The One That I Want(18)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I guess it was kind of strange that Addison was a debutante and I wasn’t. Addison’s mom was stretching to scrape up the money. They lived in what was jokingly referred to as the “slum” of this part of Atlanta, which meant the houses were made of brick, not marble, and had four bedrooms instead of fourteen. But Addison’s mom was still trying to make up to society for her embezzling husband.

And me, I’d never wanted to be a debutante. I’d been overweight when I had to decide. I didn’t want that kind of attention. I probably would have had to dye over the streaks in my hair. It just wasn’t who I was. Astonishingly, my mom had brought up the idea only once. And unlike Addison bullying me into things, when I said no, my mom had let it go.

So a lot of weekends without Addison stretched before me. I felt a mix of relief that I wouldn’t have to put up with her, and stir-craziness that there wouldn’t be any driving around town looking for Hot Male Action (by which Addison meant whistling to boys shooting hoops at the park). The silence in my house was broken only by the sound of my mom tapping on the computer keyboard in her office, which echoed down the hall and around the marble stairwell. I could only stay so long outside in the ninety-five-degree heat, practicing baton.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I asked my mom to drop me off at the library while she ran some errands. This branch sat between Max and Carter’s high school and mine. I figured it would have their high school yearbook from last May.

I was right. I snagged it from the shelves. I told myself I was only making sure that Max and Carter were who they said they were, and that they had not in fact been attending serial killer camp at Georgia Tech. I could have looked them up online, but social pages were easy to fake. I was smarter than that. I had to protect Addison, because she was too trusting to say no to any handsome stranger who asked her out. Or too horny.

The thought of Addison being horny for Max made me so tense that I accidentally ripped a page as I turned it. I took a deep breath to calm down, and looked around to make sure a librarian wasn’t about to kick me out for destroying the collection.

I thumbed through to the football team pages and found Max and Carter in the junior varsity group photo. They were also in the varsity photo. Lots of varsity teams dressed out their junior varsity players in case the juniors and seniors got hurt, and to make the team look bigger and more menacing. The boys’ faces were so small in both photos that I wouldn’t have recognized them except for their names in the fine print. To make sure they hadn’t looked up a couple of real students and given Addison and me false names in an elaborate serial killer ploy, I paged through to the individual pictures of last year’s sophomore class.

Kichirou Maximilian Hirayama. That was Max all right, with an expression of utter joy on his face, like the photographer had told him history’s funniest joke. I smiled just looking at him.

I flipped several more pages. Carter Nelson. He frowned. I’d seen similar expressions of the faces of starting football players in high school game programs, but usually not in their yearbook pictures. Their girlfriends would complain. Nobody wanted to look at that.

Another photo caught my eye as I thumbed through last year’s sophomores. Max was seated at what appeared to be a lunchroom table, surrounded by other students, with an open box in front of him. It must have been his birthday. Ribbon and paper were scattered across the table. He had that same look on his face, that deep-down happiness. All the other kids in the picture were laughing too. Maybe one of these beautiful girls had been his girlfriend back then, and she felt so warm inside because she’d bought him the perfect gift.

Wow, I was imagining way too much. I would need to be careful when I saw Max next Friday so I didn’t let it slip that I’d seen this picture and wondered about his life outside the Varsity and the MARTA system. I would seem like a stalker.

For that reason, I didn’t thumb through the yearbook anymore, even to search for his picture in club photos to find out what his hobbies were. Any knowledge like that would give away my crush. I had made a mistake like that when Robert left his schedule on the lunchroom table where I could see it at the beginning of school last year. I had memorized it, and later I had made a point of walking very slowly by his classes. My crush was so painfully obvious that he had cornered me on a band trip and stressed to me that he wanted to be just friends, as if he was afraid the other trumpets would find out I liked him and make fun of him for it. Mortifying!

It was better that I didn’t know too much about Max. The less I knew, the less I needed to forget. I closed the book and considered running the hem of my T-shirt along it to wipe off my fingerprints. I reshelved it without any crime scene cover-up and went outside to meet my mom.

A few minutes before Max was supposed to pick me up on Friday, I sat on the front porch to wait for him. My house was imposing. Grandiose. Embarrassing. I thought hanging out on the steps in my rock band T-shirt and shorts might lessen the impact of the thick polished marble columns and the fourteen-foot-tall windows.

Also, I did not want Max to ring the doorbell. My dad had a gag bell installed that sounded like a gong in a palace. It was a joke. I didn’t think it was funny. I’d complained about it to my mom, but she didn’t know how to change the sound, and she’d never bothered to hire someone to fix it.

When Max pulled into the brick driveway in the longest old clunker I had ever seen, I crossed the lawn to meet him. But I stopped short and did a double take when he unfolded his tall frame from the car. He’d grown a goatee. I thought he’d been cuter clean shaven. Fresh-faced and younger-looking.

But as I considered him, I decided maybe “cute” was not my favorite look for him anyway. “Cute” had gotten my attention in the first place, but mature and handsomely devilish-looking would definitely keep my attention. Of course, it didn’t matter whether he had my attention or not. He was dating Addison, so he would never know.

7

As I stood there in the hot evening sunshine, brushing away the gnats I’d stirred up in the grass, I felt the most profound sadness. Max’s goatee had surprised me because I hadn’t seen him in a week. I had missed six days of his classmates teasing him about the awkward, in-between, you-really-need-to-shave phase as his goatee grew in. It was just facial hair this time, but our lives had so little to do with each other, really. He could lose a leg and it would be a week before I found out.

Squinting against the sunlight, he backed against the car door to close it. “Hi. Do I look foreign in this?”