One True Loves (6 page)

Margaret had just recently quit and Marie had lobbied for the job. I was surprised when my mom was reticent to let her do it. “She should be off enjoying herself in college,” she said. “Before she comes back here and takes on all of this responsibility.”

But my father was so excited about it that even I had softened to the idea. He made her an assistant manager name badge even though none of us wore name badges. And he told my mom that he couldn't be happier than to spend his summer with both of his daughters at the store.

The smile on his face and the gleam in his eye led me to promise myself to be nicer to Marie. But she hadn't even come home yet and I was already unsure it would take.

I was not looking forward to summer at the store. Sam had given his notice the month before and had worked his last day. Instead of staying in town, he was leaving in a few weeks to take an internship at a music therapy office in Boston. And then he was starting at Berklee College of Music in the fall.

It was his first choice and when he got in, I'd congratulated him with a hug. Then I quickly moved on to teasing him for staying so close to home. But I wasn't entirely joking. I truly couldn't understand why his first choice was to live in a part of the country he'd lived in all his life. I had set my sights on the University of Los Angeles. I got a pamphlet in the mail and I liked the idea of going to school in permanent sunshine.

As Sam's name was called out on the converted football field that afternoon, my parents were disagreeing about whether to restain our back patio. I had to nudge my father in the ribs with my elbow to get his attention.

“Guys,” I said. “Sam's up.”

“Samuel Marcos Kemper,” the principal announced.

The three of us stood and cheered for him, joining his own parents, who were seated on the other side of the crowd.

When Sam sat down, I connected eyes with him for a moment and watched a smile creep across his face.

Four hours later, Olive and I were standing in the kitchen of Billy Yen's house, filling up our red Solo cups with generic-looking beer from an ice-cold steel keg.

Almost seventeen, I had made out with two guys and dated Robby Timmer for four weeks, during which time I let him get to a tame third base. It was safe to say I was looking to ditch my v-card as soon as the moment was right and I was hoping that moment was sooner rather than later.

Olive, for her part, had come out to her parents as bisexual and then confused them when she started dating Matt Jennings. Olive patiently explained to her parents that bisexual did not mean gay, it meant
bisexual.
And while they seemed to understand, they once again became confused when Olive and Matt broke up and Olive started dating a girl from her after-school job at CVS. They understood gay and they understood straight but they did not understand Olive.

“Did you see who's here?” Olive asked. She took a sip of the beer and made a grimace. “This tastes like water, basically,” she said.

“Who?” I asked. I sipped from my cup and found that Olive was right—it did taste watery. But I liked watery beer. It tasted less like beer.

“J-E-S-S-E,” Olive said.

“He's here?” I asked.

Olive nodded. “I saw him earlier, by the pool.”

Olive and I were not aware, when we heard about the party, that there was a pool and people there would be running around in bikinis and swim shorts, throwing one another in and playing chicken. But even if we had been, we still would have come and we still wouldn't have worn our bathing suits.

I sipped my own drink and then decided to just throw it back in a series of chugs. Then I filled up my cup again.

“All right, well,” I said. “Let's just walk around and see if we spot him.”

Jesse and Carolyn broke up sometime over spring break earlier that year. It wasn't such a crazy thing to think that Jesse might notice me.

Except that it was. It was totally absurd.

He was now the captain of the swim team, leading our high school to three undefeated seasons. There was an article about him in the local newspaper, titled “Swim Prodigy Jesse Lerner Breaks 500 Meter Freestyle State Record.” He was out of my league.

Olive and I took our cups with us out back, joining the chaos surrounding the yard and pool. There were girls on the redwood patio smoking clove cigarettes and laughing together, every single one of them wearing a spaghetti-strap tank and low-cut jeans. I was embarrassed to be wearing the very same thing.

I had on a black tank with flared jeans that came up two inches lower than my belly button. There was a gap between the tank and the jeans, my midriff showing. Olive was wearing flat-front camo-print chinos and a V-neck purple T-shirt, also exposing her lower abs. Now I look at pictures of us back then and I wonder what on earth possessed us to leave the house with our belly buttons hanging out.

“You look great, by the way,” Olive said. “This might be your hottest phase yet.”

“Thanks,” I said. I figured she was referring to the way I'd been wearing my long, blond-brown hair low down my back, parted in the middle. But I also suspected it had something to do with the way that I was growing into my body. I felt more confident about my butt, less shy about my boobs. I stood taller and straighter. I had started wearing dark brown mascara and blush. I had become a slave to lip gloss like every other girl in school. I felt far from a beautiful swan but I no longer felt like an ugly duckling, either. I was somewhere in between, and I think my growing confidence had started showing.

Olive waved a hand in front of her face as the smoke from the cloves drifted over to us. “Why do girls think that just because the cigarette smells vaguely of nutmeg that I would want to smell it any more than a normal one?” She walked away, down toward the pool to put some distance between us and the smoke.

It was only once my feet hit the concrete surrounding the pool that I realized who was about to dive in.

There, in a wet red-and-white bathing suit clinging to his legs, toes lined up perfectly with the edge of the diving board, was . . . Sam.

His hair was wet and mashed down onto his head. His torso was entirely bare. There, underneath the faint chest hair and the sinewy pecks, was a six-pack.

Sam had a six-pack.

What?

Olive and I watched as he bounced slowly, preparing to take flight. And then he was in the air.

