Over You (12 page)

“All right,” Zach says, hopping on his board and making a slow run down the concrete path between the rows of splintering green benches. “Put your left foot on the board, transfer your weight to the left, and push, push, push off with your right, then bring your right leg in and gliiiiiiiiide.”

Bridget looks at him like he just gave her five easy steps to build a rocket and shakes her head.

“Bridget,” Phoebe says firmly, “can we agree that the boys who devote their lives to this sport aren’t exactly Nobel laureates? And if some tool whose idea of fun is misspelling ‘cool’ in spray paint can do this, you can, too.”

“Okay, okay.” Bridget takes a deep breath, sets her jaw, hops her left foot up—and the board goes out from under her.

“Or not,” Phoebe mutters.

An hour later finds an officially alarmed Max inserting two chilled cans of soda down Bridget’s pants to slow the swelling. “Do you think this is why they wear their jeans so baggy?” Bridget asks, wincing.

“So they can ice their asses with Mountain Dew? Maybe. Is that the spot?”

“Yes. Oh my God, I’m going to have to borrow my grandfather’s hemorrhoid cushion. I’m not going to be able to sit down tomorrow.”

“Start a rumor you’re into spanking,” Zach suggests as he peels a Mini Babybel, shot from hauling Bridget to her feet so many times.

Max widens her eyes at him to check his tone. “Zach, can you help Phoebe dismantle the ramp? I maybe set the bar a little high today.” Zach gives her a “ya think” eyebrow raise as he heads down the path to Phoebe. “You okay?” Max asks. Bridget gestures to her rear with a look of disbelief. “I mean emotionally. You
can’t
read anything into this. You’re doing amazing on the program.”

“Are you sure this skateboarding Moment thing is going to work?” Bridget pushes her waistband down a bit, and Max cringingly looks at where the skin is turning yellow. Why didn’t she call her off twenty attempts ago?!

“Yes,” Max promises.

“Because I
can’t
keep feeling like this every day—right now I’d give anything to have early-onset dementia. This Moment has to work,” Bridget says. “It
has
to. I’ll do whatever it takes. I just can’t spend the rest of my life seeing that expression on his face as I snotted.” Max sees a virtually identical expression on Hugo’s face and thinks a virtually identical thought about herself. “So be honest, Max, how did I look out there?”

“You looked like a dork,” Max admits as much to Bridget as to her memory. “You ate it. It was l-l-l-lame.”

Bridget laughs while Max forces herself to focus her remaining brain cells. Bridget. Bridget and Taylor. Baylor. “Okay. This hasn’t been done before.”

“What hasn’t?”

“Switching Moments this close to deadline. But we need a Plan B.” She waves Zach and Phoebe over. “You’re not going to make anyone regret anything with your ass in a cast.”

That night Zach drags his heels as he slowly packs up his Filson satchel with the day’s files. Max chews at the inside of her cheek to keep from tugging off her clothes and hiding in the bathtub. She just needs this day—week—to be done. “You and Tom have fun tonight,” Max says as she stands by her door, not so subtly tapping her foot.

“What? Oh. Well, he just admitted he doesn’t like Ryan Gosling—we’re working through it.”

“There’s always counseling,” Max quips. “So, okay then, have a great night!”

He pauses reshuffling the already reshuffled papers and looks straight into Max’s eyes. “We’ve
never
had to switch tracks on a Moment—”

“Zach, I’ve been juggling an unprecedented amount of cases. It’ll be fine.”

“And you still have perspective on what that is.”

“Yes,” she says faintly.

“And you’ll solve Bridget’s Moment in the next twelve hours.”

“Of
course
.” God willing. “Always have—always will.”

He heaves the satchel over his shoulder. “Don’t heart the idea of my Max losing her edge.”

“Still edgy,” she reassures him as he finally walks to the door. “See you tomorrow. Text me with any ideas.”

He stops. “You know how I’ve been compiling the data on all our cases for your presentation to Professor Schmidt?”

“Yes?”

