Such a Pretty Face by Annabelle Costa

Chapter 10

When I arrive at the Italian restaurant, I’m relieved to see Brody immediately. He’s sitting in his wheelchair, right outside the door, craning his neck in the other direction to look for me. He’s waiting for me—he’s looking for me and is excited by the prospect of seeing me. It’s almost a little hard to believe.

Before Brody spots me, I take a minute to check him out. He’s wearing a nice dark blue dress shirt and brown slacks. This is a step up from what he wears to our class—he made an effort. For me. Then the thought strikes me that Brody probably isn’t able to dress himself. I have no idea who dresses him, but he likely had to tell that person he was going out and wanted to look nice tonight.

“Emily!” Brody spots me and lifts one of his arms in greeting—he manages a slight wave. It’s not really a wave though, since his hand only hangs limply from his wrist. A woman is walking by with her two kids, and the kids stare at Brody so intently that one of them walks into a mailbox.

“Hey,” I say, as I get without earshot.

He looks up at me and smiles winningly. He is adorable when he smiles—it gets me all aflutter. And his blue shirt brings out the color in his eyes. “I got you something,” he says. And that’s when I notice the small bouquet of colorful flowers on his lap. He grabs them with his wrists and holds them out to me.

He got me flowers. He went into a flower shop and purchased them for me in an effort to impress me. He definitely doesn’t want to hang out just as friends—he wants this to be a date. The thought of it makes my knees weak.

“Thank you,” I say. Truthfully, I hate flowers—I have no idea how to keep them alive. But I love these flowers so much because he got them for me. I want to keep them alive forever to remember this feeling. “What are they?”

Brody gives me a funny look. “They’re flowers.”

Does he think I’m completely stupid? “I mean,” I say, “what kind of flowers are they?”

“Oh!” He laughs nervously as he rubs his chin with the back of his curled fingers. “I don’t know. The guy at the flower store told me they were…” He thinks for a minute. “Carnations, maybe? To be honest, I don’t know. I’m not a flowers expert. Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” I say.

“I hope you don’t mind I got them for you,” he says. “I know we didn’t agree this is a date, but… well, I couldn’t help myself.”

He pauses, looking at me expectantly. I’m not entirely sure what to say. Honestly, I’m so nervous, I can’t say much of anything. Finally, I say, “I don’t mind.”

Brody looks a little disappointed somehow, but I’m not sure why. I told him I liked the flowers. Was he hoping for a more effusive response? Was I supposed to make a big show of smelling them and saying how beautiful they are? Did he want me to do an interpretive flower dance?

“Let’s go in,” Brody says. “I reserved us a table.”

I don’t know what arrangements Brody made in advance, but he’s scored us a table right near the entrance that already has one chair pulled away to make room for his wheelchair. Right now, I see another advantage of being with Brody—we don’t have to sit in a booth. I hate booths. Remember how I almost got stuck in that desk in the classroom? Well, that happens in booths too sometimes. I have had to leave a restaurant because the only places to sit were booths and I couldn’t fit.

As Brody opens the menu by using the ball of his hand, I wonder about how he’s going to eat. It’s making me a little nervous. He’s already asked me for help with notes and making photocopies. Is he going to ask me to feed him? I can’t imagine he’d assume I’d do that without asking me in advance. But then again, how could he hold a utensil with those hands?

I try not to think about it as I focus on my own menu. Ordering food in public always makes me edgy. You wouldn’t think my food choices would be anyone else’s business but my own, but that absolutely isn’t the case. If I order anything more substantial than a glass of water and a single lettuce leaf, I’m almost guaranteed to get commentary. Are you sure you should be eating that?

But Brody wouldn’t say that. Not out loud, anyway. But I don’t want him thinking it either. So I guess I’ll be ordering one lettuce leaf.

“Is the food good here?” I ask him.

“Really good,” Brody says.

“So you’ve been here before?”

“Of course,” he says. “I wouldn’t take you to a place I’d never been to before. Got to check it out, you know?”

