forward, putting one foot in front of the other along the road.
“Do your parents know that?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Nobody does,” he said. “Well, I guess, except for you now.”
At the time, I could not, for the life of me, understand why he told me this, why he trusted me with the truth about his life more than anyone else. I thought it meant that I was special, that maybe he had always felt about me the way I felt about him.
Now, looking back on it, I know it was just the opposite. I was a girl in the background of his life—that’s what made me safe.
“I never really cared much for swimming anyway,” I told him reassuringly. I said it because it was the truth. But there was a large secondary benefit in what I’d said.
Now I knew who he really was and I still liked him. And that made me different from anyone else.
“My parents run the bookstore,” I said. “Blair Books.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. I mean, I put that together.” He smiled at me and then looked away. We made our way around a corner and found ourselves on the main road.
“They want me to take over the store one day,” I told him. “They are always giving me these five hundred–page novels as presents and telling me that one day I’ll fall in love with reading just like they have and . . . I don’t know.”
“What?” Jesse asked.
“I hate reading books.”
Jesse smiled, surprised and satisfied. He put his hand up, offering me a high five. He had confided in me because he thought I was a stranger, only to find that I was a comrade.
I laughed and leaned over, raising my palm to his. We slapped and then Jesse held on for a moment.
“Are you drunk?” he asked me.
“A little,” I said. “Are you?”
“A little,” he answered back.
He didn’t let go of my hand and I thought maybe, just maybe, he was going to kiss me. And then I thought that was an insane thing to think. That would never happen.
Later on, when Jesse and I would tell each other everything, I asked him what he was thinking back then. I’d say, “That moment when you held on to my hand, right before the cops found us, were you going to kiss me?” He’d say he didn’t know. He’d say that all he remembered was that he had just realized, for the first time, how pretty I was. “I just remember noticing the freckles under your eye. So, maybe. Maybe I was going to kiss you. I don’t know.”
And we will never know.
Because just as I built up enough confidence to look Jesse right in the eye in the wee hours of the morning, we were blinded by the stunning bright light of a police officer’s flashlight, aimed directly into our eyes. We were drunk on the sidewalk, caught red-handed.
A litany of half-assed lies and two failed Breathalyzers later, Jesse and I sat handcuffed along the wall of the Acton Police Department waiting to be picked up.
“My parents are going to kill me,” I said to him. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard my dad as pissed as he was on the phone.” In the bright light of the police station, the cut on Jesse’s lip looked burgundy, the bug bites on my ankles almost terra-cotta.
I thought Jesse would react by telling me how much worse he had it, how much more unbearable his parents would undoubtedly be. But he didn’t. Instead he said, “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. I never realized how often I used my hands to talk until they were constrained. “It’s not your fault.”
Jesse shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “But I’m still sorry.”
“Well, then, I’m sorry, too.”
He smiled. “Apology accepted.”
There was a list of recent detainments on the table just to our left. I kept sneaking peeks at it to see if anyone else had been caught. I saw a few names of seniors I recognized but no Olive, no Sam. I felt confident I’d been the only one of us picked off.
“Are you worried about your parents?” I said.
Jesse thought about it and then shook his head. “My parents have a very specific set of rules and as long as I don’t break any of those, I can pretty much do whatever I want.”
“What are the rules?” I asked.
“Break state records and don’t get anything below a B-minus.”