What We Saw (3 page)

BEN DOESN'T MISS
a single shot—even when I call his name. He grabs his own rebound, then turns to face me with a grin.

“She lives.”

I cross my arms. “Disappointed?”

He bounces the ball in my direction. I catch it and slowly dribble in place without looking at my hands, daring him. He stands between the basket and me, smiling and nodding. “Okay, then. Show me whatcha got.”

I drop back like I'm going to take the shot, then try to fake him out and drive around him.

As if.

In a single step, he's cut me off, his stance wide and low, his arms over his head, blocking my layup. It's a textbook illustration of that chant the cheerleaders do:
Hands up. Defense.

Of course, I realize this too late. I'm already jumping toward the basket. I can't stop my forward momentum, but Ben's leg does, and in a flash I'm sailing headfirst toward the pole that holds the backboard aloft.

I close my eyes and brace for impact. Instead, my body is suddenly redirected. Ben's arm snakes around my waist and pulls me sideways into him. When I open my eyes, his face is inches from mine.

“Gotcha, hotshot.”

I'm still off balance. Ben is the only thing holding me up—like it's nothing, as if I were made of pure air. His arm is solid in the small of my back, the grip of his hand at my waist steady and sure. I'm not going anywhere
.

We are pressed together so tightly he must be able to feel my heart beating against his chest. Each breath I exhale bounces off his neck and back into my face. I make a mental note to thank Will for reminding me to brush my teeth.

I arch an eyebrow. “That was a foul.”

Ben laughs. “Yep. On you.” He gently sets me upright, and goes to grab the ball from the grass next to the driveway. “We call that charging.”

I can still feel the heat where his arm roped my waist. The scent of his skin lingers in my nose—a whisper of the cologne
he wore to the party last night: fresh oranges and pepper and smoke from a campfire.

“No way. You fouled me
.
And you almost brained me on that pole.”

Ben bounces the ball between his legs as he walks. “I was in a legal defensive position.”

“Oh, is that what we call ‘cheating' these days?”

He's close again, spinning the ball on his index finger, a challenge in his smirk. He palms the ball and holds it over my head. I try to grab it but he is too quick. He swings it low, and high again, then whips it around his back and tosses a perfect hook shot through the net.
Thwfft
. No rim. Barely looked.

“Don't hate the player. Those are the rules. I was set and you made contact.”

“I'll show you contact.” I charge him with a growl.

He yelps and turns to protect his rebound as I jump on his back, throwing my arms around his neck. I try for a headlock, but I'm weightless to him. He clamps his arms over my legs and takes off. I hang on for dear life as he swings me around in circles. My stomach gets woozy again, and we laugh like crazy people.

He skids to a halt under the hulking oak tree in his front yard, both of us giggling and panting. Dizzy, I slide from my perch. As I slip down his back, my eyes find the scar behind his ear. In a flash, I am seized by the urge to brush my lips against it.

I didn't mean to feel this way about Ben. I thought it was
a fluke when it started last September—something that would fade away. Like the tan I got on Labor Day, I assumed it would be gone by October. I thought I could control it. Cover it back up like my freckles—toned down with some foundation, hidden with a little powder. I'd always planned to choose the person I fell in love with.

I didn't know it doesn't work that way.

You were once my friend.

Iowa was once an ocean.

Given enough time, everything changes.

I hover there in midair. I can't say it yet—but maybe he knows already. I reach out and lightly trace the scar with the tip of my finger, then my sneakers hit the grass, and I am back on earth.

Ben touches the place behind his ear and shakes his head. “The first time you fouled me.”

“It was an accident,” I protest, but his eyes snap and crackle above his smile. His laugh spills across the space between us.

He looks up into the bare branches over our heads, and when he turns back to me, his face is dead serious. “You've always had it out for me, Weston.”

What are we talking about now?

He turns and walks back toward the driveway. All at once my legs have gone wobbly. “It's just that . . .” I follow him, my throat suddenly stuffed with cotton.

Ben picks up his orange T-shirt off the ground, but instead
of putting it on, he tucks the hem into the waistband of his shorts. “It's just that what?” he asks.

The air is thick between us. A system of high pressure threatens to flatten me into the driveway. I try to look anywhere but at Ben's body. There are crocuses shooting vivid leaves up through the dormant grass around the mailbox. The kids across the street and one house down hit a Wiffle ball into the neighbor's yard, then start yelling at each other—words their mothers wish they did not know.

All the words I know are jammed inside my brain trying to force themselves past my teeth. The muted trumpet of too much tequila squawks behind my eyes.

