Who Do You Love Page 11

  I was used to Florida heat and humidity, but at least at home everything smelled clean, and you could usually catch a salty breeze from the ocean. On this windless morning the sky was a washed-out blue so pale it was almost white, and the air seemed to hunker down, squatting on your skin, stinking of exhaust. The weedy dirt was full of broken glass, fast-food styrofoam clamshells, and the occasional clump of dog poop.

  Andy leaned down, scooping up handfuls of newspaper in his gloved hands. I daintily plucked a coffee cup between my thumb and finger and said, “Tell me everything that’s happened between the last time I saw you and today.”

  “Everything?” He grabbed a broken bottle. “That could take a while.”

  “We have time.”

  He watched as I pinched a scrap of newspaper in my fingers. “If that’s how you pick up trash, we do.”

  “What happened with your arm?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t remember much. They did an X-ray, and they splinted it. I had to go back for the cast.” With one hand carrying his rake and the other full of trash bag, he had to use his forearm to wipe his forehead. “My mom wasn’t happy.”

  I remembered his mom, her cloud of hair, her booze perfume, the way she’d talked to Andy, like he was an adult who should have known better. “So what else?” I asked. “Where do you live? Any brothers or sisters? Or pets?” Or girlfriend, I thought, and decided I’d figure out a way to get that question in the mix.

  “It’s just me and my mom in Philadelphia,” he said.

  Alex clapped her hands and, at her instructions, Andy and I started raking the lumpy ground. I edged myself closer until I felt his shoulder brush mine. Heat bloomed on my skin, and my heartbeat quickened. I was trying to think of what else I could ask him when he said, “Do you do sports?”

  I shook my head and touched my chest, the ridge of scar invisible underneath my shirt. I wanted to see if he’d remember. I wanted him to look at me—at my waist, my legs, and my hair, my best feature, the one thing everyone noticed and praised.

  “I like reading,” I said. Andy made a face, his heavy brows coming to a V over his eyes.

  “Not my favorite.”

  “I can guess,” I said, smiling.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That letter you sent. You had the unhappiest handwriting I’ve ever seen.”

  “Unhappy handwriting?” His mouth twitched upward. When he bent down to scoop up the weeds. I could see the bulges of his vertebrae against his shirt, and I could smell soap and clean cotton. “What are you talking about?”

  “You had these tiny little letters, like it hurt you to write them. Like you were being charged for every drop of ink.” I followed along as Andy put his rake against the wall, picked up a pile of lumber, and at Alex’s instruction, carried it to a spot on the dirt. I grabbed a piece myself and followed along. “Have you done this before?”

  “What, volunteered?” Andy asked.

  “No. Built a house. You look like you know what you’re doing.” It was true. His movements were quick and assured, graceful and practiced, which made him a contrast to the boys and men in my life. My father’s household skills started and ended with replacing the batteries in the garage door opener. Jonah was so lazy that even if he’d had any kind of innate abilities to deal with broken lamps or grumbly garbage disposals, he’d choose to stay stoned in his bedroom instead.

  “I’ve got a friend who’s a repairman. I help him out sometimes.”

  “I think our repairman is a pervert,” I said. This was true. The guy my parents called for home repairs was named Norman. He had a droopy, hangdog face and seemed to always have his hands in his pockets, and once, I’d seen him staring when Marissa and I were in the pool.

  “My friend isn’t a pervert,” Andy said, and started taking longer steps, so that I had to hurry to keep up with him.

  “I didn’t say he was! Not all handymen are perverts!” I set my piece of wood down. “Although actually the guy who cleans our pool is kind of creepy, too.”

  “You have your own pool?” He sounded impressed. I wanted to tell him that everyone on my street had a pool, that a pool was no big deal, but I thought that maybe, for him, it was.

  Andy scooped another armload of wood, and made a face when I picked up another single piece. “You can’t carry any more?”

  “Sorry, I’m a delicate flower.”

  “You were carrying that big duffel bag last night. What was in there, anyhow? Your entire wardrobe?”

  I tried to remember when Andy could have seen me with my bag. He must have been watching me, I thought, feeling giddy, watching when I hadn’t noticed.

