Chapter One #2
“Finley,” I said, feeling my face flush. “Hope.”
“Finley and Colin,” he repeated. “We sound like a singer-songwriter duo. Can you carry a tune?”
“Um,” I said. “No.”
“I’m not great either. Guess we better stick to history, huh?
” And with that, he grinned at me. Not smiled, but grinned, and until I met Colin I honestly hadn’t realized there was much of a difference.
But it was obvious the way this simple thing lit up both his whole face and, I was embarrassed to admit, my heart.
Yowza. Later, I’d hear a million stories about Colin and his grin, how as a baby and kid everyone commented on it, the way it ensured he never met a stranger, one of many things making him a “born politician!” his dad would say.
But at that moment, I thought that grin was mine alone. And I liked that.
“Okay,” Ms. Hernandez said. “Next, grab a piece of paper and a pen. I’m going to mark ten minutes on the clock. When I say go, I want you to list all fifty states.”
Now one of the laptop girls, who had straight black hair and glasses, did raise her hand. “Ms. Hernandez, is this a competition?”
“It is. First team to get all the states within the time limit gets extra-credit points.”
“Do you really think that’s wise? That everyone here can, you know, handle it?”
There was a flurry of laughter, although I wasn’t exactly sure of the joke myself. Then I realized Ms. Hernandez was smiling, looking at my partner.
“Colin? Can you do this without having a breakdown?” she asked.
“No,” the other laptop girl said, and snorted.
“That was last year,” Colin said, but it was clear he was in on the joke, that this was a thing. “And, I might add, a possibly biased call on the part of the official.”
“I was the official,” Ms. Hernandez said, “and it was the wrong answer.”
“Last year!” Colin said again, and everyone laughed. “I’m a new man now. Please proceed.”
“Competitive Colin,” the laptop girl with glasses added. “We’ll all be praying for your partner, poor thing.”
“Oh, Finley is going to wipe the floor with you guys,” he replied confidently. “I won’t even have to help.”
What? I thought.
“Go!” yelled Ms. Hernandez, and the room was suddenly buzzing. Colin immediately wrote down our home state. “Forty-nine to go. What’s our strategy?”
“Are you really that competitive?”
“No,” he said, writing down California, Oregon, and Washington. “Maybe. Yes. How are you on the Midwest?”
“Not as good as you think I am,” I said. “Put down Hawaii and Alaska.”
“My feeling is that you have a killer instinct. I have a sense for these things.” He was writing down states quickly as he spoke: all of New England, the Deep South, Texas, and the Gulf.
“Do the norths and souths, Dakotas and Carolinas,” I said.
I noticed the girl with glasses behind him was listening to us and grabbed a pencil, gesturing not to talk.
He shot me a thumbs-up, then pushed his desk closer so we were right next to each other, making room for me to add to the list. Instead, I found an empty spot on the page and started to draw a map.
You are brilliant, he scribbled, in between adding Virginia, Maryland, and Tennessee.
Flattered, I started filling in the mid-Atlantic states, then moved west. I got hung up for a second on Arkansas and Michigan, but rallied. All around us people were shouting states, but we were stealthy, silent except for the scraping of his pencil and mine.
W’s and M’s, I scribbled, having run out of sure things I knew in the middle of the map.
Montana, Wyoming, Wisconsin, Minnesota, he added. Then he looked at me, eyebrows raised. I snapped my fingers.
Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, I wrote.
“Four Corners!” he said. “Nice.”
“Shhhh!” I swatted at him with my hand.
“Oh. Sorry,” he said. I could feel him watching me as I bent my head back over the paper, thinking.
“Five minutes to go,” announced Ms. Hernandez. Colin looked back at the girls behind us.
“Keep your head in the game,” I said. “You want them to have bragging rights?”
Another smile. “I might love you,” he announced broadly. “Just saying.”
I couldn’t dwell on this—okay, maybe I did for a second—because we only had three left to go. “Come on, come on,” I said under my breath, running my pencil over my makeshift map.
Colin was biting his lip, thinking as well. Indiana, he wrote. Illinois.
One left. We looked at each other. Suddenly nothing mattered more to me than remembering this one last state.
A squeal from the laptop girls, and they huddled again over their paper. Colin looked at me. “They’re double checkers,” he said. “They’ve got it, there’s no—”
Idaho, I wrote down. I stuck up my hand. “We’re done!”
“We have a possible winner,” Ms. Hernandez said, walking over to us. “Pending my check.”
