Perfect Couple by Jennifer Echols
Sawyer: “Not . . . actively.”
Tia: “Jesus. Sit down. Sit down right here on the curb. Will!”
She sounded alarmed enough that I glanced over at them again. Will elbowed his way through, holding two bottles of water high above the crowd. Brody followed right behind him.
Tia: “Did you know he was running this?”
Will: “I tried to stop him. Sawyer, dammit, put your head between your knees.”
Tia: “Help me take him to the medical tent.”
Will: “There’s no medical tent. It’s a 5K.”
Sawyer, muffled: “Fuck everybody.”
Brody: “Shut up. Just enjoy the view.”
Though I was in the middle of picking out faces from a huge group of slow runners, Brody’s voice made me look over my shoulder again. He had his hand on the back of Sawyer’s neck, pressing his head toward the pavement. Will was pouring water over Sawyer’s hair. Now Kaye and her cheerleader friends circled him. Sawyer was in good hands. I tried to concentrate on the last fifty people crossing the finish line, some of them grimacing with the exertion, others giving me elated smiles and peace signs as they passed.
Finally the race seemed to be over. I watched downstream for a few moments, but the street in front of me was filling with pedestrians as if the police had signaled that no more runners were coming. I heaved a deep sigh, rolled my shoulders, and started scrolling back through the photos to one group in particular. I was curious whether my obsession with the beauty of Brody’s body had been a product of my vivid imagination.
It was not. The image was tiny, but I ran my eyes over his shining muscles and his smeared race number, and looked forward to viewing the enlarged version on my computer.
“Whatcha looking at?” Tia asked, peering over my shoulder. “Got a Pulitzer winner? You seem very intent, even for you.”
“How’s Sawyer?” I asked.
“Oh, fine. Just stupid. Will’s walking him home. Don’t change the subject. Let me see what’s so intriguing in there.”
I handed the camera over to her and watched her look at the view screen herself. “I feel like a pervert,” I said.
“You should. That is disgusting. Be sure to e-mail me a copy.” She handed the camera back to me. “Have you scheduled your Superlatives picture with Brody?”
“I’ve been trying to find an in,” I said. “Seeing him like this makes it harder. We were elected Perfect Couple That Never Was, and I’m thinking . . . in what universe would we be a perfect couple? I’m not built like a gymnast.”
I looked down at the view screen and scrolled to the best photo of Brody alone. He was so beautiful, and he looked so happy running and shoving Will out of the frame, that my heart hurt. “Did you vote for Brody and me? You didn’t answer me before.”
“No,” Tia said. “I wrote you in as Most Artistic and Brody as Most Athletic. For Perfect Couple That Never Was, I put a couple of nerds who giggle together at the back of my calculus class.”
“So, you paired like with like,” I said. “That’s how I voted too. And of the guys at school, I think Kennedy is my perfect partner, but we’re already dating.”
“Yeah, you’re such a perfect couple that you’re not talking,” she said.
“How do you know?” I’d texted her grumpily from the Crab Lab while Kennedy was giving me the silent treatment, but she and I hadn’t caught up since. She had no way of knowing we still weren’t talking.
“He does this to you every week,” she said. “Every time you have a date planned.”
I thought back over the weeks we’d been going out. Tia was right about the timing. Kennedy couldn’t be picking a fight with me just to avoid spending time with me, though. Why would he do that?
The whole idea of him made me uncomfortable, so I changed the subject. “Do you think people elected Brody and me Perfect Couple because we have something in common that other people can see but I can’t?”
“No,” Tia said as Brody walked over. He must have poured a bottle of water over his own head. He was wetter than he’d been when he’d first rushed past me. His hair was dark and slick, still caught by the headband. He stood so close to me, and his green eyes were so intense, that I looked away shyly. I found myself staring at the dent in his upper arm where his deltoid disappeared underneath his biceps. This was the first time I had ever used eleventh-grade anatomy in real life.
