ends of the line of guys huddled on the side of the field. “You two need to get your heads out of your asses—pronto!”
“I’m fine,” Bubba said to no one in particular before turning and running straight into Rex, who shoved him off with a roll of his eyes. Bubba jogged toward the parking lot. The last I saw of him, before I turned away in misery, was his large bubble butt flexing as he jogged.
Away from me.
Today’s flag-football game had been the most excruciating one yet. And that included the time I fell face-first into mud.
“We won, though, right? Even with two Poins on the team,” Dustin said, snide and loud enough for everyone to hear. He put his arm around my shoulder. “You’re welcome, Tray. Come on, Sean. Let’s go home.” He steered me toward the street where we’d left his car.
I glanced back to see Tray watching us, arms crossed over his chest and a glower on his face. “Only because the other team played like ass!” he hollered after us. “That’s not gonna cut it during semifinals this weekend!”
Dustin just kept marching me forward.
The April day was hot, despite it being almost sunset, and I was sweaty and hungry on top of being utterly despondent. Tray was right. Dustin had been really sharp during the game, but I’d sucked, even by my own low standards. And Bubba had been six-foot-five inches of wrong. He’d tripped over people, dropped the ball, and stargazed all game. Probably because he was avoiding me as if his molecules could sense my molecules and shied away. If he’d looked at me at all, it had only been by accident, and then he’d looked away hurriedly, as if just the sight of me could turn him to stone. Sean Medusa McKinney. That was me.
I knew this because I hadn’t done anything all day except look at him, which is why I’d missed two passes Tray sent my way, pulled zero flags, and half the time didn’t even know which side had the ball.
The league game had been in Janesville, so it was only a forty-five-minute drive back to campus. I stared out the window as Dustin drove. He had an older Toyota he’d made cooler by adding retro elements like a Native American blanket over the seat, fuzzy dice, and a bobble head of Obama on the dashboard. Dustin was cool. I’d accepted the fact that I never would be.
We were halfway home before he turned off the music and looked at me. “Okay, Sean. So, what’s up?”
I gave him a dubious look. “It’s probably fairly obvious that Bubba broke up with me. Hence the whole avoiding-me-like-we-were-positively-charged-particles thing today.”
Dustin laughed.
I huffed. “You know how positive particles repel each other? They literally bounce away if you try to get them closer. That was Bubba with me today.”
“Yeah, I remember that from high school chemistry. But positive and negative particles are drawn together like magnets. That’s like opposites attract, right? The Law of Attraction.”
“Precisely.”
“But you guys aren’t anything alike, sooooo—” Dustin pointed out with a frown.
“Precisely my point! That’s why it was so strange! Today, Bubba couldn’t get within ten yards of me without being repelled in the opposite direction.”
Dustin frowned. “So…what happened with you guys? Why’d you break up?”
I was silent for a bit. Ah, the ten-thousand-dollar question. “I’m not sure. We were getting along extremely well. Then I took him home with me for my dad’s birthday. One weekend with my parents was all it took to make him run screaming.” I crossed my arms tight and hugged myself. “Which I suppose is a good indicator that he didn’t like me as much as I’d assumed.”
Dustin swigged from the bottle of water he had in the cupholder. “So what happened over the weekend? Did your parents have a bacchanal or something?”
That made me laugh. “My parents’ idea of a bacchanal is a glass of red wine on a Saturday night while they read their respective books in their respective chairs and the entire house is very, very quiet.”
He looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “So?”
I shrugged. “They didn’t like Bubba. They think I’m being emotional because he’s the first guy I ever dated. They want to see me with someone who’s my intellectual equal, like this nice young man they know with a PhD in climatology from Oxford.”
“Ah.” Dustin said as if that explained everything.
“But they weren’t rude to Bubba,” I insisted. “They told me that, not him.”
“You know what? Bubba’s