by Callie West
“Move over,” I said. “Let me get up.”
Just as I pulled myself up to sit beside him, a light went on in one of the windows, the one that I guessed was the bathroom. The sound of running water followed, and Chris and I waited nervously until the light went off again. “Hold on a sec,” Chris said, grabbing my arm as I made a move to jump into the yard. “We don’t know for sure yet that the person’s back in bed.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” I teased him.
Chris looked at me like I was nuts. “I must have left it back on your roof.”
Actually, I was bluffing. The reason I was in a hurry to get going was that I knew any Favata who happened to glance out a window had a perfect view of us balanced there on the wall. I didn’t want to alarm Chris, but the longer we sat there waiting, the more we were sitting ducks.
“Besides,” I said, my teeth starting to chatter, “I’ve got to keep moving, to keep from freezing in my tracks.”
Chris watched the window for a moment, tapping his heel on the stucco and biting his lower lip. Then he seemed to shrug off his worry. “I’ll race you to that shark,” he said.
With that, the two of us dropped, like overripe fruit, onto the soft grass. Chris took off in front of me, pausing only to spin a few cartwheels before he reached the pool. Watching him leap and flail across the lawn made me laugh, but I really lost it when he dove toward the plastic shark open-armed. I watched in disbelief as he landed on his belly on the pool toy, and began to wrestle with the sea creature’s giant dorsal fin.
By then, I was laughing so hard I could hardly walk. I managed to get to the pool’s edge and practically fell in, right beside the shark.
Just as quickly, we were out again, whooping as we skipped across the brick patio, both hoping and fearing that someone would hear. We cackled like ghouls as we crossed the lawn and hurried to boost ourselves back over the wall.
I got to the wall before Chris did. “Oh, no!” I said when I suddenly realized there was no foothold.
“Put your foot here,” Chris urged me, offering a step stool he’d made by joining his hands.
“But who will help you?” I asked him as I pulled myself up. I swung one leg over to straddle the wall and anxiously looked down at him.
“You will,” he said. He pushed a foot against the wall for leverage and then reached up to grab my hands. “Come on, you can do it,” he told me. “You’re the strongest girl I know.”
I could feel my calves scraping stucco as I gripped the wall tighter, one leg tensely anchored on each side. I tried not to panic, but I could see light after light going on inside the Favatas’ house.
“One, two, three, pull,” we said together.
My arms strained in their sockets, and for one scary moment, I felt myself tip toward the wrong side of the wall. I almost let go out of fear when I heard a door open. A second later, a man’s angry voice called out, “Hey!”
“What was that?” Chris said, as if we didn’t both know. I looked, and there was Mr. Favata in a plaid bathrobe, standing on the patio.
“It’s Mr. Favata—he’s coming over!” I shrieked. Chris’s feet scrambled frantically, like an insect’s, against the wall.
Just then adrenaline shot through me, like the zing I feel sometimes in the last lap of a race. All of a sudden, I couldn’t feel how much my arms ached and how my legs stung. I pulled, and I practically launched Chris right over that wall.
We tumbled down together, laughing, out of breath, still holding hands.
“You’re awesome,” Chris said.
“No problem,” I panted. “Now let’s get out of here.”
Back at the Palms we collapsed in the courtyard, still laughing and wheezing from running so hard. Then Chris climbed up to the roof and retrieved the blanket and the wicker basket. Once he was on the ground, he wrapped the blanket around us both. “Do you think he recognized us?” Chris asked when we had stopped shaking. I shook my head.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He was probably distracted, looking at the moon.”
By then, the eclipse was nearly over, and we sat quietly watching the coppery glow fade. In a few hours, the sun would rise as though the wild night of moon watching and pool hopping had never happened.
“I wish I could take a picture,” I said, meaning not just the moon but the whole evening, everything I’d felt and done and seen. “To have something to remember this by.”
