The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [35]
“Well, you find your boyfriend yet?” Stacey would ask. Her lips curled into something closer to a sneer than a smile. For a while I pretended not to notice. Then one day in a rush of indignation I said in a haughty tone, “As a matter of fact I did. See that blond boy over there?” I pointed to a nice-looking high school boy standing by the diving board.
Stacey glowered. “Not funny, Paisley. Mason’s my boyfriend. You fool with him and I’ll tear your eyes out.”
I thought she really would. Her expression turned stony, her hands curled into fists. Mason sprang high off the board, dived in, and swam to our section of the pool.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Stacey said. “Keep away from her,” she hissed to him, nodding in my direction. “Tell her you’re spoken for. Tell her you belong to me.”
“Don’t you wish.” Mason laughed. Stacey laughed. Her cohorts laughed. They’d been putting me on—though Stacey’s expression said she wished her story were true. Briefly, Mason regarded me with more interest than he probably would have otherwise, to see what he was supposed to avoid. A sweet cramp fluttered through my belly. I couldn’t have stated in words exactly what it meant, but I knew.
“And here I thought he was my boyfriend!” said another voice, throaty and mellow, coming from a sweet-faced girl who’d walked up behind us. Molly. I’d seen her before.
Mason winked at me. “Molly loves me because I’m such a hunk.”
He flung his arm around her, his thick tanned hand connecting with the tanned skin of her slender arm. The air whooshed out of me, the baseball bat connected with my head, my vision went blurry. I would have knocked his arm away and taken her place, if I hadn’t gotten my wits about me just in time. In a flash of intuition, I understood that Stacey was no threat for Mason’s affections, but Molly was.
I found out he helped coach the swim team. No one joins the swim team at twelve and hopes to compete with kids who’ve been at it since they were eight. I signed up anyway. Workouts were at seven in the morning. I didn’t know until I got there that Molly was a swim coach, too.
I made a fool of myself. Practice, practice, practice, but for the life of me I couldn’t perfect my breast stroke. Invariably, in every length I swam, without being aware of it, I’d do a scissors kick instead of the frog kick. I was disqualified at every meet. Mason would come over and say, “It’s all right, it’ll come, it just takes time.” Sometimes Molly would get into the water, sleek and calm, her low voice reassuring. “Let me show you again, Paisley. I’ll do it and you copy.” Over and over. Frog kick. Frog kick. And sure enough, at the last meet, when I made it the full length of the pool in correct form, Mason was waiting at the other end, applauding silently, giving me a thumbs-up sign. Molly, too.
I might have been their slightly clumsy younger sister.
Over the winter I saw them at basketball games at the high school. Mason’s blond hair had grown out brown, no longer streaked by the sun. Molly’s hair stayed light. Bleached, I thought, but I wanted that hair, that resonant voice, that sweetness. In a way, I loved her. I wanted her for a friend. It was complicated. I wanted Mason more.
They broke up now and then. I wasn’t allowed to go out with him for two more years. “And not exclusively, Paisley,” my mother would say. “You’re too young. For that matter, so is he.” Sometimes we met in secret, which added to the allure. Then I’d find some other boy and he’d find some other girl, often—guess who?—Stacey. Which didn’t bother me. Then he’d get back together with Molly, which did.
The year I was a senior in high school, I ran into Stacey in JCPenney. “You think just because you look the way you do, you can get anybody you want, don’t you?”
She didn’t know Mason was going out with Molly at the time. I didn’t tell her. I was surprised