Wat considered me, his eyebrows still slightly raised. “Well, I certainly hope so,” he said.
The rest of the weekend was thankfully devoid of similar embarrassing moments. Mr. Davenport made his usual, brief appearance and then disappeared into his office. Wat popped in and out, helping Mrs. Davenport in the kitchen, wagging his eyebrows at me and occasionally singing songs like “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in a surprisingly good voice. Fritz, annoyingly, stuck around with me and Abby much of the time, declining to go out to dinner with his uncle—“All he does is talk about famous people he’s met or how he’s been to the Louvre or the Great Pyramid of Giza,” Fritz said—but finally his mother took him to exchange some clothes from Christmas that hadn’t fit him. Mr. Davenport was still working in his office, and Wat had a meeting in D.C., so Abby and I got a couple of hours together. We spent them sitting together in their home theater, watching Say Anything, Abby’s choice. It felt good, just sitting in the dark, holding Abby’s hand or putting my arm around her. But soon I became very conscious of Abby’s breath, barely tickling my neck as she rested her head against my shoulder. I could see the outline of her bra underneath her tight pink sweater. Her thigh was pressed against mine. Suddenly I understood that it was actually possible that Abby and I could sleep together one day. From there it was a single, short step to thinking that I could close the door to the theater, turn the movie’s volume up a little, and we could have sex right there in one of the leather reclining chairs. I had a condom in my wallet. That her father was in the house added a thrill of danger. And I wanted Abby, every inch of her. I was thrumming like a tuning fork.
Abby turned her head to look up at me. “What?” she said, a slightly puzzled smile on her lips.
I shook my head. I wanted her, but as she looked at me, I realized that I wanted all of her, not just some quick, furtive sex in the basement. “Nothing,” I said, squeezing her gently with my arm. “Just thinking that we’re gonna be like them one day.” I nodded in the direction of the screen, where Lloyd Dobler was warning Diane Court to avoid stepping near some glass in a parking lot.
This is perhaps the single wisest decision I ever made in a relationship, not just because it led to more kissing and to our hands wandering. We didn’t have sex, and I was left aching with desire, but we discovered that, on some deep, instinctual level, we both liked and trusted each other.
If perhaps I had trusted myself half as much as Abby did, things might have turned out better.
LESS THAN TWO MONTHS later, on the day before Fritz vanished, Mr. Summerfield, my physics teacher, gave us a take-home test to complete. Teachers occasionally did this at Blackburne, assigning tests for homework so they could use precious class time to conduct more labs, or force students through the subjunctive mood again, or squeeze in one more lecture about the effects of the Peloponnesian War. In our case, Mr. Summerfield wanted us to work on one more set of practice questions in preparation for the AP exam. So I took my test back to my dorm room and left it in my physics notebook while I went down to the track to run laps in the cold and practice baton handoffs with the relay team. After practice and a shower and dinner in the dining hall, I returned to my room. Fritz was studying in the library for a calculus test with two other classmates, so I had the room to myself. It was dark outside the two windows of our corner room in Walker House, and my lamp threw a golden, solitary cone of light over the desktop. I liked studying this way, the harsh overhead light switched off and the desk lamp radiating a soft, focused glow that just touched the darkened windows. I pulled my physics notebook out of my backpack and opened it; then I took out the test, laid it out on the desk, and peered at it.
It consisted of four practice questions, each with various parts. The first question was about converting mechanical energy into thermal energy, something we had recently reviewed. Easy. The second question was about sound wavelengths, a topic I had presented to the class for a project assignment. I wrote out my work on my own sheets of notebook paper, comforted by the sound of the pencil scratching against the paper. Then I read the third question. As was typical with such questions, the description of the scenario was both clinical and absurd. Two small blocks, each of mass m, are connected by a string of length 4h. Block A is on a smooth tabletop, with block B dangling off the edge of the table. The tabletop is a distance of 2h from the floor. Given a couple of other variables, I was supposed to answer various questions about the acceleration of block B if it was released from height h, the time that B would hit the floor, the time that A would hit the floor, and the distance between the landing points of blocks A and B. I stared at the problem and then looked back at the brief list of equations that came with the test, the only extra help we were allowed to use—no notes or textbooks. It was an easy set of questions about acceleration and mass, but for some reason I was drawing a blank. I made a stab at part (a), silently cursing the entire premise as ridiculous. When would I need to know the speed at which a block falls off a table? I knew this wasn’t the point, but it felt good to grumble.
Halfway through part (b), I wrote to the end of my last sheet. I reached down to pick my physics notebook off the floor and opened it for a piece of scrap paper. Instead of opening the notebook to a blank sheet, however, I inadvertently opened it to a scrawled page of notes. I frowned and then actually felt my eyes widen. The notes were from earlier that month, the day Mr. Summerfield had gone over acceleration. The answer to the test question I wasn’t sure about was in those notes.