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  “Thanks, Ty,” Becky says.

  “Be there soon,” I say, and hang up.

  Robby glares at me.

  “I gotta go,” I tell them.

  “You aren’t going nowhere, brother,” Robby says.

  I can’t tell if he’s swaying or I am. “Dude, something’s wrong with Becky, I gotta go see her.”

  Justin stands up beside Robby, blocking my path to the parking lot. Robby shakes his head.

  “Not like that, bro,” Robby says. “Uh-uh.”

  “What?”

  “Dude, you’re wrecked,” Robby informs me. “You’re not getting in that car.”

  “Screw you,” I say. “I barely had half what you did, and—whatever. Becky needs me.”

  I take a step toward the parking lot. Robby sidesteps to intercept.

  “Ty,” he says, “you take one more step toward that car, I’m gonna punch you in the dick.”

  Robby was only a skinny little dweeb freshman like me that day he and Justin interfered with my imminent senior beating. Since then, he’d put on about twenty pounds, maybe more, most of it muscle, and he’d grown about six inches. Growth spurt, I guess. I’d gotten taller, but not much else. No matter his size, one thing was still true about Robby Jackson: he was no bully, and he wasn’t violent, but he also wasn’t afraid of anyone.

  Least of all me.

  Robby was one of those laid-back, easygoing, funny, and fun-loving types who can and does get along with virtually everyone. Pick any high school label you want—Robby had friends who fit it. Probably that’s because during freshman and sophomore years, he raced through pretty much every style of clothes and music known to man. By the third month of freshman year, he was wearing nothing but basketball shorts and jerseys while he listened to rap and hip-hop, his heavy-metal T-shirts forgotten. Later it was all black shoes, white socks, and nothing but Johnny Cash and rockabilly. And wherever Robby wandered, he left a trail of charmed friends behind.

  Well, no. Not friends. Not the way he would define it.

  Justin and I went with Robby’s parents on a day-hike trip toward the end of freshman year, before the summer weather really hit. I remember sitting after a three-hour hike, tired, sore, and out of breath. Exhilarated, though, because the view from this mountaintop was awesome.

  “Thanks for coming with me, guys,” Robby said suddenly as he gazed at the panorama around us.

  Justin and I traded a glance. It wasn’t the kind of thing a fifteen-year-old guy goes around saying. But then, that was Robby. Spoke his mind, consequences be damned. I always respected that about him.

  “Uh, sure,” I said, and Justin gave some kind of affirmative sound as well.

  “Nobody else would’ve gotten it,” Robby went on.

  “Gotten what?” I asked.

  But Robby just shrugged and grinned. He broke out bottles of water from his pack and passed them to us. Justin and I had drained ours half an hour before.

  Justin brought up plans for the summer. We talked about that for a while, while I tried not to have a panic attack at the thought of not seeing Becky for three months solid.

  On the way back down the mountain, as Justin lagged behind, I asked Robby, “What did you mean about getting it?”

  “Ty,” he said, “you ever notice I know a lot of people at school?”

  I said I had.

  “But I wouldn’t climb a mountain with ’em,” Robby said. “That’s all.”

  “Get out of my way, Rob.”

  “No, sir.”

  I consider trying to make an end run around him. It won’t work. He’s too fast.

  I try whining instead. “Come on, man!”

  “Text her back, tell her you can be there in a couple hours,” Robby says. “Because seriously, you’re not driving before then.”

  Still pissed, but somehow managing to grasp the wisdom in what he’s saying, I text Becky.

  Need couple hours. Can’t drive. Cool?

  The three of us wander back to the concrete table, and before I even sit down, she’s texted me back.

  NVM thx.

  “Oh, goddammit!” I show Robby the screen. “See that? Thanks, asshole.”

  “That’s me, the asshole keeping your drunk ass alive,” Robby says, faking sorrow. “Tough luck, compadre.”

  “I’m not drunk!” I say.

  Justin picks up the champagne bottle. “Drink?”

  My cell buzzes. Thrilled, I check it, assuming it’ll be Becky, changing her mind.

