14.

“The thing I figured out when I was doing it is that they’re stupid the way video games are stupid,” Will said, pushing the floppy SAT book up toward the edge of his bed. “The more you do them, the better you get. That’s really the only trick. You just have to take, like, a million practice tests.” Our elbows fell together on his flimsy mattress. 2320, I thought, over and over, as I watched Will’s quick, confident face scanning the pages. He’d gotten a 2320 on his SATs. I imagined I felt a little flutter as I lay on my stomach. Mom had called to schedule “the procedure” with someone named Dr. Moore, but the appointment wasn’t until later in December, when I was further along. In the meantime, I had the SATs to keep me distracted.

We went over a question about a motorcycle stuntman riding over the walls of a circular well.

“So if the radius of the well is five kilometers, the distance he travels is …,” Will said, his voice rising expectantly, like a preschool teacher’s, trying to engage me. I wondered if stress could make you miscarry.

“I don’t know, three and a half kilometers,” I guessed. All I could think of was the economics homework still on my desk at home. It had taken me two hours that morning to do the supply schedule and to make the stupid line go straight up, and I hadn’t even gotten to the supply curve. We were only a couple of months into the semester, only a couple of months of watching Mr. Goff’s skinny, Levi’ed ass tottering on the edge of his desk while he took that same bag of pretzels out of his desk drawer every day to demonstrate the endless stream of economic principles, principles that slipped from my grasp almost as quickly as they piled up. I shut the SAT book suddenly, folding some of the thin pages over. “I’m tired.”

“Let’s take a nap, then.” Will slid his finger through the folded pages, laying them flat, then dumped the book on the floor. He smiled with his face inches from mine and closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry you have to, you know, go through this with the other stuff going on,” he said, rubbing my temple. “Not exactly great timing, is it?”

I shook my head, my eyes welling up.

“Not exactly looking forward to it, are we?”

“What, the SATs or the abortion?” I asked.

“Both, I guess.” He sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“You can totally do this, Thee,” he said urgently. “You’re much smarter than you think you are.”

“This is you trying to cheer me up,” I said, sulking.

“I mean it. You’re weird.”

“I’m not weird.”

“Oh, let’s see,” he said, drumming his chin with his fingers. “You memorized your eye doctor’s vision chart. That’s weird. You like saggy, dead trees, that’s weird, and your peach-pit collection? That row of fossilized little pits on your windowsill?” He reached for my hand. “That’s really weird, G-Rock, I hate to tell you. But weird equals smart, at least in my book.” He curled his leg over me. “You just have to test your ass off over the next couple of weeks.”

I stared at the wall. He’d finally hung the Tanglewood poster up, and slats of bent light from the trashed Venetian blind zigzagged across the floating, fuchsia violins. 2320. Stick with it. I fell asleep with my head burrowed in Will’s neck and woke up to him kissing me twenty minutes later. Screw econ, I thought. Screw everything. Still half-asleep, I got his jeans down to his knees, pinning his legs together, and started going down on him as he splayed his arms out across the bed, like he was making an angel in the snow.

“You didn’t have to do that, you know,” he said as he walked me to the subway. “But it was nice that you did.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” I said, squeezing his waist. We were going down Broadway, and a transvestite with neon-blue hair glanced at us as we went by. Her eyes dismissed us, as though we were dull white-bread kids, which was completely opposed to how I actually felt. I felt like I was roiling. In love to the point of roiling. I thought of the crochet hook plunged into the ball of yarn on my radiator at home. I was still hooked.

Will stopped in the middle of the street we were crossing and kissed me. We stood there on a wide, white crosswalk strip until cars honked. He pressed his forehead against mine, a straightforward, matter-of-fact lust on his face, piercing through the dusk, and still didn’t move. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” I said.

“I said it first.” He smiled. “I win.”

We walked the rest of the way to the subway without a word. A guy outside a pizza parlor was whistling and shouting at a brown van moving down the street. Everything moved, bendy buses, skinny dogs on leashes, bike messengers in army jackets whipping around corners. The city had an evening glow, an anticipation, which would normally depress me a little, make me feel like I was missing something, but I didn’t feel that way then.

“Sayonara, milady.” He grabbed my hands and rubbed his lips across my knuckles. “Take a test tonight. For me, okay?” I didn’t want to go but I also did. I wanted to pore over this weird new feeling, trust. I trusted him.

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled.

“Uh-huh,” he repeated. “You’ve still got a week before the big day, so test your brains out. I’ll call you later to see how you did.”