Forget You Read online

  He passed me and balanced on his crutches to hold open the door of the sushi restaurant for me. “Let me take care of this. Old ladies are suckers for guys on crutches. I’ve milked this with my teachers at school all day. I can be very charming.”

  “Which is the act?” I asked as I brushed the front of his T-shirt going in. “Charming or dour?”

  He threw back his head and laughed—such a beautiful, musical laugh that the dour version of Doug from a minute ago was hard to imagine, though I figured it would make another appearance shortly. It always did. “I like to keep you guessing,” he teased me, hobbling forward to the hostess podium.

  I wondered whether keeping me guessing was just another part of charming mode, or he was actually flirting with me.

  I wanted him to flirt with me.

  Which was too bad, because I had a boyfriend.

  Doug leaned on his crutches, and he and the Japanese hostess talked animatedly with their hands. Doug threw back his head and laughed again. Girls at school would not recognize this Doug. I certainly didn’t.

  Finally the hostess led us into the crowded dining room, past the enormous tanks full of fish not native to this area of the ocean, and up two stairs and through a paper screen to the low table. We kicked off our flip-flops in the doorway. I rounded to the far side with Doug to help him ditch his crutches and ease down to table level, but the hostess did this instead, fussing over him in Japanese that he seemed to half understand. I was in the way, so I retreated to the other side of the table and sat down on a cushion. The lady winked at me and left.

  Doug stretched to snag a paper menu and a tiny pencil from the edge of the table with two fingers. “Do you come here a lot? Would you like me to order you a good roll with nothing raw in it? They’re just bringing me whatever’s fresh.” When I didn’t answer, he glanced up from the menu at me. “Okay, okay, I’m not that charming. The hostess and my mom were friends.”

  I let him peruse the menu again, or pretend to. I waited for him to end this facade on his own.

  Finally, without looking up from the menu, he said what I’d been puzzling through: “My mom was Japanese.”

  I felt stupid and unworldly not knowing this, but it had never come up before. There weren’t any Asians in my high school. Or so I’d thought.

  “My dad met her when he was stationed at Pearl Harbor,” Doug said. “Cody was actually born in Honolulu.”

  I examined him as he examined the menu. Of course he was Asian and white. This explained his beautiful sea-green eyes with a deep tan and black hair. But I could still see how his dual heritage had never occurred to me. His face scintillated as I watched, like the optical illusion of a vase and two faces, flickering between known and unknown.

  I said, “I didn’t know you were half Japanese.”

  “I can tell.”

  A waiter popped through the paper screen. Doug made a few marks on the paper menu and handed it to him. As the waiter bowed and disappeared again, Doug said, “I ordered you rice and shrimp and avocado, basically. We could have gone for California Eatin’ for that.”

  “Do you try to keep your . . . ethnicity a secret from people?” I should not have been so fascinated by Doug turning up Asian, but I couldn’t quite get my head around the fact that I hadn’t known something so basic about him.

  Leave it to Doug to turn his response into a defensive insult. “I don’t try to hide anything. People know all my business anyway, or think they do. You’re just not paying attention.”

  Screwing up my courage, I struck right back at him. “Nobody seems to know why you went to juvie.”

  9

  A burst of laughter from behind the paper screen made both of us jump. It was easy to forget we were in a public place, enclosed only in the illusion of privacy. Now I wondered if I’d spoken loudly enough for other diners to hear me through the thin screen.

  I adjusted my position on the cushion. Doug didn’t move. His body, laid back against the cushions and the wall with his broken leg straight out to one side, said relaxed. His fingers, frozen in midfidget on his good knee, said people aren’t supposed to ask me that. Either that or I have just been shot through the paper screen.

  He wasn’t bleeding. But I began to see his point about catching a marlin and then letting it go, because honestly, what were you going to do with a marlin? He was a six-foot-two fish out of water behind a miniature dining table. Even slouched down, his shoulders were broad, his head was even with mine, and his legs took up the entire space in front of him. No wonder the wreck had broken him. If he was too big for the tatami table, he was way too big for Mike’s Miata.

