What We Saw Read online

IOWA WAS ONCE an ocean.

  Sounds crazy, I know, but it’s true. Three hundred and seventy-five million years ago, there were no cornfields. Only a large, shallow sea filled with trilobites and mud worms and prehistoric fish, all splashing around in the soup, trying to turn their fins into legs—probably so they could walk to California before the ice age hit.

  After surviving this winter, I understand that urge. Sometimes we have snow in March, but today the sun is warm on my face, and I’m glad I’m walking over to Ben’s instead of driving. It’ll take twenty minutes, and after this year’s deep freeze, the last week of upper sixties has felt like a heat wave. It’s supposed to be seventy-one degrees this afternoon—practically bikini weather. I want to soak up every ray I can. Turning the corner at the end of our block, I stare up the gentle slope of Oaklawn Avenue and try to imagine my landlocked farm town as an ancient tropical paradise.

  Mr. Johnston explained all of this last fall, the very first week of geology. Rachel’s hand flew up as soon as he said the words Devonian Era. I knew what was coming before she opened her mouth. She’s my best friend, but a true forward: aggressive on the field and off. The only things Rachel loves more than scoring are the fight to get the ball, and her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

  “Isn’t it true that this is all just a theory, Mr. Johnston?”

  “Just a theory?”

  “This whole three hundred and seventy-five million years ago thing. I mean, no one was around to see that. There’s no proof.”

  Mr. Johnston turned thirty on the first day of school. I always forget how crystal clear his green eyes are until he pulls off his funky horn-rimmed glasses, which he did right then.

  “Is that the point of science?” he asked Rachel. “Proof?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “Isn’t that why we observe stuff? To prove theories are right or wrong? That’s why all this evolution stuff is just a theory. Because you can’t observe when the world began, so you can’t prove it.”

  “There’s no such thing as a ‘proof’ in science,” Mr. Johnston said, and put his glasses back on. “You can have a proof in math or in logic, but not in science. Anybody tell me why?”

  Lindsey Chen tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and raised her hand. She’s a defender on the field, always a surprise to the opposing team. They write her off as a “little Asian girl” and are unprepared for her to be both fleet and fierce.

  “Yes, Miss Chen?”

  “Math and logic are closed systems. Like in algebra, there’s only one possible answer to a problem. You solve for x.”

  Mr. Johnston nodded. “Exactly. There’s no such thing as ‘proving’ something true or false with science. It all comes down to what we mean when we use that word theory.”

  He asked who could tell him the difference between a scientific theory and what most people mean when they say theory. Mr. Johnston pointed toward the back, and I swiveled around in surprise when I heard Ben’s voice.

  “I have a theory that the tacos in the cafeteria are made out of stray cats.”

  Mr. Johnston laughed along with the rest of us. “Yes! But is that a scientific theory, Mr. Cody?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  Ben shrugged. “I don’t have any observations to back it up. Just a hunch. Based on taste.”

  Mr. Johnston kept driving toward his point over the laughter. “And what do we call a ‘hunch’ in science? Anyone?” He pointed at me. “Kate?”

  “A hypothesis?”

  “Bingo! And how is an unproven hypothesis different from a scientific theory?”

  Lindsey spoke up again. “A scientific theory is the best explanation for something based on all the evidence we have so far. You can use it to make predictions.”

  “Very good.” Mr. Johnston smiled, mission accomplished. “Remember that words have specific meanings depending on context. When we say that evolution is a ‘scientific theory’ we mean it’s the most likely explanation—the one strongly supported by all of our observations of the natural world.”

  Rachel was waving her hand like a castaway in choppy water. “Yes, Rachel?”

  “But nobody was here three hundred and seventy-five million years ago to observe anything. So, how can we say that Iowa used to be an ocean if no one saw that?”

  “We observe the evidence.” Mr. Johnston smiled. “Even if you don’t witness an event firsthand, there’s always plenty of evidence to be found.”

  Rachel rolled her eyes. “Like what?”

