Ben was still laughing. He said, I’m sorry. I think I remember the article you’re talking about. But I don’t have it, I’m sorry.
I said, What magazine are you talking about?
He said, Did you try the library? They keep back issues of everything.
I said, Of course.
I hadn’t tried the library. I hadn’t thought they’d keep something as specific as Swimmers’ World. I thought they just had Newsweek and Time and Sports Illustrated. I said, What magazine are you talking about?
Ben touched the tips of his fingers together around his coffee cup, too carefully. I wasn’t interested in his carefulness. He said, I just wish I could get a better sense of how much you know about your brother before I, how should I say it, broach certain terrain.
He sounded like a professor. He sounded like a fake-British imbecile. Pledge started barking and a car drove up. I sat for a moment staring at him, my jaw set around a quarry of swear words. My mom opened the door and called, Julie, groceries! Everything was twisted. I was sitting across my kitchen table from a person who could tell me everything, and he wasn’t telling me anything. I said, You’re confused, and got up to help my mom.
ERIKA HAD ASKED me on Friday if I wanted to do something on Saturday night and I’d hedged. I’d thought there was a chance that Alexis would call me and ask me to do something, or just call me to talk. On Thursday in Yearbook I had found a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in my backpack and when I’d taken it out to unwrap it she’d caught my eye and given me a smile that slivered me.
On Saturday afternoon Erika called me, hysterical. She was talking even faster than usual. She said, You have to tell me you’re free tonight.
It was almost five. I said, I’m free.
She said, Thank goodness. Can you meet me at eight? We’re going to the movies with PT and his friends.
I said, He called you?
She said, No no, I went in for Saturday darkroom and one of his friends was there, that girl Larissa from the party, and I made myself ask her if he had a girlfriend and she said they were all going to the movies tonight and did I want to come.
I said, Does he have a girlfriend?
She said, No, I don’t know. Larissa said he has some thing with some girl from St. Mary’s, she said it’s complicated, but you’re coming with me, right?
It wasn’t necessarily my idea of a good time to hang out with PT and those photography girls, or whatever kind of girls they were.
Erika said, There’ll be a bunch of guys there. I bet one of them will be your type.
My first urge was to say that I didn’t have a type. I said, I like tall guys. I pictured a guy that was my height or a little taller, and was skinny but strong. He didn’t look like Ben and he didn’t look like Alexis, who looked nothing like a guy. Alexis was somewhere outside of this conversation. The guy looked, so what, like a boy version of me. In my head I dared Erika to find me a guy like that, to see what would happen when he met me, how quickly we’d go at each other, how manically the sparks would fly.
As I was getting ready to go out I had some second thoughts. There was still a chance Alexis would call, and I wouldn’t be home. But would that be the worst thing, for her to miss me? She might go out, instead, to the movies with her friends. There were often big packs of kids at the Galleria or the Tenplex on weekend nights. I couldn’t exactly see our two groups mixing, but I could feel what it would feel like when Alexis saw me from across the huge theater lobby. I put on my teal heathered henley. I took my hair down.
The movie, it turned out, was at a tiny old theater in Northwest. We met the girls from the other night and PT and two other boys, a short one with green hair and a tall one in a striped shirt. Erika whispered to me that the striped shirt was tall. His shirt was nice. These people were all clearly friends, and it made no sense that we were there with them. The theater was minuscule and mostly a dump. It had an elaborately painted ceiling for people who bothered to look up. Larissa kept smiling at Erika and giving her the thumbs-up behind PT’s back. She was being too obvious, but Erika thumbs-upped her back every time. Larissa maneuvered it so Erika entered the row just after PT, which meant that she sat next to him and that every five minutes she grabbed my arm and squeezed it in spastic excitement. She should have been grabbing PT’s arm. She should have been doing something to him or with him if she knew what she wanted. The movie was a collection or festival of animation for adults, and mostly so boring, and pointless, cartoons were for kids and once you took out the kid part there wasn’t much left. There was one that was funny, though it was hard to say why. A guy kept taking out a saw and sawing at a table and the woman, his wife, kept saying, Stop sawing, and he said, I’m not sawing, and kept sawing. Then there was a nuclear meltdown. The cartoons went on and on. Some didn’t have words. I tried to tune out and imagine that Alexis was sitting next to me, but Erika kept squeezing my arm and leaning over and whispering, and Alexis would never be at this dumpy theater, where the chairs were from some time, the 1920s, before people realized movie chairs needed to be comfortable.
After, we had to stand around outside while they all smoked cloves. Erika smoked one. For some reason unknown to me there was a long line for the next showing edging the side of the building. Ben was in the line, partway down the block. He was with a couple other guys who looked something like him and something like the guys I was with. They had jean jackets — one of them had the sheepskin-lined kind that looked so warm — and their hair was sticking up as if it were supposed to stick up that way. Ben was laughing and looking like he was having a really great time. That morning he had laughed like that, too loud, as if there was someone else in the room who was in on the joke. Anyone would call it paranoid, but it was possible that he and those guys were laughing about the same thing that Ben had been laughing about earlier, cloaking me out with their laughter again. I went to the other side of the huddle, upwind of the clove smoke, so he wouldn’t see me.
PT and Larissa and their friends were all going to hang out at striped shirt’s house. Erika wanted to go. She whispered to me, Wasn’t I right? Aaron is completely your type.
He had a cute face and I did really like that shirt, and maybe if I hadn’t suddenly felt so tired, or tired of hanging out with these people who, clearly, were including us just to be nice, I might have come. I said, You should go if you want.
SUNDAY WAS UNUSUALLY clear and cold. It was unusual for it to be clear when it was cold out. When I woke up I had gone to look out the window, though I knew Ben only came on Saturdays. It looked like he was done with whatever he’d been doing. It was possible that he wouldn’t be coming back. Something about seeing him last night, or how far or close I’d felt from him at the kitchen table yesterday, made me nervous to show up at the Alderwood without calling. The paper with his number was in my desk drawer.
Ben said, Hey, as if he were expecting someone.
I said, No, sorry. It’s Julie.
He said, Hey Julie. How’d you like the animation?
I said, You saw me?
He said, I’ll admit, I was a bit surprised that that was your crowd. Clove cigarettes! My goodness.
I said, They’re not my crowd. I said, I wasn’t smoking.
He said, Clearly I’m not one to talk.
Talking on the phone with Ben was easier than talking to him in the kitchen. If I hadn’t had the feeling that we needed to have a conversation that called for more privacy than the extension in my room would allow, I might have tried to have it there. Ben said, It looks like a nice one out there. He suggested we go for a walk in Forest Park. He said he’d pick me up at the bottom of the hill in an hour. Neither of us had to say that he shouldn’t pick me up at the house. As I walked down the hill the colors — the sky, the leaves, the shrubs — were crisp from the rain, their one chance all winter to show something off. I couldn’t give a reason for how good I felt.