Forget You (6 page)

Or, in an alternative scenario so awful that I hardly dared consider it, Doug's invitation for a date was some kind of blackmail. He sure was being nice to me after my dad's threat to his brother. And his brother sat in his pickup in the center of my neighborhood's courtyard. He had come to our home and stuck his feet into the ocean breeze as if to say
I know everything about your mother.

The door banged shut behind me. Only then I realized I'd left it open. Doug and I stood in a bubble of escaped air-conditioning in the hot day. His hot finger traced a
Z
on my back, through my T-shirt. Every one of his touches had been a quirky brush against an unexpected part of my body. But this time I was determined to keep things cold.

I turned to him. As I spun, he kept his finger at the same level so it trailed around my shoulder and across my breast, making me shudder. His fingertip centered over my heart as I faced him.

This had gone too far. I had a new relationship with Brandon that I didn't want to ruin. And if Doug did have some wild blackmail scenario in mind, reminding him I was with Brandon might make him think twice.

I grabbed his hand, pulled it down to waist level, and squeezed it. "Doug, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but Brandon is my boyfriend." Of course, in rejecting Doug, I was giving him yet another reason to hate me, and to get revenge on me by telling the whole town about my mother. I hoped against hope he would be reasonable for once. I looked down, past our clasped hands at the expensive faux-weathered wood floor of the porch.

My mom had told me it was important to look people in the eye, especially men, when you were trying to control a situation.

I was scared to see the expression on Doug's face, but I forced my eyes upward from the rubber tips of his crutches, his one tanned foot in a battered leather flip-flop, and the other splinted leg he held awkwardly a few inches off the ground. Upward to his cargo shorts, loose around his waist. Like me, he must have lost weight since competition started. The heathered gray waistband of his underwear peeked out above his shorts. His
FSU SWIMMING
T-shirt was so old and loved, the dark red had faded to a doubtful magenta.

Finally my gaze reached his clean-shaven jaw locked in anger, his angry eyes. He glared down at me with exactly the look he'd given me last night at the game.

Hastily I dropped his hand.

And then he took a slow breath. His chest expanded and his broad shoulders rose. He exhaled through his nose. The anger left his eyes. He gave me a small nod. "You mean you need to break up with Brandon officially? You want to tell him in person to get closure? I mean, yeah, but, you're not going
out
with him tonight, are you? You don't need to go out with him to break up with him."

"I'm not breaking up with him." The porch was shady, but even the sunlight beyond us in the courtyard was too bright and fueled the throbbing in my forehead. "Doug, Brandon is my boyfriend. I'm glad you're okay. I'm glad Mike's okay. I'm grateful to you for pulling me out of the car. But I'm with Brandon."

"I don't understand," Doug said coldly.

"I don't know how to make it more clear." The golf ball in my head grew to billiard ball size. "Last night doesn't change the fact that you've hated me since the ninth grade."

He rocked backward and shifted the pads of the crutches under his arms. "No, I haven't," he said innocently. He might have used his customary honeyed sarcasm. I couldn't tell because the billiard ball had grown to a bowling ball inside my head.

"You made fun of me to the swim team at the football game," I reminded him.

"When? No, I didn't."

He seemed so adamant, I wondered whether I could have been wrong. I hadn't actually
heard
the boy half of the swim team make fun of me. But this much I was sure of. "You told me I'm a spoiled brat!"

He gaped at me. "I already apologized for that, Zoey."

I didn't remember him apologizing. Now
brain damage
was etched across the bowling ball banging against the inside of my skull. "Look, I have a headache, for real. Thanks for checking on me." I took a step back from him, giving him room to move down the porch steps to his brother's truck.

He stared blankly at me with those beautiful eyes for a moment more. Then he said, "If I weren't still high from the drugs the hospital gave me intravenously, I think I would be very angry with you right now."

"What's new?" Saying it made me realize what was new. This misunderstanding with Doug might do more than make our relations worse. It might ruin what I had with Brandon too. "Oh God. You didn't
tell
anybody about last night, did you?"

"I haven't had time."

"Well, don't!" I shrieked. "Doug, you can't say anything to Brandon. Promise me you'll tell Mike and your brother not to say anything to
anybody.
" Brandon was laid back, but I couldn't expect him to understand my behavior with Doug in the grass last night when I didn't understand it myself. I couldn't lose him just because Doug had dragged me from the wreck!

