Love Story(42)
Author: Jennifer Echols

He walked another sixty-four yards up the road, gravel crunching under his work boots. The sky had deepened to rose now, and he might have been worried about a car creaming him without ever seeing him in the dark, except that there was nobody out here to run him down—only the boss, and the people who worked on the farm, most of whom had gone home for the night already, or lived here like his dad in an ancient house built back when it was acceptable for workers to live on their employers’ land.

He stopped and looked around. He was standing next to a large mossy boulder that jutted from the grass, maybe a marker of something long gone, maybe a tombstone, maybe just a boulder. He had wondered about it since he’d arrived here at the farm. Now he set his tape measure down on the road and walked over to the boulder. The moss was soft, with creepy-looking white flowers that glowed like an alien species in the disappearing light. He looked back toward his house. It was a football field and a half away now, and if the sun were six feet wide in front of his door, Venus would be here, the size of his thumbnail.

He slid a piece of paper out of the pocket of his jeans and consulted his calculations.

He tugged the tape measure so the end of it escaped the last rock he’d placed in the road. The tape measure zipped back into the case. He made a mental note to pick up all his rocks when he was finished. If a farm truck was damaged running over one, his father would kill him.

He set the end of the tape measure down in the road again and secured it with a new piece of the heirloom fence. From Venus, he walked another sixty-four yards, down the other side of the hill and halfway up the next one, and stopped. If the sun was six feet wide in front of his front door, which he couldn’t see anymore because the hill was in the way, but he knew how far away it was, Earth would be here, also the size of his thumbnail. He looked around. Now he could see the boss’s house on top of the highest hill of all, looming regally in white-painted brick over the wild and verdant rolling hills, like a Victorian lady in a hunting party.

He considered his calculations again. He thought the experiment was working out well. Of course, if he performed this demonstration at school, he would lay it out starting in the science classroom. He would take the whole class on a walk out of the classroom (Mercury), down the hall (Venus), outside the building (Earth). They would have to walk a third of a mile to get to Neptune. That was the only drawback. But Neptune needed to be a third of a mile away, or he would have to reduce the planets so much that nobody could see them, which was not good for the purposes of demonstration. He thought his teacher might balk at the class taking fifteen minutes to walk two-thirds of a mile just to see where Pluto would be at the darkest reach of its orbit, because it would seem to her that they were goofing off and were not on task when nothing could have been further from the truth.

But as he shivered in the twilight, he realized that she might have a point. He himself had no desire to walk the entire two-thirds of a mile to Pluto over another eight hills and up a grade to the stables. Three planets had been enough for him and he got the gist. Pluto had been downgraded to a dwarf planet anyway.

Satisfied—really wanting to finish what he’d started and walk the rest of the solar system, but cold and satisfied enough—he pocketed his calculations, zipped the tape measure up, and started back toward his house, remembering again that he needed to pick up the rocks and put them back in the fence where they belonged.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a movement in the grassy valley below the white mansion. It was the girl, urging a black filly into a gallop, hair streaming behind her. He had thought he might run into her, but he’d assumed that if he did, he would be looking up at her. Now she was in the hollow, and he was on the crest of a hill, looking down.

I COULD HARDLY SPEAK WHEN GABE asked me what I thought of Hunter’s story. I definitely couldn’t think. I said something about his penchant for scientific jargon that distracted the reader from the emotion of the story, and I wondered, along with Summer, whether he was writing that way on purpose.

I did not wonder out loud whether he’d moved the setting of his story to Kentucky in order to hint to Gabe that we knew each other and had been toying with each other in our stories. I did not tell him what I thought of his story:

After living the life of a self-made chick for the last five months, and having Hunter psychoanalyze that experience for me, I realized that maybe there was an advantage after all to growing up with money. Maybe I did think better of myself because my grandmother owned a Kentucky horse farm. I didn’t worry as much as someone else would when I was down to my last pack of ramen noodles, or when I got hit by a taxi. I knew that if I ever did deign to call her for help, she would send me money.

But if I did have those feelings of superiority, they did not survive Hunter writing a beautiful story in which he gazed down on me as if I were someone to be pitied. I saw myself exactly as he saw me.

And that made me angry.

The interminable class finally did end. Gabe gave me a look I didn’t really see, hefted himself out of his chair, and left. The rest of the class got up giggling, as usual. Their chatter about Hunter unexpectedly turning out to be a space nerd had already changed to chatter about heading to the dining hall together as they passed over the threshold to the hallway.

Hunter stood with his back against the open door, blond head cocked at me in question.

“Coming?” Summer asked me.

I shook my head, never taking my eyes off Hunter. She stood beside me a moment more, hand poised on the table. I could tell she was looking from him to me, sensing the electricity, knowing we had communicated something awful to each other through a story. Again.

“I’ll wait for you.” She walked through the door. I listened for her voice and Manohar’s and Brian’s to recede down the hall, but they didn’t.

“Everything okay?” Hunter called to me.

He sounded like a noncommittal friend asking after my health. I looked like a crazy person sitting at the table after everyone else had left, staring at “The Space Between.” I was going to sound like a crazy person no matter what I said to him next.

It had to be said. I stood with my book bag, swept up “The Space Between” without a single mark on it, and crumpled it in one fist. Rounding the table, I shoved his story at his chest.

He took the wad of paper. “What’s the matter?” he asked innocently.

I thought of Summer, Manohar, and Brian just outside the door, listening. I did not want them to hear this. But if I asked Hunter to step away from the door and close it so we could have a private conversation, I would be showing him how much I cared. I was through with that.