into the store to change out of his ugly Red Sox shirt.
And five minutes later, he’s back with the new T-shirt, and an additional bag.
“I’m not wearing a sports shirt,” I warn, backing away.
“En français s’il te plaît.” He smirks, pouting his lips.
“Pas de T-shirt sportif pour moi.” I laugh, taking additional steps to get away from the bag that is now dangling from his fingertips.
“Do you trust me?” he asks, taking small steps toward me. As-tu confiance en moi? The grin on his face is bordering on maniacal; his eyebrows waggle up and down over his glasses.
“Non!” I laugh. “Je ne veux pas ton T-shirt.”
I don’t want your T-shirt.
Even though I do.
I do.
“Vraiment?” Zeke says, as though reading my thoughts.
I shake my head. “Pas de T-shirts.”
“As-tu confiance en moi?” he asks again.
Do I trust him?
Would he buy me a baseball T-shirt to punish me? He could have said no to the nerd shirt but he didn’t even debate it. He went and put it on.
Zeke bought me a shirt.
“D’accord.” Okay.
“D’accord quoi?” he asks.
“I want my shirt.”
“No matter what it says?”
I try to remember if I saw any baseball shirts when I was going through the racks. I couldn’t remember anything that was smaller than an XX-large.
Do I trust him?
“Oui.”
“Peut-être plus tard,” he says instead, flipping around and walking toward the diner we’d decided earlier would be our reward if we didn’t kill each other during our shopping expedition.
“What do you mean maybe later?” I ask, following behind him like a lost puppy. “Give me my shirt.”
“It’ll be another reward for not being mean to me this evening,” Zeke says.
Mean. Méchante.
“Je ne suis pas méchante,” I protest, but he doesn’t even slow down.
Am I mean?
“Viens,” he says instead of answering. Come. Like I’m a puppy.
I’m about to open my mouth when I remember his comment. Am I mean?
Over dinner we talk through the newspaper articles we’re supposed to discuss, adding more and more words to our ongoing list. Cherry pie for me (tarte aux cerises) and chocolate cake for Zeke (gâteau au chocolat).
“Was it hard to learn all this French on your own?” Zeke asks when we walk back to campus. I know that cherry pie is not an appropriate dinner, but I think I could eat the pies from Sweetie Pies for dinner every night and never get bored. “I mean, having no one to talk to.”
“No,” I say, thinking through the words I want to use. While my mouth is still aching from the unfamiliar positions it’s being forced to make to create French words, they’ve started coming more easily, like they’re meant to be my words.
Except right now, when I feel like it’s important that I find the right ones.
“It was always my own private language, like this special thing just for me. It gave me something that was my own. My oldest brother, Jed, was the baseball statistics guy; he knew everything about the sport, every player’s stats. And my middle brother, Si, was the one who always had a half dozen baseballs banging around in his backpack. He played catcher, the one who could sit for hours as Jed and I would practice our throws.”
Zeke chuckles. “You used to throw a baseball?”
If I admitted the truth, it would unleash a conversation that I really, really didn’t want to engage in. So instead I glare at him until his hands rise up in a surrender position.
“Sounds like it was a lot for your parents.”
“Ha!” I can’t help the sound this time. “Who do you think lied about our ages so we could get on little league teams younger than we should have been? All three of us came home from the hospital in infant-sized Cubs onesies. And that was before they invested everything they had into a Cubs merchandise store, always so sure that this would be the year that the Cubs would finally make it.”
Zeke wisely doesn’t touch that one with a ten-foot pole. “What did you do during all this?”
I tread carefully, winding around the land mines like an expert.
“I spent years watching and playing little league games. We’d go from one ballpark to another, first to my games, then Si’s then Jed’s, then Si’s travel team game. And then there were the professional games during the years we had enough money for Cubs tickets. And the trips to Iowa to see the Cubs prospects play.”
What I don’t tell him: how I loved it all. Loved it. How until I turned fourteen, there was