Brandon found me poking a packet into his locker one afternoon. I was mortified. We were friends at school and I'd gotten him the job, but I didn't know him well enough to stuff his locker with condoms. He was really nice about it, though. He asked me for advice about the chick he was doing. I wanted to help him. And that's how we became buddies.
For the rest of the summer, chicks winked at me and said, "Yeah, you and Brandon are just friends," meaning, How could you be just friends with a piece of meat like that? But we honestly were. He came to me for advice about a new girlfriend every week.
Girls fell all over Brandon. Threw themselves at him. It rained girls through the sunroof of his Buick. A lot of his complaints had to do with girls he went out with getting mad at him about the other girls he went out with. I didn't want a boyfriend like that. And he didn't want a girlfriend like me. All the boys at school knew I was just Zoey, everybody's friend, and I didn't put out.
Until now. "Just a sec," I said as we passed my Bug on our stroll through the parking lot. "Let me get something out of my car." While he finished another cigarette, I unlocked my trunk and leaned into it for the king-size box of condoms. I pulled one out and poked it into my pocket, hoping Brandon wouldn't notice. Not yet. I turned around.
He stared at my pocket. Then he looked straight at me with blue eyes I would have sworn were innocent as a baby's if I hadn't known him so well. He seemed to see me with perfect clarity.
He didn't say a word about it, though. He just turned toward his Buick again and asked as we walked, "Y know that girl Phoebe who does the ou airbrush tattoos at Slide with Clyde?" He unlocked the passenger door of the Buick and pushed it open a little for me. We couldn't open it wide because it was huge and would ding the car in the next space. Carefully I squeezed inside and closed the door behind me.
Brandon sat in the driver's side, still talking. I suspected he'd been talking outside the car too, and hadn't noticed I wasn't there to listen. "--down at the beach right now with her cousin from Destin who is hot, Zoey, and somehow I have to find a way into that without scaring both of them off." He put his elbow on the steering wheel and his chin in his hand, staring into space with his brow down, perplexed.
When I'd first discussed such matters with Brandon, I'd thought he was kidding. No real person could take problems like this seriously. But Brandon did, and once you realized this about him, it was easy to like him. He had no malice. He just loved girls, and sex.
I leaned back against the door and pointed my knees toward him. "Can I ask you something?"
"I know, I know," he said. "Why can't I hit on Phoebe and be satisfied with that, instead of chasing her cousin? Why do I always want the one I can't have? I don't know, Zoey. If I knew, I wouldn't need you."
"Y wouldn't?" I slid my hand onto his bare thigh--the hand without the chip in the fingernail polish.
A lot of boys would have asked me what I thought I was doing. Brandon did not. Either he knew exactly what I was doing, or he was easy. That's why he got as many girls as he did. I wanted to be easy for once.
"That's not what I was going to ask you." I smoothed my hand down the crisp blond hairs on his tanned leg. "Why haven't we hooked up?"
He laughed. "Because I want to keep my job?"
"My dad doesn't care." It hurt to say this. I kept smiling.
Brandon shrugged. "I only see you at work. Y ou've hardly come out with us a single time all summer."
"I'm here now," I said.
His brow furrowed. I was busted. He knew there was something wrong with me, and he would refuse to help me make it worse, some line like that.
But no. Rising from the steering wheel and scooting closer across the wide seat, he reached behind my head and pulled his fingers along the length of a lock of my hair. "I don't know, Zoey. I guess I figured you'd say no. Y ou're such a nice girl." He leaned in and kissed me.
My body was there in the car with him, making out with him. My mind raced through a lifetime of warnings about sex. Before this night I'd assumed I wouldn't be doing it for a while. I had too much to look forward to--graduation, college, a job, travel. I couldn't risk losing it all to satisfy my raging hormones.
But as he pulled my shorts down, these lessons didn't make sense to me anymore. Where was the risk? We were only doing it. It was amazingly easy. His fingers found the condom in my pocket and pulled it out. I kept kissing his neck as plastic crinkled, and then he scooted me down until I lay on the long seat.
