Perfect Couple

by Jennifer Echols

When I entered the bathroom again, she was sitting cross-legged, waiting for me. “Survived the heat in that outfit?”

  I skipped right over that one and asked, “Where are the guests?” This phrase was our code to make sure we were alone before we said anything private. Mom had taught me it was more out of courtesy to the guests than to us.

  “They’re all out enjoying the day,” she said.

  “Do you still have my prescription for contacts?” Every time I got my eyes checked, I wanted only a glasses prescription. Mom asked the optometrist to give me a prescription for contacts, too, in case I changed my mind.

  “You changed your mind!” she exclaimed.

  I shook my head. “I just want to try them.”

  She raised her eyebrows at me. “After five years of me begging you? What happened?”

  I would rather have given up on the idea of contacts than tell her about Brody, Grace, Kennedy, Sawyer, Noah, Quinn. . . . I couldn’t even reconstruct how the wild ride of the last few days had dumped me off at a place where I never wanted to wear my adorable glasses again, or kitten heels, or a pencil skirt. And even if I could have verbalized my mindset, I didn’t want to share it with Mom, who would pass my teen angst around the B & B’s dining table tomorrow morning like a basket of orange rolls.

  I said, “You don’t have to stop working. Just tell me where the prescription is.”

  She lowered her brows and opened her mouth, ready to put up a fight. But her cell phone was ringing in the hall on her cart of cleaning supplies.

  “Get that, would you?” she asked. “If it’s your father, tell him I’m unavailable.”

  Not that fight again. I didn’t want to get dragged into it. And I didn’t want to get dragged into a personal one with her, either. I repeated, “Where’s my prescription?”

  Because she didn’t want to take a chance on missing a call from a potential boarder, she quickly told me which office file my prescription was in. After that victory, I dashed into the hall, my heels clattering on the hardwood floor, and scooped up the phone, hoping it was my dad. I didn’t want to get in the middle of my parents’ fight, but I hadn’t talked to my dad in a month or seen him in three. I glanced at the screen. Mom had been right. I clicked on the phone and said, “Hi, Dad!”

  “Hey there, Harper,” he said. “Is your mom around?”

  My stomach twisted into a knot. I didn’t think about my dad a whole lot because he wasn’t home and didn’t have much to do with my life anymore. But I wanted him to want to talk to me. I said stiffly, “I’m sorry, but she’s unavailable.”

  “Unavailable how?” he asked, suspicious.

  I couldn’t lie to my dad, but I didn’t want to say Mom was just scrubbing the floor and refusing to talk to him either. I swallowed.

  “Harper,” he said firmly. “Give the phone to your mother.”

  Funny how his tone of voice could send my blood pressure through the roof, even over the phone. “Just a minute,” I whispered. With my temples suddenly pounding, I walked back into the bathroom, extending the phone toward Mom. “It’s Dad.”

  She started upward and banged her head against the sink.

  “Ouch,” I said sympathetically.

  Dropping her scrub brush and pressing both rubber gloves to her hair, she glared at me with tears in her eyes. Ever so slowly, she reached for the phone. “Hello.”

  In the pause as my dad spoke to her, I escaped. But her next words followed me, echoing out of the cavernous bathroom, into the wide wooden stairwell, and down the steps: “I told Harper to say that because we’re going to court next week. You’re supposed to leave me alone until then. Leave me alone.”

  Inside the house was cool and dark with a faint scent of age and the sound of Mom’s angry language. As I shut the heavy door behind me, outside was bright and smelled like flowers. Tree frogs screamed in the trees. I skittered back to our little house and dug through Mom’s office files until I found my prescription, wondering how I’d ever thought I could spend the hot holiday at home.

  * * *

  The locally owned drugstores in the old-fashioned downtown around the corner from the B & B couldn’t help me today. To get my contact prescription filled on Labor Day, I needed the discount store with the optical shop out on the highway. And that meant I needed Granddad’s car.

  I knocked on the door of his bungalow, just as I had yesterday and the day before, holding my breath until he answered. He drove to the grocery store once a week, and sometimes he swung by the art supply store to pick up more oil paints. As far as I knew, those were the only times he left the house where he’d lived forever and where Mom had grown up.

