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23. Forced Proximity

23

Forced Proximity

“No!” Luke exclaims. “No. No. No. This is bad.” He rushes to the door and bangs it with his fist.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, backing up. My hip pushes against the metal bar and we hear the lock unlatching.

Luke pulls me away from the door. “If you press that handle, you break the emergency mechanism and trigger the fire alarm.”

I jump away from it. “Why would you come through this door then?”

“Because turning off the alarm system leaves a record and this door is the only one that’s a one-way alarm. Using the key to get in isn’t recorded. It’s only when you try to leave. Why would you pull the door closed behind you?”

“How was I supposed to know it’s some trick door with a thousand rules?” I ask defensively, anger rising in my voice to hide my anxiety.

“One rule. Don’t let the door close behind you. One.”

“What now? How do we get out?”

“We don’t. Not unless you want to alert the fire department.”

Not only don’t I want that. I can’t have it. I pull my jacket around me. Dean Perez warned me about boys and everything else, no more stunts. I got my one strike. There’s no second or third. Next one, I’m out.

“There has to be another way out. What do we do?”

Luke sits on the nearest bench beside the pool. The smell of chlorine fills my nostrils.

“There isn’t. We wait until someone finds us.”

I start pacing. “Finds us? Oh, no. I really can’t get into any more trouble.”

“More?” Luke asks. “When are you going to tell me what everyone else knows but I don’t?”

Like a reflex, I say, “It’s nothing.”

Luke leans back to rest on his elbows. I can feel his eyes following me as I pace back and forth. He doesn’t push me for answers or try to get any more information out of me as seems to be his way. He just watches as I walk a few feet in one direction, then a few feet back.

“You’re seriously not going to ask me anything else?”

Luke keeps his eyes on me. “I did. You chose not to answer. I’m not going to pry you open like a stuck jar of pickles.”

I stop pacing. “That’s such a weird simile to choose.”

“Only because you’re the pickle jar.”

“Eww. That sounds even worse. It’s like you’re going to turn me upside down and smack me until you can pop me open.”

Luke wrinkles his nose. “Why do you make opening a stuck jar of pickles sound like a BDSM scene? You know you can run jars under hot water and use a spoon to break the vacuum? You don’t have to spank your pickle jar into submission.”

I close my eyes and hold up a hand. “This conversation has gone in a really bizarre direction.”

“I know I’ll never look at a jar of pickles the same way again.”

I roll my eyes. “Get up. Come on. I’m sure we can find a way out.”

“There isn’t one.”

“Humor me.” I take off toward the locker rooms.

“Don’t bother with the gender-neutral one,” Luke says as he catches up. “It can only be accessed from the deck and there’s only the one door. And the other locker rooms lock from outside.”

“How are you so sure?” I walk into the women’s locker room and test the door. It doesn’t budge.

“I’m the one who locked them.”

I head to the men’s locker room in case Luke’s wrong. He’s not.

“Told you so,” he says when I return to the deck.

“Isn’t there an office or some sort of maintenance hatch?” I ask.

“The office is down the hallway outside and there’s no access to maintenance areas from the deck. You can’t have people wandering through all the pumps and chemicals.”

“How about windows or those skylights?”

Luke points up. “Even if you could scale the walls, they don’t open.”

I climb the bleacher steps. “What about that door?” I call.

“Storage.”

“Who designed this building?” I ask.

“Want me to text Evie? She gives campus tours. I bet she’d know.”

I groan at the mention of Evie. She’d be one of the last people I’d text. Then an idea comes to me. “Wanda. She’ll get us out of here.”

“How? She doesn’t have a key. She’d have to find someone from the college to spring us.”

“Right. Don’t text her.”

“Too late.” Almost instantly, Luke’s phone dings and vibrates. “She says she’ll let your mom know you’re not going to be home tonight.”

“I told you not to text her,” I say, coming down the steps.

Luke lies down on one of the benches. “I didn’t listen,” he says. “Remind you of anyone?” He closes his eyes and crosses his hands over his chest. “I’m guessing Wanda is another person who you let into your pickle jar?”

I screw up my face. “I’m serious. Put that on your list of phrases to never say to me again.”

“Are you one of those people who hates the words moist and wad too?”

“Not if they come before cake or of cash ,” I reply.

“Moist wad of cash,” Luke says. “Casanova’s pickle jar.”

“How do I get you to stop?”

Luke pivots his body and is up, standing in front of me in one fluid motion. We’re as close as we were on the day we met at Corner Books. “Give me a good enough reason to.” In the moonlight coming through the windows along the tops of the walls, the skin along his cheekbones and nose radiates with that golden undertone.

His eyes hold mine.

I refuse to look away first.

I realize (too late, I admit to myself) Luke never lacked curiosity. Nor was he simply respecting my privacy. He’d been running me under warm water to loosen me up. He was giving me time to trust him.

I take a deep breath and tell Luke everything. About Truman and the unicorn and the fountain. About how I planned this grand gesture to win him over. About the Summer of Bobby and the smashed window and losing my job and nearly losing college too. About the statue and Cass and Corner Books and the Baroness. About Roger and the video. The story spills out like water onto cobblestones. Then it slows to a drip before it stops.

Luke listens. When I’m done, he waits a few seconds, tilting his head to the side, his eyes roaming my face. He steps forward. He pulls me in, closing his arms around me, and he holds me. One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight—I stop counting long before he releases me.

I avoid his eyes and fumble for the start of a sentence before I manage to get out, “What was that for?”

