None of the Regular Rules (6 page)

Johnny, whose arms were still wrapped around Mackenzie, said, “Aw, Peter, isn’t that
brown haired
Barbie your good
-
luck charm at away games? Didn’t you knit her a jersey with your number on it last year?”

“Rush, shut it. I don’t bring Barbie dolls to the games.” He was
so
upset. It actually made the whole thing funnier than if he’d just let the stupid crack roll off his back. Peter dropped the empty cup on the ground and thrust his hands in his pockets before puffing his chest out. He looked like a penguin. Unfortunately, Ella didn’t seem to notice that all of this was going on. She’d love him just as much tomorrow, no matter how bad he was at taking a joke.

Peter squirmed, but was saved from further discussion when someone shrieked from waist-deep in the water. We all turned to see what had happened, and I realized that at least half the partygoers had moved to the lake.

“To the water!” Johnny cried, waving his arms in the air like an air-traffic controller. “Super-dip!”

Okay, I’ll admit that I thought maybe the cops were busting the party or something, and we were all supposed to hide in the water for a while. The screaming and the feeling of panic as everyone began to peel their clothes away and run toward the lake—this combination of factors made me wonder if something was wrong. But within seconds, I realized this was some sort of tradition. When Johnny yelled “in,” everyone went in.

Some people charged all the way out into the deep water, while others lingered quietly near shore, getting only their feet wet. A few people were still entangled in each other’s arms near the fire and didn’t look like they were pulling out anytime soon. The strange, staring guitar guy had turned so he could watch the water, but he played on.

“Come on, neighbor,” Johnny yelled from a few feet out from shore. “It’s a tradition. Super-dip time.”

“What’s super-dip?” Grace asked timidly. “Do I have to get naked?”

It was obvious she didn’t. Most people still had at least some of their clothes on in the water, though many had stripped down to bras and underwear. Johnny and Mackenzie held hands in water that was up to their thighs, laughing and splashing at the people around them. As I watched, he dropped her hand and ran back toward shore. Johnny peeled his shirt away, revealing a slim, tightly
muscled torso, and tossed his top on the ground before high-stepping back into the water.

Ella caught me admiring his body. “I see you looking,” she teased. “Johnny Rush
is
kind of hot. His name is still ridiculous, though.”

“Let’s go in,” I said, trying to peel my eyes away from Johnny’s stomach and chest and arms. First his eyes, now his body. I had to get my mind off my neighbor’s assets.

I only debated for a minute before I said, “I’m gonna go swimming.” I pulled my jeans off, after a quick peek to see if I was wearing decent underwear. Luckily, I’d put on super-cute boy shorts that day—they went up my butt if I moved at all, but they actually made it look like I
had
a butt, which was a good thing. I left my tank top on and charged into the water.

Grace and Ella gaped at me from shore. “Come
on
, you guys,” I said, rubbing at my arms and trying to keep my teeth from chattering. “It’s not bad.”

Peter Martinson was jumping around and playing Frisbee with a few other guys near me in the water, and that was enough to pull Ella in. She stripped her leggings off and crashed into the water in her skirt. Grace stood timidly, a few feet back from the water line, considering. Almost everyone else at the party had moved into the lake, and Grace looked completely exposed, standing on shore alone. She chewed at her thumb and tried to look like she was having a great time watching everyone else frolic in the lake.

I was about to slip out of the water, to go back to shore and keep her company, when Johnny suddenly yelled “Fish nibbles!” People ran and scurried away from him and he dove and leaped in the water, reaching beneath the blackness of the surface to grab at people
’
s limbs to tug them under. It was like a giant game of tag, a game that was somehow fun for everyone, despite the fact that it was so stupidly juvenile that it seemed impossible that these people could be having a good time. Johnny had that magic that made everything more fun—and it was that magic that made him so magnetic and strangely charming. He obviously didn’t care about what people thought about him, and I envied him for that.

Before I could rescue her, Johnny charged out of the water and wrapped his hand around Grace’s waist. “Fish nibbles,” he cried, pulling her into the water behind him. Grace gasped as the water soaked her clothes, but soon she was laughing and splashing in the water beside us.

The game went on for a while, with people tickling and chasing and grabbing at each other, until eventually everyone began to slink back out of the water to dry off on shore. We curled up close to the fire, waiting for the heat from the flames to dry our bodies and our clothes, listening to the guitar guy play songs.

Ella, Grace, and I huddled
together at one edge of the group, listening and watching while Johnny and his friends talked about memories and their futures, most
of them
plann
ing for the year ahead. Many of Johnny’s friends
seemed to be going somewhere, heading off to this school or that job, making their way to something else that wasn’t this. Peter and his friends stayed close to the beer, reveling in the buzz of the alcohol and the first week of school. We still had a year left, and clearly, Peter’s group wasn’t going to waste that time fretting about the future or staying sober.

