What Happens Now (5 page)

“It’s not that easy for me,” I finally said to Kendall, hoping she would get it. I was not going to be making ice-cream cones for everyone in town or collecting multicolored golf balls out of a fake pond. I would have very little time where I wasn’t being relied upon by a family member. She could do whatever the hell she wanted to, but I could not.

Kendall spotted something over my shoulder and made a cringe-y face. I turned to see, and there was Lukas coming down the hall, walking with his friend Brady.

“Ugh,” muttered Kendall, which really said it all for both of us.

Brady stopped and said, “Hi, guys.”

Lukas grabbed him by the shirt and yanked, shaking his head. It didn’t seem malicious. It was more like,
I’m not prepared to do this right now
.

Kendall asked, “What’s up?”

I stared at a suddenly riveting spot on the wall.

“Too much and not enough,” said Brady, grinning with newly braceless teeth. Kendall had always liked Brady. There had been talk of a double date, when Lukas and I were together. They both had last names as first names, so why not give it a try?

It still hurt, with Lukas. To not-quite-see each other this way. He was the third person I ever kissed, and the first who ever wanted to call me his girlfriend. His hands, which had been all over my body. His lower lip, which I’d held lightly between my teeth. How he made me sigh on the plaid couch in his basement, wanting more but not wanting more, desperate to lose control while gripping it as tightly as I could with white knuckles.

I didn’t want to think about that other part of him, which I could almost still feel on my fingertips.

“Hey, Lukas,” my mouth said without consulting my brain.

He looked straight at me now, and I was reminded of how much we resembled each other. It was one of the things the Mock Trial kids said from the beginning. They called us “the Siblings,” but Lukas took it as a sign we were supposed to be a couple. He had the same wavy, dirty blond hair and brown eyes I did. As prosecuting attorneys, we’d seemed united.

“Ari,” he said. Simply and flatly, like my name alone told the story of the cruel way I cut myself off from him. Lukas turned
and walked away. Brady shrugged at us, then trailed after his friend.

I had made that, what had just happened.

“Do I get points for trying?” I asked Kendall, blinking the sting from my eyes.

“Sure, but I’d say you’ve got a big deficit to make up. You messed the guy up bad.”

“I never meant to do that.” I shook my head hard, shook that thought out. “I’ll never forgive myself for it.”

Kendall must have sensed how serious I was. “Would it have been so hard to simply, you know, break up with him?”

“I thought it would be easier to ignore and avoid him until he finally got the hint,” I replied. “Easier for me, I guess. For him, not so much.”

I winced at the memory of Lukas’s emails, the note he left in my locker.

Please, please tell me what I did. Is this about what happened after the party?

I’m sorry if I pushed you too far, but you never told me to stop. We can dial it back.

Talk to me, Ari.

I don’t deserve the silent treatment.

He was right. He didn’t. But my fear of confrontation beat out my sense of what was mature and, you know, kind.

Kendall put a hand on my shoulder. “He was your first boyfriend. How the hell were you supposed to know what to do? Now, at least, you know better.”

“I know a lot of things better,” I added.

“Then take that and do what you need to about Camden Armstrong. Otherwise, you are not allowed to pine for him from a distance and then talk about it all summer. Agreed?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay, then. Let’s go figure out what the hell Hester Prynne was thinking with that creepy Arthur Dimmesdale who was
so
not worth the hassle.”

I followed her down the hall, happy to have orders.

4

I was loading
up the car after a morning at the lake with Dani, and suddenly there he was. Lashing his bike to a rack in the reservoir parking lot. Like a normal human being who, you know, exists. It had been a full week since the Bathroom Incident and I’d replayed the scene so much in my head, it was easy to forget he was three-dimensional and could move of his own accord.

I looked away and wasn’t going to glance again but of course I did it anyway, when I was reaching up to pull the hatchback down. Naturally, this was when Camden saw me. My arm caught in midair as if I were waving. He waved back.

My adrenaline level went from Zero to Holy Crap in a millisecond.

