“That’s because you’d eat them all otherwise.”
Dev sighed and turned to Mike. “What about you, Mike? You have a date tonight?”
Mike looked startled that Dev had addressed him. “Uh, I’m not sure what I’m doing,” he said.
“Charlie?” Dev asked. “Date?”
“What?” I said.
“Leave her alone, dummy,” Asha said.
“Charlie’s got the same plans I do, I think,” Mike said.
I looked at him. He was smiling. My heart knocked. “I don’t have…I don’t know,” I said.
Dev looked between us and then said, “You think Drummond does?”
“If you count reading Dickens as a date,” Asha said.
Dev laughed. I glanced at Mike again; he was still smiling. I frowned at him, and his smile faltered and he turned away.
“You think he’s been different lately?” Dev said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Drummond.”
“What?” I said. “How so?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just different.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” I said. But he had been. It was subtle, but he was a little more distant, a little distracted. There was a pause before he laughed, a small hesitation before he made a joke. He didn’t meet my eyes quite as often, and when he did, he looked away too quickly. I tried not to think about that night in the classroom, because if I did, I went hot with shame, but I worried that he was different because of me, that he couldn’t think of me the same way anymore. But mostly I tried to pretend things were the same as they’d always been.
Dev batted at the shuttlecock again. “Do you guys think he’s going to grade us for Truth Bomb this semester?” he asked. “Considering we haven’t even put an issue out.”
“I think we just get credit for participating,” I said. “It’s not our fault it hasn’t come out. Well, except for the fact that only half the people have actually written their articles.”
“I hope we get credit,” Dev said. “Because Asha’s article is terrible.”
Asha threw her racket at him, and he laughed and let it hit him. “Asshole,” she said.
“You’ll be all right, at least, Charlie,” he said. “He loves you.” He said it guilelessly, as if it were indisputable.
I flushed. Mike made a noise and I looked at him. His face was red too.
“Less chatting and more playing, please,” Mrs. Deloit said as she passed by.
“He loves everyone,” I said.
That night as I stuffed my feet into my snow boots and strapped myself into my heaviest coat, my mother appeared in the hall.
“Walking Frida?” she asked.
“Looks like it,” I said.
Frida panted and waved her tail at the word walk. She nosed her leash, which was still hanging on the wall.
“Mind if I come with you?” my mother said. She looked shy, like she was a child asking permission, afraid I would say no.
“I thought you were about to go out with Dad,” I said. I stood up and pulled Frida’s leash from its hook. She danced in a joyful little circle, her nails clicking on the tile.
“Change of plans,” my mother said.
I looked up. “Not because of the park project?”
She nodded. “We’re postponing. I thought maybe you and I could take a walk together.”
“I’m backup?” I said.
She looked stung. “If you’d rather be alone, that’s fine.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean…” I fiddled with Frida’s leash. “No. No, it’s okay.”
I always took Frida to the small clearing a few streets over. The snow had been melting into ash-colored rivulets for weeks, and I’d been worried that we were in the dregs of winter, those days when the sun couldn’t push through the flat sky, and the slush was gray with tire tracks, and everything that showed through underneath was rotten and brown. But we’d had a storm the day before, and now the trees were crested with fat caps of snow, and the streetlamps’ lights were soft and hazy.
“Did you have any plans for tonight?” she asked.
Pizza and masturbation, I thought. “I was just going to read,” I said.
“We didn’t ruin anything by staying home, then,” she said.
I glanced at her. She was looking up at a roof that was heavy with snow.
“Like what?” I said.
“Just curious.”
“No,” I said. “Sorry to disappoint.”
She paused. “You know, I’m aware that you don’t care about makeup and haircuts and stuff. You think it’s shallow. But, Charlie, I really am just trying to help.”
“No, I— When—when have I said that?”
She ignored me. “Honey, why do you think you don’t have a boyfriend?”
“I don’t…what? Why do you want to know?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Is it bad that I don’t?”
“Of course not,” she said. “But I think you could have one if you wanted to.”
I laughed, but something in my stomach constricted.
“I’m serious,” she said. “And I know you don’t want to hear it, but I really think I could help. This is just the way the world works. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but appearances are important, especially to men.”
When I didn’t say anything, she said, “I know you think you shouldn’t have to care about that stuff, that people should just see past it. I wish that were the case, I really do. I know you’d like to have a boyfriend.” She stepped closer. Her voice turned soft. “If you’d let me in, I could—I could help. I want to— I wish you’d…I wish you’d let me help.”
I hesitated. There was a hush over the street. “So you think I’m ugly,” I said.
She stepped back, and her voice got hard again. “No,” she said. “No, not at all. I think you are a beautiful girl who for some reason is determined to keep herself unattractive.”
“Jesus, Mom,” I said. I could feel a sob knotting up in my chest. I tried to say something else but I couldn’t. Maybe she was right. Maybe I just needed to give in.
