Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,32

she says. You don’t wanna walk with me? Her bookbag is down by her feet and she scoops it up athletically and jogs toward me in one motion. It is what I noticed first about her: her hard determined striving for the ball, on the lacrosse field, at field hockey, on any field or anyplace, Lindsay is graceful.

I don’t get crushes on girls. It almost never happens. Mostly I am avoiding girls with crushes on me. When I was twelve it started happening: a girl would summon all of her courage and approach me or phone me or pass me a note as if she were throwing a message over a wall, and if she was one of the twenty—in middle school in Yonkers there were approximately twenty girls at any time considered popular or pretty or slutty enough to respectably pursue—I would say yeah, sure, let’s go out, and then we would meet up someplace, in a park, behind the school, and kiss, and give each other hickeys, and then the next day I would break up with her.

In high school the rules are different but the same. Everyone knows who can go out, who can hook up with each other. Risks are very rarely taken. There is something psychic going on, something unspoken. But I feel too noticed. All the girls I’ve gotten with in high school have known I think that I don’t have girlfriends. I have never had a girlfriend. By keeping it this way I can feel less guilty.

But now there is Lindsay Harper—Lindsay with long dark hair, Lindsay with dark eyebrows and very light eyes. Every part of her body is firm and round or straight and slim. Her hands are smooth and tan, her nails are crescent moons. Holt Caldwell had a famous crush on her when she was a freshman and he was a senior and she even more famously didn’t like him back. We have never been friends until now. She was not part of my group until this year and then suddenly she was, and now we’re very very good friends, better than friends you could say. For the last four weekends we have gotten together and hung out with nobody else there. I have not told anyone, not even Trevor, for fear of breaking it. Every Friday I call her after school and say Hey, what are you up to? And she says Nothing! very quickly, before I have finished speaking, and then there is a pause on her end—here I can tell she is waiting for me to gather my bravery and suggest that we meet—which usually takes me around five seconds, and usually comes out uncertainly, like Maybe we could meet up tomorrow night? or Maybe I’ll pick you up at your house?

I don’t know if I am imagining the little bit of disappointment that has started to make its way into her voice. I want to make her happy but I’m not sure what she wants. A date, a real date like adults go on? I have never done such a thing with any girl. It frightens me to think how expensive something like a date would be. Mostly all my friends just get together where we can drink or smoke in peace. Sometimes we see a movie. I guess there are some boys, boys like Preston Hutton and George Bristol, who do take girls on dates, who do the unthinkable thing of asking out girls from other grades who they otherwise do not know. Girls they meet in class. As if they were in college. Boys like them drive very nice cars and have picked up their strange style of dating from watching movies about rich kids in the 80s. There are a lot of boys who love movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Say Anything and Pretty in Pink. George Bristol, who was voted Best-Dressed this fall, actually wears blazers with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Fortunately for him he is very good at football so his weirdness is thought of as cool rather than ridiculous.

But I don’t know how to be like those boys. I like what Lindsay and I do: we get together and go to the mall or the movies, or else we just drive around. We drive around and talk about stuff, or we go to the McDonald’s drive-through the next town over or anyplace, a parking lot, it doesn’t matter.

We have not kissed or even held