He looks up into the bare branches over our heads, and when he turns back to me, his face is dead serious. “You’ve always had it out for me, Weston.”
What are we talking about now?
He turns and walks back toward the driveway. All at once my legs have gone wobbly. “It’s just that . . .” I follow him, my throat suddenly stuffed with cotton.
Ben picks up his orange T-shirt off the ground, but instead of putting it on, he tucks the hem into the waistband of his shorts. “It’s just that what?” he asks.
The air is thick between us. A system of high pressure threatens to flatten me into the driveway. I try to look anywhere but at Ben’s body. There are crocuses shooting vivid leaves up through the dormant grass around the mailbox. The kids across the street and one house down hit a Wiffle ball into the neighbor’s yard, then start yelling at each other—words their mothers wish they did not know.
All the words I know are jammed inside my brain trying to force themselves past my teeth. The muted trumpet of too much tequila squawks behind my eyes.
This is a first. I’ve never been tongue-tied around Ben Cody in all the thirteen years I’ve known him. Have I always “had it out for him”? Or only since last fall? And how does he know?
The first two words that escape the logjam in my head are “Thank you.”
“What?” He frowns and smiles at the same time.
I almost stutter, but I don’t. I keep my eyes fixed on his. I will not embarrass myself further by staring at the place where his T-shirt hangs from his waistband. “For inviting me to the party last night. For driving me home. Thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”
He grins. “Somebody did.”
“Well, I’m glad it was you.”
“Wasn’t gonna trust any of those other yahoos.”
There’s a spark in his eye when he says it. This is our shorthand. Yahoo is my dad’s word. When Ben and I were kids, if we were making too much noise while the Hawkeyes’ game was on, Dad would bellow at us from the couch: You two stop acting like a bunch of yahoos.
I smile. This is what Ben does for me: He makes everything easy. Even as I’m standing here red-faced and worried, he’s reminding me of all the reasons I shouldn’t be. “Yeah, Dad woulda been pissed if I’d left my truck at the Doones’. Thanks for that, too.”
“What are friends for?”
Crap. I was afraid of that. Clearly, I’m stuck in the friend zone.
I wonder if he remembers saying the same thing on the sidewalk last night. Him taking my keys, leaning in, touching his forehead to mine. It seemed like so much more than “friends” to me. Was I the only one who felt it? A side effect of agave and lime?
Have I invented that moment? Or has he forgotten it?
I open my mouth to say something—anything—I have no idea what. I am out of my element, trying to reach a new dimension on old machinery, peddling toward the Galaxy of Lovers on the Rusty Ten-Speed of Friendship. I feel certain I’ll never even get off the ground.
Maybe the universe acts on my behalf, or Rachel’s heavenly father intervenes, but before I can utter any word I may regret forever, Mrs. Cody’s old Ford Explorer roars into the driveway. She screeches to a halt a few feet from Ben’s knees, and mercifully, I am saved by Adele.
“Jesus, Mom!” Ben shouts through her rolled-down window. He jumps back, pulling me with him. “Coming in hot.”
Adele Cody heaves herself from the car as if flames were licking the gas tank. She is wearing a neon-green tracksuit, and sprints around to the back where she pops the hatch, and begins jerking entire flats of a purple sports drink onto the driveway. “Gotta get to Hy-Vee and hit the Right Guard special before Esther Harris cleans ’em out. Hi, Katie!”
No one has ever called me “Katie” except Ben’s mom and my dad.
Ben goes tense as he watches his mother’s electric mop of auburn curls, bouncing around on the spring of her Zumba-coiled body.
Divorce sometimes turns the women of Coral Sands into shapeless prisoners of depression, a doughnut in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. It took Adele Cody in the opposite direction. The summer after eighth grade, Ben’s dad, Brian, attended a week-long convention in Omaha for the pharmaceutical company he reps. Over dirty martinis in the hotel bar, he met a regional manager from Lincoln named Linda and never returned. Within a month of signing divorce papers, Adele’s transformation began. She renewed her certification as a paralegal that summer, and when Ben took the bus to our first day of freshman year, his mom took a job at the law firm owned by John Doone’s dad.