I give a small, terrified nod.
"You think it's pretty?"
"Uh huh."
"Thank you," he whispers. It's the voice he's used to wilt the petals of dozens of girls and women. I'm not wilting though—far from it. I'm sprung up like a weed. My heart's beating so loud I'm sure the whole of Sommerville can hear it.
"Let's play shark."
"What's that?" I ask suspiciously.
"You swim and I chase you. If I can catch you, you're the shark."
"Why don't you save yourself the time and just call it 'tag'?" I sneer.
He gives me a droll smile, then shouts, "Go!"
I torpedo under, heading for the bottom, but he catches me, grabbing my feet, tickling them, and then wrapping his arms around me from behind, spinning me around to face him. We're in our own liquid world.
When we break the top of the water, he smiles, I smile...
His smile crumples...
"I've gotta go," he mutters, and leaves me in the pool. He says his hasty goodbyes to Ray and them, clutching his soggy clothes against his body.
Stacy watches me as my eyes following him all the way out the iron gate. She carefully steps into the water and wades over to where I am beginning to cry, my joy waterlogged, drowned, by his rejection. She puts her arms around me from the side. "Maybe he had to get home. Maybe he's got a curfew."
"Yeah, right! That'll be the day."
"He loves you. It's all over his face every time he looks at you."
"Do you think he took it wrong when I told him to shut up?"
"Of course not! You were teasing each other! You were flirting with each other! It was adorable!"
"One minute he acts like he likes me, the next it's like I repulse him!"
"No, Baby, he loves you. I can see it." She nods toward the other three parties in our vicinity. "He just can't let them see it."
"Who cares what they think?!" I hiss, loud enough to draw stares.
As we slosh out of the pool and towel dry ourselves, Stacy sighs. "You have to understand, Jamie. It's not the kind of world we live in. Civilisation has come far, but it has a way to go yet. I want to see you with him more than anybody. I'm sorry."
"He hates me," I say as I pull on a long-sleeved blue and white shirt. "I'll be out by your car." I don't even bother saying goodbye to anyone.
She shakes her head. "You're full of shit and you know it. He so loves you!"
I'll let Tammy tell you what happens in Ray's drive a short time later. I haven't told Stacy about it. When Stacy comes out to the car and finds us together, I'm still in shock as I stammer, "Tammy was telling me this funny story about how he met me in a grocery store when we were little. I'm sure he's just goofing."
"I'm not, I tell you!" Tammy insists.
"You never know, Jamie!" grins Stacy.
"Later," he smiles, and walks to his car.
As she drives me home, she pokes and winks at me. "Told you he loves you!"
"What do you mean?" I bluster guiltily.
"He couldn't even go home without talking to you again!"
That night, I dream that I'm back at Ray's house, with Tammy. He's holding my hands underwater, and we're staring at each other. He pulls me close to him. His lips touch mine. "I love you," he says. I don't notice how strange it is that his voice is crystal clear under the water. I feel his lips. I taste them, like I tasted them when...
I touch him, feel the crisp hairs growing on his chest...
I merge slowly into wakefulness. I usually cannot sleep in total quiet, or darkness, but my room is pitch black, save for the faint, silvery glow of the half moon through my window blinds. I reach over to turn on my digital clock radio, which reads, 1:57am, wondering who's turned it off. Lloyd wouldn't. Did I forget to turn it on when I went to bed? I can't seem to get my thumb and forefinger around the little knob.
A light tapping distracts me. It's coming from my window. I hear a voice floating over to me from where the window has been raised just a bit to let in some cool night air. "Jamie!"
Ohmygod!
I leap out of bed and trip my way to the window. "What are you doing here?" I ask as I open and raise the blinds.
He only says, "Come out."
"It's two in the morning!"
He stands there, smiling at me. "Open your window. Please? Come out."
"If Lloyd catches me, I'm grounded!" I whisper loudly, raising the glass.
He just stands there, below me, waiting, his chest heaving.
