One True Loves(14)

“Yeah,” I said. “I got it.”

A few awkward army-crawl-like steps forward and I was standing on the grass in front of Jesse Lerner.

His lip was cut and there was a scrape on the top of his forehead. My arms had a few tiny scratches down them. My ankle still itched. I lifted my foot up and saw a few small welts where my pants met the top of my shoes.

It was pitch-dark, the lights in the house all dimmed. Everything was deadly quiet. The only sound either of us could hear was the sound of our own breath and that of the crickets rubbing their wings together, chirping.

I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do now. How we were supposed to get home.

“C’mon,” Jesse said, and then he took my hand again. Twice in one night, holding hands with Jesse Lerner. I had to remind myself not to take it too personally. “We will walk down the street until we find somebody else who escaped and bum a ride with them.”

“Okay,” I said, willing to follow his lead because I had no better idea. I just wanted to get home quickly so I could call Olive and make sure she was okay and make sure she knew that I was.

And then, there was Sam. He’d been there, in the pool. Where had he gone?

Jesse and I set out down the dark suburban road, headed nowhere in particular, hoping it would lead us somewhere good.

“How come you weren’t swimming?” I asked him once we were a few feet down the road.

Jesse looked at me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, aren’t you supposed to be the greatest swimmer of all time?”

Jesse laughed. “I don’t know about that.”

“You were written up in the Beacon.”

“Yeah, but I’m not a fish. I do exist outside of the water,” he teased.

I shrugged. “Question still stands, though,” I said. “It was a pool party.”

He was quiet for a moment. I thought maybe the conversation was over, maybe we weren’t supposed to be talking, maybe he didn’t want to talk to me. But once he finally started talking again, I realized that he had been caught up in his own head for a moment, deciding how much to say.

“Do you ever feel like everyone is always telling you who you are?” he asked me. “Like, people are acting as if they know better than you what you’re good at or who you are supposed to be?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

“Can I let you in on a very poorly kept secret?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

“My parents want me to train for the Olympic trials.”

“Ah.” He was right. That was a very poorly kept secret.

“Can I let you in on a better-kept secret?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I hate swimming.”

He was staring forward, putting one foot in front of the other along the road.

“Do your parents know that?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Nobody does,” he said. “Well, I guess, except for you now.”

At the time, I could not, for the life of me, understand why he told me this, why he trusted me with the truth about his life more than anyone else. I thought it meant that I was special, that maybe he had always felt about me the way I felt about him.

Now, looking back on it, I know it was just the opposite. I was a girl in the background of his life—that’s what made me safe.

“I never really cared much for swimming anyway,” I told him reassuringly. I said it because it was the truth. But there was a large secondary benefit in what I’d said.

Now I knew who he really was and I still liked him. And that made me different from anyone else.

“My parents run the bookstore,” I said. “Blair Books.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. I mean, I put that together.” He smiled at me and then looked away. We made our way around a corner and found ourselves on the main road.

“They want me to take over the store one day,” I told him. “They are always giving me these five hundred–page novels as presents and telling me that one day I’ll fall in love with reading just like they have and . . . I don’t know.”

“What?” Jesse asked.

“I hate reading books.”

Jesse smiled, surprised and satisfied. He put his hand up, offering me a high five. He had confided in me because he thought I was a stranger, only to find that I was a comrade.

I laughed and leaned over, raising my palm to his. We slapped and then Jesse held on for a moment.

“Are you drunk?” he asked me.

“A little,” I said. “Are you?”

“A little,” he answered back.

He didn’t let go of my hand and I thought maybe, just maybe, he was going to kiss me. And then I thought that was an insane thing to think. That would never happen.

Later on, when Jesse and I would tell each other everything, I asked him what he was thinking back then. I’d say, “That moment when you held on to my hand, right before the cops found us, were you going to kiss me?” He’d say he didn’t know. He’d say that all he remembered was that he had just realized, for the first time, how pretty I was. “I just remember noticing the freckles under your eye. So, maybe. Maybe I was going to kiss you. I don’t know.”

And we will never know.