The Book of Us Read online

  So, it was a revelation to see her play basketball.

  In a way, he wasn’t proud of going to the game. He knew that part of him wanted to see her in the team’s shorts and top.15 A small part of him, but it was there. Walk definitely did. He let that out the instant Noah brought up the idea of going to a game.

  School got out an hour early on game days and all the students were supposed to attend, but many didn’t, especially when the girls were playing.16

  Noah had been thrilled by what Miranda said to him and by her touch, but also by the way she gazed at him. She seemed to be almost trying to look into him — a questioning, penetrating peer.

  He made up his mind at that moment that he was going to watch her play.

  “Up for some Black Ops at my place?” asked Walk as they closed up their lockers that day.

  “I think I’m going to the game.”

  “What?”

  “The girls’ game.”

  That was probably when Walk started imagining Miranda — and some of the other girls — in their shorts and tops.

  “Right on,” he smiled.

  Unfortunately, the first person they encountered at the gym was Constance Mark.

  “Well, look at what we have here,” she sneered, loudly, sitting next to Bruce and a girl named Rosie Gonzalez, making up about a quarter of the entire crowd on that side of the bleachers. Constance was constantly on the guys in her class to come to these games. “What’s the attraction?” she asked, loudly again, then glanced out toward Miranda and the other girls who were warming up.

  “Go away,” said Walk, under his breath.

  “I heard that, Jones. The truth is a bit too much for you, isn’t it? Typical.”

  But Miranda wasn’t sneering. It was obvious to Noah that she was trying to focus on what she was doing, like she always did, but he also noticed that she noticed him. As she rebounded a ball under the basket and made her way out to the foul line for a jump shot, she caught sight of him sitting down with Walker. She missed the shot. He had the feeling that didn’t happen often.

  Much to his shame, he did not pay a lot of attention to her form — at least not to her shooting form. There she was … no longer in loose clothing. To Noah, and, he had to guess, to every other heterosexual male in the universe, she was spellbinding. She wasn’t the tallest player on the team, she was just above average, and yet there was nothing average about her. She was … well, he couldn’t describe it. Everything about her seemed the way it ought to be. She was like the golden mean or the golden ratio or divine geometry or whatever that thing was in mathematics, architecture, and nature, where everything looked beautiful and balanced.17 She wasn’t perfect and yet she was. Once the ball was tipped to start the game, she was all business, or mostly so.

  It seemed to Noah that she was aware that he was there even as she played. She did well, as she apparently always did, but somewhere in her alert eyes, in her perspiring face, in the very language of her movements, she knew he was watching her. It was so exhilarating that he did not have the words to describe it. He felt like they were doing this together, like he, sitting in the crowd, and she, running on the court in another crowd, were communicating with each other. Some sort of chemical invasion was happening to him too. He felt like he was weightless and simultaneously heavy. He felt so happy that he almost couldn’t stay upright. He had the sense that out there in the game, she felt the same way.

  When the buzzer sounded at the end, he wanted to walk out onto the court and talk with her as she celebrated with her teammates. He wanted to take her into his arms. It turned out that wasn’t needed because she turned in the midst of the celebration and smiled at him. He smiled back.

  “Man, what is going on?” asked Walk as they left the gym. “Miranda Owens was smiling at you! It’s like … like … she’s in love with you or something.”

  That sounded weird coming out of Walker Jones’s mouth. It was as if the word “love” and definitely the words “in love” were from some sort of foreign language that he had no idea existed, let alone how to pronounce.

  Noah was flustered. “Let’s go,” he said before bounding down off the bleachers, turning toward the exit, and then picking up the pace in the hallway, making Walk nearly run to keep up. They pushed through the outside doors and felt the sun shining down on them. It had been so different on the way to school in the morning. It was surreal; the cold fall day had transformed into a strangely warm late afternoon. “Let’s go to your place. I want to shoot hoops.”

  It had become their thing during their first month or so of friendship. Walk had a net in his driveway and he had lowered it a bit, just below standard height, so he might have an outside chance at dunking. He never did, of course, not even at that height, though Noah had come close. All through September and into October they had banged around, stripping down to shorts and skins, Noah destroying Walk each and every time, no matter what game they played or challenge they tried.

  “You’re good,” Walk had said to him more than once. “You should have tried out for the team.”

  It wasn’t Noah’s thing, though.

  Noah felt awfully strange that day as they made their way to Walk’s house. Now, he couldn’t tell if he was happy or angry or what. He did know he was frustrated. He couldn’t get Miranda out of his mind. Not the look she gave him, the sound of her voice, or the way she moved with the ball in her hands on the court. He felt like he wanted to sprint to the end of the earth … or jump off a cliff.

  They walked home in silence.

  “You’re a talkative bastard,” Walk finally said. “Why are you so —”

  “No reason.”

  “Right.”

  “If I say I have no reason for being quiet, then I mean it!”

