Kiss Crush Collide (6 page)

When we were little, this park was one of our favorite places in the world. The flowers were so tall and dense back then that you could get lost and disappear in them. One time I looked up from my inspection of a bright red ladybug and saw only flowers. No sisters, no parents, not even a dog, only stems and leaves and petals that towered above me, closing in on each side.

I thought I was lost forever, alone in a forest of flowers. I stayed still, squatting next to my ladybug friend with my heart thumping and my eyes wide until the sound of my sisters laughing floated by.

I followed their voices, my little legs pumping until I promptly bumped into Yorke’s back. There they were, just around a curve in the path, and I was safe.

I follow that same curve today, out of the flowerbed and back toward the street. Hitching my sliding backpack up again, I look up and notice a dark green Corvette slinking along the side of the road. I slow myself when the car rolls to a stop. I can almost feel someone watching me from behind its dark-tinted windows. I look around, nervously hoping to see Freddie and Yorke busting out of the tall flowers, just a step away as always, but the park is deserted.

The car idles, motionless, and then suddenly rumbles off down the hill as I stand watching, with my head cocked and my pulse racing.

Relieved and a little embarrassed, I silently scold myself for being such a chicken and start walking again. My mother is so worried about strangers that I think I have become paranoid. We know everyone in this town, for Christ’s sake. There are no surprises around here.

Except for maybe that one, I think as I reach the bottom of the steep hill minutes later, the fronts of my thighs screaming. The dark green Corvette is parked at the bottom of the hill, the front tires pointing into the street, ready for a quick getaway, the engine still running. I see long legs in frayed jeans, a black T, messy brown hair, and those eyes. They glow green and sharp even in the bright morning light.

I stop, mid-step. I’m sure I look stupid. My mouth is hanging open, and my hair is pulled back in a sweaty ponytail. My mother would be so upset with me: I don’t even have lipstick on. God, I can’t believe I made out with this guy and I don’t even know him.

His grin cracks open, and he asks, “Why are you out walking so early on such a fine morning?”

I step closer, despite myself.

“Why are you out stalking me so early on such a fine morning?” I ask, figuring, as my dad always says, a good defense is the best offense, or whatever. I’m sure it can work for boys as well as football.

“I am not stalking you,” he says with a definite emphasis on the “not.”

“Are you sure?” I ask, raising my eyebrows before I turn to glance back up the hill. “It kind of felt like it.”

“I wasn’t sure it was you,” he says, and then ducks his head to stare at his feet.

He actually looks kind of embarrassed when he reaches up and rakes his fingers through his hair.

He looks back up at me.

“You look different,” he says. He grins again, and the heavens open up. “Very shiny.”

“Thanks,” I say while holding out one of my arms for him to admire. It is, like the rest of me, coated in a thick layer of
SPF
30. I look as if I have been dipped in butter, but I smell like the beach.

“It’s for work,” I tell him.

“Where’s that?”

“Up at the pool,” I say, nodding in the direction of the pool. You can’t see the water from where we are standing, just the top of the chain-link fence.

His eyes follow mine across the park as I continue. “I’m a lifeguard.”

“Really?” he asks, grinning in a wicked way. He pauses for a beat. “You sure you’re not just working on your tan?”

Now, this pisses me off, because a lot of people, Yorke, most of my friends, even this dude apparently, think that I am just going through the motions of lifeguarding so I can soak up some sun. If I were, wouldn’t I at least wear a bikini? Or, better yet, sunbathe at home?

Thing is, my parents made me quit the swim team the summer before I started high school. I came downstairs that first day of vacation, ready for tryouts, knowing I was going to make the team, that trying out was just a formality for me since I had been on the team the summer before, and then my dad, sitting at the table, eating a boiled egg with a tiny spoon, commented on my shoulders. How big they were from all that backstroke.

My mother appeared, turned me around for a good look at my lats, and agreed. My shoulders were looking boyish.

Next thing you know, I am not swimming anymore. I am sitting on a tall metal chair with a whistle, watching little kids dog-paddle and fat people float.