Grace got into a conversation with a couple of girls who had been cheerleaders, and Ella focused on watching Peter, but I let my mind wander. I caught myself staring at people as they cuddled and talked and pulled together collections of memories they could take with them to wherever they were going next. Johnny spent time with everyone, circulating between Mackenzie and his other friends, giving everyone a bit of his time and his charm.

I watched Johnny as his friends teased each other, and noticed that he grew quieter as the night went on. When he saw me watching him, Johnny scooted over to sit next to me. I guess it was my turn for his company. Having his attention didn’t make me feel like I was any different than anyone else at the party, but it did make me feel sort of special. Johnny had a way of giving all of his attention to the person in front of him that made it feel like you were the only person on earth. Or maybe that’s just how it felt to me.

“You sure are an observer, aren’t you?” Johnny said this quietly, making me lean in to hear him. I looked over and saw that Mackenzie was cuddled up inside what I imagined was Johnny’s sweatshirt, a big, blooming
Madison
hoodie that reminded me that they didn’t need to get in their last kisses and final good
-
byes. They’d have plenty of time to be together. “A watcher?”

“Here, sure.” The fire had quieted and I was in the darkened outer circle, away from flickering embers, far enough from the warmth of the fire that my face was dark and chilled. “Not always.”

“We’re an interesting group,” he said. “Aren’t you sad you never came by one of
my
parties before?”

“A little,” I admitted. “I only came because you told me I had to protect my pumpkins.”

He laughed. “Now, that’s not true.”

“A little,” I said again, and smiled. “Was anyone actually threatening the security of my little orange squatters?”

Johnny shrugged. “A while ago. I wouldn’t worry about it too much anymore.”

“I guess I can finally relax,” I said, lying back to look up at the stars. I assumed he’d move on, go back to Mackenzie or another friend. He’d played the part of perfect host, and my time was up.

But instead, Johnny lay down next to me. I tried to be still and not obsess. But it was hard. He turned his head so he was looking at me and said, “Did you really only come because you were worried about the pumpkins?”

“No.”

He nodded, and looked back up at the sky. “I like your hair.”

“Yeah,” I said, realizing his earlier compliment—the one that had made me feel so special—had actually been so hollow that he’d forgotten he’d already told me he liked my haircut. “Thanks. Again.”

“What made you do it?”

“I’m donating it to Locks of Love,” I said with a shrug. “I didn’t need it anymore.” Okay, so that wasn’t exactly the full truth. I was making myself sound like a much better person than I actually was. As though I had a cause that I believed in, and had selflessly grown my hair out for the explicit purpose of donating it to poor, hairless kids. “Also, it was sort of a dare.”

“Ah. Dares are good. I mean, Locks of Love is good stuff, too. But dares are also fun.”

“M
mm-
hmm.”

“Are you a daring person?”

“Me?”

“No, that guy over there—the one playing the guitar.” Johnny gestured to guitar guy and laughed. “Who is that dude, anyway? Did he come with you?”

“You don’t know him?”

“Nah, he just showed up. I figure he must know someone.” We both laughed. “So are you? A daredevil?” He grinned. “I can’t get a handle on you, Sophie.

“I’m not really. Not at all, actually,” I confessed. “I’m actually sort of a coward. But Grace and Ella and I are trying to shake things up a little bit for senior year.”

“I like that,” Johnny said. “Approved.”

“You’re
approving
me? Isn’t that a little arrogant?”

He ignored the question. “What other dares? Cutting off your hair, coming to my party…I’m guessing the sudden interest in my party was also a sort of dare? You ladies looked scared out of your mind when you got down here. It’s just the beach. We don’t bite.” He giggled—it was adorable. “Unless you count the fish nibbles.”

I glanced at him. “It’s possible.” He looked proud. “We might have come to your party as a dare.”

“What else?”

I didn’t want to tell him about the list. It felt like it was private. It wasn’t even mine—not really, anyway. “I’m not sure yet.”

“Right on.” Johnny sat up then and nodded. “Well, thanks for coming, even if it was just a dare.” Then he stood, leaving me behind as he moved on, easily slipping into other conversations.

Sadly, I wasn’t sure moving on was going to be quite as easy for me. Somehow, Johnny Rush and his charming magnetism were stuck in my head. His face and eyes and the contours of his chest were imprinted on my mind the way one of those images from an accidental porn pop-up ad gets stuck in your head.

