My First Love (2 page)

Chris laughed. “I’ll know when I reach the finish line.”

Even though he looked sort of strange floating there, I admired his quiet determination. Chris is the fastest swimmer on the Dolphins, but breaking the breaststroke record was something that he had never been able to do.

I loved watching him. His body was long and thin, yet muscular, and he moved as though he felt completely comfortable
in it. I’m about 5′ 7″ and pretty thin myself, but I don’t move as gracefully as Chris. Before I started swimming with the Dolphins my freshman year, I was really skinny. Now I wore my muscles carefully, like a rental I’d have to return when swim season was over.

Several Dolphins came into the pool area, their voices sending echoes across the floor tiles. Not even this commotion disturbed Chris’s concentration. I wondered what part of the race he was mentally swimming just then.

As he drifted nearby, I wanted to reach down and gently stir the water, send it rippling to touch him. Instead, I ducked my head back under and continued swimming laps.

I swam freestyle for a few lengths, feeling confident in the water—until I made a graceless flip turn, whacking my heel against the lip of the pool.

“Ouch!” I yelled. I hadn’t meant to draw attention to myself, but as I limped along the bottom of the pool to the starting blocks, I could see that Chris was moving toward my lane. My heart skipped a beat when I realized he was waiting for me.

“Your timing’s off,” he told me when I stopped to get my breath. He touched my wrist and I was suddenly aware of his long, strong fingers. I stiffened, and he must have noticed, because he took his hand away immediately and let it skim the surface of the pool.

“That’s what Coach August says,” I said, trying to sound casual, as though my wrist weren’t burning from his touch. “He says I turn too late.”

“Not too late, exactly, but too cautiously. Your turn would be right on target if you didn’t mentally pull back just as you get to the wall. It’s like you trip yourself up.”

Chris was probably right—it wasn’t so much the turn as it was the dread of it that kept me from swimming full speed. I constantly imagined bashing my heels. And that was exactly what kept happening.

“You could do a neater flip turn and probably shave twenty seconds off your time if you didn’t hold back but just charged,” Chris said. “Otherwise, it’s like you’re swimming with your mental brakes on.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “But how do I charge if I’m terrified I’ll hit the lip of the pool?”

“By picturing doing it perfectly so many times that you really believe you can.” He waded over to grab a kickboard from the pool deck. “First,” he said, tossing me the Styrofoam board, “you’ve got to relax. Here, float and breathe deeply.” He walked over and steadied the board.

But it was hard to relax with Chris staring down at me. I lay there looking up at him. All I could think about were his deep-set brown eyes. There was an intensity in them, and a kindness as well. I felt like I was about to blush.

“Good so far,” Chris said, gently brushing his fingers across my brow. He had these hands that looked honest—slim
fingers, one wrist tied with a frayed leather friendship bracelet. “Now, close your eyes.”

I squeezed them shut and waited. “Not so tight,” Chris advised. “What do you see?”

You
, I wanted to say. Aloud I said, “I see myself lying on a kickboard, looking stupid, in the middle of the pool.”

“Amy, be serious.”

“I am.” At first, I was too self-conscious to imagine anything but the rest of the Dolphins making fun of me. But after a while, I got the hang of it. I saw myself in the practice pool, speeding toward the end of the lane. I was surprised that the mental picture was so vivid. “I’m swimming,” I said, still feeling kind of silly.

“And?”

“I’m watching the lane lines, getting close to the lip.”

“Okay, now try to imagine keeping up your speed. What are you thinking?”

“Don’t hit the lip, don’t hit it, don’t hit it—wham!” I opened my eyes then, and instinctively reached down to rub my heel.

“Try again,” Chris said gently.

“What’s the use?” I moaned. “It’s like a movie someone else is directing.” Sometimes my whole life felt like that.

I thought then that he’d give up, but instead he urged me on. “This time, instead of thinking ‘Don’t hit it,’ try thinking ‘Flip.’ ”

I closed my eyes and was mentally halfway down the lane when I stopped midstroke to ask, “Why?”

“Because your brain takes the ‘don’t’ out of ‘don’t hit the lip.’ And your body only does what your brain tells it to.”

