Read Crush Online

Authors: Carrie Mac

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #General, #JUV000000

Crush (7 page)

“I have to sit for a second.” I feel like my life just leapt off its course and is careening toward a brand-new me. It’s all more than a little overwhelming.

“Are you okay?”

“Definitely.” I nod. “Better than okay, just a little shaky.”

“I’m your first girl?”

I nod again.

“Ever?”

“First girl. Ever.”

“Well, hey, welcome to the club.”

“But I wanna be in your club!” Julio hollers. “I want to be a lesbo too!”

“I’ll see what I can do, Julio.” Nat pulls me up. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Chapter Nine

Maira and Larissa have both heard about Nat and me by the time they get home from work.

“Julie from the food co-op saw you two,” Maira says as she lifts Avery into her arms.

“And she phoned Maira,” Larissa helps herself to Felix and coos at him in a singsong voice, “and then Mommy phoned Mama and pretty soon all the dykes in Brooklyn will
know how we corrupted that poor young slip of a thing from out west. Isn’t that right?” Felix grabs at her nose and giggles.

“So?” Maira dances Avery around the kitchen. “Tell us everything. And no, Larissa didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.”

I’d been chopping carrots when they walked in. I look at the knife and at the carrots and think back over the afternoon. It is amazing and dreamy and hot and scary and not something I want to share with them at all. Besides, I’m supposed to be looking after the boys, not making out with some girl. But she isn’t just “some girl.” She is far more than that.

“I don’t know what to say.” An enormous grin slides across my face.

“Oh! Look at the look on her!” Larissa sticks Felix in my face. “Look at her, Felix!”

Felix babbles happily at me, trying to grab my nose too.

“Should we throw you a coming out party?” Maira says.

I ignore the carrots. This is all so weird, and cutting carrots is just so normal, and
somehow the two do not go together. I plunk myself down at the table.

“I can honestly tell you that I don’t know anything about anything at all,” I say.

Larissa and Maira share another one of their looks.

“Too much?” Maira says.

“Too fast?” Larissa says.

“And totally none of our business,” Maira finishes. “Are we on the right track?”

“That’s just it.” I yank a flower from the arrangement on the table and start pulling it apart. “I don’t know. It just seems like life is really hard if you’re a person who’s alive.”

“This is true.” Larissa offers me another flower to demolish. “But think of the alternative. That’s no fun.”

They leave me to myself and finish making supper while I annihilate the flower arrangement. After we eat, they take the babies out for a stroll and I wander the empty house, willing the phone to ring. She said she’d call. I carry the portable phone with me as I meander restlessly from one room to another. Should I just call her?

I pull the piece of paper out of my pocket. She wrote her number in huge black digits, like it’s yelling at me to call her. I start dialing, but of course, obedient to the cliché, I hang up before it rings.

Maira and Larissa come back, armed with movies and microwave popcorn, and we all settle in to watch some brain-dead action movie, which they’d picked especially for me.

“Doesn’t use any gray matter,” Maira says.

“So you can use all available gray matter for other matters,” Larissa finishes.

The phone rings halfway through the movie, and because I’m still clutching it, I answer it before the first ring finishes.

“Hey,” Nat says.

“Hey,” I say.

And then we both get a serious case of the unstoppable giggles. Maira kicks me out of the room, so I dash upstairs, flop onto the bed, and we get ourselves under control.

“So, can I take you to Coney Island tomorrow?”

“Absolutely.”

“Wait a second, let me twist your arm.”

And then hours pass in a few fleeting seconds, or it’s the other way around, or something, anyway. Time is huge and at the same time it is tiny. It’s after midnight when we finally hang up, with plans to meet at the subway in the morning.

Chapter Ten

We hold hands on the train, all the way out to Coney Island, and it doesn’t feel weird at all. Some people stare, and a Hassidic mother frowns and hustles her children to the other end of the car, but I don’t care. We get off the train and buy iced coffees and peroshki at a Russian deli and then walk barefoot across the hot sand to the water’s edge. It’s a weekday, but the beach is still crowded, with so many colorful children and toys and
towels and sun umbrellas that I imagine we look like a spill of beautiful jewels from above.

It’s windy and hot and loud and feels like we’re all teetering at the edge of the planet. Nat cartwheels along the beach and then does a series of backflips, supposedly for a pack of shirtless little boys who don’t speak English at all, although I’m more impressed than anyone, I’m sure. The boys cheer her on, in Russian, I think, and then follow us along the board-walk to the freak show. Nat gives them each a quarter, and they run off toward the arcade.

“Want to go in?”

“I’m not old enough.”

Nat winks. “I can hook us up.”

She knows the girl who swallows swords, so I soon find myself in a dim little theater with wooden bleachers and a sad, rickety stage. The lights go down. Nat kisses me and takes my hand.

“I’ve never brought a girl to the freak show before,” she whispers.

“So what should I think?”

She kisses me again as the curtain rises. “You’re pretty special, that’s what I think.”

We watch her friend swallow swords. There are flame eaters and knife throwers and a man who hangs weights from fresh piercings, and another man who can contort himself through a tennis racket with the strings removed, and a woman who lies on a bed of nails with the sword swallower standing on her belly. Life is like that, really—a stunning, painful stunt, yet magically endurable.