  “How do you know about my luggage? Were you spying on me?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, you were,” I said. I’d teased boys before, gotten them to laugh, but I thought that if I could get a smile out of Andy it would be better than all of their laughter combined. “You have that look. You’re obviously working for the CIA.”

  His lips twitched into an almost-smile. “How about this time you try two sticks of wood, princess?”

  “As much as I’d like to contribute more of an effort, the thing is, with wood I could get a splinter, and that could get infected, and then I could get really sick,” I said. I liked when he called me princess, especially because Jewish American wasn’t in front of it.

  “That’s why they gave us gloves.” He lifted a hand to show me. “And make us wear long sleeves.”

  “Splinters can get through long sleeves,” I told him. “Splinters can go anywhere.” I dropped my voice to an ominous whisper. “Anywhere.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said, shaking his head. Back at the woodpile, I made a show of adjusting my gloves, and Andy gravely piled not one but two pieces into my arms.

  “Think you can handle all of that?”

  “I’ll try,” I said, and took a deep breath, trying to stop my heart from beating so hard. “Do you have any hobbies outside of construction?”

  “I run,” said Andy. His face was sober, his eyes were intent. “I’m going to go to the Olympics one day.”

  “Really?” I said. “I hear the tickets are pretty expensive.”

  “Oh, you,” he said, in a funny, scolding tone. He wasn’t smiling, though. He wasn’t kidding.

  “What is your . . . event?” My school had a track team, the same way we had teams for everything else, but none of my friends were on it, and I’d never been to a meet or a match or whatever they had.

  “I’m a distance runner. I run cross-country in the fall—the course is just over three miles. Then I do the sixteen hundred meters, the thirty-two hundred meters, and the eight-hundred-meter relay in the spring, but in college I’m probably going to do the five and the ten thousand meters.”

  “So that’s how far?”

  “Three and six miles.”

  “I think I’d pass out if I had to run a mile.” I wasn’t lying. The most running I’d ever done was in junior high, when the bus came at seven-fifty in the morning and I’d have to dash down the street to meet it.

  “They don’t make you run in gym?”

  I touched my chest again. “Remember, I’m a delicate flower. The most I do in gym class is square dancing.”

  “Square dancing,” he repeated, shaking his head.

  “How does it work? You go to college . . .” I said, and let my voice trail off. Even if he won the entire Olympics and then went off and won a war, I knew there was no way I could date him if he wasn’t going to college. His religion, I guessed, might also be a problem. When my cousin Abby, my mother’s sister’s daughter, had married a guy named Tim whom she’d met in college, I’d overheard my mom on the phone, saying things like “At least the children will be Jewish,” and “Maybe he’ll convert.” Then there was the race thing. My parents had certainly never said that
they’d wanted me with a white guy, probably because it had never occurred to them that I would date—or even meet—a teenage guy who wasn’t white. They weren’t racist—they’d never used the n-word, and they frowned when Great-Uncle Si talked about why the schvartzes were best at sports, but I didn’t think they knew too many black people, and I guessed that maybe they wouldn’t be thrilled if I wanted to take Andy to the prom . . . which I was already considering.

  “I’ll run in college,” Andy confirmed. “Oregon, I hope. They’ve got the best facilities, and that’s where the best coach is right now. Then, if I’m good enough, I’ll go to a development camp. Those have sponsors, like Nike, and they’ll pay me to live there, and train and compete. I’ll be twenty-three for the 2000 games, which is just about right, although guys at my distance can compete into their thirties. So, 2004, 2008, maybe even 2012.”

  An Olympic runner. I tried to picture it. I saw myself in the stands, dressed tastefully and patriotically in blue jeans, a lacy white blouse, sheer but not too revealing, with a red band in my hair. The cameras would cut to me as Andy burst past the finish line. I’d jump out of my seat and throw my hands in the air. Cut to Andy, down on the track, with one hand shading his eyes, searching the stands, looking for me.

  “So you train, and you go to this camp, then to the Olympics, and you bring home the gold, and your picture’s on the Wheaties box . . .” He smiled at me. “Then what?”

  His smile got bigger. “Coach, maybe. Or find something else I like.”

