I know the name Shelby, but I can't remember from where.
“What does she want?” Steve says.
“Another PTA thing,” she says. “If it were up to this woman we'd have 'PTA' meetings three times a week just to...stitch and bitch.”
Theo laughs.
“But without the knitting,” Jennifer says. “The stitching part of that would make it so much more bearable.” She shakes her head, nudging Josey out of the way with her hip and taking the spatula back. “We never get a damn thing done at those meetings. I try to talk about silent auction budgets and she wants to talk about her new husband's new...car...something. Part.”
“Hang on,” I say. “Is this Shelby Tyson?”
“Don't tell me you're friends with her,” Jennifer says. “She's a bad influence, Taylor.”
“She's my stepdad's ex-wife,” I say. “I met her once and she was the scariest thing.”
“Ha! Sounds like stepdad traded quite a bit up.”
I smile, and Josey catches me at it and just beams.
“Come help me,” Josey says.
I say, “I'm a really bad cook, I don't want to mess it up.”
She holds out her hand. “C'mere, firefly.”
So I do. I come into the kitchen and stand beside her at the stove. Theo walks past us to the fridge and gives us each a little scratch on the backs of our heads, like we're kittens. Annie, Jennifer, and Steve gab at each other almost too quickly for me to decipher, like they have their own language.
And Josey hands me ta basting brush and shows me how to coat the chicken, her long, pink-nailed fingers on top of mine, and the steam from the pan is bringing out the jasmine smell of her perfume and she's talking to me quietly and I feel like I'm sinking underwater.
Because, the truth is, and I've known it for a while, and God knows I know it right in this moment: I am falling in love with her. I have been falling in love with her for a very long time.
And it's hard to explain, because I don't want to violently crawl into her pants every time I see her like I do Theo's, and I'm not still not comfortable with her the way I am with him. I just want to talk to her and I want her to talk to me, and I want her to light up when she sees me, and I want to look like her, not because Theo thinks she's beautiful but because I do. I'm not in love with her the way I'm in love with Theo, maybe because it's happening in a directly opposite way; I loved him carelessly and stupidly from the moment he raised my hand at that party, and I love her the way you climb into a bath you ran too hot. Hesitantly, haltingly. A little painfully.
Altogether warmly.
15
Guys and Dolls is a raging success, despite Theo's mediocre singing and the other male lead's mid-show sprained ankle. I sit in the audience one night and up on the catwalk with Josey for the rest. She even lets me work the spotlight one night, and it does not accidentally malfunction when Theo's co-star is singing.
Unfortunately, I was wrapped up in the musical for too long to realize that my swim team friends were getting annoyed with me, and by the time the show has wrapped and I'm back to paying attention to them, they've passed 'getting annoyed' and progressed to 'actively pissed.'
“You've missed two practices this week,” Elisha says. She's filling her swim cap with water before we start warm-up laps; it's much easier to put on caps when they're wet and stretched out, plus you get the joy of pouring a cap-full of freezing pool water over your head first thing. Elisha's assistant captain, usually, but our real captain has mono—adding to the stress factor of the whole situation—and our coach has some ongoing problem going on with his car registration or something very adult like that that's causing him to miss almost as many practice hours as I have, so Elisha's had to take over a lot. I don't blame her for being a little on edge.
“I was working tech for the show,” I say, which is sort of a little bit true. “We had to break down sets this week.”
She doesn't say anything, but she does hold out her hand for my cap and fills it up for me, which feels like a peace offering of some sort.
“It's over now,” I say. “So I'm totally focused.”
“I told you, remember?”
“Told me what?”
“Back at the beginning of the year,” she says. “I told you that those two...suck someone up. They had this girl trailing after them last year and I heard she had to drop out of...I can't remember. It was something stupid.”
“See, if it was something stupid then who cares.”
“No, it wasn't stupid for her,” Elisha says. I don't know why I keep expecting her to get my humor. “She was probably super into academic bowl or French club or whatever. But she had to give it up because she was all obsessed with them.”
“Josey's in a billion things,” I say. “Clearly you can still have a life if you're...”
She raises an eyebrow rather skillfully. “If you're what?” she says. “That's the thing. They have this...whatness.”
“Whatness.”
“I'm not saying I know what the whatness is,” she says. “Clearly. But I'm just saying that I saw this happen to a girl last year and I don't want to see it happen to you. You're a good swimmer.”
Maybe if Elisha were coming to me because she was concerned for my well-being that would be one thing. Though, if I'm being completely honest, I still don't think I'd consider her advice as anything other than condescending. But she doesn't care about me. She just cares about my