  Mr. Johnston passed around eighteen plastic buckets, assigned partners at random, and sent us out to look for coral fossils in a ditch behind the school—roughly twelve hundred miles from the nearest ocean.

  I can hear the basketball pinging on Ben’s driveway from half a block away. Pausing at the corner of the front hedge, I watch him shoot free throws. He is sweaty and shirtless.

  It is unseasonably warm.

  Bounce-bounce.

  Bounce-bounce.

  He spins the ball to his hip, then squares and shoots.

  Thwfft.

  Precision, timing, balance, concentration: Ben in his natural habitat.

  Until that day in the ditch during Mr. Johnston’s class last fall, neither of us realized we’d stopped speaking beyond a quick “hey, how’s it going?”

  It happened so slowly—us taking each other for granted. The ebb and flow of our separate lives became a steady current, carrying us toward different pursuits.

  Ben shot up almost a foot the summer after sixth grade and traded his cleats for high-tops. The promise of Hawkeye basketball has a chokehold on this town, and any boy who crests six feet in seventh grade is drafted without mercy. The Friday night lights on the Coral Sands football field in October can’t hold a candle to the ones in the gymnasium come December. Our football team has never done very well, and soccer is fine for girls, but varsity basketball? They get all the glory—and, lately, the Division 1 scouts.

  Ben and I were still in classes together, but over time the familiar has a way of getting covered up by layer after layer of life, the everyday sediment of homework and practice and parties and who eats lunch where. Our moms talked a lot when his dad filed for divorce a couple years ago, but I didn’t know how to bring it up with Ben. I’d wanted to tell him that I was here for him, that I missed him, but it seemed weird to walk up and say, “Heard your parents are splitting up.” So, we just continued to nod at each other as we passed in the hallway.

  Maybe digging around in the dirt made us remember being kids again. Whatever the reason, tromping through that culvert out behind the school last September, all of the ease I used to have with Ben came flooding back. It only took five minutes, and we were laughing like six-year-olds at soccer practice.

  I read a novel last summer, and there was a scene where two people saw each other again after a long absence. The author wrote, “It was as if no time had passed at all.” At the time, I wondered how that could be. There’s no way to stop time from passing or people from changing. Ben’s most rapid and dramatic change had been his height—practically overnight—but lots of other changes had been more subtle. In many ways, Ben had grown up right in front of me, only I hadn’t been paying attention. I’d missed all the tiny changes because they’d occurred so slowly.

  We learned last year in biology that the cells in our bodies are completely replaced by new ones every seven years. Ben and I are literally different people now than we were as children—fundamentally changed on a molecular level.

  As we dug around that ditch, I saw how broad his shoulders had become, how his biceps stretched the sleeves of his clingy gray T-shirt. An eon’s worth of natural selection had come to pass. The boy who used to be shorter than me now towered overhead at six feet, four inches. Those years between twelve and sixteen might as well have been the Paleolithic Period.

  That afternoon, Ben held the bucket while I brushed off tiny bits of ancient history, but we unearthed more than a few hunks of lim
estone for Mr. Johnston’s class. As Ben bent to grab one last piece of coral, I glimpsed the scar behind his ear, and when I saw it, a tremor fluttered through my chest.

  A tiny seismic shift.

  The layers inside me got all stirred up that day.

  I uncovered something beautiful buried deep within my heart, and realized it had been there all along.

  four

  BEN DOESN’T MISS a single shot—even when I call his name. He grabs his own rebound, then turns to face me with a grin.

  “She lives.”

  I cross my arms. “Disappointed?”

  He bounces the ball in my direction. I catch it and slowly dribble in place without looking at my hands, daring him. He stands between the basket and me, smiling and nodding. “Okay, then. Show me whatcha got.”

  I drop back like I’m going to take the shot, then try to fake him out and drive around him.

  As if.

  In a single step, he’s cut me off, his stance wide and low, his arms over his head, blocking my layup. It’s a textbook illustration of that chant the cheerleaders do: Hands up. Defense.

  Of course, I realize this too late. I’m already jumping toward the basket. I can’t stop my forward momentum, but Ben’s leg does, and in a flash I’m sailing headfirst toward the pole that holds the backboard aloft.

