The Ex Games(5)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Instead, the opposite happened. Seconds after I handed my enrollment slip to the teacher and snuck into an empty desk in the back of English class, Nick picked up his books and moved to the desk beside mine.

I remembered every detail of that first five minutes with him, as if each minute were packed with a whole day’s worth of emotion and color. Even back then, Nick was a head taller than most of the other boys in the class, and so handsome. He looked vaguely familiar in a way I couldn’t quite place.

But what struck me most was how comfortable he seemed with me. The thirteen-year-old boys I’d known in Tennessee were split down the middle: Either they wouldn’t make eye contact because they weren’t interested in girls yet and played way too much Nintendo, or they were interested in girls and expressed this by making comments about their boobs. Unlike those immature boys, Nick talked to me like a friend. And he was funny. And he was hot. And I was the vulnerable new girl. I never had a chance.

Back then we weren’t very mobile, of course. A seventh-grade “date” looked exactly like every other seventh grader’s weekend outing: pizza at Mile-High Pie, the dive for locals only, and then whatever movie was playing at the theater down the street. Only, if you were on a little baby “date,” you did all this while hanging with a boy, and the rest of the seventh-grade girls gazed at you in awe. And if your relationship were truly serious, you sat in the back row of the theater and kissed. I’d been on three “dates” with Nick. The girls in my class squealed every time they saw me, beside themselves over the possibility that our fourth time might be sealed with a kiss.

That night, Mile-High Pie was packed with teenagers wearing hip winter sports gear even if they didn’t ski or board. February in Tennessee was cold and brown, but Snowfall sparkled with excitement at the height of the ski season, like a beach town in summertime. I sat in a booth with Nick, surrounded by colored lights twinkling in the windows and decades of teen graffiti layered on the walls: VIOLET LOVES RANDY. ZACH + KAREN. That’s what Nick and I were: Nick + Hayden. He watched me attentively, smiled at me, laughed at my jokes, and ignored Gavin elbowing him.

After a while we moved with the teenage crowd to the movie theater. Do you remember a Will Smith romantic comedy about a player who makes all the right moves to sneak into a woman’s heart? IRONY. Maybe you could tell me the details sometime, because I wasn’t paying much attention.

A tall, beautiful blonde named Chloe, obviously the prima donna of the class, was having a very public argument with two different boys who liked her. Because I was new, I had a hard time puzzling it out. There was a lot of high drama before the film started, middle schoolers yelling accusations at each other, like a Disney Channel version of COPS, and Chloe was comfortable at the center of it. I thought the attention had finally moved away from Nick and me, and we were safe from everyone’s eyes in the back row.

The second the lights dimmed, he put his arm around me. We weren’t wearing poofy parkas, either—we’d draped them over the backs of the seats when we’d come in—so the heat and weight of his arm imprinted themselves along my shoulders and the back of my neck. By the first love scene in the movie, he was leaning toward me.

I figured he wouldn’t really kiss me. He would want to. He would mean to. But I couldn’t possibly be lucky enough for this to happen for real, even though I was wearing my four-leaf clover earrings. The fire alarm would sound in the theater, or the roof would collapse under the weight of the snow. (I hadn’t gotten used to two feet of snow blanketing everything.) The fact that we were hot for each other would be obvious to everyone, but like a pair of unfortunate saps on a TV sitcom, we wouldn’t kiss for another two seasons.

And then he kissed me. His arm tightened around my shoulders, his other big hand cradled my cheek, and his warm lips touched mine. We kissed for a long time. I didn’t make him stop. If this had happened in Tennessee, I would have known the boy just wanted to brag to his friends afterward. Nick made me think he honestly liked me and wanted to touch me.

My first kiss.

Obviously not his. He knew what he was doing.

I blink away tears thinking about this now. Such a perfect night, the sweetest reward after two years of embarrassment at school in Tennessee and excruciating pain 24/7. I’m feeling sorry for myself, I know, but I can’t help crying for poor little thirteen-year-old me at the moment Nick kissed me. Because the castle in the air he’d built for me over the past month was about to come crashing down in the snow.

A girl named Liz bounced into the seat beside me and whispered that I should come to the bathroom with her and Chloe. This surprised me, because I’d never heard Liz’s voice before—she was a quiet little librarian in class—and also because I’d begun to think no one dared disturb the mature teen bliss that Nick and I embodied. But I really did need to pee. I had needed to pee since the movie began. In seventh grade you do not admit to boys that you need to pee, so this was the perfect excuse to relieve myself while retaining my image as a peeless goddess.

When I came out of the stall, Chloe was peeking under the other doors to make sure the bathroom was empty. Liz stood in the center of the tiled room with her arms folded. I felt a flash of panic that maybe Colorado middle schools traditionally welcomed new students with a swirly. Or that Nick was on the list of boyfriends Chloe was balancing. I’d had my fun with him in the back row, and now she wanted payback. But Chloe didn’t look bent on revenge. For the first time all month, she was silent, waiting, deferring to Liz.

By junior year Liz let her dark curly hair float around her shoulders. But back in seventh grade, she was still pulling it off her face with combs and clips with little monkey faces on them. The monkey faces laughed at me as she dropped the bomb. She told me Nick was from a famously rich family. Hadn’t I seen the TV commercials last year in which Nick and his parents stood beside a huge rock fireplace and his father invited the camera to try Krieger Meats and Meat Products, from their family to yours?

That’s why Nick looked familiar!

Liz said that at the beginning of the year, Nick and Gavin had argued about whether Nick’s family money was the only reason he got any girl he wanted. So a month ago, when the English teacher let the class know a new girl was starting school, Nick bet Gavin he could get a date with the girl that weekend, sight unseen, without her knowing anything about his money. To make it fair, Nick and Gavin swore everyone in the class to secrecy.