“Okay,” I admitted, “maybe one.”
He grinned again. We’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks now, but this easy give-and-take still surprised me. From that very first day in my room, I felt like we’d somehow skipped the formalities of the Beginning of a Relationship: those awkward moments when you’re not all over each other and are still feeling out the other person’s boundaries and limits. Maybe this was because we’d been circling each other for a while before he finally catapulted through my window. But if I let myself think about it much—and I didn’t—I had flashes of realizing that I’d been comfortable with him even at the very start. Clearly, he’d been comfortable with me, grabbing my hand as he had that first day. As if he knew, even then, that we’d be here now.
“I bet you,” he said to me, “that I can name more states by the time that woman comes out of the dry cleaners than you can.”
I looked at him. We were sitting outside of Joie, both of us on our lunch break, me drinking a Diet Coke, him snarfing down a sleeve of Fig Newtons. “Dexter,” I said, “it’s hot.” “Come on,” he said, sliding his hand over my leg. “I’ll bet you.”
“No.”
“Scared?”
“Again, no.”
He cocked his head to the side, then squeezed my knee. His foot, of course, was tapping. “Let’s go. She’s about to walk in. When the door shuts behind her, time’s on.”
“Oh, God.” I said. “What’s the bet?”
“Five bucks.”
“Boring. And too easy.”
“Ten bucks.”
“Okay. And you have to buy dinner.”
“Done.”
We watched as the woman, who was wearing pink shorts and a T-shirt and carrying an armful of wrinkled dress shirts, pulled open the door to the cleaners. As it swung shut, I said, “Maine.”
“North Dakota.”
“Florida.”
“Virginia.”
“California.”
“Delaware.” I was keeping track on my fingers: he’d been known to cheat but denied it with great vehemence, so I always had to have proof. Challenges, to Dexter, were like those duels in the old movies, where men in white suits smacked each other across the face with gloves, and all honor was at stake. So far, I hadn’t won them all, but I hadn’t backed down either. I was, after all, still new at this.
Dexter’s challenges, apparently, were legendary. The first one I’d seen had been between him and John Miller. It was a couple of days after Dexter and I had gotten together, one of the first times I’d gone over to the yellow house with him. We found John Miller sitting at the kitchen table in his pajamas, eating a banana. There was a big bunch of them on the table in front of him, seemingly out of place in a kitchen where I now knew the major food groups consisted of Slurpees and beer.
“What’s up with the bananas?” Dexter asked him, pulling out a chair and sitting down.
John Miller, who still looked half asleep, glanced up and said, “Fruit of the Month Club. My nana gave it to me for my birthday.”
“Potassium,” Dexter said. “You need that every day, you know.”
John Miller yawned, as if used to this kind of stupid information. Then he went back to his banana.
“I bet,” Dexter said suddenly, in the voice I later would come to recognize as the one that always preceded a challenge, deep and game show host-like, “that you can’t eat ten bananas.”
John Miller finished chewing the bite in his mouth, then swallowed. “I bet,” he replied, “that you’re right.”
“It’s a challenge,” Dexter said. Then he nudged out a chair, with a knee that was already jiggling, for me, and said, in the same low, slow voice, “Will you take it?”
“Are you crazy?”
“For ten bucks.”
“I am not eating ten bananas for ten bucks,” John Miller said indignantly.
“It’s a dollar a banana!” Dexter said.
“And furthermore,” John Miller went on, tossing the now-empty peel at an overflowing garbage can by the back door, and missing, “this double-dare shit of yours is getting old, Dexter. You can’t just go around throwing down challenges whenever you feel like it.”
“Are you passing on the challenge?”
“Will you stop using that voice?”
“Twenty bucks,” Dexter said. “Twenty bucks—”
“No,” John Miller told him.
“—and I’ll clean the bathroom.”
This, clearly, changed things. John Miller looked at the bananas, then at Dexter. Then at the bananas again. “Does the one I just ate count as one?”
“No.”
John Miller slapped the table. “What? It’s not even to my stomach yet, for godsakes!”
Dexter thought for a second. “Okay. We’ll let Remy call this one.”
“What?” I said. They were both looking at me.
“You’re an unbiased view,” Dexter explained.