Wrecked (6 page)

Looking down at her plate again, she realized this might mean eating less at breakfast time. 
If that’s what I have to do, then so be it.  Goodbye pancakes and goodbye bacon.
  She pushed the uneaten portions of her breakfast away, even though she really wanted to eat them.

She looked up and caught Kevin watching her with amusement.  He looked over at his sister, who was sitting there with her sunglasses already on, looking bored over a piece of dry toast.  Then he looked back at Candi again, sitting in front of a plate she wished wasn’t there.  She was embarrassed to think he was noticing that she’d laid waste to the buffet.  

He smiled and nodded his head, frowning as if impressed at how much she’d eaten.  Then he looked over at Jonathan’s plate.

Jonathan looked up with his mouth full of food to see Kevin staring at him.

“Whaffs wong?”  He swallowed with some effort and then tried again.  “What’s wrong?  Did I do something?”  He looked from Kevin to his sister and then back to Kevin again.  

“No, dude, nothing.  I was just looking at how much you’re eating.  I know guys on the football team who can’t eat that much for breakfast.”  He wasn’t being rude – he sounded fascinated.

Candi wanted to die.  Here was her brother, the skinniest kid in their grade at school, eating his normal gigantic breakfast, oblivious to the fact that everything they did on this vacation was potential ammunition to be used against them later at school.

“Oh, he normally doesn’t eat this much,” explained Candi, “He’s just excited about the buffet.”

Her brother looked at her, confused.  “That’s not true.  I eat pancakes and bacon and eggs almost every morning.  Sometimes I have a waffle instead of the pancakes, or sausage instead of the bacon, but the fat and calorie count is virtually equivalent.”

“Seriously?” asked Kevin.  “How do you stay so skinny?”

“Oh, I run and do other stuff.” 

“What do you mean, you run?  Like track?”

“No, I’m not on the track team.  I just run around the neighborhood.  Sometimes I just have a lot of energy, especially when I’m studying and I’m trying to work out a calculation or a piece of code or something; I get a little antsy, so I go running and come up with the answer while I do it.  Then I can calm down and finish my work.”

“Interesting,” was all Kevin said in response.  He seemed to be mulling over the answer in his head.

Candi couldn’t tell whether Kevin thought this response was normal or completely crazy, which is what she thought.  Her brother was telling the truth, though.  He had lots of energy.  When it wasn’t spent coming up with answers to complex mathematical equations, it was spent burning up the pavement.  He probably ran thirty miles a week … more during finals.

Sarah looked up from her coffee and toast to join in the conversation.  “So, you eat a million calories, run, and do math while you burn every calorie you ate?”

“Yep, I guess so,” answered Jonathan, a wary look on his face.

“Does it help?  The running I mean?”

“Well … yeah … it helps me.  It clears my mind so I can just let it do the work for me.  I kind of just stop thinking at all, and my mind works behind the scenes and comes up with the answers I’m looking for.”

Kevin joined in.  “I’ve heard about that kind of thing – you know, letting your subconscious come up with answers to questions.  Like you have to stop thinking about a problem so the solution will just come to you from your subconscious.”

Candi knew the look on her brother’s face and wished she could stop the train of thought that she knew he was forming in his head – but there was no stopping one of her brother’s freight trains of useless facts.

“Did you know that ‘subconscious’ is the layperson’s word for what Dr. Sigmund Freud called the ‘unconscious mind’?  He said it’s a place where socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions are put out of the mind through psychological repression.”  

Oblivious to the blank stares that greeted him from around the table, he took a quick breath and continued, “Unconscious thoughts are not directly accessible, but are supposed to be capable of being ‘tapped’ and ‘interpreted’ by special methods and techniques such as meditation, random association, dream analysis, or things like running, like I do.”

He finished by clasping his hands together, waiting to hear the comments he was expecting to come from his rapt audience.  This topic was obviously fascinating to him; Candi knew he could talk about it for hours.

No one said a word.  Jonathan raised his eyebrows, still waiting for someone to comment.  He looked over at his sister.  

She was stared at him, wanting to kill him.

“What?” he asked.

Candi didn’t answer.  She just shook her head slowly, rising up out of her chair.   

Kevin was the first to break out of the trance.  “Dude, how do you know all that stuff?  You sound like you’re reading out of one of our school textbooks or something.” 

