The Future of Us (6 page)

From her seat across the room, Rebecca mouths,
Why are you staring?

I turn back to the door. And there’s Sydney!

I grip the sides of my desk, unable to look away. Her chestnut brown hair flows over her shoulders and down her back. A green knit sweater hugs her chest, the top two buttons left open. She wears a gold necklace dotted with tiny diamonds. She moves up my aisle, sliding her cell phone into a pocket of her tight jeans. My palms sweat just watching her.

Sydney looks at me and it feels like she might smile, but then she lifts her eyebrows. My face must be rearranged into something goofy.

After she passes, a backdraft of coconut floats by my nose, snipping the threads holding my heart in my chest.

TYSON AND I set our skateboards on the lowest bleacher facing the track. I suck down a cherry Slurpee while Tyson freezes his brain on blue raspberry. The cardboard pizza box at our feet is now empty. Because Tyson’s dad owns GoodTimez, we get all the pizza we want for free. In exchange, sometimes I help with the birthday parties, which can mean anything from monitoring the ball pit to dressing as a smiling slice of pizza and handing out goodie bags.

Last year, Tyson and I brought pizza to every home meet. We never paid much attention to the events, but it meant a lot to Emma knowing we were there. When the first meet came around this year, I told Tyson I had too much homework. At the next meet, I said I had to help my dad clean the gutters. Eventually Tyson stopped asking. But today I need to make sure Emma drives me home after the meet and shows me what she saw on that website.

The team walks out to the field. Tyson and I shout, “Go, Emma!” Once she waves, we grab our skateboards and head to the parking lot. Next to the bike racks are two parking spaces with a couple of loose concrete blocks. Tyson grabs one end of a block, and I grab the other.

“Lift!” I say.

We drag both blocks, one after the other, to the center of a parking space, and then Tyson pulls a chunk of Sex Wax from his backpack and tosses it to me. Surfers use this to keep their feet from slipping off their boards, but skaters love it, too. Especially Tyson, who laughs at the name every time we use it. I rub the sticky wax across the top of both blocks and then step back. Tyson lands his board sideways and slides the entire length, then skates to the next block and grinds across it on his trucks.

“Speaking of Sex Wax,” Tyson says, grinning, “are you really thinking of asking out Sydney Mills?”

I walk my board a few feet out of the parking space and set it down. “I don’t know why Emma brought that up.”

I skate up to the first block and grind its length with only my rear truck. On the next I try a nosegrind, but I can’t keep up the momentum.

“You have Peer Issues with her, right?” Tyson asks.

“With Sydney Mills? Why?”

Tyson pushes his board a few feet ahead, jogs after it, and then jumps on. “So when you talk about sexual issues, you’ve probably heard her say ‘vagina.’”

I laugh. “What does that have to do with anything?”

He skates up to the block and stops. “It’s cute when girls use proper words like that.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I say, kicking my board into my hand, “but I’ve never heard her say ‘vagina.’”

Tyson raises his eyebrows suggestively. “Maybe you would if you asked her out.”

On the track, someone must’ve crossed the finish line because the crowd on the bleachers applauds.

CODY SET A SCHOOL RECORD in the hundred-yard dash today, leading the Lake Forest Cheetahs to victory. I, on the other hand, placed fourth in the sixteen hundred and was the second slowest leg of my relay. I’m usually a stronger link, but I’m going on practically no sleep, and my brain is scattered. Before last night I’d never heard of Jordan Jones Jr., and suddenly I’m in a bad marriage to him.

It made me feel better to see Josh and Tyson in the stands, clapping and waving as we took the field. I know they don’t actually stay to watch the meets, but I’m still glad they came. They’re probably skating over those concrete blocks in the parking lot.

The meet is over and the visiting team is heading toward their buses. I’m sitting on the grass, sipping Gatorade and watching Cody chat with a girl from the other team. She’s tall and tan and they’re standing close, laughing and touching each other’s arms. I wonder if they’ve ever hooked up, or if that’s coming soon. The word on the team is that Cody can be quite the stud.

I personally have never had sex. It’s not like I’m waiting for love because who knows if that will ever happen, but it always felt like I would be giving too much of myself to a guy. Like Graham. I
definitely
wouldn’t want him to be the one I lose my virginity to. Cody, though, is in a different category. If he and I ever got together, I can imagine myself not wanting to stop. The guy is seriously gorgeous.

“Is the meet over?” Graham asks, plopping down next to me. He has on the blue gym shorts and white T-shirt he always wears when he goes to the weight room. And he’s sweaty, which makes his newly shorn head shiny and slick.

“It just ended,” I say. I stretch my legs in front of me and lean forward until my forehead touches my knees. “We won.”

“You’re very flexible,” he says. “It could give a guy some ideas.”

Maybe he caught me in the wrong mood, but I sit up and snap at him. “Why do you
always
go there?”

“Where?”

“You know where.”

Graham shrugs. “Hey, my buddies are hanging out on the baseball diamond. Do you want to go?”

I look around for Josh and Tyson, hoping they’ll rescue me. Josh and I didn’t make specific plans, but I figured we’d meet up here and drive home to check out my computer.

I look over at Cody again. He’s still with that girl, but now he’s jotting something in a notebook. He tears out a page and hands it to her. She smiles and hugs him goodbye, her hand lingering on the small of his back. They are definitely going to have sex.

