Here So Far Away(2)

You can see under a slide, right? The only reason his head seemed to disappear into the hippo’s nostril was because he was so tall for his age. We decided that Joshua Spring was too dumb to pay any more attention to and ignored him until he moved away a few months later, after his parents split up. Every time he came back to visit his dad, he was several inches taller—and still in love with me. It was like a sickness, and by the time we got to high school, I think he kind of hated me for it.

Now here he was, hanging out with a bunch of stoned jocks, including Keith, Lisa’s boyfriend and Joshua’s default best friend whenever he came back to town. Joshua was another half foot taller since I’d last seen him, easily six three, and he was genuinely, astoundingly hot. He had a jaw, for Christ’s sake. Most of the boys at our school didn’t have jaws yet, especially the jocks, with their baby fat and thick jowls. Their faces just sort of slid into their necks. And from that look Joshua gave me before turning away, I knew that however old I got, even when I was eighty and my boobs were dangling by my ankles like old-timey Christmas stockings filled with one orange apiece, Joshua would be there waiting for me. Hotly.

“He has a girlfriend,” Bill said.

Lisa stared at him. “Impossible.”

“Fact.”

“Who? He just moved back.”

“Back back?” I said. “Permanently?”

“Christina with the face,” Bill said.

“Can’t be serious,” Lisa said. “Keith hasn’t said anything about it. If they are together—ish—technically, you can’t become boyfriend-girlfriend in only a week, and—”

“Dude,” Bill said. “When’s the last time George talked to that guy? Him looking this way doesn’t mean they’re hooking up.”

I shrugged. Because Joshua was now standing in front of a crumbling fireplace that had a mirror built into the mantel, and I knew that he could see me behind him, and he was watching me watching him watching me.

I was leaning against a sideboard in the dining room, drinking directly from the bottle of Long Island Iced Tea, when Joshua finally made his move.

“Where are Lisa and Keith?” he asked. Super-laid-back. As though he hadn’t been giving me lingering looks for an hour.

I nodded toward the corner, where they’d stacked themselves on a kitchen stool. “Brother-sister quality time.”

“I’m never going to get used to that.” He took the bottle from me, sniffed it. “Jesus. It’s like plane fuel. What did you cut it with? Tap water?”

“Yup.”

“You want some of this home brew instead?”

“Nope.”

I knew one thing about the Spring family’s home brew: no one tried it twice.

“That would be a good nickname,” he said. “Home brew.” His hair was bronze colored, his skin a similar shade from his summer tan. “I guess that’s stupid.” He handed the bottle back.

“No, it’s just, you’re the most uniformly colored person I’ve ever seen.”

“I know. I’m like a big beige crayon.”

“Not beige. Camel? Bile?”

If you want to get a hot boy to headlock you, and I’m not saying I did, that’s how you do it.

“Hey! Stop putting the moves on my guy!” Christina yelled from the kitchen.

I didn’t know much about Christina Veinot: eleventh grade, popular, probably one of the Veinot Dairy Veinots from Veinot, a little ferrety in the face. But I could tell she was only partly joking and magnificently sloshed, center of gravity up in her head, makeup running, hair wet against her T-shirt. Bill had started a game of bobbing for beer caps in the corroded sink.

“We were fighting over you,” I said. “You’re so pretty.”

Joshua and I were reclining against the sideboard now. His arm felt hot against mine. I knew we looked good together, my dark Irish coloring contrasting with his beach boy glow. Lisa and Keith were grinning at us with unabashed glee.

Christina seemed to be contemplating a comeback as she stood there, head bobbling around. Then she threw her arms up and screamed, “Whoo-hooo!” which made everyone else scream, “Whoo-hooo!” and that was a shack party. That really was the best we could come up with when we all put our heads together and decided to have a good time.

“Whoo-hooo,” said Joshua, raising his bottle of home brew. His mouth grazed my hair as he leaned over and murmured, “You want to get out of here?”

“What about . . .” I nodded toward Christina.

“Oh, we’re not . . . We’re just hanging out.”

I glanced at my watch. An hour left before curfew. If I couldn’t find someone to drive me home for midnight, I’d be facing the Sergeant. Or would I? My father was—well, let’s say, under the weather. Maybe he wouldn’t be waiting up.

“I’ve had only a few sips of this,” Joshua said. “I’ll get you home on time. Promise.”

We drove to the shore, where we lit a fire and huddled together against the cold wind coming off the bay and ignored time passing. Yeah, he said something mildly ignorant about Kuwait and, yeah, something that might have been racist about Saddam Hussein, and yeah, okay, we ran out of things to say about two minutes after that, but he was sweet and he was gorgeous and he smelled like woodsmoke and strawberry gum and boy, and he looked at me like I was the only girl there had ever been.