“Talk to Ilona?” Tyler checked the ball to Ben and then took a shot that glanced off the edge of the rim. They were playing a halfhearted game of Horse in Tyler’s driveway on Sunday afternoon. Ben had lost track if he was a H-O-R or a H-O-R-S
“Nope.”
“Text her?”
“She doesn’t have a phone.”
“Huh.” Tyler contemplated this. “Is she working? Did you go by?”
“Nah, it’s kind of busy right now. I don’t know if they’d really want her to have people show up there, you know?”
Tyler checked the ball again, but Ben wasn’t watching and it bounced hard off his chest. “So you’re doing this on purpose?”
“Doing what?”
“Being a dick.”
“What? No! I mean, no.”
Tyler dribbled the ball in place and then looked up and sank his shot, nothing but net. “She goes down on you. You’re telling me that you like her, and then you just let it go?”
“Ilona’s not like that,” he protested.
Tyler shook his head. “Don’t be cold. You’re not cold.”
Ben dribbled, pretending to consider various angles for his shot. They were both right. Ilona wasn’t the kind of girl who wanted him to bring her flowers and hold her hand. But Tyler was right too; he wasn’t cold. He didn’t want to be cold. He wanted to care about Ilona as much as she would let him. He smiled to himself, adding this to the small but growing file of things he was sure of about himself.
He had told Tyler about the blow job while they were at IHOP. When Ilona came back from the bathroom and they were both grinning, she just rolled her eyes and sat down to her blueberry pancakes. “You two are pathetic. Did he say it was good at least?”
Tyler gave her the same smile that had gotten them real maple syrup for free from Tracy, their waitress, and said, “I think he enjoyed himself.”
“Jesus,” Ben had said, looking around nervously, as though the nearby table of senior citizens, clearly just back from church, knew exactly what they were talking about.
He checked the ball to Tyler, who bounced it back to him. This time he caught it before it smacked him in the face. “What do you care, anyway?”
“Ilona’s cool,” Tyler said. “You shouldn’t fuck it up.”
Ben took a shot and missed. “All right.”
“All right, what?”
“I’ll call her. I’ll go over there or something.”
Tyler seemed satisfied with this answer. “Good,” he said. “Better.”
That afternoon Ben drove by Broadway Gardens, but Ilona’s jeep wasn’t in the parking lot. He knew he should go by her house, but he kept circling the turnoff for her street, getting farther and farther from his destination until, bizarrely, he ended up at the mall. He pulled into a parking space and wandered into Newberry Comics, deciding he’d browse the CDs and used DVDs for a while before deciding on his next move.
He was holding a copy of Game of Thrones: Season One in his hand when two people turned down the row where he was standing. The girl had bleach-blonde streaks in her otherwise black hair, and the guy had his hair dyed a bright atomic green. They were arguing about an animation series, manga or something. The girl was wearing black-and-white checked tights underneath skintight jean shorts. She had her pinkie linked to the guy’s pinkie. There was something about that gesture of attachment that tugged at Ben.
He walked to the front of the store where they sold the body jewelry and hair dye. Then he plunked down twenty-seven dollars and forty-three cents for a bottle of fire engine red hair dye and the Game of Thrones DVD and felt that somehow he was hedging his bet.
Ben pulled right into the driveway behind Ilona’s jeep to avoid chickening out and leaving before she knew he was there. He got out of the car holding the bottle of red hair dye and feeling like he was awkwardly late for a date he didn’t know was even happening. Before he could knock on the front door, he heard voices from around the side of the house. He walked around the porch and was greeted by an unusual scene. Ilona was wearing a long green dress slit down the middle nearly to her belly button. She was wearing makeup—loads of it, all dark and glittery around her eyes, and she was perched on this tall older guy’s knee. The guy was dressed like a lumberjack in a red-and-black checked shirt. There was another guy who looked a whole lot like the first guy, taking pictures with a giant camera. He was wearing a faded black T-shirt and skinny jeans.
Ilona jumped up. “Hey,” she said. There was only that one word for him to try and gauge if she was happy or annoyed or angry by his sudden presence. It wasn’t enough to go on.
“Hey,” he said back. “I thought you’d be working.”
She crossed the porch to where he was standing. “So you stopped by hoping I wouldn’t be here?”
“No.” He was flustered already and hiding the bottle of hair dye behind his leg. “I went by Broadway and I didn’t see your car. I don’t know.”
Ilona looked amused. “These are the Calvins. That’s Harris,” she said, pointing to the lumberjack, “and this is Elwyn.”
“Oh,” said Ben, “the, um, mural guys.”
“Yeah, I’m helping them shoot some photos for their new album cover.” She put her fingers up for air quotes. “It’s not that big a deal. They’re putting it out themselves.”
“Thanks a lot,” said the lumberjack.
Ilona flipped him off. “What they’re really doing is sleeping on my couch and eating all my food.”
“So they’re fighting over the last dented can of tuna,” Ben said.
The guy with the camera threw a grin his way.
Ilona narrowed her eyes at him. “Ha, ha,” she said. “What are you doing here? If the last of the tuna’s gone, I mean.” She reached behind his back and grabbed the paper bag with the bottle in it. She looked honestly surprised when she peered inside. “You want this?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
She looked pleased and pushed back on his chest with her pointer finger so that he had to walk backwards around the corner of the house. “You want to hang out?” she asked when they were out of sight of the Calvins.
“Yeah,” he said. He’d known as soon as he saw her that Tyler was right and he was right to be there.
She pushed him up against the side of the house and leaned into him. “You going to invite me over?”
“Sure,” he said. His legs felt warm. He was trying not to look at her mouth and think about where it had been.
“For dinner? With your parents?”
He hesitated. “That’s what you want to do?”
“Kind of,” she said. “I kind of want to be sure I’m not, like, the freak you’re going to keep in the closet or under your bed.”
“Under my bed?” he said grinning. Ilona scowled. “Okay,” he said. “I will invite you to dinner.”
“Plus, we need to finish that long-ass book of yours.”
“It’s almost over anyway.”
She stepped back, looking surprised. “So after all that, they’re just going to waltz up the side of Mount Doom and toss the thing in?”
“Huh,” Ben said, “you’re actually paying attention. And no, it doesn’t happen exactly like that.”
“I never said it was a bad book,” Ilona said. “So are they going to die? Like, sacrifice themselves in the fire or something? Or, wait, I bet Sam’s going to die. Like saving Frodo’s unappreciative ass somehow.”
“Do you want me to tell you?”
Ilona shrugged. “Sure, whatever.”
“They both live.”
“Really? Like, happily ever after?”
“I don’t know. More or less, I guess. Until the next demon tries to take over Middle-earth.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s not all that bad, really.”