Forget You(30)
Author: Jennifer Echols

"They don’t?" he croaked, then cleared his throat.

"Even Keke and Lila don’t know, and they know everything."

He laughed bitterly. "I didn’t belong there, if that’s what you’re asking. But I learned a thing or two. If you ever want to sell crack, I can show you every possible place to hide it."

I cringed. "No, I’m asking why you went."

"I thought you knew," he said flatly.

"How would I know?"

"Y mom defended me."

our

The waiter came back and placed rectangular plates and small dishes in front of us. After he left, I did what Doug did, poured soy sauce into the small dish.

Doug deftly nabbed a block of raw tuna with chopsticks and held it in my direction. "Try?"

I shook my head and concentrated on balancing a piece of my roll between my chopsticks. I was not good at this. And I hated to ruin the beautiful design of the plate, perfectly matching circles of rice encasing dots of pink and green. Finally I dipped one in soy sauce, chewed it slowly and swallowed, to give myself time to think. "I didn’t know my mom defended you."

"Of course she did. She’s the public defender. My dad sure as hell wouldn’t pay for my lawyer. He was the one who wanted me to go to juvie."

"For . . . ?" I was glad we were eating. We looked at our food instead of each other. That seemed to be key for Doug and me to have a conversation. The conversation was so charged that I couldn’t taste what I ate, but that was a small price to pay for what I was dying to know.

"I went to juvie because I ran away," he said.

I thought I’d misunderstood him. "From home?" I clarified, frowning into my soy sauce.

"Y I ran away from home, like you do when you’re six and you get mad because your dad turned off Scooby-Doo."

es,

This story didn’t make sense to me. I began to realize that Doug kept his own counsel, and that he probably viewed this terse conversation as "opening up." I would need to drag every detail out of him. "Why’d you get sent to juvie just for that?"

"My dad asked the judge to send me. Y know, to straighten me out once and for all." In his bitter tone I recognized the bark of his father calling him a

ou fag. I had lifted up a stepping- stone to find snakes teeming underneath.

"Straighten you out. What was so crooked about you?" I pictured him shoplifting, smoking pot. Someone who didn’t spend a lot of time around him might suspect him of these things now, as a senior. He had that edgy personality, that cavalier expression to his eyebrows. But he would never do anything to jeopardize his chance to swim. And back in ninth grade . . . as I remembered him, he was even less likely to make juvie-worthy moves. Laughing and clueless, he hadn’t yet developed the honeyed sarcasm. I remembered being floored the first time someone told me Doug Fox was in juvie, not out of school with the flu.

"Oh! Pffft." He waved his chopsticks in the air, shifting again to the voice of his father. "What wasn’t crooked about me? I read too much. I wanted to swim instead of playing tough-man team sports like football. And my dad couldn’t convince me to join the navy."

"The navy! Y ou?"

"Exactly." His hands moved in the air in front of him. "He would conscript me on my eighteenth birthday if that were still legal. But I know I couldn’t stand people telling me what to do. And actually having to do it. On a submarine, where I was caught." Still gripping his chopsticks in his fourth finger and pinky, his pointer fingers and thumbs closed around an imaginary throat. Then his hands fell to the table in defeat, submerging and sinking.

I laughed, because a little part of me still clung to the hope he was kidding.

He wasn’t. He pinned me with an angry look. "My brother acts half dead since he came back from the navy, like he’s been lobotomized."

Then his angry expression faded. He realized what he’d said. Lobotomies and other treatments for mental illness were one of the topics we did not want to talk about.

The key was to avoid looking at each other. I gazed at my plate again, dipped another slice of roll in soy sauce, and hoped he would follow suit.

"Why’d you run away?" I asked offhandedly, slipping the bite into my mouth.

"My dad hit me." His finger tapped double-time on his knee, twice as fast as the beat of Japanese rock music whispering on the speakers overhead. "Sorry to lay all this on you. No wonder no one’s ever asked."

No one’s ever dared, I thought. I put my chopsticks down on my plate. Throughout high school I’d been a problem solver and a good listener. But I wasn’t sure I could handle this marlin I’d reeled in. "Does he still hit you?" I murmured.

"No. I’m bigger than I used to be." His voice was tight. His hand on his knee had stopped. "Anyway, it was this weird time. When my mom died, Cody was still around, and the three of us were okay. It was only after Cody got shipped to the Persian Gulf that my dad and I found out there’s nothing between us. Nothing." He struck the ends of both chopsticks on his plate to even them, then turned them over and struck them again, considering his last bite of sushi. He put it in his mouth and chewed slowly. "Eight months to graduation."

I picked up my water glass. "To graduation."

We clinked glasses and sipped, watching each other.

"Well," I said, "I had no idea why you went to juvie or that my mother was your lawyer. She’s very big on attorney-client privilege. I’m sure she has dirt on half the town, and I’ve never heard a peep about it."

"She wouldn’t have told you she was defending your homecoming date?"

We eyed each other. The look on his face was one I recognized. It was the glare he gave me right before he rolled his eyes at me, the expression Keke was so good at imitating.

"Y didn’t tell your mother we were going to homecoming?" He sighed.

I shifted on my cushion. "I don’t remember exactly. It was three years ago."

It was his turn to stare me down, one black brow cocked, until I confessed. "If I didn’t tell her," I said quickly, "it wasn’t because of you. I felt gangly. I didn’t involve my parents in my social life when I didn’t have to. I felt embarrassed about that sort of thing." Still had, until last Monday night. "And when you came back to school and acted like I didn’t exist, I didn’t possess the social skills to waltz up to you and demand to know what happened."

"I was mad at you because you’d gone to homecoming with Carey Lewis!"

Come to think of it, so I had. I hadn’t even remembered that boy’s name. His family had moved inland to Alabama shortly afterward. They were scared of hurricanes.