Before You Go (11 page)

Jude had steered clear of Becka all day, even worked through his break to avoid her. He resisted a dozen urges to confront her about last night. If Becka noticed, she didn’t push things, just did her job and kept a distance.

Kenny went around, thanking guys, sending them home, until his handpicked skeleton crew remained. Once the last customers were served, Kenny locked the door and yelled, “All right, let’s knock this out and get out of Dodge.”

Kenny energized the entire crew. They worked like whirling dervishes for the next twenty minutes—scraping the grill, emptying the grease trays, cleaning up behind the counter, washing the windows, sweeping and mopping the floors. Kenny brought up a little portable Bose system, plugged in his iPod, and the walls shook with a crazy mix of hard-core rap and metal. By the end, the place was spotless. Unlike Denzel, who left every night with clean fingernails, Kenny labored right along with everyone else, really putting his back into it. Jude noticed Roberto cleaning out a large, plastic, gallon-size mustard jar. “What are you doing, Berto?” Jude asked.

Roberto grinned. “Kenny’s idea. Our reward for a job well done.”

While the crew punched out, Roberto filled two mustard jars with beer from the tap. DaJon stood watch by the back door.

“Don’t let anybody see you guys,” Kenny said. “Throw a towel or something over it.”

“You going to hang with us, Kenny?” Roberto asked.

Kenny shook his head. “People to do, things to meet. Just be sure to get away from the building. Go to the far end of the parking lot—over by the dunes. If you get caught, I don’t know anything about it.”

Off they went, the jolly crew, smuggling mustard jars of pale ale into the sand dunes. It gave them a feeling of giddiness, a happy euphoria: beer, because they earned it. A bunch of working stiffs on their way to the neighborhood dive. Not enough beer to get hammered or anything, or even fail a Breathalyzer test, just enough to take the edge off a long day.

The only ones left were Jude, Roberto, DaJon, Ivan, Daphne, and Becka. Roberto opined that no way in hell he was walking across that hot parking lot—“I’d rather play hopscotch on the surface of the sun”—so he rolled over in his mother’s wheels with DaJon and Ivan.

Becka got her car too and offered Jude and Daphne a ride. “No, I’m good,” Jude said. “I’ll walk. You guys go.” Becka gave him a quizzical look, like,
Are you for real?
So he relented and climbed into the backseat. In the hot car, Jude felt tense and uncomfortable. Fortunately, Daphne seemed oblivious to the tension and chattered about her volunteer work at some pet-rescue center. “I’m not kidding,” she said. “After the old lady died, we discovered there were more than seventy-five cats living in her house.”

“Oh, my God,” Becka gasped.

“You should have seen it, Beck. They were sick and undernourished; my heart was breaking the whole time. It was horrible and disgusting.”

“Didn’t anyone notice?” Jude asked.

“That’s what I said,” Daphne replied, shifting in her seat to look back at Jude. “It was just this old, lonely woman who lived by herself—”

“With, like, a million cats,” Jude said.

“It makes me sad,” Becka commented. “That poor lady.”

“Those poor
cats
,” Daphne corrected.

They parked and gathered in a loose circle in a depression amid the dunes, pulling off shoes and socks, feeling the scrunch of warm sand between their toes. Roberto complained about seagulls, “rats with wings,” he called them.

Jude glanced at Daphne to see if she’d react. She probably liked rats. But the thin girl with large eyes had her head tilted toward Becka, deep in some kind of whispered conference.

DaJon took a swig from the mustard jar, wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. “They say that about pigeons. Rats with wings.”

“Sure, if you live in the city, it’s pigeons,” Berto conceded. “Out here, it’s seagulls. People think they are so beautiful soaring in the wind, but those people should come over with me to the Dumpster sometime. I’ll show ’em what seagulls are all about.” He took a shallow sip of beer, shivered, and said, “Nasty beasts.”

Roberto had a way of claiming the spotlight without overdoing it. He told hilarious stories about his Cuban grandmother Mam-Maw, and kept the conversation rolling. Roberto was in full glory, mid-story, saying, “At first I was like, ‘
What
?’ then I was like, ‘
WHAT
?!’” when Jude’s cell vibrated.

Why r u so weird today?

Jude read the text and glanced at its sender, sitting across from him. Becka looked back at him, worry in her eyes.

