Sometimes when I look back I wish I’d paid more attention to Harry. He was just so insignificant to me at that time that I never stopped to talk to him or play with him. But at fifteen, you have a lot more on your mind than the woes of an annoying kindergartener. That and the fact that I was a selfish bastard. But that’s beside the point.

I was so sick of myself then that I didn’t have time to be concerned with the feelings of anyone else. It wasn’t a self-hatred—not yet—but really just an annoyance. I was so darn stupid, always saying stupid things and following everyone around with a stupid expression and just being stupid. I obsessed with the inferior character traits that seemed to stand out on me like bulbous pimples.

But everyone says they feel that way in high school. So I figured I was nothing special. And that’s what I wanted, wasn’t it? To be just like everyone else. In theory, it was perfection.

Only I didn’t feel like everyone else. I felt like there was this deep chasm between me and all of my peers—like we were both standing on opposite ends of a canyon. I’d listen to some of the boys on my team talk and it was like they were speaking a foreign language. They’d be roughhousing and wrestling, and if they touched me I’d flinch and jump away and they’d laugh. You wuss, Arik, they’d snigger. Whenever I tried to bring up a topic I was thinking about I’d get strange looks and chortles. You weirdo, Arik, they’d say. And I’d feel so completely different.

But then again, everyone says that no one understands them. Because we’re all so different that we’re all the same.

Only not everyone falls in love with his same-sex best friend.

I always liked going over his house. His house was in a different dimension than mine. It smelled different, because the people who lived in it smelled different than the Reddes, and they used a different air-freshener. Roger’s mother, a small, pleasant woman who walked around holding God’s hand, always had scented candles lit around the house. It made the house, which always seemed a bit stuffy to me, smell strangely like perfume and fruit in certain corners. It was the kind of old house with protruding sharp corners, small cozy rooms, and creaky wooden floors. It was my second home for so many years and sometimes I felt more at home sprawled across the rickety front porch with Roger than I did at my own house.

His parents were very fond of me, which was definitely a good thing since they were nearly forced to adopt me. Mr. O’Donnell had liked me from the first tryouts, and he always had an enthusiastic “Hallo!” and a slap on the back for me whenever we crossed paths. He was an entertaining man, always excited and opinionated about something, with ruddy cheeks and reddish hair that matched his personality. I didn’t mind talking to him, but whenever he tried to tell me a joke or an amusing anecdote Roger would groan, roll his eyes, and drag me away by my arm.

Roger’s mother was one of the sweetest ladies I’ve ever known. She was so tiny Roger had to bend down to kiss her cheek, and I don’t think she could have weighed much over a hundred pounds. She was pale and freckly, with fluffy red-blonde hair and a little girl smile, only one lined with creases earned from years of laughing. She was designed for flowery sundresses, and making her cry was like kicking a kitten. She hugged me often, and I really liked her a lot.

I once teased tall, dark Roger that, “Gee, with short Irish redheads for parents, what happened to you?”

I exactly remember how he blushed and shrugged, and then confessed, “Well, actually, I’m adopted. So I guess that explains it.”

That stunned me at first, as I’d never known anyone who was adopted. He said his real mother had given him up when he was a baby, and that she’d been the one who named him, but other than that he didn’t know anything about her. He said it didn’t bother him, so I never brought it up.

There were a lot of things I didn’t know about him, I realized. For one, he was also dyslexic. The boy was smart, but my God, he couldn’t write. His handwriting was hideous, his spelling was nearly incomprehensible, and he never, ever got the right form of ‘there.’ He was in Level One for math, and he was smart enough to be in Honors for English too, but his pitiful writing kept him struggling at the bottom of Level Two.

The poor guy was convinced he was stupid. We would study together and he would get frustrated and end up throwing his book/notebook/backpack against the wall and sulk. Even with our difference in grades, the level difference meant we studied some of the same things. I would try to help, and it’d make him feel worse because his best friend was “a brainiac genius kid” and he was “a dope with a brain disease.” I couldn’t even do his homework for him (I gladly would have), because my handwriting was loopy and neat, and his looked like someone had chased a chicken across the paper.

One particular study session stands out in my mind, even though it was just like all the others. It was in the fall of tenth grade, and we were in his living room with our books strewn across the coffee table. We were sitting cross-legged on either side pretending to be Japanese while eating cheese curls with chopsticks. I was hard at work on my Spanish homework, which was a breeze, pretending to ignore him while he got no work done and pestered me about which girl I liked.

