Forget You(51)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I’d never opened a condom packet before in my life. I sat up on Doug’s hips and held the packet up to the light to tear it.

"Zoey."

"What. Am I doing it wrong?"

Breathing hard, he reached up with one hand and took the packet from me. "It’s almost two thirty. Y have an appointment to narrowly miss a deer and

ou crash into Mike."

Coaxing had worked before, so I coaxed him again. I lay down on him, my bare br**sts to his warm bare chest, skin to skin, such a strange sensation. I brushed his stubbly cheek with the back of my hand and ran my thumb across his soft lips, echoing caresses he’d given me during the week, which he must have given me Friday night but I hadn’t understood until now. I whispered, "Y owe me."

"I don’t owe you, Zoey," he said sadly. "I only agreed to do this because I thought there would be more after tonight. But this is really all you wanted. I can’t do it. I can’t make it worse than it already is. I know you need this one night, to reconstruct your memory, and I care about you. But I care about me too, and I can’t do this anymore." He sat up, swung his leg and his cast around to the floor, and handed me my bra and my shirt without looking at me.

I wanted to say something to keep him there with me, even if we didn’t make love. More caressing, talking, anything. I knew I shouldn’t have stopped. But he was right. His lies had ruined whatever there had been between us. I didn’t want anything from him beyond tonight. And as badly as I wanted this one night, I wasn’t willing to lie to him to get it. I, for one, was through with lying.

He ducked into his sweatshirt, picked up his crutches, and paused with his hand on the door. "Y have my cell phone number. I’ll keep the same one

ou when I go to college." He rolled his eyes. "If I go to college. I’ll keep it wherever I go." He looked straight at me. "If you ever feel like doing what your mom did, call me."

I shuddered. "I won’t."

"Please." It was the first time I’d ever heard Doug say this word. To anyone.

I shook my head. "I mean, I won’t feel like that."

"If you do, call me. Promise."

I tried to picture feeling that way, and wondered whether I could really bring myself to call Doug if I did. But I couldn’t imagine that feeling. Which was a good sign. I said, "I promise."

He put his hand on my knee and stroked there with his thumb. "I understand I can’t have you. But I want to know you’re in the world with me." Leaning forward on his crutches, he kissed me on the cheek. I got one last whiff of chlorine and the ocean. He made a slow, awkward exit from the car, during which he dropped his crutches twice and nearly fell off the causeway. I had plenty of time to call him back and stop him before he limped back to his house.

And then he was gone.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY life, I was late for school. I dragged myself into the main office on four hours’ of sleep with no parental excuse. I hoped the assistant principal didn’t turn me in to Child Protective Services.

But by the time I interrupted Ms. Northam’s lecture and stumbled down the aisle between the rows of desks in English, I’d forgotten all about that, and I didn’t even notice whether everybody was staring at me. I focused on Doug. He might or might not be hungover. He’d had a long time to recover from his early night of drinking. But I knew he’d missed a pain pill.

Sure enough, his head was down, his face pressed into the open leaves of a battered hardback copy of A Passage to India on his desk (the rest of us had the school’s pristine paperbacks). I’d intended to hand him his glasses, which he’d left on my dashboard last night, and use that as an excuse to talk to him and make sure he was okay.

But Keke had taken my seat behind him. Usually she sat across the room with Lila. It must be too hot for her over there today, with Lila so angry at her.

I dropped his glasses beside the book on his desk, then slipped into the desk across the aisle, behind Connor. Now I could see that Keke’s hand was on Doug’s back.

I resented how Keke had treated me yesterday, but jealousy and fear overrode that. I leaned across the aisle and whispered to her, "Is he okay?"

"Doug?" Ms. Northam prompted. She’d asked a question I hadn’t heard. And she wasn’t very good at identifying who caused disturbances at the back of the room.

Keke whispered to him, "Flat characters," as if she were the friend assigned to protect him and keep him out of trouble today. Which suddenly made me very, very angry.

"Round characters in Aspects of the Novel. " He said it loudly enough for Ms. Northam to hear, but he said it to his desk without lifting his head from the book.

"That’s correct," Ms. Northam said. She stepped to one side until she could see Doug. "Is your leg bothering you?"

"Y ma’am," he told his desk. "My pill will kick in any second now."

es

"Well, go lie down in the nurse’s office while you’re waiting," Ms. Northam said.

Without being asked, Keke slipped his glasses and his books into his backpack and handed it to him. He picked up his crutches and slowly stood to his full height, towering over the class.

I whispered up at him, "Do you want me to go with you?"

He turned and gave me the most evil look with watery eyes. Keke turned from him to me and back to him.

"Aw, have woo been cwying?" Connor asked him. "Do woo need a tissue?"

Doug took a sudden step toward Connor. Connor fell backward out of his desk. An uneasy titter rose from the boys in the room.

Doug turned and limped up the aisle and out the door. Immediately there was a metallic crash like he’d fallen against the lockers. Keke half rose. Ms. Northam nodded at her. Before I could do anything to stop Keke or explain that I was the one who was supposed to help Doug, Keke disappeared after him.

He didn’t need me. 16 Amid jabs of, "Skeered?" from other boys, Connor picked himself up off the floor and sat in his desk. I waited until Ms. Northam’s lecture had absorbed the attention of the room again before I whispered over his shoulder, "Remember in tenth grade when Doug got suspended for starting a fight with Aaron Spears, I think, outside history class?"

Connor in front of me and Nate beside me both nodded.

"What set Doug off?"

"Aaron made a kung fu joke," Connor said. "Wait, that’s not even Japanese. A karate joke."

Nate shook his head. "That was a completely different fight, last year with Jimmy Gillespie in back of Jamaica Joe’s. When Doug got suspended, Aaron did his eyes like this." Nate placed his fingers at the corners of his eyes and slanted them up.