Saturday afternoon. I’m nervous as I make my way into the pool area where (after some light internet stalking) I figured out that Leo’s swim meet was being held. But it’s a good nervous. I feel prepared this time. Ready, like I said. I even feel pretty. My hair has been tamed and braided over one shoulder. I’m wearing some light makeup and the prearranged outfit and a pair of strappy sandals that show off the pedicure Afton gave me. The shoes are Afton’s, too. We don’t have the same size bodies, so we’ve never been able to share clothes, but we do have the same size feet: seven and a half.
I trot those strappy sandals up to a seat in the bleachers. From above I spot Leo right away. His cowlick is covered by a swim cap, and his eyes with goggles, but I still recognize him by his height and the chest-forward way he strides along the edge of the pool. He’s wearing a black Speedo with a bright blue letter Q on the side—Q for Quicksilver, the name of his swim team.
I don’t try to get his attention, and I don’t text to tell him I’m here. I don’t want him to know yet. I’ve been imagining a moment while he’s swimming when he’ll look up, and then he’ll see me here, and I will wave and cheer, and he will smile and swim even faster.
He’s gorgeous in the water, graceful in a way he isn’t on solid ground. I compose a half dozen mental sketches of him swimming, the shapes filling my mind: the double arcs of his arms sluicing through the crystalline liquid, his legs trailing behind, the fierce set of his mouth as he pushes forward. I can almost understand his preoccupation with Michael Phelps. There’s something mesmerizing about watching Leo do what he does best.
But he never looks up. When he’s in the water he’s completely focused, and when he’s out of the water he concentrates on his teammates, encouraging them, calling out their names.
“Go, Kayla!” he screams during one of the girls’ races. “You’ve got this, Kayla! You’re killing it, Kayla! Go!”
I wonder if the swimmers can even hear what people shout at them, or if their ears are full of water. I guess it doesn’t matter. The point is that people are cheering them on.
I feel proud when Leo wins first place in his division, like my presence has brought him good luck, like that day on the boardwalk. I’m happy for him, of course, but I’m also happy because now tonight’s sex can be a celebration of his awesomeness. If he lost, it might feel like consolation sex, which sounds like less fun. The only problem is that I can’t stay the night. My family is leaving for Hawaii at nine a.m. tomorrow morning.
Hawaii is turning out to be a major inconvenience in my life.
I wait until the meet is completely over—the medals handed out and everything—before approaching Leo. Outside the men’s locker room I pause a moment to reapply my lip balm. I want my lips to be soft and smooth against his when we kiss. My heart is beating fast again. But good fast.
“Hello there,” I imagine myself saying as he comes out. Or maybe I’ll try to come up with something bold like I said that first day in his mother’s gallery, like, “It must be exhausting, being that good at swimming.”
This is it: I hear his voice from the hall that connects the men’s and the women’s locker rooms. He’s talking to someone. He’s laughing. This is my big moment.
I adjust my braid and check my breath: minty. The strappy sandals looked amazing. My toenails are gorgeous. This is as good as it gets. My body tenses. My feet start to walk around the corner to reveal myself.
“You know,” Leo’s saying, “my mom’s out of town until Tuesday.”
Something about the way he says it freezes my breath inside me. It’s exactly the same—the same cadence to his voice, the same words, the same undercurrent beneath them.
My mom’s out of town until Tuesday.
But my body is already moving around the corner, and I can’t stop it, so I keep walking, and instantly get an eyeful of my boyfriend—my miracle, mine—leaning in to kiss another girl. They are both angled in perfect profile: Leo’s sharp straight nose, his full lips, his cowlick. The girl’s delicate chin. She’s one of the swimmers, her hair still wet, leaving damp trails across the shoulder of her sweatshirt.
“That sounds promising,” she says to Leo after they’ve kissed for an uncomfortable amount of time. “So we’ll have your house all to ourselves.” She has to crane her neck to smile up at him. Because she’s so petite.
“You could even stay the night,” he says.
“Wait.” I find my voice. “That might get a little crowded.”
I say this without even thinking, and much louder than I intend to. Leo and the girl swing to face me. Leo’s eyes widen so dramatically I could laugh, if I thought I’d ever be capable of laughter again.
“Ada,” he says, sounding breathless, but then he was just sucking face with someone else. There wasn’t a lot of time for breathing properly.
I should say something scathing. That crowded comment was pretty good, but now I need something that will brutally cut him off at the knees. Something truly devastating.
“I wanted to surprise you,” I state hoarsely. “You look . . . surprised.” Epic fail. I spin around and stagger for the exit. The strappy sandals might be good for looking sexy, but they are shit for running.
And even worse, Leo is running after me. Alongside me, I realize. Talking to me. Although I’m not really registering what he’s saying.