  He drew to a halt when he said that and glared at Walker Jones. Those words were the first angry ones that had passed between them. Walk looked a little scared.

  “Okay,” he said quietly.

  Miranda Owens was untouchable, unknowable, and unreachable. She was beyond Noah Greene, and he wanted to hit something.

  * * *

  He took it to Walk like he never had before on their little driveway court. He pushed him around, he dribbled past him as if he were standing still, and he even ran him over a couple of times. Every shot he tried to make, he made. He schooled him.

  “Give me a chance, LeBron,” said Walk at one point.

  Noah was perspiring like a fiend. He took off his shirt. Scrawny Walker Jones did the same.

  Then Noah did it.

  He dunked.

  Noah saw that Walk was leaning to his left, knowing that Noah usually went right, so Noah faked left, drew Walk that way, then took two steps and rose up above him like Michael Jordan in old clips. He slammed the ball down through the net with two hands, nearly tearing the basket off the backboard.18 They both stood and stared at what he had done, the hoop still vibrating. Then, they started to laugh, but it didn’t last long.

  They realized that someone — four people, in fact, were standing out on the sidewalk at the end of the driveway staring at them. Noah, however, only saw one. Miranda.

  She was gazing at him as he stood shirtless and sweating, back on land after accomplishing his moonshot. Walker grabbed his shirt and threw it back on. Beside Miranda stood Constance Mark, Bruce King, and Rosie Gonzalez.

  Then something equally ridiculous happened. Miranda started coming toward them. Well, toward Noah. She was smiling again, but not quite the same smile she had given him back in the gymnasium; this one was a little more self-conscious, shy, but it had the same effect on him. He had not known that Miranda could ever look shy around anyone. Wow, thought Noah, am I doing that to her? He could feel himself rising up into the air, watching all of this happen in slow motion. His heart began to pound.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” he somehow got out. She looked at him as if Walk wasn’t there, as if her friends had faded into the distance.

  “Nice dunk,” she said. “I didn’t know you could …”

  “Play ball?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t.”

  She laughed. “That’s not true.”

  “Walk lowered the basket.”

  “Still, that was impressive.”

  “Come on, Mir!” shouted Constance from the sidewalk. “Let’s go.”

  “Can I play with you?” asked Miranda.

  Noah tried to answer, but nothing came out.

  “Uh,” said Walker, “it’s just me and —”

  “Sure,” said Noah.

  By this time, Constance and the other two had come up the driveway.

  “An interesting challenge in the game of basketball. A boy against a girl,” said Bruce.

  Miranda grinned at him and then back at Noah. “Do you want to do that? Me against you?”

  “Sure.”

  She took off her hoodie and tossed it on the ground. “My ball first.”

  He let her go by him and score. As she corralled the ball and passed him on her way back to the foul line, she came up close. “Don’t do that,” she said heatedly. She was deadly serious, not pleased with him. It was like a command. There was something anxious in her voice too, as if she were worried that he was not measuring up or something.

  He almost knocked her into the garage door the next time she tried to go by him, rising up as she passed the ball smoothly and low to the ground from her right hand to her left, and raising it to try a hook shot. He swatted the ball with everything he had, sending it crashing into a garbage can and incidentally knocking her backward.
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  “Isn’t that a penalty or something?” asked Constance. “That’s not fair.”

  Miranda was smiling. She had smoothly regained her balance. “He got the ball first. All ball. No foul.”

  He dunked on her. When he landed, they were inches apart, his skin almost touching her T-shirt. They both paused for a second. She smelled good. How was that even possible after this sort of physical exertion?

  Once, she touched his bare chest when it seemed she didn’t need to. “Sorry,” she said, but it was almost as if she didn’t mean it. “That’s all right,” he responded, and they grinned at each other.

  She was a handful, of course. He didn’t beat her every time he tried, and she scored on him several times, but in the end, he triumphed, ten to six. He was amazed at how good she was when he tested her — she was strong and never gave an inch. She was graceful and talented. It made him realize that he was pretty good too.

  “Can we go now?” asked Constance.

  “We don’t have to,” said Rosie, who was staring at Noah, somehow doing so while barely looking at him.

  “No,” said Miranda. “I’ve got to go. I told Mom I’d be home by 6:30.” She picked up her hoodie and draped it over an arm. Her face was wet with perspiration. “Thanks for the game,” she said to Noah. “I’ll beat you next time.” It was obvious to Noah how competitive she was, that she had not liked the fact that she had lost; he could tell by the way she had played, the way she had strained to win, the slight anger in her face and in some of her aggressive moves. Yet there was also something in her expressions that was happy too — not to lose, but to have him engage her so honestly.

  “Next time?” said Constance.

  “Another occasion of playing the game of basketball together, just the two of them likely during that occurrence,” said Bruce.

  “I get that,” muttered Constance.

