Then
Smells of popcorn and cigarettes and rotting leaves mingled in the dark space beneath the bleachers. Above me the marching band shuffled off the stands, dislodging a shower of empty cups that had previously held chocolate so blisteringly hot that if you sipped it too soon you wouldn’t be able to taste anything for the next thirty-six hours. With the band gone, I got my first clear view of the game I’d been half listening to for close to an hour. Crouched and ready for the snap of the football, Peter shouted out the play in a string of nearly unintelligible syllables.
I didn’t care about football, but I did care about Peter. He’d made good on his promise to set the record straight with his friends regarding our relationship, if you could even call it that. I’d given him the combination to my locker, and every few days I opened it in the morning to find a new book waiting for me on the bottom shelf. Each time I finished a novel, I slipped a poem on a folded-up piece of spiral notebook paper dated like a check through one of the slits in his locker. My payment for each book.
With the terms of our literary commerce defined and the steady stream of books coming my way, I had no time to worry about the fact that I had so little in common with the kids I met on the first day of school that we hadn’t managed to move past the occasional nod in the hallway into the territory of real friends. I still sat with them at lunch, but only as a spectator. When the last bell rang, they went to play practice and volleyball and the game consoles in their basements, while I quickly got my homework out of the way so I could pick up where I had left off the night before.
In the absence of real society, I made my own out of the imagined people Peter Flynt slid into my locker. They entered like corpses on a slab, but they came to life in my mind with each turn of the page. With their willing help, I began to forget my terrible life in favor of their spectacular lives. And because Peter continued to lay these offerings at my feet, I had come to each home game and watched him through the legs of the supportive crowd. I never added my voice to their cheers or groans, but I was there.
The half ended. Glossy jerseys yielded the field to stiff woolen uniforms embellished with gold fringe. The light filtering beneath the bleachers exposed my as-yet-unseen company. Junior highers roamed like stray dogs down here. They couldn’t be bothered with the game, but it was the only thing to do on a Friday night in Sussex. A gaggle of girls here, a huddle of boys there, and the occasional couple edging off to dark corners.
Soon the band returned to their seats, shrouding me once more in darkness, and the game continued. The speakers spat out Peter’s name and number regularly until the game was won. Cheers went up and the fight song played one last time as the crowd began its creaking descent from the bleachers out to the parking lot. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the field went black. I hated the thought of having to push through the crowd to leave, so I didn’t move from my spot until the only remaining sources of illumination were the crescent moon, the stars, and a single floodlight above the closed concession window.
I was about to get my bike when I heard footsteps shuffling through the trash.
“So this is where you’ve been hiding out.” Peter was silhouetted against the floodlight and closing in on me.
“Nice game,” I said, because people say that.
“Did you even see any of it?”
“Enough.”
“I saw your bike. Figured you had to be here somewhere.”
Peter leaned back against one of the beams that supported his enormous fan base. With his face turned to the light, I could see that he still sported faint smudges of eye black. I wanted to wipe it off with my thumb. Instead I put my hands in my coat pockets.
“Wish I’d known you were watching.”
He picked a piece of newspaper confetti out of my hair, letting his fingers brush my cheek. It was the first time we had touched without the buffer of a book between us. Our eyes met for a moment and he leaned in. I guess he was waiting for me to close the rest of the short distance. I thought of the rumors from the first day of school, of what a kiss might mean for our literary arrangement.
When I didn’t move toward him, he leaned back again and crossed his arms over his chest. “So, are you going to go to homecoming with me or what?”
I snickered without meaning to. I wasn’t shocked to be asked—three guys had asked already, I imagine because they still assumed I was easy despite Peter’s efforts to convince them otherwise—but I was surprised to be asked by Peter Flynt. On game days his number twenty-two had been riding around on the boney back of Sarah Kukla.
“I doubt it.”
“Well, that’s blunt. Why not?”
“Dances are lame.” I was glad it was dark because I wasn’t sure I could sell that line in a well-lit place. All girls wanted to go to homecoming with the quarterback, didn’t they?
“You know, people are saying you’re not into guys because you turned down so many of them for homecoming. I thought maybe you’d want to prove them wrong.”
“There are always rumors.” Though I hadn’t started that particular one.
He tilted his head. “There are a lot of rumors about you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Like that your mom murdered your dad after catching him with his secretary, that you’re the descendent of some illegitimate child Emily Dickinson had with a minister, that your parents died at sea, that your dad is a mob boss, that he’s some corrupt senator who whacked people who had too much dirt on him, that you’re actually twenty but you got held back more than anyone else ever has, that you’re actually twelve but you’re super smart so they put you in high school. And my personal favorite, that you’re actually the oldest child of Charles and Diana and therefore the true rightful heir of the English crown, but your jealous brothers tried to suffocate you in your sleep, so you escaped to America.”
He fixed me with a hard stare. “So who are you, really?”
“Why do you care?” I asked lightly.
Peter mirrored my stance and put his hands in his pockets. “I was the first one in this town to meet you. I feel like I should know. People ask me sometimes and I have no good answer. And I know all this other crap isn’t true. I want to set people straight.”
“I see. So you just want to make sure people know the truth.”
“Exactly.”
“And what makes you think I want people to know the truth?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” Then he seemed to answer his own question. “It can’t be that bad.”
I shrugged, even though no amount of shrugging could dislodge the weight of what I knew to be true. That my family was disgraced, that my parents were doing time, that my life and friends and home had been stolen from me. That everything was horrible and there was nothing I could do about it.
“It’s no one’s business. You know what they say: ‘Knowledge is power.’ If I’m the only one who knows, then I have the power.”
“No, if you’re the only one who knows, people are going to think you’re a snob and they won’t talk to you. You can’t be friends with someone who never talks about themselves, and when they do it’s a bunch of lies.”
“I talk about myself all the time.”
He snorted. “Yeah, sure.”
“Don’t you read any of those poems I give you?”
“They’re about the books, aren't they?”
“They’re also about me. Each one is like a little slice of me, like those cross sections of seaweed you look at through the microscope in biology. I can’t believe you haven’t picked up on any of that.” I gave him a playful poke in the chest. “You know, you’re sitting on a gold mine there. Someday I’ll be as famous as Emily Dickinson and you’ll have a whole stack of original poems in my own hand.”
“Is that so? Well, fat lot of good it’ll do me. People will ask me, ‘What was she like?’ and I’ll have to say things like, ‘I dunno. She was pretty quiet, kept mostly to herself,’ like they do about serial killers.”
I scoffed. “I guess you’ll just have to get better at reading. The books—you read them all first. They’re about me too.”
Peter let out an exasperated sigh. “How are the books about you? They were all written before you were born, even if you did get held back six times.”
“You mean you’ve read all these books and you never found yourself in them?”
“What?”
“When you read a novel, you don’t see yourself in it? You don’t identify with any of the characters or the situations or the feelings?”
“The last book I read was Lord of the Flies. So no, Robin, I don’t see myself as a murderous grade-schooler on a lawless deserted island. Before that it was—”
“The Great Gatsby.” I was nearly finished with it myself.
“Yeah, and I don’t see myself as some pathetic poseur who’s obsessed with a girl he can’t have.”
I leaned into the light, close to his face, close enough to give him that kiss he had wanted, and smiled. “You sure about that?”