Jo Leigh - Catching His Eye

“What do you mean, we? I’m not doing any such thing.”

Hope grabbed her by the T-shirt and pulled her toward the high school track. There were quite a few people jogging already, even though it was only just past six in the morning, on a Saturday no less. Some teachers, but mostly students circled the infield, almost every one of them looking tan and fit and wonderful in their little teeny shorts. Not her. No one laid eyes on her thighs. Ever.

She started jogging, if you could call it that. It was more a lumbering walk, actually. But Hope let go of her shirt, so that was something.

“So, tell me. Damn, girl, you sure do know how to build the suspense.”

“It wasn’t pretty, Hope.”

“Huh?”

“I was flat on my butt in the middle of the hallway outside my classroom.”

Hope stopped. Emily jogged past her. Slowly.

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Why were you on the floor?”

“Doing yoga.” She was too tired for sarcasm. After gulping a few breaths, she slowed her pace a wee bit. “Some kid, and I think it might have been Tommy Wells, crashed into me, and I fell.”

“And?”

“And Scott helped me up.”

“Was it incredible? Did your eyes meet and—”

“It was humiliating. I looked like death warmed over and he didn’t blink an eye.”

“He didn’t remember you?”

“Yes, he did. But it was nothing. A big fat zero.”

“Are you sure?”

“I was there.”

“Oh.”

They jogged in silence for a while. Emily might have said more, but her lungs were preoccupied with trying to save her life.

“I bet there was more. You probably just didn’t see it.”

“There was no more.”

“I don’t believe it.”

Emily didn’t argue with her. But she did move to the right as she heard an approaching runner. She also wiped the sweat from her eyes and pulled up her sagging sweats.

“Hey!” the runner said as he got to her side.

Oh, God.

“Emily! I didn’t know you ran.”

She smiled at Scott, who looked like he should have been on a box of Wheaties with his perfect chest and windswept hair. She thought about her own hair, elegantly swathed in a decrepit sweatband, with just a few insouciant tendrils plastered against her cheek. About the shirt she had so carefully chosen this morning, emblazoned with Bart Simpson shouting “Don’t Have a Cow!”

“Hey, Scott,” Hope said, looking far too pretty.

“Hope? Oh, man, this is old home week. You’re still here, too?”

“I ask myself why every morning, but yes, I’m still here.

He laughed as he slowed down to meet Emily’s pace, and try as she might she couldn’t improve it. It was probably better to go slow than to actually have a heart attack at the next quarter-mile. On the other hand…

“So what about that cup of coffee we talked about the other day?” he asked.

She nodded, not sure if she could continue to jog and speak at the same time.

“Great. How about tomorrow. You don’t work on Sunday, do you?”

She shook her head this time.

“I’ll have to,” he said, “but I can take a break around four if that works for you.”

Again she nodded. This time throwing in a smile.

“Great. I’ll call you. You’re in the book?”

More nodding.

“Okay, then.” He turned to Hope. “Great seeing you again.”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice as even as his. “Nice to have you back.”

“Have a good run,” he said, then he put on some speed, leaving her and Hope in the dust.

At least he gave Emily something terrific to look at as he raced away. She kept moving her legs, swinging her arms, all the while looking for an escape plan. At the next curve in the track, she headed for the girls’ locker room, and she didn’t stop until she was safely inside.

She made her way to a bench and collapsed, her lungs burning like fire, her legs like Jell-O, her face so hot she could fry an egg on her forehead.

The door slammed and Hope found her still gasping for breath.

“Oh, my God!” she said. “What are the odds? But hey, he asked you out. That’s something. That’s incredible.”

Emily looked up into Hope’s beautiful, sweatfree face. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Tomorrow. I heard him ask you. And you said yes.”

“For the record, I said nothing. There’s no way I’m going to coffee with him tomorrow.”

Hope sat down on the other side of the bench. “Emily—”

“Don’t start. Don’t quibble. Just know that I quit. Right here, right now. It was a stupid idea.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do. But what I don’t understand is why you want to quit.”

“You were right there!”

“Where?”

“Don’t be dense, Hope. He thinks I’m his buddy from English lit. He’ll never see me any other way.”

“You don’t know that.”

Emily gave her a look, but she didn’t argue. In fact, all her arguments ended right then. Except…

“It’s completely unacceptable. You’re going to see him if I have to drag you to the coffee shop by your hair.”

“You and what army?”

“Lily, Sam, Zoey, Julia—”

“Sam and Zoey aren’t even in town.”

“They’ll fly in for the occasion.”

Emily let go a troubled sigh. She’d had such dreams about meeting Scott. How she’d look, her hair, her nails. How cool she’d be, sophisticated enough to sit next to Dorothy at the Algonquin. She’d imagined his reaction dozens of times. His eyes widening, his jaw slackening. His inability to string three words together. It was supposed to have been heaven. A meeting so gorgeous songs would be written about it.

Instead, she’d sweated and gasped, panted like a dog. She could have gotten over the incident in the school hallway. But now she was two strikes down. She wasn’t anxious to go up to bat again.

“Are you listening to me?” Hope asked.

Not only had Emily not been listening, she hadn’t even seen Hope get up and take her shirt off. Her dark hair was a mess, but it still managed to look sexy and sleek. Hope, who considered her looks average, who thought that she was too short and her nose too big, wasn’t any of those things. She was beautiful. Everyone saw it but her.

“Why do we do this to ourselves?” Emily asked, surprised that she’d said it aloud.

“What?”

“Think of ourselves in the worst possible light.” Hope grabbed her T-shirt and pulled it on, then came back to the bench. “I don’t know. We do, though, don’t we?”

“All the time. It’s never about how happy we are with our eyes, but how miserable we are with our nose.”

Hope nodded. “Men don’t do that.”

“I’ll say. They think if they can stand upright they’re hot stuff.”

“So go see him, Em. Why not?”

Emily met her gaze. “I don’t know.”

“I do. Go. Go with no expectations except to see an old friend. Go without making yourself nuts, just like you were meeting one of us. Go and talk to him, and let him see who you are now. The very worst that’s going to happen is you’ll have a new friend.”

She nodded. “Okay. Why not? I’ll go, and I’ll talk and I’ll leave my expectations at home.”

Scott handed Mrs. Newberry her package of green beans then forced a smile. The immediate reward of a return smile did little to elevate his mood. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plane tickets sitting in his suitcase. First class, round trip from Los Angeles to Bristol, Connecticut. The plane would be in the air right now, with some other passenger in his seat.

“Are the tomatoes ripe?” a strident voice said from behind him.