“Ada, stop!” he exclaims as I reach the main door. He pulls me away from the line of people leaving the pool. “Please stop. Talk to me.”
I stop, if only because he said please. “I can’t think of anything to say.”
“I’m sorry if that hurt you just now,” he begins.
“If? You’re my boyfriend, and you were—”
Cheating. That’s the word for it. Leo is cheating on me. I’ve been cheated on.
“No, it’s not like that.” He shakes his head, his honey-brown eyes sorrowful, like this is all a tragic misunderstanding. I feel an improbable flash of hope, like maybe it isn’t like that—Leo cheating on me. Maybe I’m misinterpreting things somehow.
“We never established that I was your boyfriend, Ada,” Leo says. “We didn’t talk about being exclusive. I’m seeing now that we probably should have.”
I let out an incredulous, unladylike snort. “We’ve been dating for six months!” I exclaim, even though it’s only been five.
“I wouldn’t call it dating,” he says. “Do people even say that anymore?”
God. This is worse than cheating. This is Leo saying that I was never important enough to him to classify as his girlfriend. But I can’t bring myself to believe that. Every moment I’ve spent with Leo lately suggests otherwise.
“Is this because I wouldn’t have sex with you?” I whisper. “I turned you down last night, so for tonight you thought you’d find a girl who’d actually put out?”
What does that even mean, put out? Put out what, exactly?
“Oh my god, no!” Leo says in disgust. “How could you think that?”
I gesture impatiently toward the locker rooms, where the other girl is still standing there with an increasingly hurt expression.
“No,” Leo protests. “I don’t care that you didn’t want to have sex with me. I mean, I was hoping you would, but it’s fine. You weren’t ready. I was okay with that.”
“So you just—I don’t know—found a girl who was ready?”
“I’m not assuming that she’s going to have sex with me. I thought I’d see what happens, go with it, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” I say. “But she—”
“I actually think you’d really like Kayla,” he continues, the most nonsensical thing he’s said so far. “Did you see her swim today? She’s got the best form of any girl on the team. And she’s really funny. She—”
“Please stop talking about Kayla,” I say.
“Okay.” He nods. Clears his throat. “I just think if you got to know her—”
“You said you loved me,” I say, again too loudly, and someone passing by catches the words and hoots at us. We both redden. I cross my arms over my chest. “That was yesterday, that you said that. Less than twenty-four hours ago.”
“I know. I didn’t mean—”
“So you meant it like the way a person says they love peanut butter cups.”
His eyebrows squeeze together in confusion. “I don’t like peanut butter.”
I close my eyes for a few seconds. “Fine. So maybe the way a person says they love a good cheeseburger.” My stomach turns at the thought. The chlorine smell of the pool is so strong it makes me feel dizzy. I lean against the wall and take a deep breath.
Leo scratches at the back of his neck. “Yeah, I guess I meant it that way. I do like you, Ada. Really. You have to believe me. I meant it, what I said.”
“So I’m the cheeseburger in this scenario. And she—” I gesture again toward the locker rooms.
“Kayla,” he fills in.
“Thank you. Kayla. She’s the shrimp cocktail.”
“Actually, I’m allergic to shrimp,” he says.
“Goodbye, Leo,” I say. I push off from the wall and run for the door.
This time he doesn’t run after me.
I’m halfway through the parking lot when I think of more I want to say. About how if you kiss someone regularly, if you go on (I do the calculations in my head) twenty or possibly twenty-one dates with a boy, over the course of five fucking months, it should be safe to assume that he’s your boyfriend. And about honesty. And about communicating your expectations.
I turn around and march back to tell him this, to make sure that he understands I don’t accept his half-assed excuses. But then I see Leo walking with the other girl—the hilarious and talented Kayla—and his arm is around her, and he’s clearly trying to talk her down, too. And for some reason I duck behind a car to eavesdrop on them.
“I met her at one of my mom’s art shows,” Leo says as they pass me crouched behind a VW Bug. “I think she got a crush on me because she was obsessed with my mom’s sculptures—and so many of them are of me. She’s a nice girl, but we don’t actually have a lot in common.”
Subtext: unlike Kayla, who clearly has so much in common with Leo. Kayla is likable. A good swimmer. Funny. Athletic. Undeniably attractive.
“She looked upset,” Kayla murmurs. “I felt so bad for her.”
Oh, and great, Kayla is nice, too.
Leo smiles, a kid-seeing-a-baby-kitten type smile, because he’s come to the same conclusion. “That’s so sweet. You’re a really good person, Kayla.”
It’s too much. I stand up. “You know what, fuck you, Leo,” I scream, and everybody in the parking lot turns to stare at us. I shoot a killing glare at Kayla, nice or not. “And fuck you, too.”
I’ve never said that before to anyone: fuck you.
Which is literally about sex.
Which is something I’m not going to be having anytime soon.