Perfect Couple by Jennifer Echols
I wasn’t lonely. I actually looked forward to two days almost totally by myself. I planned to process the remaining photos I’d taken for the yearbook but hadn’t yet turned in to Kennedy. I would also get my website ready to showcase the pictures I’d take of the 5K on Monday. If I got caught up with this work, maybe I would feel less stressed about corralling my classmates—including Brody—for the rest of the Superlatives photos during the next two weeks.
Both days, I helped Mom serve breakfast. After that, she spent her time working on the B & B—cleaning the guest rooms and bathrooms and the common areas, then painting or replacing boards on the exterior that were rotting in the fierce Florida sun and rain. Most days if I didn’t talk to her while she was making breakfast, I didn’t talk to her at all.
I also took breaks from my computer to check on Granddad, who lived alone a couple of streets over. I’d been doing this every couple of days since he and Mom had argued a few months ago. Granddad didn’t like it whenever Mom said she was willing to take my dad back.
After I made sure Granddad was okay, I walked the other way along the beach road until I reached the private strip of undeveloped sand that Granddad had inherited from his family. When my dad had been around, he used to complain that we’d all be rich if Granddad would give in and sell his beach. Stubbornly, Granddad had never put it up for sale or even built a house on it. He liked to go there by himself and paint the ocean.
I knew how he felt. That’s where I’d fallen in love with photography, taking pictures of the palm trees, the sand, the boats on the water. Everybody saw the same thing, but a photographer framed it to focus on one object in particular, telling a certain story.
In fact, I was afraid I was a little too much like Granddad. Someday I would inherit his house on one side of downtown and his strip of beach on the other. Like him, I’d hole up with my art and resent having to interact with other people when I went to the grocery store once a week.
I enjoyed being alone on the beach, but sometimes I wished my friends were there. This weekend, the public beaches were crowded enough that I could hear families laughing through the palms. As I swam out into the warm waves, I could see kids splashing together over on the park side. A teenage girl hugged a guy in the water with her legs looped around his waist. He kissed her ear. They laughed and whispered.
Brody was probably over there too, with Grace.
Never mind. I had work to do.
* * *
Monday morning, I got up early, as if it wasn’t a holiday, because it wasn’t—for me. I chose a fitted blouse tucked into a trim pencil skirt I’d made, and my most professional-looking glasses. I pulled back my hair into a classy bun at my nape. Then I walked from the small house I shared with Mom, which had been converted from a coach house, over to the huge Victorian, her bed and breakfast. Mom was already there, cooking her boarders’ one expected meal of the day. It was my job to help serve.
I hated doing this. Since my parents had separated two years before, I’d tried to be supportive of Mom, but the first thing she did to rebuild her life without my dad was to borrow money from Granddad and buy a B & B. She loved people. She thought living on top of a constantly rotating group of strangers was a fun way to spend her days. It was like a sickness. She’d dreamed of running a B & B in the beach town where she grew up. Obviously Granddad’s introverted gene had skipped a generation. To me the B & B was a nightmare.
I stood outside the pink clapboard back of the house. Palmettos shaded me from the bright morning sun. My kitten heels ground the seashells in the path. I took a few deep, calming breaths. Then I opened the door into the kitchen.
“Good morning,” Mom sang, pulling homemade orange rolls from the oven. She wore a long, flowing beach dress and feather earrings, and she’d put up her dark hair in a deliberate tousle. Her feet were bare. She liked to dress ultra-casual so her guests would feel at home with the beach lifestyle, but I was pretty sure serving orange rolls in bare feet was reason for an inspection by the Health Department.
She turned away from me to snag a bread basket from a shelf, but I heard her say, “You look [unintelligible].”
I didn’t ask her to repeat herself. I’d heard all her comments about my fashion sense before.
She kept on me. Handing me a pair of tongs and the basket of rolls to pass out to guests in the dining room, she looked me up and down and said, “I thought you were photographing the 5K this morning.”
“I am.”
“You don’t look comfortable.”
Well, I wasn’t comfortable right then, living out somebody else’s dreams of owning a business. I didn’t say this, because it wouldn’t do any good.
“Smile,” she said, touching my lips, possibly smearing my perfect red lipstick. Now I would have to check my face before I left the house. Then she tapped her finger between my brows, possibly transferring the lipstick up there, and reminded me, “Nobody likes a pouty B & B.” She swung open the door into the dining room, where eight strange adults eagerly awaited me. They would ask me embarrassing, none-of-their-business questions they would never ask if they weren’t on vacation, such as, Do you have a boyfriend?
Answer: I wasn’t sure. Kennedy hadn’t so much as texted me since Friday at school.
After the guests were served, Mom sat down to eat with them, putting on her best “colorful local character” act. She was their font of information on the best beaches and restaurants and sights in St. Petersburg and Tampa.
She set a place for me at the table too, but breakfast was the one time I suddenly took great interest in making sure the B & B ran smoothly. I always volunteered to stay in the kitchen and unload the dishwasher or watch the next batch of rolls. I was able to get away with this only because Mom’s first rule was never to have an argument where the guests could hear. At the B & B, we were a hotel staff, not a family.