This is a first. I've never been tongue-tied around Ben Cody in the almost thirteen years I've known him. Have I always “had it out for him”? Or only since last fall? And how does he know?

The first two words that escape the logjam in my head are “Thank you.”

“What?” He frowns and smiles at the same time.

I almost stutter, but I don't. I keep my eyes fixed on his. I will not embarrass myself further by staring at the place where his T-shirt hangs from his waistband. “For inviting me to the party last night. For driving me home. Thank you. You didn't have to do that.”

He grins. “
Somebody
did.”

“Well, I'm glad it was you.”

“Wasn't gonna trust any of those other yahoos.”

There's a spark in his eye when he says it. This is our shorthand.
Yahoo
is my dad's word. When Ben and I were kids, if we were making too much noise while the Hawkeyes' game was on, Dad would bellow at us from the couch:
You two stop acting like a bunch of yahoos.

I smile. This is what Ben does for me: He makes everything easy. Even as I'm standing here red-faced and worried, he's reminding me of all the reasons I shouldn't be. “Yeah, Dad woulda been pissed if I'd left my truck at the Doones'. Thanks for that, too.”

“What are friends for?”

Crap. I was afraid of that. Clearly, I'm stuck in the friend zone
.

I wonder if he remembers saying the same thing on the sidewalk last night. Him taking my keys, leaning in, touching his forehead to mine. It seemed like so much more than “friends” to me. Was I the only one who felt it? A side effect of agave and lime?

Have I invented that moment? Or has he forgotten it?

I open my mouth to say something—anything—I have no idea what. I am out of my element, trying to reach a new dimension on old machinery, pedaling toward the Galaxy of Lovers on the Rusty Ten-Speed of Friendship. I feel certain I'll never even get off the ground.

Maybe the universe acts on my behalf, or Rachel's heavenly father intervenes, but before I can utter any word I may regret
forever, Mrs. Cody's old Ford Explorer roars into the driveway. She screeches to a halt a few feet from Ben's knees, and mercifully, I am saved by Adele.

“Jesus, Mom!” Ben shouts through her rolled-down window. He jumps back, pulling me with him. “Coming in hot.”

Adele Cody heaves herself from the car as if flames were licking the gas tank. She is wearing a neon-green tracksuit, and sprints around to the back where she pops the hatch, and begins jerking entire flats of a purple sports drink onto the driveway. “Gotta get to Hy-Vee and hit the Right Guard special before Esther Harris cleans 'em out. Hi, Katie!”

No one has ever called me “Katie” except Ben's mom and my dad.

Ben goes tense as he watches his mother's electric mop of auburn curls, bouncing around on the spring of her Zumba-coiled body.

Divorce sometimes turns the women of Coral Sands into shapeless prisoners of depression, a doughnut in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. It took Adele Cody in the opposite direction. The summer after eighth grade, Ben's dad, Brian, attended a week-long convention in Omaha for the pharmaceutical company he reps. Over dirty martinis in the hotel bar, he met a regional manager from Lincoln named Linda and never returned. Within a month of signing divorce papers, Adele's transformation began. She renewed her certification as a paralegal that summer, and when Ben took the bus to our first
day of freshman year, his mom took a job at the law firm owned by John Doone's dad.

Adele followed up gainful employment with a membership at the LadyFit Gym. There, she met a group of women who introduced her to the thrill of Latin dancersize and the rush of extreme coupon deals. By Christmas, she'd lost twelve pounds and found that the empty space in her two-car garage was the perfect place for eight aisles of utility shelving. In the years since, hours of online coupon swaps have created a stockpile of nonperishable goods that may prove handy if the rapture Rachel speaks of ever comes to pass.

Ben squints into the sky as if deliverance from the puzzle of his mother's addiction might indeed be coming in the clouds. I touch his back lightly without looking at him. He lets out a slow sigh. “Looks like we're filling the pool with Powerade,” he whispers.

“C'mon.” I take his hand and pull him behind me toward the back of the car. I used to drag him around like this when we were kids. Only now, I lace my fingers through his, brazen and bold. This is my answer to his earlier question. This is what friends are for.

“Let us help you with that, Mrs. Cody.”

Adele claps her palms together, holding back the tips of her bejeweled manicure. “Oh, bless your heart, Katie.” She jerks her chin at Ben. “This one just thinks I'm crazy.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Well, this one needs all the free deodorant you can bring home.”

Adele giggles as I slide a flat of Powerade out of her Explorer and plop it into Ben's arms, then tell him to wait while I give him another one. The combined weight of forty-eight twenty-ounce bottles makes every muscle in his arms and shoulders pop while he lugs them over to the growing stack at the edge of the drive.

