Page 69 of The Way I Used to Be
“With who?” she asked, desperate to keep him talking to her. She rolled a one and a two and wound up back on Chance: another fifteen dollars for Poor Tax. “Shhhoot!” she said in her good-little-girl voice. She couldn’t possibly have said shit.
Then he smiled at the girl in a way nobody had ever smiled at her before. For the first time, she felt like she should be embarrassed to be wearing that childish little flannel nightgown covered with tiny sleeping basset hounds in front of him. “His girlfriend—who else?” he answered, taking the money from her hand.
“Do you think she’s pretty?” she asked as she watched him roll two fours and scoop up New York Avenue for the orange monopoly.
“I don’t know, yeah, I guess. Why?”
She shrugged. She had only seen pictures of her brother’s college girlfriend, but she could tell the girl was really pretty. She didn’t know why she suddenly cared if Kevin thought the girl was pretty or not. Maybe because she knew deep down that she herself wasn’t. Because she was just all angles and flatness. Because she didn’t look like a girl someone like Kevin might think is pretty, and she was afraid she never would.
She rolled a six and a four. Community Chest: Go to jail. “Oh, come on! I have to go to jail now?” she said, flipping the card over for him to see.
“Oh, shoot!” he mocked in a girly voice.
“Hey!” She grinned, but only once she realized he was making fun of her. And then she kicked his foot under the table.
“Oww, okay, okay.” He put houses on Illinois Avenue and Marvin Gardens while the girl waited to roll doubles to get out of jail.
When it was her turn, she shook the dice in both hands and then unleashed them. A six landed off the board at the edge of the table and the other fell on the floor under Kevin’s chair.
“Oooh, what is it? What is it?” she asked, trying to see.
“It’s a six,” he announced from under the table. He placed the die in the center of the board, six side up. “You’re free.” He grinned.
“Was it really a six?” she asked him. After all, the girl was not a cheater.
“I swear to God,” he proclaimed, holding his hand up in an oath.
She looked across the table at him suspiciously, finally deciding. “I don’t believe you.”
“Ouch. How do you not trust me by now? That hurts, Edy. Really.” He spoke in a strange way, almost seriously, but not really because he was smiling. The girl didn’t quite understand. All she knew is that it made her feel nervous and excited at the same time. Like there was maybe something else happening, but she wasn’t sure what.
“All right, I believe you—I trust you,” I hear the girl tell him.
I want to slap the girl. I want to stand up and sweep my arm across the table, knocking over the little dog and the little shoe, the plastic houses and the paper money. Because as the girl smiles demurely, I look in his eyes and I see now what the girl couldn’t then: that this is the moment. He had been thinking about it for some time and was pretty sure, I could tell, but this was the moment he knew not only that he would do it, but that she would let him get away with it.
“Good.” He grinned again. “It’s your turn.”
She moved her dog ahead, not thinking about anything except the way he kept looking at her, like she was a girl and not just some annoying kid. She pretended to have something in her eye so that she would have an excuse to take her glasses off. “So,” she started, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible, “do you have a girlfriend?” And I remember how her heart raced as she waited, taking mental inventory of every pretty girl she’d ever seen him with.
“Yes,” he answered, as if that was the most ridiculous question anyone had ever uttered in the history of the world.
“Oh. Oh, you—you do?” She tried so hard to sound casual, but even she knew she just sounded pathetic and sad. She rolled again and tried desperately to add the two numbers together.
“That’s eight. You only moved seven,” he told her matter-of-factly. She moved her dog one more spot. “Are you disappointed?” he asked, reading her thoughts somehow.
She looked up at him. He was slightly blurry without her glasses. “Disappointed? No. Why—why would I be?”
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
Her breath caught in her throat. She thought, for sure, he’s making fun of her. “A boyfriend? Yeah, right,” she mumbled, reaching to pick up her glasses. But suddenly the girl felt his hand on top of hers, just for a moment.
“You look good without your glasses, you know that?”
She literally could not breathe. “I... do? Really?” She tucked her messy, grown-out bangs behind her ears. She passed GO, she collected her two hundred dollars. Her heart skipped some vital beats.
“Yeah, I’ve always thought that.” He leaned in across the table ever so slightly, looking at her intensely. “You still have that scar,” he said, touching his own forehead in the place where her scar was, the place where my scar is still.
She mirrored him, too bewildered by what was going on to make sentences. She started to get scared she might actually faint.