“I can’t find Angie Riverdale’s file.” Zach reaches for his phone in his pocket. “And since she predates my employment, I wasn’t sure if there’s somewhere else I should be looking.”

“Oh, right, I, um, took it out. The, uh, file,” Max says with forced casualness of her only failure, the one client who sunk to depths even Ex, Inc. couldn’t pull her from.

“You did?” He checks for texts and returns it to his bag.

“Oh my God, it was such a disaster. She, Angie, was a total aberration. Doesn’t count. Don’t give it—her—another thought.”

“She shouldn’t be included in the presentation?” He rests his hip against the wood.

“Nope.” Max reaches around him for the knob. “Have a great night.” She spins him onto the slate. “Call me about Bridget. Bye.” She locks up and drops her forehead to the door, trying to steady her breath.

Her phone vibrates with the perfect distraction, a text from Ben. “SOS.”

Ten minutes later, having tossed her hair into a ponytail and pulled on her Converse, Max is armed only with a tin of cookies from Trish Silverberg. She reads Ben’s last text, checking his home address again as she walks the commercial stretch of Court Street. She’s confused for a minute before she realizes where she must be headed. Just then the overhead lights at the back of Cooper Baby come on.

Ben unlocks the door and the bells jingle.

“Not what I pictured when you said you were home,” she says, stepping inside, noticing he looks like he’s been up for days.

Ben locks the door as Max takes off her coat. One track of her brain still poring over every word Bridget has uttered, the other circling around Zach’s question like it’s a maypole. “Dad lives upstairs. Mom kept the house over on Henry. Half the week I sleep here.”

“Here?” Max asks, picking up a nursing bra from one of the overcrowded shelves.

Ben shakes his head, pushing his hands into the pockets of his sweats. “I have my own room, but it’s hard to concentrate. This way.”

Max follows him past the aisle of sippy cups and pacifiers to the back of the store, an open, carpeted space ringed with display strollers and high chairs. The floor is strewn with textbooks, soda cans, a laptop, all centered around a life-sized stuffed brown bear that has clearly been serving as a recliner.

“Shut. Up,” Max says.

“It’s for the toddlers,” Ben explains, dropping onto the blue carpet and leaning against its massive trunk. “Surefire way to keep them occupied while their moms shop for number two or three.”

“And it’s just generally awesome,” Max says, falling to her knees to stroke its soft arm.

“And it’s just generally awesome,” Ben agrees.

“You were reading by this?” Max asks, picking up the glowing goose night-light. “No wonder you need a break.”

He lifts his knees, resting his forearms atop them. “Didn’t want to give the neighborhood the wrong impression—we’ll have crazed moms with busted Sleep Sheep knocking on the glass in a minute.”

“What’s a Sleep Sheep?”

Ben hops up, goes to a shelf, pulls down a lamb in an open box, and presses its tummy. The sound of crickets fills the room.

“That is mad soothing,” she acknowledges, cuddling the bear, an excellent stand-in for the bath she was planning on diving into. As her eyes drift closed, she thinks she should buy one of these for the baby, maybe just bring it downstairs for a couple of weeks first. “How do you get any work done?”

“Okay, where you see soft, furry awesomeness I just see a flashing neon sign that says ‘Don’t get stuck here, asshole.’”

“Right. Sorry.” Max straightens up, deeply inhaling through her nose to revive herself. “What’s the SOS?”

Ben looks down at Max, wondering why he didn’t just let her fall asleep so he could watch her. Not creepily. That even sounded creepy in his own head. Not like that. Just … get to stare at
her
face without having to keep making sure
his
face doesn’t look like it likes her. Does she know he almost kissed her at Halloween? Did she notice? Did she want him to?

“My brain is fuzzy. I just needed to talk to someone for five minutes, and everyone else is busy cramming for midterms and writing applications. My college essay sucks. I used all the pointers I got at that stupid seminar. But it still just … sucks.”

“Hit me.” Max opens the tin.

“You don’t want to hear this crap.”

