She didn't come back to class until halfway through history. As she tiptoed to her desk across the room from me, she mouthed in my direction, I have to talk to you. I actually looked behind me to see who she was talking to, but I was sitting in a desk against the wall.
Well, that totally blew my concentration on the Boston Tea Party. She'd just spent the last half hour with Doug. Whatever she had to say must be about Doug, and about me. And whatever it was, good or bad, I was dying to hear it. I glanced at my watch five hundred times before the bell finally rang for break.
Lugging our backpacks, we walked toward calculus with our heads together conspiratorially. Which was very strange, because usually I walked fast to calculus to make sure I got across campus in time, and Keke ran toward calculus to get some energy out, checking the status of practical jokes she'd slipped into lockers along the way.
"I talked to Doug for a long time," she said.
I nodded, fighting down the butterflies in my stomach and suppressing the urge to shake her to get the information out faster.
"I told him about that big fight we had yesterday. He got really mad at me. With that on top of his leg hurting, I swear I thought he was going to blow a gasket."
I laughed. "He doesn't know anything about cars," I said nonsensically.
"He said you always listen to me and put up with me," Keke said, "and the one time you really needed me, I turned on you. He made me feel like shit. So, I'm sorry." She stopped and held out her arms.
I stared at her for three full seconds before I realized she wanted to hug me. Then I stepped into her embrace. "It's okay."
"I just thought we were really good friends," she said in my ear. She pulled back to look at me. "I couldn't believe I had no idea something that big happened to you. People kept coming up to me asking how I could possibly not have known about your mother, like there was something wrong with me. It was embarrassing. But you went out of your way to hide it from me." She looked straight into my eyes, which she didn't do often either, waiting for an answer.
Slowly I said, "I've been kind of screwed up. Keke, I'm really sorry." I felt the butterflies rising with the tears as I said this. By the time I coughed out sorry, I was crying there in the hall with sophomores streaming around us, in and out of the driver's ed room. Keke's arms tightened around me, which made me cry harder. "See," I sobbed, "this is why I don't tell people."
"It's okay," Keke said, rubbing my back. And strangely, it was. Just as I'd seen myself retching over the public toilet in the swimming pool bathroom, I could see myself crying in the hall. I could hear what the sophomores would whisper to their friends later: "Zoey Commander lost it outside driver's ed. Y ou know, that senior whose mom tried to kill herself and went ape shit at the last swim meet." But that was okay, because I was also that senior with friends. At least I had Keke.
Calculus was still a long distance away. We jogged through the halls as I wiped at my eyes with the backs of my hands, and I started to tell her everything that had happened with my mom. I told her more in snippets as we walked from calculus to biology, and at lunch we settled across from each other at the swimmers' table. I'd wanted to snag the end of the table away from the others so we could have a little privacy, but someone else had beaten us to it. Leaning across the table toward each other with their heads close together were Doug, looking like himself again (hot), and Lila.
Keke's eyes slid over to them, then back to me. She spoke softly (Keke was full of surprises today) so the junior girls sitting around us couldn't hear. "When I talked to Doug this morning, he also told me y'all had a huge fight last night. Y goal for the night was having a fight with everybody on the swim
our team?"
I cringed. "The one with Doug was special." I took a bite of salad.
"That's what he said. Are you going to try to get him back?"
I glanced over at him and swallowed. "Doug is hot."
Grinning, she nodded at me.
I said, "Doug is also manipulative and controlling."
She frowned. "He asked me to watch out for you today. I guess you could say that's manipulative and controlling. But you could also say he was worried about you and he cared about you. Any girl would kill to have a boy like that." I could hear the wistfulness in her voice. She and Lila must still be arguing about Lila going out with Mike. "A week ago, if you'd told me you were going to hook up with this criminal--"
"He's not." I sighed.
"--I would have laughed."
"Y did laugh!"
"But after hearing the way he talks about you . . ." She shook her head. "Wow."
"I need to break up with Brandon first." I felt a flash of guilt that this was the first thought I'd had of Brandon all day. Automatically I pulled my cell phone from my backpack and turned it on to check for a text from him--or better yet, a message from my mother. Nothing from her, and no text from Brandon. I hadn't heard from him in two days, since I saw him Wednesday night at the meet.
Keke shifted closer across the table and talked even more quietly. "Funny you should say that. Y know the swim team's having a party after the
ou football game tonight. At least, we're supposed to be. I'm holding up my end. If Lila doesn't bring the hot dogs, that's not my problem. Anyway, Stephanie swears she's bringing Brandon as her date." I sat up straight in surprise, then leaned over my salad again. "Does Brandon know he's Stephanie's date?"
"As his girlfriend," Keke said, "you should definitely ask him."
AT THE BEGINNING OF PRACTICE, I was standing in front of my locker and I'd just pulled off my shirt to change into my swimsuit when the door to the pool squeaked open a crack. "Ladies," Doug called.
Six girls screamed at once. I didn't. I only felt a little warm.
"The boy band has left the building," he called when the squeals died down. "Coach said don't change today because we're putting the dome on the pool. Zoey."
Six girls jerked their heads toward me.
I felt my face flush. As casually as I could manage, I called back, "Doug."
"Coach has lost the dome instructions again." The door to the pool squeaked shut.
I found the instructions in Coach's office where I'd filed them last year under D for dome and duh. When I took them outside, I saw Doug had used the word we loosely when he'd said, "We're putting the dome on the pool." He sat on the pool deck with his cast extended and his back against the door to the bathroom, guarding it against girls going in there to faint. He read Howards End as the rest of us unfolded the enormous plastic tent across the water, hooking it around the edges of the pool deck and tossing heavy cables across it. The rest of the boys and Coach argued about the best way to install the plastic corridor between the dome and the locker rooms. Doug stayed put, nose in his book. They installed it around him.