Now he was walking toward me. I unfocused my eyes so all I really saw was the bright white of a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, set against the brown skin of his arms and the dark blue of his jeans.

In the middle distance, two other people pulled into the parking lot on bikes. Eliza, and the other boy from last summer, so tall he made his bicycle look like a toy. And Eliza, well. All I noticed at first was that she still had lips. The ones Camden had kissed.

I closed the hatchback and leaned against it for support in case I’d have to see them do whatever they were going to do together, as a couple. Camden kept approaching, and in a moment of terror, I wondered if he was not actually coming over to
me
but headed somewhere else, and this was going to be even worse than the restroom.

“Hey,” he said, finally stopping a few yards away.

“Hi.” It somehow came out normal. Maybe this would be fine.

“That was you the other day, in the men’s room.”

“Yes.”

“It was funny.”

“It was?” Come on, Ari. Say a complex sentence. With clauses and stuff. “I thought it was a little bit devastating.”

“Eh. Men, women. Toilets are toilets.”

I laughed. He made me laugh. “At least nobody was changing in there.”

“True. You got lucky it was just me.” He paused. “You’re Ari, right?”

He knew my name. His voice saying it made me flush. I could only nod.

“I’m Camden.”

“Hi, Camden.” I made it sound as if I didn’t know, and that felt like a lie.

Now the other guy and Eliza were walking up behind Camden. I’d forgotten how the boy teetered as he moved, with all that height, and how nonchalantly stunning the girl was. Like she glowed and knew it and didn’t let it change anything.

“Thanks for totally
ditching us
at the traffic light,” she said to Camden.

Camden halfway turned to them. “I told you. I can’t ride slower than that, it’s physically impossible for me. Sorry.”

He didn’t go to Eliza.

Instead, he looked at me. “This is Ari. Ari, this is Eliza and Max.”

“Hello,” I said, with a wave in their direction. Okay, then. So now we’d officially met. It was like characters from a book I’d read over and over, suddenly stepping off the page.

Max said, “Hey,” but Eliza simply scanned me from the top down. She stopped dead when she saw my purple boots.

“Satina Galt,” she said, pointing with her chin at my feet.

“Totally,” said Max, taking off his bike helmet. The previous
summer, his hair had had streaks of blue and purple in it, but he’d cut the colors off and now his head was covered in brown duckling fuzz.

Camden rolled his eyes. “I apologize for them. They’re a little obsessed.”

But there I was, feeling suddenly, thrillingly, seen.

“No apologies necessary,” I said, sticking out one foot sideways to better display the boot. “They’re comfortable and practical and surprisingly stylish, regardless of where in time or space your hypership lands you.”

Camden and Eliza and Max exchanged the same deeply impressed look.

“Season Four? When she had those shiny pants, too?” asked Eliza. It was like we’d all lapsed into our native language. The only other person I’d ever spoken it with before was my mom, multiple lifetimes ago.

“Actually, Season Three,” I said. “They changed her boots first, before they sexied up the rest of her uniform.”

“Ah, right,” said Eliza. “Wherever did you find these beauties? I figured spray paint was the only way I’d make a full Satina uniform happen.”

“I got lucky at the thrift store in town.”

More impressed looks. The whole story was more complicated than that, but I wasn’t going to get into it.

“A perfect thrift store find is the universe wanting you to have something,” said Camden, making those scandalous dimples
for me
.

“I like to think so,” I said, willing my voice not to shake. Keeping myself together while having this conversation took an amount of strength I could only attribute to the boots. The boots made me able. The boots made things Possible.

Camden was about to say something else when Danielle came running into the parking lot.

“Freeze!” I yelled on instinct.

She froze, but snapped back, “You told me to hurry up, so I’m hurrying!” Then she noticed Camden, Max, and Eliza, and her eyes widened. “I remember you guys . . . ,” she said.

“We’ve got to go,” I said quickly, cutting her off. I could already hear Dani’s next comment.
You were Ari’s summer crush last year!
Or maybe:
I’m pretty sure Ari dreams about having babies with you. What’s your name again?