“I bet it’s that blonde girl—Mandy—right? She’s pretty hot,” he guessed, waving his finger at me. I didn’t look up from my irregular past participle verbs and snatched another cheese curl out of the bowl.

Roger frowned. “You are a tough nut to crack, Arík, mi muchacho.”

“I don’t like anyone, really.”

Roger rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sure. Hmm. What about that annoying girl who follows you around? Marguerite or something?”

I glanced up and cocked an eyebrow. “No.”

He chuckled. “Ooh, what about that cheerleader Jenny Osborne who hangs out at our practices? She’s really cute. She’s…you know…” he cupped his hands about a foot in front of his chest.

I grinned. Roger is not a pervert by nature, so whenever he says things like that he blushes and lowers his voice. It amuses me.

“You like girls with big boobs, Roger?” I asked, teasing him.

He grinned sheepishly and shrugged, rolling his head on his shoulders in a very Harry-like fashion. “I like girls with bodies,” he explained defensively. “Skinny girls are boring.”

“You like the hips and butts, eh?”

He grinned again, and promptly began humming the “Baby Got Back” song until I threw a pillow at him.

“Get to work, stupido!” I barked, and he threw the pillow back at me. A brief hysterical scuffle ensued, and only ended when Mr. O’Donnell opened the door and cleared his throat loudly. We both grinned guiltily from the floor, the bowl of cheese curls upended over the two of us.

“Nice to see you two hard at work,” he said flatly.

“Sorry, Mr. O’Donnell,” I said softly, smiling sweetly, playing my part as the impossible-to-be-angry-with-nice-kid-next-door. He grinned at me, and then flicked his head at Roger.

“Roger, clean up these cheese curls up before they get ingrained into the carpet.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Roger mumbled.

“I’m not kidding. I don’t want to see any smushed orange crumbs or you’ll hear about it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered tensely.

Mr. O’Donnell turned and left the room, closing the door behind him. Roger threw the empty plastic bowl at the door, and then ate a cheese curl out of my hair, the tension dissipating instantly. There was something between he and his father that I’d picked up on, some uneasiness and mutual annoyance, and whenever they were in the same room a humid tension would rise.

“Go roll in your own pork fat, old man!” Roger muttered, sticking his tongue out at the closed door. I chuckled, standing up and letting the cheese curls cascade down my pants to the floor.

“Pick those up, man-ho,” Roger commanded with a mock frown.

“You dumped them on my head, doofus,” I replied, and went back to my Spanish.

In the end Roger ate the rest of them off the floor (“Five minute rule!”) and spent the remainder of our study session making paper airplanes out of his old homework papers and throwing them at me.

God, I adored him.

Mr. O’Donnell came in again, his mouth in a tight line. “Roger, are you getting any work done?” he growled.

“Yeah, yeah,” he lied, surreptitiously rolling his eyes.

“Well, hurry up. Mr. Redde will be here in half an hour. Did you ask Arik about the trip?”

“I will if you leave.”

“Hey.” Mr. O’Donnell snapped, throwing Roger a stern look for his disrespectful tone before turning and leaving.

Roger snorted. “Guh, he’s just pissed at me because I got a D on my last English test. And I’m mad at him because he’s a lying oaf who doesn’t keep his promises.”

“Oh?”

Roger stretched out with his back against the base of the couch, his hands on his knees. “We kind of have this place in New Hampshire rented—it’s a spot at a campground. Every year around this time we go camping for day or two, just the two of us, unless he brings a friend of the family or his brother. It’s our tradition, you know? It’s pretty cool.

“But this year…” he sighed irritably. “All of a sudden he has to work on our weekend, so he can’t go. Even though he promised me last year that he would.”

“That sucks, man,” I agreed.

“Yeah, I know. But, uh…that’s what I was supposed to ask you about.” He looked up at me. “We still have the place reserved. I know how to get there, and I can set up the site by myself. My dad trusts me enough to let me go by myself if I bring some friends. So…you want to come with me?”

I stared, thoughts of shared kayaks, cozy tents, and lots of marshmallows blooming in my mind. The notion of staying up late talking around the campfire, of spending an entire night in a tent next to him—Stop it, Arik!

“Just you and me?” I asked, trying to keep the goofy giggle in my chest off my face.

“Well, I was gonna ask McKellen—you know, from soccer?—if he wanted to come.”

Ah. I knew him from soccer and the lunch table. I believed him to be a professional assassin working for the Russian government.

“Oh, cool, cool.”

“So, yeah. Next weekend. You up for it?”

“You bringing marshmallows?”

“Of course.”

“I am so there.”

Chapter Nine...