chapter eight
JEREMIAH
I can pinpoint the exact moment everything changed. It was last summer.
Con and I were sitting on the porch, and I was trying to talk to him about what a dick the new assistant footbal coach was.
“Just stick it out,” he said.
Easy for him to say. He’d quit. “You don’t get it, this guy’s crazy,” I started to tel him, but he wasn’t listening anymore. Their car had just pul ed into the driveway. Steven got out first, then Laurel. She asked where my mom was and gave me a big hug. She hugged Conrad next and I started to say, “Hey, where’s the Bel y Button?” And there she was.
Conrad saw her first. He was looking over Laurel’s shoulder. At her. She walked toward us. Her hair was swinging around al over the place and her legs looked miles long. She was wearing cutoffs and dirty sneakers. Her bra strap was sticking out of her tank top. I swear I never noticed her bra strap before. She had a funny look on her face, a look I didn’t recognize. Like shy and nervous, but proud at the same time.
I watched Conrad hug her, waiting my turn. I wanted to ask her what she’d been thinking about, why she had that look on her face. I didn’t do it though. I stepped around Conrad and grabbed her up and said something stupid. It made her laugh, and then she was just Bel y again. And that was a relief, because I didn’t want her to be anything but just Bel y.
I’d known her my whole life. I’d never thought of her as a girl. She was one of us. She was my friend. Seeing her in a different way, even just for a second, it shook me up.
My dad used to say that with everything in life, there’s the game-changing moment. The one moment everything else hinges upon, but you hardly ever know it at the time. The three-pointer early on in the second quarter that changes up the whole tempo of the game. Wakes people up, brings them back to life. It al goes back to that one moment.
I might have forgotten about it, that moment when their car drove up and this girl walked out, a girl I barely recognized. It could have just been one of those things. You know, where a person catches your eye, like a whiff of perfume when you walk down the street. You keep walking. You forget. I might have forgotten.
Things might have gone back to the way they were before.
But then came the game-changing moment.
It was nighttime, maybe a week into the summer. Bel y and I were hanging out by the pool, and she was cracking up over something I said, I don’t remember what. I loved that I could make her laugh. Even though she laughed a lot and it wasn’t some kind of feat, it felt great. She said, “Jere, you’re, like, the funniest person I know.”
It was one of the best compliments of my life. But that wasn’t the game- changing moment.
That happened next. I was real y on a rol , doing an impersonation of Conrad when he wakes up in the mornings. A whole Frankenstein sort of thing. Then Conrad came out and sat next to her on the deck chair. He pul ed on her ponytail and said, “What’s so funny?”
Bel y looked up at him, and she was actual y blushing. Her face was al flushed, and her eyes were shining. “I don’t remember,” she said.
My gut just twisted. I felt like somebody had drop-kicked me in the stomach. I was jealous, crazy jealous. Of Conrad. And when she got up a little while later to get a soda, I watched him watch her walk away and I felt sick inside.
That was when I knew things would never be the same.
I wanted to tel Conrad that he had no right. That he’d ignored her al these years, that he couldn’t just decide to take her just because he felt like it.