I grabbed Dani’s hand and pulled her close to me. Camden regarded us. I couldn’t read his expression. Amused, maybe, fringed with sadness. Wistful. Everyone was silent for a few moments, not sure what was supposed to happen now. A white parking space line divided me from them, and the boundary suddenly seemed important. If Dani hadn’t been there, would I have stepped over it to more Satina, more
Silver Arrow
, more everything?

Finally, it was Eliza who ended the awkwardness and said, “Well, hopefully we’ll see you around, Specialist Galt.” She moved toward the entrance gate, gesturing for Camden and Max to follow.

In the car on the way home, my right foot solid on the gas
pedal, I wiggled my toes in the boot.

“That was him, right?” asked Dani from the backseat.

Him. That
X
on Camden’s baseball cap last summer, and how it was like he’d been marked for me.
This is The Boy
.

“Yes,” I said.

Already, it hurt extra hard to be driving away from the lake, knowing they were there and I was not.

“Why did that girl call you Something Galt?”

Most of the time, Dani already knew the answers to the questions she asked, but she liked to hear them come from someone else.

“Satina Galt. From
Silver Arrow
.”

“And that’s your favorite show, right?”

She knew it was, but I still said, “Yes,” then added, “It was Mom’s favorite show, too. When she was a teenager.”

I wasn’t sure if Dani knew that, but had a feeling she didn’t. Judging from Dani’s surprised expression in the rearview mirror, I was right.

Thing was, “favorite show” did not even scratch the surface of it.

And another thing, a
terrible
thing was, I felt glad Danielle would never know that.

It was me who watched
Silver Arrow
with Mom going as far back as I could remember, in our basement apartment with the once-green-but-now-yellow carpet, where it always smelled of hot dogs even though we never ate them. She’d come home from her job at the bank, change into sweats, make two cups
of tea with lots of sugar, then pull out her DVDs of all five seasons that first aired in the 1980s. I’d watch her select a disk and handle it so delicately, with two fingers, that I was afraid to ever touch these glimmering things myself. I believed you could stare into them, like a mirror, and see a different reality staring back.

My mother needed an episode every day. She especially needed Satina Galt, the sole human woman among men and aliens and androids in an interplanetary crew.

As for me? I was five years old. I could recite the alphabet, the Pledge of Allegiance, and this speech from the opening credits of the show (and I could do it in a slow, deep voice that sounded eerily like the one on TV):

Behold the
Arrow One
, a twenty-third-century hypership designed for long-range space travel! The shining beacon of an ever-unfolding future!

But an accident on its maiden voyage has torn a hole in the universal continuum. Now it hurtles randomly through time and space while its crew tries to get back home.

Where, and when, will the
Arrow One
hit next?

Wherever. Whenever. It was always Satina’s intelligence, her independence, her toughness, and her sense of humor that made all the difference. At least, that’s how Mom and I saw it.

She stopped watching around the time she met Richard. I didn’t.

The universe wanting you to have something
, Camden had said about my thrift store find.

Some people were fans. Some people wove their fandom into the threadbare places in their lives, to make them stronger. I wondered if Camden Armstrong was one of these people, and where he wove, and why.

The next Monday afternoon, I stepped out of my AP French final and took a deep breath. It was almost worth it to get sick with stress about a test, to have this. One delicious moment of relief that it was over.

I found Kendall by her locker. She’d just come out of her chemistry exam and looked appropriately destroyed.

“A C at best,” she said, throwing a stack of study notes in a nearby garbage can. “I am so sick of this shit.”

“I’m sorry, Ken,” I said.

“Me, too.” She didn’t meet my glance. I knew from past experience that she was feeling a special combination of embarrassment and anger. Her parents, who were both college history professors, would have to put on their supportive-but-disappointed expressions that even I knew so well.

“What are you doing later?” I asked. “Wanna come over and cram for English?”

“I’m meeting up with Sasha, Caitlin, and those guys to do that,” she said, looking truly torn. Sasha, Caitlin, et al., were Kendall’s friends from the newspaper. I’d never clicked with them. Still, she asked, “Why don’t you join us?”