Olive's Ocean by Kevin Henkes

Author:Kevin Henkes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Social Issues, Emotions & Feelings, Family, Juvenile Fiction, Multigenerational, Friendship
ISBN: 9780060535452
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

39

A Question

Jimmy wouldn’t stop talking. His speaking engine had been idling, and now was revving up. Martha’s worry about uncomfortable silences had drifted out of her mind.

They weren’t holding hands any longer. They had picked up the camera at Jimmy’s house, and a tripod, too. He needed both hands to carry his equipment. Martha thought to offer to carry the tripod—then they would each still have a free hand for holding—but she couldn’t summon the courage to make the suggestion, afraid her motive would be obvious.

“I was thinking we’d go to the Benton place again,” Jimmy had said.

“Oh, good,” Martha had replied. “I left my sweater there last night. I hope I find it.”

As they traveled the familiar route, Jimmy talked about things as disparate as the lack of interesting girls at his school (“none whatsoever”) to the drunk man wandering through the bleachers at a Sox game at Fenway Park he’d been to earlier that summer. (“He was totally, completely, amazingly trashed, and he had a gargantuan pink nose with giant pores and veiny blue lines all over it.”)

He told her that his mother never fished, hated it in fact, because when she was a girl, she had accidentally snagged the eyelid of the family dog with her hook as she practiced casting. (“Posy yelped and yelped and my mom says she still can hear yelping whenever she sees a fishing rod.”)

He told her that when he was little, he had snipped their cat’s whiskers off with scissors and announced to his parents that he had seen the cat suck in her whiskers with one big inward breath. (“Schrrrp. Just like that. They didn’t believe me, of course.”)

He told her that he couldn’t wait to make it as a real director—and that he might even skip college—because he was so tired of having no money to speak of. (“My bank account totally sucks. I’ve got a trust fund from one of my grandpas, but I won’t get that until I’m eighteen or twenty-one, or something.”)

Jimmy covered it all: his favorite band, his favorite classic rock band, his favorite songs of the decade and the century, his favorite TV shows, his favorite Web sites. He talked about the history and future of film and the difference between “films” and “movies.”

Jimmy talked and Martha listened. And then Jimmy switched gears and asked Martha what she thought about many things, anything that came to his mind, and his voice was serious, as if her opinion were the most important thing and he really wanted to know.

For the moment, for a while, being twelve was not so bad, not bad at all, and Martha sensed that a whole other world lay beyond twelve. A world still out of reach, but growing nearer by the second.

“Okay,” said Jimmy, the Benton house coming into view, “here’s a question for you. Have you ever been kissed by a guy?”

Martha had never been so surprised by a question in her entire life. Her whole body went soupy, even her fingers and toes.

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