Chris turned to me then and put his damp hand on my cheek. “Here’s something,” he said, and he drew my face closer, until I could feel the warmth radiating from his skin. His lips brushed my cheek gently, before I turned my face toward him and kissed him.
Chris lingered in our front yard long after the eclipse was over, at least a half hour after he’d first said he had to leave. I didn’t exactly encourage him to go, either. Kissing had made us both lazy. We sat quietly on the grass, holding hands and talking, totally unaware of what time it was.
Finally, we retrieved Chris’s bike from the bushes and wheeled it slowly to the street. Together, we folded the damp blanket and stuffed it into the basket. We took our time tying the bundle to the handlebars. I knew that we both wanted to make this magical night last.
“Amy,” Chris whispered, placing his hands on the back of my neck, letting his fingers weave through my hair. “I wish I could stay here with you.” His lips met mine as surely as if he’d memorized a map of my face. And that last kiss, long and deep, told me everything: that he’d written my name in his notebook, that he’d been dreaming about this moment, as I had, for a very long time.
Reluctantly, we pulled away from each other, and Chris walked me to my window. Quietly, I slid up the screen and pulled myself over the sill.
“I wish…,” Chris began, but I shushed him. I didn’t want him to wake Mom. I leaned out the window and put my lips next to his ear. “See you in physics on Monday,” I whispered.
It was already three-thirty in the morning when I climbed back through my bedroom window and crawled into my bed. I was relieved to find the apartment dark and quiet, the air still perfumed with apple pie.
In my room, my books were lined up on the white pine shelf, along with the dolphins—plastic, ceramic, and crystal—I’d collected since I was a little girl. On my desk was a bag of M&M’S I’d been eating while studying, my physics book, Matter and Motion, the unopened books for our health project, and a multicolored bundle of ballpoint pens.
Everything was just the same as I’d left it, the same as it had always been. But as I changed into a long nightshirt, then climbed into bed, I felt like a different person. I felt as if I’d just returned from a trip around the world. I lay there with my heart racing, thinking, This is what it feels like when you fall in love.
chapter eight
Blythe got home early from Payson on Sunday. She was so eager to discuss the affairs of my heart that she rushed over to my house immediately. “What happened last night?” she burst out loudly when I opened the kitchen door.
“Shhh,” I said, pointing toward the living room, where my mom was reading the paper. I stifled a yawn.
“Hi,” Blythe called cheerfully to my mother. “Do you mind if Amy makes a quick trip to the mall with me? There’s something I need to pick up.”
I looked at Blythe in amazement. She had made that up on the spot, just to get me out of the house so she could hear my story.
Mom looked up from her paper and smiled. “Sure. Have fun, girls.”
“Spill it,” Blythe said as I climbed into her Jeep. But I wasn’t going to give up my secret so easily.
“What do you mean?” I asked innocently. “I’m not doing your homework for you just because you slept through the eclipse.”
“I’m not talking about the physics assignment, and you know it,” Blythe said, turning the key in the ignition. “I’m talking about your extracurricular activities.” She backed the Jeep out of our driveway and took off like a maniac. Her boldness was part of what m
ade her a great writer—but it also made her a terror behind the wheel.
She accelerated around a corner. “Blythe, slow down!” I yelled. “I’m too busy fearing for my life to tell you anything.”
“Spoilsport,” Blythe pouted. But wanting the story, she slowed.
“The eclipse was amazing,” I told her.
“I know—I saw it.”
“You did?”
“Of course,” she said impatiently. “I watched it from Payson.”
It seemed impossible to me that we had witnessed the same moon. “What happened after?” Blythe teased me as she cut between two cars. “And don’t tell me that after you looked at the moon together, you cuddled up for an exciting game of chess.”
“Very funny,” I said. “As a matter of fact, we went for a swim.”
“Skinny-dipping?” she asked.
“Blythe, don’t start rumors,” I said. “Of course we kept our clothes on! We went down the street and hopped Joey Favata’s pool.”
