My First Love (5 page)

I was confused by his question. “The assignment is to—”

“I don’t mean the eclipse,” he said. “I mean before that, for our date.”

If he was asking for a list of romantic possibilities, I wasn’t exactly the authority. “A movie?” I suggested weakly to the seat in front of me. I found it impossible to look at him directly. My face was so close to his that I might have kissed him accidentally if I’d turned forty-five degrees.

I stopped breathing as he studied the side of my face. “I’d rather look at you,” he said so softly I wasn’t sure I’d heard him.

I blushed and punched him lightly on his kneecap, a real sixth-grade thing to do. “Ouch!” he said, catching my hand
in his and laying it flat across his heart. “Feel that—I’m wounded.” He laughed, and I felt the tension of the moment subside.

“Take her to the greyhound races,” Wayne Dean suggested.

“Don’t listen to him,” Shannon said. “That’s the last place you want to go.”

I hadn’t even known they were listening, but now everyone started tossing out ideas.

“Dinner at the Coyote,” Shannon continued. “Enchiladas by candlelight.”

“Rollerblading,” Jill suggested.

Oh, right
, I thought. She’d love it if I broke my legs.

“Tubing on the Verde River,” Zipperman tried.

None of their ideas struck me as quite right. I imagined something different—somewhere romantic but off the beaten path, a place where we could talk. Then Chris squeezed my hand. “How about a picnic on the rooftop of your apartment?” he whispered. “It’s quiet, secluded, and a perfect place to watch the eclipse.”

“Perfect,” I agreed softly, wanting to keep our plans a secret from our teammates. Fortunately, at that moment we pulled up to the curb of Pie in the Sky, and the group was distracted by the prospect of pizza.

“Pay up,” said Zipperman, passing around a rubber Dolphins swimming cap to take up a collection. “A large vegetarian costs nine bucks. That’s a buck-fifty each.”

Everyone dug into their wallets. One by one, we tossed dollar bills and bounced quarters into the cap.

“The smallest I’ve got is a twenty,” Jill said when the cap was passed to her. “Can someone chip in for me, and I’ll pay you back?”

Jill said the same thing every time we carbo-loaded, and all of us had taken turns paying her way. I would have thought she didn’t have any money if she didn’t wear a new outfit practically every day and if I hadn’t seen her trying to use her parents’ credit card to buy a soda and a sandwich at the school snack bar. I guess when you’re as rich as some of the kids at Thunderbird, you just can’t be bothered carrying petty cash.

“You can have my slice,” I said. “I think I’ll pass.”

“Is your stomach bothering you, Amy?” Jill asked in a tone of false concern.

“No, ma’am,” I said, winking at Chris. “Just holding out for a burrito supreme.”

Jill thought about that a moment. “What a coincidence—I suddenly got a craving for the exact same thing,” she said.

“She must think that’s your secret power food,” Chris whispered.

“Fine by me,” Zipperman said. “I say we get a medium instead of a large, and add one extra topping.”

“Sausage,” said Shannon.

“I’m allergic,” Wayne wheezed.

“Zipperman, you have a microscopic memory,” Chris said. “We started getting vegetarian because no one can agree on meats.”

“I say we give the driver veto power,” Zipperman suggested. “How about pepperoni?”

“In that case,” I said, taking another dollar out of my wallet, “I will take a slice. Pepperoni works like a good-luck charm for me.”

“Good-luck charm?” Jill asked.

I could see she was aching to go in on the pizza, but Zipperman was already on his way into the restaurant. She rolled down her window as if to call to him, then rolled it back up. She took out her wallet and put it back into her shoulder bag again. When Zipperman came back with the pizza, she whipped out the crumpled twenty and held it out to him so that it flapped in the air-conditioning breeze. “Is it too late to change my mind?” she asked. “I could just pay for the whole pizza—I probably owe everyone here at least a buck.”

“Six,” Shannon said.

“About three,” said Zipperman.

“Two,” Chris and I said in unison.

“Four-fifty, if you’re going to bring it up,” Wayne added.

“Okay, okay, I get the message!” Jill exclaimed, handing over the money to Zipperman. “Here’s for the pizza, and keep the change. This carbo load’s on me.”