"Fine." Doug heaved himself across the porch and down the first step. Tall though he was, he was one of the most agile boys I'd ever seen. It was bizarre to watch him miss the next step with his crutch and stumble forward.

I leaped to catch him.

He caught himself with the crutch in time. My hand on his elbow was unnecessary. He was so much heavier than me, I wouldn't have been able to prevent him from tumbling into the sea oats anyway. In full sunlight now, he moved out from under my fingers, across the stone courtyard, without looking back.

I almost ran forward to help again as he struggled to open the truck door while balancing on one leg and one crutch. The bare feet disappeared from the window, and Officer Fox leaned across the seat to open the door. Doug tossed his crutches into the payload, hopped a few times, and dove into the truck, wincing as he dragged his broken leg after him. He never looked up at me. Officer Fox shook his head. He glanced behind him to back the truck in a turn, then drove forward and made a fast, sharp, un-policeman-like turn onto the road.

As soon as the gate folded shut behind the truck, I dashed back inside and ran through the house to my bathroom to double-check the counter and drawers for a prescription painkiller bottle. Nothing. And there was no way something like that would have gotten lost under the surface. I'd just moved back in, after all, and I kept my room and my bathroom neat so I never misplaced anything.

I sank onto my bed, reached for my cell phone on my bedside table, and held it facedown in my lap for a few seconds, wishing. I needed my mother right now. If I hadn't checked my phone since the football game last night, this was the longest I'd gone without making sure there was no message from her. I actually crossed my fingers and turned the phone over.

Nothing. I was still alone.

So I headed out back to the pool on a fact-finding mission. When my parents built this house a few years ago, I'd said, and my mom had agreed, that it was silly to build a pool overlooking an ocean. Wasn't the ocean good enough for us? Wasn't that why people vacationed in Florida in the first place? Building a pool at your oceanside house was like the theme restaurants in town--Jamaica Joe's, Tahiti Cuisine, California Eatin'--all evoking a different place on the ocean as if the place we already had on the ocean was somehow inferior. Jamaica and Tahiti and California probably had restaurants named Florida Foodie. It was like my dad and Ashley living in a beach house on the Emerald Coast and flying to Hawaii to get married.

But my mom had said people who'd grown up with money, like her, and me, didn't care about showing off that they had it, whereas people who'd grown up without it, like my dad, cared very much. All the other houses in the neighborhood had a pool overlooking the ocean, so my dad needed one too. He also needed a Benz, a Rolex, a flat-screen TV that took up his entire bedroom wall, a mistress, a love child, and a divorce. And now, with a wedding in Hawaii, a trophy wife.

"Good morning!" Ashley called brightly as I dragged myself out the back door. She and my dad, wearing matching robes, lay in cushioned teak lounge chairs in the shade of a potted palm. The roar of the ocean, which my dad had moved here to be near, could hardly be heard over the wall protecting the pool. My dad stubbed out his cigarette.

"Good morning!" I replied even more brightly. Normally I tried to stay out of Ashley's face. I didn't want to be the spoiled brat my dad expected me to be. However, a post-car crash greeting as enthusiastic as hers begged for such a response. Doug was right: I'd become sarcastic overnight. Or maybe it was just the headache. I sat down on the foot of the chair next to my dad's.

Still grinning at me, she reached for my dad's hand. He did her one better and massaged between her fingers with his thumb. Like I was a threat to their relationship and they needed to show solidarity.

I didn't care. My head was about to fall off. "Where are my pain pills?"

They looked at each other. At least, they turned toward each other, but I couldn't see their eyes behind their his-and-hers designer sunglasses. They turned back to me. My dad said, "The hospital didn't give you anything. You're not supposed to take anything stronger than Tylenol because it might mask symptoms if there were something really wrong with your head. They told you this four times last night!" He sounded angry with me, and then I understood why. He spat toward Ashley, "There goes Hawaii. We have to take her back to the hospital. And another hurricane's forming in the Gulf. God knows how long we'll be grounded if we miss this flight."

I found myself concentrating on how handsome he was, how manly and tall and tan, as he said to me, "You'd better be damn sure you have amnesia."

I wasn't sure what he was getting at. The pain in my head brought tears to my eyes, but through the throbbing I was beginning to realize I was in big trouble with my dad. "What?"