We’d reached the clearing. The snow was thick enough that the grass was covered, so it stretched out in a swelling plain, broken only by the deer tracks and footprints that littered the ground like little craters. The woods at the edge were dark and quiet.
I let Frida’s leash play out as I tried to get my breath to stop hitching dangerously. I felt a buzz in my pocket. I pulled out my phone: a text from Lila.
Saw Drummond in ShopRite earlier. He was buying lotion & tissues & an issue of Shape magazine. :-(
I gave a sobbing sort of laugh. Frida tugged on the leash and I said, “Can you take her?”
“Of course,” my mother said. As I handed the leash over, she said, “Something important?”
“Kind of,” I said. I texted back: Liar.
She replied almost immediately. All right, he wasn’t. He did buy a single eggplant, though. Made me sad. Gotta go, Jason’s here with some gas station carnations. Probably thinks he deserves a blow job for this. UGH.
If that was what having a boyfriend was like, maybe I didn’t want one anyway. I didn’t need anyone. Screw my mom if she thought I did. I felt a tide of defiance rise where the sob had been. I was rereading the text when I heard Frida bark and my mother yell, “Dammit! Frida, come here!”
I looked up. Frida was scrambling across the clearing, kicking up clouds of snow like a stuck van. Toward a deer.
“Frida!” I said in my deepest, sharpest voice. She froze for a second, glanced at me, and then bounded after the deer again.
I turned to my mother and said, “Great.” Then I started wading through the snow.
She kept pace with me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “She startled me.”
“Maybe if you walked her more often, this wouldn’t happen,” I said.
“If you hadn’t been looking at your phone, you would have seen something was wrong,” she said.
“I asked you to watch her for five seconds!” I said. “When I said I didn’t have any plans, I didn’t mean I wanted to be chasing after my dog in the dark.”
“Our dog,” she said.
“My dog,” I said. “And I don’t want a boyfriend, so you can stop trying, okay? Just give up.”
“Okay,” she said. “I give up. Good luck.”
“Frida!” I shouted, and blundered into the woods. I didn’t have to go far; Frida was sniffing frantically at a tree, trying to find the deer’s scent. She whuffed distractedly. I grabbed the trailing end of her leash and pulled. She whined and then came away reluctantly.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said as I walked past her.
“Thanks,” I said, and kept walking.
One Saturday, while I was coming back from an errand my mother had sent me on, I spotted his car in the parking lot of the community center. I knew it was his from the license plate number, which I had memorized long before, and the way the black trim on the passenger-side door slumped downward like a line charting a bad stock.
“Ha,” I said aloud. “So he does swim there.”
I was stopped at a red light, and I watched the front door of the building, wondering if he was inside.
“I bet he’s swimming now,” I said. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. I laughed. “This is stupid.”
The car behind me honked. I looked into the rearview mirror and saw that the driver behind me was making a what are you doing? gesture.
“What the hell,” I said, and pulled into the parking lot.
I turned off the engine and sat there for a few minutes, listening to the radiator tick. Occasionally people walked past; the drumbeat of footsteps seemed magnified in the cottony silence of the car. I was sure they were all looking through the windows at me and knew what I was there for. I realized I had to either get out or leave, because the longer I sat there, the creepier I felt.
I walked up and peered through the front door. There was a reception desk in the lobby, and Katie from my English class was standing behind it. She was flipping listlessly through the pages of a glossy magazine.
She looked up when I came in, and smiled in a perfunctory but not unfriendly way.
“Hi,” I said. “This is going to sound stupid, but I’m looking for a friend of mine and I wondered if you could let me into the pool.”
She frowned. “Are you a member?”
“Um, no,” I said.
“Like I care.” She grinned. “Yeah, go ahead.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Drummond’s in there,” she said as I was walking away.
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know.”
“No problem,” she said. She raised an eyebrow at me and then turned back to her magazine.
The pool entrance was down a hallway and through two sets of double doors. A balcony ran around the outside of the pool, overlooking it from the floor above. The damp air clung to me as I watched from the corner, listening to squeaking and splashing and the occasional squalling laugh.
Then I saw him. He was at the edge of the pool, ready to dive in. He wasn’t wearing a Speedo after all; he had on short brown swimming trunks that sat low on his hips and traced the curve of his ass. His torso was much more muscular than I had expected it to be. He looked good.
I’d been trying not to think about how awful it would be if he didn’t, but now I let myself feel it: how pathetic he would have seemed; how embarrassed for him I would have been. It felt safe to think it now that it hadn’t come to pass.
He dove into the water in a clean arc and came up like a seal with his hair plastered back. I had never liked swimming myself, so I hadn’t realized how graceful it was: something about the explosive kick of his legs, the smooth muscular pull of his arms, the rhythmic power of each stroke, the way his body coiled and sprang open again at the end of a lap.
I watched him as he cut through the water like a blade slicing through a seam, back and forth, back and forth. After a while—I had lost track of time by that point—he reached the edge and pulled himself out in one quick powerful movement. He walked to a chair and started drying himself off with a towel. His chest hair looked darker now that it was wet. I followed the water’s path down his torso, until it reached the band of his shorts. They were so low that I could see the indentations on his hips that led down to his groin.
