Then he seemed to shrug off whatever dark thought had occurred to him, and said brightly, "Seriously, don"t worry about it. I"ll see you in school."
He turned like he was going to jump off Spider Rock and go away. I could almost hear my best friend Nancy"s voice screaming in my head, Don"t let him get away, you idiot! He"s hot! Make him stay!
"Wait," I said.
Then, when he turned expectantly, I found myself frantically trying to think of something witty and brilliant to say...something that would make him want to stay.
But before I could think of anything, I heard the sliding gla.s.s door being thrown back. A second later, my mom called down from the deck, "Ellie, would your friend like to borrow a suit and go for a swim, too? I"m sure one of Geoff"s would fit him."
Oh my G.o.d. My friend. I was sure I was going to die. Besides which, go for a swim? With me? She had no idea she was talking to one of the most popular guys at Avalon High, or that he was dating one of the prettiest girls there.
But still. That"s no excuse.
"Uh, no, Mom," I called to her, giving Will an apologetic eye roll that he grinned at. "We"re okay."
"Actually," Will said, looking up at my mom. I have to go now.
That"s what I thought he was going to say. I have to go now, or I made a huge mistake, or even, Sorry, wrong house.
Because guys like Will do not hang around girls like me. It just doesn"t happen. Clearly, Will had thought I was some other girl-maybe someone he"d met at camp and had a crush on when he was eight, or whatever-and now that he"d realized his error, he"d be leaving.
Because that is how things are supposed to go in an ordered universe.
But I guess the universe had tilted on its axis without anyone mentioning it to me, or something, because Will went on to say, "A swim might be nice."
And not three minutes later, against all laws of probability, Will was emerging from my house in a pair of Geoff"s baggy swim trunks, with a towel around his neck. He was also holding gla.s.ses of lemonade that my mom had scrounged up from somewhere, one of which he knelt down at the side of the pool to hand to me.
"Free, fast delivery," he said, with a wink, as I took the plastic gla.s.s from him. If he felt, as I did, a jolt of electricity race up his arm as our fingers accidentally brushed, he didn"t let on.
"Oh my G.o.d," I said, holding the already-sweating gla.s.s and staring at him. He had, I was not at all surprised to see, a terrific body. His skin was tanned bronze-from sailing, no doubt-and he was gorgeously well-muscled-but not in a crazy steroid sort of way.
And he was in my pool.
He was in my pool.
"Did she-" I was in too much shock to think of anything else. "Did she talk to you?"
"Who?" Will asked, draping himself over Geoff"s raft. "Your mom? Yeah. She"s nice. What is she, a writer or something?"
"Professor," I said, through lips that had gone numb. But not from the ice cubes in my drink. From the thought of Will Wagner, alone in my house with my parents, while I, too transfixed with horror to move from my raft, had lain in the pool, doing nothing to rescue him. "Both of them."
"Oh, well, that would explain it," Will said lightly.
My blood went as cold as the ice in my drink. What had they done? What had they said to him? It was too early for Jeopardy! so it couldn"t have been that. "Explain what?"
"Your mom quoted some poem after I introduced myself," Will said, leaning his head back and peering up at the sky through his Ray-Bans. Whatever Mom had said, he clearly wasn"t bothered by it. "Something about a broad, clear brow."
My stomach lurched. ""His broad clear brow in sunlight glow"d"?" I asked nervously.
"Yeah," Will said. "That"s it. What was that about?"
"Nothing," I said, vowing silently to kill my mom at a later date. "It"s a line from a poem she likes-The Lady of Shalott. Tennyson. She"s taking the year off from teaching to write a book on Elaine of Astolat. It"s making her a little crazier than usual."
"That must be cool," Will said, his raft heading perilously close to Spider Rock, though he wasn"t, of course, aware of the potential spider-related danger he was in. "To have parents who talk about poetry and books and stuff."
"Oh, you have no idea," I said, in the flattest voice I could.
"How"s the rest of it go?" Will wanted to know.
"The rest of what?"
"The poem."
She was so very, very dead. ""His broad clear brow in sunlight glow"d,"" I quoted from memory. It"s not as if I hadn"t heard it seventy times this week alone. ""On burnish"d hooves his war-horse trode;/From underneath his helmet flow"d/His coal-black curls as on he rode,/As he rode down to Camelot." It"s a very lame poem. She dies at the end, floating in a boat. Weren"t you supposed to meet some people at Dairy Queen after practice today?"
Will glanced over at me, as the question had startled him. I didn"t blame him. It had startled me, too. I have no idea where it had come from.