He let go of Ashley's hand, leaned forward with a creak of the lounge chair, and counted off the offenses to him on long, shaking fingers. "Ashley and I plan this trip," first finger, "and your mother picks that very week to crack up," second finger, "you total your car the day before we leave," third finger, "and now you have
amnesia
?" He moved his extended pinky finger close to my face. "If that's your story, I will take you back to the hospital." He made a fist. "But by God, I will make sure they lock you up in the loony bin with your mother."

5

In my mind I was back in my mother's bedroom, trying to fix everything, but I just sat there, helpless, with one hand pressed to the throbbing in my head, watching my mother die quietly.

Ashley shook her head at me and rolled her eyes as if my dad was being silly. As if what he had just said to me could be considered a silly, impatient thing to say to his daughter when he was under a lot of stress with a Hawaiian vacation planned.

Then she reached for my dad's hand and spoke in that calming, motherly tone I did not like at all. "Clyde. They said the concussion confused her and that's very common. They said she might not remember the entire night, and if she didn't, there wouldn't be anything they could do." She turned back to me. "You don't remember last night?"

"Oh, sure, I remember," I lied. My words came out gravely. I cleared my throat. "My head really hurts. I was hoping a nurse had taken mercy and slipped you some pills for me on our way out."

"Sorry," Ashley said with an exaggerated
sorry
face, bottom lip poked out. "The nurses were preoccupied with your boyfriend."

"Doug?" The gremlin in my head had given up on the balls of increasing size and was now taking whacks at the inside of my skull with a baseball bat. "You know my boyfriend, Brandon. He worked at Slide with Clyde with us this summer? You hired him?"

"Ohhhh." She and my dad gave each other another look through their sunglasses. Ashley said, "We thought you'd gotten together with Doug, the way the two of you were acting last night."

"Right. That was because of the wreck. We were so relieved to be alive." I hoped I sounded embarrassed instead of mortified. No wonder Doug had thought we were together now and I would break up with Brandon for him.
What had I done?
Had I freaking humped Doug Fox in the ER?

"Wasn't he the one there with the policeman last Monday at the emergency room?" my dad barked. "And suddenly you're in a wreck with him?"

"I have almost every class with Doug, and we're on the swim team together." I had been ready to accuse Doug with some conspiracy theory a few minutes ago, but now that my dad verbalized it, I heard how ridiculous it sounded.

"Honey!" Ashley patted my dad's hand insistently, glancing at her diamond watch. "We need to leave for the airport
right now
and we haven't finished packing, haven't showered . . ."

My dad stood and held out a strong hand to help up his fiancee. Ashley continued to fill the void among the three of us with busy talk until they escaped inside, leaving me alone on the edge of my seat, straining my ears for the familiar breath-sounds of the ocean.

Dizzy and sick, I wandered into my bathroom and found a bottle of over-the-counter pain pills. I took two. Examined the label. Under absolutely no circumstances was I to take more than two at a time. I shook out another and swallowed that. Read the label again and wondered who had written it and how serious she was. Then slammed the bottle into a drawer. It was too much, calculating the line between reasonable under the circumstances and overdose.

I filled the bathtub. This would use all the hot water and ruin the showers for my dad and Ashley, but they probably were taking one together anyway. Then I pulled off my damp clothes. And got another shock when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

Mottled purple extended from my left shoulder diagonally down my breast and disappeared at my waist on my right side.

I squinted into the mirror and tried to picture the wreck. It was dark. It was raining. A deer appeared in the road. I swerved and stomped the brakes. My car skidded on the slick road and crashed into Mike's Miata, hard enough to heave me forward and snap my seat belt. My head whacked the rearview mirror. I sat up and saw the boys past the crumpled hood of the Miata, in the front seat: Mike trapped behind the wheel, fumbling for his phone, Doug in pain and struggling to open the passenger door.

No, I didn't remember a bit of this.

I shook my head--mistake, renewal of throbbing--and sank into the bathtub. This would make me feel better, to scrub off the dirt and germs and God knew what from unknown people and places. I wanted clean, dry clothes. I wanted straight, smooth, tangle-free hair.

