My First Love (4 page)

“Okay,” Blythe agreed. “But I really want to get started on it soon. I know we have over a month, but there’s a lot of work to do.”

After I hung up the phone, I went to my room and unloaded my books onto my desk just like I always did. I kicked off my shoes and tossed them into my closet just like I always did. Just like always, I glanced over the careful list I’d made at the beginning of the week.

But when I opened up my physics book, the graphs and formulas somehow transformed into Chris’s face—the way it looked in the warm, orangy light of the sunset. And when I finally put it aside and turned to my English notebook, I felt a delicious chill as my careful script turned into his loopy scrawling of my name over and over again.

So I got up from my desk and flopped on my bed, which I absolutely never did, and closed my eyes to relive every second of the afternoon I’d spent with Chris.

It was a well-known fact that Mr. Tayerle, our physics teacher, hated tardiness more than any other academic vice. He was a scientist, after all, and the stiff way he walked, talked, and graded our reports always gave me the feeling his whole life ticked along like a reliable wristwatch, digitally precise.

So I was worried the next day when, ten minutes into Tayerle’s lecture on astronomy, Chris came into the room. He didn’t enter quietly, smiling apologetically, as I would have done. Instead, he burst through the doorway and stood
there a moment, glancing around as he tried to catch his breath.

“Uh-oh,” Blythe whispered from the desk next to mine. She loved a good scandal, and she leaned back to watch the action unfold, a grin on her face.

“Uh-oh is right,” I whispered back.

Chris appeared to be wearing the same torn Levi’s and leather flip-flops he had worn the day before. Only his navy T-shirt was different.

It had taken me forever that morning to get ready for school. I’d tried on a pair of black leggings, a lavender miniskirt, and then my faded denim overalls before I settled on my favorite jeans and a ribbed blue sweater. Somehow, every time I pictured my name in Chris’s notebook, I headed right back to my closet. But Chris, apparently, hadn’t suffered the same overnight attack of self-consciousness.

Blythe and I weren’t the only ones staring. The whole class was watching quietly, wondering what Chris’s excuse for being late was and what Mr. Tayerle would do. That’s when Chris spotted the mobile of the universe the teacher had put out on display. He slapped a hand to his heart and pretended to fall back into the doorway, gripping the frame for support. “Someone stop the world from spinning,” he said. “I want to get off.”

“I’m afraid you’re my captive for the next forty minutes,” Tayerle said dryly, glancing from Chris to the wall clock. Then he added, “Funny you should mention spinning.”
There wasn’t the slightest hint of amusement in his voice. “Today we’re talking about the orbits of the planets, if you’ll kindly take your seat.”

“Cool,” said Chris. As he passed by the mobile, he reached out and gave Saturn’s rings a twirl.

Chris always asked interesting questions in class, and he wasn’t at all afraid of disagreeing with teachers. As a result, he could get away with things that no one else could.

If Tayerle had been the sort of teacher who gave points for participation, Chris would have been the best student in the class. As it was, though, Rick Finnegan outranked him. That’s because while Chris was sending Tayerle off on tangents, Rick was meticulously taking down every word he said. Rick was practically a professional note taker, with all the practice he’d had covering stories for the
Thunder
. The pages in his notebook were so crammed full that there probably wasn’t room left for doodling anything—definitely not the name of a girl.

In fact, Rick was so diligent I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d written down what happened next: Chris sauntered down the aisle and dropped a note on my desk.

“Mr. Shepherd,” Tayerle said, holding out his hand and beckoning, “don’t think I didn’t see that message you just delivered to Ms. Wyse. I’d like to believe it contains your ponderings about astronomy, but I’ve a feeling that this morning your mind is on other matters.”

“But Mr. Tayerle,” Chris argued as he picked up the
note from my desk and went to place it in the teacher’s hand, “how can a guy know about the universe without first examining his heart?”

It was like one of those nightmares where you show up at school without your clothes on—everyone who’d been staring at Chris turned to stare at me. Meanwhile, to my horror, Mr. Tayerle fumbled with his bifocals, then unfolded the note.

“Ms. Wyse?” he asked when he’d finished reading. “Would you please do Mr. Shepherd the honor of joining him in—I hope I’m reading correctly—something called a carbo load?”