By our fourth stop, Taco Villa, the car was filled with
greasy wrappers and the smell of pizza and french fries. We’d already stuffed ourselves to the gills when Zipperman declared that nachos-to-go were the one last thing the Dolphins needed to help us win the meet. I no longer wanted a burrito supreme.

At Taco Villa, the drive-through line was bumper-to-bumper with kids from our high school, some probably as hungry as we’d been two meals ago.

“There’s no way we’re waiting in that line,” Zipperman said. He started to turn the car around.

“But the restaurant’s almost empty,” Chris pointed out. “If you park, we could go in and whip through the order line in three minutes, max.”

“I’ll go,” I volunteered. I felt like I needed some fresh air.

“I’ll go with you,” Chris said.

The restaurant was cool and quiet, compared with the smoking asphalt of the parking lot and the noise of engines roaring outside. For a moment, we stood swaying slightly in the doorway, stunned by the blast of chilly air-conditioning.

“What a relief,” I said, meaning that we were inside in the cool air, but also that we were, for a few minutes at least, alone.

“Yeah, it is,” Chris said. The way he smiled at me I knew he was thinking the same thing I was.

We stepped up to the counter, and I ordered the nachos.

“I could wolf down a couple of tacos,” Chris said, eyeing the menu.

“I hope you’re kidding,” I said. “You’d sink as soon as you hit the water!”

“At least I’d drown happy,” he joked. “But seriously, lately I’ve had this monster appetite.”

“Is that why you were late to physics this morning?” I couldn’t resist asking. “You were polishing off a six-course breakfast?”

Chris laughed. “Actually,” he said, “I was having this great dream I didn’t want to wake up from. I must have shut off my alarm clock and gone back to sleep.”

“I’ve done that,” I told him. “Last week, I was dreaming I got these fat acceptance letters from twenty different universities. It was the best feeling—then my mom came in the room and turned on the light, yelling, ‘Rise and shine!’ and it hit me that I haven’t even decided where I want to apply yet.” I stopped for a moment. “What did you dream?”

“W-well, uh,” he stammered, “we were driving in the Mustang with the top down …”

I felt my cheeks flush. “We?” I asked.

“Um, yeah,” he said. “You and I.”

You and I
. Those words seemed to hang in the air between us. I looked at the menu above the counter, then at the floor, then out the window. When I finally got up the courage to look at Chris’s face, he was smiling ruefully.

“Great,” he said with a forced laugh. “I’m dreaming about you, and you’re dreaming about college. What’s wrong with this picture?”

I gave a feeble laugh as I gazed at the floor. Was there something wrong with this picture?

Chris wasn’t very talkative during the hour-long bus ride to Ocotillo High, the home of the Sharks. We sat across the aisle from each other, pretending to be absorbed in our homework. Still, whenever I raised my head to keep from getting carsick, I saw that Chris was looking at me.

I was so busy trying not to look up too often that I got absolutely no work done.

By the time we got to Ocotillo, the pool was such a welcome sight that I didn’t even have my usual premeet nerves. I couldn’t wait to change into my racing suit and step up to the starting block.

“Good luck, Amy,” Chris said, putting his hand on my arm, before he headed for the boys’ locker room. “I’ll be rooting for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, a flutter of nervousness in my chest. “I’ll do the same for you.”

In the girls’ locker room, I changed into my suit and stuffed my sweats and tennis shoes into my team bag. Then, instead of going out to the pool with the other girls, I decided to stay in the locker room and practice imagining my
flip turn until the meet began. I sat down on a bench and closed my eyes.

“Are you saying a prayer?” a voice interrupted, and I looked up to see Jill Renfrew pacing around in a pair of ankle weights she always wore up until the very moment she jumped into the pool.

“Sort of,” I said.

She frowned. “Maybe I should do that too.”

It was hard to hate somebody who was so insecure she didn’t trust herself to be herself, but tried instead to be just like you. I sort of felt sorry for her.

That feeling disappeared, however, when we took our places on the starting block for the 100-meter freestyle and she scowled at me. “Just make sure you stay out of my lane,” she ordered. I rolled my eyes. There were three good swimmers from Ocotillo swimming this event, and I had to put up with being demoralized by my own teammate.

“Don’t worry. I don’t flail as much as you do,” I said. “I prefer to swim in a straight line.”

