Perfect Couple (8 page)

“Granddad!” His footsteps didn’t retreat into the house, so I knew he was still listening. “Why not?” And why was I so determined to borrow his car? Why couldn’t I drive to the discount store to get contacts another day?

Because I was on a mission to be bikini clad and glasses free when I met Brody at the beach. And I was damned if this was the one day out of the year Granddad decided I couldn’t borrow his car.

“I don’t have to tell you why not,” he said through the door, which was the adult version of me changing the subject when Mom asked why I wanted contacts.

“You said when I turned sixteen that I could borrow your car whenever I wanted. That was your birthday gift to me.
You wrote it on a scrap of paper and wrapped it up in a box.” If he didn’t remember that, we needed to have a talk about what he
did
remember, and what year it was, and whether he should be allowed to live alone and own a microwave oven.

“That was a fine idea of mine,” he said, “when you didn’t want to borrow my car.”

I demanded, “What are you doing with your car today?”

“I don’t have to tell you that, either. I’m sixty-eight years old.”

And you’re acting like you’re two
, I thought, but that was Mom’s line. Really, he was acting like
me
. I took care never to be as mean as he was, but I wanted to be by myself a lot, and people probably took it as meanness. Tia had asked to hang out with me at my house in the past, and I’d told her no. She was so extroverted that after a few hours with her, I needed to be alone with my art. And I’d ruined some fledgling relationships back in ninth and tenth grade by complaining when guys with boyfriend potential called me and texted me and interrupted my thoughts. They were insulted when I turned my phone off.

Granddad was just dishing out the same antisocial behavior to me, and I couldn’t take it.

“All right,” I called through the door. “I’ll come back to check on you tomorrow.” The way things were progressing, he probably wouldn’t even open the door for me then. I
would have to wave to him through the window. I turned for the stairs off the porch.

The lock turned. The door opened. He stuck his hand out with his car key dangling from one finger.

“Thank you,” I said, sliding the key ring off his pointer before he changed his mind. “I’m going shopping out on the highway and then to the beach. You can call me on my cell if you need the car back.”

Instead of answering, he shut the door and locked it.

*   *   *

A few hours later, I parked Granddad’s car way back from the beach in the nearly full lot and lugged my bag and cooler out of the trunk. I always brought thermoses of water so my friends didn’t have to throw away plastic bottles, which was bad for the environment. The smooth cooler felt strange on my bare tummy. In my teeny bikini, I struggled to haul my load onto the sand, across the beach, and around families and motorcycle gangs and groups of elderly drunken rabble-rousers. Finally I spotted the cluster of towels and umbrellas where my friends had settled.

As I walked, I squinted at the ocean. Compared with my glasses, my new contacts made the sun almost unbearably bright. But I recognized Aidan and Kaye in the waves. Her hair in black twists was easy to pick out. Then I saw the
drum major of the marching band, DeMarcus, and his girlfriend, Chelsea, and the cheerleaders who’d run the race with Kaye that morning. Noah and Quinn and Kennedy sat in the sand with the tide flowing over their feet.

Obviously Kennedy wasn’t as worried about being associated with Quinn and Noah as he’d been when he’d sneered at me in Ms. Patel’s class on Friday. Maybe Tia was right: He picked a fight with me only when we had a date planned.

Off to themselves in the water, Brody held Grace. I could tell he was supporting her in deep water because she was higher than him. Her sunglasses still balanced on top of her head, and her bouncy curls were dry. In fact, he might have been holding her out of the water specifically to keep her hair dry, which was the dumbest thing I’d ever seen at the beach, and I’d lived here almost my whole life.

“Howdy,” I said, plopping down my ice chest and bag near Tia, Will, and the huge dog Will borrowed from the shop where Tia worked. The three of them lay on towels in the shade of an umbrella. Will still had trouble staying in the Florida sun for long.

He and Tia stared at me for a moment. Then he exclaimed, “Oh, Harper! I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.”

“I didn’t recognize you in a bikini,” Tia said. “Look at that
bod! You could crack pecans with those abs. What gives?”

I spread out my towel next to them and lay down. “I don’t know if you heard Sawyer this morning,” I said, “but when he was sitting on the curb about to pass out after the race, he said, ‘Fuck everybody.’ That’s pretty much how I feel.”