If that was true, I was in trouble, because there were plenty of my mother’s “don’ts” rattling around in my head.
Don’t apologize for your intelligence, don’t mope about what you don’t have, don’t take your education for granted, don’t underestimate yourself, don’t expect something for nothing, don’t throw away your future on some guy
. For years I’d been repeating those commands in my head, maybe dooming myself to do the very things I’d told myself not to do.

In my mind, I began my stroke again, saying, “Flip, flip, flip,” under my breath, swimming as fast as I could imagine. Then, before I knew it, I’d turned in the water almost effortlessly.

“Hey, I did it!” I said, and opened my eyes in time to see Chris looking at me intently, studying me the way I’d studied him.

Just then Coach August blew his whistle, signaling it was time to put the lanes in for practice. I slid off the kickboard and let myself sink. “Thanks,” I said shyly.

“Anytime,” Chris said, smiling. Then he turned away and swam toward the coach.

Anytime
, I thought happily as I dove underwater.

Anytime …

I was the last one to leave the girls’ locker room after practice that afternoon, mostly because I was thinking so
much about Chris that I couldn’t get moving. As I walked out of school, he was sitting in the grass by my bus stop.

I was surprised. He lived on the east side of town, and I lived on the west. “Hey, Chris,” I called out as I crossed the street, “aren’t you waiting for the wrong bus?”

“I was waiting for you,” he said.

I thought my heart would stop. “Me?” I managed to say.

He smiled as he stood up and brushed the grass off his faded, torn Levi’s. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought you might want a ride home.”

“You’ve got a car?”

He pointed in the direction of the school parking lot behind me. “It’s my brother Dave’s. It’s that ’sixty-four Mustang,” he said. “Dave said I could use it today. He’s home on break from college.”

I turned and saw this gleaming, classic car. I knew that Chris came from a pretty wealthy family, but because he always wore Levi’s with holes in the knees, T-shirts, and baseball caps, I never thought about it. “Cool,” I said as we walked toward the convertible, trying to conceal the excitement I felt.

Chris opened the car door, and I got in. As he slipped into the driver’s side, I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. Just the night before, I had been in Rick’s car, being kissed by him and seeing Chris. Now I was actually in a car with Chris! Maybe thinking about things really could make them happen.

“Do you want to celebrate something with me?” Chris asked as he turned onto Central Avenue.

“What are you celebrating?” I asked, willing the nervousness out of my voice.

Chris grinned at me as he pulled up to a stoplight. “I’m celebrating the occasion of driving you home.”

“If that’s your idea of a party, you ought to get out more,” I said. I was trying to sound witty and nonchalant, but I could feel my heart pounding in my chest.

“I would, if I had a good reason … if I had the right girl.”

Suddenly I felt so shy I didn’t know what to do or say. In my rush to fill the silence between us, I said something really dumb.

“So,” I said lamely, “I hear you scored over twenty-three hundred on your SATs.”

Chris winced. “Who told you my scores?”

“No one in particular—I mean, it’s all over school.”

“Don’t people have anything more interesting to gossip about?”

“That’s pretty interesting to me,” I said defensively. “I’ve never known anyone who scored that high. Why wouldn’t you want people to know?”

“Because it doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

“Of course it does. I’d kill for a score like that.” I laughed. “You can’t tell me scores don’t matter. The college counselor told me I’d be in the running for a merit scholarship if I get a high score on the PSAT.”

“But what I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things.”

“How large a scheme are we talking here?” I asked. “To me, getting into a good school is a pretty big deal.”

“It is for me too!” The light turned green, and Chris hit the accelerator so suddenly, I was pinned for a second against my seat. He put out his arm to steady me. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I’m sick of how every junior and senior I know
can’t talk about anything but college, as though that’s the only reason we get out of bed in the morning.”

“I know what you mean,” I told Chris. “But I can’t help worrying about grades and SATs. I’m going to need a good financial aid package for college—it’s just me and my mom at home. So I feel a lot of pressure to get good grades. Like in physics, for instance. I hate that class. Sometimes I just want to throw the stupid book right across the room.”

“We could study together,” Chris suggested. “I could use some help with physics too.”

