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She wasn’t too worried about that. After Bono was charged with assault, she doubted he’d risk setting foot in Lark Field. She was glad the two other girls from the team kept near her. It saved her from having to talk to the chaperones.
Elsie didn’t come to class early on Monday or give her teacher a bottle of applesauce. Her mother had still given her one—rhubarb applesauce this time. Elsie left it in her locker. She wasn’t going to look at Kye again, let alone talk to him. During his explanation of L’Hopital’s rule, she stared at her calc book, her paper, the whiteboard behind him, anything but his face.
He didn’t speak to her that day, didn’t mention the missing applesauce, and the week plodded by on its slow countdown to graduation. By the weekend, Elsie felt an impatient restlessness to be done with high school, done with the summer too. It was time to start her new life—a new her where she was officially an adult. People took you seriously when you were an adult.
On Sunday night, Elsie pulled an old tanning lamp out of the garage. Her mother had bought it years ago but hadn’t used it for a long time. A healthy glow would make Elsie look better and, therefore, feel better. She took the lamp to her room, twisted her hair in a ponytail, and put on her bikini. She lay on her floor underneath the lamp and pretended she was sunning herself on a yacht. A yacht owned by the hot son of some billionaire tycoon.
After ten minutes, Elsie wondered if the sunlamp was doing anything. Wasn’t it supposed to put out some heat? It felt like a normal lamp; the same type she had on her desk.
Then she vaguely remembered that Jace, one of her brothers, had used the sunlamp for a science project once—something to do with how different types of light affected plant growth. For all she knew, the lamp had a regular bulb in it right now.
While she examined it, her mother called from the foot of the stairs. “Elsie, dinner!”
She didn’t want dinner. She wanted to spend the remaining days of school with a beautiful glowing tan.
Carson was coming home today from Denver to visit and see her graduate. He’d leveraged his athletic talent and six-foot-five height into a job as a lineman for the Broncos. Hometown boy makes good. Her mother had been making a special dinner for him, so he must have arrived. Well, maybe he could tell her what sort of bulb this was. Elsie tied her bikini straps back up, unplugged the lamp, and went downstairs to talk to him.
She was looking at the lamp, and not at anything else, as she rounded the corner and walked into the kitchen. “I can’t get the sunlamp to work,” she said, knowing Carson would be somewhere near the food. “Is this the right kind of bulb?”
Elsie’s first clue that something horrible was happening was her mother’s inward gasp. “Elsie, for heaven’s sake! Get some clothes on!”
Elsie’s gaze shot up. Kye McBride stood three feet away from her. He stared at her, taking in her bikini and everything it didn’t cover. Carson and her father paused in their efforts of putting food on the table to look at her as well.
The lamp slipped from Elsie’s hands, which was too bad, as it had provided a partial shield. The cracking sound of glass told her the bulb had broken, perhaps the entire lamp had too. She didn’t check. “What are you doing here?” she asked Kye, her voice high-pitched.
She regretted the question as soon as the words left her mouth. Mature women shouldn’t get flustered when they walked into their kitchens in swimwear and found their crushes—or ex-crushes—standing around. She should’ve been able to laugh and brush it off, to come up with some clever retort. Besides it was a stupid question. Kye was obviously visiting her brother, and the way she’d asked the question sounded like an accusation.
Kye didn’t answer. Her mother did while making shooing motions with her hand. “He didn’t come to check your homework. He’s having dinner with us. Go get dressed.”
Before her mother was even done speaking, Elsie was out of the room and bounding up the stairs.
Great. Why hadn’t her mother mentioned Kye was coming for dinner? Elsie knew the answer, and it was another piece of bitterness to add to her collection. Her mother hadn’t told her because Kye was Carson’s friend, not hers. Her mother hadn’t considered it would matter to Elsie. After all, she was nothing to him…just another replaceable, forgettable student.
Elsie reached her room, slammed her door, and flung open her dresser drawer to find clothes. She was tired of being the youngest and always overlooked and eighteen. She shimmied into her jeans, then flipped through her closet for a shirt. She needed something nice, something that made her feel confident and beautiful. Which was hard to do at this point. Even the best of shirts couldn’t work miracles.
Did Kye think she had known he was coming over? Did he think she’d come down wearing a bikini as a way to…to tempt him? The idea made her feel sick. It was what some pitiable starstruck Lolita would do. And Elsie wasn’t like that.
She changed into a light blue T-shirt, took her hair out of her ponytail, and checked her makeup. She reapplied powder, but that was mostly because she was stalling, looking for reasons not to go downstairs again.
Finally, she couldn’t put it off any longer. She made the slow walk of shame back to the kitchen. The lamp had been cleaned up. No sight of it remained. The family was already seated at the table, eating and talking. “Did you like the rhubarb applesauce I sent last Monday?” Her mother asked Kye. “Elsie thinks it’s too tart, but I like a little zing.”
The bottle still sat in Elsie’s locker. How was it that the one time she had skipped out on delivering applesauce, her mother asked Kye about it? Could Elsie believably profess forgetfulness?
Kye raised his gaze to hers. For one second something was in that gaze, though she couldn’t tell what. “It was great,” he said. “I like a little zing. I’m surprised Elsie doesn’t.”
Yeah, well, Elsie had been full of surprises lately.
She slumped in her chair, knowing she was blushing.
“So,” Carson said, shoveling some prime rib into his mouth. “I figured out why your lamp doesn’t work. Turns out, it’s in about ten different pieces.”
“That would explain it.” Elsie reached for a roll. It was about all she had an appetite for.
Carson speared a potato chunk on his fork. “Hey, when did Lark Field High implement flash-your-teacher-day? When I went to school, all we got was crazy hair day.”
Kye spread butter on a roll, unfazed by the question. “It’s part of the new math curriculum.”
Carson bit into his potato and shook his head. “See, I knew there was a reason the old math sucked.”
