Because. I shouted the word. The taxi driver half-turned in his seat. I watched him to make sure he put his eyes on the road again and didnt hit any love-starved novelists.
My mother wanted to be an actress and my grandmother told her she was cutting her off, surprise. So my mom booked for L.A. when she was eighteen. Maybe she would have made it if she hadnt gotten pregs when she was twenty.
With you, Hunter said.
I nodded on his thigh. Even after I was born she got a few bit parts, but mostly she would work as a secretary, and then she got training as a paralegal. My dad mostly didnt work. That was a big thing they fought about. He always had some reason for why he wasnt working. He was always saying she was the one with the rich family, why didnt she ask her mother for money, and she always said she wasnt asking that bitch for shit, not after what her mother had said to her when she left. But she wouldnt marry my dad, either, and I never knew why, but now I wonder if it was because she didnt want him officially part of her family, with access to the family money that he talked so much about and seemed so eager for.
So youre a bastard, Hunter said.
The question caught me off guard. You meanwas I born out of wedlock? Yes.
Then Ive got one up on you after all.
What do you mean, youve got one up on me after all? Are we in some sort of contest? A birthright contest? I watched the colored lights from the shops we passed reflecting on the vinyl seat. Never mind. Dont answer that. I guess we are. After six years wed finally admitted we liked each other. It had taken us all of an hour and a half to hate each other again.
Or did we? His hand had moved to my face, brushing my bangs lightly away from my forehead with his calloused fingers. So, you have to win this battle with your grandmother because that will prove she was wrong all along. If you win, your mother wins.
I adjusted my head on his thigh, unable to find a comfortable position. He was way too muscular to be a pillow. And I murmured, My mother is dead.
12
Deep in the night he laid me on my bed. Summer and Jřrdis whispered questions. I got lost in sleep and painkillers but at some point during the next day or the next, Summer brought me a walking cane and a huge breakfast and said Hunter had dropped them off. When I limped back to class, he started sitting next to me in calculusnot flirting with me or hovering over me but acting routinely pleasant and torturing me with wonder at whether hed really wanted to kiss me that night in the hospital. Summer was all aflutter at the whole incident. She agreed with the X-ray tech that getting hit by a taxi while crossing the street to see Hunter was romantic, until I showed her the black bruise on my hip and the slowly healing gouges in my back.
But a week and a half after my accident, when Id already come back from the coffee shop and delivered a cup to Hunter for his long trek to volunteer at the hospital, Summer peeked her head into my room and asked me with wide eyes whether Id read his new story. I had gotten wise by then. I did not get my hopes up. I could have rushed to the library and read it when he was scheduled to put it there for us, but then I would have obsessed about it until class time.
I knew better. I waited until the last minute, Thursday, after a lunch of peanut-butter crackers, to limp to the library and read all the stories for class. Hunters last.
That way I was furious for only ten minutes, the space of the walk between the library and the honors classroom building, before I faced him.
The Space Between
by Hunter Allen
His eighth-grade science teacher tried to explain how big space was. Space was so big, it seemed, that there was hardly anything in it, thus its name. Space.
He did not get it, and he wanted to. He hated the rare times when he didnt understand something in class. So that night after he had fed the horses and eaten the dinner he heated for himself in the microwave, and his dad was ensconced in front of the television with a pack of cigarettes and a cooler of beer at his feet to save trips to the refrigerator, he sat at the kitchen table with a pad and a calculator and worked out the relationship between the scale of the planets and the scale of the space between them. He started by making Mercury the size of a baseball, but that made the sun sixty-six feet wide. He shrank everything again. Mercury was now the size of a pencil eraser, and the sun was six feet wide. Mercury was eighty-five yards from the sun.
He still didnt get it. Could space truly be that big? He decided to walk out the model. Then he would understand. He crossed his fathers line of sight and opened the front door. Standing on the porch, he could see the orange ball of the sun just disappearing behind the grassy hill on which the bosss house sat. The black silhouettes of trees slashed across the bright pink sky.
