Girls called sometimes, but they soon gave up because Eric had become a loner in his teenage years. He learned how to dance but never went to parties. He’d gone out now and then, 1 0 3
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but found kissing in the backseats of cars and on porches unexciting. It’s not that he didn’t think about sex. He dreamed about naked women every night, often waking with an enor-mous erection.
“What’s her name?” Eric asked his father.
“I’m not your secretary, son. Ask her yourself.”
Dr. Nolan pushed the door open and threw the cordless phone onto the bed.
“Hello,” Eric said into the receiver.
“Eric?”
“Who’s this?”
“Christie. Christie Sadler.”
“Oh. Hi.”
“I’m just calling to apologize for what Drew did today. I mean, he shouldn’t have thrown that racket at you.”
“He was just mad,” Eric said. “He should have nailed me on that last shot, but the sun got in his eyes.”
“But he’s a senior. He should be more gracious. I bet you wouldn’t have thrown anything at him.”
“I don’t know,” Eric said. “I mean, I was thinking how hard it must be on him because he always does the best. But you can see that he’s doing it for his father.”
“What do you mean?”
“His father’s all big and strong and sure of himself. Drew just wants to make him proud, and so losing to me like that means that everything else doesn’t matter at all.”
“How do you know all that?”
“You can see it in the way his father talks to him and the 1 0 4
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way he’s so serious. He makes Drew nervous. I bet if his father wasn’t there, he would have beat me easy.”
“And would you care?”
“Sure. I’d have to carry him around the track on my back.”
Christie laughed. Her voice sounded like chimes to Eric.
His erection came on without him knowing it.
“Whenever we go out he’s real worried about how I look,”
Christie whispered into the phone as if it were a big secret. “I can’t ever wear loafers or jeans when we’re on a date, even if it’s only at the pier.”
“Wow. That wouldn’t bother me. You’d look good in an overcoat and brogans.”
There were a few moments of silence then. Eric realized that there was something different in the way he felt. His mind wasn’t wandering away from the conversation. His attention was fully concentrated on Christie.
“Do you want to go get something to eat?” the senior asked.
“When?”
“Now.”
“I don’t have a license. I’m only fourteen, you know.”
“I have a car.”
“What about your boyfriend?”
“You won the match,” she said, and for the first time since Branwyn lived in the house with them, Eric felt his heart stutter.
At th e Pancake House Eric asked Christie about her aspirations for college. She’d been accepted to all the schools that Drew had and was making up her mind whether to go to the same school or one that was driving distance away.
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He wanted to know what she planned to study. Her strength was in science, but she loved poetry. T. S. Eliot was her favorite, “The Waste Land” in particular, but she worried that it might not be responsible to want to be a poet.
“Most kids in school never know what they want to be,”
Eric said. “I read an article once that the average college student changes majors three times, and a lot of them still take jobs in different fields from the ones they majored in.”
