Perfect Couple (23 page)

“Yeah!” Tia cheered. “I told you the day of the elections that he would be better for you than Kennedy.”

Kaye shook her head. “Just be careful that it’s the good kind of trouble.”

*   *   *

Brody parked his truck at the edge of Granddad’s private beach. Several hundred yards away, on the public section of the beach, we could see the yellow flag flying. That meant medium risk in the high surf. We waded into the ocean with our surfboards under our arms.

Hours later, completely exhausted and tingling from exertion, I floated on my board and watched a lifeguard haul down the yellow flag and hoist a red one. Two red flags would
have meant the surf had gotten so rough that the beach was closed to swimmers. One red flag meant the lifeguard eyed us resentfully and only
wished
we would get out of the water so she didn’t have to save our asses later.

“Do you think we should go to shore?” I asked Brody, who was floating on his board beside me. The sunset was beautiful and violent behind him, with strange clouds stirred up by the approaching storm. The bright pink light smoothed the ugly purple bruise on his side, courtesy of Friday night’s game.

“Brody?” I called over the noise of the tide.

“I heard you,” he said. “I’m thinking. I have trouble giving a shit about my own safety. I’m trying to consider this as a normal person would, for the sake of
your
safety.”

“That’s sweet of you.”

He laughed. “You’re welcome. Yeah—”

His voice was drowned out by an approaching roar. Before I could turn, a huge wave crashed over my head, forcing me under the water. The surfboard squirted out of my arms, and the tie tugged my ankle. I did a flip and grabbed for the board before it escaped out to sea, dragging me with it.

I surfaced spluttering. Brody was laughing and trying to shake the water out of his ears. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

“As I was saying,” he said, “yeah, I think we should go to shore.”

*   *   *

An hour later, we were still lying on towels on Granddad’s deserted beach, kissing in the darkness. Though he’d been exploring my breasts with his hands and then his mouth, I’d wanted to keep on my bathing suit top for a while, in case someone strolling on the beach wandered by. But when Brody fitted himself between my legs and lay on top of me, with only his bathing suit and my bikini bottoms between us, I forgot my modesty. He slowly circled each of my breasts with his tongue.

He held himself above me in mid push-up, his forearms trembling. He said softly, barely audible above the wind in the palms above us, “I have a condom.”

I swallowed. “Okay.”

“Do you want to?”

My whole body said yes, rising along the length of him, desiring him. And he felt it. He sucked in a small gasp.

“I want to,” I breathed. “But I’m not on anything, and I would be terrified of getting pregnant, even with a condom.”

He smiled with his mouth only. His eyes were worried.

“But I’ll get on something,” I said, “and then I want to.”

He nodded. “Okay.” He lowered himself over me and kissed my lips once more, deliciously, slowly. Then he rolled off me. “Sit up. Let me tie you.”

I found my bathing suit beside me and clutched it to my chest as he tied two bows in the back, his fingers sliding intimately across my skin. We both lay down on the sand again. His feet captured one of mine and massaged scratchy sand between my toes.

All the while, he was inhaling deeply like he couldn’t quite catch his breath. “Wow,” he murmured, “I feel like I’ve just run wind sprints in practice.” His voice shook.

Down by our sides, I felt for his hand, grasped it, and squeezed.

He took one last long breath and seemed to relax. I couldn’t hear him breathing anymore over the surf. The waves rolled in and slipped out. The planet was breathing. Overhead, the front edge of the tropical storm sped through the sky, dark purple clouds glowing on a periwinkle background.

“Are you thinking about how you’d compose a photo of this?” he asked.

“Not exactly. I was thinking I could never take this picture. It would be a huge disappointment, because the lens wouldn’t quite capture the intense color of this sky.”

“You’re so artistic,” he said. “It seems like you could just paint the world the way you wanted it, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about catching it just right.”

“The world is beautiful exactly like it is,” I said. “You just have to know how to frame it, and bring it into focus.”

I watched the clouds race overhead. Everything in my life seemed more in focus at that moment. My body still tingled where he’d touched me. I felt close to him. His transgressions of Friday night seemed a million miles away. I was beginning to understand how Mom could forgive my dad so many times, if this was how they kissed and made up.

