into the aisle and turned to face him.
“You’re Benjamin,” I said.
His eyes were a coppery brown, and up close I could see that his lashes were obscenely long. He blinked at me, surprised. “The only person who calls me Benjamin is my dad,” he said. “Everyone else calls me Benny.”
“Hi, Benny. I’m Nina.”
“I know.”
“Oh.” I regretted sitting there and I was about to get up and go back to my seat when he sat up and leaned forward so that his head was close to mine. He had a mint in his mouth and I could smell it on his breath, hear it clicking against his teeth when he spoke.
“People keep telling me that I should meet you. Why do they say that?”
I felt like he’d just turned a spotlight on, and shined it directly in my eyes. What was I supposed to say to that? I thought for a second. “It’s because no one else wants the responsibility of having to be friends with either of us. It’s easier on them if we just become friends with each other. It’s their way of pawning off the job. And they can still feel good about themselves for doing a good deed by hooking us up.”
He looked contemplatively down at his feet, the enormous black snow boots splayed on the mat in front of him. “Sounds about right.” He stuck a hand in his pocket and pulled out a tin and offered it to me. “Mint?”
I took one, put it in my mouth, and breathed in deep. Everything tasted so fresh and clean, our breath commingling in the freezing air of the bus, that I felt brave enough to ask the obvious. “So, should we be friends?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
He looked back down at his feet, and I noticed that flush creeping up his neck from below his scarf. “If we like each other enough, I suppose.”
“And how will we know that?”
He seemed to like this question. “Well, let’s see. We’ll get off the bus together in Tahoe City and go get a hot chocolate at Syd’s and make some obligatory small talk about things like where we moved here from and how much those places sucked and how much we hate our parents.”
“I don’t hate my mom.”
He looked surprised. “What about your dad?”
“Haven’t seen him since I was seven. So I guess you could say I hate him, but it’s not exactly based on any current relationship.”
He smiled. It transformed his face, from a collection of unsettled features in awkward juxtaposition—freckles, beakish nose, enormous eyes—to something pure and joyful, almost childlike with beauty. “OK. See, look, we’re getting somewhere already. So yeah, we’ll go to Syd’s, and after about fifteen or twenty minutes of conversation we’ll either be bored to tears because we have nothing of interest to say to each other—in which case you’ll probably make some excuse about homework and ditch me, and we’ll spend the rest of the year avoiding each other in the halls, because: awkward—or we’ll find enough to say to each other to repeat the process a second time, and perhaps a third, thereby proving all of our classmates right. At which point we’ll have done our duty as responsible citizens, by making them feel good about themselves. A win-win.”
The conversation was so heady, so grown-up and frank, that it was making me feel dizzy. Teenagers I knew didn’t talk like this; they tiptoed around unspoken truths and let the unsaid mean whatever they most wanted it to mean. Already, I felt like the two of us had joined some secret society that none of our classmates would understand.
“So what you’re trying to say is that you want to go get a hot chocolate,” I said. “With me.”
“Actually I prefer coffee,” he said. “I figured you for the hot chocolate.”
“I prefer coffee, too.”
He smiled. “See, there’s something else. Maybe there’s hope for this friendship after all.”
We got off the bus in town and walked along the slushy sidewalks to a café on the main road.