Things I Like about Myself by Lori Palmer
I’m a good sister.
I’m a real artist.
The next day in the middle of class, my name wafted through the loudspeaker. I was to report to the school counselor’s office. My first thought was that they’d found out I was the graffiti artist and now I might be in trouble. A follow-up article had been done in which they’d mentioned just how illegal it was to paint over a national road. And then another thought hit me, worse than the first—that something bad had happened to Zac. I stood up and rushed out, twenty pairs of eyes staring at me. I walked up to the counselor’s door and knocked nervously.
“Come in,” a male voice returned.
I pushed the door open and stared at the man behind the desk. I hoped my face didn’t betray what I was thinking—I was thinking a lot. He was standing behind the desk, bleached-blond hair, bright-orange tan, and teeth a new shade of white: uber-hyperwhite. He was also wearing an offensively bright Hawaiian T-shirt and was lifting weights.
“Twelve, thirteen,” he counted as the weights moved up and down. “Take a seat. Pull up a chair. Just finishing my reps . . . fourteen, fifteen . . .”
I sat down and watched him as he pumped the weights, hard.
“Twenty!” he declared finally. He walked over to the water dispenser in the corner and turned to me. “H2O?”
“Huh?” It took me a second. “Oh. Water. Right. No. Thanks.”
“Cool beans.” He poured himself a cup and then strode back to the desk. Who said cool beans?
He sat loudly, collapsing into his chair. He downed the water, scrunched up the plastic cup and then, as if rehearsed, as if he was trying to show off, he tossed it over his shoulder where it fell into the trash can. He looked so pleased with himself I almost expected him to jump up and say “Booya!” But he didn’t. Thank goodness for small mercies.
He crossed his leg and a big, orange calf muscle bulged. I guess in some circles, some women might find this kind of thing attractive. I tried not to stare, but his shorts were so short that I was sure I could see up them. They were the kind that a ball—or two—might pop out of. And suddenly, I found myself wondering if his balls were as orange as his legs.
“So, Lori Palmer.” He placed his hand on the desk in front of us. “I’m Xander Brown.”
Xander Orange was more like it. “Nice to meet you,” I said and looked down at his fingers, which he was now tapping against the desk. I blinked a few times when I noticed the unusual negative space on the table.
“Shark attack,” he said, holding up his hand, displaying his obviously missing middle finger. And then he stood up and hoisted up part of his shirt to reveal a massive jagged scar that ran the length of his waist. “Got me right down to the liver. A few more millimeters and he would have ripped it right out of me.”
“Oh. Okay . . . that’s, um . . . wow!” I offered up, unsure of how to reply to this.
“I tried to poke him in the eye.” He held his hand up again. “And that’s when he took my finger.”
He sat back down in the chair. “I was surfing and was just about to come out of my roundhouse cutback when it came at me. And you know what?” He leaned over the table and locked eyes with me.
“What?”
“There was a moment where we looked at each other. Eyeball to eyeball. And I swear I heard him say—with his mind”—he cleared his throat dramatically—“‘This is my territory, buddy.’” He said it in a strange, gruff voice, which I assumed was meant to be the shark’s voice. But why would a shark say “buddy” if he was planning on biting you?
And then he smacked his hands together loudly and I flinched. “And bam! He was on me. Sank his teeth straight in and tossed me around like a rag doll. Like I weighed nothing! And I’ll tell you what, Lori. I didn’t feel a thing, not a thing, that’s how much adrenaline was pumping through my veins.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said lamely.
“No! Not sorry, Lori. Not sorry at all. Because if he hadn’t gotten me, I wouldn’t be the man I am today, and I certainly wouldn’t have written . . .” He swiveled his chair around, pulled something off the shelf and then passed it to me. “. . . this!”
I looked down at the book in my hands. Staring Death in the (Shark) Eye. A giant, creepy shark’s eye stared back at me from the cover.
“Open it up, read the dedication.” He pointed at the book and clicked his fingers together.
I opened it and read loudly, “‘Dedicated to the shark who bit me.’”
“Bingo! Binnnng-gooo! But why did I dedicate this book to the shark, you’re probably thinking?” he asked, but I got the feeling it was a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer. “Because my whole life changed after that. I got out of a very toxic relationship, moved from Durban to Cape Town, and that’s when I made the decision to write about my experiences, become a motivational speaker and school counselor.”
I put the book back on the table and nodded. “Sounds, uh, good.”
“It is all good. All great. The universe is good. You just have to listen to it. And do you think I gave up surfing after that?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“No! No, Lori, I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. Fall off the old bike, dust yourself off, and get back up. Or in my case, go to the hospital, have five blood transfusions, three hundred and fifty-six stitches, and a kidney removed. Booya!” This time he did say that.
“Oh.” I was floored. This guy was a total nutcase.
“So!” He banged his hand on the desk again. “Lori. You’re probably wondering why you’re here?”
“I am.”
