Jay stopped kneading his feet and met my gaze directly. “Do you want it to be a date?”
Uh-oh. I’d wanted him to call it, but he’d passed the buck to me. While my brain scrambled for a way to make him speak first, my mouth opened again.
“Yes,” I heard myself saying. “I think I do.”
“Me, too. So, it’s a date, then,” Jay said, with a long, slow smile that filled me with something light and lovely. Hope, maybe.
The music cranked up again. The Zamboni was leaving the ice at one end, and skaters poured onto the rink at the other, while Taylor Swift warned her latest crush that he looked like her next mistake.
“I just don’t want this” — Jay waved a finger between the two of us — “to impact badly on the production if … things don’t work out.”
“Yeah, I understand that. It wouldn’t be fair on the others, on Doug.”
Over our heads, Taylor pondered the odds of love lasting forever, or going down in flames.
“Let’s agree now that whatever we do, whatever happens, we’ll keep it professional on stage, yeah?” Jay said. “For the sake of the production.”
For the sake of the production.
“Okay, sure. Agreed.” I nodded and held out my baby finger in a crook. “Pinkie promise.”
He grinned at that but linked his finger with mine. I cut the connection with my other hand, and out of habit of doing this with Chloe, who knew how to answer, said, “Bogart.”
“Bacall,” Jay said immediately.
Amazing. He was perfect.
“You want to skate some more?” he asked.
“Nah, I think I’m done. Unless you want to?”
He shook his head — maybe his Achilles was playing up — and helped me tug off my skates. We reclaimed our shoes from a now eager-to-please Soul Patch and headed back to the car.
“So, you like old movies?” Jay said, then added in a perfect impersonation of Humphrey Bogart, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
I smiled. “I love them. Do you?”
“I like all movies. I want to be an actor.”
“Like, professionally, when you leave school?”
“Uh-huh.” He opened the passenger door for me and, once he was inside the car, continued, “I’ve applied to the Julliard School of Performing Arts in New York.”
Wow, even I’d heard of that. “You’ll get in for sure. I’ve never seen anyone act like you can.”
Were his cheeks reddening a little now? It made a nice change.
“That’s why I transferred to Longford High,” he explained as we pulled out of the lot. “Ms. Gooding is an amazing drama teacher — she trained at Julliard too, many years ago. I’m hoping she’ll be able to knock me into shape for the audition.”
“You have to audition to get in?”
“Yeah, and they say it’s hectic. You’ve got to prepare a song — don’t ask me why, I don’t want to be a singer — plus four monologues. Two classical and two modern.”
“Let me guess — one of your modern pieces will be from A Streetcar Named Desire?”
“How did you know that?” Jay said, shooting me a startled glance.
Oops, I’d done it again — speaking before thinking. I’d guessed it because the play had been on the list of items Jay had borrowed from the school library in Tim’s report, but I could hardly tell him that.
“I want to go to school in New York, too,” I said quickly.
“Yeah? NYU?”
“No, the New York School of Fashion. It has a kind of audition process, too — you have to design and sew a range of clothes and submit them, along with a paper, and be assessed to see if you qualify,” I said, then added hesitantly, “The top submission wins a full-ride scholarship.”
“You’re aiming for that?”
“It’s the only way I’ll be able to go. We can’t afford the tuition, and no way would we qualify for a loan.”
Jay nodded but didn’t say anything glib about being sure everything would work out for the best, which I appreciated. Because things often didn’t. Sometimes, things turned out spectacularly bad.
“So, that’s why you’re sometimes trimmed with thread.” Jay’s comment broke into my thoughts.
“Huh?”
“When you come to rehearsals, you sometimes have bits of fluff and thread on your clothes or your hair. And these fingers” — he lightly stroked the tips of the first two fingers on my right hand, sending a tingle up my arm — “are often stained with black. From sketching?”
I nodded. “I spend every spare moment sketching designs and practicing my sewing. And now that I’ve changed the entire theme of the range, I have to start all over again.”
“What’s your new theme?” Jay asked, as we turned into my street.
“Tall girls.” It came out sounding like a question, like I was asking for permission.
“Tall girls?”
“It’s just, I struggle — and I mean, really struggle — to find clothes that fit properly and that look good. You saw tonight, with the shoes. If you’re tall and female, it’s nearly impossible to find stylish clothes in your size. I figure other tall girls must have the same problem. And s
ince we can’t buy them, it seemed like a good idea to design and make some.”
It sounded lame as I explained it. I bet the other applicants had way cooler themes — urban decay, or dystopian diva, or eclectic elegance.
“I think it’s an epic idea. Good luck with your submission. Wouldn’t it be great if you and I both got into New York schools for next year?”
I smiled my agreement. We’d arrived at my house — time for the usual duck and dive. When Jay had dropped me off after last Saturday’s rehearsal, I’d urged him to stay in the car, and he had — waiting until I was inside the house before driving off. But now, to my dismay, he insisted on walking me right to my front door.
“Really, it’s not necessary,” I protested.
“Yeah, it is.”
“You didn’t feel the need last time you brought me home,” I said, walking as slowly as possible.
“That wasn’t a date. When it’s a date, a gentleman escorts a lady to the door.”
There was no shaking gentleman Jay. He even had his hand at my elbow, which I would have enjoyed hugely in other circumstances. When we got to the front step, he gazed down at me expectantly. Were we going to kiss? Was he waiting for me to make the first move?
“So …” I popped my lips uncertainly. “Thanks, I had a great time.”
“I could use a cup of coffee,” said Jay. “Are you going to invite me in?”
“No!” I blurted out.
Jay looked taken aback, maybe even offended. I hurried to make my usual excuses.
“I mean, I would, but I can’t. It’s just that my mom’s sick.” That was true, she was. “And I don’t want to disturb her if she’s resting.”
I racked my brains for a ruse to get him away from the door.
“Sorry to hear that. What’s the matter with her?” He sounded genuinely concerned.
I made a show of patting my pockets and checking the side compartment of my bag.
“I can’t find my keys. I think they must have fallen out in the car,” I said, switching into helpless female mode and giving him my best wide-eyed look of appeal.
Like the good guy he was, Jay volunteered to go check. I waited until he was at the car, head stuck inside the open passenger door, before whipping my keys out of their usual compartment in my bag and holding them up.
The Law of Tall Girls Page 15