  “They don’t?” he croaked, then cleared his throat.

  “Even Keke and Lila don’t know, and they know everything.”

  He laughed bitterly. “I didn’t belong there, if that’s what you’re asking. But I learned a thing or two. If you ever want to sell crack, I can show you every possible place to hide it.”

  I cringed. “No, I’m asking why you went.”

  “I thought you knew,” he said flatly.

  “How would I know?”

  “Your mom defended me.”

  The waiter came back and placed rectangular plates and small dishes in front of us. After he left, I did what Doug did, poured soy sauce into the small dish.

  Doug deftly nabbed a block of raw tuna with chopsticks and held it in my direction. “Try?”

  I shook my head and concentrated on balancing a piece of my roll between my chopsticks. I was not good at this. And I hated to ruin the beautiful design of the plate, perfectly matching circles of rice encasing dots of pink and green. Finally I dipped one in soy sauce, chewed it slowly and swallowed, to give myself time to think. “I didn’t know my mom defended you.”

  “Of course she did. She’s the public defender. My dad sure as hell wouldn’t pay for my lawyer. He was the one who wanted me to go to juvie.”

  “For . . . ?” I was glad we were eating. We looked at our food instead of each other. That seemed to be key for Doug and me to have a conversation. The conversation was so charged that I couldn’t taste what I ate, but that was a small price to pay for what I was dying to know.

  “I went to juvie because I ran away,” he said.

  I thought I’d misunderstood him. “From home?” I clarified, frowning into my soy sauce.

  “Yes, I ran away from home, like you do when you’re six and you get mad because your dad turned off Scooby-Doo.”

  This story didn’t make sense to me. I began to realize that Doug kept his own counsel, and that he probably viewed this terse conversation as “opening up.” I would need to drag every detail out of him. “Why’d you get sent to juvie just for that?”

  “My dad asked the judge to send me. You know, to straighten me out once and for all.” In his bitter tone I recognized the bark of his father calling him a fag. I had lifted up a stepping- stone to find snakes teeming underneath.

  “Straighten you out. What was so crooked about you?” I pictured him shoplifting, smoking pot. Someone who didn’t spend a lot of time around him might suspect him of these things now, as a senior. He had that edgy personality, that cavalier expression to his eyebrows. But he would never do anything to jeopardize his chance to swim. And back in ninth grade . . . as I remembered him, he was even less likely to make juvie-worthy moves. Laughing and clueless, he hadn’t yet developed the honeyed sarcasm. I remembered being floored the first time someone told me Doug Fox was in juvie, not out of school with the flu.

  “Oh! Pffft.” He waved his chopsticks in the air, shifting again to the voice of his father. “What wasn’t crooked about me? I read too much. I wanted to swim instead of playing tough-man team sports like football. And my dad couldn’t convince me to join the navy.”

  “The navy! You?”

  “Exactly.” His hands moved in the air in front of him. “He would conscript me on my eighteenth birthday if that were still legal. But I know I couldn’t stand people telling me what to d
o. And actually having to do it. On a submarine, where I was caught.” Still gripping his chopsticks in his fourth finger and pinky, his pointer fingers and thumbs closed around an imaginary throat. Then his hands fell to the table in defeat, submerging and sinking.

  I laughed, because a little part of me still clung to the hope he was kidding.

  He wasn’t. He pinned me with an angry look. “My brother acts half dead since he came back from the navy, like he’s been lobotomized.”

  Then his angry expression faded. He realized what he’d said. Lobotomies and other treatments for mental illness were one of the topics we did not want to talk about.

  The key was to avoid looking at each other. I gazed at my plate again, dipped another slice of roll in soy sauce, and hoped he would follow suit.

  “Why’d you run away?” I asked offhandedly, slipping the bite into my mouth.

