Love and Other Theories (20 page)

N
athan is darker than when he left. When we meet him at the mall, he tells Shelby and me that he played a lot of baseball during his spring break because “it didn’t rain once.” He looks fresher somehow too. He looks new again.

We round the corner on our way to the movie theater and run into Chiffon. She’s with Zane. And Trip.

“The pharmacy’s that way, Chiffon,” Shelby says.

“Easy.” Nathan keeps his voice low. He puts a hand on her shoulder like he’s going to hold her back. I watch his fingers pulse, giving her shoulder a quick squeeze. I remember everything Nathan sees when he looks at Chiffon. And what he doesn’t see.

Zane frowns and puts his hand on the small of Chiffon’s back, and they walk in the opposite direction. Just days ago Zane and Shelby were sitting across from each other at the Chapman dinner table having roast beef and apple juice. I wonder if Chiffon knows, if she cares, if it worries her.

“I thought he knew better than to be seen with her in public,” Shelby says to Trip. I can feel the prickling of his eyes on me subside, and I know it’s safe, that he’s looking at Shelby, so I look at him. His hair is still too long, the T-shirt he’s wearing too faded and worn.

“Change your tampon once in a while, will you?” Trip says to her.

Nathan laughs the kind of sudden laughter that sneaks up on you and flows out without your consent.

“Why don’t you change yours, Trip?” It’s a lame comeback, especially for Shelby, so Trip sneers at her, raising his lip slightly. “It reminds me of Elvis when you do that,” I told Trip once. I found it hilarious that he could never look mean, even if he tried.

Trip’s eyes find me again and I have no choice but to let them. “You look
nice
, Housing.” The way he says
nice
—like he’s saying something more than just that four-letter word people use to be polite—makes something in my chest flutter. It’s not polite the way Trip says it.

“Thanks.” I feel like crawling into a hole. Trip doesn’t understand the rumors that have survived his legacy at
Lincoln High. He’s looking at me as though I’m something he likes, and the air is filled with the white noise of everything that Trip has had.

Nathan’s staring at Trip. Something flashes across his eyes—recognition. Nathan looks to the ground suddenly, like he’s been caught. But I feel like I’ve been caught. I watch him clench and relax his jaw four times.

Trip and Shelby are bickering about something; I know the mocking pitch of her tone and the sluggish voice Trip uses when he wants to be funny. Nathan won’t look at me.
I’m dressed nice for you
, I want to say.
Because you were coming back today. That’s why I’m wearing green and my hair is curled at the ends
.

“Aubrey?”

Whenever Trip says my name, it’s all I can hear. It takes up all the space around me.

“We’re going to miss our movie,” I say. And after a quick wave instead of a real good-bye, when we’re walking away from Trip, I touch Nathan’s arm and he reaches it across my waist. I’m happy, but there’s still an inkling of something—a tingling in my chest—impossible to ignore, like a black dot just the size of a pin on a whitewashed canvas.

Shelby goes ahead to get our seats. Nathan and I stand in line for popcorn.

I don’t ask Nathan, “What’s wrong?” or “What are you feeling?” I say, “How long do you think it would
take to eat a seven-pound burrito?” Because it’s not supposed to be like this with us. There’s not supposed to be any tension. I know better.

He gets what I’m talking about: El Burro—the infamous taco cart set up on the outskirts of Barron’s campus. Open all night long. The seven-pound burrito is their specialty.

“Who wants to eat a seven-pound burrito?” Nathan says. He doesn’t turn to look at me, but I can see the skin crease around the corner of his left eye and know he’s making a face. “A seven-pound burrito is an impulse purchase. One of those things that seems like a good idea at first but just ends up giving you indigestion.”

“At least it’s cheap.” Only four dollars.

“This is what you want to talk about right now? El Burro?” His voice is low, unsure. Defensive. It’s there in his words, in the way he’s standing. He manages to keep his head down, but he still stares forward, looking hard at the menu on the wall above the counter even though we already know what we’re getting.

“Yes,” I tell him.

He slides against me then, our shoulders pressing into each other. I don’t know if he’s doing this on purpose or if he just took a step to the side and this is where he landed, but I’m so glad he’s here. There’s more I want to say to him, but the theories are what’s kept him here this long; they were what he wanted, what he still wants.

“It’s going to be weird next year,” he says. I don’t say anything, I just wait. “Having access to things like seven-pound burritos and all.”

I laugh a little—the way Nathan’s jokes always makes me laugh, but I call him out too. I can’t help it. “You don’t seem excited.”

I can’t hear him sigh, but I feel it, the rising and falling of his shoulder against mine. “It’s all coming up so fast.”

I forget that Nathan didn’t choose Barron. He didn’t find the pamphlet when he was ten and decide that if a perfect GPA was going to count for something, it was going to count for that. He was born into Barron sweatshirts and framed Barron diplomas on the walls, drinking hot chocolate out of worn Barron mugs. He didn’t study to reach a goal; he studied to keep up. And since coming to Lincoln High he stopped pushing forward. He’s sitting down while time just hurtles at him, because he finally can.