“All right,” I said. “Enough.”
When I walked back to the front, Katie was texting someone. She ignored me until I was almost past her, and then she said, “You find your friend?”
“Kind of,” I said.
I heard her laugh as I pushed through the doors.
—
I told myself I would leave after that, but I didn’t. Instead I hung around in the parking lot, pretending to text someone. He came outside a few minutes later. His hair was still wet and slicked back, and he was wearing the brown leather jacket I loved. He looked so handsome it made my lungs hurt. I watched him leave from a safe distance, wondering whether I could plausibly pretend to bump into him. He walked around the side of the building and leaned against the brick wall, digging for something in his pocket. He extracted it with practiced flair: it was a lighter and a half-empty pack of cigarettes.
“No!” I said aloud.
He tapped a cigarette from the pack, lit it, and took a long, lingering drag. I had to admit he did look hot—nonchalant, somehow, and older. He let smoke pool out of his mouth and looked into the distance. Unbelievably hot, actually.
I shook myself and ran over.
“What are you doing?” I said when I got close.
He was in the middle of taking another drag, but when he saw me, he froze. “Oh shit,” he said. Smoke curled between the words.
“You smoke?”
“No,” he said.
“I don’t believe this.” I put my hands on my hips.
“I don’t know, Charlie, I feel like ‘hello’ is more of a classic greeting.”
“I thought you said you quit in college!”
“Listen, I’ve been under a lot of stress late— Hold on a minute, why are you here?”
“I work out,” I said.
He eyed me as he took a final drag on his cigarette.
“I’m thinking about it,” I said. “Anyway, you smoke.”
He funneled the last of the smoke out of the side of his mouth and ground the butt into the wall. “Not anymore,” he said. “Something put me off.” He widened his eyes at me, but there was a teasing lilt to his voice.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Ironic that you’d be the one to stop me,” he said.
“Why’s that ironic?”
He shook his head, looking amused. “No reason. You know anywhere around here that’s good for lunch? I’m starving.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The Horseme—shoe. It’s five minutes from here.”
“Let’s go, then.”
I paused. “I’m…coming with you?”
“It’s the least you can do after you shamed me into quitting, I think.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’ll follow me?”
“As ever,” he said.
—
It was odd letting him tag behind me, catching angles of his face in my rearview mirror, knowing I could have led him anywhere I wanted to, for a while at least. It was even odder being in public with him, not just because I was worried someone would see us together—a lot of people from school went there—but because it threw him out of context. I was used to seeing him talk to students and sometimes to other teachers, but I’d never seen him smile at a hostess or ask what was in the meat loaf (“You’d be better off staying ignorant,” I said) or just exist outside of our school. It was almost embarrassing, to see him not be in charge, not know exactly what he was doing—even if it was just to ask an ordinary question or exchange a pleasantry with a waitress, things I realized only later he must do every day when I wasn’t around—and I wasn’t su
re whether I liked seeing him this way or whether I couldn’t stand it.
“So,” he said after we’d ordered, “what’s up?” He leaned back and rested his elbows on the edge of the booth. He looked far too comfortable for my liking, as if this wasn’t weird for him too.
I fiddled with my straw, which was still in its paper wrapper. “Other than you being a secret smoker?”
“What can I say? I missed coughing up black tar every morning.”
“Seriously,” I said, “why would you do that to yourself?”
“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” he said.
“It couldn’t be to look cool, because you didn’t.”
“Honesty is not one of your better qualities, Charlie.”
“It can’t be part of your training regimen.”
“It’s actually an essential element of my training,” he said. “Otherwise my lungs become too capacious from swimming. I was actually blowing houses down when I whistled.”
“I think it’s because of Ms. Anders,” I said. “Peer pressure.”
“Tracey smokes?” he asked. “I didn’t realize.”
“Yes, Tracey smokes,” I said.
His eyes glinted. “Not a fan of her, huh?”
I pushed down the wrapper and stuck the straw in my drink. “What makes you think that?”
He shrugged elaborately. “Just a wild guess.”
“I’ll tell you why I don’t like her if you tell me why you started smoking again.”
“Ah,” he said. “We seem to have reached a stalemate.”
Our waitress arrived with our food, relieving me of the need to respond. We chatted a little while we ate—even watching him eat was strange—but mostly he was quiet, apparently lost in thought, though I caught him looking at me more than once. I wondered whether he was regretting this.
“How’s the meat loaf?” I asked.
“It tastes like the inside of a mattress,” he said.
“Hmm. Must be the good chef today.” I looked at the counter, where a bearded man was slumped above his plate like an old jacket thrown over a chair. “Are you sure you’re all right? You’re being, I don’t know, worryingly unobnoxious.”
He smiled. “I’m fine, I promise,” he said. “The smoking’s just…I don’t know. Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis.” He laughed softly, like he thought he sounded ridiculous.
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