I'll Be Here

suddenly bowling seemed a rather interesting leisure activity.  I pictured Alex and me (along with our parents of course) forming a league with matching shirts and embroidered ball bags. 
    All right.  Maybe I was getting ahead of myself. 
    It was our family against theirs, and considering that a third of our team was me, and the last time that mom and Jake had bowled Kurt Cobain had been alive, we didn’t put up a very competitive fight. 
    In between turns, Alex and his father gave me tips on how to become a better bowler.
    “Tilt your torso.”
    “Cross your leg like this. ”
    “Put your weight into it.”
    Stuff like that.
    And once our parents were on to their second pitcher of beer, Alex and I were comfortable enough to talk about school—about teachers that we’d both had and the assembly three months earlier when Noah Watkins had gotten up and mooned the teachers.  He and Noah were friends and he said that Noah had gotten a three-day suspension and a month of after-school clean-up for the stunt. 
    Alex knew Laney’s name though he couldn’t think of her exactly.  He asked questions about my life and I answered.  I told him about deciding to become a vegetarian and how much I loved art and then I mentioned that I wanted to start a compost program at the school which he thought was a great idea. 
    Alex wanted to be an architect. 
    He said it like there was no question that he would one day become an architect and I liked that.  When I asked him why architecture, he looked down at his hands and I couldn’t see his eyes through the dark lashes that lay on his cheeks. 
    “I want to make something beautiful from nothing,” he said finally and I thought that his answer was beautiful. 
    Alex told me about Antoni Gaudi and Carlo Scarpa, who were two of his favorite architects and I loved the way his eyes brightened and his hands moved as if he could shape his words into the buildings he described.
    And at the end of the night Alex handed me his box of hot tamales and told me that I could finish them off. 
    I tried not to read into that. 
    I tried not to imagine us at the winter dance together, in coordinated outfits swaying to a cheesy love song. 
    I tried to play things cool through six more family outings, sixteen “hellos” and four casual waves in the hallways of our middle school.  Then I gave up. 
    Of course I loved Alex Faber.
    But I couldn’t tell him about it.  That would ruin absolutely everything.  So I kept my romantic inclinations to myself.  Laney knew and I think that my mom suspected as much, but for the most part, I crushed hard core on Alex in secret. 
    I was content to watch him go out with Clarissa Kelly for exactly twenty-seven days at the end of his eighth grade year because I knew it wouldn’t last.  I was okay when Marina Hattersfield talked to him for far too long at his middle school graduation party because her laugh was frightfully high-pitched and I knew from an incident involving a whistle months earlier that his ears wouldn’t be able to withstand that laugh of hers for any significant period of time. 
    Alex and I ended up going to different high schools because of zoning lines (I cursed the county commissioners), but I stayed current on his life through the constant gossip of our mothers.  When I would overhear Brooke telling my mom about the girls that called the house or the one that slipped a note under the front door on Valentine’s Day I can’t say that my stomach wasn’t churning in protest, but I lived. 
    There were boys in my life too.  There was Clay Allen who I had a one-day romance with that began on the morning bus and concluded by the fourth stop of the afternoon bus.  And Jared Teague, an older boy who escorted me to the fall homecoming dance freshman year and attempted to grope me gracelessly all night.  When he tried to drive me somewhere other than home after the dance I threatened to call his house phone and tell his mother what he was up to. 
    And there was the other Jared that I met on vacation at Aunt Delta’s.  He was fifteen months older than me and had a cute smile and muscled stomach that he liked to flaunt on the deck of his dad’s speedboat.  He had square fingers and a mole just above his collarbone that I kissed one night out on the dock in a sudden burst of recklessness. 
    I had kissed exactly four boys a total of eleven times.   
    And it was nice.  Not great, but nice.
    I figured that “great”