Attach ments(43)

“Maybe he has a girlfriend,” Lincoln said.

“Then I feel sorry for his girlfriend,” Dena said.

“Maybe he has a boyfriend,” Justin said.

“Then I feel sorry for his boyfriend,” Dena said.

“They have another show tomorrow,” Justin said. “We should go.”

“I’m playing D & D tomorrow night,” Lincoln said.

“Talk about things you do when you don’t have a girlfriend,” Justin said.

Justin was always needling Lincoln to go out more. To be around women. To try. Maybe because Justin had known Sam in high school. Because he remembered the days when Lincoln was the one who always had a beautiful girl on his arm. “A little mouthy for my taste,” Justin had said once during golf practice. “But hotter than a jalapeño milkshake.”

After California, when Lincoln showed up at the state university a year behind everybody else, Justin never asked what happened with Sam. Lincoln had even tried to tell him about it one night, over Papa John’s pizza and a six-pack of Dr. Diablo, but Justin had cut him off.

“Dude. Let it go. Good riddance to bad rubbers.”





IN THE END, Lincoln hadn’t told anyone what happened with Sam in California. (Even though his mother had asked and asked and eventually confronted Sam’s mother at the grocery store.)

He didn’t talk about it because talking about would have been conceding it. Giving in to it. And because if he told someone, he knew it wouldn’t sound that bad. That it was really a fairly standard teenage heartbreak. That the saddest part of the whole story was that he missed a semester of school and lost all his scholarships. That would be the saddest part to someone else, to an outside observer.

He didn’t talk to his mom about it, not once, not ever, because he knew how happy it would make her to be right.

When he first left for college, she called him twice a week.

“I’ve never even been to California,” she said.

“Mom, it’s fine. It’s a nice campus. It’s safe.”

“I don’t know what it looks like,” she said. “I can’t picture you there. I try to think about you and to send you positive energy, but I don’t know which way to send it.”

“West,” he said.

“That’s not what I mean, Lincoln. How am I supposed to visualize good things happening for you if I can’t visualize you?”

He missed her, too. He missed the Midwest. All the scenery Sam had wanted was making his head hurt. Northern California was impractically beautiful. Everywhere you looked there were trees and streams, waterfalls, mountains, the ocean…. There was nowhere to look just to look, just to think.

He’d been spending a lot of time in the campus library, a place without windows.

Sam had been spending a lot of time at the school theater. She wasn’t taking classes in the drama department yet, but she’d gone out for a few plays and landed small roles. Back in high school, when Sam went to rehearsals, Lincoln would go with her. He’d bring his homework and sit in the back row of the auditorium. He could study just fine that way. He could block out the talking and the noise. He liked to hear Sam’s voice occasionally pealing through his chemistry problems.

Lincoln would have happily studied at the college theater while Sam rehearsed, but she felt like he was drawing too much attention to her there. “You’re reminding them that I’m other,” she said. “That I’m a freshman, that I’m not from around here. I need them to look at me and see my role. To see my talent and nothing else. You’re reminding them that I have this cloying Heartland backstory.”

“What’s cloying?” he asked.

“The adoring-Germanic-farm-boy thing.”

“I’m not a farm boy.”

“To them, you are,” she said. “To them, we both just fell off the tomato truck. They think it’s funny that we’re from Nebraska. They think the word Nebraska is funny. They say it like, ‘Timbuktu’ or ‘Hoboken.’”

“Like ‘Punxsutawney’?” he asked.

“Exactly. And they think it’s hilarious that we came to college together.”

“Why is that funny?”

“It’s too sweet,” she said. “It’s exactly what two kids who just fell off the tomato truck would do. If you keep coming to rehearsals, I’m never going to get good parts.”

“Maybe they’ll do Pollyanna.”

“Lincoln, please.”

“I want to be with you. If I don’t come to the theater, I won’t ever see you.”

“You will see me,” she said.