When we emerge into the hot, blue daylight, we make our way to the train and go home, tired and sunburnt and blissed out on each other.

Later, Nat comes with me to Joy’s because my parents are supposed to call. Joy isn’t home, although she’d promised Bruce would make us his famous spaghetti that I’ve heard so much about and never actually had. I told her about Nat, and she told me it was a phase that she’d gone through too—but she says that about everything, so who knows, really? I bet the only comment Joy will make when she meets Nat is about her dreads. Joy hates dreadlocks on white people.

Joy’s cell phone is sitting on the table
beside a twenty-dollar bill and a note. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her separated from her phone, but judging by the note, which suggests I order pizza with the twenty, I’d say she’s feeling a little guilty about the prank she pulled on me. We order pizza and then wait for the call.

“What are you going to tell them?” Nat says. We’re spooned on the chaise lounge in the dark, the sound of the summer evening street slipping in the open window.

“I don’t know.” And I don’t, right up until the phone actually rings. I’ve been so looking forward to talking to my parents, but I’m suddenly terrified of the little silver thing, shimmying its way across the table as it plays some brain-dead club-track ring tone.

I answer it. “Mom?”

“What, you think your old man can’t work a satellite phone?”

“Daddy!” “Daddy?” The connection crackles and pops. “Is something the matter?”

“No, no, no. Everything’s fine.” And it is, I suddenly realize. It really, truly, honestly is.

“Everything is great! I met someone really spectacular.”

“Oh? Let me tell your mother.” I hear them talk, muffled, and then he’s back. “Your mother has her ear mashed up to the phone.”

“Hi, honey!” she says, her voice a little tiny scratch in the static. “We love you!”

Dad’s voice is much clearer. “What am I thinking right now?” he asks.

“Okay, wait.” I close my eyes and put my fingers to my temples. “Okay, I’m ready.”

“I’m sending it to you,” Dad says.

And I get the clearest picture of the two of them, on a beach, tanned and grinning, waving at me. I open my eyes and describe it to him.

“That’s right!” my mom says, although I can barely hear her.

“Your turn, kiddo.”

“Okay, wait.” I send him a picture of me and Nat on the beach. She’s doing the back-flips for the little boys, and the wind is fierce, and I’m holding my hair out of my face.

“I got it loud and clear. You’re doing
great,” Dad says. “That’s what I got. That you’re having the time of your life.”

“You’re right, Dad.” This one isn’t in the details, but he nailed it nonetheless.

“So who is he?”

My heart skips, but just a little. “Her name is Nat.” I glance over at her. She has her hands behind her head and is watching me, grinning. “And she’s amazing.”

“Well, how about that?” There’s a short symphony of static, and then the connection is so clear I can hear my dad breathing. “You’re happy?”

“More than ever before.”

“Well,” he says, “then I am thrilled for you.”

“Me too, sweetheart,” my mom adds, her voice almost as clear as Dad’s.

I join Nat on the couch. She sits behind me and puts her arms around me while I tell them all about Nat. Then I put the cell on speakerphone and we listen, heads together, as my parents describe the Larchberry Thailand Project and how my dad managed to fry his GPS watch and the laptop within the first week,
and how, when they get back, they want to have a proper wedding, with a gown and a tux and a caterer and vows and rings.

“And you’ll have to invite your Nat,” Mom says, taking the phone from Dad. Nat grins and gives me the thumbs-up.

I’m in!
she mouths.

Dad takes the phone back. “She’s not one of those I-hate-vegetarians New Yorkers like Joy has turned into, is she?”

“No I’m not, sir,” Nat pipes in. “Long live tofu!”

“Is that her?” Dad says.

“Yeah,” I say. “She’s been listening in.”

“Well give the phone to her for a minute.”

“Okay, Dad.” I’m not going to waste precious time explaining to a technophobe that cell phones have speaker options. “Here she is.”

“Hello, sir,” Nat says.

“Call me Marv, none of that sir or ma’am mumbo jumbo,” Dad says. I stifle a laugh. “Now, I’m going to tell you one thing and ask you one thing.”

“Yes, sir?” Nat shakes her head. “I mean, Marv.”

“Our Hope is more precious to us than anything, and she deserves to be loved by a brilliant, true heart and nothing less. Understand?”

I get shivers, hearing him talk to Nat like this. Love? True hearts? He’s never done this before. Maybe their wedding plans have sent him into a mushy tailspin?

“I couldn’t agree more,” Nat grins, “Marv.”

“And all I ask is that you be true to each other and to yourselves.”

“I think that’s how we ended up...”

“Ended up what?” I whisper.

Nat kisses me on the cheek and then speaks toward the phone. “I think that’s how we ended up girlfriends, sir.”

“Good to hear,” Dad says. “But please, call me Marv.”

photo: Benjamin Owens

This is
Carrie Mac’s
second installment in the Orca Soundings series.
Charmed
, a story of teen prostitution, was released in 2004. Carrie’s teen novel,
The Beckoners
(Orca, 2004), won the Arthur Ellis YA Award and was a CLA YA Honour Book and a White Raven Award selection in 2005. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has spent time in New York City.

www.carriemac.com

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

About the Author

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