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I bit my lip. There was really no way to avoid this now without looking incredibly rude. I pulled my own earphones out and pressed Pause on my playlist. “Hey,” I said, giving him a wave. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, hoping that maybe this had been enough and I could just start ru
“I thought that was you,” Frank said as he straightened up and headed toward me, dashing the last of these hopes. As he got closer, I could hear that he was a little winded, his breath sounding labored. His hair was dark red with sweat, and he was wearing a faded blue T-shirt that read Tri-State Latin Decathlon . . . Decline if you dare!He was wincing as he walked closer to me. “This is all your fault, you know.”
I just blinked at him for a moment. I had no idea what I’d done, or what he was referring to. “Me?”
He ran his hand over his face and through his hair. “Yeah,” he said. “I seem to remember you said you’d help me learn to run.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again, not sure what to say to this. It wasn’t like he’d found me and asked me to do this. Was I supposed to have tracked him down and offered my ru
He smiled and shook his head, and it sounded like he was getting his breath back. “I’m kidding,” he said. “I’m just so terrible at this.”
I nodded and looked down at the road, at my sneakers on the asphalt, and took a breath. “Well, I should keep—”
“Are you going this way?” Frank asked, pointing in the direction I’d been heading. I didn’t know if I could say no. If I did, I would pretty much be admitting that I was choosing not to run with him.
“Yeah,” I finally said, aware that the answer didn’t require nearly as much time to think about it as I’d given it.
“Me too,” he said. He bent down to tighten his other shoelace and looked up at me. “Want to run together for a bit? Unless I’d slow you down,” he added quickly.
“That’s okay,” I said, then wondered if this response had been rude. “I mean, I’m sure you won’t. I’m not in the best shape myself.”
“Excellent,” Frank said. He nodded ahead, and I started ru
“Um,” I said, trying not to cough at the clouds that I was kicking up. “Frank?”
Frank glanced over at me and seemed to realize what was happening. “God, I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe we should switch places?”
“Sounds good,” I said, as I jogged around to run on the outside of him. After we’d been ru
“ Bug Juice?” Frank asked. I glanced over at him, surprised, and then I looked down and realized I was wearing the original Broadway cast T-shirt, the one that had been nightshirt-size on me when I’d first gotten it, but now fit me like a regular T-shirt.
“Oh,” I said. “Um, yeah.” I kept on ru
Frank’s eyebrows shot up. “Really?” he asked. “That’s so cool. I’m pretty sure I saw a production of it. I would have been like twelve or something. . . .” I nodded. This wasn’t that surprising. Between the Broadway run and the endless regional and community theater productions, most people had at least some familiarity with the play. I braced myself for the inevitable follow-up question. “Have they written anything else?”
I looked to the road ahead for a moment before answering. This was the problem, I’d learned, with sudden and unexpected success. My parents had been writing plays for ten years before Bug Juicemade it to Broadway, and they’d written plays since. But nothing had been as big a hit. It might have been partially my parents’ fault for following up their crowd-pleaser about kids at summer camp with an incredibly depressing play about a suicidal country-and-western singer. “They’re actually working on something now,” I said, happy that I could answer like this, without having to go into details about their less-successful plays that very few people had heard of.
“Oh yeah?” he asked. He looked over at me, and I could hear that his breath was starting to get labored again.
I nodded. “It’s about Tesla.” Frank nodded, like this meant something to him. “You know who that is?” I asked, so surprised by this I didn’t stop myself.
“Sure,” Frank said, “He was a genius. Responsible for stuff like X-rays and radar. Way before his time.” I nodded, realizing that for a moment I’d forgotten who I was talking to. He might have been red-faced and struggling to talk, but this was still Frank Porter, who was going to be in the ru
“Sure,” I said quickly. I had been feeling pretty winded myself, and while I was in better ru
“Sorry about that,” he said when he’d gotten his breath back, wiping his sleeve across his face. “I’m probably holding you up. Feel free, if you need to go faster.”
“It’s okay,” I said, then realized a moment later that I could have taken the out he was giving me and gone ahead on my own, with no hard feelings. But I could actually have used some walking time myself, even though I knew from experience how hard it was to start ru
Frank lifted up the bottom of his T-shirt and dried his face with it, and I felt my feet tangle. Frank Porter, for some reason, was in incredibly good shape—he was thin, but with really defined stomach muscles, his mesh shorts sitting low on his hips. I swallowed hard and looked away quickly, trying to concentrate on walking in a straight line. The second I got home, I hadto tell Sloane—
Except, of course, that I couldn’t. At least, not yet.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” Frank said after we’d been walking for a few minutes. I glanced over at him, trying to see the person he’d been not that long ago, Frank Porter, the nice class president, not the secretly ripped guy walking next to me. I nodded, even though it had been my experience that when someone asks you if they can ask something—instead of just asking—it means it’s going to be a hard question to answer. “The other night, at the Orchard,” he said. He looked away from me and shook his head. “I’m really sorry if this is intruding,” he said. “I just keep thinking about it, for some reason. But when I drove you to get gas . . .” He looked back at me, and I could tell he was trying to figure out how to put this. “Were you by yourself?”