“What possessed you?” She laughed, delighted because it was the kind of thing she would do. “The water must have been freezing.”
“It was.”
“That’s real romantic,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Did he kiss you in the Favatas’ backyard?”
“Nope,” I said. Blythe looked disappointed. “We kissed on the rooftop, and then again in front of the Palms.”
Blythe smacked the car seat and whipped her head around. “So you did kiss him!” she said. “I knew it! I could just tell!” She sighed dramatically. “A rooftop kiss. That sounds so romantic.”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to wipe a big silly smile off my face.
“Wow,” Blythe said. “So … is he a good kisser?”
“Awesome,” I said.
“Awesome,” Blythe repeated. “Does this mean that you’ll go with him to the junior-senior dance?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” I answered casually, although the mental image of Chris and me dancing together made my pulse race. “It’s too far away.”
“Let’s look at dresses anyway,” Blythe said, swinging into the parking lot of the Ocotillo Mall. Even though it had just opened at eleven, the lot was filling up. “You never know how things will turn out.” She was going so fast around the turn I swear she left tire treads in the hot asphalt.
“I—I don’t know,” I began to protest. “I have so much homework to do. We have a physics test on Tuesday, and I haven’t done any calculus in three days, and I—”
“Amy, come on,” Blythe said impatiently, pulling the Jeep into a parking space and jerking to a stop. “You have spent your entire life doing your homework. It’s time to live a little.”
“But I—I just—”
Blythe cut the engine and dropped her keys in her purse. She looked in the rearview mirror, running her fingers through her long hair. “Let’s try Buttocks first,” she suggested, calling the store by the nickname that had stuck ever since some prankster with a can of spray paint had crossed the two L’s.
I tagged behind obediently, trying not to think about how many calculus problems would be waiting for me when I got home. Live a little, I ordered myself.
In Bullocks, we were bombarded with a blast of air-conditioning and the buy-me scent of brand-new clothes. We breezed through shoes and then cosmetics, dodging the heavily made-up women who offered makeovers and sample spritzes of cologne. “We’re on a mission,” Blythe called out to a particularly insistent salesperson, as we boarded the escalator bound for the evening-dress department. “We don’t have time for avocado facials.”
The department was called Cotillion, after the debutante ball the daughters of Phoenix’s rich families were presented at every spring. Blythe was quite at home there—after all, she’d been invited (though she’d refused) to join the Desert Debs. I admired the way she strode through this very expensive, very formal department in her combat boots, her long floral skirt, and her tank top. She stopped and held up one dress, then another. She didn’t need to look at price tags, but I did. And every time I turned one over, I gasped.
“Three hundred dollars!” I exclaimed, holding up a demure black velvet dress.
“Kind of conservative,” Blythe said, squinting. “But it would look all right with a pair of army boots.” She took the dress from me and followed a pinch-nosed clerk into the dressing room.
It’s weird how all that taffeta and satin and velvet can confuse you.
Finally, I chose a slinky slip dress in bright red—something I wouldn’t wear in my wildest dreams. Blythe and I came sheepishly out of our cubicles and stood together in front of a large full-length, three-panel mirror. To be honest, we looked like a pair of wannabe actresses auditioning for the wrong parts.
“Do I look like the Bride of Frankenstein?” Blythe asked me, turning carefully in the black velvet dress.
“Not exactly, girlfriend. You look more like the Bride of Rick Finnegan.”
Blythe laughed. “Yeah, right,” she said, then stared at me. “And you look like you should be riding on a fire truck with a cute fireman.”
I laughed. “It is the color of a fire engine.”
“It looks gorgeous with your hair,” Blythe added.
Blythe pulled her own hair back into a ponytail, then smoothed it and twisted it into an elegant chignon. She looked older and very sophisticated. “I think I like the Finnegan dress,” she said, “even though it isn’t quite my style.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, referring to myself.
