Unaware of my deep thoughts, Ballard went on in usual Ballard fashion. “Clara said her friend’s having a party in Dadeville this weekend. I’m gonna drive over. I met this girl, Christie-Ann. She may be my prom date. Wanna go?”
There was no way Ballard could date the same girl from now until prom in April. No way in hell. The Crimson Tide falling to the University of Kentucky was a more likely occurrence than Ballard dating one girl, and one girl only, for more than about two weeks.
“Sorry, not this weekend.”
“Why? What’s going on this weekend?” Ballard swirled a French fry in a pool of watery ketchup.
“Nothing. I’m just burned out on parties.” I watched his fry circle slowly.
“I don’t get you, Stephen. I don’t get you at all.”
After school, I took my time gathering my books and leaving. I stopped by the counselor’s office to drop off some papers from my last neurology appointment. They’d all go into my file alongside my 504 plan and a billion other reams of paper from all of my years in Moorhen and even some from before, records from Auburn that got transferred when we made the move.
Leaving, I had to go down a flight of stairs by the library. At the top of the steps, I paused to watch a couple walking below. They were arguing. When the girl turned, I caught sight of a blue streak in her hair. It was Joan.
Joan and Wade.
I leaned over the cement wall and watched them. They paused by the library doors. Joan wiped her eyes.
Wade’s deep voice boomed out over the sidewalks, “Fuck you, Joan.”
Her hands were in fists by her side, and I waited, expecting her to punch him like she had all those years before. Go on. Break his perfect nose and take him down a notch or two.
She didn’t though … she didn’t punch him or even slap him like some girl in a chick flick. She cried, wiping her eyes again.
“I’m so tired of you crying all the time,” Wade said. “This is why we broke up in the first place.”
Wade opened the door and went inside. I was shocked, but not by the conversation. I couldn’t believe Wade Bond was going into a library. No way did he read.
“Who knew she could cry?”
I turned to find Erin standing a few feet away, watching the same scene I was. “What?”
“Joan,” Erin said. “She acts so tough all the time, walking around like she owns the place.”
Erin was a little bit right. Sylvie was pretty much Joan’s only friend. Most guys steered clear of her because of her dating Wade and all. Except, she wasn’t dating Wade, not anymore. They’d broken up, but here she was, crying to him outside the library.
As I took a step, planning to go ask if she was okay, Joan opened the door and followed Wade inside.
However tough Joan wanted the world to believe she was, she looked like a kid who just dropped her ice cream cone.
Erin frowned. “She’d be better off without him.”
“Yeah,” I said.
There was an awkward pause. Erin and I were friends, but we didn’t talk much at school, just at church, since we didn’t have the same classes this year.
She adjusted her backpack straps. “Anyway, I came to find you because Matt wants me to ask you again about playing in the youth band. He said your mom said you were learning guitar.”
“You know I’m not going to play in that band. Besides, I just started learning. I’m not good yet.” My shoulder jerked, and Erin either didn’t notice or pretended not to.
“I figured. I told him you’d never get on stage in front of the whole church.”
“Thanks,” I said.
She shrugged. “No problem. You know how Matt is when he gets an idea. If I can’t convince you, he will have your mom start bugging you next.”
“He means well,” I said.
“Yeah, anyway, I’m running late for yearbook.” Erin opened the door to go back inside. “You coming this way?”
“No, I’m headed home.”
“See ya, Stephen.” The door creaked closed behind her.
I took the steps slowly, hoping Joan would come back out. Maybe she went in and gave Wade a piece of her mind. Maybe I’d misread the entire situation.
She never reappeared though, and I unlocked Gwinn the Schwinn from the bike rack and pedaled toward home, my mind swimming with girls and all the ways I simply did not get them. I understood girls about as well as my father understood me.
That is to say … not at all.
* * *
There were people I didn’t know at our house when I walked in after school.
I’d planned to get straight to my math homework. The sooner it was out of the way, the sooner I could relax. Two men were standing by my bedroom door, staring at the end of the hallway like any minute the wall would open up to reveal Jesus himself, seated at the right hand of God the Father coming again to judge the quick and the dead. I was tempted to repeat the Apostle’s Creed or the Lord’s Prayer or something, maybe take communion right there on the hardwood floor.
Or maybe I just spent too much time at church.
“Hi,” I said instead.
Both men turned to look at me. One wore a John Deere cap and the other wasn’t much older than me. He had on cargo pants and a Moorhen High T-shirt exactly like the one Ballard wore over the weekend, only this one was faded to a grayish color instead of the sharp navy of Ballard’s.
I might’ve recognized him. Maybe he’d graduated the year before. I wasn’t sure.
“Oh sorry, bud, guess I’m in your way.” The older man moved to one side and let me in my bedroom door. I closed it behind me and listened through it as the men discussed the best strategy for knocking out the wall they were staring at.
I looked at the carpet, faded almost the same shade as the stranger’s shirt, and watched my foot jerk. My body was heavy and slow. Around me, my room looked exactly as it always did, slightly messy but in a way that made sense to me. There was order, even if it wasn’t an order my mother would ever comprehend.
