My First Love Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1995 by Daniel Weiss Associates, Inc., and Elizabeth Mosier

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  West, Callie.

  My first love / Callie West. — 1st trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: High school junior Amy has so many important goals, including going to college and winning a swimming scholarship, that she does not have time for romance, until she meets Chris and her tidy world starts to fall apart.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83210-8 (trade pbk : alk. paper) [1. Love—Fiction. 2. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 3. Swimming—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W51727My 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009053958

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1_r1

  To Elizabeth

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  chapter one

  The night Rick Finnegan kissed me changed my life—but not in the way I’d expected.

  He had given me a ride home from my best friend Blythe Carlson’s house, where we’d all been drilling one another on vocabulary for the PSATs. There we were, sitting in his dad’s Buick outside the Palms bungalow apartments, where my mom and I live, when out of nowhere Rick slipped his arm around me.

  I don’t know what got into him, but one minute he’d been defining the word alacrity, and the next thing I knew he was demonstrating it. He moved across the seat so fast that I didn’t have time to react. Suddenly, his mouth was on mine. Instinctively, I closed my eyes—and he kissed me.

  “Amy, I … I think I’m starting to like you,” Rick whispered.

  My eyes flew open in surprise. But instead of seeing Rick, I saw Chris Shepherd, who’s on my swim team, the Dolphins, and in my physics class, too. He’s also the guy I’ve been daydreaming about for weeks. “I’m the one you really want,” Chris-in-my-mind said. I gasped and jumped away from Rick, leaving him to kiss air where my face had been.

  “Rick!” I shrieked, staring at him.

  “Amy?” Rick said, looking sheepish. “Are you mad? What’s wrong?”

  “N-n-nothing,” I stuttered, trying to collect my thoughts. I couldn’t believe that Rick Finnegan—my buddy since kindergarten—had just kissed me!

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “Look, Rick,” I said gently, “I’m very flattered. You’re a great guy. But we’re friends—and I’d like to keep it at that. I’ve got so much going on right now, I don’t have time for romance.”

  But Rick didn’t look convinced. “Amy,” he said, twisting a lock of my straight brown hair around his finger, “you know what they say about all work and no play.…”

  “Maybe,” I said, stepping out of the car, “but all play and no work gets you a career dipping cones at the Dairy Queen.”

  Actually, I didn’t say that. I didn’t even think up this perfect comeback until the next day. What came out instead were my mother’s words, words often meant for me.

  “Your passion is misguided,” I informed him, closing the car door behind me.

  “My what?” I saw Rick’s lips form the question behind the window glass right before I waved and turned away.

  I couldn’t believe I had said that. Mom uses passion in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with kissing. It has to do with enthusiasm and ambition.

  According to my mom, passion, like money, runs out. So you have to be careful not to spend it carelessly. My father, for example, turned out to be a bad investment. He wasn’t around long enough to see me turn two. I don’t really remember him, but Mom said that once she’d loved him so much her heart hurt. After he took off, she poured what was left of her passion into me.

  “Don’t throw away your talents the way I did,” my mom was always warning me. Believe me, I wasn’t planning to, not when my whole future, starting with a swimming scholarship to college, was at stake.

  I felt kind of bad saying what I did to Rick, but I guess the kiss really caught me off guard. I turned again to go back and apologize, but he was already driving away.

  I stood for a minute outside our apartment, looking up at the stars and thinking about the fact that one of my oldest and best friends just kissed me. When did Rick’s feelings for me change, and why hadn’t I realized it? I had felt nothing when Rick’s lips were on mine. But for some unknown reason just the thought of Chris Shepherd’s lips sent my heart racing. It was true what I’d said to Rick. I never had had time for guys. Until now.

  Chris and I had known each other for a couple of years from the swim team, but he had never treated me any differently from the way he had treated any other girl on the Dolphins. He was always friendly, and he kidded around, but that was it.

  I had always liked Chris, but over the last few months I had been noticing different things about him—admiring his long, lean body, his thick, glossy brown hair, his quick sense of humor …

  I shook my head to get rid of the thoughts. I had feelings for Chris I’d never had before for a guy, but I was still too shy to do anything about it. He had been a fantasy tonight, and he’d probably always be a fantasy, I thought dejectedly as I headed inside our apartment.

  “You’re just in time for the latest episode of The Young and the Restless,” Mom said as I walked into our combination living/dining room. Mom worked two jobs. She worked from nine to three at the Arizona Bank, and evenings at El Rancho supermarket. Every day she taped her favorite soaps, and when she got home from the El Rancho, she’d curl up on the couch and watch them.

  “Thanks, but I’ve been studying vocabulary for hours,” I told her. “I’m afraid I’ll erase what I’ve learned if I zone out on TV.”

