look at that mailbox is if it is far behind him. He watches until it is lost in the darkness, until he has a safe head start on it; then he says, “Yeah,” in a way that makes me know that that is all he is going to say.
We slide onto the freeway. He turns on his player. Carrie Underwood. In a million years, I never would have imagined that I’d be driving around in a pickup truck with a gay football player who likes Carrie Underwood. And that it would be more fun than anything else I have ever done in my life.
I try to sound casual as I lift one of the crutches stowed behind us and go, “You’re not using these anymore.”
“I never really needed them that much. I kind of strung this out a little.” He pauses. “But Coach says I have to come back to practice Monday, though, or he won’t play me in the game next Friday. So—”
I rush to save us both from embarrassment. “No problem. It’s cool. It was fun. Maybe we’ll hang out again sometime.”
“Sometime? Uh, yeah. Like at practice Monday. I mean, if you want to.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, ‘really.’ Why not?”
“I don’t know. Guess I thought that what happens at the quarry would stay at the quarry.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know. I just did. The quarry … You know. It’s the quarry.”
“Yeah. I wish my whole life could be the quarry. Just simple like that. Like we could all be some primitive tribe that existed at the quarry hunting and gathering and shit.”
“I know. Like you either kill the rabbit and eat or you starve. That day. Just that day. Not like, ‘Oh, I have to figure out a whole strategy for eating for the rest of my entire life. And I’d better be hunting at only the most exclusive hunting spots or the whole tribe will think I’m a big fat loser.’ ”
“That’s exactly it. Puke, you’re amazing. You are exactly who I thought you’d be right from the beginning.”
“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I guess it means I’m psychic.”
Tyler won’t tell me anything more about who he thought I’d be, just nods, happy about being psychic or right or whatever, then stares out at the landscape like he is trying to figure out how to turn it all into one big quarry.
Tyler has been dropping me off at the corner for the past week so that I can tell Mom that I walked home from Shaniqua’s house. He stops a block from my house and, before I get out, asks, “So? Monday? Practice?”
I have my hand on the door handle. I want to be simple. I want to be the one simple thing in his life, but I can’t not ask. “Not that it matters one way or another. I mean, I seriously don’t care. But, just for curiosity, why are you hanging out with me?”
He faces me, turns the engine off. “I don’t know. You’re fun. I liked it when you busted me for macking on you.”
“You mean when you were all, ‘Hey, baby, I’m Tyler Moldenhauer,’ that time at the attendance counter?”
“Yeah. You treated me like such a creeper. That cracked me up. In fact, the first thing I ever heard you say cracked me up.”
“You mean, after I puked on you?”
“Oh, that was hilarious too. No doubt. But, no, before that. The first time I noticed you I was like, What is different in this picture? Oh right, one girl doesn’t have a giant feather protruding from the side of her head. Then that band director dude—”
“Shupe.”
“Yeah, that dee bag. Such a jarhead wannabe. He is yelling at you that ‘it’s Semper Fi!’ and you come back at him in this total Parris Island DI voice, ‘Not Semper I, sir!’ That cracked me up. And he completely did not get it. No one on the team got it. I got it.”
“So I didn’t have to puke on you to get you to notice me?”
“Hells to the no.” He goes into his skeevy playboy act. “I had my eye on you, girl.”
I play-flirt back at him, purring, “Mmm. Tell me more, my fine playa manwhore.” It is exactly like being with Javier, the gay kid who was my only real friend last summer at Lark Hill. We loved to pretend in front of the other counselors that I had a giant crush on him and no idea that he was gay. It was fun to mess