Love Story(46)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Then Tommy asked, “So, did you two hook up yet?”

“Tommy!” I squealed. “What a question!”

“What?” He half-turned toward me. “I’m just asking.”

“If we hadn’t hooked up,” I said, “that question would be awkward and embarrassing. And if we had hooked up, it would be—”

“—awkward and embarrassing,” Hunter said.

Tommy watched Hunter driving for a moment. Tommy’s expression was inscrutable, and I could see in the rearview mirror that Hunter’s was, too. “So you have hooked up,” Tommy concluded.

“Of course not,” I said. “Hunter met his girlfriend in the bathroom. He has a fortune-teller and a bar waitress on the side.”

“Never say I didn’t raise class.” Tommy turned all the way around to face me. “And how do you know this?”

“We live in the same dorm.”

Tommy grinned. “Uh-huh. You’re from the same town, the same farm even, you live in the same dorm, you know all about each other’s business, but you haven’t hooked up.”

When he put it that way, why hadn’t we? He made it sound as if the prerequisites for hooking up were familiarity, proximity

and he must sense the desire, at least on my end. He didn’t understand the complications, the humiliations, the hundred reasons why not that hummed underneath us like the never-ending sound of New York traffic, or the drone of the Kentucky interstate behind the autumn trees.

“It’s none of your business, Dad.” Maybe it was because I could hardly hear Hunter over the motor and the radio, but I was surprised by how embarrassed he sounded, and wistful.

We rounded the last bend. The trees parted to reveal my grandmother’s towering mansion. It perched on the highest hill in all of the rolling pastureland that formed the farm. Like many of the historic buildings in and around Louisville, it was built in the Italianate style of the 1870s. If a photo of a classic Southern mansion was stretched on a computer until the ceilings and windows were ridiculously high—that was this overstated style of architecture, so elegant and imposing it was threatening.

“Here we are, princess.” Tommy opened his door, presumably to haul my suitcase out of the payload.

“I’m not staying here,” I said quickly. “Hunter can stay in my room, where he belongs. I’m staying with you, Tommy.”

Tommy and Hunter both looked over the seat at me in surprise. Tommy said, “That’s not proper. Your grandmother will have a cow.”

“No way,” Hunter said.

“You owe me that much.” I caught Hunter’s eye and drove home my meaning. I had no intention of telling my grandmother that he was taking her for a ride, but Hunter didn’t know that. At least I hoped he didn’t.

Hunter’s blue eyes drilled into me just long enough to trigger my heart palpitations. Then he uttered an obscenity and left the truck, dragging his own suitcase through the giant front door of my grandmother’s house.

“Your grandmother will march down to my house and get you herself,” Tommy said as he drove back down the lane.

“She knows she can push me only so far,” I said. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, unfortunately.” He parked beside his little house, and I jumped out of the truck before he could change his mind.

This house could have sat in a Louisville neighborhood with other bungalows like it, and it wouldn’t have drawn attention. But here on the farm it drew my attention. It was white timber above and local limestone below, with a slate roof, like all the outbuildings. It matched the gatehouse, and the historic kitchen with a vast brick oven, and the barn. I would not have chosen to live in a servant’s house that matched the barn. I knew from Hunter’s latest story for Gabe’s class that he felt the same way.

I crossed the wooden porch and waited for Tommy to unlock the front door. Hunter had been in my grandmother’s house plenty of times. He’d even been in my room, during that childhood moment so long ago when we were friends. I had never been in his house. I followed Tommy through the narrow hallways, past a kitchen remodeled in the 1970s, to a tiny bedroom with a huge window that looked on the lane out front.

“Here you go, son. I kept everything just like you left it,” Tommy joked, depositing my suitcase inside. “I’ll give you a few minutes to freshen up, but I need to get back to Churchill Downs. Then your grandmother wanted me to make sure you and Hunter got to the party at the Farrells’ tonight.”

A party at the house Whitfield Farrell still shared with his parents? This trip was seeming more and more like everyone in my old life had pored over my new story for Gabe’s class—the one Hunter hadn’t read yet—and re-created it. “I’m not going,” I said quickly. I had no desire to live out that antifantasy.

“Suit yourself,” Tommy said, “but you’ll have a hard time avoiding the party tomorrow night. It’s here.”

He backed down the hallway. I heard the door close and watched the truck pass in front of the house, toward the mansion. In a few minutes the truck passed again, headed for the interstate. Tommy was in the passenger seat and Hunter was driving.

Now that they were gone, I looked around. I was sitting on Hunter Allen’s bed. Eat your hearts out, girls in Gabe’s class! And I saw why Hunter had looked so horrified at the idea of me staying in his house. The walls were covered in glossy posters of fast cars and movie starlets wearing thongs. This shouldn’t have surprised me. He’d probably tacked them up when he was fourteen. It surprised me anyway to discover that Hunter was a teenage boy after all, and that he was—what was the word he’d used in his comment on my first story?—gauche.

I crawled to the head of the bed, taking way more pleasure than I should have from the sensation of his rough bedspread rubbing my skin, and got a closer look at his walls. Taped between the posters were certificates for his academic awards. First place, seventh-grade math tournament. First place, tenth-grade science fair. Senior-class valedictorian. He’d won everything but the writing contests. Those were mine.

I sat back against his headboard, as he must have sat up reading every night, and surveyed the whole wallpaper of white diploma-like rectangles superimposed on the larger images of trashy pop culture. That’s when I saw the cardboard sun, six feet across, behind his dresser where a mirror should have been, with the tiny planets floating in front of it, Earth the size of his thumbnail.

14

Bundled against the cold wind, I walked up the lane, past my grandmother’s mansion, and over the hill to the stables, built a hundred years before of solid wood and limestone and covered in ivy, picturesque to a tourist who didn’t know better.

Most of the staff had gone to Churchill Downs. Only a skeleton crew was left to care for the horses that weren’t racing. I slipped easily into the office and changed into the riding clothes I’d left in the closet, and my helmet. Very important: always wear a helmet. I could feel that my clothes were looser than they’d been when I left, but luckily the office didn’t have a mirror. I transferred the apple I’d snagged from Tommy’s refrigerator from the pocket of my overcoat to the pocket of my riding coat.