Johnny Rush was glued there, playing on repeat, even though I didn’t want him to be. Even though I knew I shouldn’t be thinking about him the way that I was.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

“I’ve hardly had time to talk to you since school started,” my mom said as I tried to skirt past her in the kitchen a few weeks into the school year. It had been a busy few weeks, and I’d been engrossed in the usual beginning-of-school stuff. My only sport—cross-country skiing—officially started just after Christmas, but our coach had set up mandatory weight training sessions after school a couple days a week to get us all in shape. There were a few people on the team who were really good. But the rest of joined because there were no other sports that took anyone who wanted to join, and we all wanted to do something or had parents that insisted we do something (like me). So the preseason practices were met with a lot of lazy grumbling. “Do we need to set up a meeting?”

“You’re talking to me now,” I said, and shot her a winning smile.

“Okay, wise guy, enough with the attitude.”

“What do you want to talk about?” I stopped moving around and looked at her patiently. I’d do just about anything to prevent her from setting up an actual meeting. My mom was a meeting fanatic—always going on and on about agendas and consensus and other boring work terms—and she loved to bring the structure of her nine-to-five home for the family to enjoy. My father and I, however, did not like meetings and I had begun to hope and wonder if maybe she’d forgotten about home meetings over the past year. We hadn’t had one in a while. It seemed like she’d been too busy lately to pencil me in, even for a “hallway status”—her clever catchphrase for casual chatting. Why must there be a catchphrase for everything?

“How are your classes?” She peeked at me over the edge of her coffee mug. Mom drank it black, with one ice cube. Always. “Any good gossip? What’s the scoop?”

“No scoop.”

“Come on,” she pleaded. “Tell me what’s happening. Are you happy? Doing well in your classes? Boys? Fill me in on everything.”

My parents really weren’t bad, as far as parents go. They obviously loved me, had high hopes for me, and treated me with a decent amount of respect—as long as I was pursuing something parent-approved and not getting into trouble. Having that kind of support made it hard to dislike them as much as I sometimes did, but it didn’t make it impossible.

One of the things that bugged me most about my mom was the way she would beg for information—“scoop” (see? Another catchphrase!)—but then she was completely unable to act normal when the details were dumped in her lap. Instead of nodding or oohing or even just sitting there mutely like a parent ought to do when they were privy to something, she just couldn’t stop herself from finding a silver lining in every little thing.

There is nothing wrong with a silver lining. In fact, I admired people who could find a little silver wrapper around anything. Like Melissa Mintz, a member of East Central’s intellectual-cheerleader crowd (yeah, there is such a thing), who is so eternally positive that she squealed a little bit when she found out we had to write a response paper every week for English. Melissa was sure the exercise would help her be better prepared for writing college application essays. At least that’s what she said in a very loud, very cheerful voice after we’d gone over the class outline. That’s an impressive level of optimism.

But there was something about my mom’s silver linings that just got to me. It’s like she wanted to be a friend or a big sister, but she couldn’t keep herself from squeezing a little mom juice into our conversations.

“So are there? Any boys in the picture this year?” She lifted her eyebrows at me.

“Nope.”

“Well, that’s probably for the best.” She tipped her coffee cup back and drained the remnants out of the cup. “Gives you more time to focus on schoolwork!”

“I guess.”

“How are the weight training sessions with the ski team?” She poured herself another cup and plopped an ice cube in. The coffee sploshed up over the rim of
the cup and landed on her
blazer. “Dang it.”

“The weight training is going fine,” I said, itching to just eat my breakfast already. But I knew I had to make it through a few more questions before I’d be excused. Otherwise, I’d find a note with a little “Let’s meet!” sticker on my bedroom door when I came home from school that night. “My arms are wimpy.”

“Not wimpy!” Mom cried. “They’re slender. Besides, skiing is all about endurance anyway, right? Maybe you should start running a bit, to help you work on your cardio? Wouldn’t that be fun? Get out
and enjoy the fresh, fall air.” She shook her head. “I
f
only
the weather would just cool off already.”

“Maybe. I hate running, though. It’s too much work.” Okay, so I was intentionally being negative, to test my mom’s silver-lining-maker.

“That’s why skiing is such a good choice for you,” she said. She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup and sighed. “You get little breaks on the downhills.” She winked.

“Precisely. You really know how to spin it, Mom.” I tried not to laugh as I poured a bowl of Cheerios and sprinkled some sugar on top. My mom lifted her eyebrows and gave me the look she always did when I made “bad choices.” My mother wore this look well. She had mastered it and knew how to accessorize it with carefully chosen words and vocal tones.

In fact, my mother had made a career out of very specific facial expressions. Apparently, when you fire people, you have to convey a sense of calm so no one comes back to kill you with a machete. And when you hire someone for a big position, your face is supposed to tell people that everyone is very happy and satisfied in their job—and the HR guru is the first point of contact. These are the nifty things I learned from my mom. People do always say the most important education you get is at home.

