Who Do You Love(39)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

“That’s why they gave us gloves.” He lifted a hand to show me. “And make us wear long sleeves.”

“Splinters can get through long sleeves,” I told him. “Splinters can go anywhere.” I dropped my voice to an ominous whisper. “Anywhere.”

“You’re crazy,” he said, shaking his head. Back at the woodpile, I made a show of adjusting my gloves, and Andy gravely piled not one but two pieces into my arms.

“Think you can handle all of that?”

“I’ll try,” I said, and took a deep breath, trying to stop my heart from beating so hard. “Do you have any hobbies outside of construction?”

“I run,” said Andy. His face was sober, his eyes were intent. “I’m going to go to the Olympics one day.”

“Really?” I said. “I hear the tickets are pretty expensive.”

“Oh, you,” he said, in a funny, scolding tone. He wasn’t smiling, though. He wasn’t kidding.

“What is your . . . event?” My school had a track team, the same way we had teams for everything else, but none of my friends were on it, and I’d never been to a meet or a match or whatever they had.

“I’m a distance runner. I run cross-country in the fall—the course is just over three miles. Then I do the sixteen hundred meters, the thirty-two hundred meters, and the eight-hundred-meter relay in the spring, but in college I’m probably going to do the five and the ten thousand meters.”

“So that’s how far?”

“Three and six miles.”

“I think I’d pass out if I had to run a mile.” I wasn’t lying. The most running I’d ever done was in junior high, when the bus came at seven-fifty in the morning and I’d have to dash down the street to meet it.

“They don’t make you run in gym?”

I touched my chest again. “Remember, I’m a delicate flower. The most I do in gym class is square dancing.”

“Square dancing,” he repeated, shaking his head.

“How does it work? You go to college . . .” I said, and let my voice trail off. Even if he won the entire Olympics and then went off and won a war, I knew there was no way I could date him if he wasn’t going to college. His religion, I guessed, might also be a problem. When my cousin Abby, my mother’s sister’s daughter, had married a guy named Tim whom she’d met in college, I’d overheard my mom on the phone, saying things like “At least the children will be Jewish,” and “Maybe he’ll convert.” Then there was the race thing. My parents had certainly never said that they’d wanted me with a white guy, probably because it had never occurred to them that I would date—or even meet—a teenage guy who wasn’t white. They weren’t racist—they’d never used the n-word, and they frowned when Great-Uncle Si talked about why the schvartzes were best at sports, but I didn’t think they knew too many black people, and I guessed that maybe they wouldn’t be thrilled if I wanted to take Andy to the prom . . . which I was already considering.

“I’ll run in college,” Andy confirmed. “Oregon, I hope. They’ve got the best facilities, and that’s where the best coach is right now. Then, if I’m good enough, I’ll go to a development camp. Those have sponsors, like Nike, and they’ll pay me to live there, and train and compete. I’ll be twenty-three for the 2000 games, which is just about right, although guys at my distance can compete into their thirties. So, 2004, 2008, maybe even 2012.”

An Olympic runner. I tried to picture it. I saw myself in the stands, dressed tastefully and patriotically in blue jeans, a lacy white blouse, sheer but not too revealing, with a red band in my hair. The cameras would cut to me as Andy burst past the finish line. I’d jump out of my seat and throw my hands in the air. Cut to Andy, down on the track, with one hand shading his eyes, searching the stands, looking for me.

“So you train, and you go to this camp, then to the Olympics, and you bring home the gold, and your picture’s on the Wheaties box . . .” He smiled at me. “Then what?”

His smile got bigger. “Coach, maybe. Or find something else I like.”

“People!” Alex hollered, clapping her hands. “Lunch break!”

Andy reached over, took one of my curls between his thumb and forefinger, and gave it the gentlest tug, so that it sprang back, bouncing against my cheek.

I was too surprised to say anything. I’d been kissed, I’d been groped, I’d had boys unhook my bra and try to put their hands down my pants, but I had never been the recipient of any gesture as intimate and assured as what Andy had just done. I wondered if he’d done it before, if it was a move he’d perfected on dozens of different girls. That wasn’t how it felt. It had felt spontaneous, specific to me. He likes me, I thought. But maybe not. Maybe he was just playing around, amusing himself. We hadn’t kissed yet, and that would be the thing that would seal it and tell me for sure whether he was just being friendly to someone he’d known a long time ago or whether he felt what I did.