My First Love (11 page)

Once in the water, I discovered that the key lay against my body neatly as long as I kept moving forward, but it bobbed around in the water whenever I turned. Twice, the key rapped me on the forehead when I was upside-down underwater. Finally, on my fourth flip turn, the cord and the key wriggled free from my neck.

I stopped traffic in the swim lane as I dog-paddled in place, trying to find my treasure. “What’s your problem?” Jill asked as she swam up beside me. She had an I-told-you-so grin on her face.

Usually I tried to be cool with her. But I was too tired today.
You’re the problem
, I was thinking. And let me tell you, one second longer and the words would have sprung from my lips.

But just then I looked up and saw Chris standing at the edge of the pool, watching me. I knew he must have seen what had just happened. “There’s no problem,” I told Jill as I watched him dive purposefully into the water.

“Looking for this?” he asked me, smiling, as he emerged a moment later holding my key.

“Yes! Thank you,” I said. I stood in the water while he knotted the cord tighter and slipped it around my neck. Behind me, he leaned close so that Jill couldn’t hear. “I hope you didn’t get in too much trouble, Amy,” he whispered. “I didn’t want to leave you last night, the way your mom was yelling.”

“It was all right,” I told him, trying to sound bold—bolder than I felt. “I told her that we hadn’t done anything wrong and that I could take care of myself.”

“How’d she take it?” Chris asked, his eyes full of concern.

What I said next was only half true. “She just wants me to be careful.”

Just then Coach August blew his whistle to organize us for timed trials. All week, he’d been taking notes on his clipboard, trying to decide which Dolphins would swim in the qualifying meet. Usually, I was the undisputed choice for the 100-meter freestyle, but that day, Coach called my name and asked me to join Jill at the other end of the pool.

“I can’t believe he’s making me race her,” I said to Chris under my breath.

“Just relax and remember your flip turn,” Chris said, patting me on the shoulder. “He’s probably just doing it to shake you up.”

If that was Coach August’s intention, he didn’t have to shake hard. I was already shaking as I got out of the water and walked what felt like a hundred miles around the pool’s perimeter to the starting block.

“Hurry up, Amy,” Jill said, shaking out her arms and legs as if she’d been waiting all day.

“I’ll be telling you that in the water,” I said, “while I’m waiting for you to catch up.”

But when the starting buzzer sounded, my foot slipped and I left the block a split second behind. When I entered the water, I was flailing, and it took me at least a lap and a half to hit my stride. By the third length, I was sailing—everything depended on my final flip turn. “Don’t hit it, don’t hit it, don’t hit it,” I chanted from habit, forgetting what Chris had taught me. “Don’t hit it, don’t hit it, don’t hit it …”
WHACK
!

As I finished the last lap, I was sure that I’d swum my very worst time. I slapped the pool deck and jerked my neck around to see where Jill was in the pool. “I’m here, Amy,” she said smugly, and I realized that she was already out of the water, resting, her feet dangling into the pool.

“It’s like she’s waiting for me to blow it,” I fumed to Chris after practice, “so she can take my place at regionals.”

“Don’t let her get to you,” Chris urged, as I waited with him at the bus stop. My bus always came about ten minutes after his.

“I can’t help it,” I said. “She made me so self-conscious today, I couldn’t do one decent turn. Which is not the way I want to feel the day before a meet.” Even as I was saying it, I knew Jill wasn’t really the one to blame. I was.

Chris’s bus roared as it turned the corner onto Central. It was rush hour, and through the windows I could see that all the seats were filled with downtown workers, people who I imagined were going home to pretty houses with heated swimming pools.

“Amy, come home with me,” Chris said as the bus pulled to a stop at the curb. “We can grab a bite to eat and study, and you can practice your turn in our pool.”

I thought fleetingly of the health project that was due at the end of the week. Blythe had done a survey in the
Thunder
of students’ views on everything from love to marriage to romantic movies. She’d already collected responses from two hundred kids and tallied the results. All I had to do, she kept reminding me, was read the books she’d checked out of the library and write up an analysis of the survey.

I knew by then that studying with Chris was asking for academic disaster. After the night of the carnival, we’d gone to the library a few times together after school, and he’d do things like write love notes in the margins of my composition book or try to kiss me while I was trying to read. I could just imagine what he’d do when he learned the topic of my homework was intimacy!