I forced my eyes up his taut pectoralis major, all the way to his face. He seemed to be staring at the barest shadow of baby cleavage in the open neckline of my blouse. Then he saw I was watching him and cracked a guilty grin.
“Later,” I heard Tia say, but I was so focused on Brody that it took me a few seconds to realize she was talking to me.
“Later,” I responded faintly after she’d already walked away. I was sweating as much as Brody was now. I could feel drops rolling down my cleavage. Holding his gaze had gotten so uncomfortable that I glanced down at my old standby and savior, my mechanical wingman, the camera. “Brody, there’s a picture I wanted you to see.” I handed the camera to him.
The view screen was paused on the best photo I’d taken of the race: Noah in the foreground, slightly blurry, looking back over his shoulder, while Brody and Will were in sharp focus in the sweet spot of the frame, a third from the top and a third from one side. They’d just realized Noah was beating them, and their outrage was hilarious. Their bare chests weren’t bad either. I figured the perfection of the photo was so obvious that even a layperson like Brody would see it. He wouldn’t think my admiration for his body was gratuitous. No, that wouldn’t be obvious unless he scrolled through my camera and saw all the other photos I’d taken of him.
He peered at the view screen and burst into laughter. I watched his mouth. His bottom lip wasn’t swollen anymore, and the bruise on his jaw had faded. When he laughed that hard, the dark circles under his eyes disappeared too. He wasn’t some older, intimidating bodybuilder. He was seventeen, like me.
With as deep a calming breath as I could draw without him noticing, I gathered the courage to ask, “Would you mind if I tried to sell this picture to the newspaper?”
He eyed me mischievously and asked, “Are you going to pay me?”
I smiled. “No.”
“Are you going to pay me half?”
“No.”
He tilted his head, perplexed. “Are you going to pay me a fourth?”
“No.” His interrogation had gone on so long that I wondered if he really didn’t want me to sell the picture. That was fine. It was his image, after all. I was profiting from his free services as a model. But I’d thought he was so happy-go-lucky that he wouldn’t care.
“Harper!” he burst out. “I’m kidding.”
“Well, I couldn’t tell!” I took the camera back from him, my mind spinning. I wanted to get Will and Noah’s permission too. Will was gone and I hadn’t seen Noah since the end of the race. I’d never find him now in the milling pedestrians. I could text them both later and then e-mail the photo to the local paper.
All that was easier to work through than one tall guy standing in front of me, too easygoing for me to decipher.
Brody wasn’t mortified about our misunderstanding like I was, though. He was still grinning as he said, “I guess you’re going to take our photo for the yearbook sometime soon, like you took Will and Tia’s.”
“Right, like Will and Tia’s,” I echoed faintly. When I’d shot their picture for Biggest Flirts, they’d shared an unplanned kiss, which had gotten Will in trouble with his sort-of girlfriend Angelica. It had all worked out in the end. Will and Tia were dating now.
I stammered, “Um, I mean . . .” I lost my verbal abilities because I was at eye level with his nipples. This was distracting.
I forced my eyes up to his face. “We have to take the photo,” I said. “We need to take it soon, because Kennedy’s deadline for the whole section is in a week and a half. He kind of jumped down my throat about it Friday.”
Exactly. “Setting up the picture is touchy when we’re both dating somebody,” I muddled through. “I’ve been taking photos in the courtyard at school because it’s convenient and the light is good, but anyone can look out of the classrooms and see us. I found that out the hard way when I took Tia and Will’s Biggest Flirts photo and there was a big fight and a fallout. Also, I don’t have an inspiration for how we’d pose. Do you?”
“I was planning to do what you told me.”
“Oh, really?” I exclaimed, stressing my excitement. This was my only success at flirting for our entire conversation. And when his mouth curled into a sly smile, my heart sped up.
“Here’s a thought,” I ventured. “I know the football team is practicing a lot, but if we could figure out a time . . .” I sounded like I was trying to get out of our meeting before I even proposed it.
