A Blind Spot for Boys (3 page)

“What’re you doing here?” I asked, throwing my arms around her. Reb’s so tiny, I’m always half-afraid I’ll crush her, but from the way she squeezed me tight, I could tell she had packed on some serious muscles from lugging paint cans for her house-painting job.

“I got home a day early!”

The last time I saw Reb was two weeks ago. Juggling a part-time job and two internships during her gap year before college seriously ate into our time together. I said, “You’re
free
? Today?”

“But you’re not,” she guessed before greeting Mom: “Hey, Mrs. Wilde!” Then, lowering her voice so Mom wouldn’t overhear, Reb asked, “So who’s the new guy?”

“There’s no new guy.”

“Mmm hmm. So who’re you meeting, then?”

“A guy,” I mumbled.

“What was that? Did you say ‘a guy’? As in ‘a new guy’?”

“Sorry, I can’t believe it, but I have to run,” I said when Mom tapped her watch. “Mom’s driving me to my non-date.”

Without missing a beat, Reb told my mom, “I can drive Shana.” A few minutes later, Mom sailed out the door, shoving a bag of
cookies at us, and as soon as she was gone, Reb wriggled her fingers at me. “Where’s your camera? Come on, show me the goods.”

“I hope you’re hungry, because I am,” I deflected as my stomach rumbled again. In the kitchen, I plated the rest of the cookies Mom had baked yesterday, an excellent first effort at replicating one of Ginny’s tried-and-true recipes. The cookie defense held Reb off for a good ten minutes, but then she brushed her hands together and settled down for some juicy girl talk.

“The Boy,” she reminded me, as she leaned forward at the table.

“Fine,” I sighed and powered the camera on, advancing to my favorite photo of Quattro. I wasn’t expecting the excited little flutter in my stomach at his expression: searing. He stared straight into the camera as though daring me to look away. When I angled the camera toward Reb, her lips curved into a smirk. “Well, hello, New Guy. What time’s the date?”

“This isn’t a date,” I told her, and glanced at the clock. Time had sped up the way it always did when we were together. It was now nine thirty. I sprang to my feet. “Oh, shoot, we gotta go.”

I quickly ushered Reb outside as I grabbed my messenger bag and tucked the camera back in safely. After locking the front door, we dashed through my pocket neighborhood of fifteen storybook-size cottages, built on a plot of communal property adjacent to wetlands. My family had transplanted here after the twins left for college, seven years ago, downsizing so my parents could afford two tuitions and a mortgage. As we exited the gate to the street where Reb had parked her minivan, she asked, “And you met this mystery man how?”

“When he ruined my picture at the Gum Wall.” I supplied the details about yesterday’s fiasco as we settled into the minivan. Few people aside from Reb and Ginny could understand my frustration about losing the perfect shot for my portfolio. But after discussing a novel together every month for the past four years in our mom-and-me book club, we Bookster Babes knew virtually everything there was to know about one another, from smoking pot (why kill my few brain cells?) to self-starvation (Ginny’s coconut chocolate-chip cookies; need we say more?) to sex. (Reb just lost her virginity to her longtime boyfriend, Ginny had come close, and I was the Virgin Queen.) Maybe I’d surreptitiously read one too many of Mom’s relationship books—and I’d definitely heard one too many of Mom’s
sine qua non
lectures—but I was holding out for true love. Anything less than that just seemed to make sex meaningless. And I, for one, refused to be meaningless.

Still, not even my besties knew about Dom. At least, I didn’t think they did.

Hands on the steering wheel, Reb asked, “Where to?”

“The Four Seasons.”

“Fancy.”

“He’s in town to scope out UW.”

She waggled her eyebrows at me and put the minivan into drive. “An older man, huh?”

Don’t you think you should have told me you were underage?
I blushed at the memory of Dom’s parting words, answering now more defensively than I intended: “He’s just a year older.”

At my combative tone, Reb’s eyebrows furrowed. “What’s up with you?”

“Sorry, just a little sensitive, I guess,” I apologized, as I dug out the cookies my mom had pushed on us, handing one to Reb as a peace offering. “So Brian had his mother call mine yesterday.”