“Oh, right,” I couldn’t help saying. He was one of the best students in the class.

“I’m serious,” he said, his face turning red. “Right now, class seems pretty dull. It might be different if I had a …”

He turned to me, and his voice trailed off.

“What?” I asked.

Chris shook his head, as if to clear it. “If only I had a teacher this year who had some
fire
. But it’s like Mr. Tayerle’s teaching in his sleep, reusing old lesson plans from 1955.”

I laughed. “I’ve seen his notes up close,” I said. “The pages are so old, they’re curled up on the edges and yellow.”

“Exactly.” Chris laughed too. “You do know what I mean.”

At Glendale Avenue, Chris was supposed to turn right to get to my apartment, like I’d told him, but instead he pulled into the left lane and stopped for the light. “Detour?”
he asked me. “There’s something out here that you just have to see.”

A feeling of worry skidded around my stomach as I looked at my watch. As I thought of my mom getting ready to leave the bank for her shift at the supermarket, her favorite word—
passion
—popped into my head again.

Passion was the thing that kept me up late to memorize a phone-book-sized vocabulary list, and to spend hours revising to turn a B English paper into an A. It was the thing that made me dive into the chilly practice pool day after day.

Was it passion that made my heart thump when Chris’s knee grazed mine? And was that passion the misguided variety?

I looked up and saw Chris gazing at me expectantly. “Um, okay,” I heard my voice say, though my brain was politely telling him I had to get home.

I leaned back into the seat cushions as the Mustang picked up speed. “It won’t take too long, though, will it?” I managed to ask. “I’ve got about four hours of homework waiting for me.” As I spoke, I suddenly had this nagging feeling that there was somewhere else I was supposed to be, something else I was supposed to be doing.

I guess I must have been frowning, because Chris said, “Don’t worry so much, Amy. This will be worth it, I promise. And I’ll even get you home before dark.”

He was right. Of course he was.
Get a grip, Amy
, I ordered
myself. I was going for a drive, not eloping. I was entitled to go out with a guy once in a while. My GPA wasn’t going to plummet just because I was having fun.

So I stopped worrying, and I let myself enjoy the open feeling in the convertible—the way the wind pulled my skin tight as it rushed against my face. I had to admit I also liked seeing other people’s envious expressions, shut up inside their cars with their air conditioners blasting while our hair blew free.

It was almost six o’clock, and it was still really warm for October. But the sun was sinking. My hair was still wet, and I began to shiver. I started searching through my gym bag for my sweatshirt. I must have left it in my locker, though, because all I came up with was a bathing cap, a candy bar, and five different-colored socks.

“Are you cold?” Chris asked when he saw me wearing two of the socks as mittens.

“Not really,” I said, plucking the sock-mittens off. I didn’t want him to think I was some tender flower. I’m not. It’s just that I’ve lived my whole life in Arizona, and my blood’s like a lizard’s—it needs direct sun to stay warm. “I was just trying to find my Dolphins sweatshirt.”

“Here, take the wheel,” he said. He reached into the backseat for his gym bag.

“Hey!” I cried, grabbing the wheel. In my moment of panic at having to take over the driving, I almost steered us right out of the lane.

Unfazed, Chris kept groping around in the backseat. “My sweatshirt’s in here somewhere,” he muttered. Finally, he snagged his athletic bag and tossed it into my lap. Then, when he went to take the steering wheel again, his hands landed on top of mine. They were so warm. I swallowed hard.

“Can you get it?” he asked.

“Uh, sure, thank you,” I said, sliding my freezing fingers out from under his.

“No problem,” Chris said.

Given the way he dressed, I didn’t expect the inside of Chris’s gym bag to be neat. It wasn’t. I pushed aside damp swim trunks, empty cola cans, pencils, balled-up notebook paper, and a dog-eared copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
before I spotted the beady eye of our Dolphin mascot.

I tugged at the neck of the sweatshirt, trying to free it from the rest of the rubble. As I did, a spiral notebook fell into my lap. I swear I wasn’t snooping—it opened right up to a page bookmarked with an ice cream bar wrapper.

And there on that page was my name. Amy Wyse. Written not just once but over and over in a hundred different styles.