Perfect Couple

by Jennifer Echols

  When I arrived, Aidan already sat in Ms. Chen’s chair. Kaye stood nearby with her arms folded. “Harper,” she called sharply when she saw me, “you didn’t say Aidan should sit behind the desk while I stand by, ready to assist him, right? That’s not the message I got.”

  “No,” I said impatiently. I had only fifteen minutes to snap this photo and Sawyer’s, or I would have to reschedule them for tomorrow. And I couldn’t do that, because I was photographing other people then. “Look, just—”

  They both shifted their gaze over my shoulder. A six-foot pelican sauntered in behind me. Sawyer was dressed in his mascot costume. His backpack was slung over a feathered shoulder, and in one bird hand he held a tattered copy of the book we were reading for Mr. Frank’s class, Crime and Punishment.

  “Sawyer,” I complained. “Is that what you’re wearing?”

  He bobbed his big head.

  The purpose of the photos was to capture the Superlatives as people, not hiding in a costume, especially when the costume included a foam bird head. But I was desperate to complete this mission, and I wasn’t going to let any of these three go while I had them. I didn’t dare send Sawyer to change. And I didn’t want him to strip, because underneath he probably had on nothing but underwear. Maybe not even that, knowing him.

  I opened the blinds over the windows onto the courtyard. Sunlight flooded the office and glinted on the four-foot-tall sports trophies too big to be stuffed into cases in the lobby. Then I turned back to Kaye and Aidan. They were arguing again. “I’m the president of the student council,” Aidan told Kaye haughtily. “You’re the vice president.”

  “We’re both Most Likely to Succeed,” Kaye said. “We’re equal.”

  “Not true,” Aidan said. “The class selected us for that title because we’re in charge of the student council. And in student council, I’m above you.”

  “I hope to God that’s the only place he’s above you,” came Sawyer’s muffled voice from the depths of the foam head.

  We all looked at him. I’d thought it was his rule to stay silent while in costume.

  I couldn’t let this session devolve into a three-way fight. The two-way fight was already bad enough. I told Aidan and Kaye, “Let’s take some shots with Aidan behind the desk, then with Kaye behind the desk, then—You know what? Let’s kill two birds with one stone—”

  “Hey,” said Sawyer.

  “—and have both of you sit behind the desk at the same time. Kaye, sit in Aidan’s lap.”

  “I don’t like Aidan enough right now to sit in his lap,” Kaye said. “Anyway, we would just be reinscribing the traditional patriarchal hierarchy of a man being in charge and a woman infantilized in his lap.”

  “Yeah!” came Sawyer’s voice.

  “Shut up,” she told him.

  “Scoot over, Aidan,” I said. “Both of you sit on the edge of the chair and share it.” I would have given anything to be told to pose like this with Brody. It was sad that Aidan and Kaye were still dating but didn’t care anymore about the golden opportunity of sitting together in a chair. “Parliamentary procedure. All in favor?” I asked. “Aye—and my opinion is the only one that counts. I am on deadline with this shit.”

  “Cussing in the principal’s office!” Sawyer managed to make his voice sound horrified even through the padding of his costume.

  “I liked you better when you wore glasses and took orders,” Aidan told me.

  Without adjusting the settings, I brought my camera up from its strap and snapped a quick photo in Aidan’s general direction. “There,” I said. “I’ve got a shot of you with your eyes bugged out and your mouth wide open. That’s probably all I need.” I turned to leave the office.

  “You look great without your glasses,” Aidan said promptly, “and this newfound assertiveness becomes you.” Kaye was laughing.

  I waited for them to get into position, then started taking pictures. I was focusing on their faces and snapping photos so fast that I almost didn’t notice the light had changed and a sunbeam streamed white through the window. It took me a few frames to realize the light was actually Sawyer’s white costume. He’d walked behind Kaye and Aidan. All the shots had a giant pelican in the background.