“Well, as school counselor, I always like to check in with our lucky new pupils who’ve joined the BWH family. Just to make sure they’re happy. BWH is a special place and I want everyone to have the best experience possible. So are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Having the best experience possible?”
“Sure. I guess.”
“Good! And is there anything troubling you?”
“No.”
“Excellent. Anything confusing about your schedule, or classes?”
I shook my head.
“Great!”
“Making friends?” he asked.
“Uh . . .” I hesitated. I thought about Jake and me. Were we friends? I guess we were. I tried to stop myself from smiling and nodded. “Yes, making friends.”
“Fan-tas-tic! Have you thought about joining any after-school clubs? Netball maybe?” he asked.
“Netball?” I scoffed.
“You have a great pair of hands on you. I saw you catch the ball at the water polo game.”
I couldn’t help it, but I chuckled. “That was a total accident, I assure you.”
He sat back in his chair and folded his arms. “There are no accidents, Lori. Only meant-to-be’s.”
“Meant-to-be’s,” I repeated. “Right.”
And then he stood up and clapped his hands together enthusiastically. “Looks like you are fitting in perfectly, Lori! Really embracing the BWH spirit.”
I gave a halfhearted nod. I wanted to say “I wouldn’t go that far,” but didn’t.
“Great to meet you, Lori, and if you ever need anything . . . please, you know where I am.”
Was this it? My big counseling session? It must have been, because suddenly he was holding his office door open for me.
“Sure. I know where you are.”
“And here . . .” He ran back to his desk and picked up the book. “I’ll even autograph it for you,” he said, signing it with a flurry. “But don’t tell anyone else, or they’ll all be wanting autographs.” He laughed at that and then gave it to me. “Read it. Learn from it. Take it all in. And remember, everything you ever wanted is on the other side of fear.” He dazzled me with a blinding smile. So big and bright, just like everyone else around here. Just like my mother’s Cheshire poster smile. Everyone here seemed to radiate positivity like sunbeams—throw them lemons, and you’d be sure to get lemonade. Maybe even pink lemonade. But I knew that my mother’s poster smile was fake, and I wondered if his was too? I walked out of his office and closed the door behind me. I stood there in a contemplative, confused silence for a while, trying to absorb all this BWH strangeness.
“Lori.” Jake walked toward me, catching me off guard. “I see you met Xander.” He pointed at the book.
“I did indeed.”
“Did he autograph it?”
I flipped it open and showed him.
“He spelled your name wrong.” I looked down at my name spelled L-o-r-r-y, and for some reason felt flattered that Jake had noticed this.
“I suppose he told you about the shark?”
“Yup,” I said as we both started walking down the corridor together. “And how he almost lost his liver. Wait, is that why he’s so orange? Isn’t that a liver thing?”
“It’s just bad self-tan. You should see his Tinder profile pic, Vuyo showed it to me.”
“Oh?”
“Let’s just say, if you think he looks orange in real life . . .”
I laughed at this. It was hard to imagine anything being more orange. A tangerine maybe.
“So, what are you doing tomorrow evening? Around five?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Cool, because it’s Lisa’s birthday tomorrow. We don’t make a big deal of it. She gets really stressed about it.”
“Zac too.” I thought back to his disastrous birthday party of a few years ago.
“We don’t have parties for her. She gets too—”
“Overwhelmed.” I cut him off. “I know. We don’t do parties for Zac either.”
We both stopped walking and looked at each other. I could see he was feeling the same thing I was, so I voiced it. “It sucks for them that they can’t enjoy those kinds of things.”
“It does.”
We looked at each other for a moment. And then we both smiled. I don’t know why he was smiling, exactly. But I knew why I was.
Because you luurve him. You wanna have babies with him, the voice in my head sang at me mockingly. God, I was getting sick of her. I quickly broke eye contact and carried on walking.
“We usually do a quiet family thing at home. But I know she would love it if Zac came,” he said, catching up to me. “She told me today that Zac is her BFF.”
I stopped walking. “Zac’s not great at other people’s houses. I wouldn’t want him to freak out and ruin her party.”
Suddenly, that hand, that hand that belonged to Jake Jones-Evans, was on my shoulder, and my whole body, every single microscopic cell in it, reacted. It burst into flames and burned with the intensity of a million exploding stars.
“Don’t worry. He can freak out. No one will judge.”
“If you’re sure?”
“I’m inviting you, aren’t I? And it would mean the world to Lisa.”
“BFFs? They’re so cute,” I said.
“They are.”
“Okay, cool,” I conceded.
“I’ll text you the details.” He looked back down at the book in my hands. “Chapter seven’s a real eye-opener.”
“I’ll be sure to read it, then,” I replied.
And then he turned and walked away from me. I stared after him. I hadn’t intended to, but I felt his sudden absence so acutely that all I could do was watch him walk away. My stare was interrupted when I heard a giggle. I looked to my left and there she was. Amber. Staring at me with a smile plastered across her face, the kind of smile a shark might have before it calls you buddy and then rips an organ out and spits it onto the cold, hard floor.