Love Story(41)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Because.” I shouted the word. The taxi driver half-turned in his seat. I watched him to make sure he put his eyes on the road again and didn’t hit any love-starved novelists.

“My mother wanted to be an actress and my grandmother told her she was cutting her off, surprise. So my mom booked for L.A. when she was eighteen. Maybe she would have made it if she hadn’t gotten pregs when she was twenty.”

“With you,” Hunter said.

I nodded on his thigh. “Even after I was born she got a few bit parts, but mostly she would work as a secretary, and then she got training as a paralegal. My dad mostly didn’t work. That was a big thing they fought about. He always had some reason for why he wasn’t working. He was always saying she was the one with the rich family, why didn’t she ask her mother for money, and she always said she wasn’t asking that bitch for shit, not after what her mother had said to her when she left. But she wouldn’t marry my dad, either, and I never knew why, but now I wonder if it was because she didn’t want him officially part of her family, with access to the family money that he talked so much about and seemed so eager for.”

“So you’re a bastard,” Hunter said.

The question caught me off guard. “You mean—was I born out of wedlock? Yes.”

“Then I’ve got one up on you after all.”

“What do you mean, you’ve got one up on me after all? Are we in some sort of contest? A birthright contest?” I watched the colored lights from the shops we passed reflecting on the vinyl seat. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. I guess we are.” After six years we’d finally admitted we liked each other. It had taken us all of an hour and a half to hate each other again.

Or did we? His hand had moved to my face, brushing my bangs lightly away from my forehead with his calloused fingers. “So, you have to win this battle with your grandmother because that will prove she was wrong all along. If you win, your mother wins.”

I adjusted my head on his thigh, unable to find a comfortable position. He was way too muscular to be a pillow. And I murmured, “My mother is dead.”

12

Deep in the night he laid me on my bed. Summer and Jřrdis whispered questions. I got lost in sleep and painkillers but at some point during the next day or the next, Summer brought me a walking cane and a huge breakfast and said Hunter had dropped them off. When I limped back to class, he started sitting next to me in calculus—not flirting with me or hovering over me but acting routinely pleasant and torturing me with wonder at whether he’d really wanted to kiss me that night in the hospital. Summer was all aflutter at the whole incident. She agreed with the X-ray tech that getting hit by a taxi while crossing the street to see Hunter was romantic, until I showed her the black bruise on my hip and the slowly healing gouges in my back.

But a week and a half after my accident, when I’d already come back from the coffee shop and delivered a cup to Hunter for his long trek to volunteer at the hospital, Summer peeked her head into my room and asked me with wide eyes whether I’d read his new story. I had gotten wise by then. I did not get my hopes up. I could have rushed to the library and read it when he was scheduled to put it there for us, but then I would have obsessed about it until class time.

I knew better. I waited until the last minute, Thursday, after a lunch of peanut-butter crackers, to limp to the library and read all the stories for class. Hunter’s last.

That way I was furious for only ten minutes, the space of the walk between the library and the honors classroom building, before I faced him.

The Space Between

by Hunter Allen

His eighth-grade science teacher tried to explain how big space was. Space was so big, it seemed, that there was hardly anything in it, thus its name. Space.

He did not get it, and he wanted to. He hated the rare times when he didn’t understand something in class. So that night after he had fed the horses and eaten the dinner he heated for himself in the microwave, and his dad was ensconced in front of the television with a pack of cigarettes and a cooler of beer at his feet to save trips to the refrigerator, he sat at the kitchen table with a pad and a calculator and worked out the relationship between the scale of the planets and the scale of the space between them. He started by making Mercury the size of a baseball, but that made the sun sixty-six feet wide. He shrank everything again. Mercury was now the size of a pencil eraser, and the sun was six feet wide. Mercury was eighty-five yards from the sun.

He still didn’t get it. Could space truly be that big? He decided to walk out the model. Then he would understand. He crossed his father’s line of sight and opened the front door. Standing on the porch, he could see the orange ball of the sun just disappearing behind the grassy hill on which the boss’s house sat. The black silhouettes of trees slashed across the bright pink sky.

He leaned back through the door and called to his dad, “I’m going for a walk.”

“Stay away from that girl,” his father said.

He didn’t respond to this. He didn’t have to, because his father was watching TV, not him. He simply closed the door and walked out into the twilight, face burning, chest tight with embarrassment and anger and dread and longing.

He stepped off the wooden porch, onto the walkway of stone pavers a hundred years old. They led down a grassy bank to the gravel road that wound through the enormous farm. In New York, where he had come from not too long before, in early springtime the grass still would have been brown. Here in Kentucky it was already long and green and juicy for the horses.

He retrieved a measuring tape from the truck. Standing in the gravel road in front of his small house, he looked to the right. The road disappeared over the hill, but he knew it bumped from grassy hill to grassy hill until it finally met the two-lane highway a mile off. That was the direction his father wanted him to go.

He looked to the left. The road disappeared over that hill, too, but he knew it pitched higher and higher with more and more hills until it reached the high point of the farm, where the boss’s house perched. That was the direction his father forbade him to go.

He loosened a large limestone rock from the century-old wall next to his house—fuck this farm, anyway—and set it on the end of the tape measure to keep it secure in the middle of the road. Then he started walking up the hill. The tape measure was only a hundred feet long, so he kept having to mark his place in the road and start over in order to make progress. After eighty-five yards, he stopped and looked around. He was standing beside an enormous old oak. If the sun was six feet wide and sat directly in front of his house, this was where Mercury would be to scale, a barely visible pencil eraser. He wasn’t sure his classmates would understand this analogy, but he did, and he appreciated for the first time the vastness of space, the emptiness, the vacuum.