Jesse and Carolyn broke up sometime over spring break earlier that year. It wasn’t such a crazy thing to think that Jesse might notice me.
Except that it was. It was totally absurd.
He was now the captain of the swim team, leading our high school to three undefeated seasons. There was an article about him in the local newspaper, titled “Swim Prodigy Jesse Lerner Breaks 500 Meter Freestyle State Record.” He was out of my league.
Olive and I took our cups with us out back, joining the chaos surrounding the yard and pool. There were girls on the redwood patio smoking clove cigarettes and laughing together, every single one of them wearing a spaghetti-strap tank and low-cut jeans. I was embarrassed to be wearing the very same thing.
I had on a black tank with flared jeans that came up two inches lower than my belly button. There was a gap between the tank and the jeans, my midriff showing. Olive was wearing flat-front camo-print chinos and a V-neck purple T-shirt, also exposing her lower abs. Now I look at pictures of us back then and I wonder what on earth possessed us to leave the house with our belly buttons hanging out.
“You look great, by the way,” Olive said. “This might be your hottest phase yet.”
“Thanks,” I said. I figured she was referring to the way I’d been wearing my long, blond-brown hair low down my back, parted in the middle. But I also suspected it had something to do with the way that I was growing into my body. I felt more confident about my butt, less shy about my boobs. I stood taller and straighter. I had started wearing dark brown mascara and blush. I had become a slave to lip gloss like every other girl in school. I felt far from a beautiful swan but I no longer felt like an ugly duckling, either. I was somewhere in between, and I think my growing confidence had started showing.
Olive waved a hand in front of her face as the smoke from the cloves drifted over to us. “Why do girls think that just because the cigarette smells vaguely of nutmeg that I would want to smell it any more than a normal one?” She walked away, down toward the pool to put some distance between us and the smoke.
It was only once my feet hit the concrete surrounding the pool that I realized who was about to dive in.
There, in a wet red-and-white bathing suit clinging to his legs, toes lined up perfectly with the edge of the diving board, was . . . Sam.
His hair was wet and mashed down onto his head. His torso was entirely bare. There, underneath the faint chest hair and the sinewy pecks, was a six-pack.
Sam had a six-pack.
What?
Olive and I watched as he bounced slowly, preparing to take flight. And then he was in the air.
He landed with the familiar thwack of a belly flop.
Someone yelled, “Ohhhhh, duuude. That had to hurt.” And then Sam’s head popped up from the water, laughing. He shook the water from his ears and saw me.
He smiled and then started to swim to the edge as a second guy jumped in right after him.
I was suddenly nervous. If Sam came up to me, wet and half-naked, what did I want to happen?
“Another beer?” Olive asked me, holding her cup out to show me it was empty.
I nodded, assuming she would go get them.
But instead she said, “Be a doll,” and handed me her cup.
I laughed at her. “You are so annoying.”
She smiled. “I know.”
I walked up to the keg outside and pumped out enough for one cup before it sputtered out.
“Oh, man!” I heard from behind me.
I turned around.
Jesse Lerner was standing six inches from me in a T-shirt, jeans, and leather sandals. He was smiling in a way that seemed confident but vaguely shy, like he knew how handsome he was and it embarrassed him. “You drained the last of the keg,” he said.
It was the first time Jesse had ever said a complete sentence to me, the first time I’d heard a subject followed by a predicate come out of his mouth aimed for my ears.
The only thing that was weird about it was how not weird it was. In an instant, Jesse went from someone I saw from afar to someone I felt like I’d been talking to my entire life. I wasn’t intimidated, as I always imagined I’d be. I wasn’t even nervous. It was like spending years training for a race and finally getting to race it.
“You snooze, you lose,” I said, teasing.
“Rules say if you take the last beer you have to chug it,” he said.
And then, from the crowd, came the word that no teenager holding a Solo cup ever wants to hear.
“Cops!”
Jesse’s head whipped around, looking to confirm that the threat was real, that it wasn’t just a bad joke.
In the far corner of the yard, where the driveway ended, you could just make out the blue and red lights across the grass.
And then there was a whoop.