“I do! It helps to read things out loud. I do it all the time. I’ll think I have something all figured out, then read it aloud and hear the holes.”

“Okay.” Ben sits and scrolls to the top of the essay. “Just don’t think I’m a moron. This is just a first draft.”

“Peanut butter?” She passes him a cookie. “Has enzymes that build neurotransmitters—helps you think. And the sugar will keep you awake.”

“Thanks.” He smiles. “Okay, here goes.” He clears his throat. “This is really embarrassing.”

“Okay.” Max considers what she’s heard. “It’s a frank opener.”

“No—reading to you. Embarrassing that you’re helping me with this.” He gestures to the screen.

“Nah, please—it’s what I do.”

“Huh?” he asks.

“Be helpful.”
At least I used to,
she thinks. “As a hobby,” she covers. “Go ahead.” She scrolls her hand at the wrist for him to continue.

“Okay.” He looks down. More throat clearing. His face springs back up. “I don’t even know where you go to school.”

“I don’t.”

“You
don’t
?” His eyes bug as he takes her in, suddenly making so much sense—and none at all. “Do you have, like, one of those hormone problems, like where you’re really forty?”

“God, if only.” She rolls her eyes. “No, I’m really only seventeen. Legal to drive—and not much else.” She carefully brushes the crumbs back into the tin.

“Yeah,” Ben says, commiserating. “So, why aren’t you in school?”

“I finished early,” she says simply.

“Shut up. You can do that?” He leans up to kneeling. “Are you, like, a genius? Did you graduate at ten? Are you already a doctor?”

She seems surprised to find herself laughing. “No, I am not middle-aged, nor am I a licensed professional. I just—needed to be done with high school.” She shrugs, her face clouding. She picks a loose strand in the carpet.

“Wow. So what are you doing now? Are you gonna go to college?” Ben puts down his computer, his essay upstaged by this visitor from another planet.

“That would be the question.” Max finds herself laughing again, this time more darkly.

“Don’t you want to?”

“Yes. But only one school.”

“Everyone has a first choice.” Ben takes a cookie.

“No, an
only
choice. The Gallatin School at NYU. This professor I need to work with is there. It’s the only place I’m applying.”

“Your parents let you
do
that?” Ben asks, crumbs sprinkling the front of his sweatshirt.

“They don’t know. They kind of have their hands full right now—what with the baby,” she says, unable to keep the ouch from her voice.

“Yeah,” Ben says, thinking back to last year, the basketball championship his dad spaced on, the teacher’s conference his mom forgot. He gets it.

Max collapses fully on the bear to stare at the ceiling, letting her back arch, unaware her striped T-shirt is riding up to reveal her midriff, giving Ben that ache again.

“Okay, take it away,” she says. In the glow of this little lamp, with this giant teddy bear and this nice guy at her feet, Max can feel herself getting dangerously close to asking his advice, which is idiotic because she hardly knows him. Maybe it’s the hour or being in a baby store in the near dark, but it feels like she walked off the street and out of real life. Max starts mentally back at square one with Bridget to see where that gets her—Taylor likes Pop-Tarts … “Wow me. No pressure.”

Ben pulls the MacBook back into his lap. “‘I know what it is to be needed.’”

“Who said anything about needed?” Max replies.

“That’s my topic sentence.”

“Oh. Sorry. I love it.”

“‘I know what it is to be needed. My family has owned and operated a store in the same location since 1932. Originally my grandfather and great-grandfather hand made cribs and rocking horses. Now we sell everything a small citizen could need. Which means, in our insular neighborhood, we are there when people feel the most panicked and vulnerable. When they need their child’s first thermometer or a pillow to help with colic.’” He looks up. “My guidance counselor told me to put in real examples. Lame?”

“No. Not at all—where’s it going?”

Ben considers for a second, trying to put the idea that’s been swirling around his mind into words. “It’s about how I’m needed here—by the community, by my dad. But I want college to show me the other ways I could serve, maybe ways I haven’t thought of, ways that might make me—not my parents or my friends—happy.” He stumbles on the last word.