One Good Punch by Rich Wallace

Author:Rich Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780375890734
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2007-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

I did ask her. We were walking home after watching a basketball game recently—we’d gotten hammered by Carbondale—and I said right straight out, “Are you gay?”

Shelly laughed sort of nervously. “I don’t know.” She stopped and put her arms around me and pressed her chest hard into mine (we were both wearing coats), got up on her toes, and kissed me on the lips for about six seconds. Then she reached around and grabbed my butt. “Not tonight, I’m not.”

So we ducked around the side of an abandoned building and made out on a stoop for maybe fifteen minutes. It was about twenty degrees, and some of our saliva started to freeze on my chin.

We went back to her house and talked to her parents for a few minutes, then they both yawned and said they were tired and went upstairs, obviously to give us some privacy (but not too much). By then, the mood had passed (at least on my end), so we turned on the TV but just left it on whatever channel it was tuned to and talked about “our futures.”

“School is so frickin’ boring,” she said. “Can’t you just not wait until we get the heck out of here?”

“Yeah,” I replied, trying to sound more enthusiastic than I felt.

“What?” she asked, picking up on my halfhearted tone. “You actually like it here?”

“It’s not so bad,” I said. “I don’t even know where I’m going yet.” Shelly’s already at Bucknell in her head; this is just a last long visit home. I’m still very much here. “I don’t hate it.”

“I don’t hate it either,” she said. “But, my God, that basketball game tonight was the highlight of my week. How pathetic is that?”

We stared at the TV. And then I realized that her eagerness to flee this place was part of the problem I was having with her. Sometimes when I can’t wait to just get the hell out of Scranton—get to some college far away and then find a job in California or Boston and only come home for Christmas—sometimes then I get to feeling guilty. Like somehow by leaving I’d be turning my back on home and letting it decay even further. Like I should be doing something to make this city great again instead of fleeing.

And that’s about the same reason I’m not so quick to jump into bed with her. We pretty much grew up together—we used to play board games every day after school; then we got to junior high and talked each other into going out for track; and we went to a couple of dances together, but we never danced and spent most of the evening laughing at how klutzy the boys who tried to were. I don’t want that capped off with a few months of sex and then it’s over. Use me up and never look back. If that sounds like I’m some prude or a wimp, then I guess I have to accept that.

I don’t tell her any of this.

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