Perfect Couple (7 page)

A lot of my friends, including Tia and Kaye, would be at the same beach. I was supposed to join them. I’d been thinking I should stay home instead and upload the race photos to my website. A delay was okay—the runners wouldn’t expect their pictures to be available instantly—but I needed to get them online a.s.a.p. so I could turn my attention back to the yearbook photos.

Suddenly, Labor Day spent in front of the computer seemed like the world’s saddest pastime compared with going to the beach with Brody. Or, not with Brody. The same beach as Brody. A photo of a fake date with Brody, more fun than any real date I’d ever been on with Kennedy. I said, “I’ll be there too.”

“So, I’ll catch up with you there?”

“Okay.”

“See you then.” He walked toward the curb.

I enjoyed basking in the afterglow of his attention—for
about one second. My ecstasy was over the instant I recognized one of the friends he was probably meeting at the beach. I heard her before I saw her. Grace had a piercing, staccato laugh, like a birdcall that sounded quirky on a nature walk and excruciating outside a bedroom window at dawn. Boys had been making fun of her laugh to her face forever—but Grace was so pretty and flirty that they only teased her as a way in.

She stopped laughing to say, “Sorry I missed your race, Brody! You know me. I just rolled out of bed.”

The crowd parted. Now I could see her better. Just rolled out of bed, my ass. She stood casually in a teeny bikini top. At least she’d had the decency to pull gym shorts over her bikini bottoms so she didn’t give the elderly snowbirds a heart attack. But her hair and makeup didn’t go with her beach look. Grace’s long blond hair rolled across her shoulders in big, sprayed curls, the kind that took me half an hour with a curling iron and a coat of hairspray. Her locks were held back from her pretty face by her sunglasses, which sat on top of her head. Her eyes were model-smoky with liner and shadow and mascara. She was ready for an island castaway prom.

“Did you win?” she asked Brody.

He chuckled. “No.”

She led him away by the hand. And that was that.

I watched him go. I
needed
to watch him
walking away with his girlfriend
, so I could get it through my thick skull that he was taken. Brody and I had exchanged some friendly jokes and agreed to fulfill a school obligation—at a gathering we’d both already planned to attend. He’d seen his girlfriend and forgotten about me. I didn’t even get a good-bye, not that I should have expected one. The “Never Was” part of our title was a lot more important than the “Perfect Couple” part.

Then he looked over his shoulder at me. Straight at me—no mistaking it. His green eyes were bright.

My heart stopped.

Still walking after Grace, he gave me a little wave.

I waved back.

He tripped over an uneven brick in the sidewalk but regained his balance before he fell. He disappeared into the crowd.

“That was smooth,” Tia said at my shoulder.

Kneeling to pick up my camera bag, I grumbled, “Shut up.”

“Does this mean you’re going on a real date or a fake date?” she asked. “It wasn’t clear from where I was eavesdropping.”

I gave her the bag to hold while I snapped the lens off my camera and stuffed the components inside. “I don’t know.”

“Does this mean Brody’s previous plan and your previous
plan to go to the beach are actually the date in question, or is there another fake or real date after that?”

Exasperated, I gave her a warning look.

“Sorry,” Tia said. “I know. I shouldn’t be criticizing your romantic life. Before Will, my dating scene pretty much began and ended with giving Sawyer hand jobs behind the Crab Lab.” Several elderly men walking past turned to stare at her as she said this. She winked at them.

“I’m too polite to bring that up,” I said.

“Do you want me to get Will to ask Brody, then report back . . . to . . . you?” Her words slowed as my expression grew darker.

“Thanks but no thanks,” I said. “This is already embarrassing enough. No reason to take us back to the fifth grade.”

Her mouth twisted sideways in a grimace as she handed the camera bag back to me. Tia clearly wanted to help but didn’t know what to say. There
was
nothing to say, because my situation was so hopeless.

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “I have a boyfriend. This is just a yearbook picture. I’ll see you at the beach.”

“Later,” she said, but she looked uncertain as she wound her way up the street toward the antiques store where she and her sister worked.