  “People!” Alex hollered, clapping her hands. “Lunch break!”

  Andy reached over, took one of my curls between his thumb and forefinger, and gave it the gentlest tug, so that it sprang back, bouncing against my cheek.

  I was too surprised to say anything. I’d been kissed, I’d been groped, I’d had boys unhook my bra and try to put their hands down my pants, but I had never been the recipient of any gesture as intimate and assured as what Andy had just done. I wondered if he’d done it before, if it was a move he’d perfected on dozens of different girls. That wasn’t how it felt. It had felt spontaneous, specific to me. He likes me, I thought. But maybe not. Maybe he was just playing around, amusing himself. We hadn’t kissed yet, and that would be the thing that would seal it and tell me for sure whether he was just being friendly to someone he’d known a long time ago or whether he felt what I did.

  Lunch came in brown paper bags, sandwiches and fruit, packaged cookies and bottled water. Andy took two, then handed me one and led me to a scant patch of shade underneath a scabby-looking tree.

  “Wish this house had a swimming pool,” he said, pulling his T-shirt away from his chest, where sweat had darkened the fabric until it was almost black. Normally I hated sweaty guys. When Troy would try to hug me after his matches I’d endure it, then hand him a towel. I found that I didn’t mind Andy’s sweat at all. “What’s your father do?”

  “Commercial real estate,” I said, hoping Andy wouldn’t ask too many questions and reveal how little I knew about how my dad made a living. I was eating my apple, daydreaming about Andy and me swimming together, how I’d float in the water with his hands underneath me.

  “Do you wear jewelry?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  He leaned over and brushed the skin at the base of my neck with his fingertips, then touched the bump of the scar through my shirt. My skin flushed. I felt color rise in my cheeks as I leaned toward him, the way the faces of flowers follow the sun. “You should have something pretty, right there.” He looked me right in the eyes, and I held his gaze, not smiling, not making a joke or a funny face, just seeing him and letting him look at me.

  •••

  I spent the night and the next day in a daze, pulling weeds, carrying boards, sorting through secondhand dishes and silverware, always aware of precisely where Andy was, feeling his eyes on me, or imagining that I did. On the bus to and from the work site he sat next to me. He told me about his paper route, his mom, his friend Mr. Sills. “I got in a few fights when I was little.” He shook his head. “Almost got kicked out of my elementary school.”

  “Why were you fighting?”

  He stretched his legs out into the aisle. “Ah, you know.”

  “No, I don’t. Girls don’t fight. We just spread rumors and steal each other’s boyfriends.” I wondered if he thought I was using the word boyfriend a lot as a hint.

  “Like, someone would say something about my clothes. It was kids’ stuff. I grew out of it.”

  “Did you win your fights?”

  His teeth flashed white against his skin. “Every one of ’em.”

  “The winner!” I said, and took his hand, lifting his arm in the air, like a referee would do to a victorious boxer, while I wondered about his clothes and why kids had laughed at them.

  On the ride home, the air-conditioning felt wonderful after a day in the sticky sunshine, and we’d sit, sometimes not talking. The silence felt easy, not weird, as the neighborhood out the window changed from vacant lots and boarded-up businesses to the tended lawns of the houses around Emory. At dinner, he would sit with his friends and I would sit with mine, listening to my classmates complain about the boring work and the stifling heat, wishing they’d be quiet so I could replay the conversations I’d had with Andy, or think about how his leg had felt, pressed up next to me.

  With a boy from home, I might have made the first move, especially if we’d been at a party together and he’d had a few beers and maybe I’d been drinking, too. I would sit on his lap or squeeze in next to him on a couch, or put myself in a position where he’d be more or less forced to kiss me. Here in Atlanta, there were no parties, and if there was booze, I hadn’t heard about it. And I still didn’t know how Andy felt about me—if he liked me or liked me–liked me (“I don’t know what’s up with Andy, but you should definitely not be an English major,” Marissa had counseled when I’d described my dilemma in those terms).