“Because you needed it,” Luke replies. “And because I don’t think you’ll like what I have to say next.” He pauses and although I’m not looking at him, I can feel the heat of his eyes on my face. “If this video has so much power over you, you need to confront it. You need to watch it.”

I meet his eyes. “How does that make any sense?”

“The video is not the issue. Your fear is. The longer you wait, the more it grows and controls your future actions. Give yourself a birthday gift and don’t let anything have that power over you.” Luke takes out his phone, unlocks it, and hands it to me. “We can do it together. It won’t be as bad as you think.”

As I sit down on the bench, I realize I’m shivering. Luke sits beside me, so close he could have his arm across my shoulders in a breath and pull me into him. My fingers hesitate above the phone screen.

“You’re the most determined person I know. If you want to end this, you’ve got everything in you already to do it.” Luke puts a hand on my knee. “You do want this to end. Don’t you?”

I think about pulling the shades and cloistering myself in the darkened living room. My biles. My Danish disease. The Summer of Bobby. Truman. My humiliation. Luke is right. I could have let it go. I could have moved on. But I didn’t.

I push my finger to the screen and access my online storage drive. I find the unedited video. All the footage from the day at the fountain in its entirety. All the stuff that didn’t stream.

“If we’re going to do this, it needs to be the full version. No one has seen all of it. Not even me.”

“Remember,” Luke says, “it’s only a video. It’s all in the past.”

Except it’s not yet.

I inhale sharply as I press play and watch myself laid out on an inflatable rainbow unicorn raft veering off course.

The small screen is a series of images, each one a different feed from the cameras set up around the courtyard. A green rectangle appears around the screen Wanda was sending out live.

Madonna’s voice is tinny on the phone’s speakers. The dancers don’t immediately miss their cues as I sail under the fountain’s curtain of water and emerge, drenched, a few seconds later.

Seeing myself on camera is surreal. I have no control over the mini-Bobbies. I can’t scream at them or warn them. I am aware of exactly how someone watching sees me. The wobble of my arm flab. The way the rolls above my hips stick out. The roundness of my cheeks and my extra chin. None of those things are as apparent when I look in a mirror.

A ripple goes through the dancers when I’m not where I should be to lift. One of them moves to grab the raft, presumably to pull me back on track but stops when I begin to paddle.

The raft shoots up with the rubbery squeak of friction against taut plastic before I splash into the fountain.

Truman stands in the shadows of Campus Books’ entrance. A figure behind him. Truman turns his head to whisper.

Wanda cuts the Madonna remix and the only sound in the courtyard is the fountain.

Then my voice plays, high, faltering, nervous. I stammer. I don’t remember stammering.

Truman’s voice is soft. The mics barely pick him up.

The onlookers shift nervously, hands over mouths as they whisper to one another. Evie holds her phone in front of her, recording.

The rose, red in my hands. Truman shakes his head. It’s a warning to stop. I don’t pay attention. He turns to go.

I stoop and pick up the pebbles. Then the fateful rock. My throw is weak. Still, the stone finds its mark.

In one rectangle my entire body angles as I fall backward. I didn’t realize until now, my ass hits the edge of the fountain.

In another rectangle, I watch as Scott and Truman hear the glass crashing. It’s Evie who screams at them, “Watch out!”

Scott rushes out of the shadows of Campus Books and shields Truman with his body while the fractures spread like a spiderweb. Then a large section of the window drops, followed by smaller sections, as if in slow motion, giving up their desire to hang on. Pieces of glass spray across the courtyard.

People scatter away from the shards shooting toward them.

I flounder in the water. I slip several times trying to gain my footing and flop, gripping the fountain’s edge, spluttering. Two dancers help me.

I touch my head, see the blood, and sway on the spot. I grab the rose, drop to my knees, and hold it out again to Truman. The recording picks up both our voices, mine stilted from catching my breath. Tru’s quiet, trying not to be picked up at all. He tells Wanda to cut the stream. The green rectangle turns red then disappears.

Wanda begins turning off the cameras. Sections of the screen go black, before the individual rectangles disappear. The others get larger to occupy more space.

The last camera feed shows Truman leading me over the broken glass, one hand between my shoulders and the other on my elbow as he helps me. Scott gives Truman a handful of paper towels which Truman pushes against my head.

I don’t know why Wanda didn’t cut the last camera’s feed faster. It keeps recording.

“You’re hurt,” Truman says.

I begin to shiver, one hand pressing the paper towel to my bleeding head.

Evie emerges from Campus Books holding a blanket. Wanda is at my side. The two of them wrap it around me. Evie, Wanda, and Scott linger.

“Give us a minute?” Truman asks.

They step away, off-screen.

Truman rubs my shoulders and arms. “Do you need medical attention?”

I shake my head forcefully. Eyes closed. I remember hoping the water dripping down my face hid my tears. I turn my head away from Tru.

“You’re a good kid, Bobby,” Truman says softly. “I like you a lot. But not the way you hoped.”

He ducks his head, hoping to catch my eyes. “At least look at me, Bobby,” he says. “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right,” I hear myself whisper, each word forced.

“Let me take you home. We can talk some more on the way.”

I shake my head. “Stop being nice to me.”

“I’m sorry, Bobby,” Truman says. He stops rubbing my back and arms. “You’re a great kid. Really. Some other guy would be lucky to have you. I promise.”

“But not the one I want.” I see myself straighten up and push the blanket off. I shove it back into Truman’s arms. “We don’t need to talk. There’s nothing to say. Just leave me alone.”

Truman reaches out for me. I push his hand away. We stand in the wreckage of my plans for the Summer of Bobby and what it means to have me love him.