driving back from Boston so late last night, how he had permission to do that, what he was doing there, but I don’t want to go back to the tense looks he gave me Friday afternoon, so I let us go back to his shirt.
“It’s ugly,” I spit out.
“En français, s’il te plaît.”
I curl my lip. “Il est laid.”
“It’s old,” he says: ancien. “But if you tell me what decade this is from, I’ll promise to never wear it again.”
“Nineteen seventies,” I answer without pause, and Zeke laughs.
“How did you know?”
“Lucky guess?” I suggest, and he seems to buy it.
“I won’t wear it again this summer, at least not while I’m here. Bien?”
Not yet. But really, I’m not his mother or his girlfriend.
“C’mon, Abby. What will make it better?”
Does he actually care?
“You’ll think I’m crazy.”
He chuckles. “I already think you’re crazy.”
I shake my head, though I can’t stop my lips from curling up. “I seem to have a visceral reaction to baseball paraphernalia.”
As in, it reminds me of the wardrobe of every guy I’ve dated, not to mention every member of my family.
Zeke frowns, biting his bottom lip. “I’m not sure I have enough T-shirts to make it through the summer without baseball shirts.”
I know this truth well. I don’t think both of my brothers together own enough nonbaseball shirts to make it through a week.
I’m about to tell him to forget it, that it’s a free country, that I’m clearly way too crazy, when he surprises me. “We have to work together every day. And I’m not sure if I can take you making shifty eyes at my shirts that often. So if I can find other shirts . . .”
He’s willing to change his wardrobe to make me feel more comfortable. That more than makes up for the crazy-town looks he’s giving me.
“Well, why don’t we make today’s talking assignment to go shopping for new shirts for you? We can hit up a secondhand store in town, and a couple of other places. I’ll even buy you one.”
Zeke’s eyebrows almost reach his hairline. “Only if I can buy you one also.”
Seulement si je peux t’en acheter un aussi.
I love French.
“D’accord.”
We barely squeak by our assigned debate on public education. Not because we couldn’t argue our position clearly, but because we spent most of our preparation time arguing about his clothing, how many T-shirts we’d buy, and how much I was allowed to spend.
That and we fundamentally couldn’t agree on a position on public education. Though it would have helped if we’d come up with one in advance, instead of me making the cardinal mistake of allowing Zeke to wing our opening remarks. Which he made about the necessity of public education because private schools are only interested in the development of the mind and not the body; and public schools lead to a balanced curriculum of sports and study. Thank the gods he added the arts also, as otherwise I would have had to vault over tables and throttle him up at the front of the room.
Either way, it was probably not a good idea for me to contradict my team member during my debate portion. But he was grinning, and I figured our grade wasn’t about winning the debate, but about speaking French. So in my speech I may have publicly outed Zeke as pushing his own agenda rather than that of our party and suggesting that he was being paid off by the sports franchises in France. And then I described, in my best halting French, the importance of strong public education for the masses, the necessary quality needed to ensure a populace that valued the mind and the cultural endeavors of the soul.
At least that’s what I was trying to say. I’m not completely sure what I actually said.
After class, we’re flipping through the racks at A New Look, the local secondhand store, trying desperately to translate the T-shirt slogans we find into French. And then we argue about colors. And styles. And cut. And how geeky my choices are. And how boring his choices are.
Which means when we walk out, we each have a bag filled with new shirts. Including the one I bought for him. The plain white one with Nerd Is the New Black printed in big, bold letters. And while he could argue with that, he doesn’t when I present it to him. Though that may be because I ask him if maybe he’s too insecure to wear it.
He waltzes back