  “My dad hit me.” His finger tapped double-time on his knee, twice as fast as the beat of Japanese rock music whispering on the speakers overhead. “Sorry to lay all this on you. No wonder no one’s ever asked.”

  No one’s ever dared, I thought. I put my chopsticks down on my plate. Throughout high school I’d been a problem solver and a good listener. But I wasn’t sure I could handle this marlin I’d reeled in. “Does he still hit you?” I murmured.

  “No. I’m bigger than I used to be.” His voice was tight. His hand on his knee had stopped. “Anyway, it was this weird time. When my mom died, Cody was still around, and the three of us were okay. It was only after Cody got shipped to the Persian Gulf that my dad and I found out there’s nothing between us. Nothing.” He struck the ends of both chopsticks on his plate to even them, then turned them over and struck them again, considering his last bite of sushi. He put it in his mouth and chewed slowly. “Eight months to graduation.”

  I picked up my water glass. “To graduation.”

  We clinked glasses and sipped, watching each other.

  “Well,” I said, “I had no idea why you went to juvie or that my mother was your lawyer. She’s very big on attorney-client privilege. I’m sure she has dirt on half the town, and I’ve never heard a peep about it.”

  “She wouldn’t have told you she was defending your homecoming date?”

  We eyed each other. The look on his face was one I recognized. It was the glare he gave me right before he rolled his eyes at me, the expression Keke was so good at imitating.

  “You didn’t tell your mother we were going to homecoming?” He sighed.

  I shifted on my cushion. “I don’t remember exactly. It was three years ago.”

  It was his turn to stare me down, one black brow cocked, until I confessed.

  “If I didn’t tell her,” I said quickly, “it wasn’t because of you. I felt gangly. I didn’t involve my parents in my social life when I didn’t have to. I felt embarrassed about that sort of thing.” Still had, until last Monday night. “And when you came back to school and acted like I didn’t exist, I didn’t possess the social skills to waltz up to you and demand to know what happened.”

  “I was mad at you because you’d gone to homecoming with Carey Lewis!”

  Come to think of it, so I had. I hadn’t even remembered that boy’s name. His family had moved inland to Alabama shortly afterward. They were scared of hurricanes.

  “You were gone,” I said. “You didn’t notify me. As far as I knew, we were over. Like nothing had ever happened between us.”

  He put his chopsticks down on the table and leaned back against the wall, frowning at me. He looked so hurt that I thought back over what I’d said—and realized it sounded an awful lot like what I’d said to him Saturday morning.

  “If I’d notified you,” he said slowly, “called you up and said, ‘Hey, Zoey, I won’t be able to take you to homecoming after all because I’ll be in jail,’ would you have gone out with me later?”

  I thought, No. I said, “You never gave me that chance.”

  “You’re right. I didn’t. I was an excellent judge of character. Because three years later, you’re still holding it against me, and keeping me from getting hired as a lifeguard at your dad’s park.” He raised both eyebrows at me, daring me to deny it.

  In the week since my mother had done what she did, I had never felt more like crying. I swallowed and leaned forward over the table. “Doug,” I whispered, “I know you have a lot of reasons to be mad at me. But please don’t tell anybody about my mother.”

  He blinked. “I won’t.”

  “If not for me, for her, because she was your lawyer. Maybe not a very successful lawyer, since you went to juvie—”

  “She got me a light sentence,” he broke in. “It could have been a lot worse.”

  “Please.”

  “I said I won’t,” he repeated, watching me somberly.

  I licked my lips and took a breath to tell him thank you.

  “So!” he burst before I could get the words out. “We’ve talked about your mother, which we said we weren’t going to do. We’ve talked about us, which we definitely weren’t going to do. You haven’t asked me a single question about the wreck. And you know what that means. You’ve taken me on a date. Brandon is not going to like it, because as we all know, Brandon is your boyfriend.”

  Why were we suddenly back to this? I sat back on my heels and huffed out a sigh of frustration. “I don’t understand you.”

  He took a sip of water. “I don’t understand you,” he said without looking at me.

