One True Loves(6)

I looked toward the pool, scanning for a girl with a ponytail. I came up empty. “Where is she?” I said.

“Okay, she’s standing by the diving board now,” Olive said as she pointed. “Right there. Next to Jesse Lerner.”

“Who?” I said as I followed Olive’s finger right to the diving board. And I did, in fact, see a pretty girl with a ponytail. But I did not care.

Because I also saw the tall, lean, muscular boy next to her.

His eyes were deep set, his face angular, his lips full. His short, light brown hair, half-matted, half-akimbo, the result of pulling the swimming cap up off his head. I could tell from his swimsuit that he went to our school.

“Do you see her?” Olive said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, she’s pretty. But the guy she’s talking to . . . What did you say his name was?”

“Who?” Olive asked. “Jesse Lerner?”

“Yeah. Who is Jesse Lerner?”

“How do you not know who Jesse Lerner is?”

I turned and looked at Olive. “I don’t know. I just don’t. Who is he?”

“He lives down the street from the Hughes.”

I turned back to Jesse, watching him pick up a pair of goggles off the ground. “Is he in our grade?”

“Yeah.”

Olive kept speaking but I had already started to tune her out. Instead, I was watching Jesse as he headed back to the locker room with the rest of his team. Graham was right next to him, putting a hand on his shoulder for a brief moment before jumping ahead of him in the slow line that had formed. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the way Jesse moved, the confidence with which he put one foot in front of the other. He was younger than any of the other swimmers—a freshman on the varsity team—and yet seemed right at home, standing in front of everyone in a tiny swimsuit.

“Emma,” Olive said. “You’re staring.”

Just then, Jesse turned his head ever so slightly and his gaze landed squarely on me, for a brief, breathless second. Instinctively, I looked away.

“What did you say?” I asked Olive, trying to pretend I was engaged with her side of the conversation.

“I said you were staring at him.”

“No, I wasn’t,” I said.

It was then that Mrs. Berman came back around to our side of the bleachers. “I thought you were meeting me at the car,” she said.

“Sorry!” Olive said, jumping up onto her feet. “We’re coming now.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Berman,” I said, and I followed them both behind the bleachers and out the door.

I paused, just before the exit, to see Jesse one last time. I saw a flash of his smile. It was wide and bright, toothy and sincere. His whole face lit up.

I wondered how good it would feel to have that smile directed at me, to be the cause of a smile like that—and suddenly, my new crush on Jesse Lerner grew into a massive, inflated balloon that was so strong it could have lifted the two of us up into the air if we’d grabbed on.





That week at school, I noticed Jesse in the hallway almost every day. Now that I knew who he was, he was everywhere.

“That’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” Olive said when I mentioned it at lunch. “My brother just told me about this. You don’t notice something and then you learn the name for it and suddenly it’s everywhere.” Olive thought for a moment. “Whoa. I’m pretty sure I have the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.”

“Are you seeing Jesse everywhere, too?” I asked, entirely missing the point. Earlier that day, I’d walked right by him coming out of Spanish class. He was talking to Carolyn Bean by her locker. Carolyn Bean was the captain of the girls’ soccer team. She wore her blond hair back in a bun, with a sporty headband every day. I’d never seen her without lip gloss. If that was the kind of girl Jesse liked, I stood no chance.

“I’m not seeing him any more than normal,” Olive said. “But I always see him around all the time. He’s in my algebra 1 class.”

“Are you friends with him?” I asked.

“Not really,” Olive said. “But he’s a nice guy. You should just say hi to him.”

“That’s insane. I can’t just say hi to him.”

“Sure you can.”

I shook my head and looked away. “You sound ridiculous.”

“You sound ridiculous. He’s a boy in our class. He’s not Keanu Reeves.”

I thought to myself, If I could just talk to Jesse Lerner, I wouldn’t care about Keanu Reeves.

“I can’t introduce myself, that’s crazy,” I said, and then I gathered my tray and headed toward the trash can. Olive followed.

“Fine,” she said. “But he’s a perfectly nice person.”

“Don’t say that!” I said. “That just makes it worse.”

“You want me to say he’s mean?”

“I don’t know!” I said. “I don’t know what I want you to say.”

“You’re being sort of annoying,” Olive said, surprised.

“I know, okay?” I said. “Ugh, just . . . come on. I’ll buy you a pack of cookies.”

Back then, a seventy-five-cent bag of cookies was enough to make up for being irritating. So as we walked over to the counter, I dug my hand into my pocket and counted out what silver coins I had.