“This is great,” William said. “This is the life. Your babysitter’s really hot.”
“Shut up,” Luke said.
“What? She is, right?”
“Yeah,” Luke agreed. “I’ve had a crush on Gosia since sixth grade.”
“You’re both rude,” I said, flipping over onto my stomach. I didn’t need them comparing me to her. Also, I didn’t think it was normal to mention sixth grade, when Kirstyn would’ve been in the pool with us. We would’ve been playing Marco Polo and nothing would’ve been weird.
I closed my eyes and floated for a while, letting the sun dry me off. Actually, this is nice, I was thinking. Old friends, hanging out together. There’s something really great about old friends, how you don’t even have to talk. You can just float and be perfectly comfortable. Well, almost perfectly. But maybe that’s why there was a tiny part of me that wasn’t in such a big rush to get this year over with—next year maybe everything would change.
Or maybe everything was already changing. Too fast.
“This is great,” William murmured. “Hard to believe it’s past six, and still bright as noon. It’s like summer already. Hey, you know your party?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You think I could score an extra invite? There’s this girl in all-county jazz band with me, and…”
“No problem,” I lied. Though Kirstyn would swear on her life she didn’t like William at all anymore, I knew she would freak out if he had a date at our party and she didn’t. But what could I say?
“Awesome,” William said, trailing his long fingers in the water. “My mom says no way we can get a pool, too much liability or something. You’re so lucky.”
I closed my eyes. Lucky. Yeah, except, maybe not so much anymore.
When I opened my eyes, William was on his back, his eyes with their long dark eyelashes shut and his hands behind his head, but Luke was lying on his stomach, staring at me.
“What?”
He didn’t answer.
“What are these thingies for, these circles?” William asked.
I squinted over at him. His eyes still closed, he was pointing at the cup holders in his raft.
“Sodas,” I said. “You thirsty?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Hooray for William. I was instantly, overwhelmingly thirsty myself, and grateful for a getaway. “I’ll get some.” I hoisted myself out of the pool and headed for the pool house.
“I’ll help,” Luke offered, and before I could say I really didn’t need any help getting sodas from the pool house fridge, he was out of the pool, dripping on the hot stone deck.
“Okay,” I said. He followed me across the deck and into the pool house, where he closed the door behind us.
I
T WAS DARK IN THERE UNTIL
I opened the refrigerator door. I grabbed two Sprites and handed them to Luke, but didn’t look him in the face. It’s not the first time he’d been in the pool house; we have parties all the time and anyway I could see his and William’s T-shirts on the bed in one of the rooms, the one to my right. But there we were, in the pool house, dripping wet, alone together.
“You want a towel?” I asked, going quickly around him, trying not to look at his flat stomach and tan chest on my way to turning on all the lights and opening the closet. When did he get arm muscles? I flung a towel back toward him. He caught it on top of his soda cans.
“Phoebe,” he said.
I took a breath and forced myself to look up at him. Water was dripping off his hair.
“Yeah?”
He took a deep breath, too, and looked at his feet. “So,
uh, what’s going on?”
My mouth opened but nothing came out. Going on? With me and him? Me and Kirstyn? My family? “I honestly have no idea,” I whispered.
He smiled, frowned, then smiled again, so quickly that if I hadn’t been staring at his face I’d definitely have missed the frown.
“What?” I asked, echo-smiling.
“Nothing, just…” He bit his lower lip. “I just know exactly what you mean.”
“You do?”
“No.” When I squinted at him, he smiled again. “Not exactly, I guess, I mean, but yeah. It’s weird, isn’t it?”
“What?” I tried to keep smiling, but it was a challenge.
“Everything,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. Okay, so here’s the thing. He really is incredibly cute. He’s fun and hot and maybe Kirstyn was right about me liking him again, and I had just been in denial.
How intense and black are his eyes? Were they always like that?
He isn’t the clingy little mama’s boy he was when we were five, I thought, but hello, I’m not in a little pink dress anymore, either. And the way I acted to him the first week of seventh grade was so long ago, I was probably remembering it all wrong anyway. Maybe I hadn’t been as much of a jerk as I thought. Maybe he’d forgotten, or decided we
had all grown up a lot and forgiven me.