We'd been a little worried about the blower toward the end of last season. We came to school one day to find the dome sagging, half deflated. So I crouched inside the corner of the dome opposite Doug, making sure the loud engine worked. The dome hadn't filled completely yet and the ceiling was waist high, so I wasn't sure who was fighting her way through the plastic until Lila dropped beside me.
"I talked to Doug for a long time at lunch," she said.
"I noticed," I said, trying not to sound as jealous as I felt.
"I tried to convince him not to kill Mike so Mike will speak to me again. But Keke told Doug about that big fight we all had at the pool yesterday. He got really mad at me! Y should have heard what he called Mike for throwing your clipboard in the pool!"
"Good!" I laughed. "Doug knows I was very attached to that clipboard."
"Mike fished it out with the net after you left, if you still want it."
"That's okay," I sighed. "I've moved on."
"Then Doug said you always listen to me and put up with me, and the one time you really needed me, I wasn't there for you. He made me feel like shit. So, Zoey, I'm sorry." She scooted forward across the pool deck and hugged me.
"It's okay." As I hugged her back, I listened for titters above the drone of the blower. It must be a cruel joke, two twins apologizing to me, using almost the same words, after they found out my mother was insane. Kicking me when I was down. But the rest of the swim team paid us no attention. They held the plastic corridor in place above their heads. Below them on the floor, Doug read on. I pulled back and looked Lila in the eye. "Have you and Keke calibrated your watches today?"
"No, we're not speaking. Dad says we have to make up with each other by tomorrow morning or we're changing our brother's diapers for a month. Why?"
"Just wondering." Obviously I was doomed to live through everything twice, even now that I remembered both times.
She took my hand and squeezed it. "I thought you and I were really good friends. I couldn't believe something that big happened to you and I had no idea! People kept asking me how I could possibly not have known about your mom, like there was something wrong with me! I was so embarrassed ! But you hid it from me on purpose."
Feeling the tingles of d?j? vu, I waited for my tears to come.
Lila's eyes widened. She said, "Oh," and squeezed my hand again as she saw what was coming too.
"I've been kind of screwed up," I sobbed. "Lila, I'm really sorry."
She leaned forward to hug me again and murmured, "It's okay, it's okay," as I cried into her shoulder. After a while, when I could talk again, I told her about my mom. As I finished, she said with tears in her eyes, "I wish you'd told me."
"I wish I had too."
Screams pierced through the noise of the blower and echoed around the dome. We looked across the pool at the roof of the plastic corridor collapsing on the swim team. I decided I would give them five more minutes trying to figure it out for themselves, and then I would go do it for them.
And then I saw Doug watching me. He looked down at his book.
Lila saw it too. "Doug told me something else at lunch," she said. "That y'all had a huge fight last night. And then"--her eyebrows arched knowingly--"you did some other stuff. Some really good stuff. And then you argued some more."
I cringed. "That about sums it up."
"Well?" she demanded. "Are you going to try to get him back?"
I glanced over at him. Amid the commotion going on around him and over his head, he simply kept reading, then turned the page. "Doug is hot," I sighed. "He's also manipulative and controlling."
"Y ou're nuts," Lila said. When I gaped at her, she went on, "No offense and all, but Doug is worried about you and he cares about you. He saved you from an exploding car!"
"It wasn't exploding. Doug just doesn't know anything about cars."
"Neither do I. It's perfect and dreamy!"
"Lila, that's exactly what you said about Brandon less than a week ago!"
"Oh!" She pointed at me. "I almost forgot. Y ou're coming to the swim team party after the football game tonight, right? Stephanie Wetzel says she's bringing Brandon as her date ! What is up with that ?"
"I guess I need to come to the party and find out." And then, when I'd gotten that settled, I could have another talk with Doug.
A talk . . . or something else. I was touching my lips again, imagining what he would do to me, and how soon we'd do what we'd saved for later.
"Are you coming to the game?" Lila asked me.
I stretched and yawned. "No. I didn't get much sleep last night."
She winked at me.
"Y eah," I said. "And I need a little quality time to recenter before the party."
RECENTERING INVOLVED THE FOLLOWING STEPS: I took a four-hour nap. I repainted my fingernails. I chose my beach party clothes carefully, including my lucky blue bra with white polka dots and blue bow. I removed the large box of condoms from my dad's Mercedes. And I played sudoku to calm myself while planning what to say to Brandon.
He was so sweet and so clueless. I doubted he understood he was Stephanie's date to the party. Someone who didn't know him might look at the situation objectively, the fact that he hadn't tried to see me since the incident with my mom, and might judge that he just wasn't that into me. But Brandon and I were friends. We had this history. I was afraid he'd be very upset when I told him I wanted to break it off with him. My stomach twisted in knots at the thought, and I practiced my speech over and over.
When I drove the Benz to the beach, the parking lot was packed with junkers I recognized from school. I had to drive quite a way inland to grab an empty spot, and I found myself wondering whether this was exactly the way it had happened last Friday night. Another hurricane churned in the Gulf, and though it wouldn't hit us and we weren't expecting rain until tomorrow, wind tossed the black silhouettes of palms against the night sky. Along the wooden walkway across the dunes, it whipped the red warning flags straight out. It almost drowned the wail of a boy band on a radio at the beach.
Even in the moonlight, it was hard to pick faces out of the dozens laughing together in circles. But one of the first people I recognized was Brandon standing with a group of hulking football players, sipping from a plastic cup with his arm around Stephanie Wetzel's waist.
Keke stood in a group a few feet behind him. She saw me on the walkway and nodded frantically toward Brandon with Stephanie.