  Granddad and Mom argued a lot. She told him she wanted to make sure he was happy and safe, and he said she was being a nosy busybody. He told her she needed to get rid of that no-good cheat of a husband once and for all, and she said he was being an overbearing jerk. They were both right. In the middle of these fights, I was the only one checking on him. Sawyer lived next door, and Granddad paid him to cut the grass, but I doubted he thought to conduct a welfare check when Granddad didn’t leave the house for days on end. That took a certain level of granddaughterly paranoia.

  I’d be the one to bang on Granddad’s door someday, grow suspicious when he didn’t answer, force open a window, and find him dead—though if he was dead already, I wasn’t sure why this idea made me so anxious. It wasn’t like finding him dead an hour earlier was going to help.

  I knocked harder. “Granddad!” I yelled. “It’s Harper.” It couldn’t be anyone else, since I was his only grandchild.

  I sighed with relief when I finally heard footsteps approaching. Even his footfalls sounded misanthropic, soft and shuffling, like he’d rather wrestle snakes than let his granddaughter into his house.

  He turned the lock and opened the door a crack—not even as wide as the chain would allow. At a quick glance, I couldn’t see any reason for his secrecy. He looked the same as always, with his salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a streak of yellow paint drying in his beard. “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Would you open the door?” I pleaded. “You didn’t let me in the house on Saturday, but at least you opened the door for me. You opened it only a crack on Sunday. This is a smaller crack. I can’t tell whether you’re less glad to see me or you’re trying to disguise the fact that you’re getting thinner.” He’d already started to close the door completely. Apparently he didn’t think I was as funny as I did. Quickly I asked, “May I borrow your car?”

  “No.” The door shut.

  “Granddad!” His footsteps didn’t retreat into the house, so I knew he was still listening. “Why not?” And why was I so determined to borrow his car? Why couldn’t I drive to the discount store to get contacts another day?

  Because I was on a mission to be bikini clad and glasses free when I met Brody at the beach. And I was damned if this was the one day out of the year Granddad decided I couldn’t borrow his car.

  “I don’t have to tell you why not,” he said through the door, which was the adult version of me changing the subject when Mom asked why I wanted contacts.

  “You said when I turned sixteen that I could borrow your car whenever I wanted. That was your birthday gift to me. You wrote it on a scrap of paper and wrapped it up in a box.” If he didn’t remember that, we needed to have a talk about what he did remember, and what year it was, and whether he should be allowed to live alone and own a microwave oven.

  “That was a fine idea of mine,” he said, “when you didn’t want to borrow my car.”

  I demanded, “What are you doing with your car today?”

  “I don’t have to tell you that, either. I’m sixty-eight years old.”

  And you’re acting like you’re two, I thought, but that was Mom’s line. Really, he was acting like me. I took care never to be as mean as he was, but I wanted to be by myself a lot, and people probably took it as meanness. Tia had asked to hang out with me at my house in the past,
and I’d told her no. She was so extroverted that after a few hours with her, I needed to be alone with my art. And I’d ruined some fledgling relationships back in ninth and tenth grade by complaining when guys with boyfriend potential called me and texted me and interrupted my thoughts. They were insulted when I turned my phone off.

  Granddad was just dishing out the same antisocial behavior to me, and I couldn’t take it.

  “All right,” I called through the door. “I’ll come back to check on you tomorrow.” The way things were progressing, he probably wouldn’t even open the door for me then. I would have to wave to him through the window. I turned for the stairs off the porch.

  The lock turned. The door opened. He stuck his hand out with his car key dangling from one finger.

  “Thank you,” I said, sliding the key ring off his pointer before he changed his mind. “I’m going shopping out on the highway and then to the beach. You can call me on my cell if you need the car back.”

  Instead of answering, he shut the door and locked it.