  I close my eyes and brace for impact. Instead, my body is suddenly redirected. Ben’s arm snakes around my waist and pulls me sideways into him. When I open my eyes, his face is inches from mine.

  “Gotcha, hotshot.”

  I’m still off balance. Ben is the only thing holding me up—like it’s nothing, as if I were made of pure air. His arm is solid in the small of my back, the grip of his hand at my waist steady and sure. I’m not going anywhere.

  We are pressed together so tightly he must be able to feel my heart beating against his chest. Each breath I exhale bounces off his neck and back into my face. I make a mental note to thank Will for reminding me to brush my teeth.

  I arch an eyebrow. “That was a foul.”

  Ben laughs. “Yep. On you.” He gently sets me upright, and goes to grab the ball from the grass next to the driveway. “We call that charging.”

  I can still feel the heat where his arm roped my waist. The scent of his skin lingers in my nose—a whisper of the cologne he wore to the party last night: fresh oranges and pepper and smoke from a campfire.

  “No way. You fouled me. And you almost brained me on that pole.”

  Ben bounces the ball between his legs as he walks. “I was in a legal defensive position.”

  “Oh, is that what we call ‘cheating’ these days?”

  He’s close again, spinning the ball on his index finger, a challenge in his smirk. He palms the ball and holds it over my head. I try to grab it but he is too quick. He swings it low, and high again, then whips it around his back and tosses a perfect hook shot through the net. Thwfft. No rim. Barely looked.

  “Don’t hate the player. Those are the rules. I was set and you made contact.”

  “I’ll show you contact.” I charge him with a growl.

  He yelps and turns to protect his rebound as I jump on his back, throwing my arms around his neck. I try for a headlock, but I’m weightless to him. He clamps his arms over my legs and takes off. I hang on for dear life as he swings me around in circles. My stomach gets woozy again, and we laugh like crazy people.

  He skids to a halt under the hulking oak tree in his front yard, both of us giggling and panting. Dizzy, I slide from my perch. As I slip down his back, my eyes find the scar behind his ear. In a flash, I am seized by the urge to brush my lips against it.

  I didn’t mean to feel this way about Ben. I thought it was a fluke when it started last September—something that would fade away. Like the tan I got on Labor Day, I assumed it would be gone by October. I thought I could control it. Cover it back up like my freckles—toned down with some foundation, hidden with a little powder. I’d always planned to choose the person I fell in love with.

  I didn’t know it doesn’t work that way.

  You were once my friend.

  Iowa was once an ocean.

  Given enough time, everything changes.

  I hover there in midair. I can’t say it yet—but maybe he knows already. I reach out and lightly trace the scar with the tip of my finger, then my sneakers hit the grass, and I am back on earth.

  Ben touches the place behind his ear and shakes his head. “The first time you fouled me.”

  “It was an accident,” I protest, but his eyes snap and crackle above his smile. His laugh spills across the space between us.

  He looks up into the bare branches over our heads, and when he turns back to me, his face is dead serious. “You’ve always had it out for me, Weston.”

  What are we talking about now?

  He turns and walks back toward the driveway. All at once my legs have gone wobbly. “It’s just that . . .” I follow him, my throat suddenly stuffed with cotton.

  Ben picks up his orange T-shirt off the ground, but instead of putting it on, he tucks the hem into the waistband of his shorts. “It’s just that what?” he asks.

  The air is thick between us. A system of high pressure threatens to flatten me into the driveway. I try to look anywhere but at Ben’s body. There are crocuses shooting vivid leaves up through the dormant grass around the mailbox. The kids across the street and one house down hit a Wiffle ball into the neighbor’s yard, then start yelling at each other—words their mothers wish they did not know.

  All the words I know are jammed inside my brain trying to force themselves past my teeth. The muted trumpet of too much tequila squawks behind my eyes.

  This is a first. I’ve never been tongue-tied around Ben Cody in the almost thirteen years I’ve known him. Have I always “had it out for him”? Or only since last fall? And how does he know?