He leaned back through the door and called to his dad, Im going for a walk.
Stay away from that girl, his father said.
He didnt respond to this. He didnt have to, because his father was watching TV, not him. He simply closed the door and walked out into the twilight, face burning, chest tight with embarrassment and anger and dread and longing.
He stepped off the wooden porch, onto the walkway of stone pavers a hundred years old. They led down a grassy bank to the gravel road that wound through the enormous farm. In New York, where he had come from not too long before, in early springtime the grass still would have been brown. Here in Kentucky it was already long and green and juicy for the horses.
He retrieved a measuring tape from the truck. Standing in the gravel road in front of his small house, he looked to the right. The road disappeared over the hill, but he knew it bumped from grassy hill to grassy hill until it finally met the two-lane highway a mile off. That was the direction his father wanted him to go.
He looked to the left. The road disappeared over that hill, too, but he knew it pitched higher and higher with more and more hills until it reached the high point of the farm, where the bosss house perched. That was the direction his father forbade him to go.
He loosened a large limestone rock from the century-old wall next to his housefuck this farm, anywayand set it on the end of the tape measure to keep it secure in the middle of the road. Then he started walking up the hill. The tape measure was only a hundred feet long, so he kept having to mark his place in the road and start over in order to make progress. After eighty-five yards, he stopped and looked around. He was standing beside an enormous old oak. If the sun was six feet wide and sat directly in front of his house, this was where Mercury would be to scale, a barely visible pencil eraser. He wasnt sure his classmates would understand this analogy, but he did, and he appreciated for the first time the vastness of space, the emptiness, the vacuum.
He walked another sixty-four yards up the road, gravel crunching under his work boots. The sky had deepened to rose now, and he might have been worried about a car creaming him without ever seeing him in the dark, except that there was nobody out here to run him downonly the boss, and the people who worked on the farm, most of whom had gone home for the night already, or lived here like his dad in an ancient house built back when it was acceptable for workers to live on their employers land.
He stopped and looked around. He was standing next to a large mossy boulder that jutted from the grass, maybe a marker of something long gone, maybe a tombstone, maybe just a boulder. He had wondered about it since hed arrived here at the farm. Now he set his tape measure down on the road and walked over to the boulder. The moss was soft, with creepy-looking white flowers that glowed like an alien species in the disappearing light. He looked back toward his house. It was a football field and a half away now, and if the sun were six feet wide in front of his door, Venus would be here, the size of his thumbnail.
He slid a piece of paper out of the pocket of his jeans and consulted his calculations.
He tugged the tape measure so the end of it escaped the last rock hed placed in the road. The tape measure zipped back into the case. He made a mental note to pick up all his rocks when he was finished. If a farm truck was damaged running over one, his father would kill him.
He set the end of the tape measure down in the road again and secured it with a new piece of the heirloom fence. From Venus, he walked another sixty-four yards, down the other side of the hill and halfway up the next one, and stopped. If the sun was six feet wide in front of his front door, which he couldnt see anymore because the hill was in the way, but he knew how far away it was, Earth would be here, also the size of his thumbnail. He looked around. Now he could see the bosss house on top of the highest hill of all, looming regally in white-painted brick over the wild and verdant rolling hills, like a Victorian lady in a hunting party.
He considered his calculations again. He thought the experiment was working out well. Of course, if he performed this demonstration at school, he would lay it out starting in the science classroom. He would take the whole class on a walk out of the classroom (Mercury), down the hall (Venus), outside the building (Earth). They would have to walk a third of a mile to get to Neptune. That was the only drawback. But Neptune needed to be a third of a mile away, or he would have to reduce the planets so much that nobody could see them, which was not good for the purposes of demonstration. He thought his teacher might balk at the class taking fifteen minutes to walk two-thirds of a mile just to see where Pluto would be at the darkest reach of its orbit, because it would seem to her that they were goofing off and were not on task when nothing could have been further from the truth.
