And then Tiny hauled off and punched Mr. Frye in the nose. Just like that. Thus ended our Little League careers.
It wouldn’t hurt if he weren’t right—if I hadn’t known somewhere that my weakness aggravates him. And maybe he thinks like I do, that you don’t pick your friends, and he’s stuck with this annoying bitchsquealer who can’t handle himself, who can’t close his glove around the ball, who can’t take a dressing-down from the coach, who regrets writing letters to the editor in defense of his best friend. This is the real story of our friendship: I haven’t been stuck with Tiny. He’s been stuck with me.
If nothing else, I can relieve him of that burden.
It takes a long time to stop crying. I use my glove as a handkerchief as I watch the shadow of the dugout roof creep down my outstretched legs as the sun rises to the top of the sky. Finally, my ears feel frozen in the shade of the dugout, so I get up and walk across the park and then home. On the way, I scroll through my list of contacts on my phone for a while and then call Jane. I don’t know why. I feel like I need to call someone. I feel, weirdly, like I still want someone to open the double doors to the auditorium. I get her voice mail.
“Sorry, Tarzan, Jane’s unavailable. Leave a message.”
“Hey, Jane, it’s Will. I just wanted to talk to you. I . . . radical honesty? I just spent like five minutes going through a list of everyone I could call, and you were the only person I wanted to call, because I like you. I just like you a lot. I think you’re awesome. You’re just . . . er. Smarter and funni er and prettier and just . . . er. Yeah, okay. That’s all. Bye.”
When I get home, I call my dad. He picks up on the last ring.
“Can you call the school and tell them I’m sick? I had to go home,” I say.
“You okay, bud?”
“Yeah. I’m okay,” I say, but the quiver is in my voice, and I feel like I might start up with the sobbing again for some reason, and he says, “Okay. Okay. I’ll call.”
Fifteen minutes later, I’m slumped on the couch in the living room, my feet up on the coffee table. I’m staring at the TV, only the TV isn’t on. I’ve got the remote in my left hand, but I don’t even have the energy to push the goddamned power button.
I hear the garage door open. Dad comes in through the kitchen and sits down next to me, pretty close. “Five hundred channels,” he says after a moment, “and nothing’s on.”
“You get the day off?”
“I can always get someone to cover,” he says. “Always.”
“I’m okay,” I say.
“I know you are. I just wanted to be home with you, that’s all.”
I blink out some tears, but Dad has the decency not to say anything about it. I turn on the TV then, and we find a show called The World’s Most Amazing Yachts, which is about yachts that have, like, golf courses on them or whatever, and every time they show some fancy feature, Dad says, “It’s UH-MAAZING!” all sarcastically, even though it sort of is amazing. It is and isn’t, I guess.
And then Dad mutes the TV and says, “You know Dr. Porter?”
And I nod. He’s this guy who works with Mom.
“They don’t have any kids, so they’re rich.” I laugh. “But they’ve got this boat they keep at Belmont Harbor, one of these behemoths with cherry-wood cabinets imported from Indonesia and a rotating king-size bed stuffed with the feathers of endangered eagles and everything else. Your mom and I had dinner with the Porters on the boat years ago, and in the span of a single meal—in that two hours—the boat went from feeling like the most extraordinarily luxurious experience to just being a boat.”
“I assume there’s a moral to this story.”
He laughs. “You’re our yacht, bud. All that money that would have gone into a yacht, all that time we would have spent traveling the world? Instead, we got you. It turns out that the yacht is a boat. But you—you can’t be bought on credit, and you aren’t reducible.” He turns his face back toward the TV and after a moment says, “I’m so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that.” I nod, tight-throated, staring now at a muted commercial for laundry detergent. After a second, he mumbles to himself, “Credit, people, consumerism. . . . There’s a pun in there somewhere.”
I say, “What if I didn’t want to go to that program at Northwestern? Or what if I don’t get in?”
“Well, then I would stop loving you,” he says. He keeps a straight face for a second, then laughs and unmutes the TV.
Later in the day, we decide we’re going to surprise Mom with turkey chili for dinner. I’m chopping onions when the doorbell rings. Immediately, I know it’s Tiny, and I feel this weird relief radiate out from my solar plexus. “I got it,” I say. I squeeze past Dad in the kitchen and then run to the door.
It’s not Tiny but Jane. She looks up at me, lips pursed.
“What’s my locker combination?”
“Twenty-five-two-eleven,” I say.
She hits me playfully on the chest. “I knew it! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t figure out which of several true things was the most true,” I answer.
“We gotta open the box,” she tells me.
“Um,” I say. I step forward so I can close the door behind me, but she doesn’t step backward, so now we’re almost touching. “The cat has a boyfriend,” I point out.
“I’m not the cat, actually. The cat is us. I am a physicist. You are a physicist. The cat is us.”
“Um, okay,” I say. “The physicist has a boyfriend.”
“The physicist does not in fact have a boyfriend. The physicist dumped her boyfriend at the botanical gardens because he wouldn’t shut up about how he was going to the Olympics in twenty sixteen, and there was this little voice in the physicist’s head named Will Grayson, saying, ‘And at the Olympics will you be representing the United States or the Kingdom of Douchelandia?’ So the physicist broke up with her boyfriend and insists that the box be opened, because she kind of cannot stop thinking about the cat. The physicist won’t mind if the cat is dead; she just needs to know.”
We kiss. Her hands are freezing on my face, and she tastes like coffee and the smell of the onion is still stuck in my nose, and my lips are all dry from the endless winter. And it’s awesome.