“I read it in various treatises on the subject.  I find the topic of the subconscious mind fascinating.  I remember most of what I read.”

Sarah stood up to leave.  “Well, I think a kid who reads about that science stuff just for fun has some serious issues.”

“Sarah!” said her mother sharply, before standing up to join her daughter.  “Excuse us, please – we’re going to go wait out in the lobby.  I’m sorry for Sarah’s rudeness, Jonathan.”

Jonathan just smiled.  “Oh, don’t worry about it Mrs. Peterson.  My sister says I have issues all the time.  I know not many people my age like to study like I do.  See you later.”  

Kevin laughed.  “You’re alright, Jon, you know that?  I’m impressed that you know all that stuff.  Who knows when it might come in handy?  Hey, maybe one of the chicks on the ship will need to know the molecular weight of copper or something.”

“The atomic mass of copper is 63.546, actually,” responded Jonathan, eagerly.

“Well, there you go then.  It’s in the bag, dude.  You’ll have the ladies all over you by the end of the cruise.”  He stood up and clapped Jonathan on the back, throwing him up against the front of his plate.

“Ooof. 
Um, thanks.  Yeah.  Hopefully.”  He glanced at Sarah’s retreating form trying not to be obvious about it – but Candi saw through his pitiful attempts at casualness.  

She watched as he shook his head a little but continued to stare at Sarah’s back.  Candi prayed he wasn’t entertaining the idea of falling in love with that viper.  She was so far out of her brother’s league, they weren’t even on the same planet.  She’d eat him alive.

Candi hooked her purse over her shoulder, leaving the restaurant for the lobby.  She couldn’t watch her brother be a dork anymore.  At least Kevin seemed to be okay with it.  He was laughing, but he wasn’t really making Jonathan feel bad.  He seemed to look at Jonathan like he was amusing more than anything else.  Candi decided this was better than having Kevin see Jonathan as a target of harassment or bullying.  Kevin didn’t seem the type though.  Good thing, since Jonathan was an easy target.  He always had been, and he’d been teased often enough; but it didn’t seem to bother him overly much.  

Once, when a kid at school punched him, Jonathan came home and spent three hours researching bullying and the psychology behind kids who use violence against other kids.  Later, he told Candi that he just felt sorry for the bully, now that he knew the problem wasn’t really him, per se.  That was when Jonathan was ten years old.

Jonathan was still a kid in some ways, but in others he was amazingly mature beyond his years.  Candi wished she could be that nonchalant about high school life.  Maybe it was a guy thing or whatever, but she couldn’t be that unaffected.  

She entered the lobby thinking about ways she might be able to start up a conversation with Sarah. 
What can I talk to her about?  What do we both like that would be interesting to her?  Oh, I know … 

Candi walked up to Sarah who was standing in the lobby next to her bags, examining her fingernails.  “So, um, Sarah, hey.  Whatcha doin’?”

Sarah dipped her head, looking at Candi above her sunglasses.  “Standing here, waiting for the stupid shuttle to bring us to the cruise.”

“Oh, yeah.  Me too.  Um, I was wondering … what kind of bathing suit did you bring?”

Sarah sighed. “Suit?  As in singular?  I didn’t bring just one, I brought five, one for each day of the cruise.  Didn’t you?”

“Um, no.  I just brought one.”  Candi was so embarrassed.  The cruise hadn’t even started, and she’d already apparently committed a fashion faux pas.

“Well, I guess you could buy some in the gift shop on the ship.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s what I planned to do.  I didn’t have time to shop before we left.”  The lie came easily to her lips, as she tried to impress Sarah.

“Well, I have all bikinis, of course, all hooked in the back so I can unhook them to avoid tan lines.  I hate tie-backs, don’t you?  A couple of them have Brazilian bottoms too.  My father is going to hate them.”  She smiled coldly.  “So, what type of suit did you bring?”  She looked Candi up and down, not bothering to conceal her critical evaluation.

Candi didn’t want to answer.  She didn’t know what a Brazilian bottom was, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t something she would wear, especially since she knew it was something Sarah wore to make her dad angry.  Candi hadn’t worn a bikini since she was seven years old.  She was pretty conservative and a bit self-conscious about her body.

“I have a one-piece.  It’s pink.”