That made it hurt exponentially. Lifeguarding was a compromise I made with my dad. I think he knew he broke my heart, or at least my swimming spirit, when they forced me to quit, so we struck a deal.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I say with an exasperated sigh, planting my hand on my hip. “They wouldn’t give me a whistle for that.”

Shrugging, he puts his hands up in front of him as if he had clearly meant no offense.

“True,” he says. “But you are a country club girl. Surely you can see how I might have been led astray.”

“True,” I say, twisting my toe into the tall sprigs of grass at the edge of the road, “but only on Friday nights. The rest of the summer I’ll be slumming it down at the public pool.”

He laughs, quiet and low.

“Well,” he says as he turns away and pulls the car door open, “maybe I’ll stop by sometime and say hi.”

I fidget, not wanting him to go.

I should have just shut up and kissed him or something. He looks back at me.

I smile and nod, lifting my chin toward the small hill where the pool sits. “I’ll be the one in the tall chair,” I say. “In the red suit. In case you’re not sure again.”

“I’ll look for the whistle,” he says with a smile.

He gets into the car, sinking down into the low seat, and leans his elbow out the open window.

“But,” he says, “you didn’t answer my original question.”

“Which was?” I ask.

“Why are you walking?”

“Easy,” I say, flipping my backpack onto my shoulder as he revs the engine. It grumbles low and deep. “I don’t drive.”

He looks away while he drops the car into drive, stops, and turns toward me to clarify.

“Don’t drive or can’t drive?” he asks, his brows knitting together.

“What’s the difference?” I ask.

He extends his arm out the open window, palm up, as he thinks. His hand drops down and rests lightly against the car door.

“One is an aversion,” he says, finally, “the other, a lack of ability.”

I mull that over, never having given it much thought before. All the choices necessary when you are behind the wheel pop into my head. Right or left? Top up or down? Fast or slow? Ugh. It’s easier to let someone else drive, to make those decisions for me.

“My lack of ability causes an aversion,” I decide.

He nods. “We’ll have to see if we can fix that.”

My heart runs faster than the V-8 engine idling underneath him.

“You want a ride?” he asks.

I shrug.

“Your call,” he says.

He gives me one last smile and squeals off, leaving me standing in the middle of the street, swirling in a cloud of elation, exhaust, and confusion.

The view from my lifeguard chair is good. I can see the entire park, which is the social hub of this tiny town in the summer months, from up here. I can see the thin two-lane road that widens into a parking lot next to the park store. The road circles the edge of the ball diamonds and comes back around to the shaded picnic shelters and worn wooden playgrounds, before climbing up the steep hill again on its way out of the park. A long, paved loop, this road strings the summer sports—baseball, T-ball, tennis, and swimming—together on a hot, black asphalt chain.

The crowd in the park is pretty light today, but it is early, in the day and in the season. I don’t ever really expect to see anyone I know here, since they spend their summers at the lake or the club or some educational immersion camp.

Even the pool is fairly empty, despite the heat. A couple of young swimmers are crossing the width of the pool with very shaky strokes, pulling their faces out of the water every few feet to sputter and breathe.

Troy, head lifeguard, full-time burnout, and serious heartbreaker, watches them intently, the edge of his clipboard balanced on his tight stomach. He squats down, encouraging and coaxing them along as he checks that no toes are touching the bottom of the pool. If they can make it across, from ladder to ladder without touching, they pass the test and can swim alone in the shallow end, no grown-up necessary.

My first shift of the summer is at the far end of the L-shaped pool, to the left of the aqua-colored diving boards, where the water is twelve feet deep and everyone wants to hang out.

I am joined by Troy’s blond band of brothers. All the other lifeguards, minus one, are junior Troys in training. Just like Troy, but younger, blonder, and browner, they are the future insurance salesmen of our fair town, with one exception. Margo, the only other girl, if you can call her that, is squat and thick and has the lats my parents feared. Her voice is like a trombone with the slide all the way out.

The hot slab of cement surrounding the three sides of the diving well is the place to be. It is far enough away from the pool office for a little privacy, yet close enough to the parking lot for boys to flirt from the far side of the fence and friends without season passes to drop by and catch up on the latest.