He watched me like he was thinking the same thing.
I made myself continue, “. . . we could go on a date and take a picture of ourselves. It would be ironic, see, that we’re the Perfect Couple That Never Was, except we would be a couple for the photo. It will be hilarious to, like, the five or six of our friends who would actually give a shit.”
He laughed so hard that he took a step back. The space between us was wide enough that a couple of little kids dashed through, chasing each other.
Laughing uneasily along with Brody, I said, “Well, I didn’t think it was that funny. Maybe seven or eight friends.”
He stepped toward me again. “No, it’s just funny to hear you say ‘shit.’ ”
“Oh.” Tia had told me this before. I was so prim and proper, apparently, that a curse coming out of my mouth was as charming as a potty-mouthed toddler on a viral video. I felt myself blush as I always did when people said that kind of thing to me, like I wasn’t a real person but a wholesome caricature.
Not knowing or caring that he was poking me in the tender parts of my psyche, Brody said, “I like this idea. Would we be going on a real date, or a fake date just for the photo?”
Well, of course it would be a fake date, and of course he knew this. We were both in other relationships. But the very idea of us going on a real date was so deliciously outrageous that I heard myself saying, “Whatever.”
“I’ll be at the beach with some friends this afternoon.” He nodded toward the curb where Sawyer had sat, as if his friends were standing there, but I didn’t see anyone I knew.
A lot of my friends, including Tia and Kaye, would be at the same beach. I was supposed to join them. I’d been thinking I should stay home instead and upload the race photos to my website. A delay was okay—the runners wouldn’t expect their pictures to be available instantly—but I needed to get them online a.s.a.p. so I could turn my attention back to the yearbook photos.
Suddenly, Labor Day spent in front of the computer seemed like the world’s saddest pastime compared with going to the beach with Brody. Or, not with Brody. The same beach as Brody. A photo of a fake date with Brody, more fun than any real date I’d ever been on with Kennedy. I said, “I’ll be there too.”
“So, I’ll catch up with you there?”
“Okay.”
“See you then.” He walked toward the curb.
I enjoyed basking in the afterglow of his attention—for about one second. My ecstasy was over the instant I recognized one of the friends he was probably meeting at the beach. I heard her before I saw her. Grace had a piercing, staccato laugh, like a birdcall that sounded quirky on a nature walk and excruciating outside a bedroom window at dawn. Boys had been making fun of her laugh to her face forever—but Grace was so pretty and flirty that they only teased her as a way in.
She stopped laughing to say, “Sorry I missed your race, Brody! You know me. I just rolled out of bed.”
The crowd parted. Now I could see her better. Just rolled out of bed, my ass. She stood casually in a teeny bikini top. At least she’d had the decency to pull gym shorts over her bikini bottoms so she didn’t give the elderly snowbirds a heart attack. But her hair and makeup didn’t go with her beach look. Grace’s long blond hair rolled across her shoulders in big, sprayed curls, the kind that took me half an hour with a curling iron and a coat of hairspray. Her locks were held back from her pretty face by her sunglasses, which sat on top of her head. Her eyes were model-smoky with liner and shadow and mascara. She was ready for an island castaway prom.
“Did you win?” she asked Brody.
He chuckled. “No.”
She led him away by the hand. And that was that.
I watched him go. I needed to watch him walking away with his girlfriend, so I could get it through my thick skull that he was taken. Brody and I had exchanged some friendly jokes and agreed to fulfill a school obligation—at a gathering we’d both already planned to attend. He’d seen his girlfriend and forgotten about me. I didn’t even get a good-bye, not that I should have expected one. The “Never Was” part of our title was a lot more important than the “Perfect Couple” part.
Then he looked over his shoulder at me. Straight at me—no mistaking it. His green eyes were bright.
My heart stopped.
Still walking after Grace, he gave me a little wave.
I waved back.
He tripped over an uneven brick in the sidewalk but regained his balance before he fell. He disappeared into the crowd.
