“I get my braces off next week,” he’d said to me when we were emptying our trays after lunch one day. I was on the free-lunch program provided by the state. He’d gotten three extra pieces of pizza, a luxury I would never know.
Not just because of how expensive it was to order extra, but because I didn’t have the room to fit half a pizza.
“Good for you,” I’d mumbled, lifting my head to see if I could find Logan somewhere in the large lunchroom.
“Then my mouth will be normal again,” Levi had persisted.
“You’ll look really good, Levi.” My face flushed at the words I’d accidentally said out loud. The worst part was that they were true. He was the cutest boy in our class. By far. Even with braces. But I couldn’t let him know I thought that. So, I’d turned to face him, wrinkling my nose. “Too bad the rest of you never will ever be normal.”
His eyes had narrowed, and the planes of his cheeks had turned pink. I’d almost felt bad, except he’d hidden my backpack yesterday after school and I’d missed the bus trying to find it. He’d offered to give me a ride home on his bike, but I’d been too mad to care about his kindness.
“I’ll be able to eat popcorn again.”
Popcorn was my favorite food of all time. I ran my tongue over my front teeth, thankful they were straight. Not just so I didn’t have to give up popcorn, but also because I knew my mom would never pay for me to have braces like Levi had. If my teeth had been crooked, they would have stayed crooked.
“There’s a new movie,” I told him, deciding I could be nice about this one thing. “At the theater. It looked good. They have the best popcorn.”
“We should go,” he suggested. “My mom could pick you up.”
My cheeks heated just thinking about Levi Cole’s mom driving to my side of town. Levi’s family had money. His mom had a new Suburban. I felt sick at the idea of Levi seeing where I lived, at his mom driving her shiny car on our pot hole ridden roads. Still it might be worth it… “Is Logan going to go?”
“Logan?” Levi asked, his entire face falling at the mention of his brother.
I blushed harder, feeling like he could see straight through me. “Yeah, he’s always nice to me,” I said defensively.
Suddenly, he burst into laughter. “Did you really think I was asking you to the movies?” He laughed harder. “Get over yourself, Ruby.” Then he turned around and laughed all the way back to his table. I’d run to the bathroom and tried not to cry.
I shook my head free of that memory. It felt different now that I could look at it through the lens of an adult… now that I knew a little more about what Levi had been thinking back then.
Propelled by belated guilt and some ridiculous feeling that we really were starting to become friends, I walked over to his booth with two cups of coffee.
He eyed me curiously as I slipped onto the side across from him. “I have a ten-minute break,” I told him quietly. “Is it okay if I sit here with you for a minute? My feet hurt.”
He nodded, accepting the full cup of black coffee from me. His green eyes watched me as he took a slow sip from the piping mug.
I wrinkled my nose. “How can you drink it like that? Do you hate your taste buds?”
He lifted one shoulder. “It’s an acquired taste,” he agreed. “But work on enough ranches, you realize real fast they’re not interested in making sure you’re comfortable.”
Well, that was one thing to be thankful for. At least my job supplied creamer. “What was that like?”
“What? Learning to like black coffee?”
I smiled despite myself. “Working on ranches, dummy. Why didn’t you just come back here and work for your parents?”
He cupped his mug with two hands, his long, dexterous fingers intertwining gracefully. “After Logan died, I didn’t want to come back here ever again.”
His words were rough, ripped open, as if he’d had to drag them through barb wire to get them high enough to spit them out. But he’d answered me. That should have been enough. “Why not?”
Staring at his coffee, he paused for so long I didn’t think he’d answer me. Just when I was working up the courage to apologize for asking him hard questions, he said, “I blame my parents for Logan’s death, I guess. Er, blamed them. I’ve worked through a lot over the last few years, but for a long time, I felt like he enlisted to get away from them… to get away from their expectations of him.”
I reached across the table and laid my hand over his fingers, unable to keep myself from touching him. “You don’t blame them anymore?”
His gaze lifted to meet mine, paralyzing me in place and holding me there. “I realize now that he could have done a lot of things. Gone a lot of different places. Simply stood up to them and told them to back off. He picked the Marines. It’s not like that was the easy option. He’d always told me he wanted to serve his country, do his time before he came back to Nebraska to serve out his life sentence.” One side of Levi’s mouth lifted in a half smile, their shared joke dancing there, even while his eyes grew darker, deepened with the heaviness of his emotion. “I’ve started to believe that he was telling the truth. It was just hard for me to acknowledge that when I wanted so badly to blame someone for his death.”
I cleared my throat hoping to banish the sudden emotions and blinked rapidly against hot tears. “I’m so sorry, Levi. I’m so sorry about Logan.” A tear escaped, rolling down my cheek, giving my emotion away. I brushed at it with the back of my hand and hoped he didn’t notice.
Then I sniffled and wanted to throw myself under the table. I hated showing emotion to anyone, but especially Levi, especially about Logan.
