Thirteen Plus One (26 page)

Was it awful that one boy could make my heart pound, while another boy—who wasn’t even here—could take that same heart and squeeze it till it bruised?

“I’m not asking you to marry me,” Alphonse said. “Just if you want to go down to the water.”

My cheeks got hot. I was glad it was dark.

I rose to my feet and tugged at my sundress to make it hang right. Alphonse noticed; I could
feel
him notice. My heart beat faster.

I walked to the water’s edge. The waves washed over my feet, and I curled my toes in the wet sand. I wrapped my arms around my ribs.

Alphonse came up beside me, and I felt a little like saying, “Hey!
Mister!
Who gave you permission to stand so close?”

I hugged myself tighter and tried to breathe. But I felt dizzy, like there was all this pressure on me to ... well, I didn’t
know,
that was the problem. Or maybe I did know? Maybe
that
was the problem?

“Winnie, look at me,” Alphonse said.

I swallowed.

“Winnie.”
He touched my shoulder and turned me to face him. “I want to kiss you.” He drew his eyebrows together as if he couldn’t figure me out—which,
sheesh,
made two of us. “Can I?”

My heart was pounding so hard I thought I might be sick. Different impulses competed inside me, and I had a surreal vision of myself with a tiny angel hovering at one ear and a tiny devil at the other.

No,
the angel said.

Why not?
the devil said.
You only live once.

But it would be wrong.

So?

So it would be WRONG. I would be cheating. On Lars.

Yeah, but vvho’s going to tell? Tomorrow you leave. You’ll never see Alphonse again.

He touched my face, and the particles and electrons between us knocked into each other and hummed. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

You know you want to,
the devil voice cajoled.

Except ... did I? Did I
really?

Alphonse was gorgeous.
Check.

He was a cool guy, despite his occasional bouts of arrogance.
Check.

He was inches away, and he smelled of summer and the sea and bonfire smoke, and—miraculously? incomprehensibly?—
he wanted to kiss me.
The intoxication of knowing that, from
seeing
it in the intensity of his gaze ... it was a pretty powerful—a
very
powerful—drug.

And yet ...

Alphonse wanted to kiss me, but did
I
want to kiss
him,
this cool and gorgeous boy who wasn’t Lars???

No,
I said to myself. Or possibly I said it out loud. Did I say it out loud?

Confusion passed like a shadow across Alphonse’s features. He shook it off. His hand moved to the back of my head, and he leaned in.

“No,” I said, stepping away.

Alphonse’s arm fell to his side. “No... I can’t kiss you?”

It was a weird moment, and I felt bad.

At the same time, I found myself able to stand a little taller. “No,” I said with conviction.

“I thought you wanted me to.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“But if you’re
sorry...”
He looked not at me, but just over my shoulder. His frustration was obvious. “I don’t get it.”

I didn’t blame him. Was there a way to explain that while my body did want to kiss him, my heart knew it would be wrong? Not wrong as in right and wrong,
and now hold out your
palm,
young lady,
so
I
can slap it
with a
ruler. That was part of it, but not the whole tamale.

The whole tamale resided in my soul, I think. Although what was a soul, anyway? I imagined my soul as residing in my heart—which complicated the argument of “my body says yes, my heart says no,” since my heart was part of my body. It was an organ. It beat inside my chest.

But sometimes my heart made bad choices just like my body did. Exhibit A: the way I handled my conversation with Lars this morning, which I was regretting more and more.

Still, if I had to listen to one over the other, my body or my heart, it was a no-brainer. I had to go with my heart, and my heart said, “This boy in front of you? He isn’t
Lars.”

Alphonse exhaled, and I realized I’d been making him wait. And for what? Nothing, unless he could magically read my mind and divine for himself that really and truly, it wasn’t him. It was me.

I tried to get him to look at me. I tried to will my thoughts from my brain into his. But the set of his jaw told me loud and clear, it wasn’t happening.

“Whatever,” he said, holding out his palms. “I’m going back up to the others.”

