PRIVATE CONVERSATION
On Saturday evening at precisely 5:55, Grandma Madison poked her head out the front door. “Are you waiting for the invisible truck with no driver?” she wanted to know.
I looked up from the chair on the porch, where I was shivering and trying to read, huddled inside my thick winter coat. “Grandma,” I whined, and shooed her away. Enduring the cold for a few minutes while I waited for Will to pick me up was preferable to him ringing the bell and suffering through comments from Grandma and Jim. I’d debated for half an hour about what to wear, and I just wanted Will to arrive so we could get on with whatever lay ahead.
Grandma tapped her foot impatiently. “Get back inside or you’ll get sick.”
“I’m fine.”
“But it’s freezing.”
“Really, I’m fine.”
“Oh, suit yourself. It’s not like I’m going to bite any of your boyfriends.”
“Right,” I said under my breath.
“I heard that.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I added defensively.
“Mm-hm. Just like you weren’t having sex with that football player.”
“Grandma,” I hissed, but she had already shut the door with a loud bang.
The headlights of a truck flashed around the corner and Will pulled up in front of the house. I stuffed my book in my bag and raced down the front walk, opening the passenger door before he could turn the key and get out.
“Hey,” I said, out of breath.
“Hey,” he said. His hand rested on the gearshift, but he made no move to put the truck into first. He wore jeans and a thick, coal gray sweater, the edge of a black T-shirt just visible around his neck, and I could see his hockey gear in the back of the truck through the narrow window behind us. Hot air blasted from the dashboard and occasionally the gusts lifted his long bangs off to the side of his face. He shook his head and they fell into place again.
“Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?” I asked.
“As good as it could be,” he said with a shrug. “My sisters liven things up.”
“Ours was just okay, too.” I thought back to Thursday and reconsidered. “Actually, it pretty much sucked. You know?”
He nodded. “I do.”
I turned away for a moment and tried to discern if there was any movement at the front windows of the house, wondering if Grandma was watching.
“Everything okay?” Will asked.
“I think so. My grandmother can be a pain. She’s probably spying on us.”
Will laughed at this. I yanked off my hat and, one by one, the fingers of my gloves. I wedged everything into the small space between us and put my hands up to the vents, enjoying the warmth. Will tugged the bright green pom-pom at the top of my hat. “Nice.”
“Thanks. Watching hockey is a cold profession,” I said, and Will laughed again.
He took the truck out of neutral and we headed up the street. His hand nearly bumped my knee every time he shifted gears. I considered inching closer to the passenger door so we wouldn’t end up in some awkward situation, but then, there wasn’t much room to move over anyway.
“So I have a few questions for you,” I said.
Will pulled onto the highway. “What kinds of questions?”
“The ones that explain why you spend so much time in the penalty box.”
He grinned. “Oh, that kind. All I have to say is that it’s never really my fault.
“I’m sure.”
“No, really.”
“Enough of the kidding. This time I want the truth.”
“Fine, fine. How about I go over why I landed there during the last game?”
“That’s a good start—though we might be here forever,” I said. “Just make sure not to leave out any important, incriminating details.”
Will glanced over at me. “Picky.”
“Sometimes. Now get on with it already,” I urged, and proceeded to grill him the rest of the way to the rink. As with the last two games, I sat with Kecia—Krupa wasn’t singing tonight; she was away for the holiday. But unlike the previous weekend, Lewis won tonight. Will scored once and made two assists, so he was in a good mood when we returned to his truck for the ride home. I pulled the scarf around my neck up to my mouth to hide my smile.
“Got everything?” he asked before backing out of the space.
“All set,” I said.
“Since I answered your questions on the way here, now you have to answer mine,” he said.
“But—”
He interrupted my protest. “It’s only fair.” The truck stopped at a light and he turned to me. “Ready?”
“I guess,” I reluctantly agreed.
“If you could go anywhere in the world and money was no object, where would you go?”
“Anywhere else is better than Lewis.”
“That doesn’t count as an answer.”
I laughed. “You dodged my first question, remember?”
“True. But then I answered it.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, so ever since I was, I don’t know, maybe six? I’ve wanted to go to Bangalore—that’s a city in India.”
“You want to go to India?” He sounded intrigued.
“Krupa’s family is originally from Bangalore and she and I have been talking about taking a trip for years. And don’t get me started on the food we would eat.”
“Do you have a favorite dish?”
“To be honest, it’s hard to choose,” I said, trying to decide, “but Mrs. Shakti—that’s Krupa’s mom—makes these lentils that are to die for.”
He made an
ick
face. “Lentils?”
“I know, right? You’d change your mind if you tasted hers, I swear.”
After discussing no fewer than five of my favorite Indian meals in great detail, Will changed the subject again—he could be talkative when he wanted. “This next question”—he said, and looked at me while we waited at another light—“you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Uh-oh,” I said, bracing myself.
“Of all the songs you’ve listened to so far on that iPod of yours, what’s your favorite?”
I thought about it. “I think I can answer that. This is going to sound random, but I think it’s ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ that version from
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Do you know it?”
“Actually, I do. My mother loves that sound track. She used
to sing that song to me when I was little, and then to my sisters, too.”
“Do you think it’s required that all parents sing that to their kids?”
“I don’t know, I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, and slipped right on to another, less touchy topic.
