Luz, Rebound Read online

  The analysis moved on to other pieces of the story and other themes in the novel. I always loved the discussions in Mrs. Sandvig’s class. Everyone really tried to do their best for her. She was just that kind of teacher. She brought us out of ourselves. Heck, I even caught Ryan finally glance at me once during the discussion. It gave me hope, but made me wonder if we talked to each other about what happened this last year if we would tell the truth or throw in some lies for reasons not quite known.

  “As well as calling this a ‘racist’ book, which we’ve talked about, some critics of Heart of Darkness say the book is very sexist toward women. We don’t have much time and didn’t quite touch on this topic except for Kelli’s comment about Kurtz’s fiancée, but you might also consider this as a possible idea for your essay on the novel. Think of Kurtz’s African mistress,” Mrs. Sandvig prompted. “Are women insignificant to the story?”

  “Women are never insignificant to the story,” Ryan quipped.

  The sound of the bell mixed with the classroom’s laughter.

  “Amen, bro.” Cooper air high-fived. I giggled. The comment made me suspect Ryan was again speaking indirectly to me. But when he rose he went straight to Christie, who was waiting outside for him, as usual, as we filed out of the classroom.

  I walked through the door, avoiding gazing in their direction. “What was that all about?” I heard her ask.

  “Just how women like you are a powerful motivation to the men who love them, babe,” Ryan replied.

  Now it was her turn to laugh, to delight in his charm, but I held my head high. Intuition told me that wasn’t his complete thought. We both knew there were two women in Kurtz’s life.

  “Hey, Kara, wait up!”

  I swung around at hearing Cooper’s voice behind me, noticing that both Christie and Ryan glanced up through a wave of people moving toward me. I focused on Cooper, my eyes questioning.

  “Hey, I wanted to ask you something,” he said when he approached, looking around himself as the crowd swept by. He appeared to notice Ryan and Christie, who hadn’t moved. “Can I walk you to your locker?”

  I smiled at the question, but started to feel a bit odd. “Sure.” Besides being a high school sports star, Cooper owned a souped-up sixties convertible that he and his father had restored. He was handsome and popular with girls, but always a little too sure of himself for my taste. I remembered thinking him attractive for a while during my sophomore year but then finding after spending time trying to talk to him one night there wasn’t a lot to discuss. Sports, cars, and girls—in that order—were what he seemed to talk about with his friends, but with me I remembered a particular conversation we had just after he got his convertible. He had driven it up to the dorm to parade it front of all of us, then leaned back against the hood in a muscle shirt. He’d asked me if I liked the color, a metallic jade green. “It matches my eyes.” He’d winked. “Maybe you’d look good in it, too,” he’d suggested, running his hand across the front fender. I wondered then if his cocky self-centeredness extended to every situation. In any case, I decided I would have to be pretty desperate for a trip off campus to go anywhere with him. Now I walked at his side, trying to remember if Nic had told me whom he had last dated when she filled me in on classmate gossip. Someone in the junior class, perhaps.

  “That was some discussion in class. I really don’t get that book so well,” he started. We walked toward the other end of the hallway. “I’ll have to reread some of it to do this essay.”

  “Yeah, me too.” I wanted to reread the part about the woman in the jungle.

  “Maybe rewatch Apocalypse Now. You know, they based the movie on the book, though I didn’t know about it when I first watched it,” he said. “But that was a cool flick.”

  “Brando,” I replied. It was one of the only things I recalled about the picture someone brought up in class. I hadn’t seen it. I didn’t enjoy dark, bloody war stories, but I was the one to mention inhumanity in class.

  “Hey, you want to do something together after the game tomorrow?” he asked, referring to the first basketball home game scheduled since my return. He was a first-string guard.

  “Like what?” We were at my locker, and I started opening it instead of looking directly at him. When he told me he had a question for me the thought had flickered through my head he might ask me out—maybe it was the way I noticed him looking at me a couple of times during the past week. But there was no way. I hated awkward encounters.

