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She wasn't grown up. That wasn't it. What caught my eye was the way she didn't change.
Her freckles were as dark as when she was ten, scattered across her nose like stars.
Like clockwork, she poured sugar over her Lucky Charms every morning as if it were just another component of the average breakfast, like milk and fruit.
The color of her toenails alternated between butter yellow and a pale pink the color of seashells. She wore her old t-shirts like a dress at bedtime.
One afternoon, I was coming back from a lunch shift at Ernie's restaurant and found Laurel, my mom, and Belly sitting at the kitchen table, flipping through old catalogs. My mom and Laur were drinking coffee, but Belly was proudly drinking grape Kool-aide with a twisty straw that must have been a decade old.
I had always liked her hair. Aubrey and the few girls I dated before her had fussed over their hair like it was a small animal that needed special, constant attention. They made me wait for a half-hour while they stank up their bathrooms with hairspray and whatever else girls put in their hair, frying it until it was straight as a board, only to mess it up later by flipping it around or messing with it every two seconds.
Not Belly, though.
Hers was always tangled, blowing around her face, getting in her eyes, making her move it with a puff of air or an impatient flick of her head. It looked soft to touch, too. Wavy and long, the color of Hershey's kisses with streaks of butterscotch sunshine shot through. Sometimes, I found myself reaching or it, ready to run my fingers through the tangles before I would catch myself and stop.
That was all I ever seemed to do that summer. Catching myself, then stopping.
I spent most of my time avoiding my life by working at Ernie's or hanging out with Clay and the various beach bums he called friends. I called Nicole a lot, the girl I had hooked up with the week before Laurel, Steven, and Belly had come to town. We usually went over to her place, which ended up in her room more often than not. All we ever did was make out, and the few conversations we had didn't extend past parties and surfing weather. She had a Red Sox cap, but it didn't take me long to figure out that she only wore it because I had worn one when we met. It actually belonged to her stepfather.
She wasn't stellar company, but it was easy to be around her. There was no history, no emotion required, no need to control anything like I did around Belly. My heart rate stayed the same, my breathing was always steady, and not once did I feel like I was free-falling out of a plane without a parachute.
It goes without saying that being around Belly was complicated. It unsettled me, this new awareness of her that I had. I had always noticed things about people—my genetic ESP, Dad used to call it—but it was like there was a live wire connecting the two of us whenever she was in the room. I couldn't not notice her and how utterly Belly she was.
That first moment she had stepped out of the car—hair blowing, smile hesitant, tattered sneakers digging into the gravel of our driveway as she stood and we stared—I had looked at her, sure. If she had been any other girl, I would have just thought she was hot. If I was drunk and feeling ambitious, I might have even tried to talk to her, hook up with her. But she was Belly, and her 'newfound' prettiness wasn't new at all. It wasn't even shocking, in a way. It wasn't a result of her growing up, or her even changing. The only thing that was different was that, for the first time in her life, when someone told her she was pretty, she actually believed it.