Forget You

by Jennifer Echols

  8

  “Zoey!” the three chicks on my relay team screeched at the same time Coach bellowed, “Commander!” Then I hit the water.

  I knew I’d jumped the block almost before I jumped it. Starts were one of the key parts of relay practice. Swimming fast and growing stronger were important, but I also had to make sure I didn’t dive into the water before the person ahead of me touched the block I was standing on. If I did, I let down all three teammates in the relay with me.

  I surfaced quickly so the team would have less time to talk trash about me. I caught Stephanie in the middle of, “Not again !” Then I swam to the edge of the pool and held on to the side, waiting for Coach’s rant.

  He didn’t rant or even kneel down to give me a talking-to. He barked, “Dry off, Commander,” like that was the end of our discussion.

  “Coach!” I shrieked. “I’m fine. I won’t do it again.”

  “You’ve done it three times in a row,” Stephanie pointed out. Swim caps and goggles didn’t enhance anyone’s natural beauty, but I thought Stephanie looked particularly googly-eyed and sea-monsterish as I hoisted myself out of the pool and slapped to the bleachers to drip-dry in the afternoon sun.

  Swim practice started the last period of school and extended an hour and a half after school was over. I’d done fine at first. And my head wasn’t bothering me. As a precautionary measure I’d taken painkillers all day—only two every four hours, exactly the recommended dosage. Maybe Coach would let me back in the water after a few minutes.

  Because I could focus now. I’d finally accepted that Doug wasn’t coming to swim practice. He’d skipped English this morning. I’d spent a long hour in fear that he wouldn’t come to school at all, I would stay in the dark about our accident for another day, and something had gone wrong with his leg. Gangrene.

  Then he showed up in biology after going to the doctor to get the splint off and a cast put on. You couldn’t miss him when he entered the classroom. He was enveloped by boys hooting, the weak ones capitalizing on a strong boy’s downfall. The thought crossed my mind that he would punch them for this, and I wondered if it crossed theirs. I wasn’t sure why he had attacked that guy outside history class and had gotten suspended for it two years ago.

  I didn’t cross the room and talk to him myself. After sleeping with him on the bus Saturday, I didn’t want to give anyone reason to tell Brandon something was going on between Doug and me. Besides, now that Doug was back at school, I knew I could talk to him during swim practice without so many people around.

  And now he’d gone missing. When I’d taken roll at the beginning of swim practice, Gabriel had told me Doug was in Ms. Northam’s class making up the English test he’d missed this morning. That accounted for his absence last period. It didn’t explain why he still wasn’t here after school.

  I shivered in the cool autumn breeze that had settled in despite today’s hot sun. We would need to put up the massive dome over the pool this week if the wind kept up. Then I sat on the bleachers, pulled my phone out of my backpack—as always, checked first for a message from my mother—and pressed Doug’s number. Cringed in anticipation of his voice mail announcement, which is what I usually got when I called him about a change of swim team plans. Sighed with relief when his phone rang. Tensed again after the third unanswered ring, hoping he was okay, revisiting thoughts of gangrene. The rest of the swim team splashed back and forth across the pool in front of me. Doug should be in the pool with them.

  The wreck hadn’t been my fault. He’d said that himself. So why did I feel guilty?

  “Zoey!” he yelled through the phone, and I jumped. “Are you okay?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “Did you think I wasn’t?” He sounded like he was as worried about me as I was about him. But that was impossible. Doug didn’t care that much about anybody.

  Static sounded on the phone as he let out a long breath. “I didn’t expect you to call me.”

  “I wanted to make sure you’re okay,” I said. “You’re not at swim practice.”

  “Oh, swim practice .” The bittersweet sarcasm was back. “You know me. Normally nothing could keep me from supporting my teammates. But my dad got a charter for the afternoon, and I need the money. I guess I haven’t totally given up on the idea of going to college someday. Hold on.” There was more static, and his muffled shout at someone with his hand over the phone. Then he was back. “I need to go. We’re trying to land a marlin.”

