“Please?” she asked, making her voice sound playful. She rested her hand on his knee, partly out of habit and partly as a gesture of reassurance. “Your mom’s at work, right?” Eli’s mom worked a lot, and his parents were divorced, so they had often had his house to themselves. She missed those afternoons from senior year, the cold ones when they had snuggled on his couch and caught a buzz while watching old movies, and the warm ones where they had donned bathing suits and sat on his back patio catching rays and dreaming of their future.
He moved his knee away from her touch. “Not sure that’s a good idea,” he said.
She pouted even though he wasn’t looking at her. Both of them were silent for a few minutes as she debated her options. Push too hard, and she could push him away. A thought dawned on her: What if he’d met someone since they had broken up? She thought about the girls from high school who’d stayed behind to attend community college, still rattling around town doing the same old things while everyone else had gone off to the hallowed halls of higher learning or whatever. Casey wouldn’t put it past one of them to make the moves on Eli after their breakup. She wondered who it could be.
Better to play hard to get, to prove that no matter how desperate those other girls were, she wasn’t. Suddenly she found herself wanting nothing more than to spend the afternoon with Eli. “Fine, then, I guess just take me back to my car,” she said, willing her voice to sound nonchalant, denying what she felt inside. She was getting frightfully good at that.
Eli shrugged and, at the next light, turned in the opposite direction of his house. She felt her heart sink but willed herself to keep her chin up, like her mother often said.
They were silent all the way back to where they’d left her car, in the parking lot of the restaurant where they’d met. The lunch had started off nicely, the conversation flowing naturally, like the old friends they were attempting to be. She’d relaxed completely by the time their food had arrived, and she could tell he had, too. She’d been so relaxed that once they’d eaten and the check had arrived (which he had insisted on paying for despite her protests), she’d blurted out that they should get some beer, keep the party going. The funny thing was, though his face had fallen when she said it, he’d done it.
He pulled into the parking space next to her car but didn’t cut the engine. He turned to her and gestured to the bag behind her seat. “You can just take that,” he said.
She felt tears prick her eyes. She had done this. She had ended things. What had she expected to happen? “OK,” she said. “If you’re sure.”
She saw his jaw muscle jump under the skin. He nodded once, then turned back to look at her. “It was good to see you. Good luck at school.” In his eyes was the weakness he had always had for her, laid bare. She saw kindness and pain surging inside him, the effort he was making to let her go. It was cruel to ask for anything from him if she herself didn’t know what she wanted.
Still, she leaned across the seat and kissed his cheek, right in the spot where his jaw muscle had jumped. “Good luck to you, too, Eli,” she said against his skin. And it was manipulation, pure and simple. She shouldn’t do it, yet she couldn’t stop herself. She moved away, slid back to her spot, and moved to lift the beer into her lap from the back seat. Right on cue, she felt his hand shoot out to halt her.
“You’re right,” he said to her. “My mom’s not home.” She could smell it on him, the longing. “I mean, we could go back there. If you’re serious.”
“As a heart attack,” she said, and grinned like she was kidding around, like this was all no big deal, when it was a very big deal, for more reasons than she was willing to admit. She exhaled as he put the car in reverse, then shifted into drive and pressed on the gas. She watched as her car grew smaller in the rearview mirror, disappearing as they left it behind.
Violet
She was outside, presumably to watch Barney pee so her grandmother could clean up from dinner. The dog had whined at the door, and when Violet had offered to be the one to take him out, Polly had looked so relieved that Violet felt guilty about her ulterior motive. Really she was just hoping that Micah Berg would take Chipper out at the same time, and the dogs would run over to check each other out, leaving their caretakers no choice but to follow. It would be like a scene from a movie, a meet cute, though technically she had met Micah before. She didn’t count the other brief encounters. She was hoping for more, a real conversation instead of merely acknowledging the other’s existence.
She kept her eyes on Barney as she tried to imagine what they might talk about. She glanced across the street, hoping Chipper would bolt from the house. But the Berg house remained quiet and still. Violet grew bored with watching Barney walk and sniff, walk and sniff.
“Just pee already,” she said to the dog, but he ignored her.
She’d begged her mom for a dog the year she was twelve, saved her allowance and birthday money, scoured Craigslist listings, researched veterinarians. Her campaign had fallen on deaf ears, though. She could still hear her mother’s voice saying, “It’s a lot of work, Vi.” Standing outside when she should be inside studying for a test, she now saw her mother’s point.
Barney wandered near the road, and she called for him to come back. The last thing she needed was for her new grandmother’s dog to get hit by a car the first time she was entrusted with him. Barney ignored her and kept sniffing the seam where the asphalt met the grass, testing the boundary lines. She walked over to the dog, cussing under her breath as she did. She’d been trying out cursing recently. It seemed time to learn to talk like her peers, even though her mother said it was classless and the sign of a low intellect. “Only limited minds use cheap substitutes,” she always said.
Cursing had never come natural to Violet anyway. She was like an impersonator: she could make herself sound like her peers, but she wasn’t. With a pang, she thought of Nicole, how effortlessly she spat curse words, peppering her speech with them like any other word. Nicole had started swearing back in the seventh grade, one of the first signs she was leaving Violet behind. But of course Violet hadn’t known that then.
As she got close to Barney, she said, “Stupid-ass dog,” when really it was Nicole who was the stupid ass. Or maybe Violet was the stupid ass.
Barney stopped his sniffing and looked up, responding to the moniker as though it was his actual name, as though he’d been called it many times before. Violet smiled at the thought of Polly calling the dog a stupid ass. Perhaps she and her grandmother were alike in some ways. Perhaps she would find out how they were alike while Polly was staying with her. She would find out, and she would tell her mom what she’d discovered when she got home. Then, thanks to Violet’s insight, her mom and grandmother would make up, and something good would come of this ordeal.
As her mind wandered, a girl seemed to appear on the street out of nowhere. The girl grabbed Barney’s collar. Violet started to call out to say, “Hey, let my dog go!” But when the girl looked in her direction, she saw that it was Casey Strickland. Their eyes met, but there was something . . . off-center in Casey’s gaze. Warning bells pinged inside Violet.
“Hey, Violet!” Casey called, tugging on Barney’s collar. “I found a stray!” She laughed like this was hysterical.