But on the other hand, I did need to practice swimming.
Otherwise, I’d probably try to turn in the lane tomorrow and end up somewhere near Timbuktu.

“You kids on or off?” barked the bus driver.

“On,” I said suddenly, skipping up the metal stairs. In the end, it wasn’t worry about my flip turn that tipped the scales toward going home with Chris. To be honest, I just wanted to spend time with him, to feel his arms around me, his cheek brush against mine, the gentle searching of his lips.

Of course, I didn’t tell him I was grounded—I didn’t want Chris to think I was a little kid.

“Don’t worry, Amy, everything’ll work out,” he said, smiling.

“Practice makes perfect,” I said with a shrug.

The Shepherds lived in a neighborhood of grand, expensive houses. Their home was a two-story, Tudor-style stucco, with a Bermuda-grass lawn twice the size of the courtyard in our apartment complex, and a giant, three-car garage. I couldn’t help admiring this easy abundance, but it also made me kind of mad. I thought about how my mom had to work two jobs just to pay the bills.

“It’s very nice,” I said as we stood in the cavernous entryway. Chris deprogrammed the burglar alarm and hung up his house key.

“Thanks. I liked our old house better,” he said, leading me through an immaculate white kitchen, which was the
same size as our living room. He slid open a glass door that led onto the patio. “But this house does have a pretty good pool.”

He wasn’t kidding. The pool was incredible: Olympic-sized and heated, with wisps of fog rising from its surface. I bent down to test the water with my fingertips and found it warmer than the early-evening air. “If I didn’t know you had a burglar alarm,” I teased Chris, “I might just climb your fence and hop your pool.”

“Be my guest,” Chris said, grinning. Then he grabbed my hand and started pulling me toward the deep end with him.

“Chris, don’t even think about it,” I warned him as he dragged me along. “Chris, you better not—Chris—”

Splash!
He threw me into the water, fully clothed and shrieking.

“Just think how light you’ll feel when you race tomorrow if you practice tonight wearing twenty pounds of wet clothes,” he said, laughing from the side of the pool as I flailed around heavily in the water.

He was trying to be funny, but he was making me mad. It was more than the fact that he’d ruined my outfit, a hand-knit sweater and black jeans whose labels screamed
DRY CLEAN ONLY
and
NO BLEACH
. And it was more than the fact that I was going to have to wear my soggy black sneakers home.

It had suddenly occurred to me that before we were a
couple, he’d taken my flip-turn problem seriously. Now he was making fun of me. Maybe it was because he suspected I hadn’t come home with him to rehearse my turn for tomorrow but to practice the delicate art of the kiss. Even if it was true, which it partly was, I didn’t want him thinking that.

“How am I supposed to practice turning?” I asked irritably, struggling with arms and legs as heavy as tree trunks. “I can barely move!”

He was still laughing, and I was getting madder and madder.

“Chris, stop it!” I finally exploded. “It’s not a joke. This is a good sweater—and now it’s ruined. And I really do need to practice!”

When Chris saw the anger in my face, his smile disappeared. “I’m sorry,” he said. He took off his shirt and jumped in. “I only wanted to make you laugh. I’ll buy you another sweater,” he offered as he paddled awkwardly toward me.

But the longer I treaded there in my waterlogged clothes, the angrier I felt. “It really isn’t funny, Chris. What do my clothes matter? If I blow my flip turns tomorrow, I might not get to swim at regionals. And if I don’t swim at regionals, there’s no way I’ll be considered for a swimming scholarship next year.” I felt tears filling my eyes. “Maybe if I had plenty of money for college the way you do, it wouldn’t matter so much,” I said quietly. “But I don’t.”

“Come on, Amy,” he pleaded as I swam-dragged myself
away from him and toward the pool edge. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

When I got to the metal stepladder, I began to pull myself up and out. But that’s when I realized the air outside was about twenty degrees colder than the water in the pool. “How am I going to get home now?” I asked in a voice fringed with tears, collapsing back in the water. “I—I can’t take the bus in these clothes—I’ll freeze to death.”

“I’ll drive you there when my parents get home,” Chris promised. “In the meantime, wait here.” I didn’t exactly have a choice, so I kept on treading water while he hoisted himself out of the pool and hurried across the patio, tracking water into the house.

