Forget You(22)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I wondered if blond hair dusted Brandon’s belly, and whether he was an inny or outy. I’d seen him without his shirt plenty of times. In the hot afternoons behind the concessions counter at Slide with Clyde, sometimes he’d bare his chest. My dad let him do this because we sold a lot more ice cream that way. And I’d rubbed my hand across Brandon’s bare chest not half an hour ago. But all I’d ever noticed was how big and muscular and tan he was. Little things like fine hair and his belly button hadn’t occurred to me. Strange that I could share the ultimate intimate moment with a boy without any intimacy at all.

He hadn’t even taken his shirt off when we’d done it last Monday. I had always thought my first time would be more of an event, with more leading up to it. Brandon had had enough sex with enough different girls that sex with me didn’t reach event status.

But I knew we would get there. I never would have pictured us as a couple before, but now that we shared this bond, I could see us staying together through high school graduation and even into college if he got his football scholarship to FSU.

Doug had nobody. Other than that girl from Destin, I’d never heard of him asking someone out since–well, me, in ninth grade. I wondered if he’d ever had sex.

Despite myself, my eyes traveled back to his flat stomach dusted with fine black hair. From underneath his cargo shorts peeked the gray heathered waistband of his underwear. I wondered whether they were boxer briefs or maybe plaid flannel boxers, but I couldn’t see farther than that waistband. His underwear disappeared into the dark.

Now it wasn’t just my face burning and my arms tingling. I was tingling in places that Doug was nowhere near touching, so why did I feel guilty? This had nothing to do with Doug. The non sequitur tingling must be what happened when you had sex for the first time and then got a concussion and thought you’d had sex again when you didn’t and then found out you wouldn’t be alone with your boyfriend for at least a few more days. That is, brain damage.

With a gasp I returned to the swim team van jerking across "repairs" in U.S. 98 that had done more harm than good. Doug snuggled his cheek deeper into the sweatshirt in my lap but didn’t wake.

Then I looked up at Stephanie Wetzel staring at me over the back of the second seat. I wondered how long she’d watched me look down Doug’s pants, and how quickly this would get back to Brandon.

Looking isn’t cheating. Brandon had said this to me a million times on our lunch break at Slide with Clyde. He would seem deeply absorbed in relating his troubles to me about the latest girl he really liked. Then his eyes would follow an entirely different girl’s ass across the food court, and I would punch him playfully for being a hypocrite. Looking isn’t cheating, he would say. The only difference was that those girls had looked back at Brandon and given him a knowing smile. Doug had no idea I was looking, and if he knew, he would just laugh and say something in that sugar-sweet sarcastic voice of his. Zoey Commander thinks I’m hot. Hoo-ray.

Except he’d asked me out this morning.

In the end I stopped torturing myself and allowed myself to look at him. Stephanie couldn’t tell what I was staring at. I could say I was staring into space. And Doug was a lot more interesting than sudoku’s white landscape of numbers. The landscape of numbers made me feel more sane and the contours of Doug’s body made me feel less sane. But in this controlled insanity maybe I could exorcise what was eating me. I let my eyes and my mind wander.

"GO, LYNN!" I CALLED. IF SHE could find an iota more power inside her, she could win the women’s 100 fly. On second thought, I screamed, "Go, Stephanie!" She was part of this heat too, and I didn’t want anyone to think I was dissing her because she was giving my boyfriend rides.

But before Stephanie or Lynn touched the wall, I sank to the front row bleacher. I’d felt disoriented since I’d followed Doug limping into this fancy natatorium. I’d thought the problem might be that for the first time since I’d joined the varsity team, I was in the stands with screaming friends and parents from five schools rather than in the locker room, getting ready to swim. Or that instead of focusing on the pool in front of me, my mind was on Doug lying on the bleacher behind me, still half asleep. Now that I was getting really dizzy, I decided to cheer from a sitting position for the rest of the heats.

My muscles tensed. My body ached to stretch out and swim. I watched my teammates so closely that I was down in the water with them. I could feel their muscles work, then burn and tire, and the cool water swirling past their bodies. I could tell how fast their times would be before I saw them. I didn’t take notes on my clipboard because the host school would give Coach a computer printout of the times for the whole meet, but I was so keyed into times that I guesstimated them automatically.

Even when I wasn’t watching the clock, I knew which runs would be personal records. And not because of some internal clock I’d constructed from attending so many practices, but because I knew my teammates’ bodies, the ways they moved when they were on, or tired, or distracted. That included Doug. Before the boys touched the wall at the end of the 200 free, I knew they were slower than Doug’s personal best, which he’d bettered every meet this season before we came to a screeching halt in the wreck.

I bet Doug never watched anyone this way.

At the end of the meet, my headache came back. It was kind of funny actually. Watching Connor and Ian in the final heat, I felt a twinge at their first turn. By their second turn I knew the culprit was the headache and not the fact that I’d stared at the pulsing water too long with my eyebrows in knots. By their third turn the golf ball was back, banging against the inside of my skull. By their fourth turn I was looking at my watch to see whether the recommended four hours had elapsed since the last dose of painkillers I’d swallowed during the meet. I stared at my watch dial for a long time. People with concussions needed digital.

The heat ended. Everyone knew what the finish meant toward the point count. Fans of the home team sprang from the bleachers, cheering that they’d won the meet. We came in third out of five. Normally I would have gone with my teammates into the locker room and bitched with them about the officiating, and that one chick from Apalachicola who was like a Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the fact that we would have won or at least come in second if we’d had Doug.

The headache anchored me to my seat. I couldn’t have withstood the escalating pitch of the excited girl-squeals in the locker room. And if Mike sang the boy-band falsetto on the van, I would kill him.

Four tall boys from other schools called to Doug. He brushed past me, maneuvering down the bleachers to the floor to talk to them. They pointed to his splint. He held it out to show them, nodding and then laughing. They’d come to the meet expecting to lose to Doug. They couldn’t believe their luck. They wanted to know how long he’d be out–that is, how long their luck would run. I knew this though I couldn’t hear them. Their voices mixed with the echoes of the crowd in the natatorium. Every word sounded five times.