Tia was tall. It took a few minutes for me to lose the back
of her shining auburn hair on the sidewalk now crowded with shoppers. I should have turned for home, e-mailed Noah and Will for permission to send my shot of them to the newspaper, and started uploading my race photos.

But now that Tia was gone and Brody was gone and I stood alone in the middle of the street, I was aware of the happiness all around me for the first time that day. The rock band had launched into another song. Families stood in line outside the ice cream parlor, even though it was nine a.m., because regular meal times meant nothing and calories didn’t count on holidays. Kids giggled as they tumbled out the door of an inflatable bouncy castle. I pulled my camera out of my bag again, attached the telephoto lens, and snapped a few shots of the kids’ flip-flops and sandals lined up on the street.

I glanced down at my own kitten heels with their shiny, black-patent pointed toes.

In the midst of all this carefree joy, I looked like a mutant. A mutant on a job interview.

I thought ahead to my meeting with Brody at the beach. He would be shirtless, again, and irresistible, again. I would be wearing my 1950s-style, high-necked, one-piece maillot. If an item of clothing had a French name, it probably wouldn’t leave much of an impression on a Florida jock. At least, not the impression I wanted.

Last spring I’d been ecstatic to find a bathing suit made specifically for my retro style. Kaye and Tia had told me it was adorable. But next to Grace, I would look like I was wearing a hazmat suit.

Ten minutes later, I found myself in the dressing room at a surf shop, staring at myself in the mirror, guessing what Brody would think when he saw me in a red bikini.

5

I MUTTERED TO MYSELF, “I have an illness.”

“What’d you say, sugar pie?” the lady who owned the store called through the curtain. “Do you need a different size?”

I raked back the curtain to show her the bikini.

“You do not need a different size,” she declared. “Maybe an extra bottle of sunscreen to protect all that lovely skin you’re showing, but not a different size.”

I paid for the bathing suit. The shop lady put it in a pretty bag with color-coordinated tissue paper fluffing out the top. But on my walk home, I felt like I’d stolen it. It was as if everyone at the street festival watched my escape. I was so self-conscious about the bikini in my bag that I stowed it in my room, at the back of my closet, where Mom wouldn’t see it. If she asked me about it, I’d never wear it. I would chicken out.

I went to find Mom. She was upstairs in one of the B & B’s guest bathrooms, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the grout on the floor underneath the sink. After I located her, I backed out of the bathroom, tiptoed down the stairs, and then stomped back up so she’d know I was coming and wouldn’t bang her head against the sink at my sudden appearance. I had found out a lot of things the hard way.

When I entered the bathroom again, she was sitting cross-legged, waiting for me. “Survived the heat in that outfit?”

I skipped right over that one and asked, “Where are the guests?” This phrase was our code to make sure we were alone before we said anything private. Mom had taught me it was more out of courtesy to the guests than to us.

“They’re all out enjoying the day,” she said.

“Do you still have my prescription for contacts?” Every time I got my eyes checked, I wanted only a glasses prescription. Mom asked the optometrist to give me a prescription for contacts, too, in case I changed my mind.

“You changed your mind!” she exclaimed.

I shook my head. “I just want to try them.”

She raised her eyebrows at me. “After five years of me begging you? What happened?”

I would rather have given up on the idea of contacts than tell her about Brody, Grace, Kennedy, Sawyer, Noah,
Quinn. . . . I couldn’t even reconstruct how the wild ride of the last few days had dumped me off at a place where I never wanted to wear my adorable glasses again, or kitten heels, or a pencil skirt. And even if I could have verbalized my mindset, I didn’t want to share it with Mom, who would pass my teen angst around the B & B’s dining table tomorrow morning like a basket of orange rolls.

I said, “You don’t have to stop working. Just tell me where the prescription is.”

She lowered her brows and opened her mouth, ready to put up a fight. But her cell phone was ringing in the hall on her cart of cleaning supplies.

“Get that, would you?” she asked. “If it’s your father, tell him I’m unavailable.”

Not
that
fight again. I didn’t want to get dragged into it. And I didn’t want to get dragged into a personal one with
her
, either. I repeated, “Where’s my prescription?”

