Forget You

by Jennifer Echols

  “My dad expects me home,” I insisted. “He has ways of checking on me.”

  “Call him,” Lila said. “Or we’ll get our mother to call him if he doesn’t believe you.”

  I waved this idea away with both hands. Their mother would find out my dad was gone and my mom was way gone. Their mother would report me to Child Protective Services.

  “Then just email him and tell him what you’re doing and why,” Lila said. “Here’s my phone. Type him an email message and we’ll take a picture of you looking . . .”

  “Used,” Keke said.

  I took Lila’s phone, typed my dad’s email address and the message, I am fucked, and handed it back to her.

  “Zoey!” she shrieked.

  Keke snatched the phone from Lila and looked at the screen. “You’re going to get yourself grounded. No parking with Brandon for you, ever.” She pressed a key over and over with her thumb, backspacing.

  “Speaking of,” I moaned. “Do you think anyone got the wrong idea about Doug and me back here?”

  They stared at me blankly. Lila prompted, “Like . . . ?”

  “Like Stephanie Wetzel would tell Brandon.”

  Keke prompted, “That . . . ?”

  “That Doug and I were making out or something.”

  “You were ?” Lila shrieked.

  “No!” I wailed, slapping my hands over my ears.

  Lila laughed hysterically. “You and Doug? That’s so random!”

  Keke patted my knee in sympathy. “No, nobody suspected you were making out with Doug Fox. You hit your head harder than we thought.”

  I’D ALWAYS LIVED ON THE OCEAN. I mean, right on the ocean, with the noise of the surf drowning out the TV when I opened the windows. But I never, ever took the ocean for granted, because most people in our town lived inland. Including Keke and Lila.

  I woke on their den sofa at my normal time in the morning, which was pretty early. A lot earlier than other teenagers who told me they slept until the afternoon on weekends. I didn’t understand this. I had homework to do and books to read and data to enter. Keke and Lila’s younger siblings weren’t even up watching cartoons yet.

  Now the headache was bad enough for painkillers, but not so bad that I was careful about moving my head too quickly. I was getting back to normal. So I approximated my normal routine. Routine was important. Since my mom tried to kill herself, routine reassured me that my life was still perfectly normal. First thing in the morning at my dad’s house, I always stepped out on my balcony to watch the ocean and breathe the air. Here, after picking off the Lego pieces stuck to my face, I stepped out the den door into their backyard.

  I’d been here a lot. I should have known which direction their house faced. But it was in a labyrinth of a neighborhood like Brandon’s with even less structure, winding curves rather than right angles in the roads. I always got confused coming here. And this morning, low gray clouds blanketed the sky, almost as if it were winter. Where was the glowing patch indicating east and the sun? I had no idea which way was south and the ocean.

  Whirling from back door to swing set to garden gnome, I choked out a cry and slapped my hands over my mouth. There was no direction. I held my breath to keep from panicking. My heart thumped in my chest. Tears stung my eyes.

  Finally I turned back toward the house. One of Keke and Lila’s little brothers stood in the open doorway in his Superman diaper, pink elephant under his arm, watching me. Oh, I knew what he was feeling, watching a Big Person go crazy.

  I sniffled and made a quick pass under my eyes with my fingertips to dry up. “Good morning!” I called. “I just realized I lost something. But no worries. I’ll find it.”

  Superman eyed me warily.

  “Do you want to help me make breakfast?” I asked, imitating Keke’s enthusiasm.

  That got his mind off my erratic behavior. Soon Princess Diaper joined us in the kitchen. I ended up making breakfast for what seemed like fifteen or sixteen children. I liked kids. I ran the birthday parties at Slide with Clyde, and of course as a lifeguard I watched kids all day long. But at Slide with Clyde I blew a chirp on a whistle when I needed their attention. I gave them a command with a nod of my head, and they followed orders because I was scary with my face stern and my eyes hidden behind my sunglasses.

  In contrast, these kids didn’t understand the meaning of, “Don’t do that.” I cleaned up a lot of flour from the kitchen floor and inadvertently thought really hard about the new half sibling I would have soon. Ashley’s baby was due on Valentine’s Day.

