The View from the Top (7 page)

Suddenly he felt her touching the corner of his mouth. With her lips.

And then the center, then the other corner.

Three dots in a row. That was called a ... what the hell was it called?

“Give up?” Jeanie asked.

“No, I'm, um, I'm thinking,” Jonah stammered.

“I can do it again,” she said.

“No, no, you don't have to. I remember.”

“You can open your eyes now.”

“I know. But this is helping me picture it.” He didn't want to look, to see evidence of who he'd just kissed. “You know,” he said, opening his eyes but keeping them off Jeanie, “I'll have to get back to you on that one.” He grabbed his bowling shoes and ran for the door. “I'm sure I've got a book at home with the answer!” he yelled on his way out.

Jonah had only gotten to the end of the Fletchers' driveway when he heard the scream.

It was deep and gravelly—kind of like a roar—and it definitely came from a female. The sound struck him in his gut, playing into all of his childhood fantasies of saving a damsel in distress. But he wasn't sure it was a role he wanted now that it could become a reality.

He tiptoed down the street in the direction of the scream, concocting a plan for how to deal with the attacker. Problem was, he didn't have anything remotely resembling a weapon. Maybe he could throw pumpkin seeds in the guy's eyes and then kick him in the nuts. Kicking in the nuts would be key.

But once he rounded the curve in the road, he saw that the screamer—who was now screaming again—was alone. And wearing an oversize red hoodie with the hood pulled all the way up. Had to be Anabelle. She'd been wearing that thing nonstop. The other day he'd put her in a head-lock and made her admit it belonged to Tobin Wood. Why did girls always have a thing for dopey guys like that?

Jonah caught up with Anabelle and fell in step with her. “Well,
that
was scary,” he said.

“Where'd you come from?” she asked, mildly hysterical.

“I heard you from back there,” he said. “I was at Matt's.”

She turned, gave him a funny look. “Matt was with me.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, hoping she didn't notice the slight crack in his voice. “That's why I was leaving. Because he wasn't there.”

Anabelle pulled a leaf off of a sea-rose bush along the side of the road and shredded it as she walked. “He dropped me in his driveway, then went driving off somewhere. Said he needed to think.”

“What's going on?” Jonah asked.

“Stuff.”

“Apparently. You wanna tell me about it?”

“Not really.”

“You know what?” he said. “This is bullshit.”

“What is?” Anabelle halted in her tracks, looked up at him all glassy-eyed.

“Stuff with you and Matt is getting worse and worse and you keep pretending like nothing's wrong. But something is obviously very wrong. And every time I try to tell you I'm there for you, you push me away. I give up.”

“Fine,” she said. “We can talk if you want to talk. But not like this. Not where we could run into people we know. We have to go somewhere. Sit down. In private.”

“Okay, yeah, we can do that.” Man, were things even worse than he'd thought? Was Matt hurting her? He'd kill him if he was. Jonah had never been in a fistfight, but was certain he could kick Matt's ass if it came to that. “I know the perfect place,” he told her. “And it's Monday, so nobody will be there.”

WhirrrlyWorld was a cinch to break into. All you had to do was crawl under the hole in the chain-link fence over by the Salt ‘n' Pepper Shake-ahhh! He and Matt had done it countless times during off-season, when they cut class to smoke up.

“Ladies first,” he told Anabelle when they got to the hole.

“Wait,” she said, “I have to finish this.” She was eating a rosehip Jonah had picked for her on their way. He'd told her it was jam-packed with vitamin C, that maybe it would make her feel better. She'd been taking tiny little bites, making an ooh-this-is-sour face as she chewed. It was supercute.

When Anabelle had polished off her rosehip, she looked around as if gearing herself up for a heist, then wriggled her way through the hole. Jonah followed. They walked past the WhirrrlyWind roller coaster, the Sail to the Starrrs! pirate ship, and into the kiddie area.

The carousel had this way of looking magical in the moonlight—as if it were a place where dreams could come true. Or be trampled by all those horses. Maybe that's what Jonah loved so much about it. That it felt both exciting and dangerous.

Jonah leaped onto the platform and reached out to give Anabelle a hand. “Anywhere you like,” he told her, as if he were a host at a restaurant.

She picked a mid-gallop purple horse with a yellow mane. Jonah got on the whinnying red-and-black one beside it.

“So,” he said, once they'd settled into their saddles, “you ready to talk?”

Anabelle fidgeted with her horse's reins, her thumbs poking through holes in the wrists of her hoodie. “Matt's been...”

Just say it,
Jonah thought.
Just say that he's been hitting you and the boy is so dead.

She wrapped one of the reins tightly around her hand. “He's been saying he thinks there's something going on between us.”

Hold on, this was about
him?
Jonah leaned his head against the brass pole. It was cold. So cold. But he stayed there anyway, the metal freezing his brain.