Though I never would have picked the red dress before Friday, the longer I wore it, the more I liked the way it looked. The dress was bold and risky, the kind that would encourage a good girl to behave like a wild thing. I whirled before the mirror, remembering how it felt to have Chris’s lips on mine.
Then I snapped back to reality. “But it’s way too expensive,” I said regretfully, smoothing the silky fabric. “I don’t spend this much on clothing all year.”
“The dance isn’t for another month,” Blythe reminded me. “We could stake out that dress between now and then, watch to see when it goes on sale.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully, since Blythe and I had vastly different ideas of what was affordable. “In the meantime,” I told her, “I’ve got to get this off before I lose all my willpower and put it on layaway.”
Just then, the salesperson walked over to us. “How are you young ladies doing?” she asked in that fake-sweet tone salespeople always use to show you that they care.
“I’m going to have to pass on Fire Engine,” I told her. “How about you, Blythe? Are you going to go for Finnegan?”
The clerk stood there smiling stiffly, trying hard to be amused. She relaxed a bit when Blythe said, “Charge it,” and flashed her parents’ Visa card. Smiling her approval, the clerk hurried away with the credit card before Blythe could change her mind.
“So,” I said to Blythe, trying to sound casual, “I guess this means you’ll ask Rick. You look too good in that dress to waste it.”
Blythe gazed at me in the mirror, a rare flash of uncertainty in her eyes. “But Rick is … our buddy. It’s always been the three of us, friends forever. Now it’s like everything is changing. What if he doesn’t feel the same way I do, what if …” She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t want to blow our friendship, Amy. Once you’ve started something like that, you can never go back.”
I stared at myself in the sexy red dress, remembering Rick’s hurried kiss and all that had happened since: the awkwardness that had replaced my easy friendship with Rick, the thrilling and confusing feelings I had for Chris.
You couldn’t go back. That was true. You couldn’t stop the planet from spinning, day from turning into night. You couldn’t take back a kiss.
“Things are going to change. There’s no way of stopping it,” I said, more to myself than to Blythe.
chapter nine
“You’re, sure in a good mood,” Mom said suspiciously when I offered to w
ash the Honda before she left for work.
“It’s just that it’s so gorgeous outside,” I said, while his name—Chris, Chris, Chris—surged through my brain. After spending the last hour staring at my physics book and daydreaming about Chris, I’d thought of a great way to do something productive and daydream about Chris at the same time—wash the car. Besides, I wanted to be alone where I could think about him without worrying that my smile or my mood would betray me. “I can’t stand staying inside.”
Mom squirted some detergent into a bucket and handed me a sponge. “Can you finish in half an hour? I’m going to take a shower now and get ready for El Rancho.”
“No problem,” I said, tossing the sponge aside and running to my room to change.
Outside, it was what people call Indian summer. In Phoenix it lasts almost the whole autumn, a stretch of amazing bright-skied, eighty-five-degree days. On such a day, anything seemed possible—breaking a state swimming record, getting a college scholarship, even living happily ever after with a guy like Chris.
I used the garden hose to fill the bucket with sun-warmed water and started sudsing down the car. As I slopped the sponge around on the hood, I wondered where Chris was at that moment and whether or not he was thinking of me.
Our yard was haunted with reminders of the previous night: the rooftop we’d used as a diving board, the lawn where we’d huddled under the blanket and kissed, the bent branches of the oleanders where we’d stashed his bike. Everywhere I looked, I saw Chris’s face. For a minute, I thought I must be going crazy, because as I was hosing the suds off the car, I heard his voice too—calling my name.
“Amy!”
I whirled around, expecting a phantom. But instead there he was—riding his bike, dressed for some reason in a linen jacket and a tie. Chris Shepherd, in the flesh. I was so surprised, I nearly doused him with the garden hose.
“I was hoping you’d be here,” he said, dismounting from his bike as he coasted to a stop, his scuffed loafers slapping the puddle of water under his feet. “I don’t have your phone number. And I couldn’t find it in the book.”