  “Good for you,” Mom said. “You go ahead and get a good night’s sleep.”

  “I think I will.” I hesitated for a moment. “Mom? Something pretty weird just happened,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Well … Rick drove me home from Blythe’s. And … he … well, he, um … told me he liked me,” I explained, blushing. I didn’t think I needed to tell her about the kiss. It was kind of embarrassing.

  Mom sat up straight. “What did you say?”

  “I told him I didn’t like him that way. That we were just friends.” I watched as Mom breathed an almost undetectable sigh of relief.

  �
�Good answer, honey. With your schedule, a boyfriend is the last thing you need,” she said.

  “Yeah. I guess,” I said, shrugging.

  I kissed her on the cheek and went to my room. There’s no way I could have sat through the soap. I was having a hard enough time already putting Chris out of my mind and concentrating on my work. The last thing I needed was to fill my aching brain with stories about star-crossed lovers and abandoned dreams.

  The PSAT, it turned out, was a nightmare of words I’d never used and math I’d understood for about an hour in ninth grade. It was bad enough that my brain was fried from choosing among A, B, C, or none of the above and that my hand was numb from filling in those tiny circles with a sweat-slick number-two pencil. But the worst part was the reel-to-reel reruns of that kiss that played in my head all day.

  And it wasn’t Rick’s kiss that I kept seeing—that was something we both would’ve liked to forget, I was sure. It was Chris’s. I couldn’t stop picturing what it would be like to kiss him. In my mind his lips were soft and warm and firm. Then, when his lips found mine, I had that roller-coaster feeling—my heart plunged into my stomach and then began the slow, suspenseful crawl right back up to my chest.

  The next thing I knew, I was sighing so loudly that people on both sides of me turned and stared. At the same time the proctor announced, “Fifteen minutes left.” What was I doing? How could I blow this? Embarrassed and frantic, I raced through the rest of the test.

  I was relieved when the PSATs were over, though considering my state of mind when I’d taken it, I was worried about my score. As we left the room, everyone seemed to be talking at once.

  “Did you finish the analogy section?”

  “How do you find the least common denominator in fractions?”

  “Does anyone know what apposite means?”

  For the rest of the day my honors classes were a chorus of collective anxiety. When my last class was over, at three o’clock, I fled to the gym, where I hoped to somehow rinse myself of it all by putting on my racing suit and plunging into the pool before practice.

  The rest of the team wasn’t due to help put in the lanes for another half hour, so I had the open pool to myself. I love swimming more than anything else in the world. As I stood on the deck and looked at the tranquil water, I began to feel calm. For the next two hours, all I’d have to do was concentrate on picking up another win in the 100 freestyle this weekend.

  I took a few running steps and blasted the water’s smooth surface with a cannonball. As always, the water was chilly, so I started swimming warm-ups, steaming back and forth from end to end. Believe me, after two seasons on the swim team, I knew that pool so well that I could swim it in my sleep.

  By the fourth lap I was cruising—when suddenly I crashed into someone and swallowed a mouthful of water.

  “Amy, are you all right?” asked a soft male voice as I surfaced, coughing. It was Chris. He grabbed my hand to steady me, which to my embarrassment landed smack in the middle of his chest.

  “I’m fine,” I said, coughing again. I wiped the water dribbling from my mouth off my chin. “I didn’t see you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I saw you swimming laps when I got into the water. I should have gotten out of your way. I know it sounds stupid, but I was just floating on my back and thinking.” He looked at me with real concern. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” I said shyly. “It’s just that I thought I had the pool to myself.” I wanted to duck my whole face underwater or at least hide my eyes. Could he tell by looking, I wondered, that my mind was spinning constant reruns about kissing him?

  Chris returned to floating on his back. His brown hair fanned out like a paintbrush behind him. “If you close your eyes,” he said, “you can pretend it’s a lake, it’s so calm and quiet.”

  I watched him as he lazily kicked his legs and drifted, eyes closed, toward the middle of the pool. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m watching myself break the regional record for the breaststroke,” he explained.

  Great, I thought. While I’m picturing kisses, he’s imagining fame. Nervously, I asked, “Do you really think imagining something can make it come true?”

  Chris laughed. “I’ll know when I reach the finish line.”

  Even though he looked sort of strange floating there, I admired his quiet determination. Chris is the fastest swimmer on the Dolphins, but breaking the breaststroke record was something that he had never been able to do.

  I loved watching him. His body was long and thin, yet muscular, and he moved as though he felt completely comfortable in it. I’m about 5′ 7″ and pretty thin myself, but I don’t move as gracefully as Chris. Before I started swimming with the Dolphins my freshman year, I was really skinny. Now I wore my muscles carefully, like a rental I’d have to return when swim season was over.