“She did
not
call your mom.”

After a therapeutic bite of butterscotch cookie, I gestured with the remnants. “She actually told my mom I was a pathological heartbreaker! Like I had some kind of disease!”

“That’s just wrong, but…”

“What?”

“Okay, I’m not saying you’re pathological or anything,” Reb said carefully as she glanced over her shoulder to change lanes, “but what’s with all these guys? I mean, it’s like you’ve become some kind of Ellis Island: Give me your jocks and your losers.”

“Reb, not you, too,” I said. One analysis of my love life a day was more than enough.

“Well, what about that guy Doug? The one who used more product in his hair than I ever had.”

“Or ever would.” I shrugged. Three dates in a row full of excuses for why he was perpetually late, and it was good-bye, Doug.

“And what about that control freak? Mr. Texter Guy?”

I frowned, trying to remember. “Oh, you mean Stephen? Yeah, he was a mistake.” After two dates, he thought he had the right to monopolize my calendar. So I voted him off mine.

“And Brian obviously lived in some kind of self-sustaining ecosystem of him, himself, and his mom,” Reb said.

At that, we both laughed the way she, Ginny, and I do on late summer nights in Reb’s treehouse, raucous and loud, when we’re hyper from too much sugar and too little sleep.

“They’re all nice guys,” I said.

“Yeah, and they’re all pretty good looking and can form complete sentences, but, Shana, no.” Reb slowed when we hit the traffic going into downtown Seattle. “The longest you’ve been with anyone in the last—what? year?—has been a week.”

“Two weeks.”

Her hands clenched around the steering wheel like she was strangling someone. Then, she turned her gaze from the road to peer closely at me before looking away. “I’m not sure what happened, but when you’re ready to talk…”

As used to Reb’s spot-on insights as I was—after all, the women in her family had uncanny premonitions—I felt flustered and embarrassed. I clasped my hands together. According to my friends, I was the quote-unquote idiot savant of boys. Little did they know the truth: I was pure idiot. Eight dates over one summer with Dom back when I was almost sixteen shouldn’t have slayed me. I knew that. I was Little Miss Rah-Rah Independence on the outside, chanting about seeing the world before settling down, but I had harbored a secret fantasy of me and Dom. He wasn’t just older and wiser, and he didn’t just have to-die-for biceps and superhero shoulders. He was turning his Big Plans for his life into reality, halfway done with business school and had already seen a huge chunk of the world. In other words, he was everything high school boys were not and he was everything I thought I wanted. I could so easily picture him in the future with his jet-setting career, and me with mine. It was a match made in
sine qua non
heaven.

Or so I thought.

I fidgeted with my seat belt, then switched the subject abruptly: “What’re you up to this week?”

Reb’s primary job was helping her grandmother lead tours to sacred places around the world, like Bhutan, where the gross national product is measured in happiness. I was envious—can you imagine the photos Reb could make in locales that most people never visit? But she was content with the camera feature on her cell phone. It killed me.

Reb took her eye off the traffic to stare at me. “Oh, my gosh, you know that treehouse builder I like?”

I laughed. “You mean, the one you’re obsessed with?”

“Well, a new resort in Bend asked him to build a treehouse restaurant. Zip lining will be the only way to get in. And he wants me to join his team.”

“That’s so cool! So when are you starting?”

“In a few weeks, right after Machu Picchu,” Reb said as she merged onto the exit ramp that would deposit us a few blocks from Quattro’s hotel.

“Oh, just Machu Picchu,” I teased with a careless wave.

She gasped so abruptly, I thought we were about to smash into the car in front of us. Instead, Reb reached over to grab my arm. “You should come! There’re two spots left. You could take one of them. You’d be saving me.”

“Reb.” I gasped as her boa constrictor grip squeezed tighter. “My arm. Losing circulation.”

“Oh, sorry.” She released me. “Only two hundred people can be on the trail, you know. And all the trail passes have been sold out for the season. What do you think? It’d be an adventure.”