“Do you think everything we feel for each other is physical?” I asked. “Like, we’ve done some things together and that makes our brains think we should be together?”

“You’re dividing the mental and the physical,” Brody said, “the head and the heart. I don’t buy that division.”

“What do you mean, you don’t buy it?”

“I mean, sure, you see it in poems and songs, but it’s a metaphor. It isn’t real. Your brain is part of your body. It’s one whole system that has to work together, or not. Nobody knows that better than me.”

Right. He was still afraid of getting another concussion—as he should be, honestly. My relaxation programs had helped, but he was still working on staying in the game.

“What you’re really asking me is whether what we have together fits into a box you’ve made.” He held his fingers around an imaginary box in the dark in front of him. The box was small. And I was surprised, once again, that he understood what I was thinking a lot better than I understood it myself.

“I’m all for standards,” he said. “But it seems to me that you built that box a long time ago, and it hasn’t been working for you lately. Maybe it never did.”

He turned to me and put one big, sandy hand up to cup my chin. “Here’s what I know, Harper. I’ve never felt more comfortable than I do right now, right here, with you. If this was taken away from me, I would fight to get it back. I’m pretty easy to please, wouldn’t you say? I’m more of a go-with-the-flow guy than a fighter. But I’m determined to keep football in my life. And I’ll do the same to keep you in it too. Of course, now I’ve compared you to football, which is insulting, sorry.” He took his hand off my chin, reclining on the beach again with the muscle control of many hours spent in the school’s weight room, and closed his eyes.

“That’s a huge compliment, coming from you,” I said.

He opened one eye. “Right.”

“I’m serious. You have a box too. You’ve wondered, ‘Will any woman ever be as important to me as football? There is not such a woman. Despair!’ Then you found me. I’m proud
to sit in that box. Next to the box containing a football.”

He rolled to face me. The smile had left his face. He wasn’t kidding anymore. He said, “It’s not just a game. I mean, it is, but it means more than that to me.”

“I know.” Admittedly, I didn’t understand one hundred percent. But he seemed to love playing football like I loved taking pictures. At some point, an activity became a part of you.

“It could be a career for me,” he said, “if not as a player, maybe as a coach.”

“You would make an awesome coach,” I said.

“But even if the game doesn’t pan out for me,” he said, “I’ve been good at it. I’ve worked hard for it. There aren’t a lot of things in my life that I can say that about.” He rolled on his back again and reached for my hand. We watched the clouds spin by above us.

After a long silence, filled with the roar of the excitable ocean, I said, “I want to talk about sex again.”

He turned his head and gazed at me. “You only want to talk about it?”

“For now. Do you think we should wait for some special event, like graduation?”

“No,” he said immediately.

“Prom?”

“No.”

“Homecoming?”

He chuckled. “You’re asking me if we
should
wait. My opinion is, no. But we
will
, if you want to.” He pulled me closer. “I’ll always be the one who wants to spend the summer after graduation touring Europe even though we don’t have any money, who wants to cut class and go to the beach for the day, who drags you to Vegas the second we turn twenty-one. I’ll say, ‘Come on, it’ll be fun.’ You just have to tell me when to stop.”

I laid my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. He wrapped his arm around me. Whatever my future was with Brody, it did sound like an awful lot of fun.

*   *   *

On Monday in journalism class, Mr. Oakley called me up to his desk. I hadn’t planned to tattle on Kennedy. Quinn had done that for me.

Mr. Oakley asked me to tell him my side of the story, but Kennedy hardly let me get a word in edgewise. He followed me to Mr. Oakley’s desk, stood right beside me, and denied everything I said. Mr. Oakley did not look happy. At first I thought he was furious with me. Then he barked at Kennedy to sit down—and Mr. Oakley was not a barker. He tried to convince me to stay on as yearbook photographer. I told him
I couldn’t work like this
and resisted the urge to throw my
hands in the air like a diva. He said we should table the discussion until he’d spoken to Kennedy, and he took Kennedy out into the hall.

Half an hour later, at lunch, Kaye told me, “I know some gossip about you! We’re having some minor problems in student council, so I’ve been spending a lot of quality time in the teachers’ workroom. I’ve overheard things.”

