Perfect Couple (6 page)

In fact, now that I thought about it, I recalled that he’d wrecked his mom’s car when he was fourteen . . . and I held on a little more tightly to my camera as the crowd passed me on both sides.

After another thirty runners, I spotted Kaye with two of her fellow cheerleaders, race numbers pinned neatly to their shirts, which matched their shorts. Kaye saw me first and yelled to the other girls. They waved wildly and mugged for the camera as they passed. At least one of them had her mouth open or eyes closed in each frame. The key to getting a great shot of all three of them, so flattering that they would swear forever I was the world’s best photographer, was simply to set the camera on continuous feed to shoot frame after frame. If I took enough photos, one of them was bound to be good. Photographing crowds for pay involved more know-how and logic than art.

A few more small groups ran by me, and then Sawyer jogged into view. He might have made it through Friday night’s game, but he should
not
have been running a 5K on a hot September morning a week past being hospitalized.

Sure enough, after three miles of running, his wet T-shirt
stuck to him, and his normally bright hair was dark, soaked with sweat. His exertion hadn’t dampened his spirit, though. As I tried to center him for a good shot, he ran straight toward me with his hand out like a movie star trying to block the paparazzi. I got three brilliant shots of his palm.

“Sawyer, dammit!” I cried as he passed, realizing as the words escaped my lips that this was a common exclamation at our school. Sawyer’s middle name might as well have been Dammit.

The groups of runners grew thicker now, and I struggled to keep up, taking at least one clear shot of every face. They still stuck together in packs, though. During a break in the crowd, I looked over my shoulder at the runners who’d finished—but
not
to locate Brody. Only to find Kaye.

The runner I saw instead was Sawyer, standing stock still and staring into space, his face so white he looked green.

Picking up the camera bag at my feet, I strode over and handed it to him. “Get my phone out of the front pocket, would you?” I couldn’t watch him because I had to keep clicking away at the runners, but in a minute he was holding the phone in front of me. At least he could still follow instructions. I swept my thumb across the screen, punched in my security code, and handed the phone back to him. “Dial Tia.”

When my phone appeared in front of me again, and there was another break in the runners, I spared Sawyer a glance. He was blinking awfully fast. I sandwiched the phone between my chin and my shoulder as I awkwardly peered through the camera and kept clicking.

“Hey there, Annie Leibovitz!” Tia chirped.

“Sawyer might pass out.”

“I’ll be right there.” The line went dead.

I slipped the phone into my pocket. I didn’t want to have to explain to the race sponsor, my boss for my first-ever gig as a professional photographer, that I’d missed capturing the last half of the race because my friend was going to faint. But I
would
have abandoned my job if Sawyer looked like he was about to hit the ground.

Before that could happen, Tia rushed over to him. I turned back to the runners. Tia and Sawyer were close enough to me that I could hear their voices above the noise of the crowd and the rock band starting up somewhere behind the finish line.

Tia: “Sawyer, dammit! Are you okay?”

Sawyer: “I will be. In a couple of years.”

Tia: “What the fuck did you run this race for? You just got out of the hospital. Are you trying to kill yourself?”

Sawyer: “Not . . . actively.”

Tia: “Jesus. Sit down. Sit down right here on the curb. Will!”

She sounded alarmed enough that I glanced over at them again. Will elbowed his way through, holding two bottles of water high above the crowd. Brody followed right behind him.

Tia: “Did you know he was running this?”

Will: “I tried to stop him. Sawyer, dammit, put your head between your knees.”

Tia: “Help me take him to the medical tent.”

Will: “There’s no medical tent. It’s a 5K.”

Sawyer, muffled: “Fuck everybody.”

Brody: “Shut up. Just enjoy the view.”

Though I was in the middle of picking out faces from a huge group of slow runners, Brody’s voice made me look over my shoulder again. He had his hand on the back of Sawyer’s neck, pressing his head toward the pavement. Will was pouring water over Sawyer’s hair. Now Kaye and her cheerleader friends circled him. Sawyer was in good hands. I tried to concentrate on the last fifty people crossing the finish line, some of them grimacing with the exertion, others giving me elated smiles and peace signs as they passed.

