Page 76 of It’s All in How You Fall
I blink once. Twice. I seriously don’t know what to say or where to start. “I was telling the truth a few weeks ago. I didn’t have a thing for Alex.”
Sunny’s face breaks into one of her beautiful smiles. “I know. But that doesn’t mean truths don’t change.”
I’d joked to myself about having more prowess than Emma Woodhouse, but maybe, just maybe, I’m both less successful and more emotionally dense than fictional Emma. Alex really is my Knightley, except way less old and broody.
Sunny squeezes my fingers one last time and then raises a hand in the air. Peregrine arrives, dropping into the empty chair. “You’re both still here,” she says, unsure. The black lipstick is back, matched with chartreuse eyeliner that only someone with Peregrine’s fine motor skills could pull off. Summer goth in the flesh. “That’s a good thing, right? Or is it a bad thing, because shouldn’t Caro have barreled out of here and straight to Alex’s doorstep?”
Sunny smiles gently. “We’re going to let Caroline do whatever she wants.”
Peregrine arches a dangerous brow. “And, if necessary, we’re going to help her.”
“Yes,” Sunny says, and begins piling kimchi onto her plate before Peregrine claims half of it for herself. “But only when she asks and only when it’s time. Until then she’s driving the bus.”
Honk, honk.
34
I spend the weekend planning my approach and then chickeningout.
First I think I might have Sunny drop me at Alex’s house after dinner on Friday. Just stand there in his front yard, courage spiked by time with my girls and some really great bibimbap, and go for it.
Then I think I might run to his house and propose a farmers’ market trip. Or maybe sneak into Northfield and ambush him before tennis practice. Or after, at his house. Or when he’s scheduled to play basketball with Nat in the late afternoon. Sunday’s plan is similar to Saturday’s, because all but the farmers’ market makes those days interchangeable in the overscheduled world of Alex Zavala.
Finally Monday comes, and the second-guesses begin to pile up with my abandoned plans. Maybe I should wait for him to make the move. If Peregrine can wait nearly five months for a text from Ryan, I can wait for Alex. Right? And I don’t want to pull focus from the Northfield tournament. He told Sunny he didn’t want to make things awkward between us as I prepare, but it’s his championship to lose. And what about that wild card? And soccer tryouts next week? Distraction layered upon distraction from Coach Bev’s point of view.
But then, as I try to soothe myself with a post-lunch stretch session on the deck, it hits me.
Alex already feels this way about me.
I already feel this way about him.
With all due respect to Coach Bev, the distraction is there, whether either of us acknowledge it or not.
In fact, it might take more of his “non-tennis” energy to navigate all of this if we leave it unsaid. That’s the distraction.
And even though all of this is logical, even though it has me nodding to myself as I walk to Northland, a zip in my step, I’m still not sure I can be the one to put it out there.
I either take the leap or wait for Alex.
In the end, I decide that Iwon’t decideuntil I see him for the first time since Sunny’s gym-mom/let’s-be-adults-about-this confession at Eomma.
So I arrive early at Northland. There’s a little more activity at the school this week than last. Fall sports two-a-day camps start next week—girls’ tennis, boys’ soccer, football, cross-country, volleyball, girls’ golf, and, of course, gymnastics and cheerleading. All those coaches have to be ready for all those kids, and there are more cars in the parking lot, and a couple of the school’s exterior doors are propped open so people can easily come and go.
The tennis courts are empty, though, as they have been before. I enter the court we’ve used exclusively for all of July and drop my racket and water bottle on the bench. I should start stretching—but instead I just begin to pace. Words press against my teeth—how am I going to say how I feel? To Alex of all people? How—
“Caroline?”
I turn around at the sound of his voice, and when I see him, I nearly fall over. My famed balance is just gone. As are the words that were trying to bust their way past my teeth mere seconds ago.
Instead of anything I’d planned, or anything normal at all, I say, “Alex Zavala, I challenge you to a handstand contest.”
He comes closer, confusion and amusement and concern all warring for control of his handsome features in the too bright light of the afternoon. Over his shoulder, I see his car parked where it usually is—how did I not hear it? How did he surprise me? Was I that out of it?
Does it matter? No.
“Handstand contest. Now.”
A grin breaks across his face and he says, “I thought you’d never ask.”