Adventure. I could practically hear Quattro’s echoing challenge:
I thought photographers leaned into adventure.
I sighed. “I really can’t. Midterms. I can’t even stand the thought of studying for them twice.”

Nearing Quattro’s hotel, I stole a surreptitious look at myself in the side mirror. Miraculously, my lip gloss was still in place.

“Okay, I know this is going to sound like whining,” Reb said, glancing at me with an anxious expression, “but the trip’s going to be rough. Grandma Stesha is really worried about some of the people who’re going on it.”

Who wouldn’t be? Her grandmother’s tours attracted a certain type of clientele, the kind who believed in fairies and water sprites, crystals and auras. Reb had told me once that Stesha was a rock star in spirituality circles, with some clients signing up for a new Dreamwalks trip every single year. So I guessed, “Repeat customers demanding to see impossible star alignments or something?”

“No. A couple of grievers.”

Grieving. Now, that I understood. Time might heal all wounds, but here it was, mid-March. Seven months and three days after Dom broke up with me, I was still waiting.

Once upon an almost-sixteenth birthday, my brother Max was going to miss my big day because he was moving to San Francisco for a new job at a PR agency and wouldn’t have the time or money to come home in seven weeks to celebrate. This, after being gone for two quarters in London already. So he promised we’d spend his last day in town together, only him and me, starting with a
shot of espresso (so adult!) at a coffee shop near the university where he had just finished his MBA. I should have known better when he suggested I bring my computer “just in case.” After we ordered our drinks, Max gave me the first of my presents: a shapeless UW sweatshirt. I hadn’t even taken a sip of my espresso when he had to take an “important call.”

“I’ll pick you up in an hour,” Max promised before he darted out of the coffee shop for a last-minute meeting with the professor who’d connected him to his job. “An hour and a half tops.”

Three hours later, Max hadn’t returned, and my coffee was long finished. Chilled from the overeager air-conditioning, I slipped on the sweatshirt. Still cold, I walked out into the hot July sun, lost in a fog of color, texture, and imagery from whittling a few weeks of photo safaris down to a single photo essay. Was the fall fashion trend in two months really going to be about long gloves, beanie hats, and boy trousers? Maybe it was going to be plaid paired with—

“You think you know everything!” a guy vented in the parking lot, his tone contemptuous. “You’re always the teacher!”

My eyes jerked from the blue sky to a heavyset guy as babyfaced as the petite blonde in front of him. The Yeller’s face was a bombastic red as he jabbed his index finger toward her. “You just can’t stop!”

“I was just—” she started to speak, shaking her head.

“Just! It’s always ‘just’ with you!”

Her lips clamped together. She wasn’t allowed a single sentence, except for “Yes, you’re right” and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“That’s all you ever are. Sorry after the fact.” The Yeller’s next lacerating words were lost on me because I was staring at the wide-eyed girl who was caught in the hailstorm of her boyfriend’s you-you-you rage. About a year ago, the Booksters had read Reb’s pick, a novel about a girl who escaped an abusive relationship, each attack softened with a Judas kiss.

Then a black BMW screamed into the parking lot and jerked to an abrupt stop. A tall guy who filled out a black Gore-Tex jacket embroidered with
UW CREW
jumped from the car. He didn’t bother to shut the door but ran straight to the Yeller.

“Do you know what I’m going to do to you if you ever so much as look at my sister again?” His voice was lethal and quiet. “Do you?”

“Come on, Dom. It’s not what you think,” the girl protested.

Without a thought to my own safety, I crossed the parking lot to place my hand on the girl’s bony arm. She looked through me as if she were blind. How long had this gone on?

“Let me buy you a coffee,” I said. When she didn’t answer, I stared deep into those hurt-clouded eyes. “You need a mocha fix. Come on.”

“Go,” said Dom, his eyes focused on the Yeller. “Mona, go.”

As the door closed behind Mona and me, Dom met my eyes through the window as though we were a couple who acted in wordless synchronicity. I shivered then, not from the air-conditioning but with knowledge. I had been twice gifted on my birthday: the college sweatshirt that camouflaged the high school junior I’d be this fall and the college boy who made me feel seen.