  Then I read to the kiddies until I was hoarse. But I could only stand so much of this. I wanted to go home. I had no toiletries except what I’d taken in my backpack to the swim meet, and I was too tall to wear Keke and Lila’s clothes.

  More than this, I wanted to find out what had happened to me. And that required a visit to the place where I’d wrecked.

  “IS YOUR MOM GOING TO SUE Mike?” Keke asked. My friends lumped all lawyers into one category and made a lot of lawsuit jokes, forever asking whether my mom was going to sue people. My mom was a public defender. She’d never filed a lawsuit in her life (disappointing my dad, who said only a spoiled brat would go to school all those years and choose to make as little money as possible). I was glad Keke asked this, though. It meant she thought my mom was still working. News hadn’t gotten out yet.

  “No, the wreck wasn’t Mike’s fault,” I said. “Or mine. My mom just wants me to take some measurements while the evidence is still here. She might be able to get me more insurance money.” I hated lying to my friends, especially since they’d taken care of me last night and they were helping me now. I was getting desperate.

  Seeing the tire marks crossing the road in the distance, I parked Keke and Lila’s Datsun on the shoulder. They pulled out buckets and sheets of poster board that we’d bought at the drugstore and printed with HIGH SCHOOL SWIM TEAM FUNDRAISER . I didn’t expect to make any money. The signs would slow cars down and keep them from creaming me while I did my research. We left Keke near the Datsun. Lila flounced a hundred yards down the road to stop traffic on that end.

  I walked more slowly after her, careful not to jostle my still-fragile brain. It was strange to walk somewhere I’d driven past a million times. The smells were different, melted asphalt and warm hay. The sounds were different too: the whisper of my footsteps through the long grass, chirping birds, buzzing insects, the sweep of wind in the trees. And crunch. I looked down. My flip-flops ground pieces of my Bug’s headlight into the sandy soil. Or pieces of Mike’s Miata’s headlight—that was the question. I’d reached the tire marks in the road.

  I glanced up and down the road before venturing into it. Lila was in place with her sign. Keke had already stopped a sucker in a pickup. Satisfied I wouldn’t get hit, I followed the tire marks to the spot where they intersected with a second set of marks and the cars had kissed. The marks weren’t very long. Mike and I had been surprised. We couldn’t see well in the dark and the hard rain, and the deer came from nowhere.

  This is what must have happened. This is what I reconstructed in my mind. But my memory was just as blank as it had been yesterday when I woke up. It started and stopped with Doug.

  A cool wind blew at my back just then, tossing my ponytail forward over my shoulder. The day was still overcast. Even though the air was warm as usual, this cool breeze kept creeping up on me. It tangled up the gray clouds in turbulence and filled the otherwise innocuous day in the countryside with foreboding. When the robes started billowing in movies about wizards, that always meant something ominous.

  I was scaring myself again.

  Taking Keke’s dad’s mini tape measure from my pocket, I set the end at the outer edge of one tire mark and walked along the metal tape, keeping it from drawing up on me, until I reached the outer edge of the other tire mark and set the measure down. Sixty and a half inches in width. This was the car that had come from the direction of Brandon’s house. When I got home I’d look up on the
internet whether sixty and a half inches was the width of a Bug or a Miata. Then at least I’d know which way I’d been driving. Simple.

  To triangulate my data, I put the end of the tape measure at the outer edge of the tire mark for the second car and calculated that width the same way. This was the car that had come from the direction of the beach.

  Sixty and a half inches. Both cars were the same width.

  “Fuck.” Panic welled up inside me and my heart knocked against my chest wall, trying to escape. I told myself to calm down, calm down. I couldn’t wig out here in sight of Lila and Keke. I would find some other way to figure out what had happened to me, and then my life would be back in order. I told myself this, but my heart sped up instead of slowing down. I was on the verge of panic with the sky still overcast and the view south and north on the highway looking exactly the same, until luckily I was distracted by Keke yelling into the distant pickup. My heart slowed down.

