“What are you doing here?” she asked me.
“Marie dragged me and then ditched me.”
“Ah,” Olive said, nodding. “Just like the Booksellers’ Daughter. Is she here to see Graham?” Olive made a face when she said Graham’s name and I appreciated that she also found Graham to be laughable.
“Yeah,” I said. “But . . . wait, why are you here?”
Olive’s brother swam until he graduated last year. Olive had tried but failed to make the girls’ swim team.
“My cousin Eli swims for Sudbury.”
Olive’s mom turned away from the swim meet and looked at me. “Hi, Emma. Come, have a seat.” When I sat down next to Olive, Mrs. Berman turned her focus back to the pool.
Eli came in third and Mrs. Berman reflexively pumped her hands into frustrated fists and then shook her head. She turned and looked at Olive and me.
“I’m going to go give Eli a conciliatory hug and then, Olive, we can head home,” she said.
I wanted to ask if I could join them on their way home. Olive lived only five minutes from me. My house was more or less between theirs and the highway exit. But I had trouble asking things of people. I felt more comfortable skirting around it.
“I should probably find Marie,” I said. “See if we can head out.”
“We can take you,” Olive said. “Right, Mom?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Berman said as she stood up and squeezed through the crowded bleachers. “Do you want to come say good-bye to Eli? Or should I meet you two at the car?”
“The car,” Olive said. “Tell Eli I said hi, though.”
Olive put her hand right into my Doritos bag and helped herself.
“Okay,” she said once her mom was out of earshot. “Did you see the girl on the other side of the pool, talking to that guy in the red Speedo?”
“Huh?”
“The girl with the ponytail. Talking to somebody on Eli’s team. I honestly think she might be the hottest girl in the world. Like ever. Like, that has ever existed in all of eternity.”
I looked toward the pool, scanning for a girl with a ponytail. I came up empty. “Where is she?” I said.
“Okay, she’s standing by the diving board now,” Olive said as she pointed. “Right there. Next to Jesse Lerner.”
“Who?” I said as I followed Olive’s finger right to the diving board. And I did, in fact, see a pretty girl with a ponytail. But I did not care.
Because I also saw the tall, lean, muscular boy next to her.
His eyes were deep set, his face angular, his lips full. His short, light brown hair, half-matted, half-akimbo, the result of pulling the swimming cap up off his head. I could tell from his swimsuit that he went to our school.
“Do you see her?” Olive said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, she’s pretty. But the guy she’s talking to . . . What did you say his name was?”
“Who?” Olive asked. “Jesse Lerner?”
“Yeah. Who is Jesse Lerner?”
“How do you not know who Jesse Lerner is?”
I turned and looked at Olive. “I don’t know. I just don’t. Who is he?”
“He lives down the street from the Hughes.”
I turned back to Jesse, watching him pick up a pair of goggles off the ground. “Is he in our grade?”
“Yeah.”
Olive kept speaking but I had already started to tune her out. Instead, I was watching Jesse as he headed back to the locker room with the rest of his team. Graham was right next to him, putting a hand on his shoulder for a brief moment before jumping ahead of him in the slow line that had formed. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the way Jesse moved, the confidence with which he put one foot in front of the other. He was younger than any of the other swimmers—a freshman on the varsity team—and yet seemed right at home, standing in front of everyone in a tiny swimsuit.
“Emma,” Olive said. “You’re staring.”
Just then, Jesse turned his head ever so slightly and his gaze landed squarely on me, for a brief, breathless second. Instinctively, I looked away.
“What did you say?” I asked Olive, trying to pretend I was engaged with her side of the conversation.
“I said you were staring at him.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I said.
It was then that Mrs. Berman came back around to our side of the bleachers. “I thought you were meeting me at the car,” she said.
“Sorry!” Olive said, jumping up onto her feet. “We’re coming now.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Berman,” I said, and I followed them both behind the bleachers and out the door.
I paused, just before the exit, to see Jesse one last time. I saw a flash of his smile. It was wide and bright, toothy and sincere. His whole face lit up.
I wondered how good it would feel to have that smile directed at me, to be the cause of a smile like that—and suddenly, my new crush on Jesse Lerner grew into a massive, inflated balloon that was so strong it could have lifted the two of us up into the air if we’d grabbed on.
That week at school, I noticed Jesse in the hallway almost every day. Now that I knew who he was, he was everywhere.
“That’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” Olive said when I mentioned it at lunch. “My brother just told me about this. You don’t notice something and then you learn the name for it and suddenly it’s everywhere.” Olive thought for a moment. “Whoa. I’m pretty sure I have the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.”
“Are you seeing Jesse everywhere, too?” I asked, entirely missing the point. Earlier that day, I’d walked right by him coming out of Spanish class. He was talking to Carolyn Bean by her locker. Carolyn Bean was the captain of the girls’ soccer team. She wore her blond hair back in a bun, with a sporty headband every day. I’d never seen her without lip gloss. If that was the kind of girl Jesse liked, I stood no chance.
“I’m not seeing him any more than normal,” Olive said. “But I always see him around all the time. He’s in my algebra 1 class.”
“Are you friends with him?” I asked.
“Not really,” Olive said. “But he’s a nice guy. You should just say hi to him.”
“That’s insane. I can’t just say hi to him.”
“Sure you can.”
I shook my head and looked away. “You sound ridiculous.”
“You sound ridiculous. He’s a boy in our class. He’s not Keanu Reeves.”
I thought to myself, If I could just talk to Jesse Lerner, I wouldn’t care about Keanu Reeves.
“I can’t introduce myself, that’s crazy,” I said, and then I gathered my tray and headed toward the trash can. Olive followed.
“Fine,” she said. “But he’s a perfectly nice person.”
“Don’t say that!” I said. “That just makes it worse.”
“You want me to say he’s mean?”
“I don’t know!” I said. “I don’t know what I want you to say.”
“You’re being sort of annoying,” Olive said, surprised.
“I know, okay?” I said. “Ugh, just . . . come on. I’ll buy you a pack of cookies.”
Back then, a seventy-five-cent bag of cookies was enough to make up for being irritating. So as we walked over to the counter, I dug my hand into my pocket and counted out what silver coins I had.
“I have one fifty exactly,” I said just as I followed Olive to the back of the line. “So enough for both of us.” I looked up to see Olive’s eyes go wide.
“What?”
She directed me forward with the glance of her eyes.
Jesse Lerner was standing right in front of us. He was wearing dark jeans and a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt with a pair of black Converse One Stars.
And he was holding Carolyn Bean’s hand.
Olive looked at me, trying to gauge my reaction. But instead, I stared forward, doing a perfect impression of someone unfazed.
And then I watched as Carolyn Bean let go of Jesse’s hand, reached into her pocket, took out a tube of lip balm, and applied it to her lips.