There was really nothing stopping us from hooking up, since that’s what we clearly both wanted to do.
Well, anything other than the fact that my best friend would think I was crazy, and an idiot, and a loser. But maybe she would never know anyway.
He took a step toward me. We had only kissed a few times, back when we went out in sixth grade, and all those kisses (other than the last one) were in front of everybody, at those dumb parties we used to have. Still, I could remember how soft his lips were, how lightly they brushed mine, so different from gross Dylan Baker at camp with his gross tongue. Ew, I couldn’t even think about
him
without gagging; I don’t care how tall he was—yuck. So what if Luke is only my height, and wears Old Navy clothes, and maybe doesn’t shave at all yet, and his father is friends with my father and we’ve known each other forever?
Right there in my pool house, on a perfect warm May day, in my best Calvin Klein bathing suit and him in just shorts, smiling at me like that…it did not seem babyish and boring to think about kissing him again. The opposite, actually.
“I was wondering,” Luke said.
I just waited. I didn’t want to mess him up, in case he had it kind of planned out or something.
“Do you have any chips in here?” he asked.
“Chips?”
“I’m starving.”
“Oh,” I said. “You want some, some what?”
“Whatever, pretzels. Doritos. Remember one time you had those orange things, the crunchy ones?”
“Yeah,” I said. I opened the cabinet with all the snack food. “Take whatever you want.” If this was his introduction to asking me out, I was not hugely impressed. “What else were you, um, going to ask? Or say? Or whatever?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I just…I’m just a little…I’m always hungry lately.” He shrugged apologetically.
“You’re hungry,” I said.
“Is that okay? You seem, kind of, annoyed.”
“No, not at all,” I said, completely annoyed. “Take as much as you want.”
You immature puppy. You want chips? That’s what you want? Take them. I don’t know why you had to look all cute and bashful, if all you wanted was a snack.
But I didn’t say any of that. I just pointed at the well-stocked shelves.
“Okay. Thanks.” He put down the sodas and the towel and came to check out what was in there.
Great. Fine. Take some chips. What do I care? I had come in for a soda, nothing more. I’ve got bigger stuff to deal with than snacks, or hungry boys. Take every bag of chips in the whole cabinet, for all I care.
I held the door handle and he leaned forward to choose what he liked from the freaking buffet of chip choices. “Um,” he said.
I let out my breath, maybe impatiently. I was starting to
get cold in there, waiting for him to choose his damned snack. He stood up, and his face was moving toward mine before my mind registered what he was doing.
In fact, I wasn’t sure what was happening until his lips touched mine.
I
T CAN’T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN
a minute before Gosia called my name. I pulled my face reluctantly back from Luke’s but didn’t answer her. He blinked twice at me when she yelled my name again. His body was so much warmer than mine, and his mouth tasted so good.
“What!” I yelled.
“Dinnertime,” Gosia yelled, right outside the pool house door.
Luke turned away.
“Okay, okay,” I yelled, and then whispered, “Sorry.”
“No, that’s…” He went into the changing room and grabbed his stuff and William’s. “We should…” he said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, and realized I wasn’t sure what I was agreeing with, so I added, “I mean…”
“Mm-hmm,” he said, eyes on the floor, and wiggled past me to get to the door. I followed him but it turns out he wasn’t holding it open for me so it kind of slammed in
my face. By the time I got out, he was diving into the pool, the pile of clothes dumped on the side. Gosia gave me a quizzical look. I shrugged and looked back at the pool to see Luke swimming fast to the shallow end. He climbed out and said to William, “Let’s go.”
William looked back and forth between me and Luke as he scrambled out of the pool and into his clothes. “I’ll just call my mom to pick us…”
“Use your cell,” Luke said. “They’re having dinner. Come on.”
“If you…” I started.
“Thanks for…” Luke looked up at me for a second. “I mean, thanks.” His cheeks turned deep red on the sides. He grabbed William by his damp T-shirt and pushed him. “Their dinner is ready!”
“Dude,” William said with a laugh in his voice. “Chill!”
I turned to shrug at Gosia, expecting her to grin at me knowingly. She was pale and serious. “Dinnertime,” she said, and walked toward the back door.