I don’t entirely know what he means, but I don’t ask. Instead, I study the menu, focusing mainly on the salad section.

Our waitress is a pretty, young woman who looks like she could easily fit into anything at Urban Outfitters. She smiles skinnily at us. “Would you like anything to drink?”

“I’ll just stick with water,” Brody says.

My face falls. I can’t order an alcoholic drink if he doesn’t get one. Even though I desperately want one. So I go with my staple: “I’ll have a Diet Coke.”

(The last time I went out to eat with Abby, she went on this five-minute monologue about how Diet Coke is worse for your weight than regular Coke. But the truth is, if somebody like me orders a regular Coke, they’ll just assume diet and bring it to me anyway.)

“And are you ready to order?” she asks.

Brody raises his eyebrows at me and I nod.

The waitress takes her pad out of her pocket. “What would you like today?”

You know what I want? The fettuccini alfredo. Alfredo sauce, when cooked right, has this perfect creamy, cheesy taste that makes me oh so happy. Just thinking about it makes my stomach growl. But I can’t order that in front of Brody. Or ever, if I’m being realistic. So I bite my tongue and say, “I’ll have the house salad, no dressing.”

“Okay.” The waitress turns her skinniness in Brody’s direction. “And what would you like, sir?”

Brody frowns at me. “That’s all you want? Just a salad? Without even any dressing?”

No, that’s not what I want! Can we please not talk about it? Because I have used all of my self-restraint to order that salad, and I need this waitress to leave the table before I change my mind.

“Yep,” I say.

“Emily.” He shakes his head. “You should get whatever you want. Please. It’s my treat.”

Now both Brody and the waitress are staring at me. “The salad is fine,” I croak. “Really.”

Finally, he shrugs. “I’ll have chicken parmigiana with ziti,” he says. He flashes the waitress a crooked smile. “Um, could you have them, like, cut up the chicken for me, please? Into small pieces?”

“Of course, sir,” the waitress says. Her voice has a mildly patronizing edge that grates on my nerves.

After she leaves with our menus, I’m terrified there’s going to be an awkward silence between us, but there isn’t. I mean, there’s a moment of silence, but it’s not awkward. Brody is grinning at me and seems thrilled to be here. Which makes me happy too. The two of us sit there for a good minute, grinning like idiots.

“Hey,” Brody says, breaking our sappy silence. He seems like a talkative guy, who doesn’t leave much room for silences. He’s not shy like I am. “So I was flipping through my Townsend Harris yearbook last night. I thought we could compare notes.”

My smile slips. I’m not sure I want to compare notes about high school. High school wasn’t a happy time in my life. But I don’t have any alternative topics of conversation to offer.

“Mr. Jeffers,” he says. “Did you have him for calculus?”

I close my eyes for a second and picture a man with curly black hair and a creepy mustache. “Yes, I did.”

“Me too,” Brody says. “You know what happened to him, don’t you?”

I stare at him. “What?”

He smirks. “You don’t know? Oh, man.”

“No…”

“He got canned. He was always hitting on the female students. All the kids knew about it, but the administration finally caught on. Did he ever hit on you?”

No. I was most definitely not the kind of teenager who got hit on by teachers. Even teachers of the creepy mustache variety. Doesn’t Brody realize that? “Not really,” is all I say.

“I’ll send you a link to the article,” Brody says. I gave him my phone number yesterday, and he sent me a text this morning to confirm the location for our date. The text was one long sentence with zero punctuation and a couple of bizarre autocorrects. I suppose it’s not too surprising from a guy who can’t use his fingers.

“I thought of someone in your class that I knew,” I say. “Knew of, at least.”

Brody raises his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“Pete Glasser?” I didn’t know Pete well at all. The only reason I knew him was because he was an asshole. In elementary school and middle school, I got teased mercilessly about my weight, but in high school, kids don’t do that anymore. If they have something negative to say about you, they’ll usually say it behind your back.