A sudden realization made me dizzy. A realization so obvious that I felt like the biggest idiot in the world for not grasping it sooner.

“I
said
I’m heading back up,” Alphonse repeated with enough pout to suggest that I could still make him change his mind.

“Um, okay,” I said distracted. Now that I’d been hit with this new way of looking at things, I had to follow it to its bitter end.

I mean, God. I’d wanted Alphonse to
magically read my mind
? People couldn’t magically read other people’s minds. Maybe, possibly, some people could, if ESP existed. But I didn’t have ESP, and clearly Alphonse didn’t, either. And guess what?
Lars didn’t
either. If he did, he’d have done party tricks for me for sure, asking me to think of a number and then wowing me time and time again by saying, “Three!” Or, “Six hundred fifty-two and three-fourths, ha
ha!
Thought you got me, didn’t you?”

If he had ESP, he’d have given me that stupid cupcake I’d become so fixated on. He’d have given it to me on my birthday, easy-peasy-lemon-squeezie, and we’d have been
la la la,
look at
us, aren’t we happy!

But he didn’t have ESP, and he wasn’t psychic, and even if he was, it wasn’t as if my thoughts and feelings were so crystal clear that he’d have been able to read them like an instruction manual.

Geez Louise, if even
I
didn’t know what I wanted, how could I expect Lars to?

Maybe being known by someone,
really
being known by someone, wasn’t a party trick like ESP. Maybe it was about opening your heart to that person, consciously and on purpose. And that meant the flip side was also true: to know someone in return required conscious effort, too.
Ag
. And, like, willingness to try ... even when it was hard.

“All right,” Alphonse said, startling me because I thought he’d already gone. “See ya.”

“Uh-huh, see ya.”

His Adam’s apple jerked, and I berated myself for being such a lousy human being. He was kind of a victim of my freakishness, when it came down to it.

“I’ll be up soon,” I said in a more even tone. Not flirty—
no more flirty
—but as one friend to another. Well, ish.

Alphonse’s posture loosened, as if I’d given him permission to reclaim his dignity. He smiled wryly and headed back up toward the blackened bonfire.

My thoughts returned to Lars. For the zillionth time, I replayed our phone conversation, and I burned with shame at the memory of how he’d laughed at me. I finally came clean about the stupid cupcake, and what did he do? He
laughed.

But ... possibly ... ag. I hated being wrong, I really did. Even more, I hated being in the wrong.
Lars thought you were going to break up with him,
I admitted to myself. He
laughed because he was relieved, you numbskull.

It might possibly have had to do with the, um, ridiculousness of holding onto a grudge for so long. Over a cupcake.

I might
possibly
have laughed, too, if I were him.

I faced the ocean, heaviness weighing me down like rocks. Like Virginia Woolf, the writer who loaded her pockets with stones and walked into the sea—that was how I felt. (Though I would never, ever, ever do something like that. Never.)

But I was seeing something with increasingly uncomfortable clarity ... and, it wasn’t pretty.

When it came to me and Lars, I’d been a big baby.
There.
And I’d probably known it for a long time, in the deepest, truest part of myself.

I hadn’t been a baby every single minute of every single day—and for sure Lars could have handled certain situations better, himself. But take the night of the penguin, for example. I’d been pissy that he wouldn’t dump Bryce for me, but was I willing to dump Cinnamon and Dinah for him? Uh, no.

Big whiner baby.

When he told me about going to Germany, I blew up at first, and then got sullen. And then—poof! big smile!—I pretended in the very next moment like all was hunky-dory. We both knew it wasn’t, but instead of talking about it, we went along
tra-la-la
as if it was. Only since we were both faking, it was a tainted, sloggy
tra-la-la.
More like a
tra-lalump
.

I gazed at the inky water, surrendering to the hypnotic
swoosh
of the waves. A path of moonlight stretched from the shore to the horizon. Somewhere, baby sea turtles were following that path, listening only to the message in their hearts:
head toward the light, bitsy hatchlings. Head for the light!

Farther up the beach, I heard Cinnamon shriek.