I undo the wire latch and release the screen and climb up into the square making the window, dangling my legs out. I'm in an old white t-shirt and my pyjama bottoms. In the distance, I hear a dog bark. Tammy reaches for me, pulls me out of my room. My heart scampers as his lips search for mine in the half-light. I dig my fingers into his hair and pull him closer. Neither of us says a word. We just kiss, the humid pre-summer air growing more warm and moist around us, as our kisses and moans increase in volume. More dogs begin to bark. "Fucking dog ears!" Tammy curses, and I laugh as he snatches my mouth with his, deep, hungry moans vibrating from his throat.
Close by, a human voice shouts, "I don't hear anything!"
"Shit!" snaps Tammy. From about fifty yards away, a vehicle horn blares, and we're forced, from the heaven we've been sharing outside my bedroom window, back into reality. "Go to bed, nosey assholes!"
"Tammy," I sigh ruefully.
"I know. I'd better go, before those dogs wake the entire town." He helps me back into my window. I bend over and we kiss again, again, again... "Do you want to come inside?"
The longing in his eyes makes my stomach plummet into my loins. "What about Lloyd?"
I sigh again, "I know."
One more long kiss, and we finally let go.
He waits for me to close and lock up, and I watch him go back to his car and drive away.
I get under my sheets, my entire body humming with happiness and desire. I wish Lloyd had been working tonight! I would have invited Tammy right into my bed!
I can't believe this is happening! To me! How many people at school are in love with someone who doesn't even know they're alive?
I can't get over it!
I jolt awake, wet and shivering. Had I been asleep just now? Was the entire thing outside my window a dream?
My room is dark, the radio is off. The time is 3:04am.
It felt so real.
My hair is soaked with perspiration. I smell chlorine.
I'm stupid enough to believe I'll see him a few more times before he moves away, that I'll share a few more incredible evenings with him, more conversations, more touches, more kisses.
Maybe he'll stay! Maybe he'll decide to stay here and go to school, so he and I can see each other, go places together...
I want to be with you, I whisper, willing my plea to reach all the way across town. Stay with me. Stay. Stay home...
But he doesn't. He leaves the very next day and I cry in my room, for five hours, like a heartsick little schoolgirl. Now I'm glad I didn't mention the kiss to Stacy. For him to just leave, just like that, after everything that happened, after we talked for hours, after he touched me the way he did, after we kissed...
He didn't even say goodbye.
He's been playing with my mind.
It meant nothing to him.
I'm too vulnerable for games. He's disarmed me, and I'm more in love than I ever thought possible—madly, deeply, terribly in love.
Yvette put him up to these pranks. She's the biggest bitch in town. and I'm the pawn in a heartless scheme. No doubt, from day one Lard-Ash has probably known that I'm completely in love with Tammy. She's probably seen the want in my eyes every time I've looked his way, clear back to when he was going out with her. That's why she came to me, trying to see if I'd go out with her, and when I rejected her, she began calling me a faggot.
They've probably been in cahoots for the past nine months, since that historic day in church. They've been planning and preparing for t
he theft of my heart, guffawing together as they survey my unrelieved hunger, my stupefaction, my dejection, as he yo-yos between being genial and spiteful.
It's all been a prank. Like everyone I'm stupid enough to love, Tammy has only been out to amuse himself, to toy with me, before leaving town and recommencing his important life.
And yet, can I hate him? Can I regret experiencing my very first kisses with him? No.
No matter how cruel he is, I'll always love him.
It's all I can do not to splatter tears and snot all over the clean white pages of my yearbook as I weep over pictures of him, the impeccable senior portrait of him, unsmiling and dangerously beautiful, in a black jacket and shirt unbuttoned to reveal the dark hairs on his chest, the glorious action shots of him playing football, soccer and baseball, a group photo of him and his jocks hamming it up. As I thumb through my autograph pages, I come across something that seizes my breath in my throat:
Don't change. There's only one Jamie in this world. Your friend, Tam Mattheis
I'm inconsolable.
Stacy tries to help, pointing out boys for me to crush on. Boys.