I wasn’t trying to sabotage Mom and her business. The truth was, I couldn’t stand to sit at the dining room table and talk to a new group of strangers each week as if it was a family meal. I didn’t want to answer a million questions about my school and my friends and my boyfriend. It was too much like making get-to-know-you small talk every time Mom brought home some guy she was dating. Inevitably she whispered to me that this one was the one.
I supported her dreams. I only wanted her to leave me out of them.
This morning, I hid in the kitchen, periodically dropping a knife in the sink to make actually-busy-in-the-kitchen noises while I noiselessly opened the three-times-weekly local newspaper to the sports page. I expected a triumphant review of Friday night’s game. Reading about Brody as a hero would give me the fan-girl fix I’d been bluesing for. Simultaneously it would remind me how out of reach he was.
But the headline was cruelty in six words: LARSON DISAPPOINTS IN PELICANS’ FIRST WIN.
The article explained that Brody’s signature as a quarterback was his willingness to wait until the last nanosecond to pass the ball. That increased the chances he’d be sacked—tackled, clobbered, hit incredibly hard by the other team, who wanted to take him out of the game so we’d have to rely on our second-string sophomore. Brody didn’t care. He braved getting hurt, which gave him more time than quarterbacks normally had to choose a receiver for his long, accurate passes.
At least, that’s what had happened in practice, and that’s what sports reporters had been so excited about when they hyped the season. But the article went on to say that Brody had lost his mojo. During the game, he’d gotten rid of the ball as fast as he could, like an inexperienced quarterback running scared.
No wonder he and Noah had seemed so down after the game.
I couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong.
Strangely, that one negative article about a guy I hardly knew threatened to ruin my whole holiday. That and Kennedy giving me the cold shoulder, and Mom’s comment on my outfit. But once I’d passed the second batch of rolls around the table, shouldered the strap of my camera bag, and escaped from
I ducked under the retaining rope—not over, which would have been awkward in my tight skirt—and walked into the middle of the street, a few yards in front of the finish line. Mom had made me doubt the wisdom of what I was wearing. I guessed her opinion bothered me so much because I was afraid she was right. I was sweating already underneath my waistband and my bra. But dressing this way made me feel as beautiful as Lois Lane and as talented behind my camera as Jimmy Olsen, but with the strength of Superman. I had no identifying badge that said I belonged on the participants’ side of the ropes, but nobody challenged me. I looked like I meant business.
Down the street, the crowd noise swelled and moved in my direction as the first finishers ran closer. I brought up my camera and prepared to focus. My goal was to snap at least one clear picture of every runner. I would use the runners’ numbers pinned to their shirts to label the photos for purchase on my website. But that was a tall order: nearly perfect photos of hundreds of people in the space of a few minutes. I took a deep, calming breath.
The crowd noise spiked as the leaders of the race came around the corner and entered the town square. The thirty front-runners were experienced athletes, led by the owner of the running-shoe store who’d sponsored the race and arranged for me to photograph it. I needed a perfect picture of him, at least. I focused as well as I could and set the continuous feed to snap a number of frames in quick succession. As soon as the runners had passed, another wave bore down on me. I kept up as best I could, heart hammering in my chest.
And then, oh. There, centered in my viewfinder, was Brody.
4
TINGLES OF EXCITEMENT SPREAD DOWN my neck and across my chest before I even consciously understood I’d recognized Brody. And I hadn’t recognized his face. He was still too far away, even through my zoom lens. I recognized his running stride. I’d been looking out the window of English class, watching him run wind sprints for football practice in the parking lot, way too often in the past two weeks.
Remembering what I was standing in the road for, I opened the shutter and snapped a picture of him shoving the guy jogging next to him, who laughed and shoved Brody right back. It was Tia’s boyfriend, Will, I realized as they came closer. I snapped photos of every runner I could see clearly, then focused on Brody through my viewfinder again.
His sun-streaked brown hair, long enough to fall into his eyes, was held back with the same sort of headband he used on the football field. I watched the defined muscles in his legs move as he sprinted toward me at top speed. He wore red gym shorts and no shirt, showing off his six-pack abs. Strong as he looked, I was surprised at how thin he was compared with his apparent mass when he wore a football uniform and pads. After the newspaper’s hype, I’d expected him to be more muscle-bound. Maybe all athletic high school boys looked like this, and they bulked up in college.
The number 300 was printed across his chest in marker—which meant he’d been the last runner to register, because that was the total number I’d been told to expect. But the 3 had smeared into more of an 8 during his shoving match with Will. The two of them galloped toward the finish, gaining speed, cackling as one and then the other got a long arm in front of the other’s body.
Suddenly another runner broke from the pack behind them—Noah. His shirt was off too, and his body gleamed in the sunlight as he found an even faster gear and tore past them. Though they were still down the street from me and I was seeing all this through my telephoto lens, I could hear Brody’s and Will’s moans of dismay at being beaten.
And watching them, something happened to me.