  The fourth day of work was brutally hot. “Drink lots of water!” Alex told us in the morning, and there were extra thermoses full of ice water set up for us as we measured and marked lengths of lumber in the sun. Andy brought me a cup of water and reminded me to put on sunscreen, and I concentrated as hard on not sweating in front of him as I did on my job.

  The workday ended early, at three o’clock, when it was almost ninety-five degrees. Gratefully, we piled on the cool bus. Once Andy and I had taken our usual seats, I closed my eyes, and as we began the drive back to campus, I found myself half-asleep, drowsy from the heat. My head came to rest on his shoulder, not because I’d planned it, but because that was where it landed. I woke up when my cheek hit his shoulder, and froze, holding my breath, feeling the heat of his skin through the cotton, wondering if he’d move me back. Instead, he shifted his body so that I was resting more comfortably next to him and then, so gently that at first I thought I was imagining it, he began to stroke my cheek, just rubbing the side of his thumb against it, so gently that I could hardly feel it.

  “Your skin is so soft,” he whispered. I thought about whispering back, something about my moisturizer, but instead I just made another noise, a pleased little coo, and reached across his body, and he tucked my small hand in his big one.

  •••

  That night, after dinner, he came to my table and stood there quietly until Marissa and I looked up. “Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked. Wordlessly, I got to my feet, and he took my hand and led me out the door. There were trees on campus, dotting the grassy lawns, places I imagined the college students probably sat to do their homework, and that was where he took me. We sat side by side, leaning against a tree trunk, looking up at the sky.

  “In Philadelphia, you can’t see the stars like this,” he said.

  “I went to Cape Cod once, and it was so dark there that you could see everything, hundreds of stars.” I didn’t want to talk about the stars, or the
city versus the country. I turned toward him, seeing the shape of his face in the darkness, feeling the warmth of his hand around mine, thinking If he doesn’t kiss me, I’ll die.

  “Will you save me a seat at breakfast tomorrow?” he asked, as the campanile rang ten o’clock and kids started streaming back to their dorms.

  “Unless I meet someone I like better,” I said. A hurt look flickered across his face. For the second it took him to realize I was teasing, he looked like he was eight years old again, his lips pressed together and his brown eyes sad. I remembered how alone he’d been that night in the hospital, how his mom seemed more interested in embarrassing the nurses than in making sure Andy was okay. A boy who’d grown up the way he had probably had less tolerance for teasing than someone like me.

  Then he slipped one hand behind my neck, the other around my waist, pulling me so close that I could see the long lashes I remembered, curling up at the tips. His hand was so big and warm at the base of my skull, cradling me with ease. “Good night, Rachel,” he said. I shut my eyes and tilted my face toward his and then I felt his lips on mine, warm and gentle and unhurried, sweeter than any kiss I’d ever had before.

  •••

  I drifted into the dorm room, barely seeing the bunk beds, the desks, the closet made of honey-colored wood, with a handful of empty metal hangers dangling from the rods. I pulled my nightgown out of my monogrammed pink-and-­orange duffel bag. Lyrics from a dozen love songs were running through my head, and every single one of them, every word about longing and desire and not being able to live if living was without you, felt like it had been written specifically for me. Don’t stop believin’, I hummed. Hold on to that feeling.

  I was still humming Journey when Marissa came charging through the door, with Bethie galumphing along behind her.

  “What’s going on?” Marissa demanded.

  Bethie pulled out a book from one of the two plastic Piggly Wiggly bags in which she’d packed her stuff.

  “He kissed me,” I said.

  “Oh my God! Finally!” I grabbed her hands, and we bounced on the bed, squealing, barely noticing when Bethie, carrying a tiny tube of Crest, a toothbrush, and a threadbare white towel, went waddling out of the room, then came waddling back, with her damp hair staining the back of her nightshirt. We talked—“tell me everything,” Marissa kept saying, and I was happy to oblige—while Bethie read a library copy of A Wrinkle in Time, which I remembered fondly from sixth grade, lying on her side underneath the skimpy brown blanket that she’d brought from home. Her evening finery was an oversized baseball-style shirt with a glittery unicorn cavorting across the rolls of her belly and chest, and a pair of pale-blue sweatpants so tight that it looked like they’d been spray-painted on her thighs.