more like a scratch or a tap. I’m at that top-of-the-pushup, arms-shaking point, right before I exhale –
Collapse.
Wipe my arm across my sweaty forehead. I’m wearing Ellery gym shorts and a sweaty black polo. Not exactly poised to receive company. But I’ve still got time to get it together for Alice.
Whatever it is we’re sampling on this date, the thought of it has me grinning as I open the door.
But when I do, the face I see is so out of context, it takes me a few seconds.
Big blue eyes, small pointed chin, tidy ponytail. One seat to the left of me in English Writers of the Western World. I used to borrow her perfectly sharpened pencils. Never gave ’em back.
“Tim?” she says, like I might be Tim’s evil twin.
“Hi. Uh . . . Heather.” How I scrounge that name from my subconscious, I have no idea.
“It’s Hester. Can I come in?”
What? I think, at the same time I say, “Sure,” and open the door wider for her. She brushes past me, sits down on the couch, and looks at her shoes. Hester was a Brain and a Good Girl. So we had nothing in common. What’s she doing here? She smoothes down her khaki skirt, readjusts her white shirt. Prep wear. Clothing as birth control, my douchey friends and I used to joke. All those fuckin’ buttons. Little gold hoop earrings, neat part in her brown hair. Shit, is she, like, a Jehovah’s Witness or something? I don’t have time for this. But now she’s weaving her fingers together, studying them. “So, Tim . . . you left Ellery early this year.”
“Yeah, left, as in got booted.”
I look at the clock on the stove right as it flips from 5:58 to 59. Less than half an hour to meet Alice, and it takes fifteen minutes to drive. If you don’t run the lights or speed.
Hester lifts her face and looks at me squarely. “Before that, you went to Ward Akins pool party.”
I did? Geez, I was so messed up back then, worst of my worst. I can hardly remember those last months of school. Little flashes. Ward Akins? Asskite guy on my tennis team. Pool party? Would I have gone to one of those? Who’m I kidding? I would have gone to anyone ’s party.
But also? Who the eff cares what party I did or didn’t go to.
“Uh. Look, can we catch up some other time? Sorry – I mean . . . not to be a dick, but . . . why are you here?”
“Ward is my godmother’s stepson,” Hester says, like family history answers the question. “Even though he’s an abject loser, I went to this party because . . . well, never mind.” Her voice, which is husky, throaty, stalls out for a sec. Then she braids her fingers together even more tightly, swallows. “Big house – very modern, glass windows . . . the pool’s indoors, heated. They have a tiki bar . . . do you remember any of this?”
Not even the tiki bar. “No. Sorry. I got nothing.”
Her face shuffles through a boatload of emotions in, like, seconds – there and gone. Then her features smooth, totally composed. She looks dead on at me, blue eyes crystal clear, focused, narrowing, like she’s aiming a gun. “You don’t have ‘nothing.’ You have a son.”
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