But first I wanted to soak. Not to relax, exactly. That would have been impossible with the noise of Ashley and my dad in their room over my head, rushing around getting ready for their trip (or just Ashley rushing around and my dad lying on the bed watching CNBC). At a particularly hard
bump
overhead, I jumped, sloshing water against the sides of the tub. That was okay. The way I felt, I would never relax again. I just tried to clear my mind and start over, like rebooting a computer when it got clogged with spyware, so I could make sense of what had happened.

My mind wouldn't reboot. The same window kept popping up, the one snippet of the last twelve hours I did remember: Doug coming to my car and pulling me out of the wreck. I suppose it was because of the concussion, but I didn't recall the snippet with shock or fear or pain or anything but giddiness at being saved by Doug. If my memory of this was accurate, I'd acted like such a dork, no wonder he thought we'd connected and I'd fallen for him for real.

His wet black hair lay against his skin glowing white in the headlights. His voice rumbled in my ear. He smelled like chlorine. After twenty replays, I realized my subconscious was trying to tell me something. The wreck had been awful, but some elements of it I
needed
to be true, only changed a bit. I'd had sex with Brandon last Monday, and despite my best efforts, I hadn't seen him since--or if I had, I didn't remember. What if he'd been in the other car instead of Mike and Doug? What if he were my hero?

"Zoey," said Brandon. Did he have a broken leg like Doug? No, he wasn't hurt--at least, not yet. He reached into the Bug, lifted me out, and carried me across the grass. Behind us, the Bug exploded (the deer was clear of the blast zone). Even as big and solid as Brandon was, the shock wave slammed him to the ground. He twisted in midair so he took the brunt of the landing and I was cushioned on top of him.

"Brandon, I'm so sorry," I murmured.

"Sorry!" he groaned, in pain because of his heroics. "It's not your fault. Hush now." He stroked his fingers across my scalp. My hair didn't tangle. It wasn't raining.

This new and improved scenario was less satisfying. Maybe I'd been with Brandon earlier in the night, and that memory was more appealing than this fantasy, if only I could access it. After making love with Brandon at the beach party and dropping him off at his house in the main part of town, maybe I'd been headed home when I wrecked.

The thought made me flush in the hot bathwater. If we'd done it, would I be able to tell? The first time I'd felt it the next day. How about the second?

I glanced into the corners of the ceiling as if cameras would suddenly materialize in my bathroom, of all places. I pressed my fingers into myself, then outside. I rubbed my fingertips in wider and wider circles. I wasn't sore.

That didn't mean anything. I'd taken painkillers for my head. They might have dulled the soreness. Maybe Brandon and I had done it after all.

What if we'd done it?
I was on the pill. I reached into the drawer nearest the bathtub to check and, sure enough, I'd taken my pill yesterday like a good girl. Right after my seventeenth birthday, my mom had suggested I get on the pill. At the time I didn't bother to tell her she had nothing to worry about.

Now she did. God bless the pill. But that wouldn't protect me against a venereal disease. Surely Brandon had used a condom again. I wouldn't have let him do it otherwise. I hadn't hit my head and gone crazy until the wreck after.

The more I invented worst-case scenarios and dismissed them logically, the more deflated I felt. Catching a venereal disease or getting pregnant because of something Brandon had done to me would be the end of me. Yet the idea seemed so normal and teenage and, dared I say,
romantic
compared with everything else going wrong in my life just then. Comforting.

I was scaring myself.

Reboot, reboot, reboot. I sank deeper into the water and massaged myself again. Testing for tenderness gave way to making myself feel better. It helped with my headache. I forgot all about my headache and Brandon as I opened for Doug. He slipped his hands into my jeans and explored me with his fingers, and finally took me there in the wet grass.

I
STEPPED FROM THE BATHTUB WITH
a smaller headache (marble-sized) and a resolution to stop being so screwed up.

After drying my hair (which still didn't cover the bruise very well), putting on makeup (which did), inserting fresh contact lenses, and pulling on dry clothes, I sat on the living room sofa, waiting for my dad and Ashley to leave. As I painted my fingernails, I brainstormed for ways I could find out exactly what I'd done last night without revealing the extent of my amnesia and getting myself committed.

I would ask around carefully. If that didn't work, I would hope Doug wasn't out to get me after all, and admit to him that I'd lost my memory not just of the wreck but of the whole night. If, and only if, I exhausted all my other possibilities, I would trust him with this.

I smudged the paint on that fingernail and had to remove it and start over.