“Is that legal?” someone called out, and the whole class started to laugh.

“It—it just means carbohydrates,” I stammered, my cheeks turning bright red. “It’s a Dolphin tradition. We go out for a big lunch before every swim meet.”

“Say yes, then,” Tayerle said, sending a humbler Chris back to his seat. “And with your permission, Ms. Wyse, we’ll continue our own tradition—that of talking about science, rather than romance, in class.”

“Okay, yes,” I said to the ceiling. I couldn’t look at him.

Tayerle went back to his lecture, reading from his ancient notes. He looked up every now and then, as if to make sure that we were still awake. Somehow, his droning voice had seemed tolerable until yesterday, when Chris had
said that Tayerle didn’t have any fire. Now I sat there trying to listen, but all I could think of was Chris.

I tried to steal a look at him by moving my eyes in his direction without moving my neck. He sat three rows ahead and one over, so my view of him was limited to parts: a sinewy arm, his strong jawline, that thick brown hair.

Then Tayerle lost his place, and the room was silent as twenty-five college-bound classmates used the momentary pause to catch up on their notes, taking down every single testable word. Chris and I were the only two who weren’t frantically writing, whose heads weren’t bent over our desks. Until yesterday, to tell you the truth, I would have been scribbling away with the rest of the class.

Chris turned around and caught me staring, as if he’d read my mind. My heart beat faster as he held up his notebook so I could see the single word he’d written:
Sorry
. Meaning, I guessed, for the note. I blushed again, but I smiled and shrugged.

It was too bad that Tayerle was such a boring teacher, because the unit on astronomy we’d started that week was actually really interesting. Luckily, I’d read ahead a chapter in our textbook, so while he droned on about the planets, I stared at Chris out of the corner of my eye and entertained myself with more interesting thoughts.

Until yesterday, my life, like the universe, had a certain order to it: school, swimming, homework, friends. Now
I sensed this unfamiliar pull. It was exciting but a little scary too.

Tomorrow things will fall back into place
, I told myself. Tomorrow I’d be note-taking with the best of them, rather than daydreaming about Chris. The feelings I’d been having these last two days were unfamiliar, maybe, but they weren’t threatening. They didn’t mean anything had to change.

Class dragged on for what seemed like hours. Then, just before the bell rang, Mr. Tayerle gave us an assignment to observe Saturday night’s lunar eclipse.

“Since the eclipse will begin at twelve-oh-eight
A
.
M
.,” he said, “the project requires two people—one person to record the moon phases and the other to make coffee to keep that person awake.” I was surprised at Tayerle’s attempt to be funny. “But seriously,” he continued, as though we ever took him as anything but, “I’d like you to choose partners and write up your observations in the form of a lab report.”

When Tayerle said the word “partner,” Chris turned around in his desk and raised a questioning eyebrow at me. I swallowed hard. I pictured Chris and me together at midnight, staring up at the night sky. Just the idea of it was incredibly romantic. I nodded.

A split second later, I remembered Blythe. Ever since junior high, we’d had an unwritten rule that anytime we were in the same class, we worked on school projects together. The last thing I wanted was to make her mad, especially after what had happened yesterday. But the absolute
last, last, last thing I wanted was to give up the opportunity to watch the eclipse with Chris.

After class, I caught up with Blythe. “You should pair up with Rick,” I advised her in a whisper. “It’s the perfect time for you two to be alone.”

Blythe was shaking her head. “My parents are dragging me up to our cabin in Payson this weekend,” she said, sighing. “So I’ll be gazing at the heavens alone. And unless you can come with us, I guess you’ll just have to pair up with Chris.”

There was hardly anything I liked more than driving with the Carlsons to Payson, wedged into the backseat with Blythe and her brother and grocery bags full of junk food. We sang stupid road songs, and sometimes we did crossword puzzles together or played word games. I loved being with a real family, one where there was a mother and a father and a brother. Mr. and Mrs. Carlson seemed to really love each other, and Blythe and her little brother Bill actually got along. The cabin itself was beautiful—tucked away in the mountains northwest of Phoenix, surrounded on three sides by a fragrant forest of pines. But to me, getting up there was at least half the fun.

