The Beginning of After

Eve. But she looked over my shoulder and nudged me.
    “Some cutie’s coming over to us,” she said.
    I turned again to see Joe bouncing in our direction, a little too quickly, like he wanted to get it over with.
    “Hey, Laurel,” he said.
    “Hi, Joe.”
    “I’m on my break from the movie theater,” he replied to a question I hadn’t asked. He pointed with his thumb to our left, and I remembered the little art house cinema at the other end of the shopping center. “What are you up to?”
    “Just trying to cool off,” I said, as Eve handed me my drink.
    “We’ve had a furry day,” said Eve, with no sense of how absurd that sounded.
    Joe frowned. “What do you mean?”
    “It’s a long story,” I said. We were all silent for a moment, so I added, “This is my friend Eve . . . Eve, this is Joe, from my school.”
    “Do you guys want to join me?” asked Joe.
    Eve glanced quickly between Joe and me, picking up on something. “I should get going,” she said. “But Laurel, you can stay.”
    I knew I didn’t need Eve’s permission or even encouragement, but in that moment I was glad to have it. I looked at Joe now, at those eyes that had searched me over in Adam LaGrange’s backyard. He had been there for me, once. He had made me feel propped up for a few lovely hours.
    So I said, “Sure.”
    After we said good-bye to Eve, I followed Joe to his table. It was in the back corner and the place was packed, so of course we had to scrunch in and bang our knees together to make it work. I placed my ice-blended chai next to Joe’s black coffee, the wimpy chick drink alongside the grown-up guy one like they were already in a relationship, and tried to look him in the eye.
    “I didn’t know you worked at the movie theater,” I said.
    “Yeah, I take the tickets, and then when the movie’s over, I get to clean up the garbage the audience leaves behind. In between, I like to pop over here.”
    “You don’t stay and watch?”
    “Well, yeah, when we first start showing something. But after twenty or thirty times, it gets old. Especially if it’s, like, French.”
    “Too bad you take Spanish,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. I wasn’t supposed to know which classes he took, was I? Joe laughed nervously and shifted in his chair. He had a messenger bag hanging over the back, and now I noticed a big sketch pad sticking out of it. To change the subject, I asked, pointing at the pad, “Did you get that at Walden Art Supply?”
    He turned to look at it, then nodded. “You know it?”
    “My mom used to buy her paint there.” Joe looked instantly uncomfortable, so I added, “I’ve seen those pads at the store, that’s all.”
    Now Joe reached for the pad and pulled it out. He opened to a page and turned it toward me to show what he’d drawn: a middle-aged man in a cape and a helmet with two bugles sticking out of it like antennae, a big B inside a hot air balloon on his chest.
    “I call this one BlowHard. Yesterday I was sitting here next to some dude with his girlfriend, and he was just going on and on about stuff like he knew everything there was to know, and every time she tried to correct him, he’d shoot her down.”
    “Do you turn everyone into some kind of superhero?”
    “If they seem like they deserve it, yes.” He stared at the sketch protectively, like a new parent. “I mean, isn’t everyone a superhero, in their own mind?”
    I smiled. “On certain days, yeah.”
    We were quiet again, and I tried to fill the silence by sipping loudly on my drink. Why did things have to be so weird? We had kissed. We had kissed a lot, and from what I could tell it had been pretty good, until everything imploded. Before, I’d believed that once you’d done that with someone, you’d broken a barrier, like maybe you could always kiss them again whenever you wanted and it would be completely okay. But now there was some kind of force field between Joe Lasky and me, stronger than if we’d never kissed to begin with. He felt further away than a complete stranger.
    A quick flash of David and me, sitting together on the bench outside Ashland. We’d had a history between us too, but a different kind. It was confusing to think about these differences or about David at all. I pulled my focus back to Joe and suddenly felt mad.
    We would have been a couple by now. But no, I didn’t get to have that, just like I didn’t get to have a prom memory that didn’t make me want to puke from embarrassment.