I tap my feet against the long legs of my tall chair and twirl my whistle around my fingers, eager to fall into my summer routine. At least one swimmer in the well would be nice.

I check the road over my right shoulder. No cars. The baseball fields, empty. Straining my eyes behind the cover of my dark sunglasses, I try to see all the way down to the bottom of the hill. It’s been only a couple of hours, but I’m jonesing to see him again.

A flapping beach towel catches my eye. A lone sunbather is shaking out her towel and setting up camp across the water from me. I take in the pale skin and thin limbs as they settle onto a shabby striped beach towel from the only place around here that rents rooms by the hour, Towne’s Tiki Motel. Good god, Valerie Dickens is at the pool.

She is reading
Moby Dick
poolside, with no apparent irony. Her skinny arms look as if they have never seen the sun and can barely hold up the hardcover. She rests the book on her concave stomach to turn the page.

She is definitely preparing for an academic showdown next year. Has to be. Why else would she feel the need to read an American classic in my presence? She has never been to the pool before. I’m not even sure she can swim.

I grab the Coke I planted in the shade under my seat at the beginning of my shift and swallow a huge gulp. I try to ignore Valerie. I watch for green cars instead.

“Leah.”

I jump as a hand touches my ankle. Troy laughs.

“You missed the whistle,” he says, tapping his fingers on my toes. “Time to move.”

My feet sizzle on the cement as I make my way through a parting sea of preteen girls to the next lifeguard chair. I can feel them watching me, looking me up and down, as I turn the first corner at the base of the high dive. I smooth my ponytail over my shoulder and look straight back at them. The braver ones smile at me, the others look away quickly, as if I didn’t notice that they were just totally staring at me. You’d think I would be used to it by now. If I were Yorke, I would smile and give them all a twirl or, at the very least, the finger.

Turning the second corner, the one by the low dive, I pause for a second, squinting through the golden hue my sunglasses cast on the world as a car slows in the lot, the driver waving in my general direction. But it is only a bright blue Mini. I don’t wave back, and the Mini rolls right on by as I look away and find myself caught in Valerie Dickens’s evil stare.

“Rest assured you are enjoying your summer, Leah,” she says, leaning on a razor-sharp elbow to drop one of those old lady bookmarks complete with a yarn tassel into
Moby Dick
’s yawning crack. Her sarcasm is not lost on me. It is as thick as Mr. Hobart’s stubby fingers.

I walk slowly past her, smirking at the stack of library books tumbling from her beach bag and the sunburn on her nose. The page beneath her is dripping in neon, almost every line highlighted. Who brings a highlighter to the pool? I should let her drown.

“Let me give you a sneak peak,” I say, lifting my sunglasses and smiling my sweetest smile as I lean in close to her.

“The captain dies,” I whisper, and the highlighter goes slack in her hand. I climb up onto my chair, flick my hair over my shoulder, and blow my whistle extra loud at nothing in particular.

“Leah,” my mother says, finally having taken her seat at the head of the table with an approving nod, apparently feeling no need to fuss any further with the placement of the napkins and glasses and the forks, “please pass the peas.”

Then, looking to where my dad is still messing about at the barbecue, a platter of grilled chicken in his hand and the sun sinking low in the sky behind him, she asks, “Mason, are you about ready over there?”

Turning back to the table, she smooths her napkin as she places it on her lap and announces loud enough for my dad to hear over the sputtering flames of the grill, “We are going shopping for wedding dresses tomorrow afternoon.”

The clang of the barbecue tongs is followed by the quick shuffle of my dad’s house slippers across the patio.

“Here it is,” he says, setting an oval platter in the middle of the table. “I was just burning one for Freddie.”

We are sitting at our old teak table on the patio near the deep end of our pool. The table is one of the few things that made the move from the old lake house, my mother insisting everything else be brand-new in her brand-new house.

I miss our old house. I miss the trees. I miss the lake. I even miss being crammed into the tiny kitchen with the teapot wallpaper, the talk of books and boys and sweaters borrowed without permission looping around the worn round table at dinnertime. Our tight connection seems to have dissolved somehow into the extra square footage and vaulted ceilings of this new place. It may be twice the size, but it’s half as much like home.