I’d never thought of guys in the same way other girls seemed to. Kaye was devoted to Aidan, but we occasionally caught her following another guy with her eyes. She would let slip a remark about his fine ass that made clear she wasn’t about to cheat on her boyfriend but she did appreciate the male physique. Tia offered a constant stream of the same kind of commentary. She was a sexual being and not the least ashamed. I admired her for this, though I didn’t tell her. She certainly didn’t need any encouragement. In comparison, I didn’t consider myself sexual. I wasn’t gay, I wasn’t bi, I was just disconnected from the entire scene.
So out of it, in fact, that I was gay guys’ go-to girl when they weren’t ready to come out and wanted to put their friends off their trail a little longer. They figured I wouldn’t mind too much because I wasn’t that interested in the opposite sex anyway.
Until now. Maybe it was because I’d thought about Brody constantly and planned what I would say to him when I told him we needed to take our Superlatives photo. But I didn’t think so. The pure sight of his beautiful body, shining with sunscreen and sweat in the morning sun, running toward me, made me realize I was a part of this scene after all.
A part of the scene that was about to get knocked on its ass. Since the first runners had approached, I’d trusted that my professional attire and large, expensive camera would warn the competitors not to run me down. But Noah galloped past me a little too close for comfort. Brody and Will were barreling straight for me, their shoes slapping the asphalt.
Brody turned away from Will. His eyes drilled straight through my viewfinder, into my eyes. He kept coming. He was about to hit me.
With a squeal, I spun to protect the camera if he elbowed me.
He passed so close, I felt the wind move against my back.
And then I was watching him raise both hands in victory as he crossed the finish line just ahead of Will.
Brody had forgotten me, if he’d even intended to pay me any attention at all.
Grumbling to myself, I turned back to the pack of runners and shot as many of them as I could, thankful I’d taken some of their pictures before I focused on Brody. I wondered if he knew or cared how close he’d come to making me drop my camera. But that was Brody. He was a daredevil who took crazy chances. Nothing bad ever happened to him, though. He always landed on his feet.
Except for that time on Fifth-Grade Play Day when he dove off the water slide and had to go to the hospital.
And another time, in second grade, when he wandered away from the group during our class field trip to the children’s museum in Tampa, and the teachers found him inside a priceless dinosaur skeleton.
In fact, now that I thought about it, I recalled that he’d wrecked his mom’s car when he was fourteen . . . and I held on a little more tightly to my camera as the crowd passed me on both sides.
After another thirty runners, I spotted Kaye with two of her fellow cheerleaders, race numbers pinned neatly to their shirts, which matched their shorts. Kaye saw me first and yelled to the other girls. They waved wildly and mugged for the camera as they passed. At least one of them had her mouth open or eyes closed in each frame. The key to getting a great shot of all three of them, so flattering that they would swear forever I was the world’s best photographer, was simply to set the camera on continuous feed to shoot frame after frame. If I took enough photos, one of them was bound to be good. Photographing crowds for pay involved more know-how and logic than art.
A few more small groups ran by me, and then Sawyer jogged into view. He might have made it through Friday night’s game, but he should not have been running a 5K on a hot September morning a week past being hospitalized.
Sure enough, after three miles of running, his wet T-shirt stuck to him, and his normally bright hair was dark, soaked with sweat. His exertion hadn’t dampened his spirit, though. As I tried to center him for a good shot, he ran straight toward me with his hand out like a movie star trying to block the paparazzi. I got three brilliant shots of his palm.
“Sawyer, dammit!” I cried as he passed, realizing as the words escaped my lips that this was a common exclamation at our school. Sawyer’s middle name might as well have been Dammit.
The runner I saw instead was Sawyer, standing stock still and staring into space, his face so white he looked green.
Picking up the camera bag at my feet, I strode over and handed it to him. “Get my phone out of the front pocket, would you?” I couldn’t watch him because I had to keep clicking away at the runners, but in a minute he was holding the phone in front of me. At least he could still follow instructions. I swept my thumb across the screen, punched in my security code, and handed the phone back to him. “Dial Tia.”
When my phone appeared in front of me again, and there was another break in the runners, I spared Sawyer a glance. He was blinking awfully fast. I sandwiched the phone between my chin and my shoulder as I awkwardly peered through the camera and kept clicking.
“Hey there, Annie Leibovitz!” Tia chirped.
“Sawyer might pass out.”
“I’ll be right there.” The line went dead.
I slipped the phone into my pocket. I didn’t want to have to explain to the race sponsor, my boss for my first-ever gig as a professional photographer, that I’d missed capturing the last half of the race because my friend was going to faint. But I would have abandoned my job if Sawyer looked like he was about to hit the ground.
Before that could happen, Tia rushed over to him. I turned back to the runners. Tia and Sawyer were close enough to me that I could hear their voices above the noise of the crowd and the rock band starting up somewhere behind the finish line.
Tia: “Sawyer, dammit! Are you okay?”
Sawyer: “I will be. In a couple of years.”
Tia: “What the fuck did you run this race for? You just got out of the hospital. Are you trying to kill yourself?”