Finally the race seemed to be over. I watched downstream for a few moments, but the street in front of me was filling with pedestrians as if the police had signaled that no more runners were coming. I heaved a deep sigh, rolled my
shoulders, and started scrolling back through the photos to one group in particular. I was curious whether my obsession with the beauty of Brody’s body had been a product of my vivid imagination.

It was not. The image was tiny, but I ran my eyes over his shining muscles and his smeared race number, and looked forward to viewing the enlarged version on my computer.

“Whatcha looking at?” Tia asked, peering over my shoulder. “Got a Pulitzer winner? You seem very intent, even for you.”

“How’s Sawyer?” I asked.

“Oh, fine. Just stupid. Will’s walking him home. Don’t change the subject. Let me see what’s so intriguing in there.”

I handed the camera over to her and watched her look at the view screen herself. “I feel like a pervert,” I said.

“You should. That is disgusting. Be sure to e-mail me a copy.” She handed the camera back to me. “Have you scheduled your Superlatives picture with Brody?”

“I’ve been trying to find an in,” I said. “Seeing him like this makes it harder. We were elected Perfect Couple That Never Was, and I’m thinking . . . in what universe would we be a perfect couple? I’m not built like a gymnast.”

I looked down at the view screen and scrolled to the best photo of Brody alone. He was so beautiful, and he looked
so happy running and shoving Will out of the frame, that my heart hurt. “Did you vote for Brody and me? You didn’t answer me before.”

“No,” Tia said. “I wrote you in as Most Artistic and Brody as Most Athletic. For Perfect Couple That Never Was, I put a couple of nerds who giggle together at the back of my calculus class.”

“So, you paired like with like,” I said. “That’s how I voted too. And of the guys at school, I think Kennedy is my perfect partner, but we’re already dating.”

“Yeah, you’re such a perfect couple that you’re not talking,” she said.

“How do you know?” I’d texted her grumpily from the Crab Lab while Kennedy was giving me the silent treatment, but she and I hadn’t caught up since. She had no way of knowing we
still
weren’t talking.

“He does this to you every week,” she said. “Every time you have a date planned.”

I thought back over the weeks we’d been going out. Tia was right about the timing. Kennedy couldn’t be picking a fight with me just to avoid spending time with me, though. Why would he do that?

The whole idea of him made me uncomfortable, so I changed the subject. “Do you think people elected Brody and
me Perfect Couple because we have something in common that other people can see but I can’t?”

“No,” Tia said as Brody walked over. He must have poured a bottle of water over his own head. He was wetter than he’d been when he’d first rushed past me. His hair was dark and slick, still caught by the headband. He stood so close to me, and his green eyes were so intense, that I looked away shyly. I found myself staring at the dent in his upper arm where his deltoid disappeared underneath his biceps. This was the first time I had ever used eleventh-grade anatomy in real life.

I forced my eyes up his taut pectoralis major, all the way to his face. He seemed to be staring at the barest shadow of baby cleavage in the open neckline of my blouse. Then he saw I was watching him and cracked a guilty grin.

“Later,” I heard Tia say, but I was so focused on Brody that it took me a few seconds to realize she was talking to me.

“Later,” I responded faintly after she’d already walked away. I was sweating as much as Brody was now. I could feel drops rolling down my cleavage. Holding his gaze had gotten so uncomfortable that I glanced down at my old standby and savior, my mechanical wingman, the camera. “Brody, there’s a picture I wanted you to see.” I handed the camera to him.

The view screen was paused on the best photo I’d taken
of the race: Noah in the foreground, slightly blurry, looking back over his shoulder, while Brody and Will were in sharp focus in the sweet spot of the frame, a third from the top and a third from one side. They’d just realized Noah was beating them, and their outrage was hilarious. Their bare chests weren’t bad either. I figured the perfection of the photo was so obvious that even a layperson like Brody would see it. He wouldn’t think my admiration for his body was gratuitous. No, that wouldn’t be obvious unless he scrolled through my camera and saw all the other photos I’d taken of him.

He peered at the view screen and burst into laughter. I watched his mouth. His bottom lip wasn’t swollen anymore, and the bruise on his jaw had faded. When he laughed that hard, the dark circles under his eyes disappeared too. He wasn’t some older, intimidating bodybuilder. He was seventeen, like me.