  A picture in the yearbook of Sawyer photobombing Kaye and Aidan would have said volumes about our senior class. But Aidan would resent it. Kaye would be hopping mad. And Kennedy had a sense of humor about his own projects, not mine.

  “Sawyer!” I barked. “The white pelican is about to become an endangered species.”

  He put his hands on his padded hips. “That is insulting,” he said, his voice thin behind the foam head. “All our large waterfowl are in danger because we’re destroying their wetlands. It’s not something to joke about.”

  No topics were off limits for him to joke about. I suspected I’d found, for the first time, Sawyer’s sensitive spot. He was an animal rights supporter. Sawyer, sensitive!

  That was okay. I was sensitive too. Kennedy had called me disorganized last Friday, and I was determined to prove him wrong. I pointed to a chair in front of Ms. Chen’s desk, where I assumed Brody sat when he got lectured for playing practical jokes and sentenced to on-campus suspension. I told Sawyer, “Sit down and shut up.”

  He commanded everyone’s attention as he sat, wiggling his bird butt to fit it into the chair’s confines. He casually crossed one big webbed bird foot on the opposite knee and opened his copy of Crime and Punishment. I wasn’t sure which part of the bird head he saw from, but he appeared to be actually reading.

  I snapped ten pictures of him. One of these would be perfect.

  11

  WHEN I FIRST GOT HOME from school, Mom was wearing paint-stained clothes and carrying a ladder, but then I lost track of her. I closed myself in my bedroom, sat down at my desk, and went right to work on the race photos for my website. I’d made a lot of progress on them the last two nights. I wanted to finish that night and send out an e-mail to the 5K racers saying that their photos were available for purchase.

  Then I could get back to processing the Superlatives photos. I’d scheduled my last few photo sessions for tomorrow during school. I could continue fixing the photos over the weekend. I assumed I would meet Kennedy and our friends at the Crab Lab after the game Friday night. He’d also invited me to a jazz concert in the park on Saturday, which sounded suspiciously like we would be the youngest ones there. That happened on a lot of dates with Kennedy. But if Tia was right about Kennedy’s pattern of picking a fight with me before our dates, we wouldn’t go anyway.

  I suspected I knew what the subject of the fight would be too. My photo of Brody, Will, and Noah took up half the front page of the day’s local paper. PHOTO BY HARPER DAVIS was printed in the bottom corner. I was so proud. And I was afraid my admiration for Brody shone through in that shot. Even if it didn’t, I’d gone out on my own and sold my work to a publication outside school, something Kennedy had never been able to do, despite all his attempts to submit movie reviews and peevish columns about tourists. Either way, he was likely to be pissed with me.

  So be it. Frankly, I was getting pretty disillusioned with dating. My boyfriend annoyed the crap out of me, and the guy who made me feel like heaven didn’t want to be my boyfriend. Anyway, if Kennedy decided to give me the silent treatment again, that would free up plenty of time for me to perfect the yearbook photos and turn them in to him by Monday. I would get the rest to him on a rolling basis, as he’d requested, so he could complete his (awful) layouts. At the end of the week, he would have them all, and he could put the section to bed by the deadline.

  That was my plan.

  My dad was shouting. I blinked at my computer screen and glanced at my bedroom window. Night had fallen. My heart sped as fast as it had when he’d reprimanded me on the phone. He was yelling at Mom. He said she wasn’t giving them a chance. She was going through with this ridiculous divorce to punish him. No, he would not shut up just because he was disturbing the guests at her Goddamned bed
and breakfast.

  He’d come over and shouted like this every time my parents got close to finalizing the divorce. Mom said he did it because the best way to hurt her was to make her B & B look bad. He wasn’t just shouting at her. He was alienating the guests at the B & B, leading them to think the house wasn’t safe, and ruining their peaceful vacation. He was trying, in this small way, to destroy her business, which she saw as the one good thing that had come out of their separation.

