As Soon As She Was in Her Classroom, He Turned and Bolted in the Opposite Direction. One

1

As soon as she was in her classroom, he turned and bolted in the opposite direction. “One minute,” the loudspeaker squawked. “Students, you have one minute to get to class. Teachers, please lock your doors at the sound of the tardy bell. 40 seconds.”

Eddie was always amazed at the speed with which the final minute between classes zipped by. He knew Mr. Nolan wasn’t going to give him a break, especially in an announced lockout. And, besides wanting to avoid Saturday detention, he now wished to pick Nolan’s brain on airplane engines.

“Twenty seconds.”

His hurdle over the railing into the lower shop area was one of the most graceful physical moves he’d ever done, on or off the track field, ending in a forward somersault that put him back on his feet. A teacher he’d never seen before applauded while standing at his door watching over the final seconds of passing period. Eddie didn’t stop to acknowledge the praise, but rolled under the closing aluminum garage door to his auto mechanics classroom just as the tardy chime sounded.

“You’re lucky, James,” Nolan said, attendance clipboard in hand.

“You can say that again, Mr. Nolan,” said Eddie, smiling at just how lucky he was truly feeling about now.

The rest of the day moved like a glacier in February. When seventh period finally let out at 3:07, he went to find Doc Belson in his office, and then remembered what he’d said about having to leave early. He ended up seeing him the next morning, when the Doc signed him up, as a special case, for the SAT. It was also when Eddie told him about Louise, way more than he thought he’d be able to when they spoke the day before in the gym. The Doc seemed happy for him, almost too happy, like he knew more about Louise Parker than he let on.

And now, Saturday a week and half later, here Eddie was again racing against time because of her, trying to make it to this test that he spent the last year convincing himself not to bother about. He didn’t have the money to go to college anyway, and his junior year grades knocked him out of contention for any scholarships. This was what started the fight with Louise. Except for that, last Saturday couldn’t have gone better. Actually, it wasn’t really a fight. It almost got to that point, but she stopped it before it did.

She had called him on the afternoon of the day they met, just as she said she would. He skipped sparring with TJ just to ensure that he’d be there when she called. He hovered near the upstairs hallway phone from about 4:30 on, but he wasn’t the one to answer when it rang promptly at 5:00. Steve, a new guy, answered.

“Louis?” he said. “I don’t know any Louis. Let me check.”

Eddie walked up and held his hand out for the receiver.

“Hello?”

There was a pause, and for a moment Eddie wondered if someone was still on the other end. Then he heard her breath, very soft, butunmistakable.

“Hello?” she echoed.

“Oh yeah, hi,” he said.

“Well, my mom talked to my dad, and they agreed it would be okay for you to come over on Saturday so we can study together.”

“Okay. I guess we’re all in agreement, then. What time should I be over?”

“How about nine?”

“Sure,” he said, trying to make his voice sound little more than routinely interested. “By the way, does your father still fly?” he asked.

“He gave up flying after I was born. He now practices law.”

“What kind of planes did he fly?” Eddie asked, determined to score some points with her dad.

“Fighters.” She said. “The F-15 Eagle. But that was sixteen years ago,” she added, after hearing his quick intake of breath on the other end of the line. “And don’t worry,” she said. “Daddy’s not going to be around, so you don’t have to brush up on U.S. military hardware of the post Cold War era just yet. At least not for Saturday.”

“Okay, then,” he said. “We’ll call it a date.”

“Our second,” she said, and he could picture that magnificent smile as he hung up the phone.

He didn’t see her the rest of that week, but he didn’t go out of his way to either. It was killing him, but intuition was telling him that overzealousness would be the kiss of death. He had to play it cool, but not too cool, which was why he darted into Mr. Rubalcava’s classroom before fourth period on Thursday to leave a peach on her desk. Mr. Rubalcava seemed all too willing to point her desk out to him, and Eddie hoped that the peach he found in the market was as sweet and juicy as the one he taste-tested.