  At that distance I couldn’t tell what she was saying to the people inside, but she shook her poster at them, then her bucket. She threw her poster and bucket into the payload and climbed in after them. I began to see that she and Lila shared something with all their siblings. It was hereditary and they couldn’t help it. They were not good at following instructions, such as do not throw flour or stand here in the road until I call you. The truck must have contained hot boys.

  Sure enough, as it drew closer, I saw it was Officer Fox, with Doug in the passenger seat. My heart sped up again.

  I released the tape measure so it wound back up into its metal coil, slapping my legs as it went. Then I stuffed it into my back pocket like I wasn’t already caught.

  “Busted!” Keke squealed at me as the truck pulled onto the shoulder in front of the Datsun. Doug opened the passenger door and stepped out, crutches first.

  “Soliciting charitable donations is not illegal,” I called past him into the cab to Officer Fox.

  “It’s not safe to do it on the highway,” Officer Fox said. “But you’re right, being stupid isn’t illegal. Otherwise half this town would be behind bars, and Doug would have gotten the death penalty by now. Hey—” Officer Safety opened the driver’s side door and fell out of the cab onto the highway with the engine still running to avoid Doug reaching across the seat to grab him.

  Doug gave up, slammed the passenger door, and righted himself on his crutches, hopping a little. “What’cha doing?” he asked me in his sweet, sarcastic voice, pretending he hadn’t seen the tape measure.

  “Getting some fresh air,” I said. The wind at my back flipped my ponytail over my head. I brushed it away. “I’ve been hanging out at Keke and Lila’s house. They have, like, fifteen or sixteen siblings.”

  “We have three,” Keke called from the payload as the pickup drove past to retrieve Lila.

  “Seems like more,” I called back. I stared after the retreating pickup, and Keke knocking on the window to bother Officer Fox, so I wouldn’t have to meet Doug’s gaze. I should thank him for insisting Keke take me home with her last night. I didn’t thank him because all I did lately was thank him and apologize to him and hope he wasn’t ruining my mother’s life behind my back. I wished we could go back to the way we were at the beginning of the school year, when we avoided each other. Before he called me a spoiled brat at the game. Before he knew I liked to snuggle in the grass. Before I knew what he smelled like.

  Because now the wind swirled around us both and wound me up in his scent of chlorine and ocean.

  He reached for my mouth. I didn’t know what he intended, so I willed myself to stay still and not make a big deal out of his hand moving in slow motion toward me, beside my cheek, almost out of my line of sight. With his pinky he brushed a strand of my hair from the corner of my mouth where the wind had blown it into my lip gloss. His fingertip trailed fire across that tender corner.

  And then he put his hand down and smirked at what he’d done to me. At least, that’s how it seemed. He stood in the hot air and the cool wind, taller than ever on his crutches, and looked me up and down with his distant green eyes. “So, a little hair of the dog?”

  “Where?” I glanced around. Now that Keke and Lila weren’t guarding the road, a car could fly by and cream whatever wandered into its path.

  Doug whistled and passed his hand in front of my eyes to get my attention. “Hair of the dog. Bloody Mary after you’ve spent the night drinking. As in, revisiting something helps you get over it.”

  My eyes followed the path of his hands down as he grabbed the handle of his crutch before it fell over. Did he mean we’d spent the night drinking? I didn’t drink. Doug didn’t drink while he was in training. Mike did drink. However, he hadn’t been drinking before the wreck, or Doug would have been driving Mike’s Miata.

  Doug’s fingers caressed the worn wooden handle of the secondhand crutch. My gaze trailed up his big hand, his wide wrist, his strong forearm meant for pulling his body weight through the water rather than maneuvering himself on land. Slowly I realized he was speaking metaphorically.

  And I lashed out. “I do not need to get over you,” I said more forcefully than I’d intended, because I was lying. Oh God, I was lying again, and now I was confused, but this had to stop. “I am happy dating Brandon. I didn’t know you would drive by while I was here. How could I know that?”

  He stared at me without blinking, and tilted his head ever so slightly to one side. “I meant you’re getting over the wreck.”

  “Right!” I turned toward the skid marks in the road to hide my red face. He would use this to embarrass me in public. Embarrassing me in private was bad enough. Zoey likes me after she swore she didn’t. Zoey has been fantasizing about my knee on her thigh.