My mind wasn’t clear though. It was like I’d gone to that party and found a couple of strangers standing around inside me, debating the best way to proceed with what sounded like destruction. I was pretty sure the men in my hallway had a good reason for wanting to knock out a wall, but I wasn’t so sure about the strangers in my mind.
Something had gotten knocked loose.
After the men outside my door left, I found Mom sitting on her bed with her ancient laptop.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’m making a Pinterest board.” She clicked something on the screen.
“For what? And I was talking about the men in the hall. The ones planning to rip out a wall in our house.” I sat on the foot of her bed. It was covered in a green and blue quilt my great-grandma made.
“Inspiration for the new office space, which is what those guys will be building.” She looked up from her computer. “I’ve been saving for a while so I can build your dad a writing room, somewhere he can spread out. It’s his Christmas present this year.”
“He has a writing room.” I pointed in the general direction of my father’s computer room.
“Sweetie, that’s a closet. Or a pantry, technically. It’s supposed to hold canned goods. There are no outlets, and he can hear every sound the rest of us make.”
And we can hear every sound he makes.
We lived in an old mill house, two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a two-car garage the last owners added on. She was right about the outlets. I tripped over bright orange extension cords at least twice a day. But my father never complained about the cramped space.
“Can’t he use an office at The Exchange?” It was logical to me, and it would get him out of the house more often. I hardly ever got the whole place to myself the way Ballard got his house all summer while his parents worked and his siblings went to camp.
My parents are both active people. When we are all home, they want to talk and do household projects. I like
my alone time though. I like time to process without needing to explain that processing to Mom and Dad.
Mom frowned. “There’s no space at the church, and you know it. We’re packed in as it is. Besides, while we’re doing this, we’ll also be adding a second bathroom. You won’t have to share with Dad and me anymore.”
Now that was the kind of building project I could get behind.
I wandered back into the hall, where the older man had returned and was making notes on a yellow legal pad. The younger guy had been replaced by a middle-aged man in overalls. Since the men were, once again, blocking my bedroom door, I decided it was a good time for a bike ride. Math homework could wait.
When I pedaled out of the garage, I almost rode right into one of the guys I’d seen inside.
“Whoops.” I put on the brakes. “Sorry.”
“No worries, man.” He was leaning against our rolling green trash can, smoking a cigarette. His hair was long and blond, held back by a blue rubber band.
My shoulder jerked and I sighed. The boy didn’t mention the tic, but I knew he noticed it. “I have Tourette’s,” I said. May as well get it out of the way. If these guys were going to rip out our hallway and add two rooms, odds are they’d be over at our house every day. We’d be seeing a lot of one another.
His eyes lit in recognition. “I remember. You sat at my lunch table at Moorhen, with your buddy Ballard, right?”
Yes! That’s why I knew him. He was a senior when we were freshmen. His girlfriend’s best friend dated Ballard for a while, and we got to sit at their table. It didn’t last long. It never does with Ballard, but I remembered the guy.
“Nick Dane,” I said. “It’s been a while. Sorry I couldn’t place you earlier.”
“No worries, man,” he said again. “You’re better though, right? You seem better.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, your twitching or whatever was bad. Like, your legs used to bump up on the underside of the table and shake everything. We never said anything, ’cause, you know, it wasn’t like you did it on purpose, man. But you’re pretty still right now.”
His voice had a low undulating rhythm. Like if a surfer dude moved to small town Alabama and smoked a few joints and listened to Bob Marley. It wasn’t annoying, though. He was relaxed and my twitchy self envied him. A lot.
“I guess I’m better, most days. Freshman year sucked.” I remembered my feet and knees hitting the undersides of tables and desks that year. I worried the bruises would never heal, the bruises on my knees and the mental bruises left by Wade and his friends.
“Always does, bro. Always does.” He nodded sagely, like he’d said something deep.
I almost argued with him. I’m sure there are sucky things about freshman year for everyone, yeah, but I was convinced I had it worse.
Maybe every high school freshman is nervous and a little lost when they show up at their brand-new school, surrounded by older kids, but how many of those kids get dragged down the hall by a scarecrow-singing football player? How many of those kids fall down the stairs because their legs are jerking so bad on a regular basis? How many of those kids are forced to use the elevator to avoid falling down the stairs?
But I knew better than to argue with Nick. People who didn’t live with Tourette’s syndrome had no idea. To them, it was just some twitches. Or else it gave me carte blanche to yell out cuss words in the middle of class.
“So…” I could’ve ridden off, but Nick was a popular guy when he was at school. Chatting with him would give me something cool to tell Ballard about during lunch on Tuesday. “You work in construction now?”
“With my dad, yeah.” He nodded toward the yellow truck parked on the street. The logo on the door was a giant dog in a spiked collar. It read “Great Dane Construction.”
“Weren’t you enlisting in the army?” I turned away from the truck and back to Nick.
“Air force,” he said. “Messed that up, man. I messed that shit all kinds of up.” He didn’t sound angry or even frustrated. He could’ve been telling me he had turkey for lunch or my shoe was untied.
