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“Why are you defending him?” I counter. “He hates people like us. We’re not worth licking the dirt on his shoes, according to him.”
“And what exactly is that? People like us?”
Her eyes are challenging me.
Like an idiot, I meet the challenge. “Losers.”
A shard of hurt slips across her eyes. “Is that what you think of me?”
I lift a hand, drop it. “That’s what they think of us. Jason and his crew.”
She pushes herself off the dryer and brushes off her dress. “That’s funny, because Jason never called me a loser. But you did.”
I jump off and follow her down the gravel pathway to the dock. “Kenzi, that’s not what I meant…”
She turns to me suddenly. “Is that why you…?” But her question catches, and her voice trails off.
My throat lumps. How do I tell her now that it’s not that I don’t want her…
The problem is wanting her too much? The type of longing that makes your soul ache.
My words go brittle and crack. “Kenzi…”
She shakes her head. “Just leave me alone for a minute. Please.”
Please. When she says please, I can’t do anything but obey.
My feet are trapped to the ground like they’re stuck in tar, and I watch her walk down the dock and away from me.
I don’t see Kenzi for a couple of days.
It feels like a lifetime.
I’m not sure if she’s still mad at me about the loser comment. I spend nearly a full twenty-four hours downloading music off Limewire and burning it onto a CD. I put it in a case, climb onto her boat, and leave it trapped in the hatch window that leads to her room.
But the next day, the CD is still there. She hasn’t come back to the boat.
I’m trying not to let it consume me. But it’s a challenge. I find myself spending too much time staring off into the void blankly.
“Donovan.” I glance up from my notebook. I’ve been distractedly doodling the letter K in the corner.
I’ve been zoning out during the Tomorrow’s Doctors class. Dr. Esmerelda is staring at me expectantly from across the conferences table. “Team up with Jason for the assignment, please.”
My chest gets tight. I look at Jason, but for once, he doesn’t have murder in his eyes.
Actually, he’s been in a bizarrely good mood today. And I feel like I’m walking on a minefield around him, waiting for the bomb to detonate, because it can’t be this easy.
The class dives into teams of two. Each team is given a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff. Our task is to accurately take the pulse and pressure of our partner.
Simple enough, at least. Jason goes first. I have to roll up my sleeve so he can take my blood pressure. This is easy for him.
He jots down my statistics in his notebook. Then he rolls up his sleeves and extends his arm. He’s distracted, though. He keeps glancing off into nothing, getting lost in his thoughts.
“This is familiar,” I say, trying to draw him back to reality.
For the first time, his blue eyes meet mine. “What?”
“Come on. You don’t remember?” He looks at me blankly, so I continue. “Four summers ago. I was practicing to get my lifeguard certificate so I could pull a couple shifts at the pool. You volunteered to be my CPR dummy and then complained that I nearly broke your ribs.”
