Evvie Drake Starts Over(64)

   “You’re lying.”

“I am not lying. If that doesn’t work, they use part of a dead body.”

“They do not.”

“They absolutely do. They do it on teenagers.”

“Wait, how do you tie a bone to something?”

“They drill a hole in it and loop it through.”

“Oh my God.”

“Oh, it’s disgusting.” He rubbed his elbow just thinking about it. “You ever broken a bone?”

“When I was eight, I jumped off a picnic table and broke my arm.”

“Why did you jump off a picnic table?”

She turned her head toward him. “Because John Cody said I was afraid to jump off the picnic table.”

“Your badass phase.”

“Indeed.”

“When I was fifteen, I broke my collarbone skiing,” he said, pointing to it. “My dad was so pissed. ‘You’re supposed to be going to college for baseball, and you’re going around with these idiots and hot-dogging.’ I hadn’t told him we were going. I wasn’t supposed to go. I went anyway.”

“What did he do?”

Dean laughed. “Nothing. He didn’t want me to let my knucklehead buddies toss me off a mountain in a hang glider. I come home in a bucket and he can’t send me to college. And he wanted me to go to college.”

“What did you do in college besides play ball?”

“I was a chemistry major.”

She turned to look at him. “You’re kidding.”

“Oh, I get it. You thought I took bullshit classes? Just a lot of Running Laps 101 and How to Tape Your Ankles?”

“No, of course not. I didn’t know.” She stared at the ceiling. “What did you like about chemistry?” she asked.

“I got to do things,” he said. “You mix this with that, and if you know how it works, you can make it turn blue or heat up or blow up. It was crazy shit, but it was predictable crazy shit. You could make something give off green smoke or turn into foam, but it did it the same way every time. And then you record it, and boom, that’s your result. It’s the same thing with baseball. It looks crazy, but it’s all physics. It feels like there’s no logic, but there is. I mean, except when there isn’t, obviously.”

   She turned on her side and sat up on her elbow. She reached out with her ring finger and ran it along his brow bone. “What’s the scar here?”

“Ball to the face junior year at Cornell,” he said. “Blood pouring down. Just pouring. Remember the normal people I said I dated? I had a girlfriend then, Tracy, who was at the game, and she fainted. Just, boom, like that. I felt so bad. From what I heard, she took one look at me and she slithered right down in her seat like in a Daffy Duck cartoon. Her friend revived her with a face full of ice and Diet Coke.”

“Oof, that’s a hard way to wake up.”

“Then they took me to the hospital and glued my face back together.”

“You didn’t have stitches?”

“No, glue. When I called home and told my mother I got taken to the ER and fixed up with glue, she hung up and called the hospital. My dad says it was all ‘You glued my child together,’ ‘This isn’t an arts and crafts project,’ stuff like that. But then they told her that it wasn’t glue, that it was called artificial skin. And she’s just ‘Oh, okay.’?” He pantomimed hanging up the phone.

“Is it really called artificial skin?” she asked.

“No idea. She felt better, though. Have you ever had stitches?”

“Once in my knee, and then once a couple years ago when I stepped on a broken glass in the living room.”

“Ouch.”

“Bled all over the place. It was really gross.”

“I bet.”

Almost without realizing she was doing it, Evvie used her toe to feel the scar on her other foot where the ER had stitched her up. It had been Tim’s broken glass. He’d been angry. But she’d told the nurse she broke the glass in the kitchen. “Slipped right out of my hand,” she’d said.

   She trailed her finger down from Dean’s temple to his jaw and jumped at a deep red mark above his collarbone. “Oh, damn, I think I got you right here. You have a bruise.”

He sat up in bed until he could see himself in the mirror over the dresser, and he tipped his head to the side. “That’s not a bruise,” he said, feeling it with his fingers. He turned to her and lowered his chin until he was looking at her through his impressive eyelashes. “You gave me a hickey.” He repeated it. “You gave me a hickey.”

She squinted at it. “Wait, when did I do that?” And then she remembered. “Ohhhh, I did do that.” She smiled and gritted her teeth. “Sorry?”

“Don’t be sorry. Shit, this is almost enough for me to get on Instagram. I’ll just write, ‘Having fun up here in Maine.’ Then put up the picture—ka-pow!” He reached for his phone. “I’m taking a selfie.”

“You are not.” Laughing, she reached for it, too, but she was hopelessly overmatched by his considerable wingspan, and she wound up lying on top of him, inches from his scruffy face, as he held the phone out of reach. “It doesn’t hurt,” she whispered, “does it?”