ON CRUSHES, LONELINESS, AND KALE
Someone’s got a crush on Bahar. Someone named Sam Abernathy.
James Jenkins’s text message chimed and lit up my phone. I thought the sound might wake up Mom and Dad and get me in trouble. But high school kids do that kind of stuff, right? Ugh. My stomach knotted. It was after eleven o’clock, and I was supposed to be asleep, even though lately I hadn’t been getting the most restful nights’ sleep.
I rubbed my eyes and picked up my phone from the nightstand beside my bed.
I clicked it to silent.
SAM: Not me. I don’t even know what that is. I don’t even know what you’re talking about, James.
JAMES: I’m talking about a crush, Sam. That’s when you just go around in a state where you can’t do anything but wait for the next time you get to see the person you have a crush on. Duh.
I might explain that James Jenkins probably would have been my best friend if he’d still lived in Blue Creek.
Best friend things are always complex, like crushes, I suppose, even though I definitely did not have a crush on Bahar, despite what James was telling me. Or texting me.
James Jenkins had moved away from Blue Creek the previous fall to live with his mother in Austin, leaving his dad behind to run that swill mill of a diner. We had both been in eighth grade together even though at the time I was only eleven and James was fourteen.8 So we were like a pair of balancing opposites—James was bigger than he was supposed to be as an eighth grader, and I was much smaller than I was supposed to be. But James Jenkins hated football, and he quit to do what he loved most of all, which was dance, and also not living in Blue Creek with his father. And now he was at some big-time summer dance academy in Massachusetts, training with some of the best young dancers in America and getting scouted by universities and theater programs and stuff, because that’s how good James Jenkins was.
His mom and my parents had arranged for James to come visit me for a few days next week, just so we could hang out with each other again before I left for Oregon (spiders started rampaging again), and before James had to go back to high school in Austin, where he’d be in tenth grade and not playing football, which was where James Jenkins belonged.
Anyway. I did not have a crush on Bahar.
SAM: I do not have a crush on Bahar, James.
JAMES: If you say so. I guess maybe there’s something wrong with you then.
SAM: Have YOU ever had a crush on anyone?
JAMES: Miss Van Gelder.
SAM: James Jenkins! Our Spanish teacher???
JAMES: LOL. Yes.
SAM: ¡Increíble!
JAMES: Well she was always so nice and pretty. And she smells like a strawberry fruit roll-up. I wonder if she likes unsweetened iced tea at Colonel Jenkins’s LOL. Anyway, I got over it.
SAM: How’s dance school going?
JAMES: Don’t ask. At least it’s finished next week and I can go back home to Texas.
SAM: Why? What’s wrong?
JAMES: Everything. I don’t think I’m good enough. The other boys here are really good. I mean, they’re really good. My feet are so torn up, they made me go see a doctor this afternoon. My entire body hurts. The doctor told me I should quit dancing. I guess that’s why I texted you so late. So I could talk to someone. Sorry.
SAM: Are you thinking about quitting?
JAMES: I don’t know.
SAM: I don’t think you should quit, James.
JAMES: I just wonder what it would feel like one morning if I could wake up and not hurt so much, and not feel like I’m not good enough to be here, and not have people looking at the food on my plate like I’m a loser for what I eat.
SAM: What DO you eat?
JAMES: I’m not telling you. You’d judge.
SAM:
SAM: You just have one more week. Don’t quit. You can make it. Are you learning new stuff about ballet?
JAMES: Learning that I’m not as good as people think I am. Learning that there’s this kid from Little Rock named Dante and everyone loves him and he’s sixteen and about a hundred times better than me.
SAM: What does Dante eat?
JAMES: Kale, water, and bird food.
SAM:
JAMES:…
SAM: Mmm. Kale.
And at some point between our texts about Dante from Little Rock, how sore James was, and his insistence that I had a crush on Bahar, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, it was three thirty and my phone was under my face, with the last words James had texted on the screen: Well I guess you must be asleep. Good night. I will try to hang in there and keep taping up my feet and stop worrying so much about everything. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening, Sam.
8. His father, Kenny Jenkins, had purposely held him back a year so James could be a bigger and better football player than any other boy in Blue Creek.