The Here and Now (5 page)

“Can you show me how you did them?”

“Seriously? Have you tried turning off the TV?”

Ethan laughs and I am inordinately pleased with myself. Nobody ever teased me before I met Ethan, and when he first did, the language was as foreign to me as Swahili and at least as beautiful.

Ethan is very good at physics. He reads about string theory and quantum gravity in his spare time. He spent the last two summers interning at some kind of lab in Teaneck, New Jersey, that does research in theoretical physics. He does his homework while watching old seasons of
Breaking Bad
. He doesn’t need my help, and he barely needs to do the problems at all. He’s going to Columbia Engineering in the fall.

He once told me he calls me for the homework because I am the prettiest girl in AP Physics, which got my heart racing shamefully but doesn’t mean a lot considering there are five of us in AP Physics and I am the only girl.

“Want to meet me at the library?”

I can hear in his voice he’s just checking on me, seeing if I’m okay. I was acting weird this morning. I hear other voices in the background. Probably his friend Matt and some of the other guys from the sports blog he edits.

“No,” I say. What if I were honest?
I can’t meet your eye because I am ashamed of the romantic fantasy I spun out between you and me the night of the Rules Ceremony
.

I pretty much never meet him anywhere outside of school
or tell him anything he wants to know. I don’t even make up excuses, because of the problem of lying to him. He is undeterred by this. It doesn’t seem to discourage him that he calls me often and I hardly ever call him, or that he has about fifty dumb nicknames for me (Penny, Henny, Hennypenny, Ghouly, Doofus, James the First …) and I can barely bring myself to call him Ethan.

“I have a free period before lunch tomorrow,” I offer. I will pull myself together by then.

“I have Spanish. I’ll skip it.”

“I thought you had a test.” I hate the scold in my voice. I get scolded so often, sometimes I forget there’s another way to talk.

“So I’ll get there a little late.”

Ethan was the first person who talked to me the day I started ninth grade. It was the strangest thing. He was sitting in front of me in math class, and he turned around and looked at me like he knew me, like we were old friends with serious business between us, like he expected me to know him too. Two years later I am still trying to figure out that look.

It wasn’t the kind of look I was accustomed to getting. I was this confused, weirdly dressed fourteen-year-old spouting canned lines from nineties sitcoms, whose classmates stayed as far away as possible. Except for Ethan. It was almost like he had something important to say, like he’d been waiting for me to show up.

I remember the thought that hung in my head toward the end of that school year, when I finally got up the courage to look at Ethan and not just my shoes:
Nothing bad has ever happened to you. You think the world is like this
.

He is a year older and the opposite of me in every way:
invited to everything, liked by almost everybody. But he isn’t your typical popular kid. His hero is Stephen Hawking. He has hair the color of Cheerios, which he cuts himself. He wears these oddball wool army pants even though they get shorter on him every month.

I’ve tried not to make too much of it. Ethan is genuinely nice to everyone, especially the underdogs. Since last summer, one of his favorite people is the homeless man who lives in the park and hangs out on a blanket in front of the A&P. Ethan calls him Ben Kenobi, and spends hours talking with him about quantum physics and whatnot.

Our last names are James and Jarves, and the school is very big on alphabetical order, so from the beginning Ethan steered me through a lot of picture days and field days and all-school assemblies.

I see myself kind of like the homeless guy in Ethan’s eyes: a bit of a sad case, but an interesting one. More of a project than a friend. He knows something’s a little off about me. Or suspects it. I can see by the way he looks at me, and I guess there is kind of a subtle alliance that goes with it.

I don’t lie to Ethan, but I don’t tell him the truth either. I can’t. To share anything with him, even if I could, would put him in an impossible place. Already he is the drip, drip of water that carves a canyon right through the middle of me.

The next Monday afternoon I sit in physics class gazing out the window at the bluest sky. I tune my ears to the traffic on Bay Street, and suddenly I’m deafened by the closer, louder clanging of the fire alarms in the hallway.

We take our time standing up and trooping to the door. Nobody looks particularly concerned. We join rivulets from other classrooms to form a stream down the hallway and then a raging river going out the side door.

“It’s not a drill, it’s a bomb threat,” I overhear someone saying upriver. The message makes its way back.

“Stupid seniors,” a girl to my left mutters.

It’s a tradition, an unimaginative prank, for a senior to call in a bomb threat twice a year: once in the fall, once in the spring, usually on a warm and sunny day. It’s as predictable as changing your clocks for daylight savings, but the administration has to take it seriously every time.

Faculty members are posted along the line, but we don’t need their instructions to know what to do. I wish we could hang around on the football field and soak in the sunshine until the threat is cleared, but it isn’t to be.

That’s what used to happen, apparently. A few hours outside and then you got to go home. But finally the administration wised up and realized that the dismal Village Community Center is only two blocks away, and since I’d gotten to high school they’d started sending us there to make sure that the bomb threat posed as little fun as possible.

There is something humiliating about walking in a fat line down the sidewalk and across the street to the community center. It feels like nursery school.

We collect in the lobby to be shunted out to various rooms—alphabetically, of course.
A
s through
I
s get the auditorium.
R
s through
Z
s get the media center. The saggy middle of the alphabet waits for instructions. Finally
J
s through
Q
s are packed into a tiny room with four card tables usually
reserved for old people who play bridge. I watch as the freshmen and sophomores call their parents and are signed out, one after another, by a young and inexperienced biology teacher. Maybe the principal reasoned that if the upperclassmen found themselves doing the lowerclassmen a favor with the bomb threats, they’d stop.

After they go, attendance is taken, and as soon as the well-meaning biology teacher is out the door, the rest of the
J
s through
Q
s up and walk out, leaving just Ethan and me. He looks at me and shrugs. He takes up a worn pack of cards from the basket in the middle of the table where we sit and starts shuffling them.