  “Have we been sitting here forever? How do I get a check?” I turned around to look through the opening in the partition, at the other diners on real dates with less drama.

  “There’s no charge. The hostess loves me.”

  “Oh, I want to pay.” I opened my purse to pull out a credit card. “I told you I was taking you out, and I’m paying.” Boy was I.

  Doug reached around the corner of the table for his crutches and braced himself on them, struggling to stand. By now I recognized the pain in his eyes.

  I threw a five down for the waiter, at least, and hurried around the table to help Doug. “Here.” I held out my hands to him.

  “I don’t need your help.” He braced his shoulder against the wall and slid up it, but now he dropped one crutch. He grabbed for it and caught my wrist instead.

  We both stopped moving and stared at each other. His big hand was warm and solid and tight around my wrist. His face turned red. Saying boo to Mike would make his face turn red, but Doug did not blush for just anything.

  In this instant, Doug was my boyfriend.

  “Okay.” I twisted my wrist out of his grasp and bent to pick up his fallen crutch. I had just gotten one boyfriend—Brandon—and I didn’t need another. I wasn’t like that.

  I followed Doug as he crutched slowly down the steps from the platform and through the dining room. I stood nearby as he exchanged a few last words of broken Japanese with the hostess in the doorway. I walked next to him down the sidewalk to the Benz, edging closer to him to let other laughing couples pass. All of which gave me ample time to stew about him making fun of me.

  I had to stay with Brandon. I had to. Brandon was the only good thing in my life right now, and the only thing that made perfect sense. If I broke up with him just because Doug Fox had taken a shine to me for some reason and threw jealous fits, I was a cheater, a ho who’d slept with a boy she didn’t love, and nuts.

  Trouble was, I was nuts. I was beginning to see that now. Because every time Doug complained about me dating Brandon instead of him, I wanted to agree. And that hurt.

  In the car, we sat in silence until I turned from the highway onto the main road through town. Doug muttered, “Things were going so well.”

  I ignored him and kept driving. During the summer I would have navigated through the backstreets built on bridges between inlets, reminding myself just how tenuous our town’s hold was on the shifting ocean and earth. I would have swerved left and right through a maze of low beach houses overgrown with ho
tly scented flowering vines, just to avoid the strip. The main road through town ground to a halt at this time of night when the tourists were in town, eating at Tahiti Cuisine, browsing the books at Beach Reads, taking advantage of the half-off sunset admission to Slide with Clyde. The tourists were gone now, store hours shortened, Slide with Clyde closed, sidewalks empty, roads clear. The faster to drive Doug away.

  “I don’t know how this happened,” Doug said.

  “What you mean is, ‘I’m sorry, Zoey.’”

  “I’m sorry, Zoey,” he said immediately.

  I turned in at the road to the wharf, then realized I might be driving to the wrong place. “Do you want me to take you to your house, or—”

  “The wharf’s fine. I have some paperwork to finish for the business. My dad can’t do math.”

  “But you can’t do math either.” Calculus was the one class I didn’t share with Doug. He was in a lower-level class and still didn’t make the grade for National Honor Society, which was probably why he was so desperate for an athletic scholarship.

  “I come by it honest,” he said as I pulled the Benz to a stop at the docks.

  I waited.

  He waited.

  The motor was running. Did he want me to get out and open the door for him? I stared straight ahead at a streetlight until my eyes watered.

  And then he was hugging me. Half hugging me, really, because I didn’t hug him back. His cheek rested against my shoulder and his arm reached across my chest to my far side. “Okay then. I had a great time,” he said, syrupy and sarcastic. He squeezed me hard and let me go, sliding out of the seat and slamming the door.

  Soon I realized I should drive home or he would come back and ask me why I was still sitting there. But for a few moments I enjoyed the residual tingles rippling along my skin like the fireflies leftover from summer, zooming and firing in the dusk. I watched him crutching into the streetlight. He disappeared under the brightness.

  A boy who was such a threat to my mental health and happiness should not be so tall.