He paused at the edge of me, not pushing in but maintaining pressure there, threatening. I was putting up barriers, even now, that were hard for him to get past. I tried to relax for him. I visualized opening for him, letting him into me.
Something inside me screamed Noooooo, this is crazy. Something else inside me reached up with one hand to cover my mouth. It held me down so I couldn't escape until the damage was done. Brandon slid himself all the way inside me, the point of no return, so swiftly and so deep that I gasped. I felt a little sick to my stomach, and my arms had gone tingly and cold, like I had some strange disease.
"That's it," he whispered, pushing farther in.
I hadn't realized how far in he could go, but it was best to trust him since he'd done this before. I let him push into me, pull out, push in again, until he found a rhythm, and the sex turned into every pornographic snippet I'd ever walked in on boys viewing on the computer in the break room at Slide with Clyde. This was familiar. It wasn't comfortable, but at least I recognized it. I was doing what everybody else had already done, which made me normal. My arms still tingled, but my whole body flashed from cold to hot now, and I understood the animal nature of it, doing it to reproduce. Brandon was the biggest, best example of my species, and I felt an animal pride in having caught him. ***
LATER, HOLDING HANDS, WE CROSSED THE bridge over the sand dunes and sat on the wooden stairs, looking out over the party. This was perfect. We were part of the party but apart from it, above it, because of what we'd just shared.
Then he asked, "Y want a beer?"
The question struck me as funny. I never drank. I was afraid of losing control that way. All my friends knew this about me, except the one I'd just lost my virginity to.
"Why're you laughing?" he slurred. "I take that as a yes?"
"No thanks. Not while I'm in training." I put my hand on my belly and phrased my refusal in terms Brandon would accept. As an athlete, he would understand abstaining for the sake of training, even if it would never occur to him to abstain himself.
"Mind if I get one?" he asked, already pushing up to standing, steadying himself with one hand on my shoulder. If he'd been sober, he would have known he was putting enough weight on me to hurt me.
I didn't mind. I grinned through it. "I'll be waiting." I watched him walk across the sand, into the shadows toward the beer stash against the sand dunes, staggering only a little.
A few seconds later a silhouette moved back toward me. That was fast. But the silhouette was too small to be Brandon, and as it moved closer I recognized the outline of girly curls. Lila. I felt like I hadn't seen her in a year. She dashed up the stairs and scattered sand over me as she plunked down next to me. Over the noise of crashing waves, she stage-whispered, "I just heard you hooked up with Brandon Moore!"
"We did," I said.
"No, I mean I heard you did it with Brandon Moore."
I suppressed the urge to glance suspiciously at the parking lot behind me, beyond the bridge. I'd noticed fogged-up windows in cars when I first arrived. People could have seen Brandon and me too. I asked carefully, "Where did you hear that?"
"From Brandon Moore!"
"Oh." I wasn't sure what to make of this. I hadn't counted on Brandon kissing and telling. But he was drunk, and I forgave him. He must be happy about what we'd done, or he wouldn't announce it. "We did," I said again.
Lila persisted, "Wasn't that your first time? Ever?"
"Y He was really sweet."
es.
Lila frowned at me and bit her lip. I was beginning to get a little annoyed with her. I felt good about what Brandon and I had done, but Lila's response gave me second thoughts. I did not want second thoughts. I reminded her, "Brandon and I are good friends."
"Y eah," she said.
"Everybody at Slide with Clyde told me all summer we should hook up."
"Y eah." She nodded slowly. "That is great, Zoey."
"I'm happy." I wrapped my arms around my knees and hugged myself. The breeze off the ocean remained steady, but suddenly it seemed colder. "Where's Keke?"
"Embarrassing me," Lila said bitterly. "I will never get laid at this rate."
I unwrapped one arm from my knees and fingered her springy red curls. "Give it time. It will happen."
"Oh, like you're the expert on this suddenly in the last five minutes."
My hand stopped in her hair. Not that it mattered in the dark, but I could feel the blood rushing to my face with anger at what she'd said to me, and embarrassment at what I'd said to her. I did sound like a sex ed film from middle school PE class.
