Chapter #42The Story of a Crush by: Seuzz   You've got three reasons to blush as you stare at your reflection in the bathroom mirror. Stephanie wears only the very lightest makeup—a little face powder and some lip gloss—but your cheeks are rouged like a clown's with embarrassment.
First is your own mortification at getting wet and weak-kneed at the thought of Marc Garner. Just the thought of him looses a flock of butterflies into your stomach.
Your mind flashes back a few weeks, to the charity soccer demonstration at the community soccer fields. Stephanie had plopped down next to you—or, as you remember it now, you plopped down next to Will Prescott. Are the Garners here? you asked him. Marc's down that way, he said. You rocketed up and shoved him away to look. Yes, Marc was over there, watching the game intently. Should I go over to sit with him? Would that be okay? What would he say? What would I say? It wouldn't be weird, I see him all the time when I see his sisters, I could say I'm waiting for them to show up. 'Oh, they're not coming? That sucks,' but I'd stay there with him and help him cheer Westside on even though—
You and Stephanie both wince at what comes after that "though." Even though he's dating that bitch Hannah Westrick. Your throat tightens.
Yeah, Stephanie has a giant crush on Marc Garner, and you can't get that crush out of your head or stop it from twisting your guts in knots.
Stephanie's psyche is also mortified by what she—you—are feeling. You're not even meeting Eva and Jessica, not really, and there's no way Marc will be there. So it's just humiliating to be so wound up over him that you'll make yourself nearly sick just because you're going to be with people who remind you of him.
And then there's the embarrassment you feel at what you and Caleb—and who knows who else—suspected of her. A dyke! Fuck you, Prescott! You too, Johansson! Just because I like sports and take sports seriously and don't like wearing dresses, you assume I'm— Fuck you!
Stephanie's a bit of a romantic too, about Marc. It's what makes her so furious about Marc's falling all over Hannah. For five years, at least, Stephanie has been saving herself for him.
That's right. Stephanie Wyatt's a virgin.
At least I don't have to worry about those kinds of memories, you mordantly reflect as you flip off the bathroom light. No, you add, I just get to live with the fantasies.
* * * * *
You're meeting with Carlos and Mike and Philip, but in body it will be Philip and Eva and Jessica, so you can't get the Garners out of the forefront of your mind as you drive the old station wagon out to the library. You're careful to watch the traffic and the lights, but it's automatic, like it's your lizard brain driving while you fret over wasn'ts and might-have-beens.
Stephanie—you—with both perspectives it's a bifurcated vision of the past, but the vivid aliveness and sickness of it all is Stephanie's entirely; yet it's your guts twisting, so you give in and think of it as happening to you—
—and your family moved to Saratoga Falls when you were nine. You were already a tomboy athlete then, and were delighted to make friends with two girls equally rambunctious. Eva and Jessica were twins, but they had a brother, and it was a bit of shock to discover that triplets didn't have to be all girls or all boys. Marc was as wild as them, and maybe more so, because he had to fight twice as hard (their mother told you after he tore through one of your games like a tornado, sending three girls screeching inside with furious tears) to keep up with his two sisters. For the first year he was just a nuisance and a hellion. But the next year he got into soccer just like you and the other girls did. You practiced all the time with him and his sisters, at first just to show him that girls were too better at soccer than boys, and then because he was the only one who took it even remotely as seriously as you did. Pretty soon, he was the only one that could keep up with you; and not long after that, you were the only one that could keep up with him.
And he just kept getting bigger and stronger, and his teeth got brighter, and his voice dropped, and one day when you were in middle school you looked across the soccer field and saw this golden-limbed young god striding confidently toward you, and it gave you chills all over. You'd had TV and movie crushes before, but those were safe because they were just actors on the other side of a screen, and somehow not even real. But the one coming toward you was real, and you could touch him if you wanted to, and all of a sudden you did want to touch him.
You didn't even recognize that it was Marc until he was only twenty feet from you, and it was such a shock you couldn't answer right away when he asked if anyone else was going to show up. You said they weren't. He challenged you to one on one. You accepted, and lost badly, both because he'd had some kind of spurt recently that left him outclassing you totally, and because you were fuzzy-headed with confused feelings. This was your friends' brother. He didn't have any business being the kind of person that you felt this way about. Kayjay told you that you were supposed to get crushes on your high school teachers first, and that until you'd had a crush on one of them you weren't allowed to have a regular boyfriend because you wouldn't know what love felt like.
(And, chowder-head that you were, you believed him until you caught him chortling about it with his friends as they were smoking behind the garage. That night in revenge you put cold, slimy oatmeal in his bed.)
For the next season you'd meet Marc at the park for one on one. You were very scrupulous, and never tried to do anything else with him except kick the ball around. Until the last time you played. He slid in to knock the ball away, and you fell onto him ...
... And you went tingly all over, as you were touching him all over with yourself all over, from the knees to the shoulders. Your face fell into the crook of his neck and you got a nose full of grass and the smell of his soap and of his tangy sweat. For what seemed like a couple of minutes you lay atop him, paralyzed with delight, shaking all over.
Finally he asked if you were hurt, because you weren't moving, and to cover your excruciating embarrassment you pretended that you'd hurt your ankle. You pretended to wince when he held it and turned it. He finally pronounced it "stressed"—which it wasn't; it was just numb from the ecstatic thrill you got from him handling it—and you hobbled home as he babbled apology after apology. Shortly afterward you told him you were giving up soccer for basketball, and he professed himself guilt-struck, which left you feeling horribly guilty even though you swore to him it had nothing to do with the accident, and showed him you were completely over it. I'm just not good enough for you, you'd said, then stammered To play soccer with. So you said you were moving into a sport where you could maybe beat him, because you'd been playing lots of basketball with Kayjay, and you'd seen that Marc wasn't so good at that.
You'd still kept as much in touch with him possible, even after your family moved to the new house in Acheson, and Eva and Jessica shifted into gymnastics and makeup and gossip and other things that left you impatient. You kept your friendship with them, though, as much as you could even as you spent more time with your sports friends. All so you could stay close to Marc, who kept getting bigger and stronger and more beautiful.
Then he started dating Serena Harris at the end of his sophomore year. You'd been steeling yourself to make some kind of declaration of interest to him at the start of your junior year, when (you told yourself) it wouldn't look like lame kid stuff, but Serena slid in ahead of you, and she and Marc went around holding hands while you ground your teeth. Then Serena broke the news that her family would be moving to New Jersey at the end of her (and your) junior year, and everyone (including you) were so sympathetic—but you were also gleeful, because you knew, despite their promises to each other, that the relationship wouldn't last past the end of summer.
So you bided your time, and sure enough, at the beginning of August you heard a rumor that Marc had quietly but formally ended things with Serena. You asked him in an off-hand manner about it, and he confirmed, and you extended your condolences, then went home to mark days off the calendar until you thought you could safely declare that long-delayed interest.
September 23, you decided, would be a propitious date. Autumn equinox, about a month after school had started. Plenty of time for everyone—Marc included—to get used to the idea that Serena was ancient history.
Then, in the first week of September, that slut Hannah Westrick transferred in from Eastman and slid right in front of you.
That makes twice you've been cheated.
So when Anita Nuevo—the girls' varsity soccer captain, who hates Hannah for her own reasons as much as you do—casually spat that she wanted to kill the strumpet, you proposed a better idea: Let's hex her to death. You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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