  * * *

  A few hours later, I parked Granddad’s car way back from the beach in the nearly full lot and lugged my bag and cooler out of the trunk. I always brought thermoses of water so my friends didn’t have to throw away plastic bottles, which was bad for the environment. The smooth cooler felt strange on my bare tummy. In my teeny bikini, I struggled to haul my load onto the sand, across the beach, and around families and motorcycle gangs and groups of elderly drunken rabble-rousers. Finally I spotted the cluster of towels and umbrellas where my friends had settled.

  As I walked, I squinted at the ocean. Compared with my glasses, my new contacts made the sun almost unbearably bright. But I recognized Aidan and Kaye in the waves. Her hair in black twists was easy to pick out. Then I saw the drum major of the marching band, DeMarcus, and his girlfriend, Chelsea, and the cheerleaders who’d run the race with Kaye that morning. Noah and Quinn and Kennedy sat in the sand with the tide flowing over their feet.

  Obviously Kennedy wasn’t as worried about being associated with Quinn and Noah as he’d been when he’d sneered at me in Ms. Patel’s class on Friday. Maybe Tia was right: He picked a fight with me only when we had a date planned.

  Off to themselves in the water, Brody held Grace. I could tell he was supporting her in deep water because she was higher than him. Her sunglasses still balanced on top of her head, and her bouncy curls were dry. In fact, he might have been holding her out of the water specifically to keep her hair dry, which was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen at the beach, and I’d lived here almost my whole life.

  “Howdy,” I said, plopping down my ice chest and bag near Tia, Will, and the huge dog Will borrowed from the shop where Tia worked. The three of them lay on towels in the shade of an umbrella. Will still had trouble staying in the Florida sun for long.

  He and Tia stared at me for a moment. Then he exclaimed, “Oh, Harper! I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.”

  “I didn’t recognize you in a bikini,” Tia said. “Look at that bod! You could crack pecans with those abs. What gives?”

  I spread out my towel next to them and lay down. “I don’t know if you heard Sawyer this morning,” I said, “but when he was sitting on the curb about to pass out after the race, he said, ‘Fuck everybody.’ That’s pretty much how I feel.”

  The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Sawyer had been angry that he couldn’t run a race like everybody else. I was sick and tired of trying to make a statement with my look, and sabotaging myself in the process.

  As usual, Tia didn’t press me for details. “Well, you look super cute in that bright red ‘fuck you.’ ”

  “I’m not complaining either,” Will said. Tia snagged an ice cube from her cup and placed it in his belly button. He jumped, grabbing his stomach like he’d been shot. Then he dropped the ice in her belly button. She shrieked. The dog jumped up. The ice slid off Tia’s tummy and onto her towel, where the dog ate it.

  “Is Kennedy still maintaining radio silence?” Tia asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait till he sees you.”

  “You look hot, Harper,” Will said.

  Tia told him, “There’s ‘Thanks for being nice to my friends,’ and then there’s ‘You can stop being nice to my friends now.’ ” She turned back to me. “Let’s go hang with girls. You can walk slowly by Kennedy like your very own Labor Day parade. Brody’s going to be pleased by your ass, too.” She stood and held out her hand to help me up. The dog lay down in her place.

  We shuffled across the beach. The sun was really doing a number on my contacts. I squinted and followed the blur of Tia. It wasn’t until we’d reached the water that I realized she’d led me on a roundabout path that veered much nearer Kennedy than necessary.

  I didn’t look toward the boys, but I recognized Noah’s wolf whistle.

  Quinn said something under his breath that ended in “Harper.”

  “What?” Kennedy asked. “Oh.”

  Now that Quinn had drawn his attention to me, Kennedy must have been watching me pass. But I forgot all about them when I saw Brody coming toward me from the ocean, stepping over the waves—without Grace.

  He put out his hand. Tia slapped it as she passed.

  He kept holding it out for me. I slapped it. But before I could pass him, his hand enclosed mine. We both stopped calf high in the surf.

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” he said. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, which made him somehow sexier. He was so near, and—like that morning—so nearly nude, with almost every inch of his tanned skin showing over tight muscles. I imagined I could smell him over the salt air and sunscreen. Suddenly my entire body was glowing.