Still. It needed to be asked.
"I guess so," Will said. "How"d you know about that?"
"Because I heard Jennifer ask you about it when I saw you today in the hallway at school," I said. Nancy, I knew, would freak out if she"d heard me say this. She"d be all, Oh my G.o.d! Don"t let on that you know about Jennifer! Because then he"ll know you went to the trouble to look her up, and then he"ll think you like him!
But not mentioning Jennifer just didn"t seem very practical to me.
Nancy wouldn"t have liked the next words that came out of my mouth, either.
"She"s your girlfriend, right?" I asked, looking at him as he floated past.
He didn"t look at me. He lifted his head up to take a sip of his lemonade, then dropped it back down to the air cushion on his raft.
"Yeah," he said. "Going on two years."
I opened my mouth to ask what seemed to me to be the next natural question-the one Nancy definitely would have forbidden me from asking. But before I could get a word out, Will lifted up his head, looked right at me, and said, "Don"t."
I blinked at him from behind the lenses of my sungla.s.ses. "Don"t what?" I asked, because how was I to know-then-that he could read my mind?
"Don"t ask me what I"m doing in your pool instead of hers," he said. "Because I honestly don"t know. Let"s talk about something else, okay?"
I could hardly believe what was happening. What was this totally great-looking guy doing in my pool? Not to mention, reading my mind?
It didn"t make any sense.
But then, I"m not sure it made sense to him, either.
So instead of asking him about it, I asked him something else that had been bothering me: just what, exactly, he"d been doing in the ravine that first day I"d seen him.
"Oh," Will said, sounding surprised I"d even ask. "I don"t know. I just end up there sometimes."
Which pretty much answered my question about what he was doing in my pool instead of his girlfriend"s: He was clearly mentally unstable.
Except that-the being-in-my-pool-instead-of-Jennifer"s thing aside-he seemed totally normal. He was able to make perfectly lucid conversation. He asked me why we"d moved from St. Paul, and when I told him about the sabbatical, he said he knew what that was like-having to move around a lot, I mean. His dad, he said, was in the navy, and had been stationed lots of different places-forcing Will to change schools every other year or so when he was younger-before finally taking a teaching position at the Naval Academy.
He talked about Avalon High, and the teachers he liked, and the ones I should try to stay away from-Mr. Morton he declared, much to my surprise, a good guy. He talked about Lance-he described the month off he and Lance had taken over the summer to sail up and down the coast, just the two of them.
The only thing Will didn"t bring up again was Jennifer. Not even once.
Not that I was counting.
I didn"t have any trouble figuring out what Nancy would have made of that. Clearly all was not happiness and joy in that relationship. Why else was he floating in my pool, and not hers?
Not, of course, that I imagined his interest in me was at all romantic. Because who"d want hamburger when they could have filet mignon? Which isn"t-despite what Nancy would say-putting myself down. It"s just being realistic. Guys like Will go for girls like Jennifer: perky little blondes who seem to know instinctively what color eyeshadow looks best on them, not girls like me-gangling brunettes who aren"t afraid to pull snakes out of the pool filter.
The sun was starting to slide behind the house, and there was more shade than light on the surface of the water when my mom came back out onto the deck and announced that she"d ordered some Thai food, and asked if Will wanted to stay for dinner.
To which Will replied that he"d love to.
Will was the perfect guest, helping me set the table, then clear it afterwards. He finished everything on his plate. And when my parents and I declared that we were stuffed, he ate everything that was left over in the cartons-to my dad"s very obvious admiration.
He was nice to Tig, too, when she came over and sniffed the back of one of his shoes. He bent down and put his finger out so she could smell it before she decided whether or not to let him pet her. Only people who"ve actually spent time around cats know that this is accepted cat etiquette.
He didn"t laugh when I told him Tig"s name, either. It"s kind of embarra.s.sing to have a pet that you named when you were eight. Back then, I"d thought Tigger was the most original, creative name you could give a cat.
But when I mentioned this to Will, he grinned and said Tigger wasn"t as bad as the name he"d given his Border collie when he was twelve-Cavalier. Which is a pretty weird name for a dog, if you think about it. Especially a naval family"s dog.
During dinner, Will told funny stories about Cavalier and about the pranks the middies down at the academy sometimes played on one another, as well as on their instructors. He didn"t look bored when my dad told him all about the sword, or when my mom quoted a few more verses of The Lady of Shalott, as she is embarra.s.singly p.r.o.ne to do after a gla.s.s of wine with dinner.
