My Sister’s Boyfriend

It was Valentine’s Day, two months before my sixteenth birthday, when Todd first noticed me. I opened the front door in my brown-and-gold Wildcats uniform, still flushed from my track meet, to find Beth and Todd curled up on the couch, his hand on her thigh. Beth’s eyes flicked to me, then back to American Idol. “Hey Angie. Moms not home,” she said, but I barely heard her over the bright, panicked awareness that Todd was looking at me. His eyes had slid from the TV to my body, and hadn’t moved. Suddenly conscious of how short my shorts were, I pressed my back against the front door, closing it without turning around, and walked straight to the kitchen, head down.

He was probably stoned, I realize now, but this all happened nearly ten years ago. I was a sophomore at El Camino High, my sister was a senior, and Todd had finished school the year before and now spent his days at the skate park with his crew of long-haired, slow-mouthed slack-offs. He’d been dating Beth since I was a middle schooler with braces doing fractions at the kitchen table. I wanted desperately to impress him, for him to notice me, for him to think I was grown-up, and cool, and, if possible, hot.

The next day, I was curled up at the end of the couch, bare feet on the cushions, reading Tank Girl – I wasn’t really into comics, or graphic novels, but I knew Tank Girl was something cool girls read – when Todd sauntered out of the kitchen with a piece of peanut-buttered bread.

“What up, homegirl?” he asked, standing at the other end of the couch.

I looked up, short of meeting his eyes, to the uneven blonde stubble on his chin, and tried to shrug nonchalantly.

He shoved the rest of the bread in his mouth. He didn’t toast it, I thought.

Todd dropped to the arm of the couch with studied casualness. I was in thrall to his baggy shorts and oversized Thrasher Ts, though looking back, they were nonconformist only within the carpeted confines of our living room, and comically out of proportion to his perpetually underfed angularity. He had the earlobe-length haircut inexplicably popular among teen actors and boy band members of the late 2000s, and brushed a sun-bleached strand out of his face as he spoke again.

“Tank Girl,” he said. I inhaled. “Rad.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking up. “It’s pretty cool.” My voice sounded overeager and childish.

Todd didn’t notice; his eyes were on my body. I didn’t move, or breathe. Finally, long fingers brushing his hair away again theatrically, he said, “So you, like, run track?”

He’d been dating my sister for three years, and that was the only thing he knew about me. I nodded.

“You fast, or whatever?”

“I’m okay,” I said automatically. It was a lie; I was the fastest sophomore at the school.

“Nice,” he said, nodding absently. “Maybe I’ll come see you sometime – with Beth,” he added. This was also a lie: my sister had only seen me run when she had to give me a ride home; she wasn’t an athlete and had no interest in sports. She was the kind of girl who would actually read Tank Girl, and not to impress a boy.

“You skate, right?” I said next, because it seemed like my turn to ask him about himself.

An even more inane question than his, considering how often I had heard the rasp of his skateboard sweeping up our asphalt driveway, seen him carry it inside. It didn’t matter; he launched into a monologue about the skate videos he and his crew were making, or planning to make, stringing together impenetrable phrases like kickflip nosegrind and Chinese nollie over the mini gap. I nodded along, watching his mouth move and following his knuckle-and-bone hands mime tricks in the air between us, trying to look like I was listening, impressed, and cute all at the same time. Eventually, after talking for a long time, he said enthusiastically, “You should come down and see the spot sometime, it’s sick,” adding, again, “with Beth.”

I knew I wouldn’t, but said, “Yeah, that’d be awesome!” cringing at how girlish and excited I sounded.

In front of my bedroom mirror that night, I practiced speaking in a low, slow voice. “Yeah, that’d be awesome,” I repeated, aiming for sultry but landing somewhere between serious and sleepy.

Beth and I had been close when we were younger, but we’d stopped confiding in each other sometime after the divorce. That was also around when Beth got her first boyfriend. She’d had four or five since then. Meanwhile, I had my best friend, Lucy, and a crush on Michael Phelps.

 

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