It was halftime now. Out on the field your school’s principal and band director, Doyle Dixon, pumped a baton in front of the Bliss Township Marching Band, leading a spiraling medley performance of the Eagles’ greatest hits.
You spent a while there, leaning against the chain link behind the last row, looking into the sea of school-spirit-reddened faces. A football game, in Bliss Township’s tacit racial distinctions, was a decidedly white event, but out beyond the stadium, you observed the loud, boisterous activity of a group of Hispanic kids you recognized from school—an old recess-hour tormentor of yours, David Garza, among them—gathered around someone’s pickup, whose subwoofers reverberated in your own chest. Was this a kind of halfhearted protest, the way they congregated near the stadium but did not enter, or were they only drawn to that bright activity on an otherwise silent town night?
You turned back to the rafters, straightened your nut offerings, and that was when you saw Rebekkah Sterling. Not only saw her: through the flittering of paper Mountain Lion paw-mark paddles and jumbo foam fingers, your gaze latched onto hers and held. You had read, again in one of Pa’s Scientific Americans, that if two people maintain eye contact for six unblinking seconds it means they want sex or a fight. This wonderful hypothesis was on your mind when you started counting, all the way up to seven, which—combined with the first two awestruck seconds—must have totaled at least nine. The school’s theater teacher, Mr. Avalon, was sitting next to Rebekkah, and he apparently mistook your gaze as directed toward him. He put a hand to his light beard, lifted it and waved faintly. You replied with an awkward Boy Scout’s salute. You nearly stumbled in your hurry to get to the bathroom, where you could be alone to marvel at those nine seconds.
Rebekkah might not have joined the Young Astronomers for good, you might not have touched again since that brief grazing of hands, but her one-night attendance at the meteor shower over Zion’s Pastures somehow set in motion a wondrous sidereal phenomenon. Rebekkah and you, without ever actually mentioning your standing date, now met each morning in Mrs. Schumacher’s literature classroom, empty before school began. For the rest of the day, under the mocking glare of your classmates, you knew that Rebekkah would not have dared to keep your slouched, socially poisonous company. But in those solitary, quiet minutes before Mrs. Schumacher’s literature class? In those minutes, your words couldn’t come quickly enough.
In that empty classroom, you had already told Rebekkah many things, things you had never tried before to put into language. Your parents’ silence with each other, how your mother’s love worked like an elaborate and efficient contraption, how your father’s love was more like a puddle. You told her about the books you had read and reread, the adventures Charlie and you had invented, the Old Texas tales Granny Nunu told you when you were a kid, the ones that became nearly scriptural to you after she passed. Rebekkah hardly said anything in reply. In truth she usually spoke only when you asked her outright for an answer. “What do you want to do when you graduate?” you asked once. Her face went pensive, as if she’d never before considered the question. “Maybe a musician,” she said. “I want to be a musician and live in New York. But is that even a job anyone can really have?”
And it seemed to you that she held whole albums, all those songs she’d one day write, in what she didn’t say. Her silence was your greatest inspiration. In the twenty-three and a half hours of your own muteness that constituted the balance of your days, you tried to continue the conversations via the moody, baroque poems you wrote in your journals. You had never known you had so many words in you, that sudden urgency you felt, that need to empty yourself of your entire past, to lay it out and arrange it for her. You talked as rapidly as you could, but your mouth felt too narrow to convey the rush. When you told your stories to Rebekkah, she nodded and listened, and it could seem you had discovered a purpose for your solitary years. An unlikely theory, perhaps, and you were prone to believe other unlikely theories as well. You knew you might never have Rebekkah Sterling, at least not how you envisioned in this universe, but in those parallel universes Pa described? You borrowed from your father’s ideas, the very ones you had initially silently disparaged. Every one of the poems you wrote offered a tour of a different place in the multiverse, a physics equal to what your heart required of it. You wrote: There is another universe where we do not need a single word no need to try to converse / when our every thought is heard.
But even in this universe, after many days subjected to the erosive sunlight of your many diatribes, Rebekkah’s silence began to fissure. You couldn’t see what lay beneath, but she did offer you dark glimpses.
“You know, the thing about West Texas is that it was the state’s last Indian territory, did you know that?” you were telling her one morning, playing the historian again. “The Apache might still be out here if the Mexicans hadn’t had the idea that there might be silver up in those mountains. Of course there wasn’t, but that didn’t stop them from slaughtering the tribe.”
“That’s men for you,” Rebekkah said. “Not unlike my father, really.”
“Your father?”
“With his fracking. Apparently it’s not going well. Business as usual, for him.”
“But you know what? My granny, she said that there really might be some silver the Mexicans stashed away up there. Supposedly they buried some huge treasure in a drought crack in the earth, but then rain came, the crack closed, and no one could remember where.”
“There’s a metaphor if I ever heard one,” Rebekkah said. “Precious things buried and lost. I should write a song.”
You looked at her for a long while. “What things?” you ventured.