What to Say Next(8)

Me following her outside.

Me electing myself the one to check on her.

Me suddenly redefining green.





I’m in the concession hut and David Drucker is standing outside. The whole thing is so weird. Surely he knows that when I sat at his lunch table this afternoon I was just looking for a place to be alone. I don’t want anything from him. Or for us to suddenly be besties or something. I don’t mean that in a nasty way. I’m not usually like this. I don’t abandon my friends in the cafeteria or walk out of class in the middle of the teacher’s lecture or have any trouble lying and saying “Your ass looks awesome in those high-waisted jeans.”

My dad’s shirt is filthy.

This place reeks of rotting hot dogs and old gym sneakers.

Everything is wrong.

It’s been one month.

I am still all wrong.

“I wasn’t following you,” David says, his eyes darting off the walls and then, finally, landing on mine. “I mean, I was. But just because someone needed to follow you. Does that make sense?”

“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.”