When my mom gave me a food-inspired “look,” it usually meant: “Don’t blame me if your thighs slowly grow and bulge to the point where they actually explode, leaving small bits of sugar and organic cookies in their wake.” Or something like that.

As I pulled the milk out of the fridge, I debated asking my mom about Suzy. I’d been eager to ask some questions about her since I’d found the list, but hadn’t yet mustered up the courage. Whenever I’d asked about Suzy in the past, my mom had blown me off and changed the subject. She turned every conversation about my favorite aunt into a lesson in safety and caution and learning how to be happy with your boring lot in life. I hated that Suzy was nothing more than a cautionary tale, so I never brought her up anymore. But I had questions, and I was trying to understand why she’d written the list—and maybe try to figure out what else she’d attempted to do before the accident took her away from us.

Whenever anyone talked about Suzy, they made it seem like she was this major rebel. Because of how she’d died, I’d always assumed that was true. But now that I’d found her list, I was sort of questioning just how wild she really could have been. To me, it always seemed she was full of ideas and spontaneity, but I was only eight. Now that I had something of hers that gave me some insight into her last year, I got the sense maybe she was just as stifled and cautious as I’d been trained to be—and as desperate to break free. So why was everyone always acting like she was so dangerously risky? Had she done more than that one big thing that had ultimately killed her? “Mom?”

“Mmm?”

I started out slowly. “Suzy died in November, right?”

My mom held her coffee in her hands without moving. She didn’t look at me, just stared in at the sliver of ice cube that I could hear bobbing along the inner rim of her cup. “Yes, November.”

I felt for the list in my back pocket, and said, “Was she happy before the accident?”

My mom sighed. “Why are you asking about Suzy?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said noncommittally. “I guess I’ve just been thinking about her more lately—it’s weird to think that she was my age when she died. I just want to feel closer to her, I guess.”

“You don’t want to feel closer to your aunt, Sophie. She’s dead. Luckily, you’re nothing like her, and that’s a good thing.”

I was horrified by the tone in my mom’s voice. “Mom!”

“She was a nice girl,” my mom said more carefully. “But she could never figure out what she wanted out of life. So yeah, I suppose she was unhappy and dissatisfied.”

My mom stopped to process her thoughts, and in the silence, I thought about how my mom could have been describing me. I couldn’t figure out what I wanted out of life either, and I was growing increasingly frustrated by that.

My mom continued, “The thing about Suzy was, she made some bad choices. Don’t make her a hero.” She gave me a look that told me this was going to be it. She was done talking about
Suzy
, and I was relieved. I walked away from my mom to eat my cereal at the table. I thought she’d leave me alone, since she ought to have left for work already, but I could feel her eyes on me from behind.

She didn’t say anything, just stood there quietly, watching me. When I sat at the table, I could see her reflection in the windowed panes of the sliding glass door that led out to our deck. “Mom?” I asked, worried because I’d never seen her stand still for quite this long at once.

“Yes?” She startled, as though I’d surprised her. She’d been staring right at me.

“Do you know where the tent is?”

Now I could see her
poking
through her purse, and her voice was distant again. “The tent? What?”

“Where do we keep the tent?”

She looked up. “Why do you need the tent? Oh, Sophie, you hate camping. I hope you’re not thinking about going camping. There are a million reasons why it’s a bad idea, I don’t even want to start—”

I cut her off. The hazards of camping were too great to name. “I know, I know…I could get eaten by a bear, or some psycho killer could come by and hack me into bits, or maybe I’ll starve to death since I don’t know how to cook for myself.”

She stared at me, stunned. “That’s not what I was thinking about, no. That’s a very negative attitude.” She cracked a smile. “I was just going to say that there are other things that you’re much more successful at, and it doesn’t make sense to spend a weekend pretending to be rugged if you’re just not a rugged kind of person. It’s important to play to your strengths, focus on the things that will get you what you want out of life.”

“Ella and Grace and I just want to sleep in the backyard this weekend,” I said, half wishing I could ask her what other things I was so good at that made camping such a certain waste of time. Were there things I ought to be doing on a weekend night, other than “Number five: Go camping in a real tent”? “Do you know where the tent is?”

“Probably in the basement,” she said after a beat. “But I don’t understand what’s wrong with sleeping inside? It’s warm, and there are healthy snacks. I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

“I guess I just want to see what it feels like when a city bear reaches his head inside the tent flap to take a bite out of my scrawny backside,” I snapped back. “I like camping.” Then I stood up and put my bowl in the sink. I’d find the tent later. I had to get out of the house and away from the passive-aggressive parenting. Before I went at my mother with a machete.