  “Do you plan to avoid swim practice for the rest of the season because you don’t want us to see how upset you are?”

  In the background, a man shouted, “Doug! A little help!”

  When Doug didn’t answer me, I rushed on before he hung up on me. “You’re overreacting. Yeah, six weeks in a cast is a setback, but you were so far ahead already. College scouts know that you had an injury and that you’ll recover. You need to come to practice and show Coach how committed you are instead of catching marlins and feeling sorry for yourself. Break your leg, take one day off, fine. Now get back to work.” I got more excited and louder than I’d intended. Coach looked over at me from the edge of the pool and gave me a thumbs-up.

  “Doug!” shouted the man on the boat.

  Without putting his hand over the phone this time, Doug hollered back at the man, “What the fuck? I’m on crutches.” Then he lowered his voice for me. “I guess I was waiting for somebody to tell me that. Coach hasn’t told me that.”

  “How could he tell you? You didn’t come to practice!”

  Silence fell, except for the calls of seagulls through the phone, circling Doug’s boat. Or maybe they were the seagulls swooping above the school. I couldn’t tell.

  “I’ll come tomorrow,” Doug finally said. “Thanks for calling, Zoey. I’ll see you in English.”

  “Wait. That’s not what I called about,” I said quickly, cupping my hand over the phone. Stephanie and the others were pulling themselves out of the pool to line up behind the block again. There was no reason to keep it a secret that I wanted to see Doug. I needed him for information, to figure out what had happened to me Friday night. But I didn’t want him. Brandon had nothing to worry about. Still, I tucked the phone away behind my hand so the swim team couldn’t read my lips. “What time are you getting to shore? Could I meet you? Maybe take you to dinner? Just as friends. Just to talk.”

  His voice turned dangerously sweet. “What do you want to talk about? Us?”

  “No,” I said. Definitely not us. “The wreck. I still don’t remember everything.”

  “Do you want to talk about your mom?”

  I sucked in a breath and held it, my mind reeling, grasping for something to say. He hadn’t brought up my mom all week. He’d lulled me into thinking he wouldn’t.

  “That’s why I came to swim practice late every day last week,” he said. “I knew you didn’t want to talk about it in public, and I was afraid to call you and make your dad mad and get my brother fired. I was trying to get you to call me.”

  “Doug!” The man on the boat was cursing at him now.

  “I planned to sit by you on the van to Panama City on Saturday,” he said in a rush. “But on Friday you turned me in to Coach for being tardy. Logically I knew you hadn’t betrayed me. How could you betray me when we’d never been friends? But that’s what it felt like. I figured you’d go to the football game to see Brandon play. I paced around the parking lot forever, planning exactly what to say to you. And then I came in, and I said the wrong thing, and you mentioned Brandon, and I was an ass.”

  “You called me a—”

  “Spoiled brat,” we said at the same time.

  “And I apologized for calling you a spoiled brat,” he said. “I wish you remembered that.”

  I clung to the underside of the bench with one hand, trying to breathe normally, refusing to go back to my mother’s bedroom and try to fix everything. It had been a week since I’d found her. I couldn’t melt down every time somebody mentioned her.

 
“All right,” Doug said kindly. “Yes, Zoey, I would like to meet you after I get to shore, and go with you to dinner, and talk about the wreck, and nothing else.”

  I PARKED THE BENZ AND WALKED around the docks crowded with polished yachts and dilapidated fishing boats until I found the empty space and the big wooden sign for the Hemingway. Taped to the sign, a sheet of green paper advertised the rates for fishing trips. The trip this afternoon appeared in a special box with the caption YOUR HOST BY SPECIAL REQUEST, PEGLEG DOUG.

  I glanced at my watch. It was exactly time for the cruise to be over, yet they weren’t here. Maybe a storm had popped up and they’d capsized. What if Doug couldn’t swim with one serviceable leg? What if his cast took on water and weighed him down?

  I told myself to get a grip. Friendly white clouds puffed across the hot autumn sky. The Hemingway was running a little late, and why hurry? No one was waiting for it. Except me.