Ray, who doesn't seem to know I've been pining after his best friend for the past year, keeps suggesting "shorties" who would love me.
I hope they'll get a life and leave me alone so I can punish myself in peace.
If he cares about me, why did he go?!
I return to Miss Halliday, and she renews my Zoloft, gently scolding me that I should never stop taking something without checking in with her first.
I begin smoking more heavily, bumming more and more cigarettes off of Stacy and Patti, and putting each one out on the big scar on my left ankle.
nine:
tammy
(graduation night/college)
After graduation, we all go to Ray's and swim and sign yearbooks. I wait for Jamie to turn away from his and grab it.
I want him to sign mine too, but I don't know how to ask. In his, I take everything inside of me and compress it into a couple of simple sentences, erasing at least five times before I think I've got it right.
I spend the entire evening with him. We talk more than we ever have. Stacy cranks the radio and everyone argues about what music we'll listen to. Ray and Benny want AC/DC, Ozzy, Metallica, etc. Queen Bitch wants the "soft rock" station. Stacy finds a classic rock station playing Heart, The Pretenders, The Police. Yvette sulks as the rest of us nod in consensus.
This unexpectedly charmed night with the elfin boy I secretly ache for starts when Ray and Benny toss Jamie into the pool. After I ream their asses about grabbing him by his bad arm, I teach Jamie to swim. When I first take him under with me, he resists, kicking back up to the surface and spitting water. "I can't hold my breath!"
"Yes, you can!" I encourage him. "Just take a breath. Don't pooch your cheeks out, silly!" I chortle.
He lets me hold his hands as I guide him, and I rejoice in any excuse to touch him. We play "shark", under the water. We eat chips and mango salsa that Ray's mom made.
And we talk and talk and talk. Jamie asks me, "So you want to be on TV? The next Cronkite?" His voice has a diminutive drawl I haven't detected before, like he's from Texas or something. I love listening to him.
"That's the plan."
"I like your stories. You're a good writer."
"You like sports, do you?" I ask coyly.
"Not really," he blushes. "But I like reading your stories."
"You don't like sports?! Then you don't know what I'm writing about do you?"
"Well, I've learned a little, watching you play. It's... very... interesting..."
"And what have you learned?" I tease.
He shrugs. "I don't know, but I like watching."
"You're weird!"
"Shut up!"
"What do you want to be?"
"Veterinarian," he says.
"Ah hah! Going to take care of dogs and cats and horses and cows, eh?"
"I don't want to take care of horses and cows, or lizards or birds or anything like that. Just cats... maybe dogs."
Cotton. I try not to remember him, but there he is. I croak, "That's cool."
"Are you alright?" he asks.
I must be green under the gills. "Just thinking about a little pooch I had a long time ago."
"I love cats," says Jamie. "I love talking to them. I love the way they purr. It's so soothing when I'm nervous or upset."
"Talking to them? How do you talk to a cat, Dr. Doolittle?"
"Very softly, in a baby-talk way," Jamie explains, his face pinkening. "It sounds ridiculous, but they love it. They just purr and drool all over me!"
"Give me a sample."
"Nooo," he shakes his head briskly.
"Come on! Please?"
"No way!"
"Please?"
His cheeks bloom. "Tweet didda idda bidda kidda." His voice is thin, keening, like Mel Blanc doing Tweety Pie. "You toe tweet. You toe tweet!"
I'm tickled. "You're weird!"
"If I'm so weird, go find someone else to talk to!"
The hours pass. We talk and talk. We tease each other. The smile I've missed reappears tonight, and I'm in heaven.
"Is that your real hair colour?" I ask him, yanking gently on a freshly dyed cranberry coloured lock whose tip is so yellow it looks like it's been dipped in mustard.
He rolls his eyes. "Does it look real to you, genius?"
"Well, then, what is your real colour?"
"Dark blonde... boring!"
"Ah, so you're a blonde! So, when you dye your hair red, is that, like, artificial intelligence?"
He snorts glibly. "Well, dyeing my hair can't be too effective. I'm talking to you aren't I?"
