I just stared at my hands. Big and dumb hands. “Go tell Sean he can be on the team. I’ll sit it out.”
Jesse sighed really loud. “Bubba, you’re one of the best players on the team. If you wanted to be a professional flag-football player, you could be. Sean’s required by the dean. You’re required by us if we’re going to win the semis. Don’t do this to the team, Bubba.”
“But if Sean won’t come—”
“I’m sure he will. You two don’t have to talk to each other, although I think it would be great if you did.”
I shook my head really hard. “He’s gotta go to Harvard and be a brilliant geneticist and marry Jeremiah Osteen and go to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship.”
“You wanna tell me what that means?”
“No.”
“There’s a tournament game tomorrow. Can I count on you to come?”
“Okay.”
“And will you please eat something and stop abusing your body? You’ve worked hard for that masterpiece, my friend.”
I smiled, but I didn’t really feel it. What use was having a great body if it just made you a dumb he-man?
He stood. “Thank you, Bubba. I know exactly how fucking hard it is to be a grownup.”
I looked up at him. Wow. That’s what this was. Time to be a grownup. Time to realize I wasn’t meant to have all the candy in the jar. Time to admit when I’d lost.
Chapter Nineteen
Sean
“And you two!” Tray Blackstone managed to glare at both me and Bubba even though we were on opposite ends of the line of guys huddled on the side of the field. “You two need to get your heads out of your asses—pronto!”
“I’m fine,” Bubba said to no one in particular before turning and running straight into Rex, who shoved him off with a roll of his eyes. Bubba jogged toward the parking lot. The last I saw of him, before I turned away in misery, was his large bubble butt flexing as he jogged.
Away from me.
Today’s flag-football game had been the most excruciating one yet. And that included the time I fell face-first into mud.
“We won, though, right? Even with two Poins on the team,” Dustin said, snide and loud enough for everyone to hear. He put his arm around my shoulder. “You’re welcome, Tray. Come on, Sean. Let’s go home.” He steered me toward the street where we’d left his car.
I glanced back to see Tray watching us, arms crossed over his chest and a glower on his face. “Only because the other team played like ass!” he hollered after us. “That’s not gonna cut it during semifinals this weekend!”
Dustin just kept marching me forward.
The April day was hot, despite it being almost sunset, and I was sweaty and hungry on top of being utterly despondent. Tray was right. Dustin had been really sharp during the game, but I’d sucked, even by my own low standards. And Bubba had been six-foot-five inches of wrong. He’d tripped over people, dropped the ball, and stargazed all game. Probably because he was avoiding me as if his molecules could sense my molecules and shied away. If he’d looked at me at all, it had only been by accident, and then he’d looked away hurriedly, as if just the sight of me could turn him to stone. Sean Medusa McKinney. That was me.
I knew this because I hadn’t done anything all day except look at him, which is why I’d missed two passes Tray sent my way, pulled zero flags, and half the time didn’t even know which side had the ball.
The league game had been in Janesville, so it was only a forty-five-minute drive back to campus. I stared out the window as Dustin drove. He had an older Toyota he’d made cooler by adding retro elements like a Native American blanket over the seat, fuzzy dice, and a bobble head of Obama on the dashboard. Dustin was cool. I’d accepted the fact that I never would be.
We were halfway home before he turned off the music and looked at me. “Okay, Sean. So, what’s up?”
I gave him a dubious look. “It’s probably fairly obvious that Bubba broke up with me. Hence the whole avoiding-me-like-we-were-positively-charged-particles thing today.”
Dustin laughed.
I huffed. “You know how positive particles repel each other? They literally bounce away if you try to get them closer. That was Bubba with me today.”
“Yeah, I remember that from high school chemistry. But positive and negative particles are drawn together like magnets. That’s like opposites attract, right? The Law of Attraction.”
“Precisely.”
“But you guys aren’t anything alike, sooooo—” Dustin pointed out with a frown.
“Precisely my point! That’s why it was so strange! Today, Bubba couldn’t get within ten yards of me without being repelled in the opposite direction.”
Dustin frowned. “So…what happened with you guys? Why’d you break up?”
I was silent for a bit. Ah, the ten-thousand-dollar question. “I’m not sure. We were getting along extremely well. Then I took him home with me for my dad’s birthday. One weekend with my parents was all it took to make him run screaming.” I crossed my arms tight and hugged myself. “Which I suppose is a good indicator that he didn’t like me as much as I’d assumed.”
Dustin swigged from the bottle of water he had in the cupholder. “So what happened over the weekend? Did your parents have a bacchanal or something?”
That made me laugh. “My parents’ idea of a bacchanal is a glass of red wine on a Saturday night while they read their respective books in their respective chairs and the entire house is very, very quiet.”
He looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “So?”
I shrugged. “They didn’t like Bubba. They think I’m being emotional because he’s the first guy I ever dated. They want to see me with someone who’s my intellectual equal, like this nice young man they know with a PhD in climatology from Oxford.”
“Ah.” Dustin said as if that explained everything.
“But they weren’t rude to Bubba,” I insisted. “They told me that, not him.”
“You know what? Bubba’s pretty intuitive. I bet he picked up all of that.”
I thought about how Bubba had come to my rescue at that first flag practice. He’d tuned in to the fact that I was lost when no one else had. And he’d helped me with my makeover and with my gym training when most people, including Dustin, expected me to figure it out myself. And he’d come out, like it was nothing, when he’d decided to date me. He hadn’t made it some big drama.
“I suppose he does have high emotional intelligence,” I agreed, recalling the concept from a psych class.
“Probably. I don’t know him that well, but he’s pretty social.”
Yes. Bubba was highly social. In that regard, he was the opposite of me. Everyone liked Bubba. Well, everyone except my parents.
“So, look at it from his point of view,” Dustin continued. “What if you went to meet his family and they were all gorgeous and huge and buff, and they looked at you like you were some scrawny little pipsqueak—”
“Accurate.”
“—and they told Bubba they had a Mr. Universe all lined up for him because he shouldn’t be dating someone as wimpy as you. How would you feel?”