  “Ah, shit.”

  “What’s up?” Robby asks.

  “Nothing,” I tell him. “It’s Sydney.”

  After that day in the hall when Becky looked at me, the tables turned. Now it was Becky keeping an eye on me. At first I liked it. I mean, why wouldn’t I, right?

  But she never said anything! Of course, neither did I. I couldn’t figure out why she’d suddenly gained interest in me. We had no classes together or anything like that. Which, honestly, was another mystery; our high school was pretty big, but you’d think our paths would cross in some class or another.

  I’d spend pretty much every night pacing my room, developing mental movie scripts to talk to her in a variety of smooth, cool, charming ways.

  FADE IN:

  INTERIOR. SCHOOL HALLWAY.

  TYLER DARCY, cutting an ironically dashing figure in jeans and a tight T-shirt that shows off his splendid abdominals, leans back casually against a wall. Two—no, four!—seniors walk past him and cower when Tyler gives them the slightest sneer of disregard.

  From around the corner enters REBECCA WEBB, an adorable girl with blond hair like corn silk, blossom skin, and the slightest wry tilt to her hips. Her perfectly shaped rear is cupped not too tightly and not too loosely in blue jeans. She eyes Tyler, who kicks off the wall and saunters to meet her. The other students move to walk around, many of them casting glances of envy at Tyler’s good fortune.

  REBECCA

  So, I know we haven’t ever really talked before, but—

  TYLER

  —you were thinking we should go out for coffee and get acquainted.

  REBECCA (smiling shyly)

  How did you know?

  TYLER

  You can’t fight fate, Rebecca.

  REBECCA

  You know who I am?

  TYLER (caressing her cheek)

  I’ve always known.

  Slow dolly forward as he tilts his head to meet her lips. This kiss is so exquisite, so beautiful, that the other students dissolve away into … No, wait, they stop and watch, in total awe of their perfection. FADE TO BLACK as Bob Dylan’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” plays under.

  A real Oscar winner, right?

  In these scripts, she was demure yet possessing a great sense of humor. She was smart, but impressed by my own natural brilliance. That kind of thing. You know how it goes.

  Luckily, I never wrote any of that down.

  I don’t know if our drama department was anything outstanding or not, but the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was pretty good. I think Becky was supposed to be a fairy or a sprite or something, named Mustardseed, but the director had gone all conceptual and reimagined the play in the 1930s, so everyone was playing old-time movie actors, like W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers.

  I’m not saying the show was good just because Becky was in it. It helped, most likely, yes, but she wasn’t the only reason. I liked it because William Shakespeare definitely felt my pain.

  I am beloved of beauteous Hermia; the course of true love never did run smooth—page after page of stuff like that, things that if you said them out loud, for real, would get your ass rightly kicked, but when Shakespeare says it … I dunno, man.

  Then there was Becky herself.

  I didn’t know this at the time, but thanks to Ms. Hochhalter—like it or not—I found out Shakespeare used two forms of writing in his plays: prose and verse. Typically, royal characters use verse, which rhymes, and common characters use prose. The
actors in Midsummer who spoke in verse generally got monotonous, like they were really bad rappers or something. A few were pretty good. One of those few was Becky Webb.

  When she spoke the poetry, I swear her entire body lit up. Maybe it was makeup or something, but her eyes seemed to sparkle and her face to shine. I felt myself leaning forward whenever Becky danced onstage. Her first scene, opposite the main fairy, Puck, was short and sweet, but immediately added to my imaginary biography of Becky, famous star of stage and screen. I thought maybe instead of movie scripts, I should be writing plays for her.

  At one point in the play, the fairies did this dance, wearing old-fashioned tuxedos. Something about the way the top hat tilted on Becky’s head, the playful smile she cast out at us in the audience—I saw the show only once, yet was sure I had the entire dance number memorized. The way she carried herself at school didn’t do her body justice. It wasn’t just the dance routine, it was the way she moved across the stage—glided, almost. I know I’m biased, but I swear she captivated the entire audience. I didn’t miss a moment of her performance from my seat in the middle of the auditorium.

