Perfect Couple (Superlatives 2)

Alone under the umbrella, I spent a few more minutes trying to chill. I let the cool cloth soothe my eye. Finally I took it off and blinked. My eye worked, and my contact stayed in place, thanks to Brody. I unbundled the cloth and looked at it. It was a huge T-shirt emblazoned with PELICANS FOOTBALL. Brody’s last name was written in marker on the hem.

I placed his sunglasses on my nose and slowly sat up, tumbling the dog off me in the process. I was ready, however reluctantly, to rejoin my safe and small and constantly disappointing world.

Brody sat back on his elbows one towel over, watching me.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“Yes, thanks.” I squinted at him, feeling my face slowly flush. I wondered what was keeping him here. Not me.

“I went to my truck to get my other sunglasses,” he said, peering at me over the top of them. “When I got back, everybody was gone. Kennedy left you by yourself?”

“Just to go to the snack bar.”

Brody glared in the general direction of the snack bar far down the beach as if he disapproved. I would have thought his concern was silly, except that my eye did still burn every time I blinked.

“Do you know where the other girls have been gone so long?” he asked.

“Mmmm,” I said, which meant Yes and If I tell you, I will seem like the scheming bitch I am becoming.

He gave me a knowing look over his shades. “Did Grace go try to get beer from those college guys?” When I didn’t answer, his shoulders dropped in frustration.

“Why don’t you stop her?” I asked. “Or . . . help her?” Stopping her was what I would have tried to do if I’d been her friend, but helping her was probably more up Brody’s alley. He wasn’t the class party animal. That would be Sawyer—at least, before Sawyer changed his ways last week, according to Tia. But the gatherings at Brody’s house when his mom was out for the night weren’t dry.

He smiled at me. “The first rule of breaking rules is that you take some basic precautions not to get caught, right?”

I didn’t answer, because I wouldn’t know. It did sound a lot like Tia’s opinion on the subject.

“It’s Labor Day,” he said, “it’s daylight, it’s a public beach, and the cops are all over the place. Grace is being stupid. Besides, I think she’s getting more than beer from one of those guys.”

“Oh.” I puzzled through what this meant. He didn’t sound upset that she might be cheating on him. But inside, he must burn with jealousy. That’s why he’d been paying so much attention to me. Grace hadn’t been around to see, but he’d hoped it would get back to her.

This didn’t explain why he was still here, alone with me.

“Let’s see that eye,” he said.

Again, I got a little excited at his bossy command. In the last half hour I’d come to think of him as the best candidate to get me to the emergency room if my eyeball popped out. I sat up on my knees. Just as before, our bodies almost touched. He took off his shades, slid the ones I’d borrowed from my face, and placed his pointer finger gently on my lower eyelid. “It’s still a little red, but not nearly as bad as it was.” He nodded down the beach. “Why don’t we go to the pavilion and take the picture for the yearbook? That will get you out of the glare.”

“Okay. Let me get my camera out of my car.”

“I’ll go with you.”

I held out my hand. “Sunglasses, please. Definitely. Thank you.”

We headed for the parking lot, leaving the dog behind. She made no move to follow us. I supposed she would be okay by herself. Our town didn’t have a leash law because the hippie city government thought animals should run free like the wind. Someone needed to relay this to the dog, who rolled over on her back, watching upside down for Will to return.

As Brody and I walked together across the melted asphalt lot, I said, “Sorry, my car’s all the way back here.”

“We could have gotten in my truck and driven to your car.”

“And then driven around the parking lot for the rest of the day after someone stole your space.” I laughed.

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” he said.

Was he implying he’d enjoy driving in circles with me? He kept saying things like this, or I kept interpreting them that way. I had to remind myself the only concrete evidence I had that he liked me was a cold compress he’d constructed from his T-shirt. Lately my brain had turned into a multiple-choice “Does he dig me?” quiz from Seventeen.

He snapped me out of it by exclaiming, “A 1990 Dodge Charger! This is you?”

“Yeah,” I admitted as we stopped behind the trunk. “Granddad bought it when he was in his midforties. Grandmom had just left him and moved across town with my mom to live with her mom. The car was his consolation prize, I guess.”

Brody put his hand out to stroke the red metallic paint. He snatched his hand back when the hot surface burned his fingers. “You’re driving your granddad’s midlife crisis?”

“He lets me borrow his midlife crisis.” I unlocked the stylish (not) louvered hatchback and pulled out my camera case.

Brody reached up and closed the hatchback for me. “I hear these things are pretty fast. What have you gotten it up to?”

“Thirty.”

He gaped at me, horrified. “You’ve never taken it out on the interstate to see what it can do?”

“Nope.”