“We’re done too,” the girl with the black hair shouted.
“Too late, Kumara!” Colin hollered back. But I was only focused on Ms. Hernandez, running a finger down our list of states. When she reached the final one, she looked at me.
“He’s going to be insufferable now,” she told me. “You know that, right?”
But I didn’t care, wasn’t thinking about that one bit as she declared us the champs.
Some people were clapping, some booing, but all I could focus on was Colin, grinning widely at me as he held up a palm for a high five.
When I pressed my hand to his, he wrapped his fingers around mine, giving them a quick squeeze.
“Way to go, Idaho,” he said. In all the noise and commotion, I heard him as clear as day. Then I squeezed back.
Idaho.
That one word would become my nickname, our inside joke, the beginning of everything.
As we sat at Double Burger on our first date, three days later, we decided we would have to go there, maybe in a year’s time, to commemorate our victory.
Never mind that we were both under eighteen, had no actual money to speak of, and still probably would have had trouble picking it out on a map.
Already, with Colin, anything seemed possible.
“Have you ever been?” he asked me as he started another burger. The boy could eat, although he was so skinny it was hard to tell where it all went.
“To Idaho?” I asked. He nodded, chewing. “Nope. You?”
He shook his head, helping himself to the fries we’d put on the table between us, only after he’d established that I didn’t believe in putting any condiments on top of them—Are you a drencher?
I can’t date a drencher—as well as my preference for extra salt.
“The only part of the country I know other than here is Chicago, which was home of the Frisbee Fam until I was in eighth grade and my dad got his job here.”
The Frisbee Fam. Who else did I know with a family nickname? I loved it. “What’s he do?”
“Political science professor at the U,” he replied. “When you meet him, avoid asking him about the election. He won’t stop talking for hours.”
He was like that too, right out of the gate: a maker of plans, already assuming a future for us.
It wasn’t just Idaho, or asking about my drencher status, or this—prepping me already to meet his dad (who did bring up a recent decision by the president before going on to list both pros and cons in full detail).
There was also how he referred to his friends, and how they’d love me—the laptop girls, Hannah Klein and Nalini Kumara, were two of his besties—not to mention that I was a natural for their group game night, which they did every week after the Frisbee Fam Friday dinner, another tradition.
“What about you?” he asked. “You always lived in Lakeview?”
I nodded, adding some salt to my end of the fries. “My parents met at school here. When they divorced, Dad and I stayed.”
“Where’s your mom live?”
Immediately, I had a flash of her current apartment. All her places—and there had been several as she climbed the corporate ladder—were done in the same aesthetic: modern, cool, and minimalist. “Timlee,” I said. “That’s her home base. But she travels most of the year.”
“What’s she do?”
With someone else, I might have felt like I was being interrogated. But Colin’s curiosity was flattering, even contagious. His need for details made me feel interesting. “She’s a corporate staffing advisor. Basically, the person who comes and tells you who to fire.”
His eyes widened. “Wow. Intense.”
“I guess,” I said, dunking a fry. “I don’t actually know her that well.”
A pause, just one beat. Then he said, “What about your dad?”
I smiled. “He’s an English teacher at the Fountain School. My stepmom teaches kindergarten. They met there, when I was in her class. Now they have the twins, my brother and sister, who are six. Will and Piper. And the baby, Leo.”
He froze for a second. “Wait. You went to the Fountain School?”
I nodded. “All my life until this year.”
“I have always been fascinated with that place,” he said. He leaned in closer. “Is it true there are chickens on the campus?”
“Yep. A coop and everything. We got to collect eggs and feed them.”
“I always wanted a goat,” he told me. “My mom was not on board.”
“She’s smart,” I told him. “The one at Fountain was a nightmare.”
He looked thrilled, as if this was another check in my column. “You had goats, too?”
“Just one,” I said, and he laughed. “His name was Seymour.”
“Are you kidding me with this?” I shook my head. “Idaho! You’re fascinating. What other secrets are you hiding?”
I laughed. “None. Livestock’s all I got.”
“Livestock can take you a long way,” he said. “I can’t wait until you come over for Friday dinner. It’s going to be all about Seymour the Goat, right out of the gate.”
“You guys really eat dinner together every Friday?” I asked. “Our house is too chaotic for that. Sometimes I just eat cereal and call it dinner.”
“Leigh Frisbee is a firm believer in family face time,” he said. “Leigh Frisbee does not tolerate cereal in the evening.”
“Leigh Frisbee sounds a little scary,” I said.