Forget You(29)
Author: Jennifer Echols

"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 spoiled 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 g*y."

"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.

"Y 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

es, 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.

He passed me and balanced on his crutches to hold open the door of the sushi restaurant for me. "Let me take care of this. Old ladies are suckers for guys on crutches. I’ve milked this with my teachers at school all day. I can be very charming."

"Which is the act?" I asked as I brushed the front of his T-shirt going in. "Charming or dour?"

He threw back his head and laughed–such a beautiful, musical laugh that the dour version of Doug from a minute ago was hard to imagine, though I figured it would make another appearance shortly. It always did. "I like to keep you guessing," he teased me, hobbling forward to the hostess podium.

I wondered whether keeping me guessing was just another part of charming mode, or he was actually flirting with me.

I wanted him to flirt with me.

Which was too bad, because I had a boyfriend.

Doug leaned on his crutches, and he and the Japanese hostess talked animatedly with their hands. Doug threw back his head and laughed again. Girls at school would not recognize this Doug. I certainly didn’t.

Finally the hostess led us into the crowded dining room, past the enormous tanks full of fish not native to this area of the ocean, and up two stairs and through a paper screen to the low table. We kicked off our flip-flops in the doorway. I rounded to the far side with Doug to help him ditch his crutches and ease down to table level, but the hostess did this instead, fussing over him in Japanese that he seemed to half understand. I was in the way, so I retreated to the other side of the table and sat down on a cushion. The lady winked at me and left.

Doug stretched to snag a paper menu and a tiny pencil from the edge of the table with two fingers. "Do you come here a lot? Would you like me to order you a good roll with nothing raw in it? They’re just bringing me whatever’s fresh." When I didn’t answer, he glanced up from the menu at me. "Okay, okay, I’m not that charming. The hostess and my mom were friends."

I let him peruse the menu again, or pretend to. I waited for him to end this facade on his own.

Finally, without looking up from the menu, he said what I’d been puzzling through: "My mom was Japanese."

I felt stupid and unworldly not knowing this, but it had never come up before. There weren’t any Asians in my high school. Or so I’d thought.

"My dad met her when he was stationed at Pearl Harbor," Doug said. "Cody was actually born in Honolulu."

I examined him as he examined the menu. Of course he was Asian and white. This explained his beautiful sea-green eyes with a deep tan and black hair. But I could still see how his dual heritage had never occurred to me. His face scintillated as I watched, like the optical illusion of a vase and two faces, flickering between known and unknown.

I said, "I didn’t know you were half Japanese."

"I can tell."

A waiter popped through the paper screen. Doug made a few marks on the paper menu and handed it to him. As the waiter bowed and disappeared again, Doug said, "I ordered you rice and shrimp and avocado, basically. We could have gone for California Eatin’ for that."

"Do you try to keep your . . . ethnicity a secret from people?" I should not have been so fascinated by Doug turning up Asian, but I couldn’t quite get my head around the fact that I hadn’t known something so basic about him.

Leave it to Doug to turn his response into a defensive insult. "I don’t try to hide anything. People know all my business anyway, or think they do. Y ou’re just not paying attention."

Screwing up my courage, I struck right back at him. "Nobody seems to know why you went to juvie." 9 A burst of laughter from behind the paper screen made both of us jump. It was easy to forget we were in a public place, enclosed only in the illusion of privacy. Now I wondered if I’d spoken loudly enough for other diners to hear me through the thin screen.

I adjusted my position on the cushion. Doug didn’t move. His body, laid back against the cushions and the wall with his broken leg straight out to one side, said relaxed. His fingers, frozen in midfidget on his good knee, said people aren’t supposed to ask me that. Either that or I have just been shot through the paper screen.

He wasn’t bleeding. But I began to see his point about catching a marlin and then letting it go, because honestly, what were you going to do with a marlin? He was a six-foot-two fish out of water behind a miniature dining table. Even slouched down, his shoulders were broad, his head was even with mine, and his legs took up the entire space in front of him. No wonder the wreck had broken him. If he was too big for the tatami table, he was way too big for Mike’s Miata.