He hurried back out a moment later carrying a big towel and an armload of dry clothes. “You can change into these in the pool house,” he said, unfurling a pair of Dolphins sweatpants, dry athletic socks, and a plaid flannel shirt. He put the clothes on a lounge chair and held the towel out to me like a blanket, welcoming me into its warmth.

“Amy, I really am sorry,” he whispered a few minutes later when I came out of the pool house, dry and dressed in his clothes. He had changed too in the meantime, and was dressed in a nearly identical outfit.

“Forget it,” I said, although I couldn’t forget it. The plunge into the pool was like a slap in the face that brought me back to reality. I moved away from him. “I really do have
to go home now,” I told him, glancing at my luckily waterproof watch. “I’ve got a lot of homework.”

“Okay.” He put his arms around me and kissed my forehead. “Let me just grab the keys from my mom, and I’ll take you.”

I gulped. “You mean your mom is home?” I spun around and saw Mrs. Shepherd standing there on the patio, elegant and perfectly groomed in a beige suit.

“Hello. You must be Amy,” she said warmly. I could tell by her fixed smile how hard she was trying not to notice that Chris and I had just been embracing. Not to mention the fact that I was dressed head to toe in her son’s clothes.

“Uh, h-hi, Mrs. Shepherd. It’s nice to meet you,” I stammered. I’d seen her at swim meets a few times, but we’d never been introduced. “Chris and I were going to practice flip turns, but then he pushed me in.…” I stopped myself just short of a full confession. I didn’t like the way I sounded.

Mrs. Shepherd laughed, but I had this sinking feeling that she didn’t believe me.

Chris, the real culprit, seemed totally unfazed. I waited in silence for him to explain to her what had really happened, but he didn’t.

“I’m taking Amy home now” was all he said, holding out his palm to receive her car keys.

“Don’t bother—I’m getting my things, and I’ll take the bus,” I said quietly. I stormed back to the pool house, stuffed my wet clothes into my gym bag, put on my soggy sneakers,
then stormed out. I half expected him to be waiting, but he was nowhere in sight.

As I walked to the bus stop, I kept thinking Chris would follow and try to stop me, but he didn’t. Even though I’d refused a ride from him, I couldn’t help but feel that
he’d
abandoned
me
.

As I stood waiting at the bus stop, looking out into the lonely street, I wondered if I had overreacted. Maybe I’d blown it with Chris the same way I’d blown my flip turn. Fear made me pull away from him and turn too early, the way it did when I reached the pool wall.

Finally, the bus pulled up. With tears in my eyes, I paid the driver, took a seat in the back, and stared out the window into the darkness all the way home.

Since mom usually works evenings, I was surprised to see the lights on in the apartment and the Honda parked out in front. “Where have you been?” she asked when I came in through the back door and dropped my gym bag and backpack on the floor. She stood in front of the dinner table, which was set for two. “It’s almost seven-thirty, young lady, and you’re supposed to be grounded.”

“I thought you were at El Rancho,” I said, caught completely off guard.

“I took the night off,” she answered, pouring herself some iced tea. “And what in the world are you wearing?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” I told her, arms crossed in front of me. “It’s too hard to explain.”

“I’m an intelligent person,” Mom said. “Why don’t you try me?”

She motioned for me to sit down. It would have been easier if she’d just yelled at me—at least then I could storm off to my room. Instead, she’d made this dinner as a peace offering, and had waited for hours for me to come home. It made me feel guilty, and feeling guilty always made me act defensively.

“Okay, I was at Chris’s,” I said, trying to provoke her. She just sat there quietly, waiting for me to go on. So I told her how Jill Renfrew had acted at practice and how important it was for me to do well in the next meet so I would make regionals.

“I didn’t mean to disobey you,” I said awkwardly. “It’s just that Chris offered to help with my flip turn.”

“So what’s with the boy’s clothes?” Mom interrupted.

“Chris pushed me into his pool,” I said, then quickly added, “He was trying to be funny. He didn’t mean anything bad.”

“Oh, Amy.” She sighed. I thought she would be angry at me all over again, but instead she put down her fork, reached out, and gently stroked my cheek. I realized when she touched me that what had seemed like meanness the night before
was actually real concern. But then she ruined everything by saying, “I’m afraid this Chris is bad news.”