  Right beside Sydney Barrett. Whether she’d planned it that way, or I had, or neither of us, I couldn’t say.

  When I wasn’t mentally scripting epic films starring myself and Becky Webb, I continued using Sydney as my main source for anything Becky-related. Or, as was often the case, making a complete idiot of myself.

  “What did you think of ‘The Lottery’?” Sydney asked after we’d read the story in class before Thanksgiving break.

  “Good,” I said. “Creepy.”

  “Yeah,” Sydney said. “I thought it would be a cool reader’s theater piece.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Reader’s theater? It’s like a staged reading. Everyone has a script, it’s not memorized. Usually you do it black box.”

  “You read it in a box?” I asked, imagining our drama club standing in empty brown shipping boxes.

  Sydney laughed. When Sydney laughs, everyone notices, and I kind of liked that about her. She was fearless.

  “No, ‘black box’ means you don’t wear costumes or use props, and your only furniture is black wooden boxes, like crates or something. It just means, like, stripped down.”

  I’d like to see Rebecca stripped down, I thought, and laughed at my own stellar wit.

  “What’s so funny?” Sydney said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “So is that something you’d, like, do for drama class?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “You could ask Rebecca to help.”

  Yep. Really said that. I wish I could go back in time and punch myself in the kidney. Way to go, fifteen-year-old me.

  Sydney’s eyebrows pinched. “Rebecca Webb? Why?”

  Caught in the open, I said, “I just mean, you know. Maybe she’d—she’d help out. Or something. Perform. Or whatever.” I could see Sydney wasn’t overly impressed with this idea, so I hurried to add, “I’d come see it if you did.”

  “You mean you’d come see it if Rebecca was in it?”

  “No! I mean, I’d come see it anyway. If you did it. That’s all.”

  Sydney laughed again, and patted my forearm. “You’re sad, Tyler,” she said, but left her hand on my arm for a few seconds. Her fingers were cool and soft.

  I tried to avoid bringing Becky up in conversation after that, with mild success. I assume Sydney didn’t pursue her black box idea with “The Lottery,” or if she did, I never heard anything about it.

  On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, Sydney turned in her seat right as the bell rang ending class.

  “So, have you talked to Becca yet?” she asked.

  I said, “Who?” Sydney hadn’t used the nickname Becca before.

  “Rebecca Webb?” Sydney said. “The girl you’ve been slobbering over since September?”

  “I wasn’t slobbering!” I said. And thought, At least, not literally.

  “Oh, okay,” Sydney said. “Sorry. Have you?”

  “Well! … Not exactly.”

  “You know I told her about you, right?”

  I almost convulsed. “You did what? What did you say, what did she say, what—”

  “I just told her you’d mentioned her,” Syd said, seeming to enjoy my freak-out. “That’s all.”

  That’s why Becky had suddenly started noticing me. I didn’t know whether to be happy or mad about it: happy that Syd had sort of opened the door, but mad that Becky hadn’t noticed me just because of me.

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay. But what did she say?”

  “Nothing. Literally. I’m not even sure she heard me.”

  She did, I thought. Yes, she did.

  “So anyway, what’re you doing tomorrow night?” Syd asked.

  My entire body lit up. This could only mean one thing: Becky had asked Sydney to ask me if I was busy, in preparation for asking me out.

  “Nothing!” I said. But I sounded desperate, so I added, “I mean, writing, I guess.”

  Syd made a mock-disgusted face. “Homework? Really? I know I’m all brainy and junk, but even I don’t do homework over Christmas.” She nudged my arm.

  “Nah, no,” I said. “I mean a story.”

  “Oh. Like, for fun?”

  “Uh, something like that,” I said. Classes were trading places by then, and the next class was seniors. I didn’t want to get caught in there with them if I didn’t have to.

  Nor did I feel like explaining my writing. Not many people knew about it back then. Robby, Justin. My parents and Gabrielle, I guess. That was it. I’d pretty much plagiarized my first short story in fifth grade, a rip-off of one of the short stories in Night Shift, in fact. Changed the character names and some dialogue and small parts of the plot. It was how I learned. I didn’t think I was good enough to actually show anyone what I was writing, despite being in Honors English and getting As on my writing assignments.

