I laugh and lie down beside him, letting my head rest in the dip between his shoulder and collarbone. I feel his lips and nose against the top of my head, and I know if I looked up at him right now we would kiss. I can imagine exactly how it would feel. “Where are you from?” I ask instead.
“Here,” he says, and I don’t think he’s going to say any more. His eyes are closed, his forehead serious. “But when we were kids, I went to live with my dad for a while in Alabama and then Texas.”
“Why’d you come back?”
His shoulder shrugs under me. “My dad got sober and then he remarried, and then his wife got pregnant. They decided it didn’t make sense for me to stay. He still cares about the important stuff, though. Course, he misses all that stuff, but he makes sure to mail me a fifth of whiskey every few months in his place.”
I sit up on my elbow and look at him until his hazel eyes open. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fahn,” he says. “This is home anyway.”
I wonder what that must feel like, to know that for sure. This is home. I look around the field, up at the stars, back down to Beau’s hazel eyes. I listen to the crickets sing and watch the sparkle of lightning bugs around us. When the world is quiet and no one else is around, Union still feels like home. I don’t think that feeling ever left me, really. It’s the noise and eyes of other people here that make me feel stilted and caged, like I’m onstage and everyone is watching for signs that I don’t belong in everything I do. I’d like to think I’m self-aware enough to know that thought is both narcissistic and ridiculous, but at the same time, I can’t make myself stop acting like it’s true. Being around people is exhausting. Being around Beau is like a really good version of being alone, as easy but more fun.
I lie back down, and Beau’s arm wraps around me, his fingers soft on my shoulder. “I don’t know my birth parents,” I tell him. “I was adopted when I was eleven days old, and I’ve always lived here, but I don’t really know where home-home is.”
“I bet your mom was a doctor,” he says.
“Oh yeah? What makes you think that?”
“Same reason you knew I played football, probably.”
“My muscular body and worn-out T-shirt,” I say.
“Tell me you’re not going away to some fancy college to become a doctor or a lawyer or something like that,” he says.
“Actually, no,” I say.
He looks down the plane of his face at me. “So you’re staying here.”
“Well, no.” I’m unable to meet his eyes. “I am going away to some fancy college, but I think I’m going to study history.”
“History.” His thick eyebrows rise. “Well, aren’t you full of surprises.”
“Are you surprised by how boring my future sounds?”
“It was never my favorite subject,” he says.
“What was?”
“Probably gym,” he teases.
“Well, that was my second choice,” I say. “I’m just not sure Brown offers degrees in classes that are named for the room they take place in.”
“Their loss.” He sits up enough to take another sip of beer.
“Really, though, Beau. Gym?”
His eyes scan the starry sky. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe woodshop.”
I consider pointing out that’s another class named after its location. Instead I watch his breath raise and lower his chest slowly and imagine his hands working over wood with the same tenderness and exhilaration with which they traveled across the piano that night in the band room. Of course it makes perfect sense that the same hands that pulled those notes from those keys could make beautiful objects too. Physical incarnations of his music. His serious eyes slide down to mine. “Really, though, Natalie,” he imitates me. “History?”
“History,” I confirm. “That, or women’s studies.”
“Women’s studies. Is that, like . . .” He hesitates, then sort of shrugs and shakes his head like he can’t even come up with one guess as to what that might mean. “Gynecology?”
I stare at him, trying to judge how serious he is, until he cracks a smile. “I’m gonna be honest with you, Natalie,” he says, “I wasn’t much of a reader in school, and I would’ve failed history the second time I took it, except my teacher didn’t want me gettin’ suspended from the football team. But, yes, I’ve heard of women’s studies.”
“So you’re at least as familiar as I am with woodshop.”