Back to dreams of him. He probably couldn't help his knee touching my thigh.
"Zoey," he said, reaching into the Bug. He lifted me out and carried me across the grass. Behind us, the Bug exploded (the deer had wandered to the shoulder and was peering at us through the trees). Even as tall and solid as Doug was, the shock wave slammed him to the ground. He twisted in midair so he took the brunt of the landing and I was cushioned on top of him.
"Doug, I'm so sorry," I murmured.
"It's not your fault," he whispered. "Hush now." His knee pressed my thigh. His knee nudged my thighs open as his tongue opened my mouth. He kissed me hard in the soft rain. I shivered.
I TOOK ONE MORE BREATH THROUGH my nose as the van came to life around me. Without opening my eyes I knew exactly what had happened. I'd gotten cold when Coach turned the air conditioner on, and I'd snuggled close to Doug. I recognized his scent of sea and chlorine. Now we'd parked at our high school. The lights were on and the team gathered their bags and shuffled through the door. Every one of them probably peered into the backseat to see what Doug and I were up to.
But maybe Doug wouldn't know I'd snuggled up to him. Maybe he was still asleep and I had nothing to worry about. I opened my eyes.
He was staring down at me.
I jumped in surprise.
"Sorry," he said. "I wanted to make sure you had normal pupil reflexes."
I started to ease up into a sitting position, but something held me down. Doug's long fingers circled my arm. His thumb pressed my wrist.
"Checking your pulse." He let me go. "Now it's sped up."
Was he telling me he knew I'd dreamed about him? I asked casually, "What would my pulse tell you anyway?"
"Do I look like a doctor?" He bent down. I bent too, to grab his crutches for him, but he'd already snagged them from the floor.
He crutched up the aisle. At the sliding door he paused to say something to Keke. She nodded. Then he placed the tips of his crutches carefully on the pavement outside the van and heaved himself down. I couldn't see him fall but I heard him yell, "Fuck!"
"Zoey, girlfriend," Keke called back to me. "Y ou're spending the night with Lila and me so we can keep an eye on you."
Gabriel said something about girl-on-girl-on-girl action. Lila vaulted over two seat backs to slap him. Everyone remaining on the bus gathered around them to watch. Everyone, that is, except Mike. Right in front of me, he bent to stuff his belongings into his bag, then turned for the door.
As he turned, he looked straight at me. Then he looked away just as quickly so I'd think his eyes were simply wandering as he exited the bus.
But I'd seen it. And he'd blushed. As if he'd witnessed everything I'd done to Doug in the grass beside the wreck, and he was embarrassed for me that I'd do such a thing while I had a relationship with Brandon.
Or as if he were angry Doug had asked him to lie to everyone, including Brandon, and pretend he hadn't seen what I'd done.
Or . . . like he wanted to get out of the van before I could ask him any questions about the wreck. Like he knew something I didn't.
"Come on, girl." Lila pulled me.
"I can't stay with you," I murmured. "My dad expects me home."
"Doug said your dad is gone and your mom is out of town and we need to keep an eye on you," Keke informed me.
Your mom is out of town. I laughed at this euphemism. At least Doug wasn't spilling the beans about her. As long as nobody knew about it, I could keep pretending it hadn't happened.
"My dad expects me home," I insisted. "He has ways of checking on me."
"Call him," Lila said. "Or we'll get our mother to call him if he doesn't believe you."
I waved this idea away with both hands. Their mother would find out my dad was gone and my mom was way gone. Their mother would report me to Child Protective Services.
"Then just email him and tell him what you're doing and why," Lila said. "Here's my phone. Type him an email message and we'll take a picture of you looking . . ."
"Used," Keke said.
I took Lila's phone, typed my dad's email address and the message, I am fucked, and handed it back to her.
"Zoey!" she shrieked.
Keke snatched the phone from Lila and looked at the screen. "Y ou're going to get yourself grounded. No parking with Brandon for you, ever." She pressed a key over and over with her thumb, backspacing.
"Speaking of," I moaned. "Do you think anyone got the wrong idea about Doug and me back here?"