But Pete apparently had the maturity of a thirteen-year-old because he made several comments to me or within my earshot during my freshman year. Nothing that made me run home sobbing, but enough to sting. The first thing I ever heard him say when he saw the freshmen filing out of the auditorium for our first orientation was, “Wow, what a crop of dogs.”

That comment didn’t bother me so much. I mean, there were plenty of hot girls in my class, so I knew he was blowing smoke. But then when I passed him, he nudged his friend hard. “Holy shit!” he snickered. “Look at that one! That’s the biggest ass I’ve ever seen in my life.”

I don’t even like to think about the fact that I was downright skinny back then compared to what I weigh right now.

“Oh, right—Pete,” Brody says, grinning. “He was a riot.”

“Yeah.” I study Brody’s face. He’s such a good-looking guy—if he wasn’t disabled back in high school, was he friends with assholes like Pete Glasser? For all I know, he was the guy Pete nudged that first day. Maybe Brody did push freshmen down the stairs.

“In our biology class,” Brody says, “Pete took that model skeleton of the human body and started waltzing around the room with it. He almost got suspended.”

“So you and Pete were pretty good friends, huh?”

Brody narrows his eyes at me for a second, then snorts and shakes his head. “Nah.”

“How come?”

He gives me a crooked grin. “Because he was a huge asshole, that’s how come. You think I’d be friends with the biggest douchebag in the class?”

I blush because, of course, that was exactly what I was implying. “People change.”

“True,” Brody says thoughtfully. He scratches his nose with the back of his wrist. “I wonder what Pete is up to these days. He’s probably either wildly successful or in prison.”

“Didn’t you just have your ten-year reunion?”

“Oh, right.” He shifts in his chair. “Yeah, I don’t go. It would have been… weird.” He averts his eyes. “I wasn’t… you know. I didn’t need a wheelchair in high school. I really didn’t want to spend three hours explaining over and over again to every person in the class what happened to me. I saw the photos on Instagram—that’s enough.”

I desperately want to ask him what did happen to him. He’s got a certain comfort level with his disability that makes me sense it isn’t a recent thing. And the scar on his neck makes me think it was an accident. That’s about all I know.

Finally, he says, “I was in a car wreck when I was nineteen. Broke my neck.”

“Oh,” I say.

He shrugs again, and that’s the end of it. I have about a million other questions I’d love to ask him, but I decide to keep my mouth shut.

At that point, Brody digs into a pouch on the side of his wheelchair and comes out with something that looks like a thick watchband. He drops it into his lap, and I watch him as he manages to get the loop around the last four fingers of his right hand. “Don’t mind me,” Brody says. “Just preparing for when the food gets here.”

There’s a pocket in the band, and Brody tries to get his fork to go into it. I guess that answers my question about how he feeds himself. Considering I’m pretty sure all he can move is his elbows and his wrists, he’s struggling with this. It’s a little painful to watch, and I’m not sure what the proper etiquette is. “Do you want me to help you?” I ask him.

“Nope, I got it,” Brody says. He doesn’t though. Well, eventually he does. It takes him about a million tries, but he finally gets the fork attached to the cuff, and I see his shoulders relax. “Sorry,” he says. “I have adaptive utensils I use at home that I’ve gotten used to. This way always takes longer.”

“It’s okay,” I say.

“It’s just frustrating,” he says. “You know, like, exactly when I’m trying to make a good impression, I do everything much worse than usual.” He takes a shaky breath. “And now I’m even saying stupid things too.”

He looks so incredibly nervous. It’s completely adorable. If I wasn’t so incredibly nervous myself, I would have given him a hug. I wonder how often he goes out on dates. I’m guessing it’s not very much. He could probably give me a run for my money. “Don’t worry about it,” I say.

“Maybe we could start over again, huh?” he says.

“Sure,” I say.

He takes a deep breath. “You look really nice tonight, Emily. Really, really nice.”

Brody is looking at me in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever been looked at before. And it makes me feel a way I’ve never felt before: attractive. Another silence hangs between us and this one isn’t sappy at all—it’s very serious. I get that tingling all over my body, but especially in my underwear.