“Can you come over tomorrow?” he asks. “Or do you have to
tutor
?”

I ignore the snide way he said the word
tutor
, and when he looks at me, I know he didn’t mean it. “I don’t have to do anything.”

“Just you?”

I’m nodding before I even open my mouth. “Yes.”

L
ife seems simple and small when you think about how so many things can be divided up into before and after. How something happens and like the flipping of a switch—that quick, that easy—everything changes. I used to think this would only matter with big things, like the death of someone close to you. A car accident. Surviving cancer. Seeing your parents cry. Graduating high school. Getting married. But it can be anything. There’s before we learned about the theories, and after. Before, when Chiffon was our best friend, and after, when she was our enemy. Before, when kissing Trip
was the most important thing, and after, when not kissing him was the most important.

I stare at Nathan while he scrubs the front of his car. Everything about Nathan’s house is clean. The paint is white, the grass is short and even, the driveway doesn’t have cracks. And now his car will match. He’s much too concentrated on getting the bugs off the bumper to notice I’m staring.

There’s another
after
looming on the horizon: after I’ve lost him.

“I don’t feel like going to school tomorrow,” Nathan announces. He stands up and runs the sponge over the hood even though he’s already cleaned it.

We say things like this. What we want and don’t want. Saying it out loud makes it viable, attainable. It’s all very brave. Only Shelby means these things when she says them. “So what should we do instead?” I play along.

His smile makes him transparent. For all the ways Nathan is extraordinary, sometimes I’m so glad when he’s typical.

“Italian food? Right now . . . ,” I say, smiling at him in a way that says I’m not referring to eating out at all. He comes over to me and I wait patiently, making him walk the entire length of the driveway to get to me. His hands are cold from the water, but I don’t care. He smells like chemicals and I don’t care about that, either. I just let
him kiss me. I put my fingers around his wrists so I can feel his pulse.

“Let’s go.” He laughs at his boldness, at the excitement of maybe getting exactly what he wants exactly when he wants it.

We climb into his car, leaving the bucket of soap and sponge on the ground. I worry for a second that we’ve left the hose on, but Nathan is so calm, I know he turned it off. This is just one more thing I really, really like about him. His ability to be careless without being reckless. It almost feels safe. My fingers dance on the back of his neck as we drive to the housing development.

My phone rings the special Shelby ring, three notes scaling up, right as we pull into our favorite spot. Nathan recognizes it and waits for me to answer.

“She’ll understand,” I tell him. He kisses me along my neck. My phone beeps. And a few seconds later it beeps again.

Nathan stops. “What does she want?” He’s as curious as I am, so I lift my phone out of the cup holder and open the message where Nathan can see it.

The message is not from Shelby, though; it’s from Trip.

ZANE JUST BOUGHT SO MANY PEACHES.

“Peaches are my favorite,” I explain without being asked. I should have waited to be asked. The message that
came right before Trip’s is from Shelby, so I open it right away.

COME TO THE PARK.

“We should go,” Nathan says, kissing me on the cheek.

“Right now?” This is a stupid thing to ask because when Shelby sends a message, immediacy is implicit.

Nathan shrugs. Shrugging away the housing development and my hand against his leg. He leans toward me, but only to pull his phone out of his back pocket. “Robert’s there too,” he confirms, staring at a message on the screen.

I don’t know where I am. After Nathan saw Trip. After Nathan became friends with Robert and Patrick. After he learned that everything he’d heard about Shelby being the daring one, the beautiful one, the more alive one, was all true. After he learned that Trip knew my favorite fruit and he didn’t.

But we’re driving to the park. Nathan’s calm excitement bursts once we arrive and see everyone we could possibly want to see on a Sunday afternoon. There’s a volleyball net set up. And Doritos. And cherry Slurpees. The girls are in sunglasses and the boys take off their shirts. All the markings of spring and senior year. Nathan, Robert, and Patrick make jokes no one else gets and take turns trying to scare us by spiking the ball too hard. Jared rubs sunscreen on Celine’s back, even though the sun’s disappearing and the sky is slowly fading into an
evening glow. Another telltale sign of spring.

I feel unprepared. I’m in a borrowed pair of sunglasses telling Tommy Rizzo for the millionth time that no, I’m not taking off my top; my navy bra absolutely does not look like a bathing suit—when I start to feel it. The cool awareness that I’m floating in the after, and that in the place I’ve come from before there was someone with me. Nathan.

We make out in the car before he takes me home. He tastes like cherries and processed cheese, and his cologne is dulled by the smell of sweat and grass. He smells like spring. And spring is when we all get ready to leave. Like the days before Trip’s graduation, when he told me it felt like everything anyone did was for the last time, and I could sense it—the urgency in Trip and all his friends. Summer is the dead point after spring good-byes, when full-time jobs and hot weather and the last nights of sleeping in your own bed interfere with the days and the people you spend them with. Only some people make it into your summer and fewer make it into your fall. We really leave in spring.

Nathan smiles and waves as I climb out of his car, and I wonder if he knows what’s going on. Or if he’s so caught up in last moments that he doesn’t even notice that this, right now, is one of them.