Will seemed genuinely interested to find out more about me, and I found myself offering opinions on all sorts of issues and confessing things I dreamed about doing someday. Soon I was shifting toward him instead of farther away. The more unself-conscious he became, the more he pushed his hair out of his face so he could really see me and I could see him. I became aware of how the blue of Will’s eyes changed when he got excited about something, and how his face became like one big open invitation when he smiled, like right now, after we arrived at my house and I agreed to go to his game next Friday, too.
“I can’t wait,” I told him before I got out. When I headed up to the house, listening to the sound of Will’s truck idling until I was safely inside, just like last time, after the front door closed behind me, I leaned against it and sighed.
The following Monday I was at my locker when I noticed Will coming down the hall, and I wondered what would happen next, if we would just pick up where we’d left off on Saturday
night or continue to act like we didn’t know each other at school. I immediately saw how different he was. The Will from the truck who laughed and smiled at me was replaced by a boy whose eyes were distant, almost blank, as if he were a thousand miles away.
“I can’t believe Mrs. Jantzen is giving a biology test right after a holiday,” Krupa complained as he walked right past us with barely a glance in my direction.
My lungs exhaled with a relief I didn’t realize I would feel.
“Rose? Are you listening?” Krupa waved a hand in front of my face, her glittery nail polish catching the light.
“Yes. Sorry. Biology test today,” I said.
“Did your brother go back to school already?”
“What?”
“Rose! Did Jim return to college?”
“Oh. Yeah. He’ll be back again in a couple of weeks after finishing exams,” I answered distractedly, and Krupa looked at me strangely.
That one encounter with Will was the beginning of a strange set of interactions—or
non
interactions—between us. As November turned to December, we fell into a routine of sorts. Every Friday and Saturday he picked me up for his game, dropped me at the front door of the rink, and drove around back to park. I took my seat in the stands with Kecia, Tamika, and Mary, and eventually Krupa, too. No one asked how I got there, or why I was so interested in watching Will on the ice, as if there was an unspoken rule not to pry for details about whatever it was he
and I were doing. As my game count rose higher, it was difficult to believe I hadn’t always done this on weekends. But during the week, Will and I barely acknowledged each other’s existence; we didn’t call each other or text. We didn’t communicate at all.
“Rose, just talk to the boy,” Krupa said one day when, yet again, he had passed in the hall without saying hello.
“I think it’s better that we keep our friendship private, for now at least. It’s different when we’re here.
He’s
different.”
“And you aren’t?” Krupa asked, filling her bag with books to take home.
“I don’t know. Do you think I am?”
“You don’t seem at ease with him like you do at the games, that’s for sure. Maybe if you guys got used to hanging out here—”
“No,” I interrupted. “It’s just what he and I do, and it works so I don’t want to mess with it.”
With each ride home from the rink, Will and I stayed together longer and longer, parked out in front of my yard. Sometimes we would talk past two a.m., until both of us were yawning and our eyes were heavy with sleep. It wasn’t long before I fell in love with the inside of Will’s truck, the intimacy of talking for hours in that small space, watching the trees sway outside in the wind while we were inside, warm and protected, and during the occasional snowfall that turned the world around us white. The more time we spent together, the more we opened up about even the most difficult subjects.
“So, remember that iPod?” I asked him one night, when, as usual, we were parked in front of my house, with Will occasionally turning the engine on so we could blast the heat and warm up.
He nodded. “I keep waiting for you to bring it so we can listen.”
“Well, it’s sort of from my mom,” I confessed. “Wait, not sort of,” I backtracked. “She made it for me. It’s like she left me a sound track for when she was gone. You know, to have after she died.” The last word was like a punch in the silence. “She put together these playlists for me.” I laughed a little, thinking about how I used to pester her that she needed an iPod because the best part of having one was how you could arrange your songs so that they told a story, and how you could make the perfect playlist to set a scene for your life, or to remind you of an experience you never wanted to forget. “She put a playlist on it of all her favorite songs. Then there’s another of holiday music—I haven’t touched that one yet. There’s one called ‘Happy Rose,’ filled with the cheesy dance music I used to listen to that drove her crazy. It must have taken her forever to make all of them.” I trailed off.
“What an amazing thing to have given you. To have
made
for you.”
“I know,” I whispered, my words two short breaths in the quiet. I was relieved Will understood the importance of the iPod and so I decided to confess something else, something I
couldn’t stop thinking about. “One of the playlists on it, it’s called ‘TBD by Rose.’ To be determined, I guess. It’s blank.”
“Not a single song?”
“Not one. Not yet,” I added.
“So she wants you to make a new playlist. That’s intense.”
“I know,” I said, feeling the weight of this task. “Sometimes it’s overwhelming to have this big open space that I’m supposed to fill, when it’s still difficult to listen to anything at all, never mind the picking and choosing through songs to get a playlist just right—to get
this
one just right. I used to be so obsessive about them. I don’t even know how to begin.” I stared down the road ahead of us, watching the bare branches of the trees dip down toward the windshield in the wind. “The closer we get to Christmas, the harder it is to think about ever filling it in. God, I’m dreading Christmas this year.” I fidgeted, pulling on the fingers of my gloves. I leaned my head back against the seat, wondering how to interpret Will’s silence. “Was that too much information?”