With as deep a calming breath as I could draw without him noticing, I gathered the courage to ask, “Would you mind if I tried to sell this picture to the newspaper?”

He eyed me mischievously and asked, “Are you going to pay me?”

I smiled. “No.”

“Are you going to pay me half?”

“No.”

He tilted his head, perplexed. “Are you going to pay me a fourth?”

“No.” His interrogation had gone on so long that I wondered if he really didn’t want me to sell the picture. That was fine. It was his image, after all. I was profiting from his free services as a model. But I’d thought he was so happy-go-lucky that he wouldn’t care.

“Harper!” he burst out. “I’m kidding.”

“Well, I couldn’t tell!” I took the camera back from him, my mind spinning. I wanted to get Will and Noah’s permission too. Will was gone and I hadn’t seen Noah since the end of the race. I’d never find him now in the milling pedestrians. I could text them both later and then e-mail the photo to the local paper.

All that was easier to work through than one tall guy standing in front of me, too easygoing for me to decipher.

Brody wasn’t mortified about our misunderstanding like I was, though. He was still grinning as he said, “I guess you’re going to take our photo for the yearbook sometime soon, like you took Will and Tia’s.”

“Right, like Will and Tia’s,” I echoed faintly. When I’d shot their picture for Biggest Flirts, they’d shared an unplanned kiss, which had gotten Will in trouble with his
sort-of girlfriend Angelica. It had all worked out in the end. Will and Tia were dating now.

I stammered, “Um, I mean . . .” I lost my verbal abilities because I was at eye level with his nipples. This was distracting.

I forced my eyes up to his face. “We have to take the photo,” I said. “We need to take it soon, because Kennedy’s deadline for the whole section is in a week and a half. He kind of jumped down my throat about it Friday.”

Brody raised his eyebrows at the idea of Kennedy scolding me. He’d been trying to flirt with me, and I’d ruined it by bringing up my boyfriend.

Exactly. “Setting up the picture is touchy when we’re both dating somebody,” I muddled through. “I’ve been taking photos in the courtyard at school because it’s convenient and the light is good, but anyone can look out of the classrooms and see us. I found that out the hard way when I took Tia and Will’s Biggest Flirts photo and there was a big fight and a fallout. Also, I don’t have an inspiration for how we’d pose. Do you?”

“I was planning to do what you told me.”

“Oh,
really
?” I exclaimed, stressing my excitement. This was my only success at flirting for our entire conversation. And when his mouth curled into a sly smile, my heart sped up.

“Here’s a thought,” I ventured. “I know the football team
is practicing a lot, but if we could figure out a time . . .” I sounded like I was trying to get out of our meeting before I even proposed it.

He watched me like he was thinking the same thing.

I made myself continue, “. . . we could go on a date and take a picture of ourselves. It would be ironic, see, that we’re the Perfect Couple That Never Was, except we
would
be a couple for the photo. It will be hilarious to, like, the five or six of our friends who would actually give a shit.”

He laughed so hard that he took a step back. The space between us was wide enough that a couple of little kids dashed through, chasing each other.

Laughing uneasily along with Brody, I said, “Well, I didn’t think it was
that
funny. Maybe seven or eight friends.”

He stepped toward me again. “No, it’s just funny to hear you say ‘
shit
.’ ”

“Oh.” Tia had told me this before. I was so prim and proper, apparently, that a curse coming out of my mouth was as charming as a potty-mouthed toddler on a viral video. I felt myself blush as I always did when people said that kind of thing to me, like I wasn’t a real person but a wholesome caricature.

Not knowing or caring that he was poking me in the tender parts of my psyche, Brody said, “I like this idea. Would we be going on a real date, or a fake date just for the photo?”

Well, of
course
it would be a fake date, and of
course
he knew this. We were both in other relationships. But the very idea of us going on a real date was so deliciously outrageous that I heard myself saying, “Whatever.”

“I’ll be at the beach with some friends this afternoon.” He nodded toward the curb where Sawyer had sat, as if his friends were standing there, but I didn’t see anyone I knew.