6. Chapter Six
Chapter Six
Then
When we were growing up, other kids often thought that Theo and I were brother and sister. By the time we were in fourth and fifth grade, it was well-known that we weren't. Instead, kids started asking if we were dating.
“No!” I would protest, my disgust completely sincere. “He’s just Theo.”
We grew older, though, and as we did, things did start to change. At first, the changes were so incremental that I hardly noticed them. One summer day right before I started middle school, I was stacking paper bags under the register when a realization popped into my mind. I gasped out loud. Theo looked up from the book he was reading at the counter. “What?”
“We haven't played one of our games in here in forever ,” I said, already amping up, ready to go. “We should do something.”
Theo looked at me for a moment. He was nearly thirteen, and his face wasn’t as round as it used to be. I also thought that his eyebrows were getting longer. They looked dangerously close to connecting in the middle. “We’re too old for that,” he said stiffly, and my excitement evaporated.
“Said who?” I demanded, because that didn’t sound like Theo at all. I knew for a fact that he still had a fuzzy cartoon blanket that he slept with in the winter.
He put a sticky note in his book to mark his place and set it aside, his movements measured, like he was buying time. “My mom told me that I needed to set a better example,” he said, “so that you would stop getting in trouble with your mom.”
My face heated up at his implication: that I needed someone to set an example for me. That Theo was my superior somehow, when all my life, I’d thought of us as being equals. “That’s stupid.”
“It doesn’t always feel like it,” he said, “but I’m older than you, Sass.”
After shoving the last stack of bags into place, I sat back on my heels. I looked up at him, but decided that I didn’t like him towering over me and jumped to my feet. “That doesn’t make you better,” I snipped. In my eleven-year-old brain, it seemed like a real zinger, and I punctuated it by turning on my heel and walking away.
A while later, I was still pouting when Theo found me. He approached with both hands behind his back, and when I looked at him, he smiled sheepishly. “Wanna play a game?”
“No,” I sniffed.
“Come on,” he said, and showed me the dust cloths in his hands. He shook one in my face, tempting me. “I call the top of the water fountain.”
I stayed stubborn for just as long as it took him to turn on his heel, as if he was about to leave me behind. Lunging forward, I snatched one of the cloths from his hand and then took off at a sprint toward the back of the store. Theo’s footsteps were loud behind me as he followed.
“Theo,” called Theo’s dad from somewhere. “Nina. Stop running.”
“Sorry!” we yelled, but we didn’t stop.
Theo edged in front of me. I grabbed his elbow, trying to hold him back, but all I accomplished was causing a crash. We went tumbling to the ground in a tangle of limbs, me shrieking, him laughing. I tried to get to my feet, but Theo’s body was draped perpendicular to mine, weighing me down. I lay back on the floor and burst into giggles, our spat from earlier forgotten.
We were still laying there when Cecil, came around the corner. He sighed when he saw us, but I knew he was concealing his amusement. “Guys, come on. Get up.”
Theo pushed himself up on his hands. I caught his eye and returned his grin, feeling like my face was about to split in two.
That was the second time I felt butterflies around Theo. It was just the tiniest flutter in my belly, almost undetectable. But it was there, and I spared only a quick thought to wonder about it before stumbling to my feet.
I don’t remember another moment like that until I was thirteen, Theo was fourteen, and we were doing our after-school chore of restocking the shelves. We had perfected our routine at that point: I would start at one end of the aisle and stock the shoes on the bottom half, and he would start at the other end and stock the top half.
When we met in the middle, Theo stepped around me as he usually did. I wasn’t really paying attention to him, but then he lost his balance and his hand landed on my back. I startled, my stomach turning over at the warmth of his palm, the press of his fingertips through my shirt.
“Sorry,” he said, using me to push himself back up to standing. He grabbed two shoeboxes from the cart behind him and shoved them into the gaps while I blinked at him, confused by my body’s reaction to a touch that was as familiar to me as my own.
As his body grew and changed, I carefully cataloged the broadening of his shoulders, the sharpening of his jaw, the deepening of his voice. I was later to start puberty than most of the other girls, but this didn’t really bother me much until Theo got a girlfriend who had at least one full cup size on me. Suddenly, I found myself overcome with insecurity, and that led to one of the lowest points of my adolescence: my mother walking in on me shoving socks in my bra.
“You’ll fill out,” she said once I’d yanked the nearest shirt over my head. “But make sure you’re trying to impress the right kind of boy.”
My face was already flaming hot, but when Theo popped into my head, I felt my blush deepen. “What do you mean?”
I was expecting her to talk about a churchgoing boy—we did go to church back then, although it was mostly for the sake of appearances—who would treat me well. Instead, she said, “There’s a lot more to think about than how cute a boy is. You need to think about his family, where he comes from. What he comes from.” At this, she rubbed her thumb and first two fingers together, as if stroking money. “Whether being with him is going to take you someplace new, or leave you stuck right here.”
I truly didn’t know what she was talking about, but I mumbled something in agreement so she’d go away. Once she was gone, I grumpily removed the socks from my bra and resigned myself to the fate of my flat chest.
Over time, I began to understand what Mom meant that day. I understood what it meant for me—I was not to become romantic with Theo or anyone else who was in the same economic boat as us—and I understood the implications for her: she wasn’t happy, stuck there in Amity running a failing shoe shop. It was disconcerting. I didn’t know what to do with that knowledge except try to pretend I didn’t have it.
When I started to get involved with boys, I was indiscriminate. I didn’t worry about who or what they came from. I generally didn’t think of Theo as someone to pursue; most of the time, Theo was still just Theo to me. But there were moments, few and far between, when I felt something else. There were even times when I wondered if he did, too: moments when I caught him staring at my lips or my butt, light touches on my back that seemed to move lower each time it happened. It would be disconcerting for a moment, and then I would shake it off, and life would go on.
Until the summer after my junior year.
That was when everything— everything —changed.