“A pink one-piece?  Are you kidding me?  Does it have one of the Disney princesses on it or something?  How are you going to get tan in a one-piece?”  She lifted up her glasses, resting them on the top of her head, and stared at Candi incredulously.  “Hello!  We’re going on a cruise … you don’t wear a one-piece on a cruise, dummy, didn’t you know that?”

Candi felt like shriveling up and dying right there on the spot.  How was she supposed to know these things?  “No, I didn’t know, actually.  I’ve never been on a cruise.”  Her face was burning red.

“Well, I have, and I can tell you that the only people who wear one-pieces are old ladies and fat people; and you’re neither of those.”  She put her sunglasses back down over her eyes and opened up a magazine she’d been holding under her arm.

“I’m not?  I mean, I know I’m not fat, but I really didn’t think I had a bikini body, I mean, like, at all.” 
I can’t believe I just said that.  How pitiful can I be?

Sarah didn’t seem to notice.  “You do.  You’re just too afraid to show it.  You’re repressed.  All you have to do is lay off the pancakes for a week and you’ll be fine for bikini season.”  Then she stopped reading her magazine to look Candi in the eye.  “Maybe you can use the cruise to come out of your shell, live a little bit.  I plan to.”  She smiled smugly at Candi, which only made Candi more nervous than she already was.  Sarah seemed to have some sort of plan formulated in her mind, and if Candi had come to know her at all in this very short period of time, it probably involved doing something that would give Frank Peterson a stroke.

“Yeah, maybe,” Candi replied, noncommittally.  She didn’t really enjoy annoying her parents.  That usually resulted in being grounded, and she hated being grounded.  It meant no after-school activities and no television for a week.  It was like a jail sentence where the only thing she could do was go to school or sit in her room.  

Without looking up, Sarah said, “I’ll help you shop for a suit on the ship if you want.”

Candi seized the opportunity, “Okay, that would be great!  Thanks!  When?”

“I don’t know.  Whenever.”

Candi couldn’t help but smile hugely.  “Okay, good.  Whenever.  That sounds great.”

“What sounds great?”  The voice came from just over her shoulder, causing Candi to leap up and squeak in surprise.  She turned around to find Kevin standing right behind her, listening in on their conversation.  Thank goodness he’d only heard the tail end of it.

“We were just talking about going shopping together on the ship.”

“Oh, god, you’re going shopping with Sarah?”  

Sarah didn’t even look up from her magazine.  “We’re going to get her a hot bikini so we can get all the little boys drooling around the pool.”

Candi’s face started burning again.  “Well, I don’t know about that part.”

“Oh, I believe it.  I could picture you in a bikini.”  Kevin backed up to appraise her more frankly.  “Yep, no doubt.  You could get them drooling.”  Then he winked at Candi and reached out to pinch her cheek.

Candi stood frozen in place.  Her stomach had about a thousand butterflies flying around in it. 
Is he flirting with me?  Oh my god, quick!  Think of something witty to say back!  

“Um, thanks.”  

Oh crap, what is wrong with me?  Why can’t I talk?  He’s going to think I’m a brainless idiot!

“Speaking of drooling, somebody get me a napkin.”  The girls followed the direction of Kevin’s gaze and saw a beautiful Latina girl walking by, looking like she’d just walked off the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.  She turned her head, catching Kevin’s eye, smiling at him with her perfectly straight, brilliantly white teeth.  

Kevin wasted no time taking off, leaving the girls standing alone again in the lobby.  They watched him go over, pick up her bag, and walk out the front door of the hotel with her hanging on his arm.

“Typical,” said Sarah.

“Yeah,” was all Candi could say, dejectedly.  To dream that this guy would actually notice her when he was really only interested in women who were so beautiful they made your eyes hurt was a complete waste of time.  What had she been thinking?  She and Kevin were never going to happen.  She was just going to have to crush on him from afar and hope that someday, life would be different for her.

“What’s your problem?” Sarah asked, picking up on Candi’s sad vibe.

“Oh, nothing.”

“You sound depressed.”

“I’m not.  Really.”

“Huh.  Whatever you say.  I know depressed when I hear it.”  She let Candi get away with her little white lie, and went back to her magazine.  A couple seconds later, she smiled, somewhat deviously.  Candi looked away, not wanting to see anymore.  She was afraid Sarah was going to figure out her deep, dark secret – her crush on Kevin.