Now, on his way to her house, he smiled to himself at the thought of the juice running down her chin when she bit into the peach. Sweet revenge!

Sylvester, one of the home’s assistant supervisors, agreed to drive him to Louise’s. To save Eddie some embarrassment, Sylvester agreed to forego the mandatory meeting with her parents to ensure Eddie had their permission to be there.

“Just be a gentleman and a scholar, Eddie,” Sylvester told him. “Remember that you’re going there to study, not to fool around. You got the rest of your life for that.”

Sylvester was chill. He’d had it rough, too, and made some poor choices in his younger years. Still, he was probably the most together staffer at Rancho, one of the few people with whom Eddie felt confident enough to talk with about Louise. Eddie told him all about her, that he felt this was it, he was in love; he believed she felt the same way about him; no, they hadn’t kissed yet; yes, she seemed to have two good parents; no her parents weren’t aware of their interest in one another.

“How do I know when it’s right to kiss her, man?” Eddie asked Sylvester in this latest of their several discussions about Louise Selma Parker.

“You’ll just know, that’s all. Don’t try to hurry anything. A boy gets nervous, lets his awkwardness show, or he tries too hard to be smooth, which is even worse. A man bides his time, lets the moment unfold. A man acts when the time calls for him to act, because he’s focused on his life, so he knows when to act and why he’s acting. This Louise sounds like she’s a smart cookie. She’s got a plan for her life. You two playing kissy-face while you’re both supposed to be studying for this college exam probably don’t fit into that plan very well. So don’t worry about it, man. You’ll just know.”

Sylvester had a way of making sense about things that Eddie doubted he’d had much experience in. He was right, though. Louise was as serious about this SAT as a ship’s captain is about making it to port on schedule. Distractions probably just weren’t in the picture.

They rolled up to the house, a modest, well-kept ranch style home with a large, very old pine that shaded most of the back yard. The well-maintained front yard whispered a soft fragrance, emanating from the flowering plants that adorned it. Eddie got out of the car and Sylvester, after giving him an assuring thumbs-up, drove off.

Louise came out to greet him, carrying a large, thick, soft-cover workbook. “Are you ready to party?” she said, holding up the book as though it were coveted “partying" material that would sustain them for the morning and afternoon.

“I’m not so sure,” he said, grinning. “My friends call me a light-weight, you know.”

“Yeah? Well you sure know how to choose a peach. That was amazing!”

“Was it juicy?” he asked, mischief in his voice.

“Oh my God!” she said. “I had to eat it with a dish towel in my hand. If that was your idea of revenge for what I did to you with my aunt’s orange, you got me three times over. My friends wouldn’t let me hear the end of it.”

God, he loved that smile.

They sat at a table in her backyard in the shade of the pine tree. “Okay, should we start with the practice essay topics?” she asked, ready to get right to work. “We’ll choose one and write for forty minutes. Then we’ll work on analogies,” she said, flipping the pages of her well-trodden SAT prep workbook and then setting it down on the table, opened to the page with the writing prompts. After setting paper out for each of them and glancing at the small clock on the table, she began to write. Again he noticed her pencil, its sleek, polished appearance, its fluid motion as if it were a part of her, its uncanny ability to appear to feed the lead out automatically.

He noticed with quick glances that she was writing about her mother, for whom she apparently had great admiration. He had chosen the same prompt, about someone special in his life, and of course he wrote about Granny, the person closer to being his parent than anyone else.

“It was her third serious attempt to get clean,” he wrote. “. . . and the first time she had stayed sober for a year since she was fifteen. She vowed to herself that on her one year anniversary, if she were able to last that long, she’d begin her search for me. One year and three weeks into this ambitious project, she found me living in a foster home in Nevada outside of Las Vegas. What she said when she did was ‘Hello, Louis. I’m your grandmother. I’d like you to come home with me.’ Just like that.