He even laughed at my impressions of the Graul"s bag boys, and also at my reenactment of the Great Snake Rescue.
Nancy has always frowned on my joking around with boys. She says boys don"t develop romantic feelings for girls who goof around like stand-up comics. How can he fall in love with you, Nancy always wanted to know, if he"s too busy laughing?
And while she may have a point-certainly no boys have fallen in love with me, with the exception of Tommy Meadows in the fifth grade, but his family moved to Milwaukee right after he declared his undying devotion...a fact which may, now that I think of it, be what spurred the declaration in the first place-my dad says he fell in love at first sight with my mom because at the faculty party where they met, she had written Demoiselle d"Astolat on her h.e.l.lo, My Name Is...lapel sticker.
Which they all had got a terrific yuk out of. It"s actually a really lame joke, but what do medievalists know?
Not that I was trying to make A. William Wagner fall in love with me, of course. Because I"m perfectly aware that he"s taken.
It"s just that, remembering the way that shadow had seemed to pa.s.s across his face down at the pool, I thought maybe he could use a laugh. That"s all.
Will left after dinner. He thanked my parents, calling my mom ma"am and my dad sir-which made me crack up-and then he said, "See you tomorrow, Elle," to me.
Then he was gone, melting into the twilight exactly the way he"d appeared at the side of my pool. As if from nowhere.
But I actually waited outside until I heard his car door slam, and saw his car"s taillights as he headed down our long driveway, proving he wasn"t a specter or-what had Mr. Morton been talking about in World Lit today? Oh yeah-a bocan, the Gaelic word for "ghost." See, I had been paying attention in cla.s.s. Sort of.
Elle. He"d called me Elle. As in...El. Short for Ellie.
No one"s ever called me Elle before. No one. Just Ellie-which, if you ask me, is sort of a babyish name. Or Elaine, which is sort of old-ladyish.
But not Elle. Never Elle. I"m so not the Elle type.
Except, apparently, to A. William Wagner.
"Well," my dad said, when I came back into the house, after watching Will leave, "he seems like a nice guy."
"Will Wagner," my mom said, as she turned on Jeopardy! "I like that name. It"s a very regal-sounding sort of name."
Oh, G.o.d. I could so see where all of this was heading. They thought Will liked me. They thought Will was going to be my new boyfriend, or something. They had no idea-no idea-what was really going on.
But then again, neither did I, really. I mean, the truth is, if somebody had asked me to explain what that all had been about back there-him showing up at the side of my pool, then staying for dinner-I wouldn"t have known what to say. I had never had a boy do any of those things before...let alone laugh at all my jokes.
I was trying not to make a big deal out of the whole thing, though. Will was nice, but he had a girlfriend. A pretty, cheerleader girlfriend.
Who he apparently didn"t want to talk about.
Which, when I thought about it, was pretty weird.
But the weirdest part of all was that while it had been happening-once I"d gotten used to the idea, I mean, of this hot guy hanging out with me-it hadn"t actually seemed that weird at all. It was like that smile Will had given me that day in the park, the one I hadn"t been able to keep from returning. It had just seemed natural, even right, to smile back, just like it had seemed totally natural-natural and, yes, right-to have Will there, joking around with the silverware as we set the table, laughing at my Graul"s bag boy imitation.
That was what was weird. That it hadn"t actually been weird.
Still, when Nancy called later that evening, and my dad answered first, and said, "Ah, Nancy. She has a lot to tell you," I didn"t try to play the whole thing down as much as I should have. Because I knew Nancy would tell everyone back home. About my having had a boy over for dinner my very first day at my new school. I made sure to mention that he was on the football team, sailed, and was president of the senior cla.s.s, too.
Oh, and that he looked very, very good in a swimsuit.
Nancy practically had kittens right there on the phone.
"Oh my G.o.d, is he taller than you?" she wanted to know. This had always been a problem, because for most of my life, I"ve been taller than the vast majority of boys in our school, with the exception of Tommy Meadows.
"He"s six two," I said.
Nancy cooed appreciatively. At five ten, I"d still be able to get away with heels if we went out, she said.
"Wait until I tell Sh.e.l.ley," Nancy said. "Oh my G.o.d, Ellie. You did it. You were able to start over at a whole new school and give yourself a total personality makeover. Everything"s going to be different for you now. Everything! And all you had to do was move to a totally new state and start going to a completely new school."
Yeah. Things were definitely starting to look up.
That"s really what I thought.
Then.
CHAPTER FIVE.