She rose and stretched. “I’m walking down to the water for a minute. Come with me, Jude.”

Phrased that way, Jude didn’t have much choice. Roberto cast a hairy eyeball at Jude and offered a slight, almost imperceptible shrug. “Good luck with that,” he seemed to say.

SIXTEEN

Jude and Becka walked in silence to the water’s edge. Becka put a stick of gum in her mouth. Jude thought of all the gum he scraped from the table and,
screw it
, asked for a piece anyway.

“Open a pack of gum and suddenly everybody’s your friend,” Becka joked.

Jude smiled—he couldn’t help himself—and took the gum from her hand. The late-afternoon surf was nearly perfect, the waves rolling in rhythmic succession before breaking and thundering to the sand, like white horses galloping to the shore. “Broken waves,” Jude murmured. He listened to the drone of the sea’s white noise, imagined it as a musical soundscape, a song, and felt the dry sting of salt air on his skin.

Becka rolled her pants to the knees and waded a few feet into the warm, low surf. “You ever go skinny-dipping in the ocean?” she asked. “It’s religious.”

Jude didn’t comment. The girl had no clue. He saw that the beach had slowly emptied out, only stragglers remained, families squeezing out the last minutes of pleasure before getting into their cars, a few joggers in both directions, a lone fisherman casting a line into the ocean, back bent and eternally hopeful.

“We should head back,” Jude said.

“They’ll wait.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I saw you,” Becka said. “At the bowling alley last night.”

Jude picked up an oyster shell, rubbed his thumb across its ridges.

“I looked up and you were there,” Becka continued. “Then you were gone.”

Jude snapped the shell between his fingers. It was dry and brittle from too much exposure to the sun. He rolled his eyes, looked to the sky, watched clouds assemble. He felt an anger pulse through his body, rising up in his throat. “You know why,” was all he could muster.

“I can explain, Jude.”

“I don’t care,” he lied. He stepped closer to her in the water. “You should have told me, that’s all. You lied to me, Beck. You said you were sick, you weren’t going out. Is he your boyfriend?”

Becka shook her head no. She fidgeted with the strings of her hoodie. “I hate it when one string becomes longer than the other,” she said, frowned, shrugged, stalling for time.

“I just thought that…” he stopped talking, couldn’t find the end of the sentence. He wasn’t used to talks like this, letting her inside. His instinct was to flee, just turn and head east along the shore, and run, run for miles.

Somehow she kept him there, water to his knees, this girl with tangled hair.

“Jude, I know you can’t understand, but I really need to try to explain. It’s important.”

Jude crossed his arms, nodded. He’d listen.

“I’ve had this stupid crush on that guy—his name is Brian, by the way, if it matters to you—ever since I was in junior high,” she said. Becka was talking quickly now, in a hurry to get the confession over, receive her penance. “He’s friends with my brother, been coming to our house for years. And all this time, I’ve been, like, invisible, Matt’s little sister.”

Jude didn’t want to hear the details. The ocean droned on, churning like a malevolent machine.

“Then last night—”

Jude interrupted her. “You don’t have to explain anything to me. I’m just a friend, right?”

“I saw you,” Becka said in a louder voice. She locked her gaze on his eyes, until they were the only two people in the world, just Jude and Becka. “And I felt like such a jerk.”

A bubble of hope burbled up Jude’s chest. He suppressed it and waited.

“I used to obsess over this guy,” Becka said. “My big brother’s friend. He was always there and he never saw me. Then last night, for the first time, he did. And it kind of threw me off balance. And the funny thing is, Jude, he’s a total creep when it comes to girls. I knew it the moment I saw you walk away. I mean, I’ve always known it—Brian is like the biggest egomaniac on the planet, and we have nothing in common except for my brother.”

“So you’re saying it’s over?” Jude looked away, afraid of the answer.

“I’m saying,” she said, “that you’re the one I like.”

Jude watched a big wave roll in, building and gathering from behind Becka. He reached out his hands, said, “Hold on.” The water hit her from behind, about shoulder high and with force, pushing her into his arms. She lurched forward, stumbling, and before he knew it, they were both knocked down in the water, twisting in the undertow.

“Are we okay?” Becka asked, struggling to her feet, clothes soaked through. There was urgency in her voice, almost panic. “I really want us to be okay.”