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Sawyer had been angry that he couldn’t run a race like everybody else. I was sick and tired of trying to make a statement with my look, and sabotaging myself in the process.

As usual, Tia didn’t press me for details. “Well, you look super cute in that bright red ‘fuck you.’ ”

“I’m not complaining either,” Will said. Tia snagged an ice cube from her cup and placed it in his belly button. He jumped, grabbing his stomach like he’d been shot. Then he dropped the ice in
her
belly button. She shrieked. The dog jumped up. The ice slid off Tia’s tummy and onto her towel, where the dog ate it.

“Is Kennedy still maintaining radio silence?” Tia asked me.

“Yeah.”

“Wait till he sees you.”

“You look hot, Harper,” Will said.

Tia told him, “There’s ‘Thanks for being nice to my friends,’ and then there’s ‘You can stop being nice to my friends now.’ ”
She turned back to me. “Let’s go hang with girls. You can walk slowly by Kennedy like your very own Labor Day parade. Brody’s going to be pleased by your ass, too.” She stood and held out her hand to help me up. The dog lay down in her place.

We shuffled across the beach. The sun was really doing a number on my contacts. I squinted and followed the blur of Tia. It wasn’t until we’d reached the water that I realized she’d led me on a roundabout path that veered much nearer Kennedy than necessary.

I didn’t look toward the boys, but I recognized Noah’s wolf whistle.

Quinn said something under his breath that ended in “Harper.”

“What?” Kennedy asked. “Oh.”

Now that Quinn had drawn his attention to me, Kennedy must have been watching me pass. But I forgot all about them when I saw Brody coming toward me from the ocean, stepping over the waves—without Grace.

He put out his hand. Tia slapped it as she passed.

He kept holding it out for me. I slapped it. But before I could pass him, his hand enclosed mine. We both stopped calf high in the surf.

“I thought you weren’t coming,” he said. I couldn’t see his
eyes behind his sunglasses, which made him somehow sexier. He was so near, and—like that morning—so nearly nude, with almost every inch of his tanned skin showing over tight muscles. I imagined I could smell him over the salt air and sunscreen. Suddenly my entire body was glowing.

Then my brain kicked in. What did he mean by “I thought you weren’t coming”? He’d been out in the ocean with Grace because he assumed I wouldn’t show up? It didn’t matter anyway. We had a date for a picture
only
. I said, “You thought wrong.”

“I sure did,” he said. “See you in a few.” He let my hand go. We walked on.

I hazarded half a glance behind me and caught
him
looking back too, at my butt.

And beyond him, Kennedy sat in the surf with his knees drawn up and his arms around them, watching us. Kennedy was a big guy, but this position made him look like an unsure kid.

Another day, my heart would have gone out to him. He was my geeky soul mate, the boy I belonged with. So what if he wasn’t a muscle-bound hunk ready to challenge Brody when he brazenly eyed me? As an independent woman, I didn’t need a protector. I wanted a sensitive guy with a great sense of humor and a fresh view of the world.

But today, my heart was cold to Kennedy. For the first
time, I felt a pang of distaste when I looked at him. My skin tingled, wanting Brody to touch me again.

I sloshed after Tia until we’d waded shoulder deep where the other girls bobbed in the surf. Grace had joined them. They were all giggling at something one of them had said. Grace’s staccato laugh was easy to pick out among the others. But when she saw me coming, she called, “It’s Miss Perfect Couple with My Boyfriend.”

“Girl, I told you the Superlatives are whack,” Kaye said. “There’s no telling why the class votes like it does.” This was directly opposed to the way Kaye had acted when she was elected Most Likely to Succeed: like it was the most important award of her life. And I was surprised to hear she’d talked Grace down about my title with Brody. Kaye hadn’t mentioned this to me. She must have been worried I would worry. She confirmed this by grimacing sympathetically as I swam up.

“Happy Labor Day!” I sang.

Grace glared at me. The other cheerleaders laughed uncomfortably. One of them, Ellen, exclaimed, “Harper! I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.”

“I got contacts today,” I said.

They ooohed and cooed over me and told me how good I looked and how pretty my eyes were, which they’d never noticed before—all except Grace, who stared me down with
a look that said,
Oh, you got contacts so you could come to this beach to seduce my boyfriend, eh?
At least, that’s how I interpreted it.