  I paced under the Hemingway sign. Then I walked up the dock to the shallower water, reasoning that moving away would cause the Hemingway to sail closer. On the bottom of the shallows, hermit crabs, all legs and claws under borrowed shells, picked across the rocks and oysters. I counted five of them in the small section I could see before the sand fell away from the shore and the water grew deep and dark. Five crabs moving in different directions, each headed where another had just been. If I knew what their goal was and what destination would best help them achieve that goal, I could line them up and send them there in an orderly fashion. Doug would scoff at me for this.

  I longed for him to scoff at me. It was awful. I was only attracted to him because I couldn’t have him. I was with Brandon. If I broke up with Brandon to be with Doug, even if Doug did want me, I wouldn’t want Doug anymore and I’d pine away for Brandon. This was how it worked, being a cheater. I hoped Ashley was enjoying her time in Hawaii, because her days with my dad were numbered.

  I knew this, yet the sign that said Hemingway pulled me back down the crumbling pier. I examined the water hoses, the plastic buckets, and wondered whether Doug had touched them. Had he taped the Pegleg Doug sheet to the Hemingway sign? I pictured him balancing on one leg, dropping his crutches, and bracing himself against the sign with one hand, a stapler in the other. In school today I could tell he’d already grown accustomed to his crutches and had developed a routine for letting them go, throwing himself into a nether realm without balance, and gracefully taking his next handhold just before falling. I knew the movements of his dance as if I were dancing it myself.

  And there was Doug, facing away from me, braced against a rail around the bow of the Hemingway . The boat glided fast through the green-blue inlet, already so close that I stepped back in surprise. Then, because Doug was arguing with his dad, I kept backing up. I sat on a clean space on a nearby bench, between blobs of dried seagull poop, to wait.

  I didn’t recognize Mr. Fox. I didn’t think he’d ever been to a swim meet. But I knew who he was right away because Doug argued with him. And because even though Mr. Fox was blond with a ponytail and a beard, he was built like Officer Fox, a tad shorter and thicker than Doug. As Doug ducked below the rail, working, Mr. Fox scanned the shoreline. His eyes moved over me without stopping.

  The boat bumped gently against the padded dock and backed up a little, engine churning and water boiling. Over this noise I heard Mr. Fox cursing the boat pilot. Then he watched Doug struggling for a moment and said, “Put your weight into it. What are you, a fag?” He turned on his heel, disappeared into the cabin, and came out with a beer can in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Holding the beer perfectly level so not a drop spilled, he jumped from boat to shore and headed for a small charter office behind me without a word to any of the passengers or crew, and without a glance at me.

  Every few seconds Doug’s head popped up from beneath the rail. Still struggling.

  On the phone he’d said at first that he didn’t want me to pick him up here. He’d suggested he crutch up to Jamaica Joe’s on the corner and meet me there. Then he’d suggested he crutch up to his house, which he’d said was not inland, as I’d assumed, but on a bluff nearby. Neither of these suggestions had made sense to me. Why should Doug hobble when I could drive? I’d insisted on meeting him as close to the boat as possible. Now I understood the problem. Everybody was embarrassed of crazy parents.

  The crew and the fishermen and the fish they’d caught spilled from the boat onto the wharf. Doug came after them, pushing a barrel in front of him and holding on to the boat rail with the other hand to keep from toppling over. He bent to retrieve his crutches and hobbled into the boat’s cabin. He came out in a different T-shirt and shorts. He crutched to the side of the boat, paused a moment to consider the bobbing bow and the two-foot gap to the wharf, and finally hopped across the gap as if he’d been on crutches all his life. When one of the crew tossed a hose to the concrete, Doug picked it up and squirted off his good foot, flip-flop and all.

  Then he crutched toward me. “Hello,” he called without smiling. Just as he stopped in front of me, the cool breeze whipped around him, carrying his scent to me. No chlorine today. He smelled of soap and ocean.

  I stood up. “Hi,” I tried to say casually, as if I were still innocent and hadn’t heard what his dad said to him. The dark look he shot me let me know I was a bad actress.

