“I was kinda…”
Christine walks out of math. Maybe she was in there talking to Mr Gretch, or one of her friends. She strides past me and I’m at eye-level with her legs and calves and I think they might just be the most beautiful calves I’ve ever seen, better than the Hot Girls’. Then I think about how when computer imaging guys are making special effects for movies, one of the hardest things they have to do with CGI light is get it to reflect off of complex surfaces the right way, but if any of those CGI guys ever needed a model for how light should bounce off a girl’s leg, pixel for pixel, this is it.
And the two forces that battle for real estate in my brain—fear and lust—they reach an agreement and I turn to Michael.
“Yeah, I’m going,” I nod.
“Really?” He stands up.
“Yeah. You still not going?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Then could you give me a ride at least? After school or something? After play rehearsal, actually, down to Halloween Adventure sometime. So I can buy a costume.”
“You’re getting a costume and the whole deal? Who are you gonna bring to the dance?”
“I guess nobody. But…” I watch Christine fade “…I have to get there somehow.”
I grab the seat next to Christine’s for our second Midsummer read-through. (A girl named Jessica gets Mr Reyes’ Hot Pocket today, while we males construct a haphazard circle of chairs.) I don’t know why; I’m just setting myself up for heartbreak, but I have fast reflexes and go with my instincts.
My arm shifts as we begin the reading. It inches so close to Christine’s that static electricity pulls our arm hairs together, my dark ones vs her sunburned ones. If we both were to sweat, the beads would join up and form a little Bering Strait for microbes to swim across from her skin to mine. All I have to do now is pull a phrase out of the air, a phrase among all the trivia and trends and hot items in the world, that’ll make her start talking to me like she did yesterday. A phrase like, “Wow, I heard this thing about Tupac’s Mom” or “I really like Picasso over Matisse”, but that might not be it. When I think about it, probably only one tenth of one tenth of one seventeenth of things are it.
“Hey, Christine, I heard this thing that human beings aren’t evolving any more.”
“Wheh?” She turns with a mix of annoyance and bafflement. But what could I expect? It’s a start.
“Yeah, seriously…” I glance over at Mr Reyes; he’s dozed off. “I heard about it on, uh, the Discovery Channel. We’re totally evolutionarily stagnant.”
Christine turns her pupils toward the sheet of paper on her lap. “‘Through the forest have I gone, But Athenian found I none, On whose eyes I might approve…’”
Right, I forgot. She has lines. When she finishes, she turns to me and says the most wonderful thing: “Actually, I heard that too.”
“Really?” I almost forget to whisper.
“Of course not, Jeremy.” Her lips curl beautifully. “Only you would know stuff like that. But it, uh, sounds interesting.”
There’s conspicuous silence around the circle. Christine pokes me (with her pen, not her actual flesh): “Your line.”
“Mrph…‘Fair love, you faint with wand’ring in the wood…’”
“Talk when rehearsal is over, OK?” Christine says.
I smile so wide that I check myself, because I know wide smiles make me look bad. Christine flicks her pen back and forth between her teeth.
I brush my arm against hers. Now that I’ve rebroken the ice, I knew I could rebreak the ice.
When the read-through is over, Christine and I chat. We put away chairs together. I give her the rap about people not evolving pretty much exactly how Michael gave it to me the night before.
“…And so it’s like we’re evolutionarily flat.”
“Wow, that’s crazy.” She’s not betraying much. Her lips are pursed and that’s a good word for it, because they look like a purse, an upside-down pink purse designed for a kangaroo rat or vole. “Don’t you think that people are evolving to become smarter?”
“I think,” I pontificate, “that women are naturally selecting males who are more successful and rich, but that has not much to do with whether they’re smart.” Heh-heh.
“Oh, no,” Christine says, motioning with her hand for me to follow as she gathers her things. “Successful people are always smart.”
“My dad’s pretty successful. He’s an idiot.”
“That’s not nice. What’s he do?”
“Divorce lawyer. What’s yours do?”
“Executive ride supervisor at Great Adventure.”
“Oh, well, that must be a great adventure for his career!”
“Um…funny. He got fired, OK. He used to work for AOL—”
“No! No…I was just, you know, trying to think of something witty to say, like a pun or whatever.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sorry.” Pause. “I’m not a great conversationalist.”
“But you were just having a conversation. We were.”
“Yeah. Well. We’re not. Now.”
“This is true.” Christine scrunches up her face. “You know what? I hate boys who are bad conversationalists.” She shakes her head. “It’s insurmountable.”
Dur. Now she has her bag in her hands but something’s missing from it that perturbs her. She bends over a theatre seat looking at the floor. I want to find the missing item desperately and be helpful. I think I’ve spotted it—a padded, white nub of material by her ankle. I reach down to pick it up; she leans back at the same time, sitting on my neck.
“Ow!”
“Hey!”
“Gimme that!” Christine streaks down, pushes me away and grabs the item off the floor.
“Sorry.”
“Hgggg,” she chortles, putting the thing in her purse. Then she looks at me as if under a new light (an angry light, not a good light). “Jeremy, you shouldn’t touch girls’ stuff.”
“I was just trying to help…”
Christine walks away, so I walk with her; we pass through the doors of the theatre together, separated only by the metal doorframe. “So I guess if your dad works at Great Adventure you don’t have to worry about lines, right? I mean, lines at the rides. Not lines in the play. Heh-heh.”
“Well…” Christine says. “First of all he’s a ride supervisor, not a ride operator. Which means he works in an office, not on the ride.”
“OK.”
“But yes, they do have this policy, if you’re employee-connected, where you walk up to the back of a ride and show them the special Great Adventure Friends and Family Card and then they give