Of course, it would be that moment when our waitress arrives with the food. Brody’s chicken parmigiana looks and smells amazing, and my salad looks comparatively sad and bland. As promised, Brody’s chicken has been cut up into tiny pieces. He nods and smiles up at the waitress. “Thank you very much.”

Brody lays out a napkin on his lap and digs into his food. I try not to watch, but it’s hard—I’m curious. He’s not doing terribly at eating, considering everything. He spills almost nothing but sometimes he takes two or three tries to spear a piece of chicken.

Meanwhile, my own plate of food is pretty much torturing me. Do you want to know a secret about me? I hate salad. So much. I feel like a rabbit when I’m eating it. I hate everything people put in salads. I hate baby tomatoes. I hate cucumbers. There’s nothing that makes salad more appealing aside from those creamy salad dressings that I’m not allowed to eat.

But what can I do? Aside from the salad, everything on this menu is at least a thousand calories. So I better try to enjoy the salad.

I’m so anxious, I wish that I had something to drink. I mean, something alcoholic. Alcohol would help the situation right now. I think alcohol was invented for first dates. Why did he just order water? What’s wrong with him?

Even though I hate salad, I devour every bite. I’m that hungry, and it’s not terrible if I eat it quickly. Brody pushes his plate away when he sees I’m finished, even though his plate is still more than half-full.

“I’m done too,” he says.

“You don’t have to rush,” I say. He barely ate anything. He’s a man—he’s supposed to at least be able to match me.

Brody shakes his head. “Nah, I’m good. I don’t walk and burn calories, so my appetite isn’t that big.”

The skinny waitress comes to take away our plates and we’re left staring at each other once again. Brody clears his throat. “So, um,” he begins, blinking his blue eyes with much too long eyelashes. “I don’t want to push you or anything, but at this point, I’d kind of like to know if this is a date or not. So if you could tell me, that would be great.”

I swallow. “Oh, um…”

“Because right now, I would really, really like to kiss you,” he murmurs. “But if this isn’t a date, I won’t try.”

All the air suddenly rushes out of my body.

“Um,” I say. “I think… yes. It is. It’s a date.”

Brody raises his eyebrows and a slow smile creeps across his lips. “Yeah?”

I nod.

“Come closer,” he says.

Across the table is way too far away for him to comfortably lean forward and kiss me, considering he has a strap across his chest, so I scooch over to the side of the table so that I’m right next to him. He stares at me for a second, as if doing a few mental calculations to judge the distances. He lifts his right arm, brings his wrist to the back of my head, and pulls my face close to his. He goes about ninety percent of the way to my lips, then I bridge the gap.

And we’re kissing.

Oh my God, we’re kissing!

I wonder if he has any clue this is the first time I’ve ever kissed a man on the lips. It feels so natural, so right, that I don’t even worry (too much) if I’m doing it wrong. At first, Brody stays chastely on my lips, but then his tongue gently laps at my upper lip—he wants to get inside. I open my mouth to let him in, and oh my God. This is amazing! My entire body tingles as his tongue dances against mine and his stubble grazes against my chin.

When we finally separate, I’m literally shaking. Brody’s face is flushed. He mumbles under his breath, “It’s been way too long.” And he turns even redder.

“It’s been a long time for me too,” I tell him.

“I’m sure it’s been longer for me,” he says.

I’m not going to play this game with him, because I don’t want to admit that no matter how long it’s been for him, I’ve got him beat by a million miles. Even if he hasn’t kissed a girl since he broke his neck, I’ve still got him beat.

“I want to kiss you again,” Brody says, and he does. And can I just say that it’s pretty adorable that he announces it when he wants to kiss me.

After our second kiss, I can’t help but notice that half the restaurant is staring at us. I guess we’re a spectacle. But I don’t even care.

As I pull away from him, my boob knocks my knife and fork off the table. My boobs and my butt are always knocking things down. I’m used to it. “I’ll get that,” I mumble, then I reach for the utensils from the floor.

And then I feel something rip.