Page 9

Nine Years Before

privately griped that he wasn’t the thick lughead people assumed, but maybe he was stupid. It had been profoundly dumb to confess to Dean what he’d written in Amber’s yearbook on the last day of school. Dean had laughed so hard he’d sent an arc of Pabst Blue Ribbon onto . “Didn’t know you had a pussy, ,”

Dean said. And then he said, “Meow.”

Meow. had been hearing it all summer long. He and Dean both worked for the same landscaping company and any time got something cushy, like mowing the Flannagan lawn with the tractor, as opposed to the more backbreaking job of building the retaining wall for the Wilsons, Dean would whisper in his ear, “Good thing you got the easy gig,”

and then he would meow. When Dean found out that had refused one of the female clients who’d started to be, um, attentive, asking in for lemonade, to rub some zinc oxide onto his sunburnt nose, he didn’t stop meowing for the better part of a week.

Yeah, Dean was an asshole. But at the same time, he was a good friend, dragging to all the parties he was invited to that summer, and some that he wasn’t, in search of Amber. Every time would show up at some pool party or kegger, he’d look for Amber, but she was never there. So he’d go home and draw her—this he didn’t tell Dean; he wasn’t that stupid—as he’d done all year long in ELA, where he’d sat behind her, staring at the back of her neck, barely listening to Mr. King go on about sentence structure or similes because he was too busy making doodles: Amber using a pencil to put her hair up in a bun. Or Amber’s freckles that showered her shoulders. Or Amber’s bracelet that slid up her wrist when she raised her hand to answer a question. If he could draw how she sounded, the uplilt in her voice when she wasn’t sure of an answer, or how she smelled, like sunshine and lemons, he would have.

He got so used to drawing her that it became second nature. So when on the last day of school, she handed him her yearbook to sign, before he could think about what he was doing, he’d drawn a picture of her, right in the margin of the page near his own picture, so it looked like his portrait was looking at her. If that weren’t bad enough, he’d drawn thought bubbles leading to a heart and a question mark.

Meow.

When he saw what he’d done, he started to scratch it out, to transform it into something less damning. But then someone asked Amber for her yearbook to sign and she grabbed it from him and handed it off before he’d had a chance to fix it. The one thing in his favor was that she hadn’t seen it then. Maybe she’d never see it. Or maybe by the time fall came back around, she would forget. He would forget it. It would all be forgotten.

Except he’d gotten drunk over the Fourth of July and confessed to Dean not just the idiotic thing he’d drawn in Amber’s yearbook, but worse, that he was obsessing over this girl, prompting Dean to ride his ass but also to drag him to all the parties, like this one, Lee Franklin’s Labor Day blast. He had no hope of seeing her at the party, or at school when it started next week. Amber was smart, on the AP track, unlike , who’d had to repeat second grade because he couldn’t read right. They wouldn’t be in any of the same classes. A devastating relief.

Partiers spilled out of the house. Lee was a senior, popular because he played varsity basketball and because his parents had a weekend house and left him home alone to throw blowouts like this one. Everyone seemed to be here.

didn’t want to be. He liked kicking back with some beers and some bros but he didn’t like parties. It was his size again. Being so tall and broad—six foot and two hundred fifty pounds; a refrigerator, Coach called him—made it next to impossible to blend in. As he climbed the porch steps and walked into the party, he felt like Godzilla pushing through the throngs of normal-sized bodies. And anyhow, Amber hadn’t been at any of the other parties, so why would she be at this one? He pulled out his phone to text Dean to say he wasn’t staying but someone jostled him, sending his phone flying out of his hands and under the couch.

He crouched down on his hands and knees, reaching for his phone, but it was too far back and he couldn’t grab it. He pulled back up and smacked into the coffee table, sending a row of Solo cups skittering. All the frustration of his size, of his stupidity, his meowness, welled up inside him making him want to punch something.

“Looking for this?”

He wasn’t facing her, but that voice, he’d know it anywhere. He had listened to it recite poems and stories and plays all year. He had imagined that voice saying his name. Saying she loved him.

Meow.

He lumbered up and there she was, Amber Crane, level to his chest and holding his phone before her like an offering. The wave of frustration crescendoed into a whole different feeling. Instead of wanting to punch someone, he wanted to kiss someone. More specifically, he wanted to kiss her. And in that moment, unlikely as it seemed, he felt like maybe, one day, he would.

“Yes,”

he said, taking the phone and looking at her. “I am.”