They stared at me blankly. Lila prompted, "Like . . . ?"
"Like Stephanie Wetzel would tell Brandon."
Keke prompted, "That . . . ?"
"That Doug and I were making out or something."
"Y were ?" Lila shrieked.
"No!" I wailed, slapping my hands over my ears.
Lila laughed hysterically. "Y and Doug? That's so random!"
Keke patted my knee in sympathy. "No, nobody suspected you were making out with Doug Fox. Y hit your head harder than we thought."
I'D ALWAYS LIVED ON THE OCEAN. I mean, right on the ocean, with the noise of the surf drowning out the TV when I opened the windows. But I never, ever took the ocean for granted, because most people in our town lived inland. Including Keke and Lila.
I woke on their den sofa at my normal time in the morning, which was pretty early. A lot earlier than other teenagers who told me they slept until the afternoon on weekends. I didn't understand this. I had homework to do and books to read and data to enter. Keke and Lila's younger siblings weren't even up watching cartoons yet.
Now the headache was bad enough for painkillers, but not so bad that I was careful about moving my head too quickly. I was getting back to normal. So I approximated my normal routine. Routine was important. Since my mom tried to kill herself, routine reassured me that my life was still perfectly normal. First thing in the morning at my dad's house, I always stepped out on my balcony to watch the ocean and breathe the air. Here, after picking off the Lego pieces stuck to my face, I stepped out the den door into their backyard.
I'd been here a lot. I should have known which direction their house faced. But it was in a labyrinth of a neighborhood like Brandon's with even less structure, winding curves rather than right angles in the roads. I always got confused coming here. And this morning, low gray clouds blanketed the sky, almost as if it were winter. Where was the glowing patch indicating east and the sun? I had no idea which way was south and the ocean.
Whirling from back door to swing set to garden gnome, I choked out a cry and slapped my hands over my mouth. There was no direction. I held my breath to keep from panicking. My heart thumped in my chest. Tears stung my eyes.
Finally I turned back toward the house. One of Keke and Lila's little brothers stood in the open doorway in his Superman diaper, pink elephant under his arm, watching me. Oh, I knew what he was feeling, watching a Big Person go crazy.
I sniffled and made a quick pass under my eyes with my fingertips to dry up. "Good morning!" I called. "I just realized I lost something. But no worries. I'll find it."
Superman eyed me warily.
"Do you want to help me make breakfast?" I asked, imitating Keke's enthusiasm.
That got his mind off my erratic behavior. Soon Princess Diaper joined us in the kitchen. I ended up making breakfast for what seemed like fifteen or sixteen children. I liked kids. I ran the birthday parties at Slide with Clyde, and of course as a lifeguard I watched kids all day long. But at Slide with Clyde I blew a chirp on a whistle when I needed their attention. I gave them a command with a nod of my head, and they followed orders because I was scary with my face stern and my eyes hidden behind my sunglasses.
In contrast, these kids didn't understand the meaning of, "Don't do that." I cleaned up a lot of flour from the kitchen floor and inadvertently thought really hard about the new half sibling I would have soon. Ashley's baby was due on Valentine's Day.
Then I read to the kiddies until I was hoarse. But I could only stand so much of this. I wanted to go home. I had no toiletries except what I'd taken in my backpack to the swim meet, and I was too tall to wear Keke and Lila's clothes.
More than this, I wanted to find out what had happened to me. And that required a visit to the place where I'd wrecked.
"IS YOUR MOM GOING TO SUE Mike?" Keke asked. My friends lumped all lawyers into one category and made a lot of lawsuit jokes, forever asking whether my mom was going to sue people. My mom was a public defender. She'd never filed a lawsuit in her life (disappointing my dad, who said only a spoiled brat would go to school all those years and choose to make as little money as possible). I was glad Keke asked this, though. It meant she thought my mom was still working. News hadn't gotten out yet.
"No, the wreck wasn't Mike's fault," I said. "Or mine. My mom just wants me to take some measurements while the evidence is still here. She might be able to get me more insurance money." I hated lying to my friends, especially since they'd taken care of me last night and they were helping me now. I was getting desperate.
