Forget You(35)
Author: Jennifer Echols

"In old cars with ashtrays, everyone puts everything in there." He looked at the earrings rather than me and held out his hand for them. I placed them gently in his palm, my fingertips caressing his skin so briefly before coming away.

He cranked down the window and tossed the earrings outside.

"Doug! Move!" I shook his seat back so he’d let me out. "I may need to replace the settings, but I’m sure the stones are okay."

"Y mean they’re real ?" His voice cracked as he opened the door and half fell out.

"Of course they’re real." I stepped over him and scanned the sandy ground. Luckily they hadn’t disappeared beneath the Porsche. I scooped them up from the sand and turned.

He sat in the driver’s seat again with the door open, foot and cast on the ground outside the car, looking pale and sick.

"Y look like you just saw a ghost. Percocet treating you okay? Or–Here, I found them." I held out the earrings for him to see, in case he envisioned

ou paying me back for losing them. I would never make anyone do something like that.

He pressed his middle finger hard along his eyebrow like he was the one with the headache. "I just had an idea. Y think you could get a couple

ou thousand bucks for those? Because you could sell them and use the money toward a newer car your dad would approve of."

"That’s a great idea," I admitted. "I can’t do it, though. My parents gave me these earrings." I dropped them into my pocket.

"They wouldn’t let you sell them? Even to get something you need more? I couldn’t make that kind of logical argument to my dad, but I’ll bet you could make it to yours."

"I mean, they’re the last thing my mom and my dad gave me together, before they separated last summer." I was pulling on both earlobes, which made me seasick. I put my hands down.

He frowned at me. "Why haven’t you been turning the world upside down looking for your real diamond earrings?"

I shrugged. "I figured they’d turn up. Like my virginity."

He laughed. I laughed with him, but mostly I wanted to watch him laugh. He blushed like a real boy and wiped tears from the corners of his eyes like a real person. I couldn’t step closer because Brandon was my boyfriend. But I wanted to laugh with Doug, hug Doug. A little part of me wanted to be Doug.

Over his laughter I said, "Tell me about losing yours. Was it with that girl from Destin?"

The sun shone into his eyes so the green seemed transparent, like looking into the shallow water and watching the sand shift underneath. He stared over my shoulder at the Porsche, but I knew he saw the girl from Destin. He took her hand and they splashed into the ocean together. He put his arms around her and held her body loosely in the warm water as the tide came in. Late in the afternoon they dried off and walked into town, wandering the tourist trap gift shops and marveling at the wondrous sculptures of pirates that could be crafted out of coconut shells nowadays. He bought her a hamburger and they shared a milk shake at the Grilled Mermaid. Trying to act carefree and beachy, she’d been foolish enough to walk the hot sidewalks barefoot. She cut her toe on a shell in the pavement. He carried her piggyback to his Jeep in the dusk. They drove to the city beach park and made love. It was the first time for both of them, they were in love with each other, and it meant something.

He blinked and looked straight at me.

I swallowed and tried to say smoothly, "What happened to her?"

"Mike told her I’d been to juvie."

I nodded. "That’s what I heard, but I never heard why he did that."

He shrugged. "I guess he liked her or some shit like that. Can’t talk to a girl himself so he has to steal somebody else’s."

I nodded again, as if I was a good listener. Not as if I was a highly interested listener pumping him for information. "Up until then you and Mike had been close friends, right?"

"Right," Doug said carefully. He knew I was up to something.

"And since then, you’ve hardly spoken to each other?"

"Until after the wreck, yeah."

Depending on what had happened Friday night, asking my next question might expose that I had amnesia. I was running out of options for finding out the truth. I chose to trust him. "Then why were you riding in Mike’s car?"

He stared at me. Not a mean stare burning a hole in my head or a vacant stare over my shoulder, but a big-eyed stare in surprise. With his eyes so deep green and his black lashes so long, he’d never looked more hot. And I’d never felt further from him, because he’d just figured me out.

Or not. "When we wrecked?" he asked, like he’d been momentarily confused rather than bowled over.

I stamped my foot. A cloud of fine sand rose around my flip-flop. " Yes, when we wrecked."

He rubbed his hands on his thighs and looked around the junkyard, suddenly uncomfortable. "Y know how Gabriel always says he’s not going to get

ou drunk, so he drives to a party, and then he gets drunk?"

I nodded.

"I left my Jeep at school and rode to the party with Gabriel so I could drive his Honda to his house afterward. Then I could walk over to the school for my Jeep."

That made perfect sense. Doug never drank while he was training. He served as designated driver for people all the time. "But?" I prodded him.

"But somebody else took Gabriel home early, and Mike was the only person left to drive me back to school to get my Jeep."

"So you and Mike were driving north," I mused. "Which means when we hit each other, I was driving south, toward the beach. Toward home. Brandon says I wasn’t with him. Where could I have been?"

"It’s a mystery."

I glared at Doug. The constant snark was one thing. I’d put up with it because I felt like I’d done him wrong times a hundred, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. But for him to make fun of me about this . . . It was too much to take.

Scooping up my megabox of condoms and wrapping both arms around it, I stalked across the junkyard toward the Benz.

Behind me I heard the door of the Bug slam. I could tell from the screech of metal and the thud that the door had fallen off its hinges, but I didn’t turn around.

"Zoey," he called.

I stopped between a tower of TVs and a pile of wheelchairs. The tricky thing about trusting Doug was that I had to stay on his good side so he didn’t tell everyone in my school about my mother despite his promise not to. I didn’t walk back to him, but I did turn with the condom box in front of me like a shield. I waited for him to maneuver down the narrow path winding through the trash.

The afternoon wasn’t hot as Florida went, but when he crutched to a stop in front of me, two drops of sweat loosed themselves from his hairline and raced down his cheek. "I didn’t realize how much memory you lost, Zoey. Why didn’t you tell me?"