“It turned out to be the truest home I’d ever known, because there was love there, true love. She is how I came to know what love is. She never used again. She and I would talk every day, about anything and everything. It was like she was making up for lost time, hers and mine, and maybe, in a way, hers and her daughter’s—my mom’s—as well. She told me she had almost forgotten what it was like to be in love with life, and that I gave that back to her. She told me not a minute goes by that she isn’t thanking God that I was born, and that she found me. I’d never been loved like that before. It was like discovering a whole world that I never knew even existed, except maybe on TV. Not real, only now suddenly it was. The home she provided for me was a one bedroom apartment in one of the cheapest rentals on Sutter Avenue, but to me it was a palace, and I was a prince.”

He was a little uncomfortable when, upon finishing her essay, she offered it to him in exchange for his. Hers was good, extremely well-written, telling the story of her mother’s quiet upbringing in Alabama, being swept off her feet by a handsome Air Force recruit who couldn’t keep his eyes off her at a Dizzy Gillespie concert in Birmingham. Her mother was a musician herself, played the piano, and Louise’s intertwining of the horn man’s notes, her mother’s own musical sensibilities, and her father’s smitten passion as he watched her enjoying herself at the concert was first rate.

Eddie had nearly forgotten his own composition, and when he looked up to show his appreciation for her piece he saw tears trailing down Louise’s cheeks.

“Hey,” he said. He was so accustomed to his own story that it didn’t occur to him that it could evoke tears, so he actually thought she was crying about something else, about the test, maybe, or her essay about her mom. When she looked up, however, it was clear. He’d only felt the love of another once, in the best three years of his life. Now that he was feeling it again there was no mistaking it. He reached over and brushed away the tears with the backs of his fingers. She smiled.

“It’s, uh, it’s really good,” she said, and then she laughed in her embarrassment.

“So is yours,” he said.

“Oh, come on.”

“No, really. The way your dad falls in love to the notes of Gillespie’s horn is downright lyrical. I’d say you have your writing down.”

“Okay, then,” she said, shuffling off her sadness to show she was ready to get back to business. “What’s next?”

“You tell me, boss. You got the book.”

They worked on math and they worked on word analogies, and then more math. Eddie learned that Louise plays piano, too, though she claims she’ll never be as good as her mother. Mrs. Parker checked on them now and again and brought them sandwiches and soft drinks so they could keep working through lunch. She was a beautiful woman herself, Eddie thought, and he had no trouble understanding Louise’s father’s passion for her that he read about in Louise’s essay.

As Louise had told him on the phone, Mr. Parker was working. Now a practicing attorney working for the Air Force, he was gone much of the time. Louise said the only consolation was that the irregularity of her father’s working hours allowed her to see him for longer spells and at better times than her friends got to see their fathers (like on the days he picked her up from school) whenever there would be a break in the case he was working on or, as he said, whenever he felt he needed his family more than their Uncle Sam needed him.

Now on word analogies, Louise held the book and read one out to him. “STUDIOUS is to SCHOLARSHIP,” she said, “as PRINCIPLED is to a. ACHIEVEMENT b. REWARD c. SCRUPLES d. ACADEMICS.”

“Hm,” he said, rubbing his chin in thought. “I go with b, REWARD.”

“Really? I was thinking SCRUPLES,” she said.

“Let’s see,” he said, rubbing his chin. “When someone is studious, they can get a scholarship. When someone is principled, they get a reward?”

“Not always,” she said. “Unless you believe in heaven.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I don’t think they’re talking about the kind of scholarships you get for college, anyway,” she said, looking at him over the book. “I think they’re talking about scholarship, as in being scholarly. When you’re studious, you exhibit scholarship. You have scholarship. Like when you’re principled . . .

“You have scruples.” They said it together. He paused for a beat. “Yeah,” he said. “I think you’re right.”

She checked the back of the book, and yes, she was right.

“You know what?” she said. “You never told me where you’re planning to go.”

“Go?”