“It’s okay,” I say, because he looks nervous and he makes me want to make things easier for him. “Here, help me up. I don’t want to touch the floor.”
David comes around to the side door. He puts out his hand, and I grab it and hike myself up to standing. “This place is gross,” I say.
“The bleachers would have been the better choice.”
“You know what? That’s a great idea.” I sprint toward the field and then up the stairs, taking two at a time, and the momentum feels good, air pumped directly to my cold, dead heart. When I get to the top, I take a seat.
I forgot how much I love being up here. I rarely miss a game, not because I care that much about football, but because I love being part of the crowd. Like there is nowhere else any of us is supposed to be except right here cheering on our team, perfect teenager clichés reporting for duty. I see David craning his neck to look up, probably deciding whether he should join me.
“Come on!” I call to him.
He takes the stairs more slowly than I did. Stares at the ground so as not to fall. David is one of those random people at school you don’t think about at all, but now that I’ve invited him to sit next to me here, I scramble to remember everything I know about him. That will hopefully make things slightly less uncomfortable, because honestly I’d totally pick the stomach flu over awkward.
But the problem is, that’s the first word I think of when I think of David: awkward. I don’t know much else about him. I remember I used to go to his birthday parties, and when he turned five he had one that was space-themed. We all got these cool NASA badges (I still have mine, actually), and his parents rented a bouncy castle that looked like the moon. We were jumping and then bumping into each other, and out of nowhere he fell to the floor and started crying with his hands over his ears. We all went home early.
What else? I’ve seen him trip about a million times, and he has this bad habit of bumping into people. Maybe it’s because he walks around with those huge headphones on and can’t hear anything, or maybe it’s because his mind is busy solving, like, global warming or something. And he’s right. He’s a terrible dresser. He looks like a missionary. Or like he has an after-school job at an electronics store at the mall.
Now that he’s sitting up here, I quickly study his face and I realize he’s not bad-looking. Actually a step up from Justin and Gabriel, who think they are hot shit despite their matching chin acne. If David got his hair cut and let people see his bottomless dark brown eyes, he’d be seriously cute. Probably the reason I invited him to sit next to me, if I’m honest with myself, is that my dad mentioned him out of the blue just a few months ago. At the dinner table one night, my dad announced that he thought I should get to know David Drucker.
“David Drucker was in my chair today, and I gotta tell you, that boy is interesting. He talked to me about quantum mechanics,” my father said. And I’m sure I replied with something sarcastic, like “Sounds fascinating, Dad. I’ll get right on that.”
Do I want to go back in time and punch myself in the face? Yes, yes I do.
“The Arthur B. Pendlock Stadium can hold up to eight hundred and four people,” David says, sitting next to me now but looking out at the field. You can make out the post office from here. The cupcake bakery. Sam’s Bagels.
“That’s what this place is called?” I ask. “The Arthur B. Pendlock Stadium?” David nods. “I never knew that. I think I would have guessed more than eight hundred and four people. It gets pretty packed at the games.”
“I’ve never been,” he says.
“To a game? Really? They’re fun,” I say, though I wonder if our definitions of the word fun are the same. He shrugs. I consider asking him about quantum mechanics, but I don’t even know what quantum mechanics is. Or are? Is quantum mechanics plural?
“Not a sports fan, I take it?” I ask somewhat inanely. I’m not sure why I’ve always assumed that the responsibility of a conversation falls on me. Half the time, I’m better off just shutting up.
“Nope. I don’t really understand the appeal. The suspense is inherently limited. Your team is either going to win or lose through some variation of throwing and catching balls. That said, I’d rather watch than play. Why would you let yourself be tackled to the ground and risk a potential head injury? It’s confusing to me.”
“I can see how that would be confusing,” I say, and find myself smiling.
“I’ve considered whether some of the guys find it homoerotic, but most of them have girlfriends, so probably not.”
I laugh.
“I’m only half joking,” he says. He looks at me and then his eyes dart away again. “We can stop talking if you want. I assume you left class to get away from all that noise, though my assumptions usually have only a thirty percent accuracy rate.”
“I did, actually,” I say. I can see the grocery store parking lot from up here, where my dad taught me to drive not so long ago. We went there at odd hours on weekends and even some weeknights for the three months leading up to my birthday. He was patient with me, a good teacher, only getting annoyed in the beginning, when I got confused between the gas and the brake. I passed my test on the first try, and my parents and I celebrated with sparkling apple cider in fancy champagne glasses. My dad toasted to “all the roads Kit has yet to travel.” He took a picture of me holding up my license, and then he teared up a little, because he said he was already starting to imagine what it was going to be like when I left for college, how his life would have a Kit-shaped hole.
My dad was supposed to miss me, not the other way around. That’s how things were supposed to go.
I don’t want to think about that.
After a while, quiet settles between David and me, and surprisingly it’s not awkward at all. It’s actually kind of nice to sit up here, away from school and the shitstorm that awaits at home, away from the terrifying concept of one whole month. It’s nice to sit with someone and not have to think about what to say next.
—
I don’t go back to class. Instead I go home and spend my time lying on the couch and watching Netflix. Though I’ve been here for hours, I did not study for tomorrow’s physics quiz. I did not read fifty pages of Heart of Darkness and think about its thematic relevance to my own life (though that should have been an easy one) or start that essay for world history on migration. I also didn’t write that article about the debate team for the school newspaper even though the deadline is tomorrow by three. We’ll probably have to run a picture in its place. Clearly this is not the way to make editor in chief, which has been my goal for the past three years, but I can’t seem to motivate.
“Egg rolls, scallion pancakes, General Tso’s. All the bad stuff,” my mom says, dropping a bulging bag of Chinese food onto the counter. She kicks off her shoes. “Does grief make your feet swell? Because these things are freaking killing me.”