  “Grab something to eat, maybe. Go for a drive.” His voice was borrowing from my nervous vibe.

  “Who else is coming?” I closed the locker after grabbing materials for my last class. The hallway was clearing out again, and I stared at someone behind him who appeared to linger. Cooper turned around too, and the person left.

  Cooper turned back, giving me a crooked smile. “I was thinking just us.”

  Maybe he’s changed, I told myself, twisting my lips as if mirroring his own. “You mean like a date?” I asked, trying to see it. We would go out for hamburgers, watch Apocalypse Now together, talk about his game, his car. He’d try to kiss me at some point. And then what?

  “Yeah. I guess.” He shifted his stance, a little more confident. He seemed so young and presumptuous. What did he even see in me? Some new conquest, no doubt. He mistook new and different for attractive and good. He was so…naive. With such an American sense of entitlement, even.

  “Coop, you’re a great guy,” I said, even though I had my doubts. “But I want to stay just friends for now, okay?”

  His face fell. The “just friends” thing was something I had said to a few guys in my past, even Ryan, before we had started to date. I knew it stung a little to hear it, but none of them had ever directly said no to friendship as a result.

  “I’m coming out of a past relationship that’s hard to forget about right now. That’s all,” I said to soften the blow into something he could understand and accept. I’d noticed other classmates at Trinity use the excuse, or reality, of a boyfriend or girlfriend from their hometown or another school to gently let down someone who liked them. Any other reason might lead me into the weeds of explanation and potential lies. “Someone I don’t want to talk about,” I added before he had a chance to ask.

  Chapter 7

  Misstep

  When I walked toward the sports complex with Nic on Saturday afternoon I finally witnessed Ryan carrying Christie. It reminded me of the kitschy way a groom is supposed to transport a bride over a threshold to symbolize their new life together—all sticky sweet happiness.

  “Do you see how he’s carrying her?” I asked, trying not to display too much reaction. Though Christie was a couple of inches shorter than me and also petite, Ryan showed no sign of strain. He had grown much stronger in a year.

  Nic laughed. “Oh, yeah. He started doing that right before football season. He told Coach it was to increase his strength, but now it’s like their thing. He takes her to practice that way.”

  I hadn’t observed the drill team in practice since I had been back, but there they all were in the distance by the football field, with Ryan crossing the turf with Christie in his arms to bring her to them. “Ugh.” I felt nauseous. “He’s never…tripped?”

  “Ha!” Nic looked sideways at me. She probably knew I kind of hoped he would. “Not that I know of. Look, there’s Kelli.” She pointed to a group of girls stretching. “Want to watch them for a while?” A few kids were sitting on the bleachers getting ready to see the drill team warm up.

  “Not really. Let’s just go to the gym.” I willed my eyes away from the scene but was sure if we stopped to watch practice, I’d be caught staring. “Ryan’s still not talking to me, and we know Christie doesn’t want to see me there. I wouldn’t want to disrupt the team or anything.” Out of the corner of my eye I continued to observe as Ryan deposited Christie back on her
feet before the team. “That’s just embarrassing.”

  “What’s embarrassing?”

  “The fact I ever went out with such a moron. Seriously, that was just one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen.” We turned toward the gym and I picked up the pace, ushering Nic along with me. “I mean, not only does he carry her books everywhere, he carries her tray at lunch, they hang out with each other like there’s no one else alive, and now he carries her? He’s like a personal slave. Or a zombie. It’s really sick, that relationship.”

  “I guess that’s love.” Nic shrugged as we entered the building, laughing a little at the indignation in my voice. “I told you he changed.”

  “You didn’t tell me he regressed! We never would have acted like that.”

  “He does kinda do whatever she says.” She gave me a sly smile. I hadn’t said much about them publicly, and seeing them like this had caught me off guard. I was letting Nic see aspects of their relationship bothered me, which I was careful to share with no one else to this point, but it was okay. I trusted Nic, and I could see she was somewhat happy I was letting off steam about the subject.