“Sure,” I say to Graham. I grab my gym bag and hoist myself to my feet. “Let’s go.”

GRAHAM’S FRIENDS ARE GONE by the time we get to the baseball field, so we settle on a wooden bench in the dugout. My head is resting in his lap and he’s running his fingers under my shirt, trying to reach up my jog bra. I keep swatting away his hand.

“I’m too sweaty,” I say.

“I don’t mind. You always look hot after your meets.”

I push his hand away again. I’m wearing my orange mesh tank top with the cheetah on the front, and my black shorts. They’re faded and wrinkled from years of Cheetah girls before me.

Nothing about me feels sexy right now. Maybe I’m just tired from last night. Or maybe it’s because I can’t stop thinking about Emma Nelson Jones, and whether I really become an unhappy person with a husband who doesn’t come home.

Graham runs his hand back under my shirt. “You have an awesome stomach. Your belly button is so sexy.”

Maybe this is the best it gets.

This time, when Graham’s fingers touch my bra, I don’t push him away. I sit up and lean into him and we start kissing. His hand slides beneath my bra, and I turn to make sure no one can see us.

That’s when I notice Josh. He’s standing frozen near second base. I pull back from Graham and tug down on my top, but Josh is already sprinting away.

IT’S ALL TYSON’S FAULT! He went on and on about Sydney Mills, which made me want to hurry up and get back to Emma’s computer. So I left my board with Tyson and went to find Emma. She wasn’t on the track, but Ruby Jenkins told me she saw Emma heading toward the baseball fields.

Ruby didn’t say Emma was with
Graham
. If she told me that, I never would’ve gone up there.

Instead, I casually walked to the baseball fields, looking around. And then I saw Emma in the dugout. She was resting her head in Graham’s lap. His face was slung low like he was talking to her, and I fooled myself into thinking she was finally dumping him.

But then Emma sat up and started kissing him, and Graham’s hand shot up her shirt.

What the hell was that? Is that how she rejects a guy? Because it’s not how she rejected me.

Before I had a chance to turn around, Emma saw me. For a brief second, we looked right at each other. I don’t know what she was thinking, but I was feeling disgust and revulsion.

I’m sprinting back across the field, wanting to kick something or scream or beat the hell out of Graham.

“Did you find her?” Ruby asks as I pass the track.

“She’s not there!” I shout.

Out of breath, I make it back to the parking lot. Tyson is sitting on a concrete block, admiring my latest skateboard sketch of Marvin the Martian.

“Is Emma giving us a ride home?” he asks.

“No. Let’s just go,” I say.

Tyson holds out a hand and I pull him up. “Can you draw something like this on my board?” he asks. “Maybe Yosemite Sam?”

I grab one of the concrete blocks and begin dragging it toward the metal rods. “Can you help me with this?”

Tyson lifts the other end of the block. We position the concrete over the rods and shimmy it down to the asphalt.

“I’ve got a question for you,” Tyson says. “And maybe one day you’ll be in a position to answer it.”

“Just help me put this other one back, okay?”

We carry opposite ends of the next concrete block and stagger over to the metal rods, then lower it down.

“My question is,” Tyson says as he claps the dust from his hands, “and I want you to find out the answer for me: are Sydney’s tits real, or did her parents buy them for her? I’ll appreciate them either way. I just want to know.”

If the block hadn’t already been on the ground, I would’ve dropped it on Tyson’s foot.

AS I’M DRIVING HOME, I blast the new Dave Matthews album. My car doesn’t have a CD player, so I bought the cassette tape when it came out last month. But even with Dave singing “Crash Into Me,” I can’t drown out what just happened on the baseball field. Josh saw Graham feeling me up. And Graham didn’t even get it. He ran his palm over his scalp and said, “It’s not like he’s never seen two people kiss before.”

I pushed him off me and ran to the locker room to get my backpack and clothes, then out to the parking lot to search for Josh and Tyson.

But they were gone.

When I pull into my driveway, I glance toward Josh’s house. Even if he’s home, there’s no way I’m knocking on his door. I know we said we’d look at my computer after track, but now everything is screwed up.

I set my saxophone case in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs and head to the kitchen to splash water on my face. My mom left a Post-it note next to the sink telling me to preheat the oven and put in the casserole dish of macaroni and cheese. When I turn the dial on the oven, I spot another Post-it on the counter in my mom’s handwriting. “[email protected].” I guess that’s the email address she wants. The password she picked is “EmmaMarie.”

I slide the macaroni pan into the oven and head upstairs. After I sign on, I add my mom as MrsMartinNichols. Then I check to see if she can get onto the Facebook website from her account, but there’s no sign of it in her Favorite Places.

Relieved, I sign out and collapse back in my chair. Our secret is safe. But I still don’t know what this thing is, or how I’m going to figure it out if Josh doesn’t come over.

Which he’s never going to do.

I sink into my papasan chair to do homework. I can smell the food cooking downstairs. My mom and Martin arrive home. A few minutes later, she calls me down for dinner.

I’ve always considered mac and cheese the ultimate comfort food. It looks like I still do fifteen years from now. But today the noodles clump in my throat. Maybe it’s because they’re whole wheat, as my mom proudly explains to Martin. Or maybe it’s because nothing could comfort me right now.