The Sweetness of Salt(2)

Did he do that kind of thing for Cheryl Hanes? I tried to picture him at the foot of his girlfriend’s staircase, arm outstretched as he recited Emerson or Whitman up to her. The thing was, I could not imagine Cheryl—who, despite being the most beautiful girl in the senior class, had a brain like a bag of rocks—actually sticking around long enough to hear it. Cheryl didn’t get poetry—or literature of any kind. It bored her. Once, in ninth grade, she’d actually asked our English teacher if Mark Twain was related to Shania Twain. I doubted Milo had heard about that one.

But I guess it didn’t matter. The rules of high school dating were the same everywhere: the prettiest girls always got the pick of the lot. The rest of us had to make do—whether we liked it or not. And so I made do with watching Milo from afar.

Then, a few days before Christmas, while we were waiting in the parking lot for Zoe to come out of the building, Milo turned and handed me a small, stiff piece of paper. I had been staring at the freckles on the back of his neck, which were arranged exactly like the Little Dipper, and wondering what he would do if I reached out and touched one. Actually, I thought, he probably wouldn’t even notice. Half the time he seemed surprised when he caught sight of me in the backseat, as if he had forgotten completely that I tagged along in his sister’s car every day. “Here,” he said, talking to my knees. “I thought you might like this. Merry Christmas.”

I glanced down at it. There, in tiny cramped handwriting, was the line: “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” Around the words, like a frame, were curly vines and leaves of all different sizes. They had been drawn with a felt-tip marker, and some of the edges were smudged.

“I didn’t write it,” Milo said. “It’s by a poet named e. e. cummings. He’s one of my favorites. One of the scary truth tellers.”

I didn’t understand what the words meant.

How could rain have hands?

But it was for me.

From him.

And I knew it meant everything. “I love it,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

He looked up at me and smiled, the dimple in his left cheek deepening. For a split second, I wanted to lean forward and put both of my lips over that dimple. But of course I didn’t.

At the beginning of May, Cheryl and Milo broke up. There were lots of rumors going around—Cheryl was getting too clingy, Milo was flirting with other girls—but Milo himself never said a word about it. He didn’t say much at all actually, until one day, when he turned around again in the car and asked me if I wanted to go to the prom with him. Just as friends, of course. Just to go, since we were both seniors.

I didn’t sleep for two days. Mom took me shopping for a dress, and I listened with half an ear as she yammered on about delicate necklines—nothing V-necked, nothing cleavage-baring—and long white gloves. To me, the dress—and even the prom itself—was secondary. It was Milo I wanted. Just him. Nothing else.

He spent most of the night dancing like a crazy person out on the dance floor with his buddies, but he’d rested his hand on my arm twice. Once, just before he’d asked if I wanted something to drink from the soda bar, and then again, when he asked me if I wanted to slow dance. Both times, a heat had traveled through my arm, straight to my stomach, until I felt like my whole body was glowing.

And then, in the car on the way home, as we parked in front of my house, he’d said that he wanted to tell me something. The street light behind us threw a shadow over his face. He’d taken off that silly red tuxedo tie, and a faint sheen of perspiration gleamed along his jaw. I didn’t wait for him to say anything more. Instead, that same longing I’d felt in the car at Christmas reared its head again. This time, I leaned over and kissed him. Really kissed him. Like, pressed myself against the front of him, flattened both my hands against the lapels of his tux, and leaned in with my whole weight, kissed him. I could taste Certs against the heat of his tongue.

But he’d pulled away, looked at me with liquid eyes that I could not read.

I held my breath, waiting.

“I’m sorry…,” he started, shaking his head a little. “I just…”

I turned and bolted, mortified that I’d misunderstood.

That was in May.

Today was June fourth.

He hadn’t said another word to me since.



I closed my sketch book, stood up, and walked over to my dresser. Taped in the corner was Milo’s little cardboard note. I ran my fingertips lightly over the words: “no one, not even the rain…” and closed my eyes. I would give up anything, I thought, even being introduced tomorrow in front of a crowd of eight hundred people as the valedictorian of Silver Springs High School, if I could kiss Milo again—and have him kiss me back. For real this time.

“Jules?” My doorknob rattled softly, followed by a light knock on the door. “Are you in there?”

I threw the sketch pad in my bottom drawer again and snatched my speech from off the top of my desk. “Yeah, I’m here. I’m working, Mom.” I rattled the papers loudly for good measure.

She sighed. “Okay. Dad just got home. We’re eating in ten minutes. Swiss steak with buttered noodles. Your favorite.”

“All right. Be right there.”

I stared back out the window.

But Milo had disappeared.