And otherwise, I would keep my own counsel. In middle school I dreaded the rare times I rode somewhere in the car alone with my dad. He wouldn't say a word the whole time. Maybe I remembered it wrong (and I sure wouldn't place any bets based on my memory
now
), but it seemed we'd gotten along fine when I was little. He wasn't home much, but on weekends he would play with me. Swim with me in the ocean, before we built this new house with a pool. Lie on his back in the sand, balance me on his feet raised above his head, and let me play airplane.

Something happened when I was in grade school--the opening of Slide with Clyde, I suppose--and suddenly he was in a bad mood all the time. My mom would say that unlike her, unlike me, he was a quiet person. He didn't want or need to talk out his observations about life or his problems. He kept his own counsel. I resented him for that. But considering that my mom had gone insane, it wasn't wise to continue along
her
path. I would keep my own counsel from now on.

And I would get started on my investigation, asking Keke and Lila what happened, if my dad and Ashley would hurry up and leave already. Waving my fingernails in the air to dry them, I glanced up at the cameras every ten seconds. There was no reason for the cameras to irk me. No one would be watching me but my dad. Like he said, it would be as if he were here in the house with me. And I'd never done anything to alarm a parent anyway. Except have sex with Brandon.

But now, with the cameras rolling, I wanted what I couldn't have. I wanted to take advantage of my dad leaving me alone for a week. I wanted to throw a wild party, roll a joint on the cutting board in the kitchen, make love to Brandon on my dad's bed. Anything bad. I wanted to make out with Doug right here on the sofa where he'd sat an hour ago. It still smelled faintly like him, of chlorine and sea.

Finally they came downstairs. My dad's arms were full of Ashley's luggage as he blustered through the room, but I called to him anyway. I had to take care of myself and my own needs, because clearly nobody else was going to. "Dad, if I get an insurance check in the mail while you're gone, can I shop around for another car?"

"You owe me out of that check," he said. "I paid to have your car towed to the junkyard from the road into town."

I filed away this information: he'd just told me where the wreck happened. And I nodded, trying not to make waves. "I'm pretty sure I can get another classic Bug for the same price as the first."

"Absolutely not," he said. "No Bug."

I looked to Ashley. She looked out to sea. She couldn't see it through the living room wall, but she looked in that direction.

"Why not?" I asked.

"You're not buying another heap," he said. "That Bug had no air bag. The aftermarket seat belts broke on impact. That's how you got so banged up in the first place." He gestured to my forehead. "Next time you'll be dead."

I realized I'd been rubbing my head. I put my hand down, took a deep breath, and asked reasonably, "If you want me to use my own money for a car but you won't let me buy an old car I can afford, what do you expect me to drive?"

He shrugged. "You can drive my Mercedes next week while I'm gone. Next summer you can work again and add to your money."

"And in the meantime? How am I supposed to get around? Is Ashley going to homeschool me?" Never let the jury see how angry you are. My mom had taught me that. Never let them see you lose your cool. However, my mom did not argue cases in court while people whacked her in the head with marbles.

Ashley laughed. "I'm sure it will all work out," she said, patting my dad's butt to scoot him on out the door. He had to make a second trip upstairs to carry down all her luggage. They were lucky to fit everything in her Beamer. In the end Ashley seemed fonder of me than she'd ever been before, while my dad glared at me like it was my fault he had to worry about me dropping dead from brain damage, thus ruining his vacation. I wanted to reassure him that when I started school a few weeks ago, I'd listed only my mom as an emergency contact. If I dropped dead at school, they wouldn't have a phone number for my dad anyway.

I decided to let him sweat it. I kept my own counsel. Cheerfully I waved good-bye and best wishes to them as Ashley executed a seventeen-point turn in the courtyard and sped through the gate. Then I sank onto a teak bench on the porch and called Keke and Lila.

* * *

"W
HERE WERE
M
IKE AND
D
OUG HEADED
when you hit each other?" Lila asked from the backseat as Keke sped their rusty Datsun through the warm morning. Hitching a ride with them was the best way I could think of to reconstruct last night. They could take me by Brandon's for a visit and debriefing. Then I'd go with them to the swim meet and grill the team about what happened, though I wouldn't compete. And I didn't think I should drive myself. The headache was still marble-sized, but I felt like I was standing on marbles too. I might lose my balance at any second.