"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "That was ugly. I didn't mean it that way."
"I know what you meant." I tugged at her curls for a few more strokes, even though I didn't want to, to show her everything was okay. We were quiet at first, but eventually we talked about the swim meet next Saturday and pretended nothing had happened. I yawned, terribly tired now, done with this party. I could probably sleep, even after the day I'd had, even at my dad's house. I wished Brandon would come back with his beer. I would offer to take him home, and we would have a sweet parting of ways at the end of our first night together.
He did not come back. After a few minutes I would go looking for him, worried. My brief search would begin to feel hysterical, thinking something had happened to him, only at the very end. Then my friends would tell me Brandon had pitched over in the sand, and the guys had helped him across the next bridge down the beach, to the parking lot. Stephanie Wetzel lived in his neighborhood, and she had taken him home.
But chatting with Lila and watching the silhouettes dotting the beach, I didn't know this yet, and I couldn't have predicted it. I still hugged my knees to my chest, almost as if I needed comfort. I felt okay, though. In the opposite direction Brandon had headed, an unseen boy asked in an incredulous tone, "Brandon Moore and Zoey Commander?" and a girl shushed him. That was okay too. They would get used to it. So would I.
FOR THAT SHORT SCHOOL WEEK, I was almost glad Ashley was pregnant with my father's baby. It kept me busy. Late Labor Day night when I came in from the party, I found a note from Ashley saying she had moved my bedroom. It used to be upstairs next to my parents' room. Ashley had put me on the first floor, in what used to be the guest room. She said she wanted the baby's room upstairs with her. She had made up the guest room bed for me with my old comforter.
I spent the rest of the week unpacking stuff I'd wanted from my mom's apartment and arranging it perfectly. Then I volunteered to put together the high chair and baby swing Ashley and my dad had bought in Destin. All this was complicated by the bustle of workmen in the house. Ashley insisted that they finish the kitchen remodel before she and my dad left Saturday for their trip to Hawaii to get married. And my dad was having cameras installed.
They'd planned their elopement weeks ago. They hadn't planned on a dependent minor in the house. My dad's solution was to have cameras record everything that went on while he was gone, and he could view the video on the internet. We used to have a cat, and when we went on vacation, my mom always wanted to board her at the vet. My dad wanted to fill lots of bowls with cat food, shut her up in the house, and leave her. She'd be okay, he'd say. What could happen? I was a cat, and the vet was closed for repairs.
I hardly minded. I didn't want to go with them to Hawaii, and I didn't want them to miss their trip and resent me. And I appreciated all the activity in preparation. Now I understood why people went to so much trouble over funerals, with wakes and food and flowers and caskets and choices. It gave them something to do besides mourn unbearably. In my mind I hardly ever slipped back to my mother's bedroom and tried to fix everything, until I lay in bed at night, praying for sleep.
Brandon was another bright spot in my week. It wasn't his fault we didn't see each other. His football practice lasted even longer in the afternoons than my swim team practice. Our classes and our lunch periods were different. Everybody had break at the same time between second and third periods, but I was hurrying between history and calculus then, and he was probably on the other end of the school. I'd never asked around or gone searching for him because that's the kind of thing his chicks did before me, back in the summer when it was raining girls through his sunroof. My relationship with him was different because we had been dear friends first. I didn't need to be reassured constantly that he wanted to be with me.
Besides, my friends brought him up all the time, amazed and vaguely amused that we were together, so it was almost like he sat next to me in every class. He texted me a message with cute misspellings at least once a day, which I actually found annoying because whenever I saw the light on my phone blinking, for a split second I always hoped my mother had called me. And on Thursday night when my phone rang and I threw down my fork in the middle of the nice spaghetti dinner Ashley had made with my dad's help and scrambled into the guest room to find my phone, that was also Brandon, not my mom. He'd called to tell me he couldn't go out with me Friday night after his game because the football team was throwing their own beach party, boys only. That was fine. I understood.