  “Why?” I rolled my eyes at her. “What does he see in her?”

  “She’s so into him.”

  “Well, I suppose there’s that. But they should have their own personalities, don’t you think? Their own lives. I mean, it would get tiring after a while.”

  “She’s still on the drill team. He plays sports. They do other things.”

  “I haven’t seen him with Doug Aragon since I’ve been back,” I said referring to his geeky friend who played a lot of Nintendo and was in Model UN with Nic and me.

  “As far as I know Doug and Ryan are still friends, but they don’t hang out as much as they used to. It’s true Ryan and Christie spend most of their free time together now.”

  “But what do they talk about?” I tried to examine Christie objectively, searching for what he saw in her. The truth is I had never really spent any time with her, so I didn’t know if she was smart or funny or not. I just knew she didn’t like me. “She’s not even that pretty,” I went on. “What about her makes him act the way he does?”

  “I dunno.” Her eyes were mischievous, whether from egging me on or analyzing the subject, like I was.

  “Sex?” The word popped involuntarily out of my mouth. Nic muffled a laugh as we perhaps stumbled upon the missing piece of the puzzle. “Do you think they’re having sex?” I said in a more hushed tone, looking around to make sure no one could overhear us. A buzzer that signaled the loss of possession brought my attention back to the court before I shifted it again on Nic.

  She shrugged and rolled her eyes, blushing. She didn’t want to say it.

  The question hung between us in unanswered limbo. I had never gone all the way with Ryan. He had always been so respectful, and I was afraid of hurting him, because being with him in that way would mark a whole new commitment in our relationship that I didn’t think I was ready for. So, instead I told him I wanted our time to be perfect when it happened. He’d agreed, probably thinking I meant something else. And Nic was still a virgin as far as I knew. She and I never talked long about these things.

  “It never happened between us, you know,” I said, watching the point guard bring the ball up the court. “Not even before I went away.” I felt protective of Nic, like I wanted to support her own decision of chastity any way I could. As long as a girl preserved her innocence, the world seemed less dark in some ways. I knew this because of Ben. But then again, with innocence lost, life could be more vivid and mind blowing in other ways—I also knew this because of Ben. I didn’t want to put this last bit out there between us, however. I was sure these beliefs would make her think differently of me. It was something others couldn’t understand without having experienced it on their own. A forward took a shot and missed; the ball changed possession again.

  We watched the game for a while and cheered for our girls. My thoughts started to drift from the Christie and Ryan spectacle we’d just witnessed, to sitting in the stands instead of competing on the court. I had always played on the basketball team in every school I went to until I went away. The Australian schools didn’t have basketball programs. Now it was midseason, and I had returned two months too late for tryouts.

  “Do you miss playing?” Nic asked right before the second quarter ended.

  I hesitated before speaking, noticing our boys team in uniform pass by the gym doors and look in at the scores on their way to the locker rooms. They usually came out and sat in the stands behind the girls in the third quarter for support. “Yeah, I feel like a piece of me is not exactly here anymore. They’re doing great though.”

  “I wonder if you could ask to join the team late,” she suggested. Below, Cooper was talking animatedly to a teammate, but looked up toward us for a second and smiled. I had told her and Kelli last night about him asking me out, though neither one of them had much to say in response. “I guess he’s over your rejection already,” she added.

  “That’s good.” I responded to the Cooper part first. “I’d never ask. I don’t even want to. There’s only half a season left, and they’re doing fine without me. Anyway, I’m out of practice. It’s really just a memory that I miss, I suppose.” I cut my eyes over at Nic, wondering what she thought of my self-analysis, but she had hers on the action below.