  I did what I always did in this situation. After a few deep breaths so I no longer felt like I was about to faint, I opened my door and walked into our tiny living room. My dad was standing and pointing and shouting at Mom, who sat on the couch with her head turned away, as if he was about to hit her. He wasn’t, but that’s what it looked like.

  I had defused this sort of argument between my parents plenty of times before. Throughout childhood, I’d convinced my dad to stand down by crawling into his lap. Recently when he’d loomed here in the living room and shouted, I’d given him a hug and told him I’d missed him.

  This time was harder to stomach. I wasn’t sure what the difference was—that I was tired of my own boyfriend dismissing my projects as worthless, or that I knew now how good it felt to start a business independent of everyone—but I had to stop this. He was still yelling at Mom. But I was immune because he never yelled at me. I walked toward him with my arms open for a hug. “Hey, Dad! I—”

  He whirled to face me. His eyebrows shot up, and he gave me a quick look from head to toe. I took people aback now that I’d removed my glasses.

  Then he said, “That shit doesn’t work on me anymore, young lady. I know exactly what you’re doing, and so do you. If you want to act like an adult now, you can do that by staying out of your parents’ business. If you want to keep acting like a child, you can go to your room!” He was yelling louder than I’d ever heard him, and the finger that had been pointed in Mom’s face was now pointed in mine.

  I turned, hurried for my room, and closed the door.

  The shouting continued.

  Panting, I lay down on my bed, pulled the phone and earbuds from my nightstand, and turned on one of my deep-breathing relaxation recordings. Try to clear your mind, the lady said. If you have an intrusive thought, that’s fine. Just let it go. But I couldn’t let it go. Now that the initial wave of panic had passed, I couldn’t believe I’d done exactly what my dad had told me to do. Just like Granddad, I’d abandoned my mom.

  One deep breath. I could call 911. But my dad wasn’t breaking any laws, except disturbing the peace. If Mom’s guests in the B & B were listening to the commotion, the one thing worse for business than my dad yelling would be for the police to come.

  Two deep breaths. I could call some friends to hang out. They could knock on the front door and interlope, making my dad see he was affecting real people when he flew off the handle like this. But Kaye and Tia had been popping in since we were in third grade. They might be so familiar that he wouldn’t stop yelling. He might shout at them.

  Three deep breaths. I took out my earbuds, thumbed through the school’s student directory on my phone, and called Brody.

  He answered right away. I said breathlessly, “It’s Harper. Can you come over?”

  “So, you finally got another idea for a Superlatives photo?” My dad’s shouting grew louder, and Brody must have heard it through the phone. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  Brody knew exactly what kind of nothing I meant. “I’ll be right there.”

  I clicked my phone off and lay on my bed, waiting. I wanted to put my earbuds back in and play the relaxation program to block out my dad’s voice, but I didn’t dare. My dad had already shouted at me, personally. That never happened. I listened to make sure my parents’ fight didn’t escalate. If it did, I would call the police after all. And I listened for Brody ringing the doorbell.

  In the meantime, I stared across my tiny bedroom wallpapered with photographs and art I’d cut from magazines. It had seemed cozy in the past, a great place to hide from the world and work on my photos. Now it seemed claustrophobic. I was trapped here, suffocating on what my dad hollered at Mom, and her silence in response.

  The doorbell rang.

  I opened my bedroom door too quickly. I needed to cool it or my dad would know I’d called Brody to intervene. I waited in the short hallway until I heard Brody’s voice. Then I walked into the living room.

  “—Larson. I’m here to see Harper,” he was telling my dad, who had answered the door as if he lived here. Mom stood behind him, looking lost rather than pissed.

  “Brody!” I said in my best impression of pleased astonishment. “Dad, this is my boyfriend, Brody Larson. He’s the quarterback on my high school’s football team.”

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” Brody said. He stepped forward and extended his hand, grinning like he wanted to impress, even though he was wearing his usual athletic shirt and gym shorts. A drop of sweat slid down his temple.

