“Mom!” she called over her shoulder. Into the house. “Lucas and I are going. See you later.”
And then we were walking down the street together hand in hand. And life was just the way you see it in the movies or on TV.
My life. Was all that.
“If anybody asks you,” I said, “we had this picnic in the park.”
We were up in the woods, on the highest hill I knew how to find, looking down through the trees at the town spread out below. I hadn’t chosen a spot looking over the river. Libby might have thought it was a nice view, but I didn’t. Not since reading that newspaper story.
“Probably smart,” she said. “Parents are weird about the woods, and I don’t know why.”
“I don’t know why, either. I like it up here.”
I lifted the checkered tablecloth off the basket. Unfolded it and spread it carefully on the forest floor.
“Have a seat,” I said.
She settled on one edge of it.
“This is nice,” she said, looking down over the town. “I like this.”
“I hope it doesn’t seem weird to have sandwiches for dinner.”
“I don’t see why a person shouldn’t,” she said. “Besides, I didn’t exactly think you had a roast turkey or a baked lasagna in there.”
I sighed out a bit of tension and began unpacking the food. Carefully laying out two sturdy china plates, cloth napkins. I arranged the fruit and the wrapped sandwiches on a third plate in the middle of the cloth. The cookies were in a plastic storage container, and I set those beside the serving plate.
Then I saw the pink rose, which had apparently fallen to the bottom as I walked. I’d forgotten it. And it was supposed to come first. But anyway, better late than never, I figured.
“Here,” I said, pulling it up by the stem. “This is for you.”
She took it from me, her eyes soft.
“You’re a very thoughtful boy,” she said. “You know that?”
It made me blush, so I turned my face down. I pulled the two small bottles of apple juice out of the basket and put one by her plate, one by mine. I never answered. I was too embarrassed by her praise.
“I can’t believe some girl hasn’t already snapped you up.”
Flustered, I became a tour guide for sandwiches.
“This is sliced ham,” I said, pointing. “And this is deviled ham.”
“Ooh. I like deviled ham. And I haven’t had it for ages.”
I put that one on her plate. I wasn’t sure if I should take it out of the plastic first. Maybe that would have been more polite. But maybe she didn’t want my hands all over her food. By the time I remembered I had made the sandwich with my hands, I had already gone ahead with giving it to her wrapped.
“There’s also turkey and tuna,” I said. “If you’re hungry enough for two.”
She ignored the statement and stared into my face as she unwrapped her sandwich.
“Have you had a girlfriend before?”
“Not really,” I said.
The honest answer would have been not at all. Not in any way. But I thought what I said sounded better.
“I wonder why.”
Now we were traveling down a less comfortable road. Were we really going to analyze whether there was something wrong with me? Why I repelled girls like the wrong end of a magnet?
“You do know I’m only fourteen,” I said. “Right?”
“I know.”
“Does that bother you? That I’m a little younger than you?”
“No. Who cares? It’s only a year. And you’re very mature. And you seem to know a lot about how to have a girlfriend for a guy who never had one.”
I did not wade into the minefield of replies.
We began to eat our sandwiches. I took the sliced ham, since I figured she was less likely to choose it after eating deviled ham. We ate in silence for a time, staring down over the town. The sun was on a long slant through the trees, off to the west. And I felt unbalanced.
Turned out I had no idea what unbalanced even felt like. Not yet. I was right on the cusp of finding out.
“I think I might know why,” she said.
“Why what?”
“Why you haven’t had a girlfriend.”
Her words iced my belly in a heartbeat. Was she really going to tell me what I was doing wrong? After everything had gone so well up until this moment?
“If you want to know, that is,” she added.
I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.
She looked over at my face and seemed to pick up on my discomfort.
“Oh, it’s not you,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anything bad about you.”
I breathed a little. Not much, but more than I had been breathing.
“Okay. I guess I want to know, then.”
“It’s just that you have to really think about who you want to hang around with. People will judge you by that.”
I had a bite of sandwich in my mouth, and I chewed it before answering. I didn’t know who she meant. Maybe Mrs. Dinsmore? But how would she even know that? My intention was to ask, but as it turned out, I didn’t need to.
She went on to tell me.
“I really think you can do better than Connor Barnes for a friend.”
I swallowed hard. The bite of sandwich seemed to hang up on its way to my stomach, and I felt a wave of something like heartburn.
“What’s wrong with Connor?”
“He’s just kind of weird,” she said. “And kind of a sad sack. He always has this big black cloud over his head, following him everywhere he goes. I mean, not really, but . . . you know what I mean. I think you’d have a lot more friends if he weren’t with you all the time.”
My mind had begun to run circles inside my head. I was trying to get a feel for whether this was a “game over” sort of thing,