Standing on the block in those few tense moments before the whistle, I scanned the crowded, noisy room for Chris. When I caught his eye, he smiled. I suddenly felt weirdly self-conscious. Did I look funny in my racing suit? Was I so completely unsexy in my cap and goggles that he’d wish he’d never asked me out?

“On your marks,” announced the timer, and I bent my
knees and leaned forward, toes curled on the block’s edge. In the moment before the buzzer sounded, the gym grew so quiet I could hear the tick of the time clock and my own steady breathing. I looked toward the wall at the end of the lane and tried to picture a perfect flip turn, but I felt the nervous trembling in my legs.

“You can do it, Amy!” I heard Chris shout, or maybe I just thought I did.

Then the buzzer sounded and I was airborne, stretching my body from my fingers to my toes. For a moment, I forgot about everything—the other swimmers, Mom’s expectations, the huge health project … Chris. I was suspended, waiting for the thrilling moment when I’d hit the pool’s surface.

I entered the water smoothly and was off. I could hear the familiar
swish, swish, swish
of the water in my ears. Swimming is so automatic that your mind is free to wander as you skim along pulled by a zing of adrenaline, air bubbles escaping and tickling your face.
Go, go, go
, I told myself, feeling this pulsating beat in my body.

Turn
, I said to myself on the first lap, and I pushed off beautifully.
Turn
, I said on the second, and my body obliged gracefully. On the third lap I felt joyous, and let myself imagine for a second Coach August posting my name on the board above our home pool, the one that boasted the school’s best times. All I had to do, I was thinking as I approached the end of the pool, was remember not to …

Whack!

I began the last lap awkwardly, my heels stinging and my confidence bruised from my too-familiar encounter with the lip of the pool.

But when I raised my head I was in first. I’d won! It was just like my daydreams, even after the disastrous third lap. I left Jill and the three Ocotillo swimmers blinking in the water as I hoisted myself out.

I saw Chris smiling at me and I smiled back. I felt great.

“Congratulations again,” Chris said, settling into the seat next to me on the bus to take us back home after the meet. He seemed happy with his three second places, even though he didn’t swim his best times. “You swam an incredible hundred.”

“Thank you” was the only thing I could think of to say.

“Your flip turn is getting better.”

I shrugged. “Two out of three, anyway.”

He reached over and pushed my wet hair from my face. The gentle touch of his fingers lingered on my skin. “You’re tough, Amy.” He studied my face for another second and smiled. “Beautiful, too.”

It was a perfect moment, sitting there in the darkness of the bus, the yellow glow of a streetlamp lighting Chris’s face.

“After wearing my ankle weights, I felt like I was flying,” Jill’s voice droned from the seat in front of us, breaking the fragile moment. “It was my best time ever,” she bragged.

I smiled at Chris. Maybe it was because I was feeling so buoyant, but I was genuinely happy for Jill.

I was genuinely happy period. I had won my most important race. I was well on my way to the scholarship I had been dreaming about for three years. My leg was pressed against the leg of the most wonderful guy I had ever met, a guy who thought I was beautiful.

I felt right then like I could have everything in the world.

“Come by our apartment at eleven,” I told Chris on Friday, scribbling the address on a piece of notebook paper. Even though he had dropped me off there, I figured he might not remember the exact address. I definitely didn’t want him to get lost. “We’re in apartment number five. My mom will be sleeping, so don’t ring the doorbell. I’ll wait for you outside.”

I decided right then not to even risk asking my mom if I could go on our “date.” I had a feeling she wouldn’t understand that this was an assignment, especially since it
started at midnight. Anyway, on Saturdays she worked until nine in the evening, and she went to bed soon after she got home from work.

But not that Saturday. When she got home from working at the supermarket, Mom was peppier than usual. She’d recently had her annual review at the bank, and today she’d learned that the manager had given her a raise. “We’re not millionaires yet,” she said as she unloaded groceries she’d picked up during her El Rancho break. “But every bit gets you one step closer to college.”

“Oh, Mom, congratulations! That’s wonderful,” I told her, giving her a hug. As I watched her dance around the kitchen, her partner a package of flour, I felt a sharp pang of guilt. After all she’d done for me, I was planning a secret rendezvous with a guy she’d never met.