“Gin?” he asks. “Canasta? Spit?”

I shake my head. I am eager to have something other than schoolwork to do, but this is not it. There are still some holes in my knowledge normal kids don’t have. Most of them were hastily plugged in those first two years thanks to a steady diet of the Disney Channel and the Cartoon Network, but card games I somehow missed.

“No? Okay. How about Crazy Eights?”

I shake my head again. I feel my face getting warm.

“Old Maid? Go Fish?” he asks.

I am trying to think. Do I know any? I watched some kids play at a day camp once.

“Well, what games do you like?”

He is giving me a particular look. Not cruel at all. The opposite, if anything. I’ve seen it many times before. Curious, maybe a bit searching, like he knows he’s pressed against something a little bit tender, and he’s promising me he’s not going to take advantage of it.

I glance at the shelves, over all the old-people games. I search wishfully for Monopoly. That’s the one I know. “Connect Four.” I can figure that out, right?

“Cards, James. We gotta play cards. I’ve got it. War,” he says. “Everyone likes War, right?” He goes ahead and splits the deck and gives half to me. Is he testing me?

I watch him carefully. He puts a card down and I follow. It’s clear the person with the higher-number card gets to take the card of the person with the lower one, and also the hierarchy of the cards with the weird-looking royalty on them. I amass a pile, facedown, just like him, of the cards I win.

“War!” he declares when we both put down a card with a four on it.

I look at him expectantly, and he looks at me, and in that split-second delay I realize he knows I don’t know how to play War or any of the other games he said.

Deliberately he puts a trail of three cards facedown so I can follow. “Ready?” he says. “Last one face up for the win.” He isn’t testing me anymore; he is teaching me.

I forget where to put my card. My head is clouding with too many thoughts. Our eyes meet and hold for less than a second.

He knows about me—he doesn’t really know, but he knows it’s something. Something different, something wrong, and something always afraid. He’s known it for a long time. It’s what makes me his special case, his charity friend. He knows I can’t talk about it, and he’s not going to push, but he is going to watch me and try to understand it. These are the moments of clarity between us where I know all this and so does he.

I take off my glasses and rub my eyes. I fumble around with my card. I feel things too much with him.

“Queen!” he cheers me, turning my card over when I finally get it out of my hand. “Nice!” He’ll smooth this over. He’ll let me off the hook. He knows I need him to, and he does. “What a time to pull out the queen, Jamesie. Go ahead and take ’em. They’re all yours.” He is happy to have me win. “I’ll get the next one,” he assures me, “so don’t get cocky or anything.”

He is trying to be lighthearted, but his face is also serious, questioning, protective. There’s always something under it with us.

“I’m hungry,” he says. “I’ve got some change. Let’s go buy up the vending machine out front.”

Gratefully, I stand up and follow him, jamming my hands into the front pockets of my jeans.

“Cards weren’t taught in a day, you know, Henny,” Ethan says, tapping the deck against my shoulder blade as we walk. “I think we should start with Go Fish and then maybe Old Maid. Then we’ll move on to Spit, and then I think Gin. I’ve got big plans for you, my friend,” he says.

I don’t know what to say. He’s accepted this as another of my weird deficits, and he isn’t demanding answers; he wants to help. He’s found another way in.

“And then, when you are ready, I’m going to teach you the best game of them all … Hearts. Trust me, you are going to love it.”

Drip, drip, drip goes the water. I can’t keep him out, because I don’t want to.

It turns out the vending machine is pretty close to empty when we get there. “Greedy kids,” Ethan mutters.

“Well, there’s chips,” I say, wanting my voice to sound normal.

Ethan makes a face. “Baked,” he says. “And what the hell is with the ketchup-flavored chips?”

I laugh. “Twizzlers?”

“Not greasy enough.”

“The cheese crackers are all broken.”

“They look like they’ve been there since 1982.”

“Gum won’t help anything,” I say.

He sighs. “What I wouldn’t do for three or four of those chocolate cupcakes with the squiggly white icing on top and the fluffy lard inside.”

“There’s Fritos,” I say. “One bag left.”

He nods. “I guess you’re right.” He puts his quarters in the slot and waves his finger over the buttons. “Uh … 
D
 … uh, four.”

“That’s sunflower seeds!” I warn.

“Oh, right. Uh … 
D
 … six.”

“No. Pork rinds!” I shout.

I am laughing. Of course he’s messing with me. I aim my finger at the 5 button and he pulls it away. “I’ve got this,” he says, pretending to slip up and hit E3 for Funyuns.

I push his hand away at the last second. “No one likes those!” I say, like I am your regular, carefree seventeen-year-old girl.

The sound of my laughter shuts me up. I look around for Jeffrey in the direction of the auditorium. Somebody, scold me quick. I am having a bit of a time here.

The Fritos drop from the spiral with a crinkly thump, and Ethan fishes them out.

I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, and I scold myself on the way.

I shouldn’t have touched his hand. I shouldn’t have laughed.
I should not share his Fritos. I lie to myself when I pretend like these things don’t mean everything to me.

The phrasing of the twelfth rule is pretty brilliant, in a way. It doesn’t say you can’t hook up with a time native, though of course that is absolutely forbidden. It doesn’t say no kissing or no holding hands or even no to flat-out having sex (unthinkable for so many reasons). Those are the kinds of commands a person could dodge and weave around. Instead, it says you must never be intimate with a time native. That’s the kicker. Intimate.

I know what this word means. It is the second’s worth of a glance between Ethan and me. It’s every time he teases me and I tease him back. It’s every nickname he calls me. It’s when he taught me how to play War and turned my queen faceup. It is the thing I crave.