Blythe knew as well as I did that my mom would let me go. She welcomed any opportunity to get me out of the city to breathe some fresh air. But just then, I would have given up a trip to Paris to spend Saturday night with Chris.

“I have to stay home this weekend and finish my English
paper,” I said. “Not to mention those two books for our report that I have to start reading.”

Blythe looked hurt for a moment, but then she winked at me. “Okay, Amy,” she said. “By Monday, I’m sure you’ll be something of an expert on the subject of intimacy.”

As I’d explained to Mr. Tayerle, it was a tradition for some of the Dolphins to go for a premeet carbo load. That’s when we piled into someone’s car at lunch period and cruised Central Avenue’s mile-long stretch of restaurants, a virtual buffet of fast food. Though I’d always liked our ritual of pizza and french fries and camaraderie, that day I’d secretly been hoping that Chris and I could carbo-load alone.

But when I got to my locker at lunchtime, there was Shannon O’Malley, one of the Dolphins. “So who’s driving today?” she asked.

Before I could even answer, Chris came up behind me. “We’re going in Zipperman’s car,” he said, meaning Mark Zimmerman. He had gotten the nickname Zipperman because he zipped along in the water, the fastest swimmer on our team after Chris. “John Horvath’s driving too, but I think he already left. Zipperman’s out in the parking lot, waiting for us in his Blazer.”

“Sorry, Amy,” Chris whispered, as if he’d been thinking the very same thing I had. “Zipperman caught me between classes and wouldn’t let me say no.”

“That’s okay,” I said, but I had to admit I felt disappointed. When Zipperman turned the car around and pulled up at the curb beside us, I was doubly disappointed to see who was sitting next to him in the front seat. It was Jill Renfrew, another junior who was always competing with me for the chance to swim the 100 free. I’d recognize her linebacker shoulders and hairless arms (she shaved them so she’d slide like a snake through the water) anywhere.

“Oh, no, it’s Cutthroat,” I said under my breath. That was the secret nickname Shannon had given her after she’d overheard Jill telling one of our teammates that she thought I should be benched for skipping practice one day last week. “What if this carbo load is just a ploy for Jill to slip poison into my food, so that I can’t swim in the meet?” I asked Chris jokingly.

Chris had noticed that Jill and I didn’t get along, but he didn’t know she had stolen (or as she put it, “misplaced”)
my bathing cap before divisionals last season. And though I couldn’t prove it, I suspected she’d once cut the straps on my suit. He wrapped his arm around me conspiratorially as Shannon opened the car door and climbed into the backseat. “Don’t eat anything she’s touched,” he whispered. “And if it’ll make you feel safer, I’ll taste your food before you eat.”

I laughed like we were just buddies, but as I climbed into the car beside Shannon, I could feel goose bumps rising where his arm had been.

“Wait up!” someone called out. It was a hoarse, asthmatic voice I recognized as Wayne Dean’s. Poor Wayne carried his inhaler everywhere. He seemed to be wheezing constantly, but amazingly, he breathed freely for the few minutes when he was swimming in a meet.

“Haul it, Dean,” Zipperman said. “We’ve got a lot of food to consume in fifty minutes.”

When we moved over to make room for him, my right leg was pushed against Chris’s, and there was only a half inch of air between his shoulder and my face. A few weeks ago I might not have noticed, but now I was almost overwhelmed by his closeness. The electricity between us seemed miraculous to me.

Did this happen all the time between people? Is this what I had been missing? While I had been charging through swim meets and classes, racking up the trophies and the As, other people had been falling in love? It was a completely
new idea to me. It was like putting on a pair of glasses and suddenly seeing the world in a whole new set of colors.

“Everyone set?” Zipperman called out, enjoying his role as the pilot of this mission. In unison, we replied with our carbo-load cry, “Let’s eat to beat!”

“All right,” he said. “First stop: Pie in the Sky Pizzeria.”

While we drove, Zipperman and Jill fought over the radio, trying to find a decent station. Shannon and Wayne were digging in their pockets, pooling their money for a first course of pizza. I was barely aware of all this commotion going on around me, I was so focused on that half inch between Chris and me.

“So—what do you want to do Saturday?” Chris asked, his breath tickling my ear.