Forget You(31)
Author: Jennifer Echols

"Y were gone," I said. "Y didn’t notify me. As far as I knew, we were over. Like nothing had ever happened between us."

ou ou

He put his chopsticks down on the table and leaned back against the wall, frowning at me. He looked so hurt that I thought back over what I’d said–and realized it sounded an awful lot like what I’d said to him Saturday morning.

"If I’d notified you," he said slowly, "called you up and said, `Hey, Zoey, I won’t be able to take you to homecoming after all because I’ll be in jail,’ would you have gone out with me later?"

I thought, No. I said, "Y never gave me that chance."

"Y ou’re right. I didn’t. I was an excellent judge of character. Because three years later, you’re still holding it against me, and keeping me from getting hired as a lifeguard at your dad’s park." He raised both eyebrows at me, daring me to deny it.

In the week since my mother had done what she did, I had never felt more like crying. I swallowed and leaned forward over the table. "Doug," I whispered, "I know you have a lot of reasons to be mad at me. But please don’t tell anybody about my mother."

He blinked. "I won’t."

"If not for me, for her, because she was your lawyer. Maybe not a very successful lawyer, since you went to juvie–"

"She got me a light sentence," he broke in. "It could have been a lot worse."

"Please."

"I said I won’t," he repeated, watching me somberly.

I licked my lips and took a breath to tell him thank you.

"So!" he burst before I could get the words out. "We’ve talked about your mother, which we said we weren’t going to do. We’ve talked about us, which we definitely weren’t going to do. Y haven’t asked me a single question about the wreck. And you know what that means. Y

ou ou’ve taken me on a date. Brandon is not going to like it, because as we all know, Brandon is your boyfriend."

Why were we suddenly back to this? I sat back on my heels and huffed out a sigh of frustration. "I don’t understand you."

He took a sip of water. "I don’t understand you," he said without looking at me.

"Have we been sitting here forever? How do I get a check?" I turned around to look through the opening in the partition, at the other diners on real dates with less drama.

"There’s no charge. The hostess loves me."

"Oh, I want to pay." I opened my purse to pull out a credit card. "I told you I was taking you out, and I’m paying." Boy was I.

Doug reached around the corner of the table for his crutches and braced himself on them, struggling to stand. By now I recognized the pain in his eyes.

I threw a five down for the waiter, at least, and hurried around the table to help Doug. "Here." I held out my hands to him.

"I don’t need your help." He braced his shoulder against the wall and slid up it, but now he dropped one crutch. He grabbed for it and caught my wrist instead.

We both stopped moving and stared at each other. His big hand was warm and solid and tight around my wrist. His face turned red. Saying boo to Mike would make his face turn red, but Doug did not blush for just anything.

In this instant, Doug was my boyfriend.

"Okay." I twisted my wrist out of his grasp and bent to pick up his fallen crutch. I had just gotten one boyfriend–Brandon–and I didn’t need another. I wasn’t like that.

I followed Doug as he crutched slowly down the steps from the platform and through the dining room. I stood nearby as he exchanged a few last words of broken Japanese with the hostess in the doorway. I walked next to him down the sidewalk to the Benz, edging closer to him to let other laughing couples pass. All of which gave me ample time to stew about him making fun of me.

I had to stay with Brandon. I had to. Brandon was the only good thing in my life right now, and the only thing that made perfect sense. If I broke up with him just because Doug Fox had taken a shine to me for some reason and threw jealous fits, I was a cheater, a ho who’d slept with a boy she didn’t love, and nuts.

Trouble was, I was nuts. I was beginning to see that now. Because every time Doug complained about me dating Brandon instead of him, I wanted to agree. And that hurt.

In the car, we sat in silence until I turned from the highway onto the main road through town. Doug muttered, "Things were going so well."

I ignored him and kept driving. During the summer I would have navigated through the backstreets built on bridges between inlets, reminding myself just how tenuous our town’s hold was on the shifting ocean and earth. I would have swerved left and right through a maze of low beach houses overgrown with hotly scented flowering vines, just to avoid the strip. The main road through town ground to a halt at this time of night when the tourists were in town, eating at Tahiti Cuisine, browsing the books at Beach Reads, taking advantage of the half-off sunset admission to Slide with Clyde. The tourists were gone now, store hours shortened, Slide with Clyde closed, sidewalks empty, roads clear. The faster to drive Doug away.

"I don’t know how this happened," Doug said.

"What you mean is, `I’m sorry, Zoey.’"

"I’m sorry, Zoey," he said immediately.

I turned in at the road to the wharf, then realized I might be driving to the wrong place. "Do you want me to take you to your house, or–"

"The wharf’s fine. I have some paperwork to finish for the business. My dad can’t do math."

"But you can’t do math either." Calculus was the one class I didn’t share with Doug. He was in a lower-level class and still didn’t make the grade for National Honor Society, which was probably why he was so desperate for an athletic scholarship.

"I come by it honest," he said as I pulled the Benz to a stop at the docks.

I waited.

He waited.

The motor was running. Did he want me to get out and open the door for him? I stared straight ahead at a streetlight until my eyes watered.

And then he was hugging me. Half hugging me, really, because I didn’t hug him back. His cheek rested against my shoulder and his arm reached across my chest to my far side. "Okay then. I had a great time," he said, syrupy and sarcastic. He squeezed me hard and let me go, sliding out of the seat and slamming the door.

Soon I realized I should drive home or he would come back and ask me why I was still sitting there. But for a few moments I enjoyed the residual tingles rippling along my skin like the fireflies leftover from summer, zooming and firing in the dusk. I watched him crutching into the streetlight. He disappeared under the brightness. A boy who was such a threat to my mental health and happiness should not be so tall.