Jude said, yeah, they were okay. But in his secret heart, full of shadows and unkempt corners, he honestly had no idea. She baffled him, and yet he ached for her even in his puzzlement.

“Let’s get back to the others,” he said.

Becka smiled and her face glowed, as if lit by candles. She was a natural beauty, no doubt about that. “We’re already wet, might as well go swimming.” Becka tugged at his hand, pulled him deeper into the ocean. And there she turned and waited, timing the surf before diving headfirst just as another perfect wave broke and shattered. Jude followed into the crash of roiling water, pounded by a hundred charging hooves, until he bobbed to the calm surface again, the sky still blue, the sunrays like diamonds glittering across the water, Becka beside him, eyes beaming, a searchlight on rocky shores.

SEVENTEEN

“What do you want to hear?” Jude asked. He sat cross-legged on a blanket in the park, holding an acoustic guitar. Becka reclined on her side, languid, liquid almost, and lazily replied, “Just play.”

He wasn’t nervous. With a guitar in his hands, Jude felt confident, at home. He went through some songs that he knew would impress her, sometimes fingerpicking, mostly knocking out easy riffs and asking her to “name that tune.”

“You’re a different person with a guitar,” Becka observed.

“Different? How?” he asked.

“My guitar teacher Jess—he’s crazy good, by the way, plays in the Centipedes—talks about something he calls a musical personality, which can be totally different from a person’s ordinary personality.”

“So somebody could be quiet in everyday life,” Jude said, “but strap a guitar on him, and he turns into an extrovert.” Jude mulled it over. “Sure, that makes sense to me.”

They talked music for a while, swapped the names of favorite bands. For some reason, Jude found himself going overboard about his love for the Cure, in his words, “one of the most underrated bands ever.”

Becka wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know, kind of old, aren’t they?”

“Uh-oh,” Jude said. “If you don’t love the song ‘Pictures of You,’ I don’t think we can be friends.”

“Oh, well, it was nice while it lasted,” Becka joked. “Do you write songs?”

“No,” he lied. He had written quite a few, in fact, each one more fabulously bad than the last. The songs would stay buried in the vault.

“Really? I’m surprised. You seem so …
inside
.”

“What do you mean?”

Becka paused, picking her words carefully as if they were shells in the sand. “It’s like, with you, it’s not all on the surface. There’s something underneath.”

Jude could live with that,
hidden depths
, secrets, and he didn’t disagree.

“Sing something,” Becka suggested.

Jude ran his fingers along the fretboard, pentatonic scales he’d played a million times, shook his head. “Um, no,” he said. “I can’t sing.”

“Yeah, you can,” Becka said. “Just open your mouth. Everybody can sing.”

“Not me,” Jude answered. He put down the guitar, reached for some bread and cheese. It was Becka’s idea—this picnic in the park—and she had brought everything to make it just so: a blanket, bread, cheese, fresh strawberries.

She took up the guitar, strumming hard, and sang in a high, clear voice, and it was Jude’s turn to watch, to marvel. She was so natural about it, authentically herself, as confident as a flower opening its petals to the sun.

“My friend Corey wants to meet you,” Jude said between songs.

“Oh, yeah?” Becka grinned. “Sounds like a big deal. Epic, almost. Is that like bringing me home to your parents? I get to meet Corey?”

“Yeah, it’s exactly like that,” Jude said, straight-faced. “I was thinking I could invite him to the softball game Wednesday night.”

Becka nodded, strummed absentmindedly. “Can he hit?”

Jude shrugged. “Corey is one of those guys who can do anything, but he’s more into pop culture than playing sports. Movies, books, music. He works at the bike store on Wantagh Avenue, near the train station. Supersmart guy.” Jude didn’t fully understand why, but he needed for Becka to know Corey, to like him. And, he guessed, for Corey to like her. It was probably dumb, but he wanted the dots to connect, like the stars of the Big Dipper. Jude, Becka, Corey, all friends. He’d seen a lot of guys get new girlfriends, and suddenly they were, like, gone. Vinnie did that a lot. He’d hook up with a girl and disappear for weeks, like a spy who’d gone deep cover. Jude didn’t want it to be that way with Becka; he wanted her to fit into his world, and that world began with Corey, his best friend.

Becka shifted and lay on her back, resting her head in Jude’s lap. Looking skyward, she observed, “It’s a tie-dye sky.”