“Yes!” she cried. “Omigod, we have to do
it this very second.
The sign is mine!”

She
had
to be talking about the “do not feed or molest the alligators” sign. It was destined to be hers; I’d known it from the beginning.

Cinnamon and the sign, Dinah’s first kiss ... God, I’d known so many things from the beginning. So why, when it came to my own life, was I so slow?

Voices drifted toward me: Dinah, trying to talk Cinnamon out of her plan; Ryan or Mark calling out for more Mountain Dew; Alphonse saying gruffly, “Yeah, she’s down there.”

The “she” he was referring to was me, and despite my gloom, I was glad someone cared. And now that person was coming to check on me. I could hear the squeak of footfalls on the sand. I was glad for that, too—even though the only person I really wanted to see was Lars. I wanted to make things right with him. I
needed
to make things right with him.

A terrible thought stopped my heart from beating:
What if it was too late?

The footsteps grew louder, and if I hadn’t been struck immobile by the fear of losing Lars, I would have turned around to see who it was. But all I could do was stand there, frozen, until I was released by the warmth of an arm slipping around my waist, pulling me close.

My heart whammed back into action, crazy fast and trying impossibly to leap from my chest ... because I
knew
that arm! The smell of Mennen deodorant filled my nose, and I felt faint ... because I knew that smell! I
loved
that smell!

I twisted around and melted into Lars’s embrace. I hugged him so hard, my Lars, and sobs burbled up. They burbled and turned to laughter, and I craned my head to see his sweet, wonderful face. Somehow I managed to say, “Why are you here?
How
are you here?”

He grinned.

“My brother drove me,” he said. “He has a buddy in Myrtle Beach. He’s going to hang with him tonight.”

“And you’re going to hang ... with me?” My eyes were so wide that I could feel my eyebrows way up past my bangs. I was smiling so hard that my cheeks felt like cherries.

“Yep,” he said, loving every second of my reaction. “I called your parents, and they said Jake can drive you home tomorrow.”

“Really?”

“Really. Cinnamon and Dinah, too, since we’re already here.”

“Omigosh, I can’t be
lieve
this. I am so happy. I am so so so so happy!” I squeezed him tight, pressing my face into his shirt and breathing in deep. My lungs expanded to about three times their normal size.

But even though I was hugging him with everything I had, he was hugging me back with just his one arm.

“Why are you only hugging me with one arm?” I asked goofily. “I’m so not down with this one-arm hugging business! I want the full caboodle!”

I fumbled behind me for his other arm so that I could plant it in its proper position. I found his forearm, but what was ... ?

His hand had something in it. That’s why it wasn’t free for hugging. And the thing he was holding? A box. A small, cardboard bakery box, tied with a pink curlique ribbon. A sticker on the top said SUGAR SWEET SUNSHINE.

“Lars!”
I exclaimed, filling that single word with the uncomplicated gratitude of a puppy dog with oversized manga puppy dog eyes. And my oversized puppy dog eyes would look wet, and have twinkle stars in them, and be super-duper adorable—but not as adorable as Lars,
who brought me a cupcake.
Because of course that was what was in the box. I didn’t have to open it to know.

“I was such a jerk,” I confessed. “It’s like ... okay, I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“I have, too,” he said. “A Starbucks card—it was kind of lame.”

“Yeah, but how could you know that? You picked it out on purpose because you thought I’d like it, right? It wasn’t like you suddenly at the last minute said, ‘Oh, crap, I’ve gotta get Winnie a birthday present.’” I felt a brief stab of doubt. “Urn... did you?”

He shook his head. “I picked the one with the beach scene, because of how much you love the beach.”

“And I was totally rude.”

“But I could have done better.”

“But I could have let you know how I felt. And see, that’s what I realized. I thought that you should just magically know what I wanted, and if you didn’t, that meant you didn’t know
me.
”

“When actually”—he half-laughed—“I just didn’t know what you wanted.”

I half-laughed, too. I was embarrassed, but so so happy. “And I didn’t know how to tell you.”