“That was smooth,” Tia said at my shoulder.
Kneeling to pick up my camera bag, I grumbled, “Shut up.”
“Does this mean you’re going on a real date or a fake date?” she asked. “It wasn’t clear from where I was eavesdropping.”
I gave her the bag to hold while I snapped the lens off my camera and stuffed the components inside. “I don’t know.”
“Does this mean Brody’s previous plan and your previous plan to go to the beach are actually the date in question, or is there another fake or real date after that?”
Exasperated, I gave her a warning look.
“Sorry,” Tia said. “I know. I shouldn’t be criticizing your romantic life. Before Will, my dating scene pretty much began and ended with giving Sawyer hand jobs behind the Crab Lab.” Several elderly men walking past turned to stare at her as she said this. She winked at them.
“I’m too polite to bring that up,” I said.
“Do you want me to get Will to ask Brody, then report back . . . to . . . you?” Her words slowed as my expression grew darker.
“Thanks but no thanks,” I said. “This is already embarrassing enough. No reason to take us back to the fifth grade.”
Her mouth twisted sideways in a grimace as she handed the camera bag back to me. Tia clearly wanted to help but didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say, because my situation was so hopeless.
“It’s okay,” I assured her. “I have a boyfriend. This is just a yearbook picture. I’ll see you at the beach.”
“Later,” she said, but she looked uncertain as she wound her way up the street toward the antiques store where she and her sister worked.
Tia was tall. It took a few minutes for me to lose the back of her shining auburn hair on the sidewalk now crowded with shoppers. I should have turned for home, e-mailed Noah and Will for permission to send my shot of them to the newspaper, and started uploading my race photos.
But now that Tia was gone and Brody was gone and I stood alone in the middle of the street, I was aware of the happiness all around me for the first time that day. The rock band had launched into another song. Families stood in line outside the ice cream parlor, even though it was nine a.m., because regular meal times meant nothing and calories didn’t count on holidays. Kids giggled as they tumbled out the door of an inflatable bouncy castle. I pulled my camera out of my bag again, attached the telephoto lens, and snapped a few shots of the kids’ flip-flops and sandals lined up on the street.
In the midst of all this carefree joy, I looked like a mutant. A mutant on a job interview.
I thought ahead to my meeting with Brody at the beach. He would be shirtless, again, and irresistible, again. I would be wearing my 1950s-style, high-necked, one-piece maillot. If an item of clothing had a French name, it probably wouldn’t leave much of an impression on a Florida jock. At least, not the impression I wanted.
Last spring I’d been ecstatic to find a bathing suit made specifically for my retro style. Kaye and Tia had told me it was adorable. But next to Grace, I would look like I was wearing a hazmat suit.
Ten minutes later, I found myself in the dressing room at a surf shop, staring at myself in the mirror, guessing what Brody would think when he saw me in a red bikini.
5
I MUTTERED TO MYSELF, “I have an illness.”
“What’d you say, sugar pie?” the lady who owned the store called through the curtain. “Do you need a different size?”
I raked back the curtain to show her the bikini.
“You do not need a different size,” she declared. “Maybe an extra bottle of sunscreen to protect all that lovely skin you’re showing, but not a different size.”
I paid for the bathing suit. The shop lady put it in a pretty bag with color-coordinated tissue paper fluffing out the top. But on my walk home, I felt like I’d stolen it. It was as if everyone at the street festival watched my escape. I was so self-conscious about the bikini in my bag that I stowed it in my room, at the back of my closet, where Mom wouldn’t see it. If she asked me about it, I’d never wear it. I would chicken out.
I went to find Mom. She was upstairs in one of the B & B’s guest bathrooms, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the grout on the floor underneath the sink. After I located her, I backed out of the bathroom, tiptoed down the stairs, and then stomped back up so she’d know I was coming and wouldn’t bang her head against the sink at my sudden appearance. I had found out a lot of things the hard way.