There was something else about Nick, something dancing at the corner of my brain, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. One simple fact tiptoed past my periphery. I shook my head and twisted my hands on the handlebars.
Nick took a long drag on his cigarette, staring off into space, so I got a good look at his profile, the bump midway down his nose, and the watery blue of his eyes.
Then it hit me.
“Joan,” I said, startling myself. I hadn’t intended to say it out loud.
“Joan?” Nick tilted his head to the left and blew out a stream of smoke.
“You used to give Joan Pearson a ride to school sometimes.”
I felt silly saying it, like I cared who gave Joan rides.
He nodded, his gaze settling on something in the distance.
“I gotta go.” I steeled myself for one last leg kick and put my feet on the pedals.
“No worries, man.” That appeared to be Nick’s favorite phrase. He managed to use it three times in a three-minute conversation. “See ya around.”
I told him goodbye and rode down my driveway, turned right by the mailbox, and headed for the Tallapoosa. I was sitting in a gazebo alongside Lost Bridge Trail when my phone buzzed.
Hey. It’s Pilar. I’m texting so now you have my number.
I made myself pause, fingers over the keyboard. My heart thrummed with excited energy. I’m not sure what I was really feeling though. Happy, yeah. She was pretty and easy to talk to. And being easy to talk to was a big deal, despite what Ballard said at lunch.
But if she was texting me, she must not know about the rest of the party. It was possible she didn’t know those girls at all. And with them kissing so many guys, I doubt they were passing my name around as some major conquest. No one would even pass my name around as a minor conquest. I liked Pilar. How I automatically smiled when I saw her text had to mean something, right?
Hey, I wrote back. How are you?
I know. Brilliant and interesting I was not. Text conversations were possibly harder than in-person conversations. The only good thing was no one could see my tics when we were texting.
Good. Procrastinating studying for a math test.
I’m procrastinating math homework too. Great minds think alike.
She didn’t reply. I waited, dumbly staring at my phone screen for three or four minutes. Another cyclist rode by and a couple with a kid in a jogging stroller. They all waved. My tics were pretty controlled while riding, and anyway, people only saw each other in short flashes as they crossed paths. I recognized some faces of regular walkers and riders, but mostly I was anonymous here in the woods, a generic teen boy on a bike.
When it was clear Pilar wasn’t going to text again, I slid the phone back into my pocket and left the gazebo. The sun would go down soon, and I did have math homework to get done.
I considered calling Pilar and telling her about the other girls I kissed the night we met, about the experiment and what a crappy person I was. But I didn’t. I was too glad she didn’t know. There was a good chance she’d never find out, right? We didn’t know the same people, so there was no one to tell her.
Besides, it’s not like we were dating. It was only a conversation at a party, one kiss, one night. It didn’t mean anything serious was going on, but I was uneasy, like everything inside me was leaning just a little to the left.
I opened a new text to Pilar, but the phone rang.
“Hello,” I said, putting on my talking-to-parents voice.
“Hey, bud, Mom wants us to go out for dinner. She’s tired of the noise here. You close by?”
“Yeah, I’m just at Lost Bridge.”
“Head on home, then. Be careful.”
“On my way. See you at home.”
I slid the phone back into my pocket and headed back into town.
I would text Pilar again soon, but first I would figure out what
I actually wanted to say.
Chapter Seven
Sunday night, I rode my bike over to The Exchange, planning to slip in the back quietly and hope my parents didn’t notice my late arrival. I would’ve been on time, but Ballard wouldn’t shut up about another potential prom date, the percentage of single girls at local high schools, and the plan he had for convincing his fantasy prom date he was the perfect guy to be her first.
I had no input for him, and kept trying to change the subject. The way he talked about girls used to be amusing, but lately his heart didn’t seem in it. Under his player attitude, cracks were forming. Mostly, despite all his talk, I hadn’t seen him with an actual girl in a while. It had all become theoretical.
I arrived at church distracted by my own theoretical girl problem. Pilar hadn’t texted again. I wasn’t disappointed as much as confused. Our text exchange Monday was innocent enough, and I couldn’t see any way my messages might’ve made her shut down the conversation.
Distracted, I locked my bike and let myself in the offices so I could use the mall entrance to the theater area. That route took me past the bathroom, where I stopped to wash my hands and run my fingers through my hair. Biking over meant dust and wind and a sheen of sweat on my forehead.
Leaving the restroom, I heard female voices in the lobby. One loud voice and one harsh whisper. I paused in the hall to listen.
“Mom, this is ridiculous. I want to go home.” The loud voice echoed off the old walls.
“Joan,” the whispering voice replied. “You promised you would come.”
“You said you needed a ride. You didn’t say I had to stay.” It was a familiar voice. Both voices were familiar.
It took all of two seconds for them to click into place. I knew that forceful whisper from school assemblies. It usually said things like “Quiet!” and “No talking!” And the other voice, last I heard it, was whimpering at Wade beside the school library.
Kiss and Repeat Page 6