  Then my brain kicked in. What did he mean by “I thought you weren’t coming”? He’d been out in the ocean with Grace because he assumed I wouldn’t show up? It didn’t matter anyway. We had a date for a picture only. I said, “You thought wrong.”

  “I sure did,” he said. “See you in a few.” He let my hand go. We walked on.

  I hazarded half a glance behind me and caught him looking back too, at my butt.

  And beyond him, Kennedy sat in the surf with his knees drawn up and his arms around them, watching us. Kennedy was a big guy, but this position made him look like an unsure kid.

  Another day, my heart would have gone out to him. He was my geeky soul mate, the boy I belonged with. So what if he wasn’t a muscle-bound hunk ready to challenge Brody when he brazenly eyed me? As an independent woman, I didn’t need a protector. I wanted a sensitive guy with a great sense of humor and a fresh view of the world.

  But today, my heart was cold to Kennedy. For the first time, I felt a pang of distaste when I looked at him. My skin tingled, wanting Brody to touch me again.

  I sloshed after Tia until we’d waded shoulder deep where the other girls bobbed in the surf. Grace had joined them. They were all giggling at something one of them had said. Grace’s staccato laugh was easy to pick out among the others. But when she saw me coming, she called, “It’s Miss Perfect Couple with My Boyfriend.”

  “Girl, I told you the Superlatives are whack,” Kaye said. “There’s no telling why the class votes like it does.” This was directly opposed to the way Kaye had acted when she was elected Most Likely to Succeed: like it was the most important award of her life. And I was surprised to hear she’d talked Grace down about my title with Brody. Kaye hadn’t mentioned this to me. She must have been worried I would worry. She confirmed this by grimacing sympathetically as I swam up.

  “Happy Labor Day!” I sang.

  Grace glared at me. The other cheerleaders laughed uncomfortably. One of them, Ellen, exclaimed, “Harper! I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.”

  “I got contacts today,” I said.

  They ooohed and cooed over me and told me how good I looked and how pretty my eyes were, which they’d never noticed before—all except Grace, who stared me down with a look t
hat said, Oh, you got contacts so you could come to this beach to seduce my boyfriend, eh? At least, that’s how I interpreted it.

  At my first chance, when the conversation turned to Chelsea’s story about fighting with a stranger over a pimento cheese sandwich at Disney World yesterday, which was the sort of thing that happened to Chelsea, I ducked beneath the surface to wet my hair. That would convince Grace I had no designs on her boyfriend. My hair was long and dark and board straight anyway, whereas she was still sporting her big blond curls. They were wilting a bit, though, now that Brody wasn’t holding her out of the surf. Her hairdo was wet around the edges, like a sandcastle nipped by waves.

  As soon as I surfaced, I was sorry I’d gone under. My eyes stung. I hadn’t opened them in the water, but as I wiped away the drops, I got salt and sunscreen in them. I wiped them again, which made the stinging worse.

  “I’m going down the beach,” I heard Grace say. “I saw some guys I know who are home for the weekend from Florida State. I’m scoring some beer. Tia, come with.”

  “No, thanks,” Tia said.

  “Why not?” Grace insisted. “You’re always drunk.”

  “I am not always drunk,” Tia said self-righteously. “I am drunk on a case-by-case basis. And not on Labor Day. The beach is crawling with cops.”

  “Ellen,” Grace said, “come with. Cathy?”

  The other cheerleader, Cathy, giggled nervously. “Wish us luck!” The three of them waded toward the promised land of beer and college boys.

  Kaye called after them, “If you get caught, do not admit you’re cheerleaders for our high school. We have standards.” She said more quietly to the rest of us, “Let’s wait five minutes and then go after them. We’ll watch from the water and intervene if they get in trouble.”

  “Or we can just enjoy the show when they do,” Tia suggested.

  By now I could hardly see through the slits that my stinging eyes had become. “I’ll catch up with y’all,” I said. “Back to the towels for me. I’m having contact problems.” Amid the chorus of “Oh, no!” and “Poor baby!” and “Do you need help?” I explained what had happened. “If I can wipe my eyes and run fresh water over my hands, I think I’ll be okay.”