  The first two words that escape the logjam in my head are “Thank you.”

  “What?” He frowns and smiles at the same time.

  I almost stutter, but I don’t. I keep my eyes fixed on his. I will not embarrass myself further by staring at the place where his T-shirt hangs from his waistband. “For inviting me to the party last night. For driving me home. Thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”

  He grins. “Somebody did.”

  “Well, I’m glad it was you.”

  “Wasn’t gonna trust any of those other yahoos.”

  There’s a spark in his eye when he says it. This is our shorthand. Yahoo is my dad’s word. When Ben and I were kids, if we were making too much noise while the Hawkeyes’ game was on, Dad would bellow at us from the couch: You two stop acting like a bunch of yahoos.

  I smile. This is what Ben does for me: He makes everything easy. Even as I’m standing here red-faced and worried, he’s reminding me of all the reasons I shouldn’t be. “Yeah, Dad woulda been pissed if I’d left my truck at the Doones’. Thanks for that, too.”

  “What are friends for?”

  Crap. I was afraid of that. Clearly, I’m stuck in the friend zone.

  I wonder if he remembers saying the same thing on the sidewalk last night. Him taking my keys, leaning in, touching his forehead to mine. It seemed like so much more than “friends” to me. Was I the only one who felt it? A side effect of agave and lime?

  Have I invented that moment? Or has he forgotten it?

  I open my mouth to say something—anything—I have no idea what. I am out of my element, trying to reach a new dimension on old machinery, pedaling toward the Galaxy of Lovers on the Rusty Ten-Speed of Friendship. I feel certain I’ll never even get off the ground.

  Maybe the universe acts on my behalf, or Rachel’s heavenly father intervenes, but before I can utter any word I may regret forever, Mrs. Cody’s old Ford Explorer roars into the driveway. She screeches to a halt a few feet from Ben’s knees, and mercifully, I am saved by Adele.

  “Jesus, Mom!” Ben shouts through her rolled-down window. He jumps back, pulling
me with him. “Coming in hot.”

  Adele Cody heaves herself from the car as if flames were licking the gas tank. She is wearing a neon-green tracksuit, and sprints around to the back where she pops the hatch, and begins jerking entire flats of a purple sports drink onto the driveway. “Gotta get to Hy-Vee and hit the Right Guard special before Esther Harris cleans ’em out. Hi, Katie!”

  No one has ever called me “Katie” except Ben’s mom and my dad.

  Ben goes tense as he watches his mother’s electric mop of auburn curls, bouncing around on the spring of her Zumba-coiled body.

  Divorce sometimes turns the women of Coral Sands into shapeless prisoners of depression, a doughnut in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. It took Adele Cody in the opposite direction. The summer after eighth grade, Ben’s dad, Brian, attended a week-long convention in Omaha for the pharmaceutical company he reps. Over dirty martinis in the hotel bar, he met a regional manager from Lincoln named Linda and never returned. Within a month of signing divorce papers, Adele’s transformation began. She renewed her certification as a paralegal that summer, and when Ben took the bus to our first day of freshman year, his mom took a job at the law firm owned by John Doone’s dad.

  Adele followed up gainful employment with a membership at the LadyFit Gym. There, she met a group of women who introduced her to the thrill of Latin dancersize and the rush of extreme coupon deals. By Christmas, she’d lost twelve pounds and found that the empty space in her two-car garage was the perfect place for eight aisles of utility shelving. In the years since, hours of online coupon swaps have created a stockpile of nonperishable goods that may prove handy if the rapture Rachel speaks of ever comes to pass.

  Ben squints into the sky as if deliverance from the puzzle of his mother’s addiction might indeed be coming in the clouds. I touch his back lightly without looking at him. He lets out a slow sigh. “Looks like we’re filling the pool with Powerade,” he whispers.

  “C’mon.” I take his hand and pull him behind me toward the back of the car. I used to drag him around like this when we were kids. Only now, I lace my fingers through his, brazen and bold. This is my answer to his earlier question. This is what friends are for.