Because she didn’t want to take a chance on missing a call from a potential boarder, she quickly told me which office file my prescription was in. After that victory, I dashed into the hall, my heels clattering on the hardwood floor, and scooped up the phone, hoping it
was
my dad. I didn’t want to get in the middle of my parents’ fight, but I hadn’t talked to my dad in a month or seen him in three. I glanced at the
screen. Mom had been right. I clicked on the phone and said, “Hi, Dad!”

“Hey there, Harper,” he said. “Is your mom around?”

My stomach twisted into a knot. I didn’t think about my dad a whole lot because he wasn’t home and didn’t have much to do with my life anymore. But I wanted him to
want
to talk to me. I said stiffly, “I’m sorry, but she’s unavailable.”

“Unavailable how?” he asked, suspicious.

I couldn’t lie to my dad, but I didn’t want to say Mom was just scrubbing the floor and refusing to talk to him either. I swallowed.

“Harper,” he said firmly. “Give the phone to your mother.”

Funny how his tone of voice could send my blood pressure through the roof, even over the phone. “Just a minute,” I whispered. With my temples suddenly pounding, I walked back into the bathroom, extending the phone toward Mom. “It’s Dad.”

She started upward and banged her head against the sink.

“Ouch,” I said sympathetically.

Dropping her scrub brush and pressing both rubber gloves to her hair, she glared at me with tears in her eyes. Ever so slowly, she reached for the phone. “Hello.”

In the pause as my dad spoke to her, I escaped. But her
next words followed me, echoing out of the cavernous bathroom, into the wide wooden stairwell, and down the steps: “I told Harper to say that because we’re going to court next week. You’re supposed to leave me alone until then.
Leave me alone.
”

Inside the house was cool and dark with a faint scent of age and the sound of Mom’s angry language. As I shut the heavy door behind me, outside was bright and smelled like flowers. Tree frogs screamed in the trees. I skittered back to our little house and dug through Mom’s office files until I found my prescription, wondering how I’d ever thought I could spend the hot holiday at home.

*   *   *

The locally owned drugstores in the old-fashioned downtown around the corner from the B & B couldn’t help me today. To get my contact prescription filled on Labor Day, I needed the discount store with the optical shop out on the highway. And that meant I needed Granddad’s car.

I knocked on the door of his bungalow, just as I had yesterday and the day before, holding my breath until he answered. He drove to the grocery store once a week, and sometimes he swung by the art supply store to pick up more oil paints. As far as I knew, those were the only times he left the house where he’d lived forever and where Mom had grown up.

Granddad and Mom argued a lot. She told him she
wanted to make sure he was happy and safe, and he said she was being a nosy busybody. He told her she needed to get rid of that no-good cheat of a husband once and for all, and she said he was being an overbearing jerk. They were both right. In the middle of these fights, I was the only one checking on him. Sawyer lived next door, and Granddad paid him to cut the grass, but I doubted he thought to conduct a welfare check when Granddad didn’t leave the house for days on end. That took a certain level of granddaughterly paranoia.

I’d be the one to bang on Granddad’s door someday, grow suspicious when he didn’t answer, force open a window, and find him dead—though if he was dead already, I wasn’t sure why this idea made me so anxious. It wasn’t like finding him dead an hour earlier was going to help.

I knocked harder. “Granddad!” I yelled. “It’s Harper.” It couldn’t be anyone else, since I was his only grandchild.

I sighed with relief when I finally heard footsteps approaching. Even his footfalls sounded misanthropic, soft and shuffling, like he’d rather wrestle snakes than let his granddaughter into his house.

He turned the lock and opened the door a crack—not even as wide as the chain would allow. At a quick glance, I couldn’t see any reason for his secrecy. He looked the same as always, with his salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a
ponytail, and a streak of yellow paint drying in his beard. “I’m fine,” he said.

“Would you open the door?” I pleaded. “You didn’t let me in the house on Saturday, but at least you opened the door for me. You opened it only a crack on Sunday. This is a smaller crack. I can’t tell whether you’re less glad to see me or you’re trying to disguise the fact that you’re getting thinner.” He’d already started to close the door completely. Apparently he didn’t think I was as funny as I did. Quickly I asked, “May I borrow your car?”

“No.” The door shut.