  Miraculously, instead of pressing the subject, he gave me a way out. “That’s where my brother and I have been, looking at the Bug and the Miata in the junkyard.” He waved past me, inland. Then he glanced pointedly at my pocket. “I didn’t take a tape measure, though.”

  I watched past his shoulder, way down the road. In the distance, Lila set down her bucket and poster board, put her hands on her hips, and argued with Officer Fox inside the truck. I willed her to stop arguing and come back to save me from this conversation and this beautiful, snarky, way-too-perceptive boy. The cool breeze caught the poster board and blew it down the shoulder. Lila abandoned her act with Officer Fox and galloped after the poster. No help there.

  “I . . .” I said, thinking hard.

  Doug raised one black eyebrow at me.

  “I’mmmmm still a little confused about what happened. What time did we wreck?”

  The suspicious look he gave me let me know I shouldn’t have asked this. “About two thirty,” he said.

  I’d made him suspicious with this question and the answer didn’t even give me any information. When I’d lived with my mom, every curfew had been negotiated in detail, taking into account the activity, location, and company associated with said revelry (and sometimes I typed out a contract in legalese like this just to poke fun at her).

  But my dad didn’t care what time I came in. When we’d wrecked at two thirty in the morning, I could have been headed south for home. Or I could have been headed north to Brandon’s house, or elsewhere.

  Where?

  Officer Fox had gathered Lila and cruised back in our direction. I could slip one more question in and then escape quickly if Doug’s eyebrow rose again. I brushed past him and walked along one of the skid marks. I asked over my shoulder, “So, I was driving along like this? And then, all of a sudden—” I threw out my arms. “Deer drama! Right?” I turned around to grin at him.

  Uh-oh. His eyebrow was up. “You don’t remember which direction you were driving?”

  So I’d aroused his suspicion again. At least I knew now that I’d been driving in the other direction, north toward Brandon’s.

  Or did I? Maybe Doug wasn’t telling me I was wrong. He was only saying it was a weird question for me to ask. I was getting dangerously close to a
dmitting I didn’t remember the whole night.

  The pickup reached us and pulled to a stop, bringing the cool breeze with it. I shut my eyes against the sand in my face.

  Lila sobbed from the payload, “Now we’ll never collect enough money to fund the swim team trip to District!”

  “There’s no one here for you to bullshit,” Doug told her.

  “Oh, right.” She and Keke climbed out and ran for the Datsun, hampered by the breeze against their poster boards and their buckets.

  I beat them to it. Before Keke could slip into the driver’s seat, I pushed the seat forward and dove into the back, which smelled strongly of used bubble gum. I owed Doug some kind of good-bye, but maybe the surprise escape would take his mind off my blond questions.

  No such luck. He crutched forward and knocked on Keke’s window until she cranked it down. (This was a very old Datsun.) “Zoey,” he said, angling his head to look past Keke and the headrest, straight at me. “You don’t remember which direction you were driving?”

  I leaned between Keke’s seat and Lila’s, out of his line of sight, and hissed, “Go, Keke, before Officer Fox arrests us.”

  “I thought you said this was legal!” Lila whined. “Your mom is a lawyer!”

  “It might be just a little illegal,” I admitted. Keke was already spinning the tires in the soft sand of the shoulder to make our getaway.

  Doug had wisely maneuvered out of our path. As Keke sped away and she and Lila both bitched at me for getting them in trouble and wondered aloud whether the wreck had given me brain damage, I stared out the back window, between the old-fashioned defrost stripes, at Doug watching us go.

  If he asked me again at school tomorrow, I would deny everything while maintaining a friendly distance so he didn’t get pissed at me and give away anything about what we’d done together after the wreck. Or about my mom.

  In the meantime, I would go to my father’s house and take a long swim in the ocean. Stroking against the tide would restore my strength and help me think. As I planned my next step in finding out what had happened to me, I would swim away from shore, and my dad’s house on the beach would grow smaller and more distant. Just like Doug leaning on his crutches in the middle of the country highway, smaller and smaller until his green eyes disappeared.