  At halftime the drill team marched out in their short shorts, fishnets, bow ties, top hats, and vests. They were always an attention-getter, perhaps for the outfits as much as for the routine. Kelli stood in the middle, an anchor point for attention and the heart of the team. Her smile shone out across the room, and yet the sparkle I had remembered in her eyes when she danced wasn’t as strong.

  “What’s going on with Kelli, Nic?” I asked. It felt good to confide in her again, and I knew if I could see it, she could, too. Now seemed like the right time to ask.

  She hesitated. “What do you mean?”

  “I can tell there is something different about her. She tries to hide it.” I cut my eyes over to hers again and found them this time. “But I sense she’s troubled about something.”

  Nic clasped her hands between her knees. “I don’t see it,” she said, shaking her head and looking away.

  “Are you sure?” I looked back at the configuration, studying Kelli again. Nic wasn’t a great liar. If I was way off base she would have laughed or made a joke instead. Kelli’s eyes looked blank. She wasn’t connecting with anyone in the crowd like she used to. “What about that comment regarding university the other day? That’s not the Kelli we used to know.”

  “Maybe not, but people change. If you feel something like that, Kara, you should ask her yourself. It wouldn’t be for me to explain—not that there’s anything I know. Anyway, I agree what she said about following him is dumb. I told her that before. Sometimes I think she just needs to fall in love with someone else. It’s such a long-distance relationship.”

  Nic’s practical point of view was always something that made her seem wiser beyond her years. I tucked her simple, low opinion of long-distance relationships in the back of my mind for later. “So, you think this is about David?”

  She shrugged. “Lots of girls lose themselves over guys. Ask her yourself.”

  “I…it just hasn’t been the right time.” I frowned. We were having a good talk today, but suddenly a boundary had risen between us—over our best friend.

  “If there is something, don’t you think she’d tell you when she’s ready?” Her voice was more resolute.

  “I guess so.” I felt deflated for an instant, and almost like crying, because I was left out of this—whatever it was—but I knew Nic wasn’t trying to be mean. She was just loyal. They both were. I hadn’t told them I had an eating disorder. I hadn’t confided in them about Ben and how I fell so tragically in love with him. Heck, I didn�
��t even want to talk about Ben, and Nic knew it. So how could I expect to so easily know what dragged on a friend from a time I obviously wasn’t around for them? “Maybe it’s just me,” I said, trying to lighten my tone. “I’ve been gone for a while, and suddenly people seem a little different. Like, what alien took over Ryan Hutchins’s body?”

  Nic laughed and the tension eased. “Do you think I’m different?” she asked.

  I tilted my head away from her and noticed her cheek twitch under my stare. Her tone had changed back to playful, but I wasn’t quite ready to make it all a joke. “Yes. Actually, it’s a good kind. I was just thinking about that the other day. You seem older, older like wiser.”

  She smiled at the compliment.

  “Cuter even,” I said, which made her laugh.

  The drill team was halfway done, and Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” was moving toward the final verse and chorus.

  “What about me?” I asked, picking at the slub in the knee of my jeans and checking out Christie’s place in the formation. Though she wasn’t as artistically graceful as Kelli, she was technically very good. She danced like she knew what she wanted and was sure of each move.

  “You mean besides the tan and the accent?” she teased.

  “Ha, ha.” I knew I was a little insecure to go fishing for a compliment myself, but I needed a little validation right now. Watching the game and Kelli had made me nostalgic for a time I felt more a part of what was going on, and watching Christie and Ryan was just bizarre. I tilted my head away from the action and toward Nic, waiting for her response.

  “You’re…older, wiser too,” she said, her own vision trained straight ahead. “You even seem like…Kelli!”

  Nic jumped out of her seat and my attention flew back to the court below. Kelli had fallen, and her face was crumpled in pain. A swarm of pinstriped gold vests and black bottoms attached to long, angled legs multiplied around her on the floor. The song trailed off into a microphone of dead air and shuffling sounds in the bleachers instead of the usual applause as people rose in the stands to get a better view.