The Art of My Life (38 page)

Mom eyed them. “We’re celebrating
Kurt’s first day of college, the beginning of Avra’s junior year,
not graduation—”

Drew huffed. “What about my senior
year of high school?”

Mom dropped her gaze from the
illuminated menu on the wall. “We’ll get two large
pepperonis.”

The girl bit a hangnail and watched
Cisco. The gummy corners of “Isabel” curled off her red plastic
badge. Overhead, a cardboard pizza twirled in the draft from the
air conditioning vent. Isabel blinked at her customer and scrawled
the order on a guest check.

Dad threaded an arm around Mom’s
waist. “And spicy cheddar cheese poppers.” He batted his eyes
through his glasses at Mom and made her laugh. They melted against
each other and glided toward the empty bench talking in quiet
voices.

I want a guy who will love
me like that―forever.

She looked at her brothers. “When I’m
married, my kids will have whatever kind of pizza they want. And
I’ll bake cookies―”

Drew’s blue eyes brightened in his
freckle-spattered face. “Make some chocolate chips
tonight.”

Kurt shot her an evil grin. “Who’d
marry you, Avra? Morgan?”

“
Puleeese.” Avra made a
gagging noise. She caught Cisco’s smirk out of the corner of her
eye and stopped, mid-gag. Warmth crept into her face.
Oh,
great.
Cisco and everyone in Stavro’s was going to see her face
go apple-red under the track lights.

Cisco’s smirk widened into a smile. “I
can’t remember the last time I had really good entertainment in the
pizza line.”

Metal scraped across metal in the
kitchen, and she looked toward the swinging stainless steel doors.
Isabel gave her the L.O.D., as Kurt called it. The look of
death.

She narrowed her eyes at Isabel.
Trust me, sister, humiliating yourself in public is not the kind
of attention a girl wants. Look at me. Look at you. Which one of us
is likely to get the guy? It’s not rocket science.

“
Hey, what about baking
cookies tonight?” Drew croaked.

Cisco pushed off the partition
separating the counter area from the dining room and joined them.
“That’s what I’m talking about! My half-price-plus-a-buck specials
sounded pretty good till I heard you guys discussing homemade
cookies.”

The corners of Avra’s mouth turned up.
Dark hair curled on Cisco’s bare ankles above the loose laces of
his tennis shoes. Her stomach quivered as it did when a soccer ball
hurtled toward her. She opened her mouth to say something,
anything, and turned away with a flutter of her hand. She shrank
into herself—the result of being too tall for too many years. Just
disappear. That’s what she was good at.

Cisco nudged her shoulder with his.
“Thanks again for the show.”

She eyed his shoulder, even with hers.
“Sure, Cisco, anytime.”

Cisco jutted his chin at her. “The
lady knows my name.”

Heat swept back to her face. Isabel’s
L.O.D. burned into her.

Cisco winked. “See you in Humanities
Wednesday—Avra.” He pushed out the door, pizza boxes balanced in
one hand over his shoulder. A two liter Orange Crush dangled from
between two fingers.

Breathe, Avra
. It was just a
wink
.
But he knew her name.

Isabel’s gaze raked over her as though
she were a palmetto bug. She tossed a boxed pizza onto the counter
in front of a man in a rumpled three-piece-suit. Isabel must have
been all of five-three, but in some weird way, she made Avra feel
small.

Avra trailed Kurt’s faded
Ron Jon
Surf Shop
T-shirt toward the corner table where her parents
sat. She would be translucent again by Wednesday, a blur guys look
through but never see. This was what she prayed for when she hit
five-eleven in the fifth grade.

She scooted across the vinyl bench
after Kurt, shooting a glance at the door where Cisco had
disappeared. Her hand touched the shoulder Cisco had bumped—as if
anything would ever come of it.

Cisco swung the Orange Crush beside
him. His sisters would get into a brawl about the soda. How was he
supposed to remember who liked what? If tuition wasn’t killing him,
he’d be out of there.

A sea breeze rustled the moss-draped
oaks overhead. The pizza warmed the palm of his hand through its
box. He breathed in the pepperoni scent and thought about Avra’s
family in Stavro’s who could have stepped out of Charity De Meer’s
Photography window. Their banter had splashed over him, making him
thirsty for more.

Families intrigued him—not his, with
Mamá cleaning schools, three to eleven, Pop living on
Freedom’s
Call
tied up behind the city marina. His kid sisters screeched
at each other all day like it mattered. No, happy families
interested Cisco.

He cracked open the pizza boxes in the
twilight to make sure Isabel got the order right.

His mind swerved away from Isabel to
this morning’s class. Avra had smirked into her Humanities book
without looking up when Mr. Smythe-Rollings called him “Mr. Carter”
instead of “Cisco.” His lips curled into a smile at the memory. She
was the kind of girl who blended in on campus. But when you really
looked at her, she was a treat—a sloppy-soft ponytail the color of
caramels; ocean blue eyes; and long, toned legs beneath the soccer
shorts.

He cut across the dirt yard to his
front door thinking about homemade cookies, a house with two
parents, and siblings that didn’t cuss each other in two
languages.

He tripped on the jagged front step.
What was he going to do about Isabel?

Jesse stood in the asphalt lot behind
Daytona State College and locked the door of his Dodge Neon. He
fanned his shirt away from his body in the muggy
morning.

Someone laid on a horn.

His head popped up.

Cisco darted around the grass islands
on the far side of the lot in his Geo Prism as if they were
florescent cones.

Jesse shook his head. Only Cisco could
make that piece of junk look cool.

