Failure to Zigzag by Jane Vandenburgh

Author:Jane Vandenburgh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582438955
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

11

Nice

He looked Japanese but he wasn’t. He was Mexican, a bean-oh, as Lionel would say. He’d made a clicking noise in the back of his throat at her that was causing her insides to wither, like a leaf curling in a fire. His hair was jet black, greased back. His teeth were white and perfectly straight. He was a ridesman, putting together his kiddie ride. “Wanna go on it?” he asked her, pitching his voice low across her path, tossing the words like pennies.

“No, thanks,” she told him. It was for two-year-olds; it had frogs, ducks, doggies. She held her beach towel to her chest to cover up the letters on her sweatshirt: UVA. The letters were bright red and slanted. Everyone always assumed, from the look of them together, that they stood for something dirty.

She was coming back from the beach where she’d been lying out, getting tan, observing the behavior of other, more normal teenagers, ones who weren’t mistaken for two-year-olds. One girl surfer had yelled at the boy who’d cut her off on a wave, “Hey, Burlingham! You asshole!” Charlotte was so entranced by the throaty sound of the girl’s shout over the crashing water that now she wanted to meet an asshole, just to be able to call him that.

This ridesman wasn’t it. He was handsome to the point of beauty, which was not Charlotte’s sort of type. He was too old for her, way older, all the way up in his twenties. His flirting seemed deadly serious, as if something might actually come of it. His eyes were copper-colored, brown with gold flecks, slanted, squinting in the strong light. He was too good-looking. Even his long brown fingers looked dangerous.

“You decide you wanna ride, then you come see me,” he was telling her, the words low, accreted with meaning.

She fixed her face to look pained, to look like a stuck-up high school girl from Verdugo Woodlands. “Sure bet,” she said, then tsked. As she walked by him, she could feel his eyes on her; she could hear only the swack, swack, swack of her rubber zoris as they hit the flesh of her heels.

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