But as he shivered in the twilight, he realized that she might have a point. He himself had no desire to walk the entire two-thirds of a mile to Pluto over another eight hills and up a grade to the stables. Three planets had been enough for him and he got the gist. Pluto had been downgraded to a dwarf planet anyway.
Satisfiedreally wanting to finish what hed started and walk the rest of the solar system, but cold and satisfied enoughhe pocketed his calculations, zipped the tape measure up, and started back toward his house, remembering again that he needed to pick up the rocks and put them back in the fence where they belonged.
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a movement in the grassy valley below the white mansion. It was the girl, urging a black filly into a gallop, hair streaming behind her. He had thought he might run into her, but hed assumed that if he did, he would be looking up at her. Now she was in the hollow, and he was on the crest of a hill, looking down.
I COULD HARDLY SPEAK WHEN GABE asked me what I thought of Hunters story. I definitely couldnt think. I said something about his penchant for scientific jargon that distracted the reader from the emotion of the story, and I wondered, along with Summer, whether he was writing that way on purpose.
I did not wonder out loud whether hed moved the setting of his story to Kentucky in order to hint to Gabe that we knew each other and had been toying with each other in our stories. I did not tell him what I thought of his story:
After living the life of a self-made chick for the last five months, and having Hunter psychoanalyze that experience for me, I realized that maybe there was an advantage after all to growing up with money. Maybe I did think better of myself because my grandmother owned a Kentucky horse farm. I didnt worry as much as someone else would when I was down to my last pack of ramen noodles, or when I got hit by a taxi. I knew that if I ever did deign to call her for help, she would send me money.
But if I did have those feelings of superiority, they did not survive Hunter writing a beautiful story in which he gazed down on me as if I were someone to be pitied. I saw myself exactly as he saw me.
And that made me angry.
The interminable class finally did end. Gabe gave me a look I didnt really see, hefted himself out of his chair, and left. The rest of the class got up giggling, as usual. Their chatter about Hunter unexpectedly turning out to be a space nerd had already changed to chatter about heading to the dining hall together as they passed over the threshold to the hallway.
Hunter stood with his back against the open door, blond head cocked at me in question.
Coming? Summer asked me.
I shook my head, never taking my eyes off Hunter. She stood beside me a moment more, hand poised on the table. I could tell she was looking from him to me, sensing the electricity, knowing we had communicated something awful to each other through a story. Again.
Ill wait for you. She walked through the door. I listened for her voice and Manohars and Brians to recede down the hall, but they didnt.
Everything okay? Hunter called to me.
He sounded like a noncommittal friend asking after my health. I looked like a crazy person sitting at the table after everyone else had left, staring at The Space Between. I was going to sound like a crazy person no matter what I said to him next.
It had to be said. I stood with my book bag, swept up The Space Between without a single mark on it, and crumpled it in one fist. Rounding the table, I shoved his story at his chest.
He took the wad of paper. Whats the matter? he asked innocently.
I thought of Summer, Manohar, and Brian just outside the door, listening. I did not want them to hear this. But if I asked Hunter to step away from the door and close it so we could have a private conversation, I would be showing him how much I cared. I was through with that.
I moved even closer to him and met his gaze. Im below you?
I dont know what youre talking about, he said evenly, looking me straight in the eye, obviously waiting at the door for exactly this altercation, which proved he did in fact know what I was talking about, and I had had enough.
Ill tell you what Im talking about. I touched the thumb of my opposite hand. I wrote a story about how much I liked you. I never meant for you to read it. I touched my pointer finger. You wrote a story about how much you hated me.
Hunters grin melted from his face. He took a breath to say something.
No, youre right, I interrupted him. Not one story. You wrote three stories like that. I touched my third finger. I wrote a story about my mother, hoping we could talk about it. I touched my fourth finger. In response, you wrote a story about looking down on me. I touched my pinkie, really banged on it with my other finger, until I bent it backward and hurt it. Dont write any more stories about me, Hunter. And I wont write any more stories about you. Deal? I whirled toward the door.