I meet Mitch in the parking lot and his face brightens because he thinks this stupid grin on my face is for him. No, I want to tell him. Don’t give me that sweet smile. I don’t deserve it.
The next day, Bo’s there again in Amanda’s seat. I watch from the corner of my vision as he brushes his knuckles across his chin. I want to touch him. It seems inevitable. He’s a negative and I’m a positive and all that stands between us is a matter of time.
Like yesterday, he says my name at the beginning of class, but this time adds, “I’ll see you tonight.”
There is a chorus of bees in my stomach as I listen to Bo whistling in the kitchen. Bo always whistles when he thinks no one is listening. But normally it’s no song in particular, just a hodgepodge of tunes. But tonight his lips press together and whistle “Jolene” by Dolly Parton. Which turns my knees to mush.
Ron comes out from his office and hums along as he restocks the receipt paper. With a few minutes to go before closing time, Marcus barks, “Don’t you know any other songs?”
The whistling stops for a moment as Bo flips a burger. The burger lands, sizzling against the griddle, and he begins to whistle again.
Marcus watches us curiously when, at the end of the night, we both walk toward Bo’s truck.
I get into his truck just as his phone rings. He picks it up, and I watch as he listens for a moment. The vein in his neck bulges, his head shaking. Through his clenched teeth, he says something and hangs up before sliding in behind the wheel.
“Who was that?”
He chews on the inside of his bottom lip for a moment. “My brother.”
“Oh.”
“He just needs me to pick him up after I drop you off.” He stares straight out into the field behind Harpy’s. “We don’t really get along.”
I don’t have any siblings, but I know what it feels like to butt heads with someone you see every morning and every night.
“I envy him sometimes,” he says. “It wasn’t the same for him when our mom died. I don’t know how true it is, but sometimes it feels I absorbed more of the blow than he did.”
I nod. I knew Lucy in a way my mom never did, and it’s hard not to feel like I carry the heavier burden because of that. “I’m sorry,” I say as we’re buckling our seat belts. It’s like a hot potato that I’ve been holding on to for days. “For what I said about you going to private school.”
He grips the steering wheel and cranes his neck back while he reverses out. “It’s fine.”
We sit at the stoplight in silence until it turns green. “What happened then? You were on a scholarship, I guess?”
“Yeah.” I love the way he drives with one hand anchored to the bottom of the wheel as he uses his palm to spin it when he turns, like he’s driving an eighteen-wheeler or something.
“Left on Rowlett,” I say.
“I was in eighth grade when one of the Holy Cross dads saw me playing. I don’t want to say I was really good, but I guess I was. I just didn’t know it because no one gives two shits about basketball in this town.”
“Except at Holy Cross,” I say. Holy Cross is too small for a football team, but their basketball team always wins district and sometimes state.
“Yeah, so I guess a bunch of the dads got together and talked to my dad about me going there. But we couldn’t afford it. Not with everything that had happened with my mom. You can’t give high school kids sports scholarships. At least not according to the athletic association they compete in. They put together this academic scholarship for me. And for my brother, too. My dad said I couldn’t go unless he went.”
“But you said it was your fault that y’all had to leave, right?” I point to my driveway a few houses down. “This is me up here on the left.”
“I blew my knee out at the end of the season last year. We didn’t have insurance then, so I’m not really sure how everything got paid for. More of those rich dads, probably. But I wasn’t going to be playing anytime soon.”