Seeing the tire marks crossing the road in the distance, I parked Keke and Lila's Datsun on the shoulder. They pulled out buckets and sheets of poster board that we'd bought at the drugstore and printed with HIGH SCHOOL SWIM TEAM FUNDRAISER . I didn't expect to make any money. The signs would slow cars down and keep them from creaming me while I did my research. We left Keke near the Datsun. Lila flounced a hundred yards down the road to stop traffic on that end.
I walked more slowly after her, careful not to jostle my still-fragile brain. It was strange to walk somewhere I'd driven past a million times. The smells were different, melted asphalt and warm hay. The sounds were different too: the whisper of my footsteps through the long grass, chirping birds, buzzing insects, the sweep of wind in the trees. And crunch. I looked down. My flip-flops ground pieces of my Bug's headlight into the sandy soil. Or pieces of Mike's Miata's headlight--that was the question. I'd reached the tire marks in the road.
I glanced up and down the road before venturing into it. Lila was in place with her sign. Keke had already stopped a sucker in a pickup. Satisfied I wouldn't get hit, I followed the tire marks to the spot where they intersected with a second set of marks and the cars had kissed. The marks weren't very long. Mike and I had been surprised. We couldn't see well in the dark and the hard rain, and the deer came from nowhere.
This is what must have happened. This is what I reconstructed in my mind. But my memory was just as blank as it had been yesterday when I woke up. It started and stopped with Doug.
A cool wind blew at my back just then, tossing my ponytail forward over my shoulder. The day was still overcast. Even though the air was warm as usual, this cool breeze kept creeping up on me. It tangled up the gray clouds in turbulence and filled the otherwise innocuous day in the countryside with foreboding. When the robes started billowing in movies about wizards, that always meant something ominous.
I was scaring myself again.
Taking Keke's dad's mini tape measure from my pocket, I set the end at the outer edge of one tire mark and walked along the metal tape, keeping it from drawing up on me, until I reached the outer edge of the other tire mark and set the measure down. Sixty and a half inches in width. This was the car that had come from the direction of Brandon's house. When I got home I'd look up on the internet whether sixty and a half inches was the width of a Bug or a Miata. Then at least I'd know which way I'd been driving. Simple.
To triangulate my data, I put the end of the tape measure at the outer edge of the tire mark for the second car and calculated that width the same way. This was the car that had come from the direction of the beach.
Sixty and a half inches. Both cars were the same width.
"Fuck." Panic welled up inside me and my heart knocked against my chest wall, trying to escape. I told myself to calm down, calm down. I couldn't wig out here in sight of Lila and Keke. I would find some other way to figure out what had happened to me, and then my life would be back in order. I told myself this, but my heart sped up instead of slowing down. I was on the verge of panic with the sky still overcast and the view south and north on the highway looking exactly the same, until luckily I was distracted by Keke yelling into the distant pickup. My heart slowed down.
At that distance I couldn't tell what she was saying to the people inside, but she shook her poster at them, then her bucket. She threw her poster and bucket into the payload and climbed in after them. I began to see that she and Lila shared something with all their siblings. It was hereditary and they couldn't help it. They were not good at following instructions, such as do not throw flour or stand here in the road until I call you. The truck must have contained hot boys.
Sure enough, as it drew closer, I saw it was Officer Fox, with Doug in the passenger seat. My heart sped up again.
I released the tape measure so it wound back up into its metal coil, slapping my legs as it went. Then I stuffed it into my back pocket like I wasn't already caught.
"Busted!" Keke squealed at me as the truck pulled onto the shoulder in front of the Datsun. Doug opened the passenger door and stepped out, crutches first.
"Soliciting charitable donations is not illegal," I called past him into the cab to Officer Fox.
"It's not safe to do it on the highway," Officer Fox said. "But you're right, being stupid isn't illegal. Otherwise half this town would be behind bars, and Doug would have gotten the death penalty by now. Hey--" Officer Safety opened the driver's side door and fell out of the cab onto the highway with the engine still running to avoid Doug reaching across the seat to grab him.