“I’ll bite,” Tia said. We all moved closer together, knowing teachers’ workroom gossip was the juiciest kind of gossip. “What are the minor problems in student council?”

Kaye’s eyes cut to me, then to Tia. “Top-secret issues that probably will amount to nothing. Anyway,” she said, splaying her fingers like this was going to be delicious, “Mr. Oakley was bitching nonstop about Kennedy. He wants to fire him as yearbook editor for moving up your deadline, Harper. He said you were reluctant to accuse Kennedy yourself, but several students told him Kennedy fired you just because you broke up with him.”

“Really!” I exclaimed. “Mr. Oakley didn’t say anything like that to me.”

“He can’t,” Kaye said. “He doesn’t think he can fire Kennedy, because the code of student conduct isn’t clear enough. Principal Chen is afraid Kennedy’s parents could sue the school. Mr. Oakley is mad. As. Hell. He keeps saying it’s a fucking
travesty that Kennedy gets away with murder and makes the yearbook’s ace photographer feel like she has to quit.”

“Did Mr. Oakley actually say ‘fucking travesty’?” Tia asked.

“Listen,” Kaye said, “I have learned some language in the teachers’ workroom that would curl your hair. You should have heard them after Sawyer passed out from heat exhaustion. The principal and the cheerleading coach and the football coach all blamed each other. I cowered in the corner, waiting for them to shiv each other.”

I felt like a million dollars for the rest of the school day. I had liked Mr. Oakley before, but it was great to be called an ace photographer. He appreciated me and was trying to come to my aid. Maybe Brody had been right and my decision to quit had been too rash. I would talk to Mr. Oakley about it again tomorrow. Paid or not, yearbook photographer was an important position I’d worked hard for, and I wasn’t ready to give it up.

My good mood lasted until about five o’clock, when, as I was in the middle of altering one of my dresses for Kaye, she called my cell and asked me to come back to school. She had student council business to discuss with me and Brody as soon as he got out of football practice. She wouldn’t tell me what the business was over the phone, but there was no way I could have missed this. I was afraid this was the reason
Kaye had been spending so much quality time in the teachers’ workroom: the minor problem, the top-secret issue that probably would amount to nothing. I hopped on my bike and pedaled back to school.

When I arrived, the football team was out of the showers and heading to their cars. Kaye, in her workout clothes and cheerleader shoes, sat on the tailgate of Brody’s truck, talking to him. As I watched, Sawyer approached them. I couldn’t hear what Kaye yelled at him from that distance, but I could tell she was shooing him. She pointed toward his truck. He retreated and sat on his own tailgate, waiting.

I leaned my bike against a palm tree. Kaye slid off Brody’s tailgate and patted the place where she’d been. I hopped up next to Brody, looking in his eyes for some hint of what was about to come. He shook his head no. She hadn’t told him yet.

“Sooooo,” Kaye said. She’d started a million club meetings since we’d been in school together. She volunteered to give speeches in front of the class. I’d never seen her look this uncomfortable.

“Spill it,” Brody said.

She pressed ahead. “The student council made a mistake. In ninth grade and tenth grade and eleventh grade, I was in charge of counting the votes for the Senior Superlatives. This year the student council advisor—you know,
Ms. Yates—wouldn’t let me because I’m a senior myself and it wouldn’t have looked good for me to count the votes for my close friends and for myself. She gave the job to some younger students. I should have found a way to do it, though. I
knew
they would mess it up.”

Brody put his arm around my shoulders. “What happened?” His voice was loud.

“Most of the categories include a girl and a boy who don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. Like, Tia was the girl who got the most votes for Biggest Flirt, and Will was the guy. I was the girl who got the most votes for Most Likely to Succeed, and Aidan was the guy. That’s how the student council tallied the votes for Perfect Couple That Never Was, too. But they shouldn’t have. Because it’s a
couple
.”

She turned to me. “You won the girl’s side of the vote because some people were pairing you with one boy, and some people paired you with another.” She turned to Brody. “You won the guy’s side because so many people paired you with two different girls. You and one of those girls should have come in second. Harper, you and another guy actually came in third. Two totally
different
people were paired together the most and should have won. But nobody paired Brody Larson and Harper Davis with each other.”