She nudges me with her shoulder. “Come on! What does he look like?”
Using the tip of the stick, I draw a big heart around the initials. The dirt is hard, so the outline is hard to see, but I keep tracing it over and over.
“He’s so cute. And tall. He’s gotta be the tallest kid in high school.” I have no idea if that’s true, but it feels true. “And his hair is this perfect shade of brown. Like… I dunno. Like that hot chocolate your mom always gets. And his voice.” I drop the stick and fall back onto the ground. “Maddie, you just have to see him.”
She lays back next to me. “How’d you meet him?”
I sigh. Then, laying side-by-side, I tell my best friend the whole story. When I get to the part about the ball hitting Brandon in the face, I worry that Maddie might laugh herself to death, but she pulls through.
When I’m finished, she nudges me with her elbow. “Well, what now?”
“What do you mean?” We turn our faces towards each other.
She lifts a hand to gesture wildly. “I mean, what are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing,” I grumble.
“What?!”
“Maddie, he’s fifteen. I’m not even gonna be eight for another month and seven days.”
She huffs, “So what? According to my cousin, older men are better. Something about them being more experienced.”
“In what?”
She shrugs, “I dunno. But she makes it sound like a good thing. So, I think it’s okay that he’s…” she pauses, and I see her lips moving as she counts, “…eight years older than you.”
“Hmm.” I haven’t heard anything about older men before but her cousin has had lots of boyfriends so she must know what she’s talking about. “Alright. Then I guess I gotta find a way to make him like me back.”
“How you gonna do that?”
“I have no idea,” I turn my gaze back to the sky, “but I’ll think of something.”