"Shut up, Doctor Doolittle!"
"Shut up, Walter Cronkite!"
We trade insults, laugh, yell at each other. It gets quiet for a minute, and I begin to fidget. "Well? Say something!"
"You say something!"
"I don't know what to say!"
"Funny... you usually never run out of things to say!" After more awkward stillness, he murmurs, "I wish I had some liquorice. Or a cigarette."
"You shouldn't smoke."
"Okay, Surgeon General Koop!"
"Why do you smoke?"
"'Cause I'm a nervous person."
I ask softly, "Do I make you nervous?"
He tries to glare at me. Instead I see his heart in his eyes.
He does like me.
Before thinking, I say, "I've known you a long time, you know."
"What?!" he snickers.
"You and I met a long time ago," I tell him. "In a supermarket. You were with your mom. I think it was your mom..."
He looks away.
"You were two," I stammer. "I was four. I remember your eyes..."
"You're undeniably weird."
"No. It's true."
"You're lying!" he giggles. His smile makes me glow inside.
"I'm serious."
He doesn't believe me.
But as we sit at the pool's edge and time wriggles through my fingers, as the sun oozes out of sight, as golden-red light settles over everything, he smiles, endlessly, his eyes far away as he pretends to be acutely interested in the yellow pool raft floating at the far end of the pool. He smiles, biting his soft, pouty lower lip, swirling his feet through the water, sending ripples of imperfection across the glassy surface, ripples of pleasure through every cell of my body.
The moments tick by, and I'm afraid of what I'm feeling tonight, what I've been feeling since the beginning of the year. I'm paying all of my attention to Jamie. And I'm not being very discreet about it. Now and then, I look up and around, expecting to see Ray, Stacy, Benny or Yvette gawking at my conspicuous behaviour. I'm ignoring most everyone except Jamie Pearce.
But Ray is busy salivating over Stacy's tits and the newlyweds are sucking face behind one of the jasmine bushes over by the rot-iron gate.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Time passes faster tha
n I want it to. We go back in the water again and again, our bodies slicing through the depths, our hands walking over the grainy blue of the bottom, keeping each other in close proximity. When we resurface, he's so close that his arms go around my shoulders...
His eyes paralyse me.
And he makes no effort to take his arms down.
He's so close. Too close...
I want to kiss him.
He's trembling. I'm trembling.
Does he know how close I am?
I see three terrifying words in his eyes as he stares up at me.
I'm afraid of the fact that I've fallen in love with him. I don't want to go to L.A.
A few minutes after I've grabbed my clothes and fled Ray's barbeque, I'm sitting in my car, crying and despising myself for running. As I struggle to shove my damp body into my dry clothes behind my steering wheel, I see the front porch sensor throw a glow over Ray's front yard and drive, and Jamie's little silhouette walks over to where Stacy's car is parked. He rocks on his feet, facing away from me, peering into the dark glass windows.
I should have driven away ten minutes ago!
He's a magnet and I'm a piece of iron. I close my car door silently, sneak up to him, grab him from behind, my hand muffling his cry of fright. "You really can't remember the day we met?" I murmur into his ear.
"In-in-in th-the st-st-store?"
"Yes."
"No... I can't... I-I-I'm sorry..."
I turn him around in my arms, lift him to sit on the hood of Stacy's car, settle my hands over his shoulders. I can see him trembling in the sparse light, his eyes dewy, his nose red.
"Have you been crying?" I ask.
He shakes his head, his mouth quivering invitingly. Can he see I've been crying? Tearfully he whispers, "I have a crush on you."
"Really?"
"Yes."
"Big crush?"
"Very big, yes..."
"You love me?"
"Yes," he nods.
It bursts quietly from my heart, like a bullet. "I love you too." My arms press him closer to me. "I kissed your cheek," I murmur, and he moans softly as I brush my lips over the creamy pink curve, surprised I'm not tasting the candy coating of liquorice there. "And you kissed my mouth. Kiss me..."
Crush Page 8