Cisco cut his engine and coasted to a
stop facing the cemetery where grass grew in fits and starts along
Welch Drive. Sand grated under Cisco’s feet when he hopped out in
front of him.

Jesse grinned. “Hey, Bro.”

Cisco bumped knuckles with him. “Bud.
Where you been all summer?” Through the open window, Cisco snatched
his backpack from the passenger seat, and they headed for
campus.

“
I’ve been nowhere at
all—the whole stinking summer. You?”

Cisco thumped his chest. “At the beach
all day, every day!” He stretched lazily. “It’s the
life!”

Jesse widened his grin. “Still
changing oil at Walmart, huh?”

Cisco grimaced. “Old man lock you up
in the church all summer?”

“
Yeah, that’s pretty much
it—mowing, clipping, swabbing down the decks—cold cash for
college.” Just once he’d like to hit the beach. Dad would go
ballistic, spewing fire like a dragon—a sermon and a half on the
sins of the flesh—gaining steam as he went. “Tunes, man. Wrote
tunes all summer.”

As they walked toward the library a
Votran bus pulled up to the curb.

Cisco nudged him. “You know that girl,
the one on the left?”

“
Sure, like forever. Avra
Martin—I got a pack of ‘A’s from working on group projects with
her. Why?”

Cisco headed toward the gym. “Saw her
in Stavro’s last night.”

“
And—”

“
That’s all.”

He narrowed his eyes at Cisco. “Yeah,
right.” He tossed his backpack onto the sun-warmed bricks on Echo
Plaza, and planted a foot on a bench.

The undergrad girls headed toward
them, their soft roundness barely camouflaged in store-starched
clothes. He rapped on Cisco’s chest with his knuckles. “Look
alive!”

“
All right!” Cisco fended
himself up from the bench and rubbed his hands together. “Come to
Papa.” He waggled his eyebrows.

Jesse laughed. He had missed Cisco’s
humor, the hero-worship in the younger girls’ eyes. This was
living. The girls’ breathless chatter, their short shorts,
captivated him.

Billy stepped into the group, hit
knuckles with Jesse, then Cisco. The girls giggled. Billy’s
shower-damp hair curled on top of his six-foot frame. His cheeks
glowed pink as if he’d over-scrubbed his acne.

The crowd swelled beyond Jesse’s
group. Students gathered under the clock tower, shouting to friends
headed across Echo Plaza. Others milled on the grass, squinting
into the sun. Some guys tossed a Frisbee around. A peal of laughter
erupted from the cheerleaders’ bench.

Ah, Sleeping Beauty Kallie. Jesse shot
a smile at the girl wedged on the wrong end of the cheerleaders’
bench. Her face was pale, her body rigid. Her gaze clamped on his
like a lifeline in a sea of unfamiliarity. If she was trying to
disappear, she failed―in those traffic-cone-orange jeans and green
Converses. But she looked smokin’ hot just the same.

The basketball team camped around the
cheerleaders. Jesse frowned. Jocks. He nodded at Kallie and settled
his gaze back on the faces in his circle. “It was so boring in New
Smyrna Beach this summer…”

Cisco, Billy, and the girls glanced
curiously at the cheerleaders’ bench and back at Jesse.

He ignored their interest. “…that the
Hometown News ran a half-page article on mosquitoes…”

When Jesse’s crew scattered for their
classes, he shot a glance at Kallie’s cascade of straight blonde
hair that slipped over her shoulders like silk. Eyes averted, she
clenched a salmon-colored class schedule in her hand. He should
welcome her to Daytona State, but he hadn’t recovered from meeting
her last Thursday when he caught her eavesdropping on his solo jam
session. In three minutes, she’d slipped into his soul.

Someone jostled into Avra as she
funneled through the doorway after Humanities. She pushed a tress
of hair behind her ear and looked up. Cisco. Oh, great. He was
going to think she ran into him on purpose. “Sorry.” Feeling the
heat rush to her face, she ducked her head.

“
Make cookies the other
night?” Cisco asked as they pressed into the hall and melded with
the stream of students.

She resisted the urge to look around
to see if he was talking to her. They walked in step, shoulder to
shoulder. “Yeah.”

“
Chocolate
chip?”

She nodded. The hottest guy in
Humanities 301 was making polite with her. What was wrong with this
picture?

“
Quite the
conversationalist, aren’t you?”

She shrugged. She wasn’t practiced up
on small talk.

“
Have it your way.” He
held the glass door open for her. “Next time you bake cookies,
invite me over.”

Her eyes popped open like Garfield’s
Odie. Her mind whirled. He was kidding, right? “You don’t know
where I live.”
That was inane.

“
If you invited me,” Cisco
said in a singsong voice, “you could tell me your
address.”

She laughed. “We’ll see.” She shuffled
away in a fog. Maybe there was something to “the way to a man’s
heart is through his stomach
.
” Who’d a thunk it? She should
have tied a chocolate chip cookie around her neck eons
ago.

She glanced back over her shoulder.
Cisco’s dark curls, bleached white in the sun, bobbed away with the
current of students flowing toward the theater building.
I guess
he remembered me.

Cisco threaded through the flotsam of
students toward the theater building. We’ll see?
I don’t think
so, Avra Martin.
He didn’t get
maybes,
only
yeses
. The girl had family, cookies, and legs you’d have to
be in a coma not to appreciate. He bet a lot went on under those
blue eyes of hers. Suddenly, he wanted to find out.

On the verge of bagging the two things
he wants most—a sailing charter business and marrying old
money—Jake Murray’s fiancée/sole crew member dumps him. Salvation
comes in the form of dyslexic, basketball toting Rachel Martin, the
only one to apply for the first mate position he slapped on
craigslist.