  The four of them started making their way down the driveway, but before they reached the end, Miranda turned and walked back toward Noah.

  “Can I, uh, talk to you for a second?”

  He shot the ball at the hoop, swish, and walked over to her. They talked for a moment in low voices. They smiled at each other as they parted, Miranda looking right at him, he glancing at her and then down at the ground.

  Miranda and her friends were gone for nearly five minutes, and Noah had scored ten more points on his poor opponent before Walk finally asked him.

  “What did she say?”

  “Not much.”

  They played a little more.

  “What do you mean ‘not much’?”

  Noah fired the ball at him, chest high. Walk barely got his hands up in time.

  “She asked me out.”

  Walk dropped the ball. It dribbled on the pavement and rolled onto the backyard.

  “She what? Miranda Owens?”

  Noah picked up his shirt, put it on, grabbed his backpack, threw it over his shoulder, and walked off down the driveway, heading home.

  “See you later,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Nice exit,” said Walk to himself. “I’d give my left nut to do that someday, all of that.” He retrieved the ball and went to his back door. As he entered, to the friendly cries of “hello” from both his mother and father, he thought about Noah Greene. What did he have that would make a girl like that, an unbelievable girl like that, want to ask him out? What did he have other than one lucky answer to a question in class or the way he looked shirtless? Maybe that was it, that last part. He doubted it, though. He wondered, too, why Noah never asked him over to his place.19

  * * *

  14 Stereotyping, I know, sorry, there are definitely some smart jocks, this works for the story though.

  15 Sorry. Sounds bad, I know, but in novels, you have to be truthful.

  16 Which sucks.

  17 I hope this also doesn’t sound too bad, “male gaze,” or objectifying. It’s the way I feel, though. Can’t help it.

  18 Perhaps I exaggerate.

  19 Being a novelist here, I made this up, felt like a moment like this worked well in the story. Besides, I know Walk well and I’m guessing he was thinking something like this. That “left nut” thing is an expression of his. Painful to contemplate.

  4

  First Dates

  She chose where they went on their first date and paid for it too. That didn’t surprise Noah and he wasn’t complaining, not at all, especially since he didn’t have enough money in his pocket to pay for a chocolate bar. Every cent he made at the grocery store went to rent. It was the day after they played basketball together, that Friday. Thank God she hadn’t picked a Monday, Wednesday, or Saturday. He remembered that night well, always will. October 22. Twenty-two: two twice. Miranda and Noah, an exceptional two, a couple.

  They went to a little café in a bookstore in town. It was cool, or at least they both thought so. The floors were wood and creaked when you walked on them, the shelves looked like they were from the Hogwarts library or Victorian England, with sliding ladders so you could reach the books at the top. There was also a movie theater upstairs. It showed mostly old flicks. There was one scheduled for that day that she liked. They ended up in the tight seating up there, holding hands. He hadn’t said a word about not wanting to see this particular film when she brought up the idea while they ate. It was a romance — she’d made that clear; one called Breakfast at Tiffany’s.20 She had taken his hand the second they sat down in a row at the back. She’d bought the popcorn too.

  “So,” she said, as they clomped down the rickety stairs afterward with the dozen other people who had attended, all of them adults, many of them gray-haired, “what did you think?”

  “Very interesting,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Not your average love story.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Good point.”

  She laughed and took his hand again.

  He realized that he needed to explain. “I guess what I meant was that when I watch a movie, I find myself following the writing, if that makes sense, and it seems to me that this one was interestingly written. It wasn’t a straightforward arc. There were some interesting lines too, like the one where the woman talks about her independence and says — ‘I’ll never let anyone put me in a cage.’”

  Miranda squeezed his hand.

  When they reached her house, a nice old one in an old part of town, she didn’t invite him in. She did, however, kiss him as they stood on the big veranda with the love-seat swing right beside them. At first, it seemed as if she was actually going to shake his hand and then simply turn toward her door, but instead she pulled him toward her, moved in, and then immediately backed away.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  He looked at her for a moment, shocked by what she had done, and said, “What do you mean ‘sorry’?”

  “I hadn’t intended to do that. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She was through her door and inside in a flash.

  Noah did not really walk home that night. It was as if he floated there, his feet not touching the ground, his mind a blissful blank. “Miranda,” he kept repeating, over and over again. “Miranda.”

  * * *

  Word spread fast that they were dating. The other students, and even the teachers, were stunned. The girls were beyond freaked-out. Many of them, somehow, knew all about it before Miranda Owens even came back to school the day after her basketball game, dressed again in her uncool clothes but looking infuriatingly cool, and holding hands with Noah Greene. Noah Greene! It was unbelievable. It was frickin’ ginormously impossible. Then again, by the end of the day, many of the girls were texting that this new guy, actually, when you looked a little harder, and thought about him a bit more, was awfully cute. A rumor even began to circulate that he had a killer bod underneath those loose clothes.21