  I cleared my throat. “You didn’t get the marlin?”

  “We did. We like to take a picture of it and then let it go. When men bring home a seven-foot-long dead fish, their wives don’t want them to come out with us again. What happens on the Hemingway stays on the Hemingway.” His words were light, his tone somber.

  I laughed. “I take it you’ve seen a lot happen on the Hemingway.”

  One black eyebrow went up ever so briefly, then back down. His mouth twisted into a tight bow. This sober mood of his worried me. Doug was frequently angry but rarely down. His anger was explosive, like his happiness. His depression was something only a parent could cause.

  “So.” He gestured with his head toward the parking lot. “More hair of the dog.”

  “Hair of the deer.” I walked slowly beside him so he wouldn’t have to exert himself as much. I saw it was just hard for him to crutch, propelling forward six foot two inches of height and a hundred and eighty-six pounds (I knew his stats from swim team) with his upper body only. Each time he put his weight on the crutches and swung his good foot forward, his biceps bulged against the material of his FSU T-shirt—a different one from Saturday, faded gold rather than faded red.

  I unlocked the Benz with the remote and stood on the passenger side to open his door, or hold his crutches, whatever he needed. But I could have predicted he wouldn’t let me help him. In a few deft moves he swung into the car and tossed his crutches into the backseat, shaking his black hair out of his eyes. I started to close the door for him, but he reached for the handle first.

  I rounded the car and slipped into the driver’s seat. Cranking the engine, I pressed buttons to lower all four windows and let the heat out. I paused a moment more to make sure I was comfortable driving. This was my third time behind the wheel today and I kept expecting to feel shell-shocked, with heart palpitations and sweating hands. Nothing. No post-traumatic stress disorder, no memory of the accident. There was nothing but a drive to find out what had happened to me, an itch to be evil, and a soft spot for Doug.

  “Sweet ride,” he said.

  “Thanks. My dad’s,” I said as I steered the car up the hill past Jamaica Joe’s. “I only get it until he comes back from Hawaii next Saturday.”

  “What are you driving after that?”

  I explained the conundrum of having a loaded father who bought expensive cars for himself and his mistress but not his daughter and disallowed his daughter from buying a cheap car either.

  “He’s as crazy as my dad,” Doug marveled. “If he’s so concerned about your safety, why won’t he just buy you a car?”

  “He says he doesn’t want me to be a spoile
d brat.”

  A few seconds passed, cars whispering beside us in the other lane of the main beach road, before I realized what I’d given away. I’d asked Doug to dinner so I could find out what happened Friday night, not so I could make him feel bad about what he’d said to me at the football game. And I certainly didn’t want to get in another argument with him.

  “If it makes you feel better, you can call me a fag.” He pressed a button until the seat motored back as far as possible. Then he pressed a different button until the seat back reclined, he was low-riding, and he could stretch his broken leg out straight. The seat motor moved excruciatingly slowly, heightening the silence that had fallen between us.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Fag as an insult is so nineties,” I said. “Nobody cares about that anymore. Ian’s parents don’t have a problem with him being gay.”

  “My dad means it as an insult. It would be impolite not to take it that way.”

  I nodded. Once when my dad had called me a spoiled brat, I’d informed him Bratz dolls were quite popular. But all that got me was another rebuff for having a smart mouth. If my dad was hateful, he was hateful, and there was no point in helping him toward lingo for a new generation. I knew what he meant.

  I pulled into the parking lot for the block of gift shops and restaurants that included California Eatin’. “This okay?” I asked, walking slowly beside him as he crutched toward the door.

  “Yes, but since we’re here . . .” He glanced down the sidewalk. “Would you mind if we ate sushi next door? I mean, they have more than sushi if you don’t do raw. It’s just that my leg’s swollen, and at the tatami table I could stretch it out.”

  “The tatami table is for parties of six or more.” I knew this because my mom and I had tried to snag it on a daring girl-outing. Even when daring each other, we did not do raw.