I’m admittedly a little jealous.
“Hey, Noah.” I clap my hands, which makes him wince. “Pass it here.”
He stops trying to dribble and glances over at me, his face impassive. Then he turns back to Griffin, handing him the ball.
“Thanks, dude.” Griffin quicksteps around him and darts for the basket. There’s something so fluid about him when he has the ball in his hands. He’s long and lean, and all of his stiffness, all of his usual guardedness, seems to fall away.
“My turn,” Noah says, and Griffin bounces it to him gently.
“You’re good with him,” I say, when he jogs over to stand with me. Around us, the schoolyard is quiet except for the sound of a distant lawn mower, and the afternoon sun is caught in the trees at the edge of the soccer field. “Do you have younger brothers or sisters?”
He shakes his head. “Only child.”
“Well, that explains it.”
“What?”
“Why you never talked to anyone in Spanish.”
He glances sideways at me. “I talked.”
“Yeah, when Señor Mandelbaum asked you a question.”
On the court, Noah flings the ball up toward the basket, but it only makes it a couple feet in the air before falling to the asphalt with a heavy thud.
“You never talked, either,” Griffin points out.
“Did too.”
“Puedo ir al baño? Doesn’t count.”
“Hey,” I say, laughing. “Is it my fault if I had to ir al baño?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Twice every class?”
“Señor Mandelbaum was seriously, seriously boring,” I admit. “Most of the time I just ended up reading out in the hallway.”
“En inglés?” Griffin asks, and I laugh.
“Si,” I tell him. “En inglés.”
We stand there in silence, watching Noah heave the ball at the basket again and again. As his arms get tired, each shot falls shorter, until he’s basically throwing it straight up in the air, then dodging it as it comes back down again.
When the ball rolls my way, I scoop it up and take a shot myself, but it doesn’t go much farther than Noah’s attempts, barely grazing the bottom of the net.
“See?” I say, frowning. “This is why Pop-A-Shot is better.”
I glance over at Griffin, who looks amused, and it occurs to me that whatever this is—this maybe-date, which was questionable even before it took such an odd detour—it should be going horribly wrong. With an empty playground for a backdrop and a six-year-old sidekick, how could it be anything else? This certainly wasn’t how I’d imagined it, all those times I stared at the back of his head in Spanish class.
But for whatever reason, Griffin looks almost happy right now.
And I realize I am too.
“Let’s play a game of caballo,” he suggests, and Noah lets out a burst of unexpected laughter.
“Caballo,” he shouts, pumping an arm in the air. “Caballo, caballo!”
“What’s caballo?” I ask Griffin, who’s already walking over to the basket, and when he turns around, he can’t help laughing.
“It’s horse,” he says with a grin. “En español.”
* * *
It’s nearly four o’clock by the time I start worrying that this is more than just lateness and that something might be seriously wrong with Noah’s mother.
The good news is that he doesn’t seem to have noticed. Having finally grown tired of basketball, he’s lying on his back in the grass, an arm shielding his eyes from the sun, his foot moving in time to some unknown rhythm.
“It’s been two hours,” I say to Griffin, who is sitting beside me in the shade, our backs against the brick wall of the school. Our shoulders are only a few inches apart, our knees almost touching, and I keep hoping that he’ll scoot closer. But he doesn’t.
“That’s a long time,” he says, gazing off in the direction of the empty soccer fields in the distance. “A lot can happen in two hours.”
I tip my head back and close my eyes. That’s exactly the thought I’ve been trying to avoid. Beside me, I can feel Griffin studying me in profile, and it’s hard not to turn and face him. But I know that if I do, he’ll look away again, those pale eyes of his like tropical fish, so quick to dart away.
“Maybe something happened to her,” he says, and I look over at him sharply.
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” I say, before trailing off.
“Because it might be true,” he finishes, and there’s something too matter-of-fact in his tone, a bluntness that’s unsettling. I can’t decide if that’s because what he’s saying is true or because I’m rarely so honest myself.
I clear my throat. “I’m sure everything’s fine.”
“Based on what?” he asks, but there’s no challenge to his words. There’s not even any emotion behind them. He’s simply asking.
“Because,” I say, fumbling a little. “Because it has to be.”
Griffin considers this. “That’s not very logical.”
“Who said anything about logic?” I say, just as my phone rings, jittering roughly across the pavement. I grab it, relieved to see the number I’ve been dialing all afternoon, and angle myself slightly away from Griffin.
As soon as I pick up, there’s a flood of words, rushed and frantic and apologetic. “His sister broke her arm on the swings,” Noah’s mother says. “One minute she was pumping her legs and the next she was jumping off, and everything was so chaotic with the ambulance and the hospital and getting the cast, and I didn’t have the number for the camp with me, and my husband is out of town on business, and—”
“It’s fine,” I say for what feels like the millionth time this afternoon. “We have him. He’s totally fine.”
“I’ll be there in three minutes,” she says, and then the call ends, and I let out a long, relieved breath.
“See?” I turn to Griffin, who I can tell has been listening. “Everything’s fine.”
“Well,” he says with a shrug, “there were only ever two options. Either it was going to be fine or it wasn’t.”
* * *
A few minutes later, as we head over to the parking lot, I’m astonished to see Noah reach up and take Griffin’s hand.
Without meaning to, I come to an abrupt halt.
I’ve never once seen Noah initiate contact with anyone before. And for that matter, I’ve never really seen Griffin do it, either.
But now he folds the younger boy’s hand in his own as if they’ve known each other forever, as if this happens every day, as if it’s not the most extraordinary thing in the world.
* * *
That night, my sister pokes her head into my room.
“So,” she says, her eyes very bright, “was it a date?”
I think of Griffin in his blue button-down, the flicker of surprise on his face when Noah reached for his hand, the nearness of him as we sat against the brick wall of the school, the way the clouds passed overhead and the world had been quiet around us.
I think of the way we’d left things in the parking lot. By then, it was too late to head out to the arcade, and we decided to try again another day. As he walked back toward his car, though, I felt a rise of panic at the open-endedness of it all, and without thinking, I called out, “Tomorrow?”
He stopped.
“Mañana,” he agreed with a smile that made me dizzy.
“Annie.” Meg’s voice is full of impatience, and I realize she’s still waiting for an answer.
“Yeah?”
“Was it?” she asks, and I shake my head.
“No,” I say. “It was better.”
* * *
In the morning, once everyone is assembled in the gymnasium, where we start our day, I ask the kids what they’d like to play first.