Page 7 of Hello Forever
And he was sitting somewherebehindme.
Welp. There went my concentration. Luckily, tweeting a basketball game isn’t exactly neurosurgery. I’d prepared so ridiculously well ahead of time that I had plenty of material. Princeton led for a while, but when we retook the lead, I tweeted a little video clip of a tiger running intoawall.
The most difficult thing, though, was keeping my face forward. I wanted to turn around so very badly. I was like Orpheus in that Greek myth where he has a chance to lead his love out of the underworld, but it will only work if he doesn’t turn to seeherface.
Orpheus fucked that up and lost the girl. But I stayed strong. I knew that if I started staring at my teen crush, I wouldn’t be abletostop.
The game seemed to last about a hundred years. Near the end, I hadn’t heard Cax laugh for a long time, and I actually convinced myself that he’d left. So I held out until there were only two minutes left on the game clock. Barmuth had a seven-point lead, and Princeton took a time-out, which followed on the heels of a mediatime-out.
My job here was nearly done. So I finally turnedtolook.
ChapterFour
Cax
“Why can’tI have Skittles? They’re only two bucks,” my youngest brother said for theseventeenthtime.
“Because you had a soda. That’s enough sugar,” I told him yetagain.
“I wouldn’t have had the soda if I thought I could have Skittles,” Scotty argued. He was twelve years old and a junk-foodhound.
“Next time,” Amy said, mussingScotty’shair.
He wrinkled up his freckled nose and turned away. But he didn’t complain about the hair mussing, because ScottylikedAmy.
Everybody liked Amy—my brothers, my asshole father. Amy was a real crowd-pleaser. “Are we going out for a beer after I drop the boys at home?” I asked her. I’d had a long week, and I was looking forward to gossipingwithher.
I heard a snort from my other side, where my seventeen-year-old brother Jared sat. “‘Out for a beer?’ Is that what we’re calling it these days?” He said this without raising his surly face from hisphone.
Amy and I exchanged an amused glance. It was hard to decide which assumption was the funniest. That everything I said was a sexual reference? Or that Amy and I would take any opportunity tohavesex?
The reality was that we hadn’t had sex in years, and we’d only done it twice before she’d very gently pointed out that we didn’t seem the least bitcompatible.
I sure as hell wasn’t ever going to correct my brother’s assumptions, though. The fact that everyone thought Amy was my girlfriend made my life a loteasier.
But we were just very good friends. With us, “out for a beer” really meant out for a beer. But when basketball was in season, we could often be found here on game nights, in the company of whichever of my brothers wanted to get out of the house. Tonight we had Scotty and Jared—two out of three—because Mark was at a middle-schooldance.
Jared had barely said a dozen words all night. Seventeen was a surly age, to be sure, but I wondered if something was bothering him. I’d have to remember to ask him later inprivate.
Amynudgedme.
“What?”
“Thatguy…”
I looked to see where her attention was focused. But the man I thought she was looking at turned his head sharply back toward the game. “Whatabouthim?”
“Well, I’ve never seen him sitting therebefore.”
“Uh-huh.” I’d never paid much attention to the guys at the officials’ table. Not when there was a game towatch.
“And he was staringatyou.”
I said nothing. Because I didn’t know anybody who worked the games, and I didn’t want to say even one word that put “guy” and “staring” in the samesentence.
Our team scored a three-pointer, and the crowd went nuts. With just a couple minutes left in the game, our lead suddenly felt morecomfortable.
“Did you see that?” I asked Jared, nudging him with myelbow.