  Sydney stood up when I did. “Well, we should hang out tomorrow,” she said, as if out of the darkness of time and space. “See a movie or something. Wanna?”

  At first I deflated, seriously bummed Syd wasn’t asking me about my plans on Becky’s behalf. But Sydney and I did have fun talking in class, even if half our conversations revolved around me trying to learn more about Becky. Sydney was confident, had that big brassy laugh … her hair was really pretty awesome …

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “Sure. I guess so.”

  “Great!” Syd grabbed my arm and wrote a number down on my palm.

  “Call me, or text or something,” she said, like she did this sort of thing every day. My god, if I’d tried this same approach with Becky, I’d have asphyxiated from my own stupidity.

  “Yeah, okay …”

  “Cool. See you tomorrow, then!”

  She picked up her bag and zipped out of the classroom before I could think to say anything else. Like, for instance, What the hell did I just do?

  Sydney was cute, but … Lily Rose cute. However, since I lacked the testicular fortitude to make contact with Becky, I went ahead and called Sydney the next afternoon and met her at the mall that night. We saw some dumb comedy, and I don’t even remember which one, a fact she will be happy to repeat any old time, thanks much.

  After that, we got Panda Express in the food court. Syd ordered a full meal. “Know what I hate?” she asked as we found a table.

  “What?” Now that the movie was over and we were moving on to the actual talking part of the evening, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep up with her.

  “Girls who won’t eat,” Sydney said, which made me laugh. Syd jabbed a fork into her noodles, grinning. “Seriously! I mean girls who won’t eat in front of guys. Who’re all, ‘Just a salad and a cracker for me!’ or whatever, and then go home and binge on Zingers and Pepsi.”

  Becky was partial to salads, I’d noticed. I didn’t point it out.

  “Thanks for dinner, by the way,” Sydney added.

  “No proble
m,” I said, and watched her eat while I fiddled around with my own meal. After the way she said all that, I half expected her to eat like a front loader, but she ate thoughtfully, taking her time and maybe savoring each bite.

  I made sure to keep my mouth closed when I chewed. That’s about as high a bar as I could set at that point. Also, I might’ve stretched a little on the “no problem” paying for dinner part; between dinner and the movie, I was tapped for the week. But I didn’t mind.

  We talked about school and parents and siblings and whatnot. We marveled that both our sets of parents were still married, agreed Ms. Hochhalter walked on water because she assigned good stories and occasionally cussed in class, and decided that Gabrielle and Syd’s older brother would make a terrible couple.

  Becky’s name did not come up. At least, not out loud. Mentally, I couldn’t help but make comparisons.

  Take their styles, for instance. Becky wasn’t a slob or anything, but she did seem to trend more toward basic T-shirts, shorts, and scuffed jeans. Syd, then as now, always looked more put together. She seemed to favor fashionable sweaters—cardigans, I think they’re called—and dark jeans that looked like they’d been tailored to fit her. Her clothes were generally bright and bold, her fingernails painted brilliant colors. She came off looking like a junior or senior instead of a lowly freshman.

  I couldn’t say which I liked better. They both fit.

  The worst thing about freshman year was no one had a car except parents and older siblings. Mom had dropped me off, and I was supposed to call Gabby to pick me up. Which, essentially, sucked. But what was true for me was true for others: if you had no car and didn’t want to be home, there were only so many options.

  So I should’ve guessed that since we were now officially on winter break and it was a Friday night, there was a good chance we’d run into someone we knew from school. Someone turned out to be someones, namely Robby and Justin and the girls they were dating at the time.

  “Hey!” Robby called in his usual boisterous voice. “Tyler! What’s up?”

  “Hey,” I said as the four of them gathered around our table. The two girls, their names long since lost to history, crowded too close to the guys, texting furiously. I wondered if maybe they were texting each other so they wouldn’t actually have to speak.