What do you say, what do you say?
he thought. He could admit that he was attracted to her, that he found her cute and sweet. But then what? He had this feeling that if he actually got the chance to kiss her, he'd find her too cute and
too
sweet. Or was that just what he was telling himself because he felt wrong about kissing Matt's girlfriend? Well, he'd almost just done that with Matt's mom and he didn't seem to have a problem with it. No, that wasn't true. He had a big problem with it. God, what was happening to him? Didn't he have any morals?

Maybe that was the biggest thing holding him back here. That Anabelle, more than anyone he knew, had high morals. She was all about morals. And he couldn't stand the idea of being the one who made her question that about herself. Besides, if he made a move on her, she'd probably reject him anyway. Because she was so good. So very, very good.

Then again, she might go along with it. And if she did, it would be proof that even the most well-intentioned people have weaknesses. That she wasn't so different from him after all.

“Did you hear what I said?” she asked.

“I heard,” he said, sitting back up. The cold spot on his forehead suddenly swelled with warmth. “It's just, it's so ridiculous that he'd think that.”

“That's what I told him.” Was he just hearing things or did she sound disappointed?

“Right, because there's not,” he said. “Anything going on, I mean.”

“I know.” She took a quick breath, tugged on the strings of her hood. “Hey,” she said, “you're gonna see him more than I will next year. Can you, like, make sure he doesn't go crazy? Remind him that I care about him?”

“Yeah,” he lied, knowing Matt would drive himself as crazy as he wanted and nobody could stop him. “I can do that.”

A foghorn groaned out on the water and it reminded him of the sounds of agony he'd woken up to this morning, coming from his mother's room. He wondered what she was doing right now, if she'd really gone to the hospital. Probably. He should've been home all this time, keeping her from spending money they didn't have on treatments she didn't need.

“Jonah?” Anabelle said.

“Yeah?”

“Why're you sticking around next year?”

It was a question he asked himself every day. “I don't know,” he told her. “I guess school's never been my thing. But I wonder sometimes if that was a mistake. If I should've tried harder. Maybe gone somewhere other than Normal Community.”

“You still could.”

“No, Anabelle, I couldn't. I'm not like you. My grades suck. And there's nothing interesting about me either. I never did an extracurricular in my life. Unless you count pot. And last time I checked with admissions people, they don't.”

“Sorry, I didn't mean to push you,” she said, stretching her legs out in her stirrups. “It just feels weird sometimes. Being the only one of our friends going so far from home.”

“If they make you feel bad, it's 'cause they're jealous,” he said. “I know I am. I like to imagine myself walking around a pretty campus, living in a dorm.”

“What would you study if you went?” Her eyes were all round. Full of genuine concern, interest. She was the only person he knew who really wanted to know the answers to questions she asked.

“You'll laugh,” he said.

“I won't.”

He knew she wouldn't. But still, it was so hard to say aloud.

“C'mon already,” she prodded.

“All right, all right. If I could be anything I wanted, I'd be an ... engineer,” he admitted.

“Wow, that's not at all what I expected,” Anabelle said.

“That's why I didn't want to tell you. It sounds so nerdy, right?”

“No, it's actually really cool. It's the kind of thing I could never do. I don't have the head for it.”

“When I was a kid I used to take apart my mom's vacuum cleaner. She'd yell at me, but I'd always put it back together just like I found it. I did the same thing with our phone, our radio, our clocks. I feel like if I worked really hard, I could build things from scratch. Things nobody else has ever made.”

“Like what?”

He'd never told anyone the thing he
really
wanted to make. The thing he'd dreamed of making since he was ten. But Anabelle would listen; she'd take him seriously. “Wings,” he said, standing up in his stirrups, holding his horse's reins. “I want to build myself wings. Mechanical wings, to wear on my back. So, y'know, I could take off whenever I wanted.” He looked toward the beach and pictured himself soaring out of the park, over the sand, the rippling water.

“I like that,” she said.

“Yeah? You don't think it's cheesy?”

“No, I think you should do it. Apply somewhere to transfer next year. If you write a good enough essay, maybe your grades won't matter so much.”

Jonah sat back down in his saddle. He didn't want to tell her that even if he had straight As, he didn't think he could ever stray far from Normal. Not with his mom being the way she was. He had to get off this woulda, shoulda, coulda topic; it was too depressing. “So,” he said, trying to keep his voice light, “what're we gonna do about Matt? Want me to set him straight?” He struck a boxing pose.

“No,” she said emphatically. “You can't tell him we talked about this.”

“Yeah. You wouldn't want anything to do with me anyway,” he assured her. “I'm wicked bad news.”

{ HOW
to
EAT
a
CHOCOLATE BOOB }