Following her inside, I grabbed a sweatshirt off a hook and turned to go to the kitchen, but nobody was there. He kissed me, I was thinking. Gosia was holding open the dining room door, looking down at her ballet flats. Beyond her, my sisters and my parents were all sitting at the dining room table.
I almost asked what we were doing, if company was coming—but their quietness erased the smile off my freshly
kissed lips. I squeezed into my chair next to Allison without pulling it out first.
There were plates of salad in front of us all. Nobody had touched a fork. I didn’t know where to look.
“For this and for so much else,” Mom quietly said, “we are very grateful.”
It’s how we always used to start meals when I was younger. It was Daddy’s thing, that we should have moments of gratitude before meals and other rituals, too. Daddy likes rituals. The first Saturday every month he goes at 6
A.M
. to give out food at the homeless shelter; at least twice a year he makes us gather up all the stuff we don’t wear anymore and he brings it to the Salvation Army; every fifty-six days he gives blood at the blood bank. When he kisses us good night he says, “Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.” Or he used to. I don’t know if he still does; maybe after I’m sleeping he comes in and kisses my forehead. We hadn’t started a meal with “For this and for so much else” in a long time.
He smiled slightly at Mom, who was grinding pepper on her salad.
We all abruptly tried to eat. I did some cutting but when I got mesclun leaves into my mouth they felt like play food: rubber, unswallowable.
Mom put down her fork and knife. “I was fired today,” she said.
We all put down our silverware, too, and looked at her
with our hands under the table.
She took a deep breath. Her eyes were clear and her voice was steady. “What happened is, I have been doing research for years on a pharmaceutical company named Galen. You might have heard me mention it?”
We nodded.
Mom continued, “It’s a small company, but well capitalized, very exciting stuff in the pipeline. Well, it ran into some snags this week and I lost a lot of money on it. A lot of money. I still think I was right to take an aggressive position on it. I still say you’ll see it hit twenty-five or even thirty before year-end. But it’s not enough to be right. You have to be right at the right time.” She forced a small smile. “Because the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
I glanced at my sisters to see if this made any sense to them. It was hard to tell. They were focusing on Mom with serious faces so that’s what I did, too.
“But I think this can be remedied,” Mom said. “I’m setting up a meeting with the principals, and I think I can make a case to them. Everything is going to be okay. I don’t want you girls to worry.”
My sisters nodded so I nodded, too.
“I would like this all to be kept as private as possible,” Mom continued.
“Of course,” Quinn said immediately.
“Absolutely,” Allison said.
“Absonitely,”
I said, not wanting to copy but changing to “definitely” mid-word, too late.
Mom smiled at me. “Thanks. So, how was everybody else’s day? Anything interesting happen?”
My sisters shook their heads so I shook mine, too, and then Gosia came in with turkey and rice and broccoli, which we all forced down as quickly as possible. I didn’t think it was the right time to share the fact that only a few minutes earlier, I had been making out in the pool house. Although that certainly qualified as interesting, I was pretty sure it wasn’t what Mom meant. I felt like I had to tell somebody, and almost said something to Allison on our way upstairs. But then I didn’t. She and Quinn were both being so quiet, I had to be, too.
They each went to their own bedrooms and quietly closed their doors. I stood in my doorway for a minute, thinking we should really be clumped together on one of our beds, talking about what just happened. But when neither of their doors opened, I closed mine, too, and went to sit alone on my bed.
I wasn’t sure what to think about. It was beyond weird to have so much happen and then not talk about it with my sisters at all.
Well, I decided, maybe it’s good to have private stuff. I could deal with this whole Mom thing without their help. Not that there was anything particular for
me
to deal with. She’d work it out, she’d said. Of course she would. So
nothing even to think about, there.
Which left the Luke thing.
How was I going to keep that to myself?
Well, I thought, why should I cheapen what happened by blurting it out all over the place? It’s not like Quinn and Allison told me every time they kissed a boy. They totally never did! So I didn’t have to tell anybody, either. It could just stay private, between me and Luke. That was way more romantic, anyway. So I resolved to keep (and enjoy keeping) the secret of kissing Luke to myself, forever.