The Impossible Knife of Memory(38)

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “You almost went over. I’m not even exaggerating. You jerked forward and I really, really thought you were going to fall. Oh, God. You hate me now, don’t you?”

I sat up, rubbing the back of my head where it hit the ground. I didn’t almost fall. It felt more like something wanted to pull me into the air, but that was crazy, right? Nothing like that could ever happen.

“So do you?” Finn brushed dirt out of my hair. “Do you hate me? Should I drive you home now? I don’t want to, but I will.”

I blinked twice, three times, and pretended I had dust in my eyes so I could rub them hard, trying to rub out the sensation of almost launching myself over the edge.

“I don’t hate you,” I said. “Do you hate me?”

He sighed and smiled. “I could never hate you, even if I wanted to.”





_*_ 39 _*_

After we left the quarry, we hung out at the library (Finn scoured the Internet for proof that the fear of heights was a sign of intelligence; I read some new manga) and went to Friendly’s for ice cream. I had one scoop of pumpkin. He had a hot-fudge sundae with chocolate-almond ice cream, whipped cream, and sprinkles. After the waitress brought the ice cream to our booth, we got stuck in one of those agonizing silences that are so uncomfortable you start thinking about escaping out the bathroom window.

“So,” I said. (Brilliant, Hayley. Utterly brilliant, witty, and dazzling.)

“So,” he agreed.

I licked my ice cream and said the first thing that popped in to my head. “So why aren’t you on the swim team this year? Gracie said you’re not that bad.”

“That’s boring.” He stuck a straw into the bottom of his sundae and tried to suck ice cream through it. “Tell me about the time you met the Russian prime minister while hunting wild boar on the taiga.”

“Swim team first.”

“Nearly naked young men, plunging into pools of warm water? Why would you want to hear about that?”

“What part didn’t you like,” I asked. “The water, the guys, or the nearly naked?”

“The coach.” Finn plucked sprinkles off his sundae and laid them in a line down the middle of the table. “He turned every meet into a life-or-death situation.”

“But you won states, right? If you swam this year, couldn’t you get a scholarship and go to college for free?”

“That’s such bullshit,” he said bitterly. “Mythology repeated by parents because it lets them force their kids into sports and push them too hard by pretending that in the end it will pay off with the holy scholarship. You know how many kids get a free ride? Hardly any. Like, maybe fourteen.”

“Fourteen sports scholarships in the whole country?”

“Okay, maybe fifteen. The point is, parents and coaches believe the myth. The Belmont coach made swimming suck, so I quit.”

I pressed my fingertip against a sprinkle ant and put it in my mouth. “What did you like about it, back when it was fun?”

He studied me for a moment before he answered. “Exploding off the block at the start of a race. It’d be all crazy noise and I’d hit the water like a missile and then the crowd disappeared. I can swim underwater for thirty-five yards. I hated coming up for air.”

“Okay, so swimming is great, coaches and parents suck.”

“Pretty much.”

He chopped at his sundae with his spoon and we plunged into another excruciating, razor-blades-under-the-fingernails lull in the conversation.

“You going to college or straight into the CIA?” I finally asked.

He smiled and—like a dope-slap upside my head—I suddenly realized that I wasn’t the only one feeling totally awkward when we ran out of things to say.

“I gave the best years of my life to the CIA,” Finn said. “I won’t go back even if they beg me.” He stuck a spoonful of ice cream in his mouth. “The real question is how can I go to college when my parents have no money for it?”

I held up my right hand and made a circle with my thumb and pointer finger. “Where you want to go.” I did the same thing with my left hand. “Where you can afford to go.” I slowly brought my two hands together until the edges of the circles overlapped a little, then I brought them up to my face and looked out of the smaller circle that they made like it was a telescope. “What college is here in the middle?”

“You just made a Venn diagram sexy,” he said. “This could make our tutoring sessions so much more interesting.”

“Shut up. College. Where?”

“Honestly? Swevenbury, which is totally unrealistic. I couldn’t afford to go there even if I sold my soul. Which is why,” he shoveled in a huge spoonful of ice cream, “I’m going to be a good little boy and visit some SUNY school next week. Mom set it up.” He licked the back of the spoon. “Where do you want to go?”

“Haven’t thought about it much. Online classes, I guess.” I licked up the pumpkin ice cream dribbling down the back of my hand. “Can’t leave home.”

“Why not?” he asked.

The bright lights in the restaurant reflected off the tables and the chrome-plated walls. The hard surfaces amplified the buzz of the conversations around us and the shouting in the kitchen. The noise might have made me wince.