“I feel like we haven’t hung out in forever,” Dustin said.
“We haven’t.” I stuffed my fingers in the holes and hefted my ball. While I understood the mechanics of the game, I couldn’t translate that into meaningful action. I threw my ball down the lane, and didn’t bother watching to see how many pins—if any—I knocked down.
My final score was pitiful, even for me, and we decided to give pool a try. Dustin racked the balls.
“What’s new with you, Pinks?”
“Uh . . . nothing?”
“Hear from any colleges yet?”
“If I had, you’d be the second to know.” I selected a pool cue at random and waited for Dustin to break. “What about you?”
Dustin scattered the solid and striped balls across the table, knocking one of each into different corner pockets. Seriously, the kid didn’t know how to suck at anything. “I got into UF.”
“Congratulations,” I said, though I wasn’t surprised. Any school that rejected Dustin Smeltzer was stupid. “That’s your safety school, right?”
Dustin shook his head. “Nope. UF’s my school.” He lined up the cue ball and sank the fourteen. “You should go. We could room together.”
“Wait. What about Princeton? And Duke and Cornell?”
“Too expensive.” Dustin scratched. He waited for the cue ball to drop, retrieved it, and handed it to me. “Your turn.”
But I just stood there holding the ball. I would’ve kept standing there if one of the girls at the next table hadn’t asked me to move. I didn’t understand what Dustin meant by “too expensive.” His parents were both lawyers and loaded. After the problems they’d experienced adopting Dustin when he was a baby, they’d started a successful family law practice specializing in helping other couples navigate the adoption process. But they made the bulk of their money handling wealthy couples’ divorces.
I placed the cue ball at the end of the table, lined it up to take out the three ball, which was right in front of the side pocket, cocked my cue, and still missed, sending the three ricocheting off the side, where it scattered a cluster of balls.
“Tough break, Pinks.”
How could Dustin act so casual? He’d spent the last four years of high school killing himself so he could attend any school he wanted. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know what he wanted to study, because there was nothing he wasn’t good at. Brain surgeon, teacher, theoretical astrophysicist? He could’ve done anything, though that last one might’ve been a waste of time if the universe continued collapsing.
“What’s going on, Dustin?” I said, finally. “UF’s a good school and all, and congratulations, but you’re better than a state college.”
Dustin cleared two more striped balls from the table like it was nothing. When he finally missed a shot, he stepped back and leaned against the table. For a stoner, tidy had always best described the way he dressed. Navy shorts, short-sleeved plaid shirt. Like he was on his way to a polo match and had wandered into a trashy bowling alley by mistake.
“My dad made a couple of bad investments,” he said. “No big deal. We probably won’t lose the house.”
“Probably?”
“Don’t make it a thing. Come on, your turn.”
Clearly he didn’t want to talk about it, so I held the hundred questions I was dying to ask. By the time Dustin won the game—eight ball, side pocket—I still had four of my balls on the table.
“You hungry?” Dustin asked. “I’m hungry. Let’s swing by Denny’s.”
I’d driven to Dustin’s house, but we’d taken his Jetta to the bowling alley. He fired up his glass bowl in the Denny’s parking lot, filling the car with thick clouds of smoke, before we went in. The hostess stuck us at a still-damp but hardly clean booth in the corner. Most of the other tables sat empty, but the night was young and creepy.
“How’re things working out with you and Frye?” Dustin asked. I sipped shitty coffee while he destroyed a chocolate milkshake.
“Nothing’s going on,” I said, before I realized he’d probably been referring to our roller coaster.
Dustin grinned. “Which means something is definitely going on. Spill it, Pinks.”
I dumped the bowl of creamers onto the table and started stacking them. “Isn’t it weird how these things sit out all day but don’t go bad?”
“Not really,” Dustin said. “Bacteria causes them to spoil, so the packages are sealed and then heated to kill it all off.” He set both hands on the table and raised his eyebrow. “You’re avoiding the question.”
Of course I was avoiding the question. Just like he’d avoided discussing why he was throwing his future away at a state university—sure, UF was the top-ranked school in Florida, but it was no Princeton. Our discussions rarely ran deeper than school or our families or our favorite pizza toppings, but maybe talking about Calvin with Dustin wouldn’t be terrible.
“We sort of fooled around.”
Dustin broke out his stoner grin, highlighted by his bloodshot eyes. “I knew it! When? Where? Does it bother you he’s dated girls? Is he your boyfriend now?”
“New Year’s Eve.” I ticked the answers off on my fingers. “In my car, parked in front of his house. Why would it bother me? And no.”
“Was it bad?” Dustin asked. “Does he have a tiny dick? Because I’ve seen him wrestle and I would’ve guessed he was packing some serious meat.”
“First of all,” I said, “gross. Second: How shallow do you think I am?”
Dustin shrugged. “I don’t know. If television and movies have taught me anything, it’s that size matters.”
Coming from anyone else, I probably would’ve been offended, but Dustin didn’t know how to be properly mean. It wasn’t in him to demean people. It was still weird, though. “Well, it doesn’t,” I said. “And, for the record, Calvin’s dick is dick-sized, and that’s all I’m prepared to say about it.”
“Do you like him?” Dustin asked.
“He called me a slut,” I said. “Right after we . . . uh . . . finished.”
“Harsh. Why?”
“I wish I knew. He tried to tell me he was only joking, but it didn’t feel like a joke.”
Our waitress delivered our food. Scrambled eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausage, and hash browns for Dustin, and a BLT and fries for me. I wasn’t hungry, but Dustin’s munchies demanded greasy satisfaction.
“Maybe I overreacted,” I said, picking at my fries.
“Your reactions do tend toward the extreme.” Dustin talked with his mouth full. “Not quite Lua territory, but you definitely overthink shit, Pinks.”
Of course, Dustin probably thought everyone overreacted about everything, but only because he possessed the emotional range of a potato. If I’d found out my parents were broke and couldn’t send me to college, I probably would have burned my house down, or something less destructive but equally terrifying. Not Dustin, though. He was either the most Zen person I knew, or he was going to implode one day soon.
“Isn’t sex supposed to be special, though?” My only other experience had been with Tommy, and it had been special.
“Don’t know,” Dustin said. “Don’t think about it much.”
“Sex?”