the longest pause ever, she thought. It felt like tides went in and out, planes took off and landed, buildings were built before he talked. “I like you a lot,” he said.
“Well, good, I like you a lot, too.”
“And you live here, and I live in New York.”
“Right.”
“I’ve got to admit, I haven’t thought about it much farther ahead than that.”
“Sure,” she said. What does being completely chill sound like when you don’t have any pants on? She sat up and swiveled around so she was lying back on her pillow. “I do think it might be better if we kept it between us.”
“You don’t want to tell Andy.”
“I don’t want to tell anybody. You’re not staying. And my dad and Kell and Andy and whoever, if they know all this, they’ll think that you’re staying, or that I’m leaving. I think it’s…better to skip it all. Besides, right now, there’s not anything to tell except, you know, this. It’s not like you’re my prom date.”
“I could bring you a corsage next time.”
“Hey, don’t make promises you’re not going to keep.” She stretched her arms straight up in the air. “I have weird fingers. Do you see how they’re crooked?”
He scooted his head over next to hers on the pillow. “They look like fingers.”
She folded her arms back over her body. “You don’t know what it’s like being a mortal.”
“Hey, you should see inside my elbow. It looks like everything looks at the beginning of WALL-E.”
“WALL-E the cartoon?”
“Yeah, when the whole world is trash and bent metal and beat-up shit. That’s what the inside of pitchers’ elbows looks like. I had an MRI once and the doctor said, ‘I have good news and bad news, and the good news is that your bones are still attached everywhere they’re supposed to be attached. The bad news is everything else.’ ”
She paused. “What do they do if your bones aren’t still attached?”
“They do surgery. They use a tendon from your leg and tie your arm bones together.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not lying. If that doesn’t work, they use part of a dead body.”
“They do not.”
“They absolutely do. They do it on teenagers.”
“Wait, how do you tie a bone to something?”
“They drill a hole in it and loop it through.”
“Oh my God.”
“Oh, it’s disgusting.” He rubbed his elbow just thinking about it. “You ever broken a bone?”
“When I was eight, I jumped off a picnic table and broke my arm.”
“Why did you jump off a picnic table?”
She turned her head toward him. “Because John Cody said I was afraid to jump off the picnic table.”
“Your badass phase.”
“Indeed.”
“When I was fifteen, I broke my collarbone skiing,” he said, pointing to it. “My dad was so pissed. ‘You’re supposed to be going to college for baseball, and you’re going around with these idiots and hot-dogging.’ I hadn’t told him we were going. I wasn’t supposed to go. I went anyway.”
“What did he do?”
Dean laughed. “Nothing. He didn’t want me to let my knucklehead buddies toss me off a mountain in a hang glider. I come home in a bucket and he can’t send me to college. And he wanted me to go to college.”
“What did you do in college besides play ball?”
“I was a chemistry major.”
She turned to look at him. “You’re kidding.”
“Oh, I get it. You thought I took bullshit classes? Just a lot of Running Laps 101 and How to Tape Your Ankles?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t know.” She stared at the ceiling. “What did you like about chemistry?” she asked.
“I got to do things,” he said. “You mix this with that, and if you know how it works, you can make it turn blue or heat up or blow up. It was crazy shit, but it was predictable crazy shit. You could make something give off green smoke or turn into foam, but it did it the same way every time. And then you record it, and boom, that’s your result. It’s the same thing with baseball. It looks crazy, but it’s all physics. It feels like there’s no logic, but there is. I mean, except when there isn’t, obviously.”
She turned on her side and sat up on her elbow. She reached out with her ring finger and ran it along his brow bone. “What’s the scar here?”
“Ball to the face junior year at Cornell,” he said. “Blood pouring down. Just pouring. Remember the normal people I said I dated? I had a girlfriend then, Tracy, who was at the