  The interruption had the desired effect. My dad changed from a monster back into a reasonably friendly guy with a toned, muscular body and a military haircut. “Brody,” he said quietly, shaking Brody’s hand.

  “Not sure you remember my mom,” I said.

  “Nice to see you, ma’am,” Brody said, shaking her hand too.

  “Pleasure,” she said. I half expected her to widen her eyes at me, wondering why I hadn’t told her about my new boyfriend, and what had happened to Kennedy. But my dad had been shouting at her for quite a while. I suspected all she could hear was the ringing in her ears.

  Taking Brody’s hand and pulling him toward my bedroom, I made small talk so his appearance would seem casual. “Did you get all your homework done?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “I still have maybe eight calculus problems left.” He stepped into my room and closed the door behind him.

  I hugged him.

  He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed me gently.

  I’d only meant to thank him. But now that I was in his arms, I didn’t want to leave. I settled my ear against his chest and listened to his heartbeat: slow, steady.

  Finally I let him out of my death grip and stepped back. “Thank you so much,” I whispered.

  “No problem,” he said solemnly.

  “I’m sorry about the boyfriend thing,” I said. “I was trying to make it seem normal that you’d pop in.” Belatedly I was realizing that Kennedy did not pop in. Not once had he crossed my mind when I was considering which friend to call.

  “Can you stay for a few minutes?” I meant until my dad left. I swept my hand around the small room, offering him a beanbag chair or my desk chair or . . . the bed seemed a little forward.

  “Sure.” He kicked off his flip-flops and scooted back on the bed until he sat propped up against my pillows. He seemed comfortable.

  I crawled onto the bed and settled beside him. Our arms touched from our shoulders to our elbows. I racked my brain for something to say to the guy I’d fallen for, who was someone else’s boyfriend but was pretending to be mine. I glanced at him and was shocked all over again at how green his eyes were.

  He watched me intently and opened his mouth to say something. Then he grimaced, shifted on the bed, knocked me with his elbow, and pulled my phone out from under him.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Remember you asked me how I could just take a deep breath and relax? I was listening to a relaxation program. It’s a directed meditation.”

  “On a recording? I can think of a better way to relax.”

  “If you can think of a better way, why don’t you do it before games, instead of worrying?” Then it hit me. “Oh, you’re making a sex joke.”

  He gaped at me.

  “A blow-job joke?” I suggested meekly.

  “Harper Davis!” he exclaimed. “Would I make a joke like that while I’m sitting on your bed? I had no idea your mind was so dirty.”

  “Uh.” In my mind I backpedaled through what he�
�d said, trying to remember what had sent my thoughts in that direction. “Sorry, I—”

  “It was a hand-job joke,” he said. “I mean, my gosh, a blow-job joke? You have a boyfriend.”

  I burst into laughter—because what he’d said was funny, and because he excited me to the point of giddiness. I swallowed the last remnants of my giggle and said, “You’re so different from the guys I usually hang out with. I can’t tell when you’re kidding.”

  “I’m always kidding,” he said. “And it’s always dirty.”

  “Ha ha, okay,” I said.

  “Harper!” he said, astonished all over again. “You didn’t believe that, did you? I was not making a hand-job joke. It might have been a kissing joke.” He was blushing.

  I took one of the deep, calming breaths I was famous for. “Sorry. I feel kind of”—I was talking with my hands, but my hands were not forming any shape that was remotely related to what I was trying to say—“deprived sometimes. I haven’t done a lot of kissing or . . . anything. And then I talk about it and go overboard, sounding like I’m starving to death.”

  “You don’t,” he said firmly, turning on my phone and thumbing through the list of recordings.

  “You could download some of these programs and listen to them in the locker room before a game,” I suggested. “Or is that not allowed?”

  “It’s allowed,” he said, “but only kickers do superstitious shit like that.”

  “Well, if you’re still feeling anxious, maybe you should start hedging your bets like a kicker.” I put my head close to his, peering at the phone, and cued up one of the programs. “Want to try?”