At my first chance, when the conversation turned to Chelsea’s story about fighting with a stranger over a pimento cheese sandwich at Disney World yesterday, which was the sort of thing that happened to Chelsea, I ducked beneath the surface to wet my hair. That would convince Grace I had no designs on her boyfriend. My hair was long and dark and board straight anyway, whereas she was still sporting her big blond curls. They were wilting a bit, though, now that Brody wasn’t holding her out of the surf. Her hairdo was wet around the edges, like a sandcastle nipped by waves.

As soon as I surfaced, I was sorry I’d gone under. My eyes stung. I hadn’t opened them in the water, but as I wiped away the drops, I got salt and sunscreen in them. I wiped them again, which made the stinging worse.

“I’m going down the beach,” I heard Grace say. “I saw some guys I know who are home for the weekend from Florida State. I’m scoring some beer. Tia, come with.”

“No, thanks,” Tia said.

“Why not?” Grace insisted. “You’re always drunk.”

“I am not
always
drunk,” Tia said self-righteously. “I am
drunk on a case-by-case basis. And not on Labor Day. The beach is crawling with cops.”

“Ellen,” Grace said, “come with. Cathy?”

The other cheerleader, Cathy, giggled nervously. “Wish us luck!” The three of them waded toward the promised land of beer and college boys.

Kaye called after them, “If you get caught, do
not
admit you’re cheerleaders for our high school. We have standards.” She said more quietly to the rest of us, “Let’s wait five minutes and then go after them. We’ll watch from the water and intervene if they get in trouble.”

“Or we can just enjoy the show when they do,” Tia suggested.

By now I could hardly see through the slits that my stinging eyes had become. “I’ll catch up with y’all,” I said. “Back to the towels for me. I’m having contact problems.” Amid the chorus of “Oh, no!” and “Poor baby!” and “Do you need help?” I explained what had happened. “If I can wipe my eyes and run fresh water over my hands, I think I’ll be okay.”

I sloshed toward shore. But as I reached dry sand, I was anything but okay. My left eye stung. My right eye was worse. When I opened it, all I could see was blur. The beach was as bright as another planet with no atmosphere to filter the sun. I could hardly see my way back to the island of umbrellas
and towels I’d come from. When I finally made it, I tripped over several boys and landed on the dog, who didn’t budge.

“Move, dog,” I said rudely. She got up, sticking her sandy butt in my face as I opened my cooler for a thermos of water.

Kennedy was telling the other guys about the indie film we’d seen at the Tampa Theater downtown last weekend. They were laughing uncontrollably. Kennedy was brilliant and had great comedic delivery. He would be perfect someday as the vastly intelligent, super dry commentator on a political comedy show. His shtick was as much about what he left out as what he said. At the moment, he was strategically omitting that we’d had an argument in his car on the way to the movie and that he still hadn’t been speaking to me by the time he dropped me off at home afterward.

“Right, Harper?” I heard him ask. He wanted me to verify some funny point in the movie—something he hadn’t discussed with me one on one, because we’d hardly talked since then.

This was his way of making up. After our fights, he ignored me until he just decided not to anymore. He asked me a question and I responded, and then it was like nothing had happened between us.

This time, instead of answering, I poured freezing water over my hand and wiped at my eye. Now it felt like I’d gotten sand in my eyeball. I tried to shift the offending particle into the corner where my tears would flush it out. That was a mistake. The stinging was intense.

I tried to open my eye. I couldn’t. My upper eyelid felt wedged shut by my contact. Was it possible that my contact had drifted that far back? Could it float even farther and get stuck on my optic nerve?
Where was my eleventh-grade anatomy knowledge when I needed it?

“Guys,” I called. Kennedy kept up his blasé movie commentary while I went blind in one eye. Tears streaming down my cheek, I said more loudly, “Guys, do any of you wear contacts? I need help. I think my contact has shifted into the back of my eye socket.”

“Harper,” Kennedy said, “only you.”

I took in a deep breath to calm myself, but I was on the verge of panic. These boys were not going to help me. Kennedy would make fun of me while this piece of flexible plastic sliced its way into my brain and gave me a lobotomy. The girls would help me, but they were too far away to hear me yell over the surf, and I couldn’t open one eye, and now I couldn’t see out of the good eye because of the tears. I felt like screaming.