He landed with the familiar
thwack
of a belly flop.

Someone yelled, “Ohhhhh, duuude. That had to hurt.” And then Sam's head popped up from the water, laughing. He shook the water from his ears and saw me.

He smiled and then started to swim to the edge as a second guy jumped in right after him.

I was suddenly nervous. If Sam came up to me, wet and half-naked, what did I want to happen?

“Another beer?” Olive asked me, holding her cup out to show me it was empty.

I nodded, assuming she would go get them.

But instead she said, “Be a doll,” and handed me her cup.

I laughed at her. “You are so annoying.”

She smiled. “I know.”

I walked up to the keg outside and pumped out enough for one cup before it sputtered out.

“Oh, man!” I heard from behind me.

I turned around.

Jesse Lerner was standing six inches from me in a T-shirt, jeans, and leather sandals. He was smiling in a way that seemed confident but vaguely shy, like he knew how handsome he was and it embarrassed him. “You drained the last of the keg,” he said.

It was the first time Jesse had ever said a complete sentence to me, the first time I'd heard a subject followed by a predicate come out of his mouth aimed for my ears.

The only thing that was weird about it was how
not
weird it was. In an instant, Jesse went from someone I saw from afar to someone I felt like I'd been talking to my entire life. I wasn't intimidated, as I always imagined I'd be. I wasn't even nervous. It was like spending years training for a race and finally getting to race it.

“You snooze, you lose,” I said, teasing.

“Rules say if you take the last beer you have to chug it,” he said.

And then, from the crowd, came the word that no teenager holding a Solo cup ever wants to hear.

“Cops!”

Jesse's head whipped around, looking to confirm that the threat was real, that it wasn't just a bad joke.

In the far corner of the yard, where the driveway ended, you could just make out the blue and red lights across the grass.

And then there was a
whoop.

I looked around, trying to find Olive, but she'd already taken off into the back woods, catching my eye and pointing for me to do the same.

I dropped the cups on the ground, spilling my beer on my feet. And then I felt a hand on my wrist. Jesse was pulling me with him, off in the opposite direction of everyone else. We weren't going toward the woods in the back; we were headed for the bushes that separated the house from the one next to it.

Everyone was scrambling. What had previously been the controlled type of chaos that rages through a high school kegger became unruly disorder, teenagers running in every direction. It was the closest I'd come to seeing anarchy.

When Jesse and I got to the bushes, he guided me into them first. They were dense and thorny. I could feel the skin on my bare arms and ankles chafing against the tiny sharp blades in every direction.

But the bushes were big enough that Jesse could crawl in next to me and they were dark enough that I felt safe from the police officers. We were far enough away from everyone else that it started to feel quiet—if the background noise of a police
siren and heavy running footsteps can ever really be described as quiet.

I could sense Jesse's body right next to me, could feel his arm as it grazed mine.

“Ow!” he said in a stage whisper.

“What?” I whispered back.

“I think I cut my lip on a thorn.”

A harsh stream of light cascaded over the bushes we were hiding in and I found myself frozen still.

I could hear my own breath, feel my heart beating against the bone of my chest. I was terrified; there was no doubt about it. I was drunk by this point. Not plastered, by any means, but well past a buzz. There was real danger in getting caught: not only my parents' disappointment, but also the actual threat of being arrested.

That being said, it was impossible to deny the tingle of excitement running through me. It was a rush, to be stifling my own breath as I felt the shadow of a police officer grow closer and closer. It was thrilling to feel adrenaline run through me.

After some time, the coast started to clear. There were no more heavy footsteps, no more flashlights. We heard cars driving away, chattering stop. My ankles had started to itch considerably and I knew I'd been bitten by something or something
s.
It was, after all, May in Massachusetts—which meant that every bug in the air was out for blood.

I wasn't sure when to speak up, when to break the silence.

On the one hand, it seemed like it was safe to come out of the bushes. On the other hand, you never want to be wrong about that.

I heard Jesse whisper my name.

“Emma?” he said softly. “Are you okay?”

I didn't even know that he knew my name and there he was, saying it as if it were his to say.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe a little scraped up but other than that, I'm good. You?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm good, too.”

He was quiet for a moment longer and then he said, “I think it's safe. Are you able to crawl out?”

The way he said it made me think that maybe he'd crawled into the bushes before, that maybe this wasn't the first time Jesse had been at a party he wasn't supposed to be at, doing things he wasn't supposed to be doing.

“Yeah,” I said. “I got it.”

A few awkward army-crawl-like steps forward and I was standing on the grass in front of Jesse Lerner.

His lip was cut and there was a scrape on the top of his forehead. My arms had a few tiny scratches down them. My ankle still itched. I lifted my foot up and saw a few small welts where my pants met the top of my shoes.

It was pitch-dark, the lights in the house all dimmed. Everything was deadly quiet. The only sound either of us could hear was the sound of our own breath and that of the crickets rubbing their wings together, chirping.

I wasn't sure what we were supposed to do now. How we were supposed to get home.

“C'mon,” Jesse said, and then he took my hand again. Twice in one night, holding hands with Jesse Lerner. I had to remind myself not to take it too personally. “We will walk down the street until we find somebody else who escaped and bum a ride with them.”

“Okay,” I said, willing to follow his lead because I had no better idea. I just wanted to get home quickly so I could call
Olive and make sure she was okay and make sure she knew that I was.