  Several Dolphins came into the pool area, their voices sending echoes across the floor tiles. Not even this commotion disturbed Chris’s concentration. I wondered what part of the race he was mentally swimming just then.

  As he drifted nearby, I wanted to reach down and gently stir the water, send it rippling to touch him. Instead, I ducked my head back under and continued swimming laps.

  I swam freestyle for a few lengths, feeling confident in the water—until I made a graceless flip turn, whacking my heel against the lip of the pool.

  “Ouch!” I yelled. I hadn’t meant to draw attention to myself, but as I limped along the bottom of the pool to the starting blocks, I could see that Chris was moving toward my lane. My heart skipped a beat when I realized he was waiting for me.

  “Your timing’s off,” he told me when I stopped to get my breath. He touched my wrist and I was suddenly aware of his long, strong fingers. I stiffened, and he must have noticed, because he took his hand away immediately and let it skim the surface of the pool.

  “That’s what Coach August says,” I said, trying to sound casual, as though my wrist weren’t burning from his touch. “He says I turn too late.”

  “Not too late, exactly, but too cautiously. Your turn would be right on target if you didn’t mentally pull back just as you get to the wall. It’s like you trip yourself up.”

  Chris was probably right—it wasn’t so much the turn as it was the dread of it that kept me from swimming full speed. I constantly imagined bashing my heels. And that was exactly what kept happening.

  “You could do a neater flip turn and probably shave twenty seconds off your time if you didn’t hold back but just charged,” Chris said. “Otherwise, it’s like you’re swimming with your mental brakes on.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “But how do I charge if I’m terrified I’ll hit the lip of the pool?”

  “By picturing doing it perfectly so many times that you really believe you can.” He waded over to grab a kickboard from the pool deck. “First,” he said, tossing me the Styrofoam board, “you’ve got to relax. Here, float and breathe deeply.” He walked over and steadied the board.

  But it was hard to relax with Chris staring down at me. I lay there looking up at him. All I could think about were his deep-set brown eyes. There was an intensity in them, and a kindness as well. I felt like I was about to blush.

  “Good so far,” Chris said, gently brushing his fingers across my brow. He had these hands that looked honest—slim fingers, one wrist tied with a frayed leather friendship bracelet. “Now, close your eyes.”

  I squeezed them shut and waited. “Not so tight,” Chris advised. “What do you see?”

  You, I wanted to say. Aloud I said, “I see myself lying on a kickboard, looking stupid, in the middle of the pool.”

  “Amy, be serious.”

  “I am.” At first, I was too self-conscious to imagine anything but the rest of the Dolphins making fun of me. But after a while, I got the hang of it. I saw myself in the practice pool, speeding toward the end of the lane. I was surprised that the mental picture was so vivid. “I’m swimming,” I
said, still feeling kind of silly.

  “And?”

  “I’m watching the lane lines, getting close to the lip.”

  “Okay, now try to imagine keeping up your speed. What are you thinking?”

  “Don’t hit the lip, don’t hit it, don’t hit it—wham!” I opened my eyes then, and instinctively reached down to rub my heel.

  “Try again,” Chris said gently.

  “What’s the use?” I moaned. “It’s like a movie someone else is directing.” Sometimes my whole life felt like that.

  I thought then that he’d give up, but instead he urged me on. “This time, instead of thinking ‘Don’t hit it,’ try thinking ‘Flip.’ ”

  I closed my eyes and was mentally halfway down the lane when I stopped midstroke to ask, “Why?”

  “Because your brain takes the ‘don’t’ out of ‘don’t hit the lip.’ And your body only does what your brain tells it to.”

  If that was true, I was in trouble, because there were plenty of my mother’s “don’ts” rattling around in my head. Don’t apologize for your intelligence, don’t mope about what you don’t have, don’t take your education for granted, don’t underestimate yourself, don’t expect something for nothing, don’t throw away your future on some guy. For years I’d been repeating those commands in my head, maybe dooming myself to do the very things I’d told myself not to do.

  In my mind, I began my stroke again, saying, “Flip, flip, flip,” under my breath, swimming as fast as I could imagine. Then, before I knew it, I’d turned in the water almost effortlessly.

  “Hey, I did it!” I said, and opened my eyes in time to see Chris looking at me intently, studying me the way I’d studied him.

  Just then Coach August blew his whistle, signaling it was time to put the lanes in for practice. I slid off the kickboard and let myself sink. “Thanks,” I said shyly.

  “Anytime,” Chris said, smiling. Then he turned away and swam toward the coach.

  Anytime, I thought happily as I dove underwater.

  Anytime …

  I was the last one to leave the girls’ locker room after practice that afternoon, mostly because I was thinking so much about Chris that I couldn’t get moving. As I walked out of school, he was sitting in the grass by my bus stop.