“Benny, do you think you can get these into the garage for me? I have to hurry.”

“Mom, we don't have room for all this crap.”

“I cleared some space this morning,” Adele says, digging through an accordion file. It is filled with stacks of coupons thick as paperbacks clamped with binder clips. “The shelf under the ramen and over the Tapatío.”

Ben frowns. “But this is Powerade.
P
comes before
R
.”

Adele waves a hand as she finds the stack for her next conquest, then runs back to the driver's seat. “
S
for ‘sports drink,'” she calls out. “If we land some Gatorade next week I don't want it all on different shelves.”

We stand aside as she screeches out of the driveway, blowing kisses and honking. In the silence that follows, Ben contemplates the stack of Powerade. It's the size of a small mastodon.

He groans. “Guess I'll get the dolly.”

I stop him as he turns toward the garage. “Might as well take a couple with you.”

He frowns as I drop one flat into his arms and bend down to grab another. “Why do I have to take two?”

“Part of the Powerade workout,” I say with a smile.

“What are you gonna do while I haul these around?”

I want out of the friend zone and decide to go for broke. “Enjoy the view.”

I think he starts to blush. I'm not sure because he turns around pretty fast and lugs those drinks up to the garage in record time.

BEN OFFERS TO
drive me back to my place.

“What if your mom needs help with the Right Guard?” I'm only sort of joking.

“Can't handle the shame. Have to get out of here.” He says this with a grim finality. I understand what he's talking about. He doesn't mean get out of here today, right now, this afternoon.

He means
get out of here.

Forever.

We've talked about this more than once since we started hanging out again.

It was an accident that I saw his garage last fall. I'd come
over to study for a geology test and arrived a few minutes before he came home from practice. Adele greeted me at the door and asked if I wanted a Diet Coke or a Coke Zero. In her excitement to serve me the Coke Zero I requested, she pulled me down the stairs to the garage entrance off the rec room of their raised ranch. While I was standing in that doorway Ben arrived and discovered me, slack-jawed, watching his mother slide a twelve-pack off the shelf just beneath
CHARMIN
and right above
DRĀNO
.

The first time I saw those perfectly packed shelves, I was seized by the urge to grab a canvas bag and do a supermarket sweep. From ballpoint pens and batteries to Post-its and Sticky Tack, Adele gave me the grand tour, tallying the money she'd saved and pointing out which products were the best deals. Most of the time, with double coupons and deals that “stack,” she actually got money back. She'd haul out a colossal pile of product for free, and because of her coupons and the way the deals worked, the store would also pay her. I stared up in wonder that first afternoon, laughing in amazement as she explained her system.

I've only seen her in action for a few months, but I now know it's no laughing matter. Adele has a coupon compulsion, no doubt about it. She can't
not
do it. The urge to get the next deal overwhelms her to the point that she's missed several of Ben's games this year—not to mention moments like this one, when it might be nice to sit on the deck out back, have some iced tea, and hang out.

Instead, she's running for the Right Guard special. It has nothing to do with deodorant. It has to do with the fix she gets from the deal, the short-lived euphoria of the score. As we watch her screech around the corner onto Oaklawn, I wonder what it was that actually caused this malfunction in Ben's mom. Had it always lurked beneath the surface? Did the divorce just uncover it, buried beneath thick layers of “normal”?

As we climb into Ben's truck, he says, “Thanks for being cool about . . . all this.”

I know that “all this” means his mom and her stockpile. I know that “being cool” means taking it in stride and not telling anyone at school. I also know how hard it is for him to talk about it.

Ben puts the truck in reverse but pauses, foot on the break, hands on the wheel. He glances over at me. “You really have to get home?”

“Eventually. No rush. Did you have a pressing errand with which you require my immediate assistance?”

He smirks at me and shakes his head.

“What?” I ask, blinking with wide eyes of false innocence.

“You,” he says, “and your attempts to pepper all conversation with iambic pentameter.”

“From the boy who just used
iambic pentameter
in a sentence, modified by the verb
pepper
.”

“Touché.”

“Conversational French. Further proving my point.”

“It was
my
point,” he says with a laugh.

I cross my arms. “Which was to mock me?” I love giving him a hard time.

“No! Just—it's nice not to have to dumb things down. It's one of the reasons I like talking with you: Your communication skills are both scintillating and exquisite.”

“Wow!” I snort-laugh, which cracks him up. “Okay, now you need to cool your jets.”

“Mmmm. Ice